Two pencil sketches for the Little Prince, [New York], [1942]

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)
Two pencil sketches for the Little Prince, [New York], [1942]
1) The Little Prince lying on the grass below a tree, with the fox in front of him.
2) The Little Prince walking the fox on a leash along a road.
275 x 215 mm each. Pencil on American 'Fidelity Onion Skin' paper. Provenance : Sotheby’s, 13 December 1993, lot 356.

An attractive pair of sketches depicting two pivotal moments for the Little Prince: the meeting of the Prince and the fox, and the taming of the fox. Of the pair, the drawing of the Prince lying on the grass is the earlier scene in the book. The Morgan Library holds an original watercolour, a preliminary for the book, which re-uses the same posture and facial expression as the present drawing, but with the fox removed (Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MA 2592.1). A third variation, still with the Prince lying on the ground in the same pose, but with a different, rather gentler facial expression and with neither the fox nor tree included constituted the definitive version, as reproduced in the book (p. 71; sold at Artcurial, 14 June 2017, lot no 82). The present drawing might therefore be the earliest known version of this scene, a crucial moment of the book: the encounter of the fox by the Prince ('And he lay down on the grass and cried').

The second drawing of the pair depicts a scene immediately following the first: [The Little Prince said:] '"I am looking for friends. What does that mean – 'tame'?" "It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties." "'To establish ties'?" "Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."'. The Little Prince does tame the fox in the end, but there appears no scene with him walking the fox on a leash in the book. The Morgan holds another sketch with a very similar composition to the present drawing (MA 4717.3): like ours, it was probably executed when Saint-Exupéry was still deciding how to represent the taming of the fox, before eventually selecting a less literal series of images.