Up for sale is a rare carbon typescript copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince, with extensive handwritten corrections by the author. It is one of only three known copies and the first time a typescript of classical history has been offered for public sale.
It contains the artifact believed to be the first written origin of the famous lines: “On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux”, which means: “Only with the heart can one see correctly. What is essential is invisible.
In earlier drafts, Saint-Exupéry was “playing with the phrase back and forth in his head,” explains Sammy Jay, a literary expert at London-based bookseller Peter Harrington. In Typescript, “you get to see the author take that turn and write that complete sentence for the first time.”
The typescript cost $1.25 million. It will be exhibited at the annual Abu Dhabi Art fair at the end of November.
Le Petit Prince was published in the United States in 1943 in French and English with the title The Little Prince and in France in 1946. Aside from religious texts, it is the most translated book in the world.
The story follows a pilot who meets the little prince, who has come to Earth from a remote and distant planet where his only friend is a rose. Saint-Exupéry wrote in New York while in exile from occupied France.
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Accompanying the volume are two original pencil sketches of the Prince, including a preliminary design for the book's final illustration of the Prince's homecoming, and a check signed by Saint-Exupéry.
Peter Harrington purchased the typescript from a collection of privately owned materials relating to Saint-Exupéry. Typescript is “a really evocative thing,” Jay says, even if it looks “dark” on the outside. It is in a black cardboard folder with nothing on the card and is stapled in places: “in a way, a wonderful temporary object.” The inside of the folder is full of doodles, notes and sketches “with love”.
One of the other carbon copies of the typescript is located at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and another can be found at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The version for sale appears to be the only one that Saint-Exupéry kept as his own working copy.
“He supplemented the typescript with his own handwritten annotations, corrections and additions to complete and finalize the text,” Jay says. Most pages have manual corrections; Among the changes was the removal of references to New York, which were replaced by more global images.
Jay says the collector may have added the $100 check included in the package to the folder. Writing on February 26, 1943, biographer Stacey Schiff says he ordered “an approach of a French Air Force uniform” to the “Brooks Uniform Co.”
He was wearing the uniform when he visited his lover Sylvia Hamilton's apartment for the last time before returning to the war. On that occasion, he left him the original manuscript of Le Petit Prince, which is now in the Morgan Library in New York. He left the United States in April 1943 and is believed to have died in July 1944 while on a reconnaissance mission.
