- Broché: 97 pages
- Editeur : Gallimard (23 février 1999)
- Collection : Folio
- Langue : Français
- ISBN-10: 2070408507
- ISBN-13: 978-2070408504
Présentation de l’éditeur :
« Le premier soir je me suis donc endormi sur le sable à mille milles de toute terre habitée. J'étais bien plus isolé qu'un naufragé sur un radeau au milieu de l'océan. Alors vous imaginez ma surprise, au lever du jour, quand une drôle de petite voix m'a réveillé. Elle disait : ... »
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry naît à Lyon en 1900. Après Vol de nuit, Terre des hommes et bien des aventures aériennes, il écrit et illustre Le Petit Prince à New York, en 1942. Il rejoint Alger en 1943 comme pilote de reconnaissance pour l’armée et disparaît le 31 juillet 1944 lors d’une mission au-dessus de la Méditerranée. La première édition du Petit Prince en France date de 1946. Depuis, le livre a été tiré à plus de 11 millions d’exemplaires en France, traduit en quelque 160 langues et on estime à 80 millions d’exemplaires sa diffusion mondiale. Plus de 60 ans après sa parution, près de 300 000 exemplaires du conte original sont vendus en langue française chaque année.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat.
