The snail on a leash, the rose and the butterfly, the tree and the businessman: some subjects of the unpublished illustrations for “The Little Prince” designed by its author, the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) who are part of a notebook that Sotheby’s will auction in Paris on June 4 dedicated to the manuscripts and rare books.
The unknown Taccuino, which contains 16 drawings, is linked to a story of friendship and little known conviviality, that the Sotheby’s auction house has reconstructed through its specialists. In 1943 the French spouses Jean and Suzanne Amrouche left Tunis, where they both taught literature, and moved to Algiers, invited by the French writer André Gide, who had previously hosted in Tunis. In the mid -1940s, Algiers had become the capital of intellectuals and writers and a brilliant cosmopolitan French bourgeoisie. It is here that Gide met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, with whom he had long been linked and was during a November 1943 lunch that presented Jean Amrouche to Saint-Exupéry.
It was during, then, during a dinner at the Amrouche house, at the beginning of 1944, that Saint-Exupéry began to scribble small characters on the paper tablecloth and to transmit to guests in which other characters, or the same character, spoke in a bubble, one of whom he said: “Do you see that I am drunk?” Suzanne gave him his notebook, where he then created 16 drawings related to the plot of the “little prince”. At the end of the dinner he handed over the notebook to Suzanne who since then kept him in the family. Some of these designs were exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2022 as part of the “A la Rencontre du petit Prince” exhibition.