LE PETIT PRINCE

Author: Antoine-de Saint-exupéry

1

A magnificent picture

I pondered deeply

I had been disheartened by the failure of

It is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining

It was a question of life and death for me: I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week.

I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice.

I jumped to my feet completely thunderstruck. I blinked my eyes hard. I looked carefully all around me. And I saw a most extraordinary small person, who stood there examining me with great seriousness.

Now I stared at this sudden apparition with my eyes fairly starting out of my head in astonishment.

And yet my little man seemed neither to be straying uncertainty among the sands, nor to be fainting from fatigue or hunger or thirst or fear.

Abruptly, with no preamble, he asked me, as if it were the fruit of a problem long pondered in silence = Abruptly, without anything to lead up to it, and as if the question had been born of long and silent meditation on his problem, he demanded:

It was from words dropped by chance that, little by little, everything was revealed to me.

And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.

At that moment I caught a gleam of light in the impenetrable mystery of his presence, I demanded abruptly:

3

At that moment I caught a gleam of light in the impenetrable mystery of his presence

9

The loser sat slumped in dejection