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Early sketches of ‘The Little Prince’ discovered in Swiss home

Early sketches of "The Little Prince," the world famous creation of French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, have been found in storage in northern Switzerland, local media and an art expert said on Thursday.

Published: 15 August 2019 20:58 CEST

Early sketches of 'The Little Prince' discovered in Swiss home

Image: Handout SKKG_le petit prince

The drawings were purchased at auction some three decades ago by Bruno Stefanini, a real estate magnate and major collector who died last year, said Elisabeth Grossmann, curator of the Cultural Foundation of Winterthur.

She said “The Little Prince” sketches were found in good condition in a folder with other works in a building in Winterthur.

“The Little Prince” (“Le Petit Prince”), a novella charting the fantastical interstellar voyage undertaken by the eponymous hero, has sold 145 million copies worldwide and been translated into 270 languages.

Photo: Handout SKKG_le petit prince

Saint-Exupéry escaped to the US after Germany's invasion of France and it was during his exile there in 1942 that he wrote his famous book. It was first published in 1943.

The author also lived in Switzerland from 1915 to 1917 while attending boarding school in the central canton of Fribourg.

Stefanini, one of Switzerland's largest collectors who assembled tens of thousands of works before his death, set up the Winterthur to manage his artistic holdings.

He bought the Saint-Exupéry sketches at an auction in 1986 in the town of Bevaix, according to the Landbote newspaper, which first reported the discovery on Thursday.

The sketches include an image of The Little Prince talking to a fox, “The Tippler” sitting on his planet, and the iconic image of a boa constrictor that has just eaten an elephant.

Grossmann said the Winterthur museum would contact New York's Morgan Library, where Saint-Exupéry's original sketches are held, to inform them of the discovery.

Saint-Exupéry, a pilot, mysteriously disappeared over the Mediterranean on July 31th, 1944 shortly after taking off on a wartime mission.

READ ALSO: Top reads – 11 classic books about Switzerland

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'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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