PARIS — Last Wednesday at Artcurial's modern books and manuscripts sale in Paris, a French collector won a recently-discovered two-page draft of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The Little Prince." After eight bidders (including six telephone bidders) engaged in a ten-minute bidding war, the manuscript sold for €385,600 ($494,000) including buyer's premium — almost ten times its low estimate. Considering that the draft consists of two almost illegible handwritten pages, the stratospheric price is a clear sign of the power that this iconic text holds over collectors' imaginations.
All told, 30 lots of manuscripts by Saint-Exupéry fetched €1.4 million ($1.8 million), more than doubling their combined €600,000 estimate. The lot containing six chapters of "Pilote de Guerre" ("War Pilot"), totaling 124 pages, was purchased by another French collector for €311,200 ($400,000), surpassing its estimate of €250,000. A South American collector snapped up "Escales en Patagonie" ("Stopping in Patagonia"), a 24-page autographed manuscript from 1932, for €162,500 ($208,000), or more than triple its €50,000 low estimate.
But the most unusual find was the top lot, the two handwritten pages of "The Little Prince," Saint-Exupéry's bestseller, which has been translated into 267 languages. The document was discovered by Artcurial experts Olivier Devers and Benoît Puttemans in a packet of letters and manuscripts consigned by a collector, and it contains a different version of chapters seventeen and nineteen. Devers estimates that it was written in 1941, while Saint-Exupéry, a pilot active in the Resistance, was in exile in New York. In this version of the story, after visiting six planets, the little prince arrives on an alternate-reality earth. One particular line reads as an homage to the melting pot of New York City: "If you brought together all the inhabitants of this planet close together as if for a meeting, the Whites, the Yellows, the Blacks, the children, the elderly, the women, and the men, without forgetting a single one, all of humanity would fit on Long Island."
The definitive manuscript of "The Little Prince" is in the Morgan Library's collection, donated by Sylvia Hamilton Reinhardt, a New York journalist. Saint-Exupéry was in love with her and gave her his manuscript in 1943, shortly before his mission to North Africa, from which he never returned. In 1944, while flying reconnaissance for the Resistance off the southern coast of France, his plane crashed. In 1948 Saint-Exupéry was officially recognized as having died for France as a war veteran.
This story originally appeared on ARTINFO France.