On the dedication page of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry apologized to his young readers:
I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted.
His friend was the Jewish writer Léon Werth, who was indeed hungry and cold in France in 1943. After the Nazi invasion, Werth had gone into hiding in the Jura countryside. Saint-Exupéry wrote the dedication in New York, where he was preparing to leave for North Africa as a pilot for the Free French Air Force. The Little Prince was published later that year, but Werth was not to see a copy until after the war, by which time Saint-Exupéry was dead, having disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission from Corsica in 1944.
The friendship between Saint-Exupéry, the scion of a conservative aristocratic French family, and Werth, a leftist novelist-critic and the son of a Jewish clothing merchant, who spoke out forcefully against French colonialism, fascism, and Stalinism, was an unlikely one. They met in 1931 and, despite a 22-year age difference, forged a friendship remarkable in its intimacy and sympathetic exchange of views. Saint-Exupéry had arrived in New York in 1940 armed with a precious manuscript, Werth's 33 Days, planning to use it to win American sympathy for France in its hour of defeat.
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