What do you see in the shape to the right? It is a sketch for the first of the unforgettable images that appear in the opening paragraphs of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 tale The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry recalls learning, in youth, that grown-ups tended to see only the outside of things. His second sketch (below left) allows us to peer inside the first. “My drawing was not a picture of a hat,” he writes:
It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), Preliminary sketch for Le petit prince (The Little Prince), 1942. Purchased on the Elisabeth Ball Fund, 1968. MA 2592.18.
© Estate of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.