The Little Prince and the Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Remington Noiseless portable typewriter

The Remington Noiseless portable typewriter used by French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry went on display this week during an exhibition dedicated to Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The exhibition is titled “A la Rencontre du Petit Prince” ("Meet The Little Prince") and is being staged at Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

The Little Prince is Saint-Exupéry’s best-known French-language work. Published in 1943 in New York, it is a poetic and philosophical work under the guise of a children's story, self-illustrated in watercolours. Translated into 457 languages and dialects, The Little Prince is the second most translated work in the world after the Bible.

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa and South America. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised from the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany.

Article in The New York Times, November 29, 1942

Saint-Exupéry spent 27 months in America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from Corsica over the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944. Although the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, the ultimate cause of the crash remains unknown.

Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon to an aristocratic Catholic family. He received his pilot's wings after being posted to the 37th Fighter Regiment in Casablanca, Morocco, and became one of the pioneers of international postal flight, working for Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. Saint-Exupéry then became the airline stopover manager for the Cape Juby airfield in the Spanish zone of South Morocco, in the Sahara desert. His duties included negotiating the safe release of downed fliers taken hostage by Saharan tribes, a perilous task which earned him his first Légion d'honneur from the French Government. In 1929, Saint-Exupéry was transferred to Argentina, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina airline.

Arriving at Gare Saint-Lazare after his plane crash, 1938.

Saint-Exupéry's first novella, L'Aviateur (The Aviator), was published in 1926. In 1929 his first book, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail) was published. The 1931 publication of Vol de nuit (Night Flight) established Saint-Exupéry in the literary world. Saint-Exupéry continued to write until the spring of 1943, when he left the United States with American troops bound for North Africa in World War II.

Over Sicily, May 1944

On December 30, 1935, Saint-Exupéry, along with his mechanic-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan desert during an attempt to break the speed record in a Paris-to-Saigon air race. The near brush with death would figure prominently in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, winner of several awards. The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being stranded in the desert, is, in part, a reference to this experience.

Following the German invasion of France in 1940, Saint-Exupéry flew a Bloch MB.174 with the Groupe de reconnaissance II/33 reconnaissance squadron of the Armée de l'Air. After France's armistice with Germany, Saint-Exupéry went into exile in North America, escaping through Portugal. He boarded the SS Siboney and arrived in New York City on the last day of 1940. Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated The Little Prince there and the village of Asharoken in mid-to-late 1942, with the manuscript being completed in October.