The Return of the Young Prince

by A. G. Roemmers

  The young prince returns to Earth for an enchanting new adventure.

  Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. But even princes from faraway planets eventually grow up. No longer content with his tiny planet, the young prince sets off once again to explore the universe.

  And so begins another remarkable journey into the secrets and joys of living a meaningful life. A charming fable for all ages, this wonderful sequel to the beloved classic reminds us what it is to be truly human, offering a celebration of life in all its wisdom, beauty and wonder.

  Contents

  Foreword

  A Few Words by Way of Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Some years ago, during a brief stay in Buenos Aires, I was lucky enough to meet Alejandro Guillermo Roemmers. I had told my cousins, François and Jean d’Agay, Saint-Exupéry’s nephews, that I wanted to trace the route of the pilots who had made the Aéropostale company’s first stops in Argentina and Chile. They gave me Roemmers’s details straight away and told me to get in touch with him. I called him as soon as I got to Argentina and we agreed to have dinner. It was late that night that I first heard about The Return of the Young Prince.

  We talked all evening, and I came away with a copy of his book, ready to start my journey through Patagonia and the Andes. When I opened it, I found an introduction to the first Argentinian edition by Frédéric d’Agay, Saint-Exupéry’s great-nephew, and at that time president of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Youth Foundation, which said, ‘Alejandro Roemmers held on to the spirit of his inner child, and when he met his Little Prince in Argentina, he wanted to relate that to us with this story, and draw our attention to its essence, to the poetry of it.’

  Frédéric was right. Roemmers, as well as being a renowned poet, is a businessman who spends a lot of his time travelling – much of it in response to invitations to present his book and his ideas. He visits schools, colleges and universities, promoting his message: namely that with education, faith, courage and temperance, it is possible to beat poverty, illiteracy and cynicism. He also gives special importance to the redemptive power of love, and how it can help us confront the erosion of values in today’s world.

  This book is the story of the Young Prince’s journey through the desolate, deserted landscapes of Patagonia, and how that affords a privileged adult the opportunity to engage with a teenager, who has come out of nowhere and will encourage him to move beyond appearances. It is a sort of initiation journey of youth, and a return to first principles for any adult who might feel uprooted.

  At times, The Return of the Young Prince can read like a contemporary catechism, written in the twenty-first century by a man buoyed by his ambition for great changes in a society that is rejecting inadequate political structures and that won’t risk an education system capable of instilling a message of hope.

  This book reminds us of the values we should never have abandoned: the importance of friendship, family, community, and compassion – the pillars of every civilised society.

  Through his hero, the poet and author shows us how, with their courage, their temperance, their vision for the world and sometimes even with their lives, certain men – like those who brought glory to the Aéropostale company, its great pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry above all – told us the way to go.

  The Return of the Young Prince lights the way for us and helps us to champion the magic of love, its capacity to change everything.

  Bruno d’Agay

  A member of the Saint-Exupéry family

  A Few Words by Way of Introduction

  In a world that was ravaged by war and rapidly losing its innocence and joy, the intrepid French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince. It would soon become the universal symbol for those lost values.

  Saint-Exupéry’s sadness and disillusion in an era that seemed to be forgetting the simplicity of the heart, and humanity’s profound spirituality, were more likely than any burst of enemy fire to have been the cause of his untimely disappearance on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean.

  Like many others who have read The Little Prince, the purity of its message resonated with me, and I shared in Saint-Exupéry’s sadness when that child, who had found a place so deep in my heart, had no choice but to go back to his asteroid.

  It was only some time later that I understood that hatred, a lack of understanding and solidarity, a materialistic view of the world and other negative forces would have prevented him from living among us in any case.

  Many times I have asked myself, as perhaps you have: what would have become of that very special child had he continued to live on our planet? What would his adolescence have been like? How would he have held on to the purity of his heart?

  It has taken me many years to find answers to these questions, and even then it’s possible that they are only of value to me. But my hope is that they might at least shine some light on the path towards celebrating the child that each of us carries inside.

  And so I presume to write to you, dear reader, at the start of a new century and a new millennium, with a more positive vision of our time, so that you might not be so sad.

  I’m sorry not to satisfy your curiosity if you were expecting a photograph of him – many years ago I stopped taking any kind of camera on my journeys, especially since I noticed that my friends would focus so much on the pictures that they stopped listening to the stories that went with them. However, I’ve included a few drawings so that you won’t think this story too serious. After various attempts of my own that would have satisfied neither adult nor child, we decided to ask Pietari Posti for help in recreating some of the moments I remember most vividly. Don’t let his lines lead your imagination, as he hasn’t been to Patagonia, nor has he met the mysterious boy of this story; but perhaps they will help you see inside my words, just like the Little Prince could see the sheep inside its box…

  Lastly, dear reader, I hope you will forgive me for including here my own thoughts and reflections that arose as these things happened – I wanted to honour them by writing a faithful record.

  And now, I’m going to tell you the story exactly as it happened.

  If you feel alone, and if your heart is pure and your eyes still shine with the wonder of a child’s, perhaps as you read these pages you’ll find that the stars are smiling on you once more, that you can hear them as though they were five hundred million little bells.

  Chapter One

  I was driving alone down a lonely road in Patagonia – a land named after an indigenous tribe you could supposedly spot by their disproportionately large feet – when I suddenly saw a strange shape to one side of the road. I slowed down instinctively, and was amazed when I saw a lock of blond hair poking out from under a blanket that seemed to conceal a person. I stopped the car, and when I got out I saw something astonishing. All the way out there in the middle of the plain, hundreds of miles from the nearest town and without so much as a single house, a single tree or fence post in sight, a boy was sleeping peacefully witho
ut a care in the world.

  What I’d wrongly taken for a blanket was in fact a long blue cape, with epaulettes and a purple lining you could just glimpse, with a pair of white trousers like jodhpurs emerging from underneath it, tucked into boots of shining black leather.

  The whole thing gave the boy a princely sort of air that was out of place around those parts. A straw-coloured scarf, fluttering nonchalantly in the spring breeze, blended sometimes with his hair, giving him a melancholic, dreamy look.

  I stood there for a while, baffled by what seemed a complete mystery. It was as though even the wind, as it swept down in great gusting dust clouds from the mountain, had skirted politely around him.

  I understood straight away that I couldn’t leave him there, asleep and defenceless in that solitary place and without food or water. Even though nothing about his appearance was frightening in the least, there was a certain resistance I had to overcome before approaching the stranger. With some difficulty, I gathered him up in my arms and laid him down in the passenger seat.

  The fact that he hadn’t woken up seemed so odd that for a moment I feared he might be dead. A weak yet constant pulse proved he wasn’t. As I placed his limp hand back on the seat, I thought that if I hadn’t seen so many images of winged creatures, I might have believed I was in the presence of an angel come down to Earth. I soon realized the boy was exhausted, at the end of his strength.

  Back on the road, I spent a long while thinking about how all those warnings designed to protect us as adults, in fact distance us so much from others that touching someone or even looking them in the eye has us uncomfortable and anxious.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ the boy said suddenly, and I jumped because I’d almost forgotten he was there. Even though he had spoken very softly, the sound of his voice was as clear as the water he was asking for.

  On long journeys like that one, which could last up to three days, I always packed drinks and something to eat in the car so that I didn’t have to stop other than to fill up with petrol. I gave him a bottle, a plastic cup and a beef-and-tomato sandwich wrapped in foil. He ate and drank without saying a word. Meanwhile, my head was starting to teem with questions: ‘Where are you from? How did you get here? What were you doing lying by the road like that? Do you have a family? Where are they?’ And so on and so forth.

  Considering my anxious nature, and that I’m always brimming with curiosity and the wish to help, I’m still amazed I was able to stay quiet for those ten endless minutes while I waited for the boy to get his strength back. He, on the other hand, tucked into his meal like it was the most normal thing in the world, after lying abandoned in the middle of those desert-like plains, for someone to appear out of the blue and offer him a drink and a beef-and-tomato sandwich.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as he finished, before leaning back against the window, as though that word was enough to answer all my doubts.

  A moment later I realized I hadn’t even asked him where he was heading. As I’d found him on the right-hand side of the road, I’d taken it for granted that he was travelling south, but in fact it was much more likely he was trying to get to the capital, which lay to the north.

  It’s strange how easily we assume that others must be going in the same direction as us.

  When I looked over at him, it was too late. Other dreams had come and carried him a long way off.

  Chapter Two

  Should I wake him up? No, we needed to cover some ground; whether we went north or south was of little importance.

  I sped up. This time I wouldn’t waste any more of my life asking myself what direction to go in.

  I was absorbed in these thoughts when, after a long time had passed, I suddenly felt a pair of blue eyes watching me curiously.

  ‘Hi there,’ I greeted him, turning briefly towards the mysterious boy.

  ‘In what strange machine are we travelling?’ he asked, glancing around the inside of the car. ‘Where are the wings?’

  ‘D’you mean the car?’

  ‘Car? Can’t it lift up off the Earth?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, with a touch of wounded pride.

  ‘And can’t it move off this grey strip?’ he enquired, pointing through the windscreen with his fingers, while I considered some of my own limitations.

  ‘That strip is called the road,’ I explained, thinking, where on Earth has this boy come from? ‘And if we went off it at this speed, we’d be killed.’

  ‘Are roads always so brutal? Who invented them?’

  ‘Humans.’

  Answering such simple questions was starting to feel oddly complicated. Who exactly was this boy, who radiated innocence and was shaking my inherited beliefs like an earthquake?

  ‘Where have you come from? How did you get here?’ I asked him, noticing something in his eyes that was strangely familiar.

  ‘Are there many roads on the Earth?’ he asked, without paying the slightest attention to what I’d said.

  ‘Yes, any number of them.’

  ‘I’ve been in a place without roads,’ said the mysterious boy.

  ‘But people would get lost there,’ I pointed out, while my curiosity to know who he was and where he’d come from grew stronger and stronger.

  ‘Where there are no roads on the Earth,’ he continued, unfazed, ‘don’t people think of using the sky to orientate themselves?’ And he looked up out of the window.

  ‘At night,’ I reflected, ‘it’s possible to navigate by the stars. But in very bright light, we’d risk going blind.’

  ‘Ah!’ the boy exclaimed. ‘The blind see what no one dares to see. They must be the bravest people on this planet.’

  I didn’t know what to say in reply and a silence fell over us while the car carried on down its brutal grey strip.

  Chapter Three

  After a while, thinking he must have been too shy to answer, I decided to press him:

  ‘What’s happened? You can tell me. If you need something, I’ll help you.’

  But the boy said nothing.

  ‘Go on, you can trust me. Tell me your name, and what the matter is,’ I went on, not wanting to give up.

  ‘What problem…?’ he answered at last.

  I tried to smooth things out a bit with a smile, so that he’d feel more comfortable. ‘If you turn up like that, lying by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, you’ve obviously got some sort of problem.’

  After a moment’s thought, he surprised me with a question: ‘What exactly is a problem?’

  I smiled, thinking he was being ironic.

  ‘What is a problem?’ he insisted, and I realized he was waiting for an answer.

  Still surprised by his reaction, I thought that perhaps I hadn’t understood the question.

  ‘Problema, problème…’ I tried it in a few other languages, even though it sounded more or less the same in all of them.

  ‘I’ve heard the word,’ he interrupted. ‘But could you explain to me what it means?’

  I racked my brains for the dictionary definition, but in vain, amazed that in a world positively overflowing with problems there might be a teenager who hadn’t even come across the concept. Finally, after realizing I couldn’t escape his penetrating gaze, I tried to put together an explanation of my own.

  ‘A problem is like a door you haven’t got the key to.’

  ‘And what do you do when you come across a problem?’ the boy wanted to know, becoming more and more interested in the conversation, even though he carried on staring into the distance.

  ‘Well, the first thing to do is to see if the problem really is yours, if it’s your path that it’s blocking. That’s vital,’ I explained, ‘because there are a lot of people who interfere in other people’s problems, even though they haven’t been asked for help. They lose time, waste their strength and prevent others from finding their own solutions.’

  It was clear he agreed with this obvious truth, one which many adults don’t accept. ‘And if the problem really is yours?’
he continued, turning towards me.

  ‘Then you have to find the right key, and put it into the lock in the right sort of way.’

  ‘It sounds simple,’ the boy concluded with a nod.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I replied. ‘Some people don’t even find the key – and not for lack of imagination but because they’re unwilling to try two or three times with the keys that they have, and sometimes they don’t try at all. They want someone to hand them the key, or, even worse, to come and open the door for them.’

  ‘And are they all capable of opening the door?’

  ‘If you’re convinced you can do it, then you almost certainly can. But if you believe you can’t, that practically guarantees you won’t manage it.’

  ‘And what happens to people who don’t manage to open the door?’ the boy pressed on.

  ‘They have to try again and again until they do, or they’ll never become what they could be.’

  And then, as though thinking aloud, I added, ‘There’s no point losing our tempers, banging on the door and doing ourselves damage, blaming it for all our troubles. But now should we resign ourselves to living on this side of the door, dreaming of what might be on the other side?’

  ‘And is there anything that justifies not opening that door?’ he insisted, still not quite accepting my explanation.

  ‘Far from it,’ I exclaimed, ‘although humans have developed a great capacity for justifying themselves. They blame their flaws on a lack of love or education, or on all the suffering they’ve had to deal with. They might eventually convince themselves that it’s better not to cross the threshold, as it might be dangerous or threatening on the other side. Or they might cynically declare that they’re not interested in what they might find if they walk through…But those are nothing more than ways of masking the pain of their failure. The longer we delay in confronting the obstacle in our path, the bigger the difficulties grow and the smaller we become; or, to put it another way, the longer we drag a problem with us, the heavier it becomes.’