Rereading "The Little Prince."

I’d just come off a divorce-memoir bender when I decided to reread The Little Prince. In the aftermath of a relationship that ended, instead of beginning, with a wedding, I’d craved accounts of other people’s loves-gone-wrong. I devoured Eat, Pray, Love and its ilk, swallowed the "Modern Love" archives whole, and binged on personal essay collections. None of it was enough. In my desire to see all the facts of someone else’s relationship laid bare, I must have hoped to figure out who’d been to blame in my own failed love. But these writers were frustratingly tight-lipped when it came to specifics. Come on, I whined, dish. I wanted the reality TV version. I wanted the dirt.

The Little Prince was meant to be a diversion from this exhausting quest—a quick dose of what Jeff Jenson, writing about an episode of Lost named after the novella, lovingly describes as the book’s “profound, soul-stirring whimsy.” By returning to those iconic ink and watercolor drawings, I was returning to an innocence that predated not just divorce but romance, too. So I was surprised to find in those 83 pages exactly what I’d been looking for elsewhere—the story of a wrecked marriage, of ruined love.

Since its publication in 1943, The Little Prince has sold more than 80 million copies, placing it firmly in the ranks of all-time best-sellers. It has spawned plays, an opera, comic books and manga, films, a television series, a Japanese museum, and countless toys, T-shirts, lunchboxes, and pencil sharpeners. Fans have included the likes of Orson Welles, James Dean, and Morrissey. Embraced by pop culture, the book also holds its own in the literary canon. Its author was, after all, a man of letters, who won, in the course of his career, several of France’s most prestigious literary prizes and the National Book Award in the United States. On top of that, poet and translator Richard Howard gave it his literary imprimatur when he published a new translation (from which the quotations in this piece are taken) in 2000.

As the little prince explains to an aviator, who has crashed in the Sahara, he’s left his planet because he’s “having difficulties with a flower.” What I’d forgotten from my childhood readings was that the prince’s troubled love for this flower, a rose, is the axis of the story. When I heard that this relationship was based on Saint-Exupéry’s own marriage, I sensed dirt. I started digging.

Consuelo Gómez Carillo was an El Salvadoran beauty, twice widowed when she met Saint-Exupéry at the age of 26. In The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince, a memoir of their marriage that she wrote after her husband’s death, but did not try to publish, Consuelo has no qualms about detailing Saint-Exupéry’s bad behavior. Consuelo’s account, which is poorly written and heartbreaking in equal parts, recounts the early passion of her marriage, and then its unraveling. She tells of Saint-Exupéry’s frequent departures from their home, and of his many affairs, particularly a long-term one with the wealthy Nelly de Vogüé. A storyteller and a sculptor in her own right, Consuelo followed Saint-Exupéry from Buenos Aires to Casablanca, from Paris to New York, forever going along with his changes of plan, and subordinating her own concerns to the imperatives of his work.