In honor of Valentines Day I would like to relate the best love story of all time!!! It comes from the book The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince is in love with a flower, symbolic of a woman, and he is talking to a stranded man in the middle of the desert.
You confuse everything...youve got it all mixed up!...I know a planet inhabited by a gentleman who has never smelled a flower. He's never looked at a star. He's never loved anyone. Hes never done anything except add up numbers....
Sipose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world but on my planet...If someone loves a flower of which just one example exist among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enouth to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, "my flower's up there somewhere..." But if a sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the star went out.
Here the little prince bursts into tears and the man comforts him and it is a tender part of the story, you should read it sometime cause I don't have the time to type it all. So the man learns about the flower the Little Prince is in love with. He tells him of another adventure he had before they met.
Good morning" he said. It was a blossoming rose garden. "Good morning" said the roses. THe little prince gazed at them. All of them looked like his flower...And he felt very unhappy. His flower had told him she was the only one of her kind in the whole universe. And here were five thousand of them, all just alike, in just one garden!
And then he said to himself, I thought I was rich because I had just one flower, and all I own is an ordinary rose...It doesn't make me much of a prince...And he lay down in the grass and wept.
It was then that the fox appeared. "Good morning," said the fox... "Who are you?" the little prince asked. "You're very pretty..."
"Im a fox," said the fox. "Come and play with me," the little prince proposed. "I'm feeling so sad."
"I can't play with you," the fox said. "I'm not tamed."
"...what does tamed mean?"
"Its something that's been too often neglected. It means to create ties'...For me you are only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you I am only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we'll need each other. You'll be the only boy in the world for me. I'll be the only fox in the world for you..."
"I'm beginning to understand," the little prince said. "There is a flower...I think she's tamed me..."
"...if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know that sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat is of no use whatever. Whear fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have the color of gold in your hair. So it will be wonderful once you have tamed me! The wheat, which is golden will remind me of you. and I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...Please, tame me!" Said the fox.
So the little prince tamed the fox and when it came time for him to leave the fox wanted to cry. The prince felt it had been wrong to tame the fox and make him cry, but the fox explains that it was all a good thing. He tells the prince to go back to the garden of roses and he would understand.
The little prince went to look at the roses again. "You're not at all like my rose. You're nothing at all, yet...No one has tamed you and you haven't yet tamed anyone." The roses were humbled. "You're lovely, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you...my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she is the one I have watered...Since she is the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose."
The fox continues teaching the prince before they say goodbye: "One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. Its the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. You become responsible forever for what you have tamed. You're responsible for your rose.
During a conversation with the man, the little prince said, "People where you live grow five thousand roses in one garden, yet they don't find what they are looking for."
"And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose..." The man replies.
this book is so moving to me. it is my favorite book! Please read it.
My husband calls me his flower, and I call him my prince.
