A drawing of the Little Prince, a watercolor by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry used in the first edition of the famous fairy tale, was auctioned in London on Thursday for around 350,000 euros (about 513,000 Canadian dollars), the house of Christie's announced.
This 1942 drawing sold for £302,400, ten times more than the estimate, which was between £25,000 and £35,000.
Reproduced on page 59 of the New York edition, it depicts the Little Prince talking to a snake in the Sahara.
This drawing had already appeared at an auction at Sotheby's in 1989.
“The drawings and watercolors in their final or almost finished version [comme ceux] reproduced in the first edition […] are of the greatest interest and extremely rare,” Christie’s described in the catalog.
Christie's recalled a sale at Artcurial in Paris in June 2017. A watercolor painting of the little prince sitting on a chair and looking at the sun sold for 294,000 euros (about 430,000 Canadian dollars), including fees. And another, with the hero lying on his stomach in a rose garden, sold for 226,000 euros (around $331,000 Canadian).
The Little Prince, a classic of children's literature translated worldwide, is the most widely read work of fiction in history. According to the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation, the book has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide in 80 years.
The author, who was in exile in the US during the Second World War, had fulfilled an order from his American publisher, who wanted a Christmas story. He died at the controls of his plane in July 1944, just over a year after the publication of the French and English versions in New York, and did not have time to witness the incredible success of this book.
His drawings of the blonde hero wandering from planet to planet and encountering multiple characters contributed greatly to the story's popularity.