A Long-Lost Set of Sketches of the Beloved Novella ‘The Little Prince’ Has Turned Up in a Swiss Storage Facility

A set of lost sketches for The Little Prince, the
beloved novella by French pilot, writer, and
aristocrat Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, has
been discovered in storage in Winterthur, a city in northern
Switzerland. The sketches belonged to Bruno Stefanini, who had
purchased them at auction in 1986.

The local collector, who made his fortune in real estate, died
in December. In the months since, the organization he founded, the
Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte
(Foundation for Art, Culture, and History), has been combing
through his archives, sorting, photographing, and cleaning the many
works in Stefanini’s collection.

Among the unexpected finds was the series of early drawings
from The Little Prince, which Saint-Exupéry wrote
between 1941 and 1943, while living in New York. Done on thin
airmail paper, the undated drawings feature familiar scenes from
the fantastical children’s book: the Little Prince and the fox, the
snake who ate an elephant, and the drunkard to whom the prince pays
a visit. One page also includes a love letter from the author to
his wife.

“They are in surprisingly good shape,” Elisabeth Grossmann, the
cultural foundation’s curator, told the Swiss
publication Der Landbote.
She said she plans to reach out to Morgan Museum and Library, which
owns the final manuscript and drawings for the book. Saint-Exupéry
had turned them over to his friend, American journalist Silvia
Hamilton, before returning to Europe in 1943 to serve as a
reconnaissance pilot in World War II.

Assigned to fly a mission out of Corsica in July
1944, Saint-Exupéry never returned. For years, his fate was
one of the great mysteries of aviation history, second only to the
disappearance of Amelia
Earhart. In 1998, a Marseille fisherman found a silver ID
bracelet bearing Saint-Exupéry’s name in his net. Later, Luc
Vanrell, French diver and marine archaeologist, found the
wreckage of his plane in 2005, even identifying the German
soldier who shot Saint-Exupéry down. Just last month, Vanrell
spoke with the BBC about the
discovery.

The Morgan staged an exhibition dedicated
to Saint-Exupéry’s time in New
York in 2014, displaying in the US for the first time the
bracelet he was wearing when he was shot down.

The newly discovered Saint-Exupéry drawings are among some
60,000 objects in Stefanini’s collection of artworks and historical
artifacts. The son of an Italian immigrant, Stefanini was a very
private figure, last seen in public, according to Wikipedia, in 2014, on the occasion of
the opening of “A Passion for Swiss Art
Treasures,” an exhibition of his holdings at the Kunstmuseum Bern.

A multi-year legal battle between the foundation and Stefanini’s
children was resolved in the
foundation’s favor earlier this year. In recent months, the
foundation’s work has grown in scope, the initial team of four
employees doubling in order to better organize the inventory, a
process expected to take years.

The post A Long-Lost Set of Sketches of the Beloved Novella
‘The Little Prince’ Has Turned Up in a Swiss Storage Facility
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