Original Little Prince Watercolor Found

There are many indicators that I am well closeted. I smoke a pipe. All of my friends are catty females who I am not sleeping with. And I have a deep, personal connection to Le Petit Prince... to the point that I can't even write the title in English... I can only reverently whisper it in sultry French phonemes.

So this story thrilled me: very few of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's perfect original watercolors to his novel survive, but another has just been discovered.

Of the 47 Saint-Exupery paintings that illustrate the book, only a handful have been found. The French novelist and aviator was lost in a flying mission in 1944, according to the organizers.

Painted on letter paper, the work depicts an asteroid inhabited by a businessman that the little prince stops at before coming to the Earth.

The watercolor was found in 1994 at a secondhand book fair in Tokyo by Minoru Shibuya, 60, curator of Ehon Museum Kiyosato -- a picture book museum in the resort area of Kiyosato, Yamanashi Prefecture. He who bought it for 1.2 million yen, the organizers said.

Saint-Exupery's disappearance has always been a wonderful mystery to me. Le Petit Prince has so deeply moved me that I've always liked to think that Saint-Exupery somehow figured out a way to pilot his plane back to the Prince's little meteorite.

Rare Saint-Exupery watercolor to be shown [Japan Times]