Professor Faith Beasley includes Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince in two of her French literature courses: Invitation de Voyages and Cherchez le Bonheur. A lover of the book and its planetary philosopher-prince since a young age, she has found The Little Prince to offer insights at every phase of one’s life. “Even if you re-read it every year you will read it very differently each time.”

The slim volume (that was originally three times as long before Saint-Exupery condensed it, is required reading in both courses. The assignment started as a practical answer to a short semester that Faith wanted to get underway in the first week.

“For most of the students, Le Petit Prince was the first French book they read in high school,” she said. “While they’re catching up with friends that first week, they’re willing to revisit it one more time. They’ve seen it before and think they know what it’s about but then they see it in a completely different light and the students recognize that immediately.”

While her college-age daughter thought the classes might feel they were being treated as children, Faith’s experience instead is that they can understand the text no matter what level of French they bring to it and, at more advanced levels, can analyze it as literature.”

When France celebrated the 75^th anniversary of the publication of Le Petit Prince in 2018, there were exhibits and articles, all exploring “why everyone should read it every year and many do.”

Saint-Exupery wrote the book, published in 1943, while he was living in New York, trying to get American support for the war effort in Europe when the United States was still pursuing an isolationist agenda.

“The message of the Little Prince himself is that we can’t live in isolation. We need each other,” Faith observed. “So many of the characters he meets, like the businessman insist they can be independent but the prince sees that his obsession with counting doesn’t make a sense. The drunkard drinks to forget his drinking. But the lamplighter, the prince’s favorite, who seems to be alone and lonely is actually working for someone else when he lights his lamp. The prince learns that being dependent on others is a necessity and a strength.”

Faith launched her "Search for Happiness" course because she found her students were so unhappy. “They were so driven to get into an Ivy League school, they didn’t ever have a chance to reflect. I wanted them to think about ‘what is happiness?’ and to be mindful of what they’re doing at and through Dartmouth. When they read a book like this they think about what is important to them, what is not just doing what other people want. Students tell me, ‘your course had me thinking’ and when they learn that happiness as a concept did not develop until the 18^th century, that one’s ‘bon heur’ or ‘good fortune’ was in the control of God, the king or society, it helps take the pressure off. It’s ok not to be happy. They, like the Little Prince, can search for happiness.”

“Le Petit Prince is a whole meditation on solitude, on what is our place in the world,” Faith noted.  “It’s about how important it is to be with others, to help others, to need others. It underscores the need to create relationships and very meaningfully.”

At this particular juncture. Faith sees Le Petit Prince as offering an approach to life, just as much for retirees considering what their value is to the world, as for students.

“When analyzed as a literary text, Saint Exupery’s writing style offers a simplistic, childlike naivete to address deep, deep philosophical issues,” she said. “But the Little Prince is not a child. He is all-knowing being, finding truths in all the characters by asking questions, even though he knows the answers (except for Fox, who has knowledge the Little Prince does not.) Saint-Exupery has the ability to speak to different levels, to a child or to an adult and raise issues without preaching.

“The story forces you to engage in many different ways because the structure of the story takes place in the pilot’s imagination,” she continued. “That’s why it’s so valuable to read Le Petit Prince often.”

Fox teaches us what is really important: that when we are interconnected, we never really leave. Fox is in the color of the wheat field, the Prince is in the laughter of the stars and ultimately he learns that although Rose is a very egocentric person and lies to him by saying she is the only rose, his attitude changes from sadness to understanding the happiness of doing something for someone else without anything in return.

Audiences love “escaping” to Blow-Me-Down Farm for the quality of Opera North’s performances but also for the tranquility and beauty of the setting on the banks of the Connecticut. Faith sees a parallel in what students find in the story of the Little Prince. “They reflect on solitude and the need they feel for independence while also recognizing we need each other. That was the theme Saint-Exupery was trying to express in his effort to gain American support for a war that seemed very remote, a theme that will resonate now.”

Likewise in her “Invitation to Travel” French literature course, “Le Petit Prince underscores how important it is to encounter others, to travel to learn, to expand. The Prince has to leave Rose and his small planet to learn the value of doing good for others,” she said. “Happiness is not individual success, it is making others successful. How do you make them feel?” It’s a message she hopes her students embrace by getting involved in volunteering to support others’ needs at a younger age, for example.  

“Le Petit Prince is about people looking for something else, about thinking more profoundly about the world around you,” she said.

In the fantasy world of “The Little Prince” beneath the tent and gazing across the Connecticut River valley and Mt. Ascutney beyond, Opera North makes the Prince’s advice to “see with the heart” within reach.