The Flower

On the little prince's planet, the flowers had always been very simple. They had only one ring of petals, they took up no room at all, and they were gone by night.

But one day, from a seed blown from no one knew where, a new flower had appeared. The little prince watched over this small plant very carefully. It was not like any other plant on his planet.

The shrub soon stopped growing and began to prepare its flower. The little prince watched over the first appearance of a huge bud. The flower was not satisfied to finish her preparations in private. She chose her colours with the greatest care. She dressed herself slowly. She arranged her petals one by one. She did not wish to appear all untidy, like the field poppies. She wanted to appear only in the full radiance of her beauty. She was a very proud creature. And her mysterious preparations lasted for days and days.

Then one morning, exactly at sunrise, she showed herself. And after working with all this careful precision, she yawned and said:

"Ah! I am scarcely awake. Please excuse me. My petals are still all disarranged..."

But the little prince could not hold back his admiration: "Oh! How beautiful you are!"

"Am I not?" the flower replied sweetly. "And I was born at the same moment as the sun..."

She was clearly not modest — but how wonderful and exciting she was!

She soon began to trouble him with her vanity, which was difficult to deal with. She spoke of tigers, though there were no tigers on his planet. She asked for a screen against the cold wind. She coughed to make him feel guilty. She said things that were not entirely true.

"I ought not to have listened to her," the little prince confided to me later. "One should never listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine filled my whole planet with perfume. But I did not know how to appreciate all her grace. That talk of claws, which troubled me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity."

He went on: "I ought to have judged her by her actions, not her words. She gave me her fragrance and her light. I ought never to have run away from her. I ought to have understood the affection that lay behind her poor little tricks. Flowers are so difficult to understand! But I was too young to know how to love her."