I quickly learned to better know this flower.
There had always been, on the planet
of the little prince, very simple flowers, adorned with a single row of petals, and
which did not stand for space, and which did not disturb anyone. They appeared one
morning in the grass, and then they died in the evening. But this one had
germinated one day, of a seed brought from ones where, and the little prince had
very closely watched this twig which did not look like other twigs. It could be a
new kind of baobab. But the shrub quickly stopped growing, and began to prepare a
flower. The little prince, who attended the installation of a huge button, felt
that he would take out a miraculous appearance, but the flower never stopped
preparing to be beautiful, sheltered from his green room. She carefully chose her
colors. She dressed slowly, she adjusted her petals one by one. She did not want to
come out all chipped like the poppies. She only wanted to appear in the full
influence of her beauty. Eh! Yes. She was very flirtatious! His mysterious toilet
had therefore lasted days and days. And then here is that one morning, precisely at
sunrise time, she had shown herself. And she, who had worked with so much
precision, said, building: - Ah! I barely wake up ... I ask you for forgiveness ...
I'm still peeling ... The little prince, then, could not contain his admiration:
How beautiful you are! -Isn't it, replied the flower gently. And I was born at the
same time as the sun ... The little prince guessed although it was not too modest,
but it was so moving! -It's time, I think, breakfast, she soon added, would you be
kind enough to think of me ... And the little prince, all confused, having been
looking for a watering water, had served the flower.
So she quickly tormented her by her slightly shady vanity. One day, for example,
speaking of her four thorns, she said to the little prince: - They can come, the
tigers, with their claws! - There are no tigers on my planet, had objected the
little prince, and then the tigers do not eat the grass. - I am not a grass, had
slowly replied the flower. -Forgive me ...-I'm not afraid of the tigers, but I hate
air. Wouldn't you have a screen? "Horror of the air currents ... It is not lucky,
for a plant, had noticed the little prince. This flower is very complicated ... " -
In the evening you will put me under globe. It is very cold in your home. It’s
badly installed. Where I come from ...
But she had interrupted herself. She had come in the form of a seed. She hadn't
been able to know from other worlds. Humiliated to have been surprised to prepare
such a naive lie, she had touched two or three times, to put the little prince in
her wrong: - This screen? ... - I was going to get him but you were talking to me!
So she had forced her cough to still inflict remorse. Thus the little prince,
despite the good will of his love, had quickly doubted her. He had taken
unimportant words seriously, and had become very unhappy. "I shouldn't have
listened to it," he told me one day, "you should never listen to the flowers. You
have to look at them and breathe them. Mine hired my planet, but I didn't know how
to rejoice. This story of claws, which had annoyed me so much, should have been
waiting for me ... "
He again entrusted me: "I then knew nothing to understand! I should have judged her
on the acts and not on the words. She was moving to me and enlisted me. I should
never have run away! I should have guess his tenderness behind his poor tricks. The
flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love him. »»