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Chapter eight

I soon learned to know that flower better. On the little prince’s planet, there had always been very simple flowers, decorated with a single row of petals so that they took up no room at all and got in no one’s way.

They would appear one morning in the grass, and would fade by nightfall. But this one had grown from a seed brought from who knows where, and the little prince had kept a close watch over a sprout that was not like any of the others.

It might have been a new kind of baobab. But the sprout soon stopped growing and began to show signs of blossoming.

The little prince, who had watched the development of an enormous bud, realized that some sort of miraculous apparition would emerge from it,

but the flower continued her beauty preparations in the shelter of her green chamber, selecting her colors with the greatest care and dressing quite deliberately, adjusting her petals one by one.

She had no desire to emerge all rumpled, like the poppies. She wished to appear only in the full radiance of her beauty.

Oh yes, she was quite vain! And her mysterious adornment had lasted days and days. And then one morning, precisely at sunrise, she showed herself.

And after having labored so painstakingly, she yawned and said, “Ah! I’m hardly awake… Forgive me… I’m still all untidy…”

But the little prince couldn’t contain his admiration.

“How lovely you are!”

“Aren’t I?” the flower answered sweetly.

“And I was born the same time as the sun…”

The little prince realized that she wasn’t any too modest, but she was so dazzling!

“I believe it is breakfast time,” she had soon added. “Would you be so kind as to tend to me?”

And the little prince, utterly abashed, having gone to look for a watering can served the flower.

She had soon begun tormenting him with her rather touchy vanity. One day, for instance, alluding to her four thorns, she remarked to the little prince, “I’m ready for tigers, with all their claws!”

“There are no tigers on my planet,” the little prince had objected, “and besides, tigers don’t eat weeds.”

“I am not a weed,” the flower sweetly replied.”

“Forgive me…”

“I am not at all afraid of tigers, but I have a horror of drafts. You wouldn’t happen to have a screen?”

“A horror of drafts…” that’s not a good sign, for a plant,” the little prince had observed. “How complicated this flower is…”

“After dark, you will put me under glass. How cold it is where you live - quite uncomfortable. Where I come from-“ But she suddenly broke off. She had come here as a seed. She couldn’t have known anything of other worlds.

Humiliated at having let herself be caught on the verge of so naive a lie, she coughed two or three times in order to put the little prince in the wrong. “That screen?”

“I was going to look for one, but you were speaking to me!”

Then she made herself cough again, in order to inflict a twinge of remorse on him all the same.

So the little prince, despite all the goodwill of his love, had soon come to mistrust her. He had taken seriously certain inconsequential remarks and had grown very unhappy.

“I shouldn’t have listened to her,” he confided to me one day. “You must never listen to flowers. You must look at them and smell them.

Mine perfumed my planet, but I didn’t know how to enjoy that. The business about the tiger claws, instead of annoying me, ought to have moved me…”

And he confided further, “In those days, I didn’t understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words.

She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions.

Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.”