l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux

The Morgan Library and Museum has up a Little Prince exhibit until the end of April. A nice collection of Antoine de St. Exupery's sketches and illustrations are on view along with a handful of photographs, letters, and biographical anecdotes of the funny man who dreamed up one of French literature's most iconic bonhommes. Very exciting to see all of those drawings in the flesh - the lonely Rose, the Fox who wanted to be tamed, my favorite Baobab trees, and of course the boa constrictor who ate the elephant.

I went last week on a very cold day with my friend Ilene (whose Tumblr I'll fawn over another time) and my Bangladeshi countryman, Sham. It was a special visit for Sham, who doesn't read this blog, so I can tell you a few things about him. He owns the Belgian beer bar Vol de Nuit in the Village, named after another of St. Exupery's books. He also once traveled from Dhaka to Strasbourg by bicycle, a three-year journey with weeks-long stopovers in friendly lands and near-death experiences in the Afghan desert. He washed dishes and cleaned houses as he went along, and he was jailed in India for 15 days because he didn't have a visa. India alone took him nine months to cross, a vast country.

He'd hate my reducing those years to an internet-byte, but I thought you had to know.

General admission to the Morgan's exhibits (there's also one on woodcuts) is $12, a bit steep I think but worth it if you're a deep appreciator of the book, and a lot of people are.

And a tribute to the Prince's lovely Rose: