Rendez-vous: The Day I Met my Prince

A year and a half ago, with my sights set on Morocco, I trotted to the Peterborough Public Library and went berserk. First, I gave away about fifteen boxes of books, and then, I set about replacing them.

I signed out an armload of language and travel resources, fiction, and DVDs about North Africa, and devoured them all, in between spastic packing fits. But my most precious acquisition was a tiny, one-dollar purchase from the library basement: a slim, winsome copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince – en français, of course, because I fancied the idea of becoming fluent in French during my two years abroad.

Ha! Well, I exported myself from one continent to the other, and soon discovered that “learning French” is a bigger endeavour than I had expected – and that Le Petit Prince is not so little after all. Even with six hours a week of language lessons, I could still do little more than pull out the precious tome and stroke it wistfully. Sometimes I would stumble through a page or two, looking up every third noun in the dictionary and skipping right over the cleverly disguised verbs. But for the most part, my little prince stayed on the shelf while I occupied myself with more pressing linguistic feats that required a completely different vocabulary base:

“Please turn around. We’re in the wrong city.”

“What is the purpose of the three watering cans in the washroom?”

“Please explain how to use this toilet. What do I do with the bottle?”

“I need a pelvic ultrasound.”

“Why are you giving me a needle in my belly?”

“Will these stitches dissolve, or do I need to come back to have them removed?”

“I think those stitches are still in my chin somewhere.”

“I can’t feel my left leg.”

And so on.

And so it was that my genesis into the lofty world of French literature was completely thwarted for at least a year. Eventually, however, my need for embarrassing anatomical terminology began to decline, and I started to hunger for some words with a little more class. I revisited my little prince with dogged determination, looking up every unfamiliar word in my dictionary and writing it in my notebook. It became a bit of a ritual each night: read, underline, define, reread; read, underline, define, reread. Over and over, paragraph by paragraph, I made my way through one agonizingly slow page after another.

But what interesting words I was learning! Things like delight, astonishment, treasure, burst of laughter, fairy tale, grope, rosebush, sweetness, twilight, rancour, annoyance, dawdle, wonder, praise, stroll, stride, grumpy, disappear, coil, conceal, crimson, annihilate, clumsy, poppy, prickly, remorse, embalm, shelter, radiance. . . Now these are useful words – not at the hospital perhaps, or in a taxi (one would hope) – but useful words for all the things that really matter. Once you can articulate ideas like delight and remorse, you can forgive yourself for not knowing how to describe the feeling of undissolved stitches in your chin.

And so I read, underlined, defined, and reread my way right up to page 50, at which time I found myself on an airplane without my reliable, yet bulky crutch of a dictionary. Google Translate is no good without WiFi, and my free dictionary app had more advertisements than definitions. How frustrating! I was so delighted with my story, and so full of remorse for packing clothes instead of language books for my vacation. How could I go a whole week without adding to my list of new and delicious words? And how could I leave my little prince unattended in the desert for so long? It would be inhumane to neglect him so.

Truly, the only responsible thing to do was to keep on reading; to take a guess when I came to an unfamiliar word; to reread or skip ahead to get the context of the phrase; to search for syllables that I’ve seen in words I already know; to look at the pictures, and at previous chapters containing the mystery words; and, when a word continues to elude me, to put a big question mark in the margin and keep on reading.

And so I did; and somewhere around page 56, things began to change between me and The Little Prince. Gradually the story became less of a cognitive exercise, and more of a literary seductress. I began to feel the anxiety of the Prince for his flower; the yearning of the fox to be tamed; the emptiness of life without connection; the pathos of unwanted good-byes.

I had tasked myself with decoding a secret message in a foreign language, but the cipher was beginning to penetrate beyond the arrangement of letters on a page. As I continued to grapple with the syntax, I was now also puzzling over the thoughts of the characters themselves. I wondered about the serpent’s true intentions and abilities; I wondered if the prince was wiser than he seemed. I began to care about the characters; and my eyes welled up with the poignancy of their interactions.

Page 75 arrived in no time. I was bereft to find that the story had finished before I was ready to let it go. I had finally experienced the linguistic epiphany that every teacher hopes to conjure for her students: that magical moment when decoding and comprehension strategies begin to take second place to the message of the story itself. I had scrutinized a lot of French words, and had done a passable job of subjecting them to my cognitive will; but now… now I was reading, and that’s an entirely different thing! I was swept up in the splendour of the thoughts behind the words. I was discovering what a story really is.

I still don’t know the meanings of a lot of those words, but I can go back and look them up, now that I have my dictionary by my side again. And then I will have the double delight of reading the story again, and probing even deeper into the message behind the text. I will ask my teacher to record a chapter of it for me, so I can listen to the vocal inflections and let the music of it carry me from one world to the next; and I will begin to put this music on my lips as well.

Eventually, maybe I will be able to stride into a Moroccan hospital and inform the doctor that the prickly stitches in my chin are annoying me, and I’ll ask her to annihilate them so my face will be restored to its former radiance… But even if I never need these ravishing new words in a foreign medical facility, I’m still so thrilled to have met them and tasted their sweetness. They showed me what a language is for, by talking to my listening heart.

Thank-you, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, for your patience as I neglected and wrestled with the story hidden inside your tiny book; and thank-you, Little Prince, for teaching me to read.