Chapter 8 🔊✎

I soon got to know this flower better. 🔊✎ On the little prince’s planet, there had always been a few simple flowers. 🔊✎ They had a single ring of petals, they took up hardly any space, they never bothered anyone. 🔊✎ They turned up one morning in the grass, and in the evening they disappeared again. 🔊✎ But this one had sprouted one day, from a seed that came from who knows where, and the little prince had carefully watched this shoot that didn’t look like any of the other shoots. 🔊✎ It could be a new kind of baobab. 🔊✎ But the plant soon stopped getting taller, and it began to prepare a flower. 🔊✎ The little prince, who watched the huge bud growing and swelling, was sure that something wonderful would emerge, but the flower was still busy making herself beautiful in the shelter of her green bedroom. 🔊✎ She painstakingly selected her colours. 🔊✎ She got dressed slowly, smoothing down each of her petals. 🔊✎ She didn’t want to emerge all rumpled like a vulgar poppy, she was only going to come out in the full radiance of her beauty. 🔊✎ Yes, she was a rather vain flower! 🔊✎ Her mysterious preparations went on for days and days. 🔊✎ Finally, one morning, just as the sun was rising, she made her entry. 🔊✎ And having worked so long and with such care, she said with a yawn:

“Oh! I’m scarcely awake… I’m so sorry… I must look like a mess.” 🔊✎

The little prince could not contain his admiration:

“You’re so beautiful!” 🔊✎

“I am, aren’t I?” said the flower sweetly. “And I was born at the same time as the sun…” 🔊✎

The little prince already guessed that she wasn’t a very modest flower, but she was so heart-stoppingly lovely! 🔊✎

“I think,” she said a moment later, “that it might be breakfast time. 🔊✎ If you could have the kindness to think of my needs…” 🔊✎ And the little prince, totally confused, went off to get the watering can so that he could give the flower what she wanted. 🔊✎

She was so full of herself and so easily offended, and that soon began to upset the little prince. 🔊✎ One day, talking of her four thorns, she told him:

“If those tigers try to come here with their claws, I’m ready for them!” 🔊✎

“There are no tigers on my planet,” said the little prince. “And tigers don’t eat green things.” 🔊✎

“I am not a green thing,” said the flower sweetly. 🔊✎

“I’m sorry…” 🔊✎

“I’m not afraid of tigers, but I hate drafts. You wouldn’t perhaps have a screen?” 🔊✎

“Hates drafts… that’s a bad idea if you’re a plant,” thought the little prince. 🔊✎ “This flower is kind of hard to deal with.” 🔊✎

“And in the evening,” she said, “you need to put me under a glass cover. 🔊✎ It’s very cold here, there’s something wrong with the heating. Where I come from…” 🔊✎

But suddenly she stopped. She had come as a seed. She couldn’t know anything about what it was like on other planets. 🔊✎ Feeling like an idiot for having made up such a stupid lie, she coughed two or three times to put the little prince in the wrong. 🔊✎

“That screen?” she said. 🔊✎

“I was just going to get it but you were talking to me!” 🔊✎

She made herself cough more so that he would feel bad all the same. 🔊✎

So the little prince, although he truly loved her, began to have terrible thoughts. 🔊✎ He had taken words seriously which were of no importance, and he felt very unhappy. 🔊✎

“I shouldn’t have listened to her,” he told me one day, “you should never listen to flowers. 🔊✎ You should look at them and smell their perfume. 🔊✎ Because of my flower, the whole planet smelled good, but I didn’t know how to appreciate it. 🔊✎ This stupid story about the claws that got me so upset, it should just have made me feel sorry for her.” 🔊✎

And he went on:

“I didn’t understand anything! I should have thought about what she did, not what she said. 🔊✎ She filled my life with sweetness and beauty. 🔊✎ I should never have left! 🔊✎ I should have seen how much tenderness there was behind her silly little games. 🔊✎ It’s so hard to tell where you are with flowers. 🔊✎ I was too young to know how to love her.” 🔊✎