Many stories are told about how Antoine De Saint-Exupéry decided to write The Little Prince and what was his inspiration. What is undoubtedly true is that the story is a remake of his first novel: South Mail. Antoine transformed what was a novel aimed at an adult audience with a somewhat overloaded prose, which had not yet found its style, into a children's story with allegorical characters, talking animals and flowers, with a simple prose, easy to understand even for a child, which meant that he kept the essence of the novel and eliminated all its defects of pomposity, overloaded dialogues, etc.

Correo Sur tells the story of an aviator, a commercial pilot, who falls in love with an aristocrat and she with him. They elope in love with each other. However, they soon discover that between romantic love and living together internship there is a very long distance. She leaves him. He begins to wander destitute in the city of Cairo. At one point, he enters a sleazy brothel and loses himself in a dozen indifferent female bodies to try to forget the woman he was in love with (reading this I understood for the first time what the rose garden of the little prince was). The Little Prince tells basically the same story, although he eliminates the mancebias and softens the final suicide with interpretative ambiguity. In Correo Sur, on the other hand, the protagonist commits suicide: this has no alternative reading.

However, in both stories, the protagonist is an explorer in conversation with a geographer. At Southern Mail he meets his former geography teacher; while in The Little Prince he meets a senior geographer who, like the professor, serves as a moral guide to the protagonist. Likewise, in South Maila priest gives a sermon on the fact that modern science has integrated the march of the star into equations, but the star itself is totally unknown to him: ironically, he knows less about the stars than a pink teenager in love. This same idea is reflected in The Little Prince by the businessman who registers the stars and declares that they are his property without even asking what a star is.

Now, beyond the simple interpretations of a children's story with moralizing and educational intentions; beyond the intention of amusing -as it does- through the ridiculous circular fallacy of the drunkard, The Little Prince poses an interesting problem: life has essentially no meaning, but we give it a meaning by creating bonds with some entities. The rose of the little prince could be one among thousands, but he had created a bond, a bond that was invisible, that linked him to that one flower and not to the thousands of others. This bond, invisible to the eye, exists. In fact, not only does it exist, but it is even more real than the flower in its concrete reality; the flower in its petal, in what a botanist can say about it. This world of invisible bonds that we create is what really makes living meaningful, what makes living worthwhile.

I really don't know if any child has ever understood the moral since this book was published. Because of these allegories of anthropomorphic foxes and talking flowers, my feeling about the book is that, at final, it is much deeper than it might seem at first glance.