CHAPTER 10 – VOLCANOES

“I shouldn’t have listened to her,” the little prince told me one day. “You must never listen to flowers. You must look at them and smell them. My flower perfumed all my planet, but I didn’t know how to enjoy it. The story about the tiger claws, which annoyed me so much, should only have filled my heart with love.”

He then continued, “At that time I didn’t understand anything. I should have judged her by her actions not her words. She perfumed my planet. She made my life more beautiful. I should have never left her. I should have seen the love that was behind her little tricks. Flowers are so complicated. But I was too young to know how to love her.”

I believe that for his escape he used the migration of wild birds.

On the morning of his departure he put his planet in perfect order. He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. There were two active volcanoes on his planet. And they were very convenient for warming his breakfast in the morning.

He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “You never know!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano too. If they are properly cleaned out, volcanoes burn gently and regularly, without eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney.

Of course, on our Earth we are too small to clean out our volcanoes. That’s why they’re causing us a lot of trouble.

The little prince also pulled out, a little sadly, the last little baobabs. He thought he would never want to return. But all these familiar tasks seemed very sweet to him on this last morning. And when he watered the flower one last time, and put her under glass, he realized that he was very close to tears.

“Goodbye,” he said to the flower. But she didn’t reply.

“Goodbye,” he repeated. The flower coughed. But it wasn’t because she had a cold.

“I have been silly,” she said at last. “I want to apologize. Try to be happy.”

He was surprised there were no complaints. He stood there quite confused, holding the glass in his hand. He didn’t understand this calm kindness.

“Of course, I love you,” the flower told him. “It was my fault that you never knew it. It doesn’t matter. But you were just as silly as I was. Try to be happy. Put that glass down. I don’t want it anymore.”

“But the wind…”

“The wind isn’t that bad. The night air will do me good. I am a flower.”

“But the animals…”

“I have to be able to survive two or three caterpillars if I want to see the butterflies. It seems that they are very beautiful. If there are no butterflies here, who will visit me? You will be far away. When it comes to big animals, I’m not afraid of them. I have my claws.” And she naively showed her four thorns.

Then she added, “Don’t stand here like this, it’s annoying. You decided to leave. So, now go!”

She said it because she didn’t want him to see her cry. She was such a proud flower.