The Rose

The Rose in Literature: Le Roman de la Rose

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Consuelo and The Tale of the Rose

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from The Little Prince, translated by Katherine Woods

I soon learned to know this flower better.  On the little prince's planet the flowers had always been very simple.  They had only one ring of petals; they took up no room at all; they were a trouble to nobody.  One morning they

would appear in the grass, and by night they would have faded peacefully away.  But one day, from a seed blown from no one knew where, a new flower had come up; and the little prince had watched very closely over this small sprout which was not like any other small sprouts on his planet.

. . .

Then one morning, exactly at sunrise, she suddenly showed herself.

. . .

... The little prince could not restrain his admiration: "Oh!  How beautiful you are!"

"Am I not?" the flower responded, sweetly. "And I was born at the same moment as the sun . . . "

The little prince could guess easily enough that she was not any too modest -- but how moving -- and exciting -- she was!

. . .

"...She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me.  I ought never to have run away from her . . . I ought to have guessed all the affections that lay behind her poor little stratagems.  Flowers are so inconsistent!  But I was too young to know how to love her . . . "

. . .

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses. "You are not at all like my rose," he said.  "As yet you are nothing.  No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one.  You are like my fox when I first knew him.  He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on.  "One could not die for you.  To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you -- the rose that belongs to me.  But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing.  Because she is my rose."

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