More than 50 million copies of “The Little Prince” have been sold since
its publication in 1943, the year before its author’s disappearance; every year an additional 1 million copies are
bought. The book has been translated into 102 languages and dialects,
including Esperanto, Congolese and Sardinian. Several film versions have
been produced (a Paramount film with Bob Fosse and Gene Wilder, and a
Nickelodeon cartoon series, among others), and the likeness of the little
prince can be found on the new French 50-franc bill, on CD-ROMs and
videos, and on bed linen, watches, address books, figurines, dolls,
wallpaper, postcards, backpacks, notebooks and keychains.
Editors at Gallimard, France’s biggest publisher and home to “The Little
Prince,” are stumped by the book’s unflagging success over the decades. “We
really can’t explain the phenomenon,” says Philip Lezaud. “It’s one of
those mysteries. The book has an aura about it. It is almost inexplicable.”
Indeed, how does a seemingly simple tale about an infinitely melancholic
little boy on a tiny asteroid compete in the antic and overcrowded zoo of
children’s marketing?

Part of the mystery lies in the enduring appeal of fables,
universal tales that underscore human foibles and follies with a dose of
morality thrown in. In the little prince’s case, the stupefying characters
he encounters on his travels through the universe, consumed by their meaningless preoccupations, could very well
be you and me: the businessman who administers stars without accounting for
their beauty, the king who rules over nobody, the train switchman who
operates speeding trains full of people “pursuing nothing at all” or the
merchant who sells pills that save time — exactly 53 minutes –
by quenching thirst. (“As for me,” says the prince, “if I had fifty-three
minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of
fresh water.”)

Grown-ups are perplexing at best, and downright dangerous at
worst. In the celebrated first paragraph of the book, our narrator explains
how, as a young child frustrated by adults consistently misconstruing his
drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant as a picture of a hat, he gave up “what might have been a magnificent career as a painter” to pursue the
sensible professions endorsed by adults. In so doing, he surrendered his
own powers of childlike vision. “Alas,” he says, unable to see through the
walls of boxes like the little prince, the odd yellow-haired child who appears before him one morning in the Sahara desert, “I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old.”

Duped by images, obsessed with the inessential, adults are unable
to truly see. And seeing is precisely the point, for the little prince
trades in the currency of the invisible. “The eyes are blind,” he tells our
narrator, “one must look with the heart.” “The thing that is important is
the thing that is not seen.” “Beauty is something that is invisible.”
Like the children who see angels in Wim Wenders’ film “Wings of Desire,” the little prince lives in that pristine realm of childhood where values dwell in the heart and the invisible reigns — that heady, dreamy universe that dissipates when we grow up and succumb to the furious imperatives of the concrete, of matter.

Cast upon our planet only to find that the Earth is nonsensical and as curiously bleak as his own desolate asteroid, it’s no small wonder that the little prince is sad. In fact, he is filled with unrequited longing and nostalgia. His melancholy is so expansive that even the narrator is stricken by an undefinable “sense of grief,” and it is this very sadness that
challenges the persistent notion that children are, and must be at all
times, happy.

Posits psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz, “Happiness is a condition
formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by
adults to children.” The zany mechanical glee and frenetic happiness of
most children’s products are no match for the feelings of emotional
disenfranchisement and disenchantment that come hard and early in the
playgrounds of youth. It doesn’t take much for children to realize that the
world is not full of happy purple dinosaurs and obsessively cheerful
friends endlessly repeating their ABCs. (Thank God. To quote Aldous
Huxley, “There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s
happiness.”) The little prince, in his quest for meaning in a seemingly
meaningless world, offers children something that falls between the artifice of entertainment and the disappointments of the real world, a tiny foothold on
the slippery shoals of reality. In this he bears the stamp of the country
and time that bore him: Saint-Exupéry and Jean-Paul Sartre were
contemporaries, after all, and so was Martin Heidegger, who called “The
Little Prince” “one of the great existential books of the century.”

But the little prince goes beyond existentialism for kids and into the mystical. In challenging the conventions of happy endings, he does what storybook heroes are not supposed to do: He dies.

Or does he?

“I shall look as if I were dead,” the little prince says of his
imminent departure, “and that will not be true.” Of his ultimate
destination he adds, “You understand … it is too far. I cannot carry this
body with me. It is too heavy.” Compared to an old abandoned shell, his body disappears by daybreak. But where exactly did it go? Is it the same place
(your child might ask) where Grandma went when she left? Will you go there too? And the terrible, inevitable corollary: Will I go there, too? “A
couple generations ago,” explains Penelope Leach in “Your Baby & Child,” “the
most general taboo was ‘the facts of life.’ Now, it’s the facts of death.”
These may be ironic words in a culture where death is a frequent if not
regular prime-time guest in everyone’s living room. But just as our
relentless insistence on being happy is often a means for abating a looming
fear of being depressed, so too does our overwhelming preoccupation with
death (from cartoon indestructibility to cinematic carnage)
underscore deep-rooted feelings of despair in the face of the Big End. “The
Little Prince” may not tackle hardcore mortality issues, but it does offer
a transcendent perspective on the question with overtones that have been
interpreted by some as quasi-religious. “A fairy-tale transposition of
certain episodes in the life of Christ,” is how literary critic Victor
Graham describes it, referring to the prince’s planetary peregrinations –
his wanderings through the desert followed by his star, his implicit
preaching of brotherly love, his transcendent purity and predetermined
death.

Christian metaphors aside, “The Little Prince” suggests that we
belong to a much vaster realm than the tiny sphere we inhabit; that our
passage on Earth is but a momentary detour on a mysterious journey
Elsewhere. In this itinerant cosmology a celestial road map exists: “I
wonder,” ponders the prince, “whether the stars are set alight in heaven so
that one day each one of us may find his own again.”

Stumbling upon our narrator in the middle of the desert, the little prince
recalls the ancient belief that strangers encountered by chance might in
fact be mystical emissaries, “a god in disguise,” according to T.V.F. Cuffe.
These powerful and fleeting encounters with strangers, through some
ineffable and startling communion, can change one unequivocally, shift
the course of one’s path, present a metaphor for something lost or deeply
sought after. As a wayward, lonely planetary traveler searching the
universe for answers, the little prince is a sort of curious reflection of
our own condition in time: The 20th century began and may very well end
with the Titanic in the collective mind — a symbol of the hubris of human
beings in their quest for dominion over nature. Interestingly, on the night
the Titanic sank it was so still and clear that the ship, according to
passenger reports, was entirely surrounded by stars, lit by starlight above
and below, by stars reflected on the ocean’s surface.

With this haunting metaphor of almost childlike extravagance, we have literally sailed into the stars throughout the century: We have “rediscovered” our universe — collected rocks on the moon, found water on Mars and organic matter on Jupiter, discovered galaxies blooming like strange flowers across
the light years. If we were to suspend grown-up disbelief for just one moment and walk back into the country of childhood, we might recognize our home Earth
(“the loveliest and saddest of landscapes”) in the context of an even
greater world, and offer our children metaphors for their journey into the
unknowable future. We could take them outside and stand together in the dark, turning our eyes upward to the night sky. Look up, we might say, pointing to the stars. That is, we could tell them, where you came from.

Take my case, for starters. My husband grew up in a French village where
laundry was done in wood-fired boilers, and he harbors deeply idyllic
memories of laundry snapping in a country breeze; of the smell of fresh
cotton, soap and pine wafting through the Loire Valley. Though this
bucolic scene bit the dust forever with the advent of washing machines in
the ’50s, for my husband laundry remains sensual: the sudsy,
stupor-inducing rhythm of it whirling in the machine; the fragrant forest
of drying clothes and the humidity it forms on window glass (my husband
tries desperately to prohibit the use of the dryer); the recalcitrant
stiffness of line-dried sheets and the cozy order of perfectly folded
T-shirts stacked like reams of paper in a wooden armoire … all this
imposes a homey sense of calm on my husband’s otherwise chaotic, nomadic
lifestyle and stirs memories of his halcyon years in the Loire. Laundry,
in short, has the evocative power of Proust’s madeleine.

I, on the other hand, have memories of pushing a shopping cart filled with
dirty laundry up a steep hill to a laundromat in Los Angeles, where I sat
through an endless inferno of spin cycles and avoided eye contact with a
local lunatic ranting about the apocalypse and throttling the coin-operated
machine slots for loose change. We were the only Americans on the planet,
I was sure, without a washer and dryer, and I bore the weight of this
domestic task with a certain incredulous resentment. Who did the ironing
later? Who did the sorting? I have blocked out the memory. Today what
remains is a deep distaste and disregard for the whole gestalt of laundry.
I mix colors. (My white underwear turned off-pink long ago, and much of my
husband’s has come along for the ride.) I do not iron (and who needs to,
with a dryer?). When it comes to energy-consuming laundry technology
(another big bone of contention), I am profligate. For me, laundry is an
odious burden and even the floral sheets hanging on lines in courtyards,
those charming icons of Parisian street life, fill me with low-grade
anxiety.

No surprise then, that laundry has become a battlefield in our marriage
where other larger issues are sublimated. In fact, in his book, Kaufmann
writes about “a veritable war” of identities and how laundry “carries the
trace left by this war, revealing the intensity of combat and its cunning
strategies.” And border skirmishes, it seems, are raging all over.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Kaufmann’s book is filled with case studies of couples with often
pathological and curious laundry problems. There’s Bruno, an incorrigible
slob who was tyrannized by his excessively tidy mother but who
unconsciously yearns for his wife Nadia to become her. (As Neil Young put
it, a man needs a maid.) There’s Bernard, a long-standing bachelor so
furiously passionate about ironing — not to be confused with Isabelle, who
irons everything including her socks — that he and his wife, Geraldine, kept
separate piles of his/her laundry. (When the author first interviewed the
couple they were in their second week of marriage. Three months later, they
were separated.) And there’s Nadine, who’s so ideologically opposed to the
purchase of a washing machine that she and her husband still do their
laundry at their respective parents’ homes. (Lucky for them THEIR parents
have no ideological problems with laundry.)

But in his exploration of
the dynamics of the couple, Kaufmann goes beyond the psychology of laundry and into another realm entirely. “Everything
speaks,” he says, “and everything speaks to us of the couple in different
languages: the bed, the dining table, records, the dish-drying rack, the
miniature plastic gondola brought back from a trip to Venice. The couple
and the family construct themselves around these objects.” And in this discursive of the dharma
of the domicile Kaufmann is not alone. In “The Poetics of Space,” French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about the phenomenology of drawers,
chests, wardrobes, nests, shells and corners, all of which come together in
a room or house to create “psychological diagrams that guide us in our
analysis of intimacy.” Françoise Minkowsa, considered a “psychologist of
houses,” describes wardrobes as being “filled with the mute tumult of
memories” and has written about the phenomenology of doorknobs. Is there
something, in our frantic rush, that we Americans are missing? According to
these philosophers of the foyer, who were writing about all this long
before Vogue and other glossies brought Feng Shui to the masses, it’s not
just your laundry that speaks; all the objects that surround you are, in
fact, signposts that chart the topology of your inner world. And you
were thinking you are what you eat.

On some level, laundry is indeed metaphysical. Viewed in its most
exalted state, the washing machine performs a sort of ablution, removing the
accumulated muck that taints our lives and going through cycles as this
transformation ensues. All this reminds me of a time back in my single days
when I would drop my laundry off at the cleaners. It would come back at the
end of the day wrapped in thick blue craft paper, with a strangely
agreeable hygienic luster. One would think that in this impersonal exchange
laundry was no longer an “instrument of investigation” for delving into the
complex world of the Other. Occasionally, however, the fugitive sock of a
stranger would turn up in my little blue pack, a sign that my laundry had
indeed co-mingled with, say, the cow-print boxers of the guy standing
behind me at the checkout line and that it was, in fact, part of a great
collective yet intimate process ripe with meaning. I realize now that the
difference between doing my own laundry and sending it off to be done was
in some ways similar to the difference between taking a jet across the
country and taking a road trip. The former may be practical, but you
miss the whole experience in the process. As the old saying goes, it’s not
the destination that counts, it’s the journey.

The laundromat in Los Angeles vanished long ago, but it lives on yet in
the messy corners of my psyche. Though I have been enlightened by
Kaufmann’s book, I still loathe laundry and dream of a life unfettered from
the shackles of hampers, detergent, drying racks and ironing boards. But
I’m now wise enough to know that even if we could avoid all the drudgery –
say we invented self-cleaning clothes — that really wouldn’t make a
difference. Like skeletons in the closet and excess baggage, dirty laundry
is something we take with us wherever we go.

Decades later, I lambasted L.A. for the way it conspired against the
conventions of “real” Christmas. Then I moved to France.

Appropriately enough, one of the most “real” things about a French
Christmas is food. In a country that does more with blood and brains than
most Americans do with whole wheat and tomato, the French bring the whole
farm to your foyer: With taxidermic flair butchers display large game
birds, rabbits as soft and furry as your cat and whole pigs strangely
festooned with herbs and ribbons, stretched out in mid-leap, their snouts
the size of golf balls. (Just in case you don’t get the message, one of them
has an entire boar hanging in front of his shop, cloven hooves and all.)
In the less fleshy realm of food consumption, little French flags and
roving musette bands herald the arrival of the latest Beaujolais nouveau.
Boy Scouts sell homemade tarte Tatin for five francs a slice. And chestnuts
really ARE roasting on an open fire.

Those with family in the country leave Paris for little hamlets and snowy
villages — places you won’t find in your guidebook — where people eat
those blood sausages and stuffed pheasant and drink enormous quantities of
Borgogne. My first French Christmas was spent in one such village, a place
so deep in the heart of France that people actually start to resemble
advertisements for packaged tours to the Dordogne. Against this backdrop for
Rudolph’s slope and sleigh, far from the insipidly romanticized province,
where Parisians flee the city only to flee back as quickly as they came, it’s not Santa who’s protean but Jesus Christ himself, the real McCoy.
There’s little room here for the mix-and-match, buffet-style religion that makes
Americans seem like curious hybrids to the French. You’re either a
Catholic, a Jew or Something Else Entirely. In short, this is where the
French put Christ back in the word Christmas, and it’s so far from the
Zeitgeist of the Parisian metropolis that at one point between the foie de
veau and the poulet farci aux fines herbes (whose relatives were in the
backyard furiously pecking away at bits of frozen corn), a jovial,
ruddy-faced in-law named Pierrot leaned over to me and asked with earnest
curiosity if Americans celebrated Christmas.

Pierrot’s question not only reminded me of how far from home I really was,
it also prompted the childhood memory of the expatriates from exotic lands
who used to drift through our holiday crash pad, castaways from family
feuds and distant lands who looked vaguely suspicious in the eyes of a
judgmental, self-conscious preteen. Who WAS that Bengali in the Santa
cap? What ABOUT that Ethiopian drinking egg nog in rubber thongs and shorts?
Somehow these people provoked my own inchoate feelings that, like the
Coneheads who crash landed in a Jersey suburb, we didn’t entirely fit in,
and watching them filled me with the remorseful thought that they were
getting gypped. After all, if they wanted a real Christmas, they’d come to
the wrong house.

Now as a castaway myself from what seems like a different planet, I have an
odd appreciation for those days of yore when the hallmark of Christmas was
that there was no hallmark at all. In France the holiday spirit is so
insistent, so irreconcilably real with the icons of a white Christmas, that
it inspires a sort of melancholic gloom. On the other hand, the beauty of
L.A. is that if you’re not into Christmas, there’s always the beach. My
husband put it differently. Burdened as a kid by years of traditional
French Catholic Christmases, he remarked that Xmas in L.A. reminded him of
seeing snowmen and sleigh bells in the African Congo. The incongruity of it
all, however, made him happy.

So how do you pass on to your kid the cozy trappings of European ritual
while fostering a taste for that “happy” permissive incongruity of L.A.?
For my son, two undeniably obvious solutions await.

We might spend Christmas with our neighbors. I’ll feel both sincerely
heartwarmed and vaguely uncomfortable as a “citizen of the world.” We’ll go
down one flight of badly carpeted orange stairs to the third floor. We’ll
eat a lavish, multi-course meal with complex cutlery. I may go to dinner in
slippers. The door on the landing will be open. Not exactly happy
permissive incongruity. But it’s a start.

Chances are higher, however, that we’ll go to L.A. We’ll marvel at
mega-malls and abundant parking spaces. We’ll eat jumbo sushi plates for
holiday dinner. We’ll watch people simultaneously roller blade, drink
Starbucks egg nog and talk on cellular phones while the French shiver in
winter hoarfrost and eat their andouilette. Then, like refugees on a
rampage, we’ll go on blow-out, after-Christmas holiday sprees and consume
vast amounts of cheap American staple goods. (Large economy packs of Haines
underwear. Cotton crew socks. Stacks of ruled yellow pads.) We’ll
manage the unctuous and strained holiday cheer of extended family and
extended credit cards. And if El Niqo doesn’t send Santa reeling through
an ozone hole or flailing down a canyon flood, we might even go to the
beach. Then we’ll return to Paris exhausted, sated and happy to be back.
Yes Pierrot, they DO celebrate Christmas in America.

My son was born in Paris at the Htpital Pierre Rouques. Originally
made for steelworkers in the 1800s and only partially renovated, the hospital
still bears the mark of its age: a paucity of bathrooms (two in a maternity ward for 20 women), nurse assistants with the
grim, forbidding air of characters in a Balzac novel and long, vaulting
windows that look onto squalid courtyards, from which the sky is a tiny
pinhole of blue above a rise of sooty concrete.

But never mind. Having a French husband qualified me for the
breathtaking generosity of socialized health care: nine months of
all-expense-paid medical, including the standard one week post-delivery
stay at the hospital and subsequent free trips to the physiotherapist. I
took the bathrooms in stride.

Those first few postpartum weeks I was an inhabitant of planet
motherhood, momentarily at one with all women while I rode the high seas of
hormonal tempests to that invisible bioplasmic wilderness beyond nation and
culture, a place that is
primal — of womb and spleen and tissue and breast and blood and milk. This
feeling, however, quickly passed, replaced by other issues, such as “Do they
sell Pampers in France?”

The answer, of course, is yes, they sell Pampers and “Hoogies” and a seemingly infinite array of Lion King bibs.
What’s different, however, lies in that gray zone where mores and
motherhood drift apart.

There are little things and there are big things. Take the little
things, for starters. In Los Angeles, I was weaned, for
better or for worse, on the open road. Mobility is in my blood. So it is
that during annual trips back home I experience a perverse sort of envy
around friends in L.A. who throw strollers in voluminous car trunks and
zip baby to and fro in more or less perennial sunshine, doing errands in record
time. I’m still mastering the art of pushing a stroller on cobblestones the
size of grapefruits, and while I used to loathe the rampant consumerism of
food mausoleums like Safeway and Ralph’s, I now envy the convenience of
one-stop shopping. In the working-class Parisian beehive where I live,
grocery shopping is a long, exhausting affair of strained stroller bags and
lines at the butcher, baker, cheesemaker, tea shop, vegetable stand,
hardware store, pharmacy and newspaper kiosk. “But you live in Paaaaris,”
my friends gasp when they hear me complaining. Right. Paris.

Not that la vie Parisienne is without its serious advantages. One
of the most welcome differences is that my son, Max, won’t grow up sucking on
the great teat Entertainment, adrift in the nonstop, 100-channel onslaught
of American TV. Granted, this lack of exposure will probably create a
yawning gulf between Max and his American peers that will dwarf their
language differences (to these peers it may appear as if Max were raised by
Lascaunian cave dwellers), but with around 19 centuries of history at our
doorstep, I’ll hedge my bets in favor of local attractions.

That being said, we’re not entirely without American TV: In the
five-channel world of French TV, there are dubbed reruns of “The Monkees”
(one desperately wonders why, though in some remote, bittersweet corner of
my heart I relish the flashbacks that rush back) and there is one station
that airs prime-time American news. Until recently it was the CBS Evening
News with Dan Rather who, seen from afar, had the vaguely alarming air
of a crash test dummy and gave me the feeling
that I was better off watching America from a cozy 3,000-mile distance.
Then Dan was dumped for Peter Jennings. Still, while America
is now beamed into our living room by a much more agreeable, Euro kind of
guy, I continue to be reminded of things that I’m gratefully spared as an
expat mom. Example: In a recent segment about the advent of children’s
soccer in America, a group of kids were playing on a field somewhere in New
England while their parents cheered hysterically from the sidelines,
camcorders rolling, exhorting the kids to run faster, harder, longer. One
father, crimson with emotion, thrust his fists in the air and screamed, “Go
Johnny! GO!!” His poor kid ran so hard he looked like he’d have a heart
attack. Another mother, whose body looked about as supple as a wrench,
talked about how soccer championships were the pivot around which her
family turns.

Fortunately, Max will be spared that particularly American
preoccupation with super-babydom that turns some kids into freakish
demi-adults. The French could care less if Jean-Luc or Marie-Claude is a
chess champion, a beauty pageant winner or a piano virtuoso at age 2.
What’s important is that everyone eats dinner together at the same hour and
finishes every course, and at around 8 o’clock every evening you can almost hear
a great sigh as millions of French sit down at their dinner tables all
over the country, doing just that. (Family values that have been around so
long, nobody much talks about them.)

Still, I sometimes wonder if this absence of competitive American
drive will make my little Max any less capable of, say, raiding the stock market. Clearly he’ll be different from Johnny in certain ways — he’ll be able to wear socks with sandals without getting abuse, or kiss girls in day care
without getting expelled (“Vive la diffirence,” the French would say in the latter case) — but later on will he have that somewhat older, self-contained quality that seems to set French children apart from their American counterparts?

I once interviewed cartoonist R. Crumb, who left the “bad taste palaces” of
California years ago to live in France with his wife and daughter.
Reflecting on these issues of child rearing in the two countries, he said,
“They raise brats in America. French children are better behaved. The
French are stricter. There are boundaries to things. Children learn to
respect those boundaries.” And perhaps that’s true. It only stands to
reason that an older, more “civilized” country should produce older, more
“civilized” children (a totally unempirical hypothesis, however, that many
French magnificently contradict).

So what exactly does this mean for Max? Will he learn about
“boundaries” through some sort of cultural osmosis? Because he certainly
won’t learn about them from me. My own mother wasn’t much for boundaries,
and she wasn’t much for France, either. The first time she visited La
Republique she looked around and said quietly, “It’s old here. The
vibrations are dense. People don’t look happy.”

Indeed, if it is our mothers who teach us how to mother, then I’m
in somewhat dire straits. A cultural chasm lies between my American mother
and my French mother-in-law: My mother-in-law tilled the land, churned her
own butter, raised eight children and ran an inn. She was born and came to
rest on a tiny plot of verdant farmland along with generations of ancestors
who lived in the same stone village where now the young flee, the old
cling and the only passers-by are Charolle cows. My own mother, on the
other hand, was a first-generation American who went west and stopped in
California because there was no more West left. (Had there been, she would
have kept on going.) She was a single mom, raised three latchkey kids, had
a burgeoning career and was on the New Age fast track before the term was
coined. When she goes, she’d rather not leave a trace and, in the
metaphysical logic of her worldview, she’ll be lucky not to return to this
place called Earth.

Somewhere between these two extremes — between the freedom of the
New World and security of the Old, between Betty Crocker and the
four-course gigot d’agneau dinner — is a land called motherhood, where the
tides keep shifting, a place where I’m “mommy” or “maman,” as the case may
be. It’s unclear where all this will lead Max, but in the end, nature and
nurture will do their proverbial dance. And in the smaller scheme of
things, I can take comfort in knowing that those boundaries keep France a
couple leery, weary steps behind America. Which means, in more concrete
terms, that I’ve never seen a Chuck E. Cheese, and I thought, until quite
recently, that Barney was the owner of a famous L.A. beanery.