High reserve.
Most manuscript pages and drawings are written or executed on Fidelity Onion Skin paper. Saint Exupéry irregularly foliated the text pages only, usually in the upper left corner of the manuscript. A later foliation, in the upper right corner of the manuscript, includes the full-page drawings. All references to specific page numbers are from the later foliation. See collection files for a detailed description of the foliations.
Saint-Exupéry began writing Le petit prince upon his return to New York City in June 1942, at the suggestion of Elizabeth Reynal. He began composing the story late in the evenings at Silvia Reinhardt's Park Avenue apartment, where "a doll ... posed as the Little Prince, giving him a mop of golden curls ... Mocha the poodle modeled for the sheep; a boxer Silvia bought for Saint-Exupéry in August ... became the tiger." The city, however, was very hot that summer and the Saint-Exupérys soon rented the Bevin House, a Victorian mansion in Asharoken, Long Island, where Saint-Exupéry completed the work.--Cf. Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupéry: a biography (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 372-379.
Saint-Exupéry used a set of children's watercolors purchased from an Eighth Avenue drugstore to execute the thirty-five full-page watercolor drawings (Schiff, p. 378). Lacroix places them all in New York, although some may have been executed after Saint-Exupéry moved to the Bevin House.
Being the original autograph manuscript of Le petit prince, written on onionskin paper in pencil and ink and with autograph corrections and revisions throughout. Eight pages (p. 2, 4, 5, 9, 19, 41, 140, 141) incorporate small pencil sketches within the text. The manuscript also contains thirty-five full-page preparatory drawings, executed in pencil and watercolor, interspersed throughout. Five text pages (p. 2, 4, 5, 19, 41) and all thirty-five full-page drawings have been matted and are housed separately. The full-page drawings have been cataloged separately as MA 2592.1-35; see related records for more information.