La Ville dont le prince est un enfant is a 1955 play by French dramatist Henry de Montherlant. The title, literally translated, The City Whose Prince is a Child, is taken from Ecclesiastes 10:16: "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!"
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Being one of the first ever works of Montherlant, started in 1912 as a work under the title Serge Sandrier, and continued to be transformed for 4 decades before being published in 1951 and the definitive version in 1967. It was inspired from the adolescent years Montherlant, particularly his formative years in Institution Notre-Dame de Sainte-Croix commonly known as Collège Sainte-Croix de Neuilly in 1912. It represented the life and tribulations of André Sevrais as a young kid in a Catholic school in France.
An amended version would be republished in 1969, little bit after Montherlant's death under the title Les Garçons (literally The Boys), that takes a fresh look on the story with André Sevrait becoming the character Alban de Bricoule, who already served as a double in Montherlant works Le Songe et Les Bestiaires.
Philosophy student André Sevrais attends a Catholic boys' school in Paris, where he becomes fast friends with his younger schoolmate, a little rebellious boy named Serge Souplier. This friendship between the two youngsters does not go unobserved by the Abbot of Pradts, who harbors a secret obsession with Souplier and uses his position of authority to try to handle the adolescent Servais, with the pretext of protecting the youngster Souplier; ultimately, however, he is undone by his own hand.
Christophe Malavoy directed in 1997 a film entitled La Ville dont le prince est un enfant, also known by its English language release title The Fire That Burns. In the movie version Malavoy played the role of Abbot of Pradts and Naël Marandin the role of André Sevrais and Clément van den Bergh in the role of Serge Souplier. The film also featured Michel Aumont the role as superior of the school.
The play was translated by Vivian Cox with Bernard Miles, and staged at the London West End, at the Mermaid Theatre in 1977.
The play deals with the complex relations in a Catholic school. The abbot is torn between his human desires and his religious obligations of abstinence. He tells the superior of the college that God has created men more sensitive than the fathers, as they see how these children who are not ours are not loved. He also tells André Sevrais who refuses this fate: "You will smile about this when you are twenty years old"; to which the boy answers: "Not me, I will never smile!". Indeed, Montherlant would be haunted throughout his life with this experience at a young age in 1912 at Collège Sainte-Croix de Neuilly in 1912.
However Montherlant would take huge precautions to approach the touchy troubled topic of the taboo subject of friendship between children and adults, especially in a Catholic environment genuinely fearing not to write a text which would devalue the religion as he carefully explained in the long foreword to the play and the appendx published with the part.