With a little imagination, one could anticipate in the distance the appearance of a Bréguet 14, battling against the winds. Imagination is partly here, in Tarfaya, that Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, found it. In this end of the world, a museum is dedicated to him.

"Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the writer was somewhat born here, in Tarfaya, where he spent two years as station manager for Aéropostale. It is there that he began to write novels, under the stars", proclaims Sadat Shaibata Mrabihrabou, opening the doors of the modest museum, in the Great Moroccan south.

"We are the cradle of a world-renowned writer", he adds.

Because who says "Saint-Exupéry" necessarily thinks of "The Little Prince", a humanist tale published in April 1943 in New York, and the most translated book in the world after the Bible (1,300 editions, 145 million copies sold).

The narrator is an aviator who, following an engine failure, must make an emergency landing in the Sahara desert.

Exactly 70 years after the publication of the work, and even if real estate projects are finally starting to emerge from the sands of the sleepy village, Tarfaya --formerly "Cap Juby"-- does not seem to have changed much.

On one side, the fort built by the British more than a century ago and the ocean. On the other side, the desert. The old airstrip is five kilometers away.

In the early days of Aéropostale, during the interwar period, planes departing from Toulouse (France) pushed at all costs ever further south the delivery of mail. But the autonomy of these biplanes of the First World War did not exceed 700 km, and it was necessary to establish in 1927 a new stopover after Agadir. It would be Cap Juby, then under Spanish domination.

Hired by the industrialist Latécoère, "Saint-Ex" set down his suitcases there as station manager, managed the comings and goings of the Bréguet 14s, and negotiated with local tribes for the release of pilots who had fallen into the desert and were taken prisoner.

During these 18 months of almost monastic life, he wrote his first novel, "Southern Mail", "the title of which was suggested by another great man, Jean Mermoz", an intrepid aviator, affirms Sadat Shaibata Mrabihrabou.

He therefore also found there the setting for "The Little Prince", which he would write, however, more than a decade later.

"Nights in dissidence"

In 2004, with the help of the "Memory of Aéropostale" association, the Tarfaya museum was born, to tell this story.

"This heritage constituted an oral culture that risked disappearing with time: the last mechanic-guardian of Saint-Exupéry died two years ago", explains Sadat Shaibata Mrabihrabou to the AFP.

"It is at this man's home that I heard for the first time the name of +Saint-Ex+, I was 5-6 years old", he continues.

On the walls of the museum, the life of the aviator unfolds, from his birth in Lyon (1900) to his death "for France" in 1944, during a reconnaissance flight in the Mediterranean Sea, prior to the Provence Landings.

"I loved the Sahara very much. I spent nights in dissidence. I woke up in this blonde expanse where the wind marked its swell like on the sea", one can read on one of the panels.

In a corner, an original of The Little Prince scribbled by its author.

"It is certainly the city that still beats the most to the rhythm of Aéropostale. It has kept the character, the stamp of the era", points out the museum manager.

Each season, the life of this city of 10,000 souls is thus marked by the passage of the Aéropostale Toulouse/Saint-Louis (Senegal) air rally.

Last year, Tarfaya also organized its first "Prince of the Desert Festival", with awareness-raising activities for environmental protection, and in the presence of the president of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Youth Foundation, François d'Agay, the aviator's godson.

During the festival, its founder had noted this quote from The Little Prince: "+what beautifies the desert is that it hides a well somewhere+". Thus, the memory of Saint-Exupéry, a treasure hidden by this village, could contribute to bringing it out of its torpor.