Croquis de personnages

Survivors among the “hundreds of small figures, many of which followed a fate that remains unknown to us […] found on loose sheets, in the margins of his literary or scientific writings, on the back of invoices or school papers, in notebooks…” (Delcroix, op. cit., p. 147), these two sketches, drawn on the back of an invoice from the tailor Simon Mouradian, can be tentatively dated on the strength of this fragile clue: located on the edge of the Armenian quarter, at 5 rue Saint-Marc in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, Mouradian’s shop stood in the very neighborhood where the young Saint-Exupéry briefly lived. In 1923 he took a furnished room at 22 rue Vivienne, having just become engaged to Louise de Vilmorin and given up aviation at the express request of his future in-laws — a convenient address for a man who had just been hired as an accountant at the Tuileries Boiron (52 rue Saint-Honoré), a position requiring him to be properly dressed. That autumn, his sister Gabrielle married, while Antoine’s engagement to Louise de Vilmorin was broken off.

Did he keep this Parisian tailor afterward? No other invoice from this well-known craftsman is known, nor any surviving suits.

Former collection of Frédéric d’Agay (noted on the drawing and credited in the Gallimard catalogue).

Delphine Delcroix & Alban Cerisier, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Dessins, Aquarelles, pastels plumes et crayons, Paris, Gallimard, 2006; Librairie Forgeot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, cat., 2023, no. 20 (reproduced).