Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at the table

Rather than a starter-main-dessert menu, Saint-Exupéry's table reads like the Aéropostale line he served: a sequence of stops, each with its own way of eating. The Saharan halt with its hospitality tea, the frugal mess tin carried between takeoffs, the grand dinner in Lyon where one rejoins one's family, and the solitary comfort of exile. The meal is not a succession of courses but a geography: one eats according to the place where the engine fell silent.

The emblematic gesture learned from the Moors at Cape Juby: pouring the tea in a long stream, arm raised high above the glass, to crown it with a fine foam (the "keskoussa"). This singing stream is the signature of desert hospitality — a care offered to the guest, and the red thread linking all these tables of men on the move.