A small inscribed photograph of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry became the emotional centrepiece of Artcurial's Paris sale on 3 November, selling for €61,456 including fees — more than twenty times its €2,000–3,000 estimate. The 22.5 by 17 centimetre gelatin silver print, dedicated by the author of The Little Prince to his fellow aviator Jean Mermoz, went to a French collector. The two men had met in June 1927 at Cape Juby, and some historians have suggested that the memory of Mermoz helped inspire Saint-Exupéry's most famous character.

The sale, titled Souvenirs Historiques, offered 327 lots drawn from Mermoz's family archive, kept since the pioneering pilot vanished in 1936, and closed at €1,008,067 with 90 per cent of lots finding buyers — roughly double the pre-sale estimate. Aviation material accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total, with 258 of 284 lots in the afternoon session selling for about €669,000.

Museums were among the keenest buyers. The Musée de l'Air et de l'Espace paid €26,720 for Mermoz's long brown leather flying coat — probably worn during a forced landing at 2,800 metres in the Andes on 2 March 1929, when he ran ahead of his aircraft to block its wheels before a precipice — and acquired 44 further lots. The same museum pre-empted his Aviorex type 801 parachute, its red leather stamped with his name in gold, for €13,360; five lots were pre-empted by French national museums.

Paper proved as collectable as objects. A 1930 letter from Henri Guillaumet describing the crash later recounted in Wind, Sand and Stars reached €16,700 against a €1,000–1,500 estimate, while the 1924 letter hiring Mermoz at Latécoère, signed by Didier Daurat, made €16,032. His military pilot's identity card, estimated at €200–300, sold for €9,619, and a Lancel clock lighter engraved by fellow pilots fetched €12,024, ten times its high estimate.

The day's highest price, however, had nothing to do with aviation. A gold collar of the Order of the Holy Spirit, one of 50 made by Ouizille-Lemoine for the coronation of Charles X, sold in the morning session for €173,680 against a €60,000–80,000 estimate.