Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born in 1900 in Lyon, lost his father early and was raised by his mother at the Château de La Mole. He was a student at a Jesuit college, later studied architecture in Paris, served as a soldier in the air force, and worked as a sales representative. In the 1920s, he became a pilot and flew the route from Toulouse to Casablanca to Dakar. In September 1939, Saint-Exupéry became a pilot in a reconnaissance squadron. In December 1940, he went to America, and in 1943, he arrived at the front in North Africa. On July 31, 1944, he took off from Borgo Airport in Corsica for his last reconnaissance flight. He never returned. The wreck of his plane was located on the seabed of the Mediterranean near Marseille in 2000 and was raised and identified in 2004.