 At the beginning of the Second World War while writing "The Little Prince", Saint-Exupéry lived in his downtown New York City apartment, thinking of his native France and his friends.Werth spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, his village in the Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he was "alone, cold and hungry", a place that had few polite words for French refugees.Werth appears in the preamble to the novella, where Saint-Exupéry dedicates the book to him