I remember fondly walking though the aisles of the St Ouen flea market in Paris. Indeed most of the older dealers there, are no longer with us and many died early from various maladies that can be so easily be dealt with today, but they were from a generation that feared technological progress...
I was not a toy airplane collector then, but I was working for a company making them as plastic kits, so I learned a thing or two on the way. The Dinky Toys experts such as JM Roulet who now works for Atlas, are virtually ignorant about the old French toy makers of the 1900 through 1955 years, when things settled and the large toy companies simply obliterated the ones left through aggressive marketing techniques. In those days, such toys as those tiny aircraft were sold not in toy stores (few such stores even existed) but through the typical French "librairies" (newspapers/magazine stores, that also sold tobacco products and novelties) or "merceries", stores where one could buy sewing material and home-made clothing. I remember buying my first Solido aircraft in the 1950s in such stores. The true issue today is that the French collectors were not then, interested in documenting their knowledge of old toys, they were rather (and still are!) hiding from an oppressive taxation system that applies a yearly tax on known collections, that are appraised by local IRS ("les impots") experts.
So, fairly few collectors were willing to talk. Fortunately on the miniature cars side, there is now a lot of information but only about French postwar 1/43-scale die-cast miniatures by their favorite makers: Dinky, Solido, CIJ, JRD and Norev. For aircraft, it is a lot harder because there were fewer people interested and the advent of the plastic model kit in the late 1950s (by Brifaut, Solivac, then Heller) replaced the Lindberg kits that had made it from the USA, at twice the dollar price. This is when the old aircraft toys went straight to the attic or the bin!
You may know of the long debate on who produced the first Bleriot and who copied the other. Or, even if there were actually copied at all. As far as I know that was never decided, but I am hoping Tootsietoy was the original one. They were vicious pursuers in the international courts of others who copied their later toys.
For me, it is quite easy to figure it out. SR made copies of the Dowst (it was not yet called "Tootsietoy" until 1924) Ford Model T and of the Bleriot pretty much at the same time, and that would be at the EARLIEST... in 1922, because of the war and the slow recovery of the French toy industry or actually, what was left of it. One has to look at the "clincher" wheels to be sure, and those did not appear until after WW1. Since the Model T appeared in the Dowst catalog in 1913, the French had to have the time to produce molds for their copy and the war broke out. If the copy had been made before the beginning of hostilities, it would have had spoke wheels like the Dowst car, and Dowst put those wheels on their "T" models only in 1922.
SR however made a nicer model of each, the Bleriot and the "T", than did Dowst. The casting is a lot more precise as can be seen here on this picture, that I publish here courtesy of my friend Dominique in France:
And this brings us back to that Morane-Saulnier Type N, the mystery remains.