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Paris. “Just to Orléans . . .” But the drivers refused, they had no more petrol. The Péricands had to go back home. They finally managed to get hold of a van, which would take Madeleine, Maria, Auguste and Bernard, with his little brother on his lap. As for Hubert, he would follow the cars on his bicycle.
    All along the Boulevard Delessert, groups of people appeared outside their houses—women, old people and children, gesticulating to one another, trying, at first calmly and then with increasing agitation and a mad, dizzy excitement, to get the family and all the baggage into a Renault, a saloon, a sports car . . . Not a single light shone through the windows. The stars were coming out, springtime stars with a silvery glow. Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darkness the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Even people who were normally calm and controlled were overwhelmed by anxiety and fear. Everyone looked at their house and thought, “Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I’ll have nothing left. We haven’t hurt anyone. Why?” Then a wave of indifference washed over their souls: “What’s the difference! It’s only stone, wood—nothing living! What matters is survival!” Who cared about the tragedy of their country? Not these people, not the people who were leaving that night. Panic obliterated everything that wasn’t animal instinct, involuntary physical reaction. Grab the most valuable things you own in the world and then . . . ! And, on that night, only people—the living and the breathing, the crying and the loving—were precious. Rare was the person who cared about their possessions; everyone wrapped their arms tightly round their wife or child and nothing else mattered; the rest could go up in flames.
    If you listened closely, you could hear the sound of planes in the sky. French or enemy? No one knew. “Faster, faster,” said Monsieur Péricand. But then they would realise they’d forgotten the box of lace, or the ironing board. It was impossible to make the servants listen to reason. They were trembling with fear. Even though they wanted to leave too, their need to follow a routine was stronger than their terror; and they insisted on doing everything exactly as they had always done when getting ready to go to the countryside for the summer holidays. The trunks had to be packed in the usual way, with everything in its correct place. They hadn’t understood the reality of the situation. They were living two different moments, you might say, half in the present and half deep in the past, as if what was happening could only seep into a small part of their consciousnesses, the most superficial part, leaving all the deeper regions peacefully asleep. Nanny, her grey hair undone, her lips clenched, her eyelids swollen from crying, was folding Jacqueline’s freshly ironed handkerchiefs with amazingly firm, precise movements. Madame Péricand, already in the car, called her, but the old woman didn’t reply, didn’t even hear her.
    Finally, Philippe had to go upstairs to look for her. “Come along, Nanny, what’s the matter? We have to leave. What’s the matter?” he repeated gently, taking her hand.
    “Oh, leave me be, my little one,” she groaned, forgetting suddenly that she now only called him “Monsieur Philippe” or “Father,” and instinctively returning to the past. “Go on, leave me be. You’re kind but we’re lost!”
    “Come now, don’t get so upset, you poor thing, leave the handkerchiefs, get dressed and come downstairs quickly. Mother is waiting for you.”
    “I’ll never see my boys again, Philippe!”
    “But you will, you will,” he said, then he himself tidied up the old woman’s hair and put a black straw hat on her head.
    “You’ll pray to the Holy Virgin for my boys, won’t you?”
    He kissed