I spent my days writing. I wrote everything that had happened to me since I’d first met Madeleine in the cemetery only weeks before and I transcribed my notes of her stories. It was a way of both remembering her and forgetting her. I avoided the company of others for fear of attracting attention to myself. Mornings, I wrote or visited the post office, the town hall, or the police station, applying for a travel permit to go overland to Spain or by rail to Marseille.

Afternoons, I wandered through the gloomy hills behind the town or down to the grounds of the basilica, where legions of sick and infirm pilgrims gathered, many in wheelchairs pushed by nuns, to drink the spring waters they believed would miraculously cure them. I avoided the news and the intrigues of my fellow émigrés. Every newspaper was a summons, every radio broadcast the news of fateful tidings, every knock at the door a policeman sent to arrest me.

In late August I was finally granted permission to travel by train to Marseille. A short distance from the terminus, I alighted the train to avoid a police check. I trudged across the scraggy limestone hills with my black suitcase and the satchel containing the manuscript until I came to an incline overlooking the city. It stretched out before me in the early morning light, cradled between white mountains and a turquoise sea. I walked on into town and caught a streetcar to the port, greeted by the city’s familiar perfume: oil, urine, and printer’s ink. Turned away from every hotel on the harbor, I scoured the backstreets and alleyways until I found a room in a dingy hotel overlooking the Cours Belsunce.