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.

Marseille was a hive of deserters, outcasts, artists, philosophers, and criminals. Arrivals swelled daily. No raid, no decree, no threat of internment could keep them from coming. They came because it was the last French port from which ships were still sailing. The city was the bottleneck through which all had to pass. Conversations invariably revolved around the same themes: passports, visas, travel permits, bonds, port authority stamps, certificates, currencies, and lists. Each one of these themes had endless variations: real, substitute, and counterfeit passports; entry, exit, and transit visas; refugee, customs, health, and discharge certificates; old, new, and counterfeit currencies; police lists, passenger lists, prefectural lists. Everyone guarded their papers as if their lives depended on them, which was indeed the case, and all the while the authorities invented cleverer ways to sort, classify, register, and stamp us like sheep in an abattoir. One spent hours in a café hoping for some morsel of useful information, but rumors flew about so wildly it was impossible to distinguish truth from fiction. A whole day could be spent in a waiting room, the air thick with exhaustion, only for someone behind a counter to tell you to return the next day, the next week, or even, as August came around and government offices began to close for the summer holidays, the next month. Applicants would fill out endless forms, whisper among themselves, doze, or rehearse their stories for their interviews. A single slip-up—eleven photographs instead of twelve, for instance—and the entire chain of documents, each one with its own expiry date, could unravel.