After saying her prayers, Madame Péricand left the church. Once outside, she decided to restock her supply of biscuits, which had been greatly diminished by her lavish generosity. She went into a large grocer's store.

"We've got nothing left, Madame," said the employee.

"What? No shortbread, no gingerbread, nothing?"

"Nothing at all, Madame. It's all gone."

"Then let me have a pound of tea, Ceylon tea?"

"There's nothing, Madame."

They pointed out some other food shops to Madame Péricand, but nowhere could she buy a thing. The refugees had cleaned out the town. Hubert met her near the café. He hadn't been able to find a room.

"There's nothing to eat, the shops are empty!" she exclaimed.

"Well," said Hubert, "I found two shops full of goods."

"Really? Where?"

Hubert burst out laughing. "There was one that sold pianos and the other, things for funerals!"

"You're such a silly little boy," said his mother.

"At the rate we're going," Hubert remarked, "I imagine pearl crowns will soon be in great demand. We could stock up on them, what do you think, Mother?"

Madame Péricand shrugged her shoulders. She could see Jacqueline and Bernard on the doorstep of the café. Their hands were full of chocolate and sweets that they were giving out to everyone around them. Madame Péricand leapt towards them.

"Get back inside! What are you doing out here? I forbid you to touch the food. Jacqueline, you will be punished. Bernard, your father will hear about this." Grabbing the two stunned culprits firmly by the hand, she dragged them away. Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilisation, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more.

11

Maurice and Jeanne Michaud walked one behind the other on the wide road lined with poplar trees. Around them, behind them, in front of them, people were fleeing. Occasionally the road rose more steeply and they could see clearly the chaotic multitude trudging through the dust, stretching far into the distance. The luckiest ones had wheelbarrows, a pram, a cart made of four planks of wood set on top of crudely fashioned wheels, bowing down under the weight of bags, tattered clothes, sleeping children. These were the poor, the unlucky, the weak, the sort who don't know how to manage, who are always pushed to the back; the frightened, too, and the stingy, who had put off buying a ticket until the last minute because of the price, the expenses involved and the dangers of the journey, but who had suddenly been gripped by panic just like everyone else. None of them knew why they were bothering to flee: all of France was burning, there was danger everywhere. Whenever they sank to the ground, they said they would never get up again, they would die right there, that if they had to die it was better to die in peace. But they were the first to stand up when a plane flew near. They were compassionate and kind, offering that active and attentive sympathy that working people normally reserve for their own families or the poor, and even then only at moments of the most exceptional fear and misery. Nearly a dozen times, some of these big, strong women had offered to help Jeanne Michaud to walk. Jeanne herself held children by the hand while her husband carried bags on his shoulders: sometimes a bundle of clothing, sometimes a basket with a live rabbit and potatoes, the worldly possessions of a little old woman who had left Nanterre on foot. In spite of the exhaustion, the hunger, the fear, Maurice Michaud was not really unhappy. He had a unique way of thinking: he didn't consider himself that important; in his own eyes, he was not that rare and irreplaceable creature most people imagine when they think about themselves. He felt pity towards his fellow sufferers, but his pity was lucid and detached. After all, he thought, these great human migrations seemed to follow natural laws. Surely such occasional mass displacements were necessary to humans, just as the migration of livestock was to animals. He found this idea oddly comforting. The people around him believed that fate was tracking them down, them and their pitiable generation; but not Maurice: he knew there had been exoduses throughout history. How many people had died on this land (on land everywhere in the world), dripping with blood, fleeing the enemy, leaving cities in flames, clutching their children to their hearts: no one gave a thought to these countless dead, or pitied them. To their descendants they were no more important than chickens who'd had their throats slit. As he walked along, he imagined their plaintive ghosts rising up, leaning towards him, whispering in his ear, "We've been through all this already, before you. Why should you be more fortunate than us?"

"There's never been anything as horrible as this!" a big woman next to him groaned.

"On the contrary, Madame, on the contrary," he replied quietly.

They had been walking for three days when they saw the first regiments in full flight. Confidence was so ingrained in the heart of the French that when they saw these soldiers, the refugees thought a battle was about to begin, that the High Command had given orders for small groups to head for the front by a circuitous route, that the armed forces were still intact. This hope kept them going. The soldiers wouldn't say much. Almost all of them were depressed and pensive. Some slept in the backs of trucks. Tanks plodded forward in the dust, camouflaged with thin branches. Between the leaves faded by the burning sun, you could see their pale faces, weary, angry and exhausted.

Madame Michaud kept thinking she saw her son among them. Not once did she see his regiment's number, but a kind of hallucination took hold of her. Every unfamiliar young face or voice caused her to tremble so fiercely that she had to stop dead in her tracks, clutching her heart and softly muttering, "Oh, Maurice, isn't that…"

"What's wrong?"

"No, it's nothing…"

But he was no fool. He shook his head. "You see your son everywhere, my poor Jeanne!"

All she did was sigh. "He does look like him, doesn't he?"

After all, it could happen. He could have cheated death; he could suddenly appear at her side, her son, her Jean-Marie; he would call out to them joyfully, tenderly, in that sweet masculine voice she could still hear, "But what are you two doing here?"

Oh, just to see him, to hold him close, to feel his cool rough cheek beneath her lips, to see his beautiful eyes shining close to hers, his deep expression, so alive. He had hazel eyes with long eyelashes like a woman, eyes that saw so many things! She had always taught him to see the funny and moving side of people. She liked to laugh and felt sympathy for others. "It's your Dickensian spirit, Mother," he would say. How well they knew each other! They would cheerfully, sometimes cruelly, make fun of people who had been unkind to them; then a word, a gesture, a sigh would make them stop. Maurice was different: he was more serene, cooler. She loved and respected Maurice, but Jean-Marie was… Oh, my God, he was everything she wanted to be and everything she dreamed of and everything that was the best of her: her joy, her hope… "My son, my little love, my Jeannot," she thought, calling him by the nickname he'd had when he was five, when she would take his head gently in her hands and kiss his ears, tilt his head back and tickle him with her lips while he laughed and laughed.

Her thoughts became more and more feverish and confused the longer she walked. She was a good walker: when she and Maurice were younger, they had often gone rambling in the countryside during their short holidays. When they didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel, they would set off like this with food and sleeping bags in their rucksacks. This was why she suffered less fatigue than her companions. But this incessant kaleidoscope, these strange faces passing endlessly before her, then fading and disappearing, was much more painful than physical exhaustion. "A herd of horses," she thought, "trapped." In the crowd, cars were tangled up like those reeds you see floating on the river, anchored by invisible knots while floodwater rushes all around them. Jeanne turned away so she couldn't see the cars. They poisoned the air with their petrol fumes, deafened the people on foot with their futile honking as they tried in vain to clear a way through. Seeing the impotent rage or the gloomy resignation on the drivers' faces was a comfort to the refugees. "They're not going any faster than us!" they would say to each other, enjoying the feeling of shared misfortune.