Georges Sadoul, a communist journalist, was one of those who mocked the flirtatious behaviour of young women he saw, and their determination, regardless of cost, to maintain their Parisian elegance. He spoke of a certain ‘refugee chic’ which involved wearing a shirt and narrow trousers with as much make-up as if for an outing on the town. Fellow writer André Fraigneau wrote about one woman he noticed sprinting out of her car to get hold of some precious petrol to use as nail-polish remover; apparently the colour of her hat did not match the colour of her nail polish. But refugee chic did not last long as this vast swathe of humanity could not wash, had little to eat and was barely moving forward. There were elderly women lying sprawled on the roadside, exhausted, unable to go on, and many younger women, promoted to head of the household in the absence of their husbands, simply could not cope. Among the rare accounts of women behaving well at this time came this from the diarist Anne Jacques: ‘I can tell you that the women are not destroyed by nerves or by weakness but are sensible and calm. They are helpful to each other and often heroic. School headmistresses have undertaken the evacuation of their schools with perfect calm.’
The desperate and terrifying flight across France, known to history as l’Exode, was captured in hundreds of memoirs. Violette Leduc, the novelist befriended and nurtured by de Beauvoir, wrote in her semiautobiographical novel La Batarde of how she and her mother had been so terrified of the enemy they were almost paralysed by the idea of moving, so they waited until the very last minute. Rumours were swirling of the enemy’s violent behaviour, with stories circulating that the Germans were ‘picking up’ boys as young as fifteen. So they left Paris at 5.30 one morning when there was only ‘silence in the streets, in the buildings a silence as heavy as the grave. Bricks, stones, tar, pavements, churches, benches, squares, bus stops, curtains, shutters all abandoned to their solitude, everything induced such pity. Paris was a human ruin. Where were the dogs, the cats, the flies? Where was everything?’
And then, as Leduc recorded, once families had left Paris behind, the chaos intensified: ‘We followed the line of people on each side of the road. Mothers breastfeeding in the ditch, flirty girls in Louis XV heels, chancers in trucks singing and throwing cigarettes at some old guy who ran into the road to pick them up … Mountains, complicated constructions on car roofs. A man alone carrying a mattress on his back.’ Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, an assimilated Jewish mother and writer whose husband had been called up, compared the scene as she fled Paris with her baby daughter Sylvie and nanny Marie to ‘a burning Pompeii, fleeing the German lava’.
Many contemporary accounts of l’Exode poked fun at women, portraying them as weak and vain, thinking only of what they should pack, and there clearly was an element of truth in the accusation. Once the Sandzer family had finally decided they must leave and abandon the lingerie factory, it was too late for Miriam’s mother to take any of her jewellery out of the bank as all the banks were closed. Instead, she brought silver cutlery and candlesticks in case it was necessary to trade them for food but decreed no personal luggage at all. The trunk of the car was to be filled with food and drink and several bottles of Napoleon brandy to be used as bribes. But, just as they were about to set off, some elderly family friends, the Sam-sonowiczes, arrived insisting they must be taken too or they would throw themselves from the Eiffel Tower. Such emotional blackmail was impossible to resist, but then the couple produced a large carton, which they refused to open but said had to come too. After the war, the carton was found to contain a fur coat. While the Sandzers delayed, two other women, former customers of theirs, begged for help as their husbands had been imprisoned in camps. They at least had a car but had not used it for months and neither of them knew how to drive. Then a factory worker with a baby came to plead as well. The Sandzer family group had now grown to ten adults with two unreliable cars, a baby and a large carton between them. In this way they set off to join the long, sad line of people desperate to get out of Paris but clueless as to where their destination should be. The baby did not survive the journey.