Exode de 1940 enters the story through Marie-Laure LeBlanc and her father, Daniel LeBlanc, trying to leave Paris as a vast civilian flight overwhelms the routes out of the city. Their journey turns a national displacement into a child’s measured passage through unfamiliar streets and a crowded road: when the trains stop, they must continue on foot, surrounded by people whose varied possessions and circumstances reveal the scale of the upheaval.

Departure from Paris

Daniel buttons Marie-Laure into her winter overcoat in the middle of June, and they leave their apartment on rue des Patriarches. The detail places practical preparation beside seasonal incongruity, while Marie-Laure’s cane and her hand on her father’s rucksack make their closeness essential to moving through an unfamiliar city. She hears distant stamping that seems to come from a great multitude on the move. As they turn through streets she does not recognize, she loses track of her steps and of the limits of the model her father made of Paris. The model can no longer orient her: their route has carried them beyond its known boundaries.

At the station, the scale of the flight becomes a direct obstacle. A crowd presses through the gates, and the gendarmes eventually lose control of the situation. By one in the morning, no train has arrived or departed for more than four hours. Marie-Laure falls asleep on her father’s shoulder; Daniel, who hears neither whistles nor the sounds of trains, decides at dawn that they should walk. The decision marks a practical reversal in their journey. They had reached the station as travelers hoping to use the railway, but the halted service leaves the road as their means of escape.

The Road West

They walk through the morning as Paris gives way to low houses, detached shops, and long stretches of trees. At noon they reach a deadlocked motorway near Vaucresson, ten miles west of their apartment and farther from home than Marie-Laure has ever been. Distance here is both measurable and disorienting: the road has taken them well beyond familiar ground, yet congestion slows the journey to little more than walking pace.

The people moving west carry radically different fragments of ordinary life with them. Vehicles include vans, carts, and a sleek new V-12; some have wooden axles, others have run out of fuel. Furniture is strapped to roofs, while trailers carry farm animals. Alongside the vehicles, a woman bicycles wearing costume necklaces, a man pulls a leather armchair on a handcart, and women push baby carriages loaded with household goods. A man in a tuxedo calls for a way through, but the crowd does not part and he moves no faster than anyone else. The procession’s variety does not make it orderly. It shows how people attempt to transport what matters to them while sharing a road that cannot accommodate everyone’s plans.

The exodus also reaches beyond the roadway’s visible congestion. Marie-Laure hears disconnected questions about how far it is to Saint-Germain, where food might be found, and who has fuel. She hears arguments between husbands and wives and learns that a child has been struck by a truck farther ahead. When three aircraft pass low and fast in the afternoon, some travelers crouch, some scream, and others leave the road for the ditch. These brief responses show how movement west is shadowed by uncertainty and threat; the travelers have no common account of what lies ahead, only immediate questions and decisions.

Nightfall and the Limits of Travel

By dusk, Daniel and Marie-Laure are west of Versailles. The day’s walk has worn Marie-Laure down: her heels hurt, her stockings are torn, and she stumbles repeatedly. When she says she cannot walk farther, Daniel carries her off the road and uphill through mustard flowers. They stop in a field a few hundred yards from a small farmhouse. The field has been only half mown; cut hay remains where it fell, unraked and unbaled. The unfinished work suggests an ordinary routine interrupted, placing the flight’s consequences in the landscape as well as on the road.

Their arrival at the field is not presented as the end of their escape or as a completed destination. It is a pause imposed by exhaustion after a day in which the station failed them and the motorway offered distance without speed. The episode leaves the family outside, near a farmhouse, with the road behind them and the outcome of the journey still unresolved.

Narrative Significance

The episode makes mass displacement legible through contrasts of scale. Paris empties into an immense procession, but the account remains close to one father and daughter: Daniel chooses to abandon the stalled railway, guides Marie-Laure through streets beyond her model, and carries her when she can go no farther. Large numbers are registered not through an abstract count but through blocked gates, stopped trains, crowded lanes, and individual attempts to bring domestic life along.

Marie-Laure’s limited familiarity with the route shapes the account of leaving. The streets extend beyond her father’s model, while her steps, cane, and contact with his rucksack provide practical points of orientation. That shift from a bounded model of the city to an unfamiliar road underscores how quickly established ways of navigating can fail in a mass flight. The half-mown field at the close echoes that disruption on a smaller scale: work has been left unfinished, just as the LeBlancs’ journey has not reached a stated conclusion.