Musyne leaves Bardamu during an air-raid alarm

Musyne leaves Bardamu during an air-raid alarm, a separation that begins in a crowded Billancourt house and ends with her disappearance into a butcher’s cellar. When a zeppelin alert sends the tenants below ground, she presses Bardamu to follow; he cannot bear the smell and sight of meat hanging on hooks, and stays upstairs. Musyne vanishes with the others and never comes back to him. The scene joins the public absurdity of wartime panic to an intimate break, after which Bardamu’s thoughts narrow to survival and escape to America.

The alarm and the descent

One night, Bardamu and Musyne return home to Billancourt together. The fire brigade passes, sounding its bugles to announce a zeppelin, and the residents of the house scramble toward the cellar. It is not a battlefield scene but a neighborhood evacuation: tenants carry candles and hurry down in their pajamas, while the danger is described as almost entirely imaginary. The alarm nevertheless sets the whole building in motion, turning a familiar home into a choice of hiding places.

The residents debate which cellar compartment offers the best shelter. Most favor the butcher’s storage cellar because it is said to lie deeper than the others. Musyne wants to go there, too, and when Bardamu resists she whines; other tenants urge the pair to join them. He eventually follows the group down the stairs, where the acrid odor immediately recalls something he knows too well and cannot bear. The practical logic of seeking the deepest refuge brings him directly into contact with a sensory memory of wartime violence.

The cellar and the choice to stay

The butcher’s cellar is not an abstract refuge for Bardamu. Seeing the meat hanging from hooks, he asks Musyne whether she really means to go down among it. Her surprised response makes plain that she sees the cellar as shelter, not as an unbearable reminder. Bardamu explains that he has memories and would rather go back upstairs. His refusal is shaped by the place itself: the cellar’s depth may promise safety from the air raid, but its stored meat makes it intolerable to him.

Musyne asks whether he is leaving her. Bardamu tells her she can join him when the alarm is over; she counters that it may last a long time. He repeats that he would rather wait upstairs, that he dislikes meat, and that the alert will soon end. The exchange turns a shared decision about where to shelter into a direct test of whether they will remain together. Bardamu chooses not to follow her into the cellar, while Musyne chooses to descend with the tenants.

Disappearance and consequence

Below, the residents settle into their refuge and exchange lively comments. The last arrivals, women in kimonos, make their way into the cellar, where the butcher and his wife welcome them and apologize for the artificial cold needed to preserve their merchandise. Musyne disappears into this group. Bardamu waits in their apartment, measuring the absence in a deliberately impossible sequence: a night, a whole day, a year. She never returns to him. The narrative gives no further explanation for her departure; its decisive fact is the silence and finality of her nonreturn.

The air-raid alarm consequently ends not with a reunion but with Bardamu alone upstairs. The contrast is stark: below, the tenants are sheltered together amid jokes and provisions; above, Bardamu waits for the woman who has gone down without him. His choice was prompted by the cellar’s meat and the memories attached to it, but the consequence reaches beyond the immediate danger. From then on, he becomes harder to please and has only two thoughts: saving his skin and getting to America. Escaping the war becomes a first step that occupies him for months.

Narrative significance

The episode compresses wartime fear into two competing forms of behavior. The neighbors rush underground at the first bugle call, while Bardamu sees their collective panic as an empty ritual of frightened people seeking a pit. Yet his own refusal is not simple indifference: the cellar’s smell and hanging meat make the refuge unbearable. The scene places the body’s memory against the crowd’s shared performance of safety, leaving no uncomplicated distinction between courage and cowardice.

Musyne’s departure also makes the war’s pressure intimate. Earlier, like Lola, she had wanted Bardamu to return promptly to the front; during the alert, she urges him to accompany her into shelter. The scene does not clarify her reasons for leaving him, but it records the rupture through his waiting and her absence. In that abrupt shift—from returning home together, to arguing over a cellar, to a year-long-feeling wait—the refuge becomes the setting of separation, and the private loss strengthens the escape impulse that governs Bardamu afterward.