His Mother Takes a Taxi to Salon to Say Goodbye

His Mother Takes a Taxi to Salon to Say Goodbye is a wartime farewell that turns a public embarrassment into a reaffirmation of the bond between Romain Gary and his mother. On the day war was declared, she made the long journey to Salon-de-Provence to see him at the Air Force Academy, where he was a gunnery instructor. Her arrival exposed the gap between his carefully cultivated image as a tough airman and the intimate world of devotion and expectation they shared.

The journey and its improvised means

The visit began with a five-hour taxi ride in an ancient, flat-nosed Renault. The car’s ownership had once been divided: Gary’s mother had held a twenty-five-percent share, but for years it had belonged exclusively to her former partner, the chauffeur Rinaldi. She nevertheless believed their past partnership gave her a moral right to use it. Rinaldi was gentle and easily moved; when he saw her approaching with determination, he usually escaped both her demands and his own good nature.

As Rinaldi later recalled, she opened the cab door, swept her cane imperiously, and ordered him to take her to Salon-de-Provence so she could say goodbye to her heroic son. The round trip would take ten hours, and he expected not to be paid. When he objected, she rebuked him as a bad Frenchman for refusing to do his part during wartime. She then climbed in with parcels of sausages, ham, and pots of jam for Gary and waited. Rinaldi held out until her stern insistence gave way to tears; confronted with her sudden, hurt helplessness, he agreed to drive, asking only that she pay for the petrol even though he knew she would not. His retrospective account makes the journey an act of affection accomplished through the mother’s characteristic mixture of force, need, and theatrical feeling.

The canteen and the exposed performance

Gary saw his mother step down from the taxi in front of the canteen, leaning on her cane with a Gauloise in the corner of her mouth, while the assembled airmen watched. She opened her arms in a theatrical welcome, radiant and waiting for her little boy to run to her. He approached slowly, cap tilted over one eye, shoulders rolling and hands in the pockets of his leather flying jacket. Among his fellow airmen he had worked hard to establish a reputation for toughness, even danger; her demonstrative arrival felt to him like an intolerable intrusion into that hard-won masculine identity.

He stayed in her embrace, sweating, then tried to guide her discreetly behind the taxi, away from the audience. Instead she stepped back to inspect his face with naïve admiration, sniffing noisily in satisfaction. Loudly enough for everyone to hear, she proclaimed, “Guynemer! You will be a second Guynemer! Your mother has always been right!” The airmen roared with laughter. Only then did she notice their amusement. She raised her cane toward them and intensified the scene, predicting that Gary would become a great hero, a general, Gabriele d’Annunzio, and Ambassador of France, while dismissing the watching men as rabble who did not know who he was.

Prophecy, shame, and reversal

The predictions magnified the humiliation: Gary was not merely being embraced in public but being assigned an immense future before an audience whose respect he feared losing. He tried in a furious whisper to tell his mother that she was ruining his standing in the Air Force and again attempted to move her out of sight. Her lips trembled; her expression became hurt and bewildered. Then she asked, “You are ashamed of your old mother!” The accusation stopped him. The pose of virility that he had labored to assume collapsed, and he put an arm around her shoulders, holding her close while defiantly making an obscene gesture at the laughing airmen.

The scene’s reversal is not that the audience becomes sympathetic or that Gary’s embarrassment disappears. Rather, he ceases to treat its judgment as the decisive one. His gesture answers the public laughter by siding openly with his mother. A visit intended as a goodbye therefore becomes, in front of the very men whose opinion he had tried to protect, a visible choice of filial loyalty over performed toughness.

The private world and its later meaning

Gary describes the reconciliation as a return to the “secret and private planet” the two of them inhabited together: a fanciful world that felt more real to them than the ground beneath their feet. Its promise had been formed in childhood by his mother’s whispers of future triumph, justice, and love. As he held her and looked toward the open sky, he imagined returning victorious, having given meaning to her years of self-denial and sacrifice and helped free the world from the enemies she had taught him to recognize. The farewell thus carried both the immediate fear of separation and the weight of a future imagined as repayment for her love.

That imagined future drew on the France his mother had built for him through stories and patriotic legend. Gary later recalled that, after the defeat of France, he heard Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms not only as the General’s appeal but also through the voice of the woman who had sold hats at 16 Grand Pohulanka Street. Her insistence on a heroic destiny was not a passing flourish: from his childhood onward, she repeatedly assured him, especially in difficult times, that he would become Ambassador of France. At Salon, the prophecy takes its most public and comic form, but it also reveals how thoroughly her vision of his future shaped his understanding of duty and belonging.

The later conflict between that intimate inheritance and official recognition makes the farewell more complex in retrospect. Gary was told that his recent naturalization and Russian birth counted against his prospects as a flying officer, despite a nationality rule that had been criticized as discriminatory and was now being applied again. He later described the painful blow of exclusion as making him feel truly French, and as teaching him that the French, like everyone else, could be ridiculous and unjust. The canteen scene does not resolve that contradiction; it preserves the earlier source of his aspiration in the mother who insisted, before any institution confirmed his place, that he belonged to France and was destined to serve it.