The approach of the Liberation of Paris brings Romain Gary to a new threshold: with Paris close to liberation, he arranges to parachute into southern France for liaison duties with the Resistance. The memoir does not depict the liberation of Paris itself; instead, it concentrates on the urgent return he hopes to make, an unexpected offer from the French Foreign Office, and the revelation that his mother has continued to shape his fate from behind the scenes.

Military Service and the Road Back

The plans recalled in this episode follow years of military service marked by both exclusion and danger. At the French Air Force training base in Salon-de-Provence, Gary learned that his recent naturalization was being used to deny him an officer’s commission: a rule requiring French birth or more than ten years since naturalization had been revived, despite not ordinarily being enforced. The setback sharpened the significance of the recognition he would later receive for his wartime service.

After the French defeat, Gary persisted in trying to reach England. In Casablanca, with two fellow trainees and no apparent route forward, he learned that the Polish troopship Oakrest was about to sail. He passed the guarded harbor entrance by giving Polish orders and joined the ship’s departure for Gibraltar. The escape marked a practical step toward continuing the fight rather than accepting that his military path had ended with France’s defeat.

His service also included severe physical reversals. During the campaign in Libya, while fellow French and English airmen were killed in a collision during takeoff in a sandstorm, Gary was in a military hospital in Damascus, gravely ill with typhoid and internal hemorrhages. Friends gave blood for transfusions, and Sister Félicienne nursed him through a prolonged delirium and a slow return to reason. The illness left lasting effects, including paralysis on the lower left side of his face and damage to his heart. Though doctors doubted he would walk normally or fly again, he returned to operational flying a few months later. This history gives weight to his impatience as Paris approaches liberation: the proposed liaison work represents a return to active service after repeated institutional and bodily threats to his ability to serve.

The Approach of Liberation and the Diplomatic Offer

With Paris on the point of being liberated, Gary arranges to be parachuted into the south of France to work with the Resistance. He describes himself as impatient to get back to his mother, and says that at night he fears that something may happen to her before he can return. The personal urgency of the mission is thus inseparable from the military one: liberation means not only a chance to serve France, but also the prospect of reaching the person whose expectations have guided him.

At this moment, an official letter from the French Foreign Office proposes that he apply for a permanent diplomatic appointment as a First Secretary. The offer is extraordinary in his eyes. He knows nobody at the Foreign Office or in any civilian department, has never told anyone about his mother’s ambitions for him, and is told that the appointment would be in recognition of exceptional services to the cause of Liberation. He turns the letter over in disbelief, struck by its unusually sympathetic, almost personal tone. Its arrival makes the imagined future his mother had long described seem suddenly close to becoming real.

His Mother’s Hand Behind the Offer

Gary first interprets the letter as a possible sign of providence, but then recognizes a more familiar explanation: his mother has been working behind the scenes, praising him to influential people and opening doors. Earlier episodes establish the force of her expectations. When he was gravely ill as a boy, his fear of failing her intensified his struggle to survive; when doctors proposed an operation on his kidney, she flatly refused it, convinced that the operation threatened the future she imagined for him. Later, a diabetic collapse revealed that she had concealed her illness while continuing to manage the demands of her business. These memories give the diplomatic offer a double significance: it is public recognition of his service, but also the fulfillment of a future his mother had labored to arrange.

The memoir’s account makes the offer less a sudden miracle than another instance of maternal intervention. Gary notices in his mother’s last letters a hint that she has been acting without telling him. The personal warmth of the official letter prompts him to understand that her influence has reached into the institutions he himself scarcely knows. Liberation therefore arrives in the episode alongside a quieter discovery: even when he believes himself to be acting alone, the path ahead has been shaped by her effort.

Return and Posthumous Support

When Gary eventually returns to Nice after liberation, the anticipated reunion does not occur. At the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, those still there remember only vaguely the Russian woman who once ran the place. His mother has been dead for three years and six months; she died a few weeks after his departure for England. Her absence transforms his return into a belated encounter with the extent of her planning.

In the last days of her life, she wrote nearly two hundred and fifty undated letters and sent them to a friend in Switzerland to be forwarded to Gary at regular intervals. The letters concealed her death and continued to offer him support through the years of war, until victory. The episode’s movement toward liberation thus carries an intimate afterlife: while Gary prepares to return to France and later reaches Nice, the support that sustains him is still arriving from his mother, who has already died. Her delayed letters complete the connection between the wartime mission and the eventual homecoming, while revealing how thoroughly his public achievements and private sense of purpose remain bound to her.