Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever nearly killed Romain Gary in Damascus in 1941, interrupting his wartime service and leaving lasting physical effects. In his retrospective account, the illness becomes more than a medical emergency: it tests his resistance to death and his conviction that he must return to his duties and to the future he had promised his mother.

The Damascus illness

During the campaign in Libya, Gary was in a military hospital in Damascus with typhoid fever and internal bleeding. His doctors, Captain Guyon and Major Vignes, gave him only a very small chance of survival. He received five transfusions, but the bleeding continued; friends came to his bedside to offer blood, and Sister Félicienne, an Armenian nun of the Order of Saint Joseph of the Lesser Apparition, nursed him. His delirium lasted a fortnight, and his reason took more than six weeks to return substantially. The crisis unfolded alongside the loss of nine English airmen and six of Gary’s French comrades in a collision during takeoff in a sandstorm in Libya: he survived in Damascus, but the accident made the peril of the campaign immediate even from his hospital bed.

An earlier crisis and the bond with his mother

The Damascus typhoid attack recalled an earlier medical crisis: after scarlet fever, Romain Gary developed acute kidney inflammation, and doctors judged him unlikely to survive. In that episode, as later in Damascus, he was wrapped in ice as treatment. The recurrence makes the two illnesses part of a pattern in his memoir: each brings him close to death, while his account measures survival against obligations and attachments that he believes remain unfinished.

During the earlier illness, Gary feared leaving his mother without support and felt he had failed to fulfill her expectations. When doctors proposed an operation on his right kidney, she refused, despite the specialist’s insistence. He later understood her opposition as bound up with her hopes for his future, including her belief that the operation might compromise his sexual capacity. He survived without the operation. Recalling this episode beside the typhoid crisis, he presents his mother’s intervention and his own sense of responsibility to her as central to the story he tells about resisting death.

The will to return

The crisis also exposed how closely Gary’s survival was bound to his sense of purpose. During a brief return to consciousness, he saw that preparations had been made for his death and made his way from his room into the garden. In his delirium he clung to his newly acquired second-lieutenant’s cap, a sign of rank whose importance he connected to the earlier rejection he had suffered at Avord. Afterward, he described his refusal to die as a refusal to leave his mother’s hopes unrealized: he still intended to return home, win victories, write a major work, and serve France. The memoir casts that determination in artistic terms, as an effort to give shape and meaning to a life that illness and chance threatened to render unfinished.

Recovery was slow and left lasting consequences. Although his fever eventually disappeared, his mind remained unsettled; he could not recognize people or speak clearly, and complications affected his legs, gall bladder, heart, and the lower left side of his face. The facial paralysis remained permanent. As his reason returned, he asked when he and his comrades could go back to battle, but doctors doubted that he would walk normally or fly operationally again. Three months later, he was back in a Blenheim bomber, hunting submarines with de Thuisy. The return to combat turned a recovery that had seemed unlikely into a resumption of the wartime life he had insisted was not yet over.

The illness also left a smaller but telling mark on his military life: for a time, an administrative error had removed his name from the list of the living, and soldiers ceased saluting him. Gary later protested the mistake through official channels to Charles de Gaulle. The episode links the hospital ordeal to his sensitivity about the recognition due his recently won rank, even as his return to flying supplied a more consequential answer to the presumption that he was already lost.

The imagined return

During a brief return to consciousness, Gary imagined himself restored to the streets of Nice: in his officer’s uniform, his chest weighted with decorations, he walked through the Buffa Market and along the Promenade des Anglais with his mother beside him. In this vision, the crowds acclaim her as much as him, recasting the military honors he had hoped to earn as recognition of her life and work. Their continuing bond appears as an umbilical cord, an image that turns survival into a connection still intact rather than a private victory over illness.

The scene gives the medical crisis its imagined ending before recovery has actually secured it. Gary understands the vision as a work of art and a masterpiece: a future in which he has kept his promise to his mother and imposed a coherent form on a life threatened by chance. Its triumphant public procession contrasts with the hospital’s expectation of his death, while the cord makes clear that the future he imagines is inseparable from her. The episode thus presents the will to survive not simply as a return to health, but as the condition for completing a shared story whose meaning he believes remains unfinished.