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the cart is not attached to the car by a simple rope for temporary towing. It is attached artistically. A system of ropes, spikes and metal cables connects the two vehicles for the long term, uniting their two destinies. These acts of kindness, this readiness to oblige, will have disappeared by tomorrow.
    The caravan of cars is overtaken by cyclists, male and female, and by limping pedestrians. Their heads seem pulled toward their feet. Some carry a travel bag; others have one or two suitcases in hand. Imagine how exhausting this walk is with a valise at the end of your arm. Others push baby carriages—loaded with children, bundles or their most important possessions—or the strangest vehicles cobbled together by handymen out of wooden planks and old bicycle wheels. A woman is seated on the lid of a three-wheeled delivery cart, which a man pedals. An old man on a bicycle, alone, is leading his dog on a leash.
    The line of cars moves at the speed of a man on foot, a hundred, fifty, five meters at a time. I can’t even let myself contemplate this halting river. My reflex as a motorist compels me to scrutinize its droplets. Mechanically, I evaluate the make and horsepower of the automobiles. The caravan moves and creaks like the chain of a well. It has neither beginning nor end. I’m obsessed by this idiotic phrase:“The horizon is an imaginary line at the intersection of the sky and the infinite line of cars.”
    A car stops, driven by a young woman. Like a caterpillar, the caravan flows around it. Inside the automobile there is another woman and an old man. The driver leans against the steering wheel, then raises her arms in desperation. Her engine has stalled, her starter is broken and she has no crank handle. “Put it in gear, step on the clutch … we’ll push you; when you pick up some speed, let out the clutch …” She’s asleep, she can’t understand me, like a sleepwalker; she confuses in gear and out of gear. We push her car again, the motor turns over, the car starts and then falters momentarily on the road.
    Enormous two-wheeled peasants’ carts from the Seine-et-Oise and Seine-et-Marne are mixed in with the caravan. They are pulled by massive horses, often by two horses harnessed in line. They are loaded with bedding and sacks of grain and fodder. On one of them is a foal with little appreciation for the joys of being on a wagon. It kicks with all four hooves—now the front, now the rear—and starts bucking epileptically. The dogs leashed underneath the carts wag their happy tails even more.
    A farm is nearby. Some people are organizing themselves to spend the night there sleeping on straw. They are tired but not panicked. The battle is far behind them, far behind Paris. They make the best of this involuntary picnic, this camping trip. Tomorrow the roads will be clear.
    We arrive in Puiseaux at night. We managed twenty-five kilometers today. We find free space in a beet field. We spend the night in the car. Some military convoys pass by on a distant road. The horses’ hooves hitting the ground make a sound like raindrops falling on a roof.
    At five in the morning my wife goes into town, lines up until eight o’clock in front of a bakery and brings back a pound of bread. Two hundred meters from the beet field there’s a fountain. I had forgotten the miracle of water, the miracle of far-sighted municipalities. I can still feel that water running over my hands. I find a pack of tobacco in town. A few minutes later, the tobacco shop will be closed.
    Puiseaux has the shape of a breast, of an anthill, at the summit of which there must be a church. I’m sleepy. It seems to me the winding streets climb to the sky. I’m lost. It will take me an hour to get back to my beet field. The streets are filled with refugees, those with cars, those with wheelbarrows, those from the Nord, those from Paris, those from the Seine-et-Marne. It’s part of the caravan, of the caravan dismantled. This crowd resembles