He took the train to Vichy, but when he got off, a wave of panic swelled within him. He wondered if it had been idiotic to come here, to the epicenter of German collaboration. Everyone seemed to eye him suspiciously; even cars and buildings looked “hostile,” he later wrote. He tried to push down the fear rising up his throat and appear casual, as if he belonged. But that was a difficult act. In the end, “I made an effort to be seen as little as possible,” he wrote, walking in the shadows of the streets, avoiding eye contact. He settled into a hotel that his Paris friend had arranged for him. The plan was to meet the man from the Vichy government in the lobby, but now that he was in his room, the whole affair seemed absurd: To meet with an actual Vichy official? In a Vichy hotel? Was this madness? “I was wary of everything and everyone,” he wrote.
Still, at the appointed time, he found the strength to walk to the lobby. He saw the government official the Parisian had described. The two greeted each other; Robert tried to ignore any gooseflesh pimpling his neck. They sat down, the official opening the conversation lightly, with banal questions and asides. He was trying to feel Robert out, which began to put him at ease—the official was “extremely nice,” La Rochefoucauld later said. The two could only playact for so long, though. The Vichy man told La Rochefoucauld that a group was about to leave for Perpignan, a city in southeastern France near the border with Spain. The official had a friend there, someone Robert would meet and who would help him cross over.
The official gave La Rochefoucauld an address for the man in Perpignan—and then stopped Robert before he could write it down. He said La Rochefoucauld had to commit the address to memory. “I began to soak up this code of conduct,” Robert later wrote, “which was so necessary to what I was undertaking but previously not really in my nature.” The Vichy man said once Robert arrived, the Perpignan friend would in turn put him in contact with smugglers who moved other clandestine agents or downed British pilots into Spain. How La Rochefoucauld got to the safety of, say, a British embassy would be at the discretion of the smugglers. The Vichy official and La Rochefoucauld then wished each other well and Robert watched him leave the lobby.
The meeting apparently made him feel better because Robert later described the trip to Perpignan as “very pleasant,” free of the paranoia of Vichy. At the given address in Perpignan, a man in his thirties answered La Rochefoucauld’s knock on the door, greeting Robert formally and aware of his plans. The Perpignan man was, like the one from Vichy, also a civil servant secretly awaiting the fall of Pétain’s government, and insisted La Rochefoucauld make himself comfortable. It could be a while before the next trip across the border, he said. So Robert stayed that night, and then seven more: The man and his smuggler friends planned to take a few clandestine fighters at a time and were rounding them up, he said. On the eighth night the Perpignan man told Robert that the smugglers would traffic two British pilots desperate to make it to Spain. Robert would travel with these Englishmen across the border.
One day soon thereafter Robert and the man from Perpignan set out to meet the Brits and the smugglers who would guide them across. The Occupation and scarcity of oil in France—the Nazis demanded more of it from the French than Germany produced annually—had forced many of the French by 1942 to abandon their vehicles and live as if it were the nineteenth century. “Distances,” one observer wrote, were suddenly “measured in paces—of man or horse.” The people who kept a vehicle often retrofitted the engine so that a pump placed near the rear of the car, resembling the cylinder jutting up above a steam-engine train, could convert coal or wood chips into fuel in lieu of oil. That was what the man from Perpignan had: A rickety bus with what was known as a gasified tank grafted onto it, its cylinder rising high above the rest of the bus’s body. He and La Rochefoucauld traveled along the small roads snaking through the outskirts of the Pyrenees mountains, stopping at a modest village a dozen miles from Perpignan. They parked the bus and the man, pointing to the heavy forest around them, said they would walk from here. They set off through the woods and the sloping mountainside until they saw it, about three miles into their hike: the makeshift camp of a dozen mountain men. They were large, hairy, and not particularly clean, but after introductions they promised they knew the routes to Spain better than anyone. Before trafficking Resistance fighters, they’d moved a lot of alcohol and cigarettes across the border. La Rochefoucauld snorted his approval.
The French and sympathetic Spaniards had their preferred escape routes, and the British government even sanctioned one, through an offshoot of MI6, called the VIC line. But many border crossings shared a common starting point in Perpignan, in part because the city lay at the foot of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain. A crossing through the range there, though arduous, wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains, more than two hundred miles to the west. The problem, of course, was that the Nazis knew this too, and Spain was “honeycombed with German agents,” one official wrote. So if the Pyrenees themselves didn’t endanger lives, a résistant’s run to freedom might.
The British pilots arrived, noticeably older than La Rochefoucauld and not speaking a word of French. Robert’s childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy. He said hello, and soon found that they were career soldiers, a pilot and a radioman, who’d been shot down over central France during a mission, but parachuted out and escaped the German patrols. They had hiked for days to get here. La Rochefoucauld translated all this and the group decided to let the exhausted English rest. They would set out the next night.
In the end, seven left for Spain: La Rochefoucauld, the Brits, and four guides—two advance scouts and two pacing the refugees. They took paths only the smugglers knew, guided by their intuition and a faint moon. The narrow passages and ever-steepening incline meant the men walked single file. “The hike was particularly difficult,” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. Vineyards gave way to terraced vineyards until the vegetation disappeared, the mountain rising higher before them, loose rubble and stone at their feet. As the night deepened, Robert could see little of the person in front of him. The people who scaled these mountains often misjudged distances, stubbing their toes on the boulders or twisting their ankles on uneven earth or, when the night was at its darkest, flailing their arms when they expected a jut in the mountain’s face that was nothing more than open air. This last was the most terrifying. Germans posted observation decks on the crests of certain peaks, which discouraged strongly lit torches and slowed or, conversely, sometimes quickened the pace, depending on whether and when the guides believed the Germans to be peering through their telescopes. The peaks at this part of the Pyrenees were roughly four thousand feet, and the descent was as limb- and life-threatening as the climb. The passage exhausted everyone. “Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour’s rest,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. At dawn the group closed in on a stretch of the range that straddled the two countries, but didn’t want to risk a crossing during the day. So they hid out and waited for nightfall. When they resumed their hike, the going proved “just as hard, and increasingly dangerous,” Robert later recalled. The group nearly stumbled into view of a German post, etched into the night’s skyline. They detoured quietly around it, but then, having rejoined the route, saw another Nazi lookout, rising