Bove Emmanuel – Departure in the night: Prisoners of war in a German camp … After much hesitation, a small group fled by killing two sentinels. Poorly begun, this flight proves difficult, initiation “to loneliness and death”. From dissension to discouragement, the group goes astray and the hero arrives alone in France. “Bove portrays a humanity fundamentally incapable of transcending its weakness, a world where revolt is an illusion, an additional weakness. This is what the character of Departure in the Night and of Non-Lieu. The latter is not less vellacious than were the characters of previous novels, however, while the others were vellitaries a priori, it is located on the other side of the veil. He has, in fact, committed an act, in this case the murder, incidentally incidentally, of two German sentinels. However, this act, far from freeing him, only leads to a tenfold increase in his irresolution. (Elisabeth Poulet, Emmanuel Bove and her shadows.)

Written during the occupation Departure in the Night is published in Algiers where Emmanuel Bove and his wife went. With Non-Lieu, these were his last works. Both books can be read independently or in a row because Non-Lieu (which will be our next publication by this author) picks up where Stopped in the Night. Sick, Emmanuel Bove dies in Paris from malaria contracted in Algeria about a year before the publication of Non-Lieu.