On 26 August 1944, a triumphant Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées in a still-not-fully liberated Paris. In the cheering crowd was a tall, elegant woman accompanied by another woman. Suddenly shots rang out. They missed de Gaulle, but several other people fell to the ground. The two women, along with everyone else in the vicinity, ran from the snipers and eventually took refuge in a basement. In spite of the danger, Simone de Beauvoir spent the next couple of days moving around Paris, covering the liberation for a newspaper.

The sniping signalled the end of the German occupation of Paris. The war itself, and the Nazi government responsible for it, would last only another year. Beauvoir captured the joy of that time of transition: