Rigadoon

Rigadoon resumes the northward journey toward the Baltic, although Céline constantly jumps backward and forward in time. The first attempt to get to Denmark fails. Ferdinand and Lili are redirected, spend time again in the orbit of Sigmaringen, and then try once more to travel north.

Germany has effectively become a moving refugee camp. Trains are overcrowded with soldiers, civilians, wounded people, women and children. Stations vanish under bombing. Tracks are destroyed. Ferdinand repeatedly uses his status as a doctor to obtain transportation, information or protection.

Eventually he and Lili become responsible for a group of vulnerable children traveling through the chaos — an unlikely responsibility that becomes crucial to their own survival.

The travelers set off from the circumstances left unresolved in North, still searching for a route to Denmark. Their path repeatedly doubles back on itself. They travel through ruined cities, get stranded in railway stations, encounter military personnel and refugees, and narrowly escape bombardments.

La Vigue eventually separates from them, leaving Ferdinand, Lili and Bébert to continue alone.

As the German transport system disintegrates, Ferdinand encounters a group of children whose original caretaker can no longer manage them. Because he is a doctor, he takes responsibility for them. The grotesque irony is that this group of fugitives now acquires a humanitarian identity: Ferdinand can present himself not simply as a French refugee but as the medical custodian of children who need evacuation.

The children become their passport through the collapsing Reich. Ferdinand manages to get the group aboard a Swedish Red Cross transport. The train offers the possibility that every previous train has failed to provide — actual passage across the frontier.