Running through the first three parts of Le Jardin des Plantes is a recurring episode in which S. is interviewed by a journalist about his experiences in the war, and in particular about the key incident of his war experience, defined here as: ‘ce qu'il éprouva pendant l'heure durant laquelle il suivit ce colonel, vraisemblablement devenu fou, sur la route de Solre-le-Château à Avesnes, le 17 mai 1940, avec la certitude d'être tué dans la seconde qui allait suivre’ (JP, 223).

The war scene has already figured, sometimes centrally, sometimes more tangentially, in previous texts, and Le Jardin des Plantes recalls some of these earlier versions in brief allusions to the other novels. From La Route des Flandres, for instance, we can recognise the ‘rideau de paon’ (JP, 216), the episode where the colonel stops to buy the men beer in a farmyard (JP, 281), and the depiction of the country bistro in which Georges, having escaped pursuit by the enemy, gets extremely drunk (JP, 289). Another reference to eating cans of fruit in an abandoned house (JP, 270) refers back to Leçon de choses, and the reiterated emphasis on the lush, ‘opulent’ green of the countryside is familiar from the version given in Les Géorgiques.

However, its re-presentation in Le Jardin des Plantes is significantly different. In the first place it is for the first time seen explicitly as traumatic: ‘le seul véritable traumatisme qu'il est conscient d'avoir subi et à la suite duquel sans aucun doute son psychisme et son comportement général dans la vie se trouvèrent profondément modifiés' (JP, 223). A traumatic experience, in Freudian terms, is one which is so intensely disturbing that it cannot be ‘processed’ by the normal means whereby the psyche regains and maintains its equilibrium. Freud's definition stresses both the suddenness and singularity of the event, and the persistence of its after-effects – ‘une expérience vécue qui apporte, en l'espace de peu de temps, un si fort accroissement d'excitation à la vie psychique que sa liquidation ou son élaboration par les moyens normaux et habituels échoue, ce qui ne peut manquer d'entraîner des troubles durables dans le fonctionnement énergétique' – and both of these aspects are clearly evident in Simon's representations of the war scene.