Exodus

One year ago Saigon's Rue Catinat was a glittering, neon-splashed midway choked with shoppers, promenaders and fun-seekers. Last week its sidewalks were all but deserted. Shop after shop stood with windows boarded up. At a cabaret once loud with the jokes and brawling of red-bereted paratroopers, sailors and the kepis blancs of the French Foreign Legion, all was quiet. By the hundreds and thousands the French, with no place in the new independent state of Viet Nam, were leaving the city they had once made famous as "the Paris of the Orient."

Last week Radio France Asie, the official French broadcasting station in the area, closed down for good, and from Paris came word that the last of France's troops, some 13,000 in all, would leave Viet Nam in the immediate future. For weeks truckloads of French soldiers bound for troubled North Africa have rumbled towards the waterfront, their full-throated soldiers' songs ringing out under the arched tamarind trees like a recessional. "There is no singing now," said the French proprietor of a local bar when they had passed. "Only the voices of the ghosts of our old comrades."

Other merchants echoed his woe in the sharp decline of French imports. In the villages outside the city the French army auctioned off its surplus to local businessmen, while Vietnamese shopkeepers eyed the stores and stalls of their French counterparts and waited patiently for them to go broke. "We can wait," they told the French, who rejected their absurdly low offers. "Your price will drop."

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