L'Apprentissage de la ville, presented to friends in a manuscript whose calligraphy recalls that of the Benedictine monks of the Middle Ages. It is June 1944 and Dietrich is working on a project dedicated to the mentally ill: as Patrice Delbourg recalls in Les Désemparés, a true catalog of unfortunate writers, almost taking on the clothes of the mother nurse or of Dr. Durtain of whom he chose to take the name, he moves among the debris caused by a previous bombing, "plays the doctor, dressed in a white coat, distributing words of comfort to the wounded", when suddenly a new wave of howitzers rains from the sky and goes to torture the village on the Channel and the life of the poet; the left foot is injured and infected: the septicemia will reach the brain. Dietrich was the umpteenth victim of the twentieth century's double misfortune known as the "World War", like Péguy and Apollinaire, and also Max Jacob, Stefan Zweig, Edith Stein, Irène Nemirovsky, Robert Brasillach and Drieu.