Peulevé and Claude de Baissac were selected to begin the SCIENTIST circuit, in the Bordeaux area. Both men parachuted 'blind' (without a reception committee) to a landing ground west of Nîmes at the end of July 1942, but were dropped too low: de Baissac sprained an ankle, and Peulevé suffered a compound fracture of the right leg. Peulevé was taken to a clinic in Nîmes run by Franciscan nuns, and in mid-September he was transferred to a villa owned by the Audouard family in Cannes. Georges Audouard was a member of a circuit of croupiers with links to CARTE, the major resistance network on the Riviera, run by a painter named André Girard based in Antibes. Peulevé was introduced to Peter Churchill, an F Section agent acting as a CARTE liaison officer and responsible for the SPINDLE circuit. In desperate need of wireless operators, Peulevé was soon put to work transmitting for Girard, along with Isidore Newman, who had been brought ashore at Antibes in April 1942. Moving continually between safe houses in Cannes and Antibes, Peulevé was able to stay for a time with the family of a young French assistant living at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Jacques Poirier. Unimpressed with Girard's lack of security and Churchill's lack of direction, Peulevé decided to leave for Spain in late November, taking Poirier with him. Despite problems with finding reliable guides, Peulevé and Poirier left the border town of Céret to cross the Pyrenees on the night 21/22 December, a remarkable feat considering that Peulevé was still unable to walk without the aid of sticks. Unable to produce relevant papers, they were arrested the next morning by Spanish police and were sent to Figueras prison, where they remained until being removed to a camp at Jaraba in February 1943. On 11 April Peulevé escaped during a hospital visit to Saragossa, and made his way to the British embassy in Madrid. He arrived in the UK three weeks later. Through a mutual friend, Peulevé met Violette Szabo, a young widow from south London. They formed a close relationship through the summer, but Peulevé was expected to return to France on a second mission to organise a new circuit, AUTHOR, supplying and training maquis guerrillas in the rural Corrèze region of west central France.