The young girl traveled on her own overland to Paris over a period of many months, surviving, despite many hostilities, via the assistance of other Roma encampments along the way plus the kindness of strangers on occasion.
In the words of Barrera: These tales for children told stories of young Romanies who left their camps to go on a journey, the first in search of a magic guitarist who lived in the midst of nature, the second to reach "the moon of the Tziganes".
In both cases, the figure of the Gypsy was a sublimation of positive aspects of her culture that Jayat also considered to be defining characteristics: the desire for freedom as the driving force of life, music as a form of emotional expression of the people, the connection with and respect for nature as a fundamental principle and the notion of "the journey" – individual or collective – as a means of learning and personal growth.
Probably the most striking and defining aspect of La longue route d'une Zingarina is the description of the feelings that Jayat makes of Stellina, protagonist of the story and alter ego of the writer, whose path to France soon loses the meaning of flight and becomes a form of initiation journey.
[8]El romanès recounted the adventures of Romanino "El Romanès", a Spanish Romani man, during World War II, while regarding her next novel: Les Racines du temps was a youthful tale in which an older and wise man, Ribeiro Verde, told a child, Maggio, the story of Libèra, a young gypsy girl whose adventures were the subject of the book.
Regarding this work, Barrera López wrote: In La Zingarina ou l'herbe sauvage the interest in the transnational dimension of their culture, the possibility of dialogue between gypsies and non-gypsies, and the respective understanding from the difference was placed in the center of the story ...
In this new book, Jayat even reserved a space to resume the history of the Nazi persecution of the gypsies, but now linking it to that also suffered by the Jews ... her own life was presented as an inexhaustible source for extracting stories that demonstrated the possibility, and above all the duty, of establishing a dialogue with other forms of life that would foster mutual enrichment.
[8]Simultaneous with her development as a writer, Jayat was also exploring the world of painting, being guided among others by Henri Mahé (1907–1975) as well as by gallery owner Émile Adès who from the early 1970s onwards exhibited her work alongside that of Chagall, Salvador Dalí and others.
[10] In 1992 she painted a work entitled "Les gens du voyage" (the Travelling People) which was used as the design for a French postage stamp of denomination 2.5 NFR.
[13] In the mid-1960s, Jayat began frequenting a venue on Paris, the Pleint Vent Club, which on its ground floor offered a bookstore and an exhibition hall, while its 13th-century vaulted basement offered a performance space for jazz and flamenco music; among these performances, Jayat presented recitations of her poetry accompanied by her friends Babik Reinhardt and Cérani (Jean Mailhes).