A Happy Death by Albert Camus
page 22, line 7
"Ms.: some delicate intoxication, designating him as its owner in the world's eyes.
page 23, line 10
Ms.: compared to the crystalline brilliance of a woman's face, in which all the beauty and futility of the world appears, ultimate luxury of a man's life, given up to (pleasure?) and preoccupation.
page 24, line 10
Ms.: in his temples and his eyes go blank.
page 24, line 13
Ms.: soiled, transformed into a sordid scene in which
rags dangled above garbage.
page 28, line 10 T.: already asked you not to. "Yes, darling."
page 31, line 20
According to Chapter 4, Zagreus is at least fifty; hence it is difficult to imagine that Marthe, though younger than Zagreus, should be young enough for Mersault.
page 32, line 19
Ms.: Rose, Claire, Catherine. We may note that Ca-
mus's mother was named Catherine Sintes.
page 32, line 20 Ms.: Oran
page 34, line 26
Ms. before he spoke. Then he would speak fast and volubly, generally laughing, but drawing swift conclusions which were always concrete and gave a curiouis weight of experience to his most trivial jokes. He was alive, that was what was striking. This trunk of a man was alive, and in his eyes appeared occasional dim gleams of a kind of concentrated passion which was never melancholy.
Chapter 4
page 36, line 11
Ms.: at the office. Still I know the secret and ardent life 1 would have if I had turned into a success, as the saying goes.
It should be noted that in one of the last outlines, Chapter 2 of Part II is called "secret and ardent happiness at Tipasa."
page 36, line 14
Ms.: filled with warmth. "Listen, Mersault. God knows
I'm fond of you. And you've already told me . . ."
"Yes," Mersault said. "Win or lose. Tve lost, and
that just suits my laziness."
page 36, line 21
Ms.: Zagreus smiled and said abruptly: "You're the
cripple, my friend," and went on while Mersault
blushed: "You live like an idiot, and you think you're
smart."
page 39, line 1
Ms.: sun bakes it. The sun is the real mirror of the
world.
page 39, line 15
Ms.: body's limits (a kind of promise of happiness)
page 39, line 16
Ms.: But I couldn't care less about self-knowledge.
page 40, line 5
Ms.: (opening like a bottomless pit into which Mersault felt himself being dragged) The preceding sentences in this paragraph do not appear in the manuscript.
page 40, line 9
This sentence is added to the typescript.
page 40, line 14
Ms.: And yet I feel entirely consonant with this human (and desperate and protean) image of the world which is my own life,
page 40, line 22
This last phrase is added to the typescript.
page 40, line 24
Ms.: smiled, as though pleased at having guessed right.
page 40, line 28
Ms.: can stand, have killed my will to happiness.
page 44, line 2
Purity of heart is one of the major problems in Camus. He attempts to distinguish it from virtue (see the end of Chapter 4, Part II: "in the innocence of his heart," taken up like a refrain). Kierkegaard annoyed Camus by linking it with virtue or goodness: "Purity of heart for K. is unity. But it is unity and the good." (Notebooks, II, p. 55) Camus's entire moral development is located within this problematic conjunction.
page 44, line 14
In the manuscript, Zagreus refers to the loss of his legs in the war (it is to be recalled that Camus's father was mortally wounded in the battle of the Marne). The reference to the First World War was crossed out in the second typescript and replaced by "the accident."
page 45
According to the Notebooks, I, p. 21, it is apparently
the novel's hero who plays with the revolver.
Chapter 5
A number of texts—typescripts, manuscripts, documents from previously printed sources—draw on, transpose, and scarcely alter Camus's family circle and its situation in the description of the barrehnaker Cardona, a "voice from the workingmen's neighborhood" transcribed with particular concern for autobiographical veracity.
Part Two
Conscious Death
Chapter 1
The trip to Central Europe, complicated by a love affair, violently affected Camus's sensibility. Prague, for him, represented exile, the wrong side ("I'envers") of the kingdom. It will therefore come as no surprise that this first chapter—an elaborated extract of a travel journal—was prepared from several texts. One figures in L'Envers et I'Endroit ("The Wrong Side and the Right Side") under the title "La Mort dans Tame" ("Death in the Soul"). According to a manuscript version of this particular text, the description of the dead man in the street has been transposed from Algiers, where it actually was observed, to the city of exile; this manuscript is designated here by Ms. 1.
page 57, line 1
Ms.: the man (Mersault)
page 67, line 5
Ms.: against their own demons (against the cruel grimaces of life)
page 69, line 16
Ms. 1: left cheek. He seemed dead drunk.
page 69, line 22
Ms. 1: a kind of wild Sioux dance
page 69, line 25
Ms. 1: from the nearby restaurant. It was eleven o'clock, on Christmas night . . . Despite the rather oppressive interplay of light and shadow, there was something about the scene that was not fierce and barbaric but instead a kind of primitive innocence.
page 70, line 1
Ms. 1: everything would collapse until it could be understood without effort.
And in fact everything would soon be explained. The police were coming. The body was not that of a drunk, but of a dead man, his friend dancing around him.
Only half an hour before, they had knocked at the door of a little restaurant in the neighborhood. They had already had too much to drink and wanted something to eat. But it was Christmas night, and no restaurant had room for them. Though shown the door, they had insisted, and been thrown out. Then they had kicked the proprietress, who happened to be pregnant. And the proprietor, a delicate, blond young man, had picked up a gun and fired. The bullet had lodged in the man's right temple. The head was turned so that it rested on the wound. Drunk and terror-stricken, the friend had begun dancing.
The episode was simple enough, and would end tomorrow with an article in the newspaper, but for the moment, in this remote corner, between the faint light on the moist pavement, the long wet hiss of passing cars a few steps away, the distant screech of occasional streetcars, the scene acquired the disturbing quality of another world: the insipid and disturbing image of this neighborhood. When twilight fills the streets with shadows, a single anonymous ghost indicated by a faint sound of footsteps and a confused murmur of voices sometimes appears, haloed by the red light from a pharmacy lamp . . .
The manuscript ends here.
page 71, line 2
Cf. the newspaper that Mersault, in The Stranger, finds in his cell, between the mattress and the bed-springs, in which he reads the story which is the source of Cross-Purposes (Le Malentendu).
page 71, line 12
Ms: silence into which he drained as though into sleep.
Chapter 2
page 72, line 29
Ms: take it (At the Austrian border, the customs officers wakened him from a kind of shapeless dream. Because of it and doubtless too because of his haggard features Mersault had to undergo a lengthy questioning. His papers were minutely examined . . .)
page 75, line 11
Ms.: an image of the ungrateful and desolate world
T.: A symbol of the ungrateful . . .
page 77,
T.: What are you up to? Whence do you come? What
are you? Whither do you go?
page 78, line 23
T.: The House above the World
page 78, line 27
T.: re-enlisting; subscribing to L'Illustration.
page 79
The sojourn in Genoa actually dates from the autumn of 1937, a year later. In fictional elaboration, it is located just after Prague.
page 81, line 22
This sentence does not figure in the manuscript. Camus
had noted it on a separate sheet.
page 81, line 29
Ms.: vanity, the strongest link of all
page 82, line 28
Ms.: to be run. He had won his right to happiness.
Chapter 3
No manuscript of this chapter has been found except for a passage concerning Lucienne contained in a fragment of Notebooks, I (pp. 81-2) relating to Marthe. All the variants are taken from the typescript.
page 89, line 4
But Rose intervened, always ready to defend Claire.
page 97, line 26
immerses her in a calm that floods her soul.
page 103, line 3 keep their truths.
page 103, line 5
Instead of the passage beginning "Rose comes over to the parapet . . .": "He loves what is the world in her, if not what is the woman. She yields her whole weight to him, nestling her warmth in the hollow of Patrice's shoulder. He murmurs: 'It will be difficult, but that's no reason.'
" 'No,' Catherine says, her eyes filled with the stars."
Chapter 4
There exists one manuscript version of this entire chapter, as well as a manuscript page of a passage concerning Lucienne and two manuscript sheets of the first dialogue between Patrice and Catherine. The variants taken from the separate manuscript sheets are designated as Ms. 2.
The portion of this chapter up to Patrice's departure from the House above the World has been inserted. Originally the chapter began with the marriage to Lucienne and the dialogue with Catherine.
page 107, line 15
Ms. 2: Catherine had asked.
"I'm not happy. I have been happy, little girl, but now I'm like a sponge squeezed dry, all shriveled up."
page 107, line 21
Ms. 2: for themselves. But what's the good of cheating? What they want is to love, or to be loved. I'm old enough to have that to look forward to."
page 107, line 21
Ms. 2: Men who are tired of loving don't deserve to be loved. If I was tired of this face filled with light that the world can show me, which smiles today in the sky and on the water, I wouldn't deserve the world."
page 107, line 26
Ms. 2: "What I'd like," she said, "is that you would
always do whatever you do without thinking of me."
Patrice turned around, his hand on the window latch, and sincerely: "I'm not thinking about you, little girl. I'd rather not lie. I haven't thought about love for one minute. Understand me—if I'm telling you this, it's because I respect you. Being afraid to make you suffer would be a way of not respecting you."
"Yes," Catherine said. "Thank you."
page 108, line 4
Ms. 2: white birds. Now he could see the tears filling her eyes as she stared at him, and he felt rising within him an immense tide of tenderness without love. He took her hands . . .
page 108, line 13
Ms. 2: shoulder. "/ have love."
page 108, line 17
Ms. 2: strangely hard. Incapable of loving, of shedding a single tear, what right did he have to speak of love in the name of nothing but love of life.
page 108, line 24
Ms. 2: and flowers. But that was what he was compelled to by the blind, black god he would henceforth serve.
page 113, line 26
Ms.: ask of you. For the rest, the same youth which has brought us together will separate us someday. There's more for me to do."
page 118, line 23
T.: adapt himself to everything, (endure life, test it,
which continued in his flesh and in his darkness. Of
course. But he had to want to endure it and to apply his
will to the point of no longer having any. That was
everything.)
page 123, line 9
Ms.: capacity for silence
page 123, line 19 Ms.: He knew
page 127, line 1
Ms.: (Claire, Rose, and Catherine)
page 132, line 16
Ms.: better now. Act in order to be happy: If / have to
settle down do it here in a place I like.
page 132, line 21
Ms.: not forcing ourselves for other people.
page 132, line 30 Ms.: hoped it would.
"Oh, ifs all right that way. A man's destiny is never anything but a secret pain."
page 133, line 18
Ms.: with nature. Unless," he went on, staring at Mer-
sault, "unless you've come here the way you withdraw
from the world before achieving some great project that will be the meaning of your life."
"For me," Mersault said, "what seems great is the withdrawing. All the rest is politics."
page 134, line 3
Ms.: or on a tremendous secret."
page 135, line 7
Apparently in the early sketches for the novel, Camus anticipated his hero would discuss his hopes of his literary vocation. There exists a sketch for the third part (Notebooks, I, p. 13) in which he confides in Catherine:
Chapter 1: "Catherine," says Patrice, "I know that now I am going to write. The story of the condemned man. I have come back to my real function, which is to write."
page 135, line 10
Ms.: "Goodbye, darling," Lucienne said.
page 135, line 11 Ms.: Three four
Chapter 5
The manuscript of this chapter consists of pages of various sizes. Apparently it was composed in several stages, from various sources, for example the first paragraph which prefigures the text of "Les Amandiers" ("The Almond Trees") in L'Ete (Summer).
page 139, line 11
Ms.: his own body too, and followed it inwardly, but
with the same truth as . . .
page 144, line 6
Ms.: a kind of eternity of flesh
page 145, line 10
Ms.: he was hardened to pain
page 146, line 18
Ms.: you can stay. Only don't talk."
page 146, line 20
Ms.: left. Night was falling.
page 146, line 27
Ms.: amazing."
"Whafs going to happen to me?" Lucienne asked.
"Nothing," Mersault said.
page 147, line 20
T.: impotence, all those who had not been able to find
eternity in the flesh
page 149, line 27
Ms.: this moment when he realized how little freedom
it had, his body
T.: this moment when he felt it so close to him, his
body
page 150, line 10
Ms.: cowardice, far from the touching and tragic comfort whose crucifixes people Europe.
In Malraux's first novel, Camus could have read: "Of course there is a higher faith, the faith proposed by all the village crucifixes, and those same crosses which stand over our dead. That faith is love, and there is consolation in it. I shall never accept it."
The last sentences of the novel were carefully reworked and recombined. There are many variants—in particular, at the very end, the manuscript phrase: stone among the stones, he returned (to the immobility of real things) to the truth of the motionless worlds.
ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. After winning a degree in philosophy, be worked at various jobs, ending up in journalism. In the thirties be ran a theatrical company, and during the war was active in the French Resistance, editing an important underground paper, Combat. Among h
Albert Camus, A Happy Death
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