the dark cellar, mingling with the mysterious melody of the accordion, swelling the bubble of saliva on
the man’s matchstick, making the conversations suddenly more meaningful, as if out of the night that lay
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upon Prague all the significance of a miserable suffering ancient world had taken refuge in the warmth of this room, among these people. Mersault, who was eating some kind of over-sweetened compote,
suddenly at the end of his endurance, felt the flaw he carried within himself yield, exposing him still more
completely to pain and fever. He stood up abruptly, called to the waiter, and understanding nothing of his
explanations overpaid the check, realizing that the musician’s gaze was once again fixed upon him. He
walked to the door, passing the accordionist, and saw that he was still staring at the place at the table
Mersault had just left. Then he realized that the man was blind, walked up the steps, and, opening the
door, was entirely engulfed by the omnipresent
odor as he walked through the little streets into the depths of the night.
Stars glittered over the houses. He must have been near the river; he could detect its muffled powerful
voice. In front of a little gate in a thick wall covered with Hebrew characters, he realized that he was in
the ghetto. Over the wall stretched the branches of a sweet-smelling willow. Through the gate he could
make out big brown stones lying among the weeds: it was the old Jewish cemetery of Prague. A moment
later Mersault realized he had been running and was now in the square of the old town hall. Near his hotel
he had to lean against a wall and vomit, retching painfully. With all the lucidity extreme weakness
affords, he managed to reach his room without making any mistakes, went to bed, and fell asleep at once.
The next day he was awakened by the newspaper vendors. The day was still overcast, but the sun glowed
behind the clouds. Though still a little weak, Mersault felt better. But he thought of the long day which
lay ahead of him. Living this way, in his own presence, time took on its most extreme dimensions, and
each hour seemed to contain a world. The important thing was to avoid crises like the one yesterday. It
would be best to do his sightseeing methodically. He sat at the table in his pajamas and worked out a
systematic schedule which would occupy each of his days for a week. Monasteries and baroque churches,
museums and the old parts of the city,
nothing was omitted. Then he washed, realized he had forgotten to buy a comb, and went downstairs as
he had the day before, unkempt and taciturn, past the clerk whose bristling hair, bewildered expression,
and jacket with the second button missing he noticed now, in broad daylight. As he left the hotel he was
brought to a halt by a childish, sentimental accordion tune. The blind man of the night before, squatting
on his heels at the corner of the old square, was playing with the same blank and smiling expression, as
though liberated from himself and entirely contained within the motion of a life which exceeded him.
Mersault turned the corner and again recognized the smell of cucumbers. And with the smell, his
suffering.
That day was the same as those which followed. Mersault got up late, visited monasteries and churches,
sought refuge in their fragrance of crypts and incense, and then, back in the daylight, confronted his secret fears at every corner, where a cucumber vendor was invariably posted. It was through this odor that he
saw the museums and discovered the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague
with its gold magnificence. The altars, which glowed softly in the darkness, seemed borrowed from the
coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent over the city. The glistening scrolls and spirals, the elaborate
setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the creches made
for children at Christmas, the
grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish, and
overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons. The god worshipped
here was the god man fears and honors, not the god who laughs with man before the warm frolic of sea
and sun. Emerging from the faint fragrance of dust and extinction which reigned under the dim vaults,
Mersault felt he had no country. Every evening he visited the cloister of the Czech monks, on the west
side of the city. In the cloister garden the hours fluttered away with the doves, the bells chimed softly over the grass, but it was still his fever which spoke to Mersault. Nonetheless, the time passed. But then came
the hour when the churches and monuments closed and the restaurants had not yet opened. That was the
dangerous time. Mersault walked along the Vltava’s banks, dotted with flowerbeds and bandstands, as the
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day came to an end. Little boats worked their way up the river from lock to lock. Mersault kept pace with them, left behind the deafening noise and rushing water of a sluice gate, gradually regained the peace and
quiet of the evening, then walked on to meet a murmur which swelled to a terrible roar. At the new lock,
he watched the bright little dinghies vainly trying to pass over the dam without capsizing until one of
them passed the danger point and shouts rang out above the sound of the water. The rushing river with
its burden of shouts and tunes, the fragrance of gar-dens, full of the coppery glow of the setting sun and
the twisted, grotesque shadows of the statues on the Charles Bridge, made Mersault bitterly conscious of
his desolation: a solitude in which love had no part. Coming to a standstill as the fragrance of leaves and
water reached him, he felt a catch in his throat and imagined tears which did not come. Tears would be
for a friend, or for open arms. But tears gave way to the world without tenderness in which he was
immersed. Some evenings, always at the same times, he crossed the Charles Bridge and strolled through
the Hradcany district above the river, a deserted and silent neighborhood, though only a few steps from
the busiest streets in the city. He wandered among these huge palaces, across enormous paved courtyards,
past ironwork gates, around the cathedral. His footsteps echoed in the silence between high walls. A dim
noise from the city reached him here. There was no cucumber vendor in this district, but something
oppressive in the silence, in the grandeur of the place, so that Mersault always ended by walking back
toward the odor or the melody which henceforth constituted his only country. He ate his meals in the
restaurant he had discovered, for at least it remained familiar. He had his place beside the man with the
red star, who came only in the evenings, drank a beer, and chewed on his matchstick. At dinner, too, the
blind man played his accordion, and Mersault ate quickly, paid his check, and re-
turned to his hotel and the unfailing sleep of a feverish child.
Every day he thought of leaving and every day, sinking a little deeper into desolation, his longing for
happiness had a little less hold over him. He had been in Prague four days now, and he had not yet bought
the comb whose absence he discovered each morning. Yet he had the vague sense of something missing,
and this was what he irresolutely waited for. One evening, he walked toward his restaurant down the little
street where he had first smelled the cucumbers. Already he anticipated that odor, when just before he
reached the restaurant, on the sidewalk opposite him, something made him stop, then come closer. A man
was lying there, arms folded, head fallen on the left cheek. Three or four people were standing against the
wall, apparently waiting for something, though very calm. One was smoking, the others were speaking in
low voices. But one man in shirtsleeves, his jacket over his arm, hat pushed back on his head, was
performing a kind of wild dance around the body, his gestures emphatic and disturbing. Overhead, the
faint light of a distant streetlamp mingled with the glow from the nearby restaurant. The man tirelessly
dancing, the body with its folded arms, the calm spectators, the ironic contrast and the inexplicable
silence—here at last, combining contemplation and innocence, among the rather oppressive interplay of
light and shadow, was a moment of equilibrium beyond which it seemed to
Mersault that everything would collapse into madness. He came closer: the dead man’s head was lying in
a pool of blood. The head was turned so that it rested on the wound. In this remote corner of Prague,
between the faint light on the moist pavement, the long wet hiss of passing cars a few steps away, the