and gains the reward of its own perseverance. Thus the days of the House above the World, woven of that
luxuriant fabric of laughter and simple acts, ended on the terrace under the star-studded night. Rose and
Claire and Patrice stretched out on the deckchairs, Catherine sat on the parapet.
In the sky, night showed them its shining face, radiant and secret. Lights passed far below in the harbor,
and the screech of trains occasionally reached them. The stars swelled, then shrank, vanished and were
reborn, drawing evanescent figures, creating new ones moment by moment. In the silence, the night
recovered its density, its flesh. Filled with twinkling stars, it left in their eyes the play of lights that tears can bring. And each of them, plunging into the depths of the sky, found that extreme point where
everything coincides, the secret and tender meditation which makes up the solitude of one’s life.
Catherine, suddenly choked with love, could only sigh. Patrice, who felt that his voice would crack,
nonetheless asked: “Don’t you feel cold?”
“No,” Rose said. “Besides, it’s so beautiful.”
Claire stood up, put her hands on the parapet and held her face up to the sky. Facing everything noble and
elementary in the world, she united her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes with the
movement of the stars. Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: “On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.”
“Yes,” Patrice said, without looking at her. A star fell. Behind it a distant beacon broadened in the night that was deeper now. Some men were climbing up the path in silence. He could hear the sound of their
footsteps, their heavy breathing. Then the smell of flowers reached him.
The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is
established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which
proceeds from death to death. Patrice, Catherine, Rose, and Claire then grew aware of the happiness born
of their abandonment to the world. If this night was in some sense the figure of their fate, they marveled that it should be at once so carnal and so secret, that upon its countenance mingled both tears and the sun.
And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.
It is late now. Already midnight. On the brow of this night which is like the repose and the reflection of
the world, a dim surge and murmur of stars her-alds the coming dawn. A tremulous light descends from
the sky. Patrice looks at his friends: Catherine sitting on the parapet, her head tipped back; Rose huddled
on the deckchair, her hands resting on Gula; Claire standing stiff against the parapet, her
high, round forehead a white patch in the darkness. Young creatures capable of happiness, who exchange
their youth and keep their secrets. He stands beside Catherine and stares over her glistening shoulder into
the bowl of the sky. Rose comes over to the parapet, and all four are facing the World now. It is as if the
suddenly cooler dew of the night were rinsing the signs of solitude from them, delivering them from
themselves, and by that tremulous and fugitive baptism restoring them to the world. At this moment,
when the night overflows with stars, their gestures are fixed against the great mute face of the sky. Patrice raises an arm toward the night, sweeping sheaves of stars in his gesture, the sea of the heavens stirred by
his arm and all Algiers at his feet, around them like a dark, glittering cape of jewels and shells.
36
4
Early in the morning, the fog lights of Mersault’s car were gleaming along the coast road. Leaving
Algiers, he passed milk carts, and the warm smell of the horses made him even more aware of the
morning’s freshness. It was still dark. A last star dissolved slowly in the sky, and on the pale road he
could hear only the motor’s contented purr and occasionally, in the distance, the sound of hooves, the
clatter of milk cans, until, out of the dark, his lights flashed on the shining iron of the horseshoes. Then
everything vanished in the sound of speed. He was driving faster now, and the night swiftly veered to
day.
Out of the darkness still retained between the hills, the car climbed an empty road overlooking the sea,
where the morning declared itself. Mersault stepped on the gas. The tiny sucking sound of the wheels
grew louder on the dewy pavement. At each of the many turns, Mersault’s brakes made the tires squeal,
and as the road straightened, the sound of the motor gaining speed momentarily drowned out the soft
voices of the sea rising from the beaches below. Only an airplane permits man a more apparent solitude
than the kind he discovers in an automobile. Utterly confident of his own presence, satisfied with the
precision of his gestures, Mersault could at the same time return to himself and to what con-
cerned him. The day lay open, now, at the end of the road. The sun rose over the sea, awakening the fields
on either side of the road, still deserted a moment before, filling them with the red fluttering of birds and insects. Sometimes a farmer would cross one of these fields, and Mersault, rushing past, retained no more
than the image of a figure with a sack bending over the moist, clinging soil. Again and again the car
brought him to the edge of slopes overlooking the sea; they grew steeper and their outline, barely
suggested in the light of dawn, grew more distinct now, suddenly revealing prospects of olive trees, pines,
and whitewashed cottages. Then another turn hurled the car toward the sea, which tipped up toward
Mersault like an offering glowing with salt and sleep. Then the car hissed on the pavement and turned
back toward other hillsides and the unchanging sea.
A month before, Mersault had announced his departure to the House above the World. He would travel
again, then settle down somewhere around Algiers. Several weeks later he was back, convinced that
travel now meant an alien way of life to him: wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an
anxious man. And deep inside himself he felt a dim exhaustion. He was eager to carry out his plan of
buying a little house somewhere in the Chenoua, between the sea and the mountains, a few kilometers
from the ruins of Tipasa. When he arrived in Algiers, he had envisioned the setting of his life. He
had made a large investment in German pharmaceuticals, paid a broker to manage his holdings for him,
and thereby justified his absences from Algiers and the independent life he was leading. The investment,
moreover, was more or less profitable, and he made up for his occasional losses, offering without remorse
this tribute to his profound freedom. The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with a countenance it can
understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap
confidence. Mersault then concerned himself with Lucienne’s fate.
She had no family, lived alone, worked as a secretary for a coal company, ate little but fruit, and did
Swedish exercises. Mersault lent her books which she returned without a word. To his questions, she
replied: “Yes, I liked it,” or else: “It was a little sad.” The day he decided to leave Algiers, he suggested that she live with him but continue to keep her apartment in Algiers without working, joining him when
he sent for her. He proposed this with enough conviction for Lucienne to find nothing humiliating in the
offer, and in fact there was nothing humiliating in it. Lucienne often realized through her body what her
mind could not understand; she agreed. Mersault added: “If you want, I can marry you. But I don’t see the point.”
“Whatever you prefer,” Lucienne said. A week later he married her and made ready to leave the city.
Meanwhile Lucienne bought an orange canoe to skim over the blue sea.
37
Mersault twisted the wheel to avoid a venturesome hen. He was thinking of the conversation he had had with Catherine, the day he had left the House above the World—he had spent the night alone in a hotel.
It was early in the afternoon, and because it had rained that morning, the whole bay was like a wet pane of
glass, the sky utterly blank above it. The cape at the opposite end of the bay stood out wonderfully clear,
and lay, gilded by a sunbeam, like a huge summer snake upon the sea. Patrice had finished packing and
now, his arms leaning on the sill, he stared greedily at this new birth of the world.
“But if you’re happy here, why are you leaving?” Catherine had asked.