Lucienne seemed almost surprised by his solicitude, when she wasn’t preoccupied with her carefully
pressed white linen dresses.
He took walks now, but with Lucienne. He recovered his complicity with the world, but by resting his
hand on Lucienne’s shoulder. Taking refuge in humanity, he escaped his secret dread. Within two days,
however, Lucienne bored him. And this was the moment she chose to ask him to let her live there. They
were at dinner, and Mersault had simply refused, not raising his eyes from his plate.
After a pause, Lucienne had added in a neutral tone of voice: “You don’t love me.”
Mersault looked up. Her eyes were full of tears. He relented: “But I never said I did, my child.”
“I know,” Lucienne said, “and that’s why.”
Mersault stood up and walked to the window. Between the pines, the stars throbbed in the night sky. And
never had Patrice felt, along with his dread, so much disgust as at this moment for the days they had just
passed together. “You’re a lovely girl, Lucienne. I can’t see any further than that. It’s all I ask of you. It has to be enough for the two of us.”
“I know,” Lucienne said. She was sitting with her back to Patrice, scoring the tablecloth with the tip of her knife. He walked over to her and rested a hand on the nape of her neck.
“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory . . . Everything is
forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That’s why it’s good to have
had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion—it gives you an alibi for the vague
despairs we all suffer from.” After a pause, he added: “I don’t know if you understand what I mean.”
“I think I understand.” She suddenly turned her head toward Mersault. “You’re not happy.”
“I will be,” Mersault said violently. “I have to be. With this night, this sea, and this flesh under my fingers.” He had turned back toward the window and tightened his hand over the nape of Lucienne’s neck.
She said nothing.
Then, without looking at him, “At least you feel friendly toward me, don’t you?”
Patrice knelt beside her and gently bit her shoulder. “Friendly, yes, the way I feel friendly toward the night. You are the pleasure of my eyes, and you don’t know what a place such joy can have in my heart.”
She left the next day. And the day after that Mersault was unable to stand himself, and drove to Algiers.
He went first to the House above the World. His friends promised to come to see him at the end of the
month. Then he decided to visit his old neighborhood.
His apartment had been rented to a man who ran a cafe. He inquired after the barrelmaker, but no one
knew anything—someone thought he had gone to Paris to look for work. Mersault walked through the
streets. At the restaurant, Celeste had aged—but not much; Rene was still there, with his tuberculosis and
his solemn expression. They were all glad to see Patrice again, and he felt moved by this encounter.
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“Hey, Mersault,” Celeste told him, “you haven’t changed. Still the same!”
“Yes,” Mersault said. He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was
being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don’t change character, men are dogs for one another.
And precisely to the degree that Celeste, Rene, and the others had known him, he had become as alien
and remote to them as an uninhabited planet. Yet he left them with affectionate farewells. And just
outside the restaurant he ran into Marthe. As soon as he saw her he realized that he had almost forgotten
her and that at the same time he had wanted to meet her. She still had her painted goddess’s face. He
desired her vaguely but without conviction. They walked together.
“Oh, Patrice,” she said, “I’m so glad! What’s become of you?”
“Nothing, as you can see. I’m living in the country.”
“Wonderful. I’ve always dreamed of living in the
country.” And after a silence: “You know, I’m not angry at you or anything.”
“Yes,” Mersault said, laughing, “you’ve managed to console yourself.”
Then Marthe spoke in a tone of voice he did not recognize. “Don’t be nasty, Patrice. I knew it would end like this some day. You were a funny guy. And I was nothing but a little girl. That’s what you al-ways
used to say … Of course when it happened I was furious. But finally I told myself, ‘He’s un-happy.’ And
you know, it’s funny, I don’t know how to say it, but that was the first time that what we . . . that what
happened between us made me feel sad and happy at the same time.”
Surprised, Mersault stared at her. He suddenly re-alized that Marthe had always been very decent with
him. She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair:
while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He
discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first
to their advantage, then to their dis-advantage. Today he understood that Marthe had been genuine with
him—that she had been what she was, and that he owed her a good deal. It was begin-ning to rain—just
enough to reflect the lights of the street; through the shining drops he saw Marthe’s suddenly serious face
and felt overcome by a burst of gratitude he could not express—in the old days
he might have taken it for a kind of love. But he could find only stiff words: “You know, Marthe, I’m very fond of you. Even now, if there’s anything I could do . . .”
She smiled: “No. I’m young still. And I don’t do without . . .”
He nodded. What a distance there was between them, and yet what complicity! He left her in front of her
own house. She had opened her umbrella, saying, “I hope we’ll see each other again.”
“Yes,” Mersault said. She gave him a sad little smile. “Oh, that’s your little girl’s face.” She had stepped into the doorway and closed her umbrella. Patrice held out his hand and smiled in his turn. “Till next time, image.” She hugged him quickly, kissed him on both cheeks, and ran upstairs. Mersault, standing in the
rain, still felt Marthe’s cold nose and warm lips on his cheeks. And that sudden, disinterested kiss had all
the purity of the one given him by the freckled little whore in Vienna.
Then he went to find Lucienne, slept at her apartment, and asked her to walk with him on the boulevards.
It was almost noon when they came downstairs. Orange boats were drying in the sun like fruit cut in
quarters. The double flock of pigeons and their shadows swooped down to the docks and up again in a
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long, slow curve. The sun was brilliant and the air grew stifling. Mersault watched the red-and-black steamer slowly gain the channel, put on speed, and gradually veer toward
the streak of light glistening where the sky met the sea. For the onlookers, there is a bitter sweetness in
every departure. “They’re lucky,” Lucienne said.
“Yes.” He was thinking “No”—or at least that he didn’t envy them their luck. For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach
happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid
desire. He could hear Zagreus: “Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness.” He had his arm around Lucienne, and her warm breast rested in his hand.
That same evening, as he drove back to the Chenoua, Mersault felt an enormous silence in himself as he
faced the swelling waves and the steep hillsides. By making the gesture of a fresh start, by becoming
aware of his past, he had defined what he wanted and what he did not want to be. Those wasted days he
had been ashamed of seemed dangerous but necessary now. He might have foundered then and missed his
one chance, his one justification. But after all, he had to adapt himself to everything.
Rounding one curve after the next, Mersault steeped himself in this humiliating yet priceless truth: the
conditions of the singular happiness he sought were getting up early every morning, taking a regular