“Better?” Lucienne asked in a whisper.
52
“Yes.” Then he returned to darkness between his arms. At the limit of his strength and his resistance, he joined Roland Zagreus for the first time, whose smile had so exasperated him in the beginning. His short,
gasping breath left a moist cloud on the marble of the night table. And in that sickly warmth rising toward
him from the stone, he felt even more distinctly the icy tips of his fingers and toes. Even that revealed life, though, and in this journey from cold to warm, he discovered the exultation which had seized Zagreus,
thanking life “for allowing him to go on burning.” He was overcome by a violent and fraternal love for this man from whom he had
felt so distant, and he realized that by killing him he had consummated a union which bound them
together forever. That heavy approach of tears, a mingled taste of life and death, was shared by them
both, he realized now. And in Zagreus’ very immobility confronting death he encountered the secret
image of his own life. Fever helped him here, and with it an exultant certainty of sustaining consciousness
to the end, of dying with his eyes open. Zagreus too had had his eyes open that day, and tears had fallen
from them. But that was the last weakness of a man who had not had his share of life. Patrice was not
afraid of such weakness. In the pounding of his feverish blood, though it failed to reach the limits of his
body, he understood that such weakness would not be his. For he had played his part, fashioned his role,
perfected man’s one duty, which is only to be happy. Not for long, no doubt. He had destroyed the
obstacle, and this inner brother he had engendered in himself—what did it matter if he existed for two or
for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
The blanket slipped from Mersault’s shoulders, and when Lucienne stood up to cover him, he shuddered
at her touch. Since the day he had sneezed in the little square near Zagreus’ villa to this moment, his body
had served him faithfully, had opened him to the world. But at the same time, it lived a life of its own,
detached from the man it represented. For these few years it had passed through a slow decora-
position; now it had completed its trajectory, and was ready to leave Mersault, to restore him to the world.
In that sudden shudder of which Mersault was conscious, his body indicated once more a complicity
which had already won so many joys for them both. Solely for this reason, Mersault took pleasure in that
shudder. Conscious, he must be conscious, he must be conscious without deception, without cowardice—
alone, face to face—at grips with his body—eyes open upon death. It was a man’s business. Not love, not
a landscape, nothing but an infinite waste of solitude and happiness in which Mersault was playing his
last cards. He felt his breathing weaken. He gasped for air, and in that movement his ruined lungs
wheezed. His wrists were cold now, and there was no feeling in his hands at all. Day was breaking.
The new day was cool, filled with the sound of birds. The sun rose quickly, and in a single leap was
above the horizon. The earth was covered with gold, with warmth. In the morning, sky and sea were
spattered with dancing patches of blue and yellow light. A light breeze had risen, and through the window
a breath of salt air cooled Mersault’s hands. At noon the wind dropped, the day split open like ripe fruit
and trickled down the face of the world, a warm and choking juice in a sudden concert of cicadas. The sea
was covered with this golden juice, a sheet of oil upon the water, and gave back to the sun-crushed earth a
warm, softening breath which
released odors of wormwood, rosemary, and hot stone. From his bed, Mersault received that impact, that
offering, and he opened his eyes on the huge, curved, glistening sea irradiated with the smiles of his gods.
Suddenly he realized he was sitting on his bed, and that Lucienne’s face was very close to his. Slowly, as
though it came from his stomach, there rose inside him a stone which approached his throat. He breathed
faster and faster, higher and higher. He looked at Lucienne. He smiled without wincing, and this smile too
came from inside himself. He threw himself back on the bed, and felt the slow ascent within him. He
looked at Lucienne’s swollen lips and, behind her, the smile of the earth. He looked at them with the same
eyes, the same desire.
“In a minute, in a second,” he thought. The ascent stopped. And stone among the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless worlds.
53
Afterword
A Happy Death draws on memories of Belcourt, the workingmen’s district where Camus spent his
childhood, as well as of his job at the maritime commission, his travels in central Europe in the summer
of 1936, in Italy in 1936 and 1937, his sanatorium experiences, and his life in the Fichu house, or the
“House above the World,” where he lived in November 1936. One reads also episodes in his love life—
his two years of marriage with Simone Hie and the break with her, after a stormy scene in Salzburg.
Another female figure, difficult to identify, plays an important role in the book. Several more specific
questions remain that biographical research may someday answer: Who was Lucienne? Roland Zagreus?
Doctor Bernard? etc. For the time being, it seems more useful to sketch a literary genesis than to establish
a point-by-point correspondence between a novel and a life.
The first specific mention, in the Notebooks, of what was to become A Happy Death is a plan of “Part II”
that could only have come after the trip to central Europe. The last sketches for the novel date from 1938.
The name Mersault occurs as late as January 1939, but by then Camus was concerned with The Stranger.
Thus A Happy Death was conceived and composed between 1936 and 1938. It is contemporary with the
first version of L’Envers et l’endroit and the final one of Noces, and follows the first draft of Caligula.
To understand the composition of the novel, it is best to consider the final version first. A Happy Death is divided into two parts, each consisting of five chapters: “Natural Death,” then “Conscious Death.” But the first part consists of only 49 typed pages, scarcely more than a third of the entire 140.
The core of “Natural Death” is the murder of Ro-
land Zagreus. Mersault, the hero, kills him in the first chapter, takes his money, and falls ill on his return home. The subsequent chapters are flashbacks: to Mer-sault’s ordinary life (Chapter 2), his relations with
Marthe and his sexual jealousy (Chapter 3), his long conversation with Zagreus (Chapter 4), and finally
the encounter with the barrelmaker Cardona, whose pathetic story is told in Chapter 5. To summarize: an
ordinary office worker, Patrice Mersault, the neighbor of a barrelmaker whose life is even more wretched
than his own and the lover of a girl whose first lover was the invalid Roland Zagreus, makes the latter’s
acquaintance through this girl, learns from a conversation with him how he made his fortune, and taking
advantage of this confidence, murders him; he then leaves the country, his health uncertain but his wallet
full.
The five chapters of “Conscious Death” present Mersault’s stay in Prague (Chapter 1), the rest of his journey and his return, through Genoa, to Algiers (Chapter 2), his life in the House above the World
(Chapter 3), his departure for the Chenoua, where he moves into a house overlooking the sea (Chapter 4),
and finally his pleurisy and death (Chapter 5). To summarize: in Prague, Mersault feels happiness
escaping him; he regains his sense of it as he returns to the sun. Back in Algiers, he makes two
experiments in happiness: first, by living with three girls in the House above the World; then in an ascetic
solitude in Chenoua, mitigated by visits from his wife Lucienne or from the three friends. He has
conquered happiness, and retains it in death itself, evoking Zagreus.
This resume of the novel suggests its chief theme: how to die a happy man? In other words, how to live as
one so that death itself is happy? The first part of the novel is the “wrong side”— I’envers—of this problem of a happy life and death, for the hero lacks money, time,
and emotional mastery; the second part of the novel, endowing him with financial independence, an
organization of time, and peace of heart, is the “right side”— I’endroit. This, in summary, is the content and meaning of A Happy Death in its final version.