A Happy Death by Albert Camus

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

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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

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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

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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, line 18

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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.”

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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.”

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