“Yes,” Catherine said. “Thank you.”
page 108, line 4
Ms. 2: white birds. Now he could see the tears filling her eyes as she stared at him, and he felt rising
within him an immense tide of tenderness without love. He took her hands . . .
page 108, line 13
Ms. 2: shoulder. “/ have love.”
page 108, line 17
Ms. 2: strangely hard. Incapable of loving, of shedding a single tear, what right did he have to speak of love in the name of nothing but love of life.
page 108, line 24
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Ms. 2: and flowers. But that was what he was compelled to by the blind, black god he would henceforth serve.
page 113, line 26
Ms.: ask of you. For the rest, the same youth which has brought us together will separate us someday.
There’s more for me to do.”
page 118, line 23
T.: adapt himself to everything, (endure life, test it,
which continued in his flesh and in his darkness. Of
course. But he had to want to endure it and to apply his
will to the point of no longer having any. That was
everything.)
page 123, line 9
Ms.: capacity for silence
page 123, line 19 Ms.: He knew
page 127, line 1
Ms.: (Claire, Rose, and Catherine)
page 132, line 16
Ms.: better now. Act in order to be happy: If / have to
settle down do it here in a place I like.
page 132, line 21
Ms.: not forcing ourselves for other people.
page 132, line 30 Ms.: hoped it would.
“Oh, ifs all right that way. A man’s destiny is never anything but a secret pain.”
page 133, line 18
Ms.: with nature. Unless,” he went on, staring at Mer-
sault, “unless you’ve come here the way you withdraw
from the world before achieving some great project that will be the meaning of your life.”
“For me,” Mersault said, “what seems great is the withdrawing. All the rest is politics.”
73
page 134, line 3
Ms.: or on a tremendous secret.”
page 135, line 7
Apparently in the early sketches for the novel, Camus anticipated his hero would discuss his hopes of his
literary vocation. There exists a sketch for the third part (Notebooks, I, p. 13) in which he confides in Catherine:
Chapter 1: “Catherine,” says Patrice, “I know that now I am going to write. The story of the condemned man. I have come back to my real function, which is to write.”
page 135, line 10
Ms.: “Goodbye, darling,” Lucienne said.
page 135, line 11 Ms.: Three four
Chapter 5
The manuscript of this chapter consists of pages of various sizes. Apparently it was composed in several
stages, from various sources, for example the first paragraph which prefigures the text of “Les
Amandiers” (“The Almond Trees”) in L’Ete (Summer).
page 139, line 11
Ms.: his own body too, and followed it inwardly, but
with the same truth as . . .
page 144, line 6
Ms.: a kind of eternity of flesh
page 145, line 10
Ms.: he was hardened to pain
page 146, line 18
Ms.: you can stay. Only don’t talk.”
page 146, line 20
Ms.: left. Night was falling.
page 146, line 27
Ms.: amazing.”
“Whafs going to happen to me?” Lucienne asked.
“Nothing,” Mersault said.
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page 147, line 20
T.: impotence, all those who had not been able to find
eternity in the flesh
page 149, line 27
Ms.: this moment when he realized how little freedom
it had, his body
T.: this moment when he felt it so close to him, his
body
page 150, line 10
Ms.: cowardice, far from the touching and tragic comfort whose crucifixes people Europe.
In Malraux’s first novel, Camus could have read: “Of course there is a higher faith, the faith proposed by all the village crucifixes, and those same crosses which stand over our dead. That faith is love, and there
is consolation in it. I shall never accept it.”
The last sentences of the novel were carefully reworked and recombined. There are many variants—in
particular, at the very end, the manuscript phrase: stone among the stones, he returned (to the immobility
of real things) to the truth of the motionless worlds.
ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. After winning a degree in philosophy, be
worked at various jobs, ending up in journalism. In the thirties be ran a theatrical company, and during
the war was active in the French Resistance, editing an important underground paper, Combat. Among his major works are four widely praised works of fiction, The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956), and Exile and the Kingdom (1957); a volume of plays, Caligula and Three Other Plays (1944); and two books of philosophical essays. The Rebel (1951) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), both of which are available in the Vintage series. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1957. He died in an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.