around their fins. Then the light faded a little more. Over the roofs the sky reddened, and with evening the
streets grew lively again. The strollers returned, the tired children whining as they let themselves be
dragged home. The neighborhood movie houses disgorged a crowd into the street. Mersault could tell
from the violent gestures of the young men that they had seen some sort of adventure film. Those who
had been to movies in the center of town appeared a little later. They were more serious: for all their
laughter and teasing gestures, their eyes and their movements betrayed a kind of nostalgia for the magical
lives they had just shared. They lingered in the street, coming and going. And on the sidewalk across
from Mersault, two streams finally formed. One consisted of neighborhood girls, walking arm in arm,
bareheaded. The young men in the other cracked jokes which made the girls laugh and look
away. Older people went into the cafes or formed groups on the sidewalk which the human river flowed
around as if they were islands. The street-lamps were on now, and the electric light made the first stars
look faint in the night sky. An audience of one, Mersault watched the procession of people under the
lights. The streetlamps made the damp sidewalks gleam, and at regular intervals the streetcars would
throw reflections on shiny hair, wet lips, a smile, or a silver bracelet. Gradually the streetcars became
8
more infrequent, and the night was already black above the trees and the lamps as the neighborhood gradually emptied and the first car crept across the street as soon as it was deserted again. Mersault
thought about dinner. His neck ached a little from leaning so long on the back of his chair. He went
downstairs to buy bread and macaroni, made his dinner and ate it. Then he returned to his balcony. People
were coming out again, the air had cooled. He shivered, closed his windows, and walked over to the
mirror above the fireplace. Except for certain evenings when Marthe came or when he went out with her,
and except for his correspondence with the girls in Tunis, his entire life lay in the yellowed image the
mirror offered of a room where the filthy oil lamp stood among the bread crusts.
“Another Sunday shot,” Mersault said.
3
When Mersault walked through the streets in the evening, proud as he watched the lights and shadows
flicker across Marthe’s face, everything seemed wonderfully simple, even his own strength and his
courage. He was grateful to her for displaying in public, at his side, the beauty she offered him day after
day like some delicate intoxication. An unno-ticeable Marthe would have made him suffer as much as a
Marthe happy in the desire of other men. He was glad to walk into the theater with her tonight, a little
before the film began, when the hall was nearly full. She went in ahead of him, drawing glances of
admiration, her flower-like face smiling, her beauty violent. Mersault, holding his hat in his hand, was
overcome by a wonderful sense of ease, a kind of inner awareness of his own elegance. His expression
grew remote and serious. He exaggerated his ceremonious manner, stepped back to let the usher pass,
lowered Marthe’s seat for her. And he did all this less from conceit, from ostentation, than because of the
gratitude that made his heart suddenly swell, filling with love for all these people around him. If he gave
the usher too big a tip, it was because he did not know how else to pay for his joy, and because he
worshipped, by making this everyday gesture, a divinity whose brilliant smile glistened like oil in his
gaze. During the break between
films, strolling in the lobby lined with mirrors, he saw the face of his own happiness reflected there,
populating the place with elegant and vibrant images—his own tall, dark figure and Marthe smiling in her
bright dress. Yes, he liked his face as he saw it there, his mouth quivering around the cigarette between
his lips and the apparent ardor of his deep-set eyes. But a man’s beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent useless-ness of a woman’s
face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.
Back in the theater, he remembered that when he was alone he never left his seat between films,
preferring to smoke and to listen to the records played while the lights were still on. But tonight the
excitement continued, and he felt that every chance of extending and renewing it was worth taking. Just
as she was sitting down, however, Marthe returned the greeting of a man a few rows behind them. And
Mersault, nodding in his turn, thought he noticed a faint smile on the man’s lips. He sat down without
noticing the hand Marthe laid on his shoulder to catch his attention; a moment earlier he would have
responded to it with delight, as another proof of that power she acknowledged in him.
“Who’s that?” he asked, waiting for the perfectly natural “who?” which in fact followed at once.
“You know. That man . . .”
“Oh,” Marthe said. And that was all.
“Well?”
“Do you have to know?”
“No,” Mersault said.
9
He glanced behind him: the man was staring at the back of Marthe’s neck without moving a muscle of his face. He was rather good-looking, his lips were very red and well shaped, but his eyes, which were set
shallowly in his face, had no expression in them. Mersault felt the blood pounding in his temples. In his
suddenly darkened vision, the brilliant hues of that ideal world where he had been living the last few
hours were suddenly soiled. He didn’t need to hear what she would say. He knew: the man had slept with
Marthe. And what racked Mersault like panic was the thought of what this man might be thinking. He
knew what it was, he had often thought the same thing: “Show off all you want . . .” The idea that this man was now imagining Marthe’s every gesture, even her way of putting her arm over her eyes at the
moment of pleasure, that he too had once tried to pull her arm away in order to watch the tumultuous
surge of the dark gods in her eyes, made everything inside Mersault collapse, and tears of rage welled up
under his closed eyelids while the theater bell announced that the film was about to begin. He forgot
Marthe, who had been merely the pretext of his joy and was now the living body of his rage. Mersault
kept his eyes closed a long time, and when he opened them again, a car
was turning over on the screen, one of its wheels still spinning in complete silence, slower and slower,
dragging into its persistent circle all the shame and humiliation that had been awakened in Mersault’s
angry heart. But a craving for certainty made him forget his dignity: “Marthe, was he ever your lover?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I want to watch the picture.”
That was the day Mersault began to be attached to Marthe. He had met her several months before, and he
had been astonished by her beauty, her elegance. Her golden eyes and carefully made-up lips in that
rather broad, regular face made her look like some painted goddess. The natural stupidity that glowed in
her eyes emphasized her remote, impassive expression. In the past, whenever Mersault had spent any time
with one woman, he made the first gestures of commitment, he was conscious of the disastrous fact that
love and desire must be expressed in the same way, and he would think about the end of the affair before
even taking her in his arms. But Marthe had appeared at a moment when Mersault was ridding himself of
everything, of himself as well. A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still
living on hope. For Mersault, nothing mattered in those days. And the first time Marthe went limp in his
arms and her features blurred as they came closer—the lips that had been as motionless as painted flowers
now quiv-
ering and extended—Mersault saw in her not the future but all the force of his desire focused upon her
and satisfied by this appearance, this image. The lips she offered him seemed a message from a world
without passion and swollen with desire, where his heart would find satisfaction. And this seemed a
miracle to him. His heart pounded with an emotion he almost took for love. And when he felt the ripe and
resilient flesh under his teeth, it was as though he bit into a kind of fierce liberty, after caressing her a long time with his own lips. She became his mistress that same day. After some time, their harmony in