his gaze never faltered. And his voice was quite steady when he said: “Have you no
Albert Camus v THE STRANGER
73
hope at all? Do you really think that when you die you die outright, and nothing
remains?”
I said: “Yes.”
He dropped his eyes and sat down again. He was truly sorry for me, he said. It
must make life unbearable for a man, to think as I did.
The priest was beginning to bore me, and, resting a shoulder on the wall, just
beneath the little skylight, I looked away. Though I didn’t trouble much to follow
what he said, I gathered he was questioning me again. Presently his tone became
agitated, urgent, and, as I realized that he was genuinely distressed, I began to pay
more attention.
He said he felt convinced my appeal would succeed, but I was saddled with a load
of guilt, of which I must get rid. In his view man’s justice was a vain thing; only
God’s justice mattered. I pointed out that the former had condemned me. Yes, he
agreed, but it hadn’t absolved me from my sin. I told him that I wasn’t conscious of
any “sin”; all I knew was that I’d been guilty of a criminal offense. Well, I was
paying the penalty of that offense, and no one had the right to expect anything more
of me.
Just then he got up again, and it struck me that if he wanted to move in this tiny
cell, almost the only choice lay between standing up and sitting down. I was staring
at the floor. He took a single step toward me, and halted, as if he didn’t dare to come
nearer. Then he looked up through the bars at the sky.
“You’re mistaken, my son,” he said gravely. “There’s more that might be required
of you. And perhaps it will be required of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You might be asked to see ...”
“To see what?”
Slowly the priest gazed round my cell, and I was struck by the sadness of his voice
when he replied:
“These stone walls, I know it only too well, are steeped in human suffering. I’ve
never been able to look at them without a shudder. And yet— believe me, I am
speaking from the depths of my heart— I know that even the wretchedest amongst
you have sometimes seen, taking form against that grayness, a divine face. It’s that
face you are asked to see.”
This roused me a little. I informed him that I’d been staring at those walls for
months; there was nobody, nothing in the world, I knew better than I knew them.
And once upon a time, perhaps, I used to try to see a face. But it was a sun-gold face,
lit up with desire— Marie’s face. I had no luck; I’d never seen it, and now I’d given
up trying. Indeed, I’d never seen anything “taking form,” as he called it, against
those gray walls.
Albert Camus v THE STRANGER
74
The chaplain gazed at me with a sort of sadness. I now had my back to the wall
and light was flowing over my forehead. He muttered some words I didn’t catch;
then abruptly asked if he might kiss me. I said, “No.” Then he turned, came up to the
wall, and slowly drew his hand along it.
“Do you really love these earthly things so very much?” he asked in a low voice.
I made no reply.
For quite a while he kept his eyes averted. His presence was getting more and
more irksome, and I was on the point of telling him to go, and leave me in peace,
when all of a sudden he swung round on me, and burst out passionately:
“No! No! I refuse to believe it. I’m sure you’ve often wished there was an
afterlife.”
Of course I had, I told him. Everybody has that wish at times. But that had no
more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a bettershaped
mouth. It was in the same order of things. I was going on in the same vein,
when he cut in with a question. How did I picture the life after the grave?
I fairly bawled out at him: “A life in which I can remember this life on earth.
That’s all I want of it.” And in the same breath I told him I’d had enough of his
company.
But, apparently, he had more to say on the subject of God. I went close up to him
and made a last attempt to explain that I’d very little time left, and I wasn’t going to
waste it on God.
Then he tried to change the subject by asking me why I hadn’t once addressed him
as “Father,” seeing that he was a priest. That irritated me still more, and I told him he
wasn’t my father; quite the contrary, he was on the others’ side.
“No, no, my son,” he said, laying his hand on my shoulder. “I’m on your side,
though you don’t realize it— because your heart is hardened. But I shall pray for
you.”
Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I
started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste
his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I’d taken him by the
neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on
him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure,
you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.
Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. It might look
as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far
surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no
doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth
into— just as it had got its teeth into me. I’d been right, I was still right, I was always
right. I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different
way, if I’d felt like it. I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x,
Albert Camus v THE STRANGER
75
whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been
waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which
was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance and I knew quite well
why. He, too, knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow,
persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that
were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people
tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What
difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God;
or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the
same fate was bound to “choose” not only me but thousands of millions of privileged
people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Surely, surely he must see that?
Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class.
All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the
others’. And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he
were executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the
same thing in the end? The same thing for Salamano’s wife and for Salamano’s dog.
That little robot woman was as “guilty” as the girl from Paris who had married
Masson, or as Marie, who wanted me to marry her. What did it matter if Raymond
was as much my pal as Céleste, who was a far worthier man? What did it matter if at
this very moment Marie was kissing a new boy friend? As a condemned man himself,
couldn’t he grasp what I meant by that dark wind blowing from my future? ...
I had been shouting so much that I’d lost my breath, and just then the jailers
rushed in and started trying to release the chaplain from my grip. One of them made
as if to strike me. The chaplain quietened them down, then gazed at me for a moment
without speaking. I could see tears in his eyes. Then he turned and left the cell.
Once he’d gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I
dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when
I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came
faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells’ of earth and salt, fanned my
cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me
like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were
starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for
the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I
understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at
making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the
dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like
someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in
the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over
again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope,
and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the
Albert Camus v THE STRANGER
76
first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like
myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was
happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to
hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators
and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
THE END.
Albert Camus v THE STRANGER
77
About the Author
ALBERT CAMUS was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. After winning a degree
in philosophy, he worked at various jobs, ending up in journalism. In the thirties he
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 (1946), The Plague (1948), The Fall
(1957), and Exile and the Kingdom (1958); a volume of plays, Caligula and Three
Other Plays (1958); and two books of philosophical essays, The Rebel (1954) and
The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), both of which are available in the Vintage series.
Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in
an automobile accident on January 4, 1960.
THIS BOOK was set on the Linotype in Janson, an excellent example o f the
influential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England prior to the development
by William Caslon of his own designs, which he evolved from these Dutch faces. Of
Janson himself little is known except that he was a practicing type-founder in Leipzig
during the years 1660 to 1687. Printed and bound by THE COLONIAL PRESS INC.,
Clinton, Massachusetts. Cover design by LEO LIONNI.
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