The bus from Aix had dropped me off in Lourmarin in the late morning, at a square shaded by plane trees whose leaves were already turning yellow. The Mistral had swept through the night before; one could still sense it in the clarity of the air, in the almost unreal sharpness with which the Luberon stood out against the sky. Provence in October is not the Provence of postcards, but something sterner—something that does not reach out to you, but waits to see if you will come to it.
I had arranged to meet at the Café de l’Ormeau at three o’clock. I walked down the Rue de l’Église, past an old silk farm made of pale stone, its green shutters half-closed. There was no sign on the door. I knew only that he lived there whenever he was in Lourmarin, and that he preferred people not to know it. In the village, the innkeeper had told me, he didn’t go by the name Camus anyway. They called him Monsieur Terrasse—an alias behind which he sought refuge from the clamor of Paris. Here, he would sit at the café, read his newspaper, chat with the blacksmith, watch the local boys play football, and—so the story went—buy them jerseys.
Shortly before three, he was already seated outside—slightly to one side, his back against the wall—wearing a dark overcoat over a gray sweater. A Gauloise rested between his thumb and index finger, held very still. He recognized me by my hat and stood up. His handshake was firm, yet not effusive; his eyes were narrow, intensely observant. He was forty-six at the time and looked wearier than I had expected. The tuberculosis that had dogged him his entire life had left a mark—one that could not be named, yet could certainly be felt. He ordered a coffee and pushed his newspaper aside.
"You come from the North," he said. It was not a question. “Sit down. You get a good view of the mountains from here. If you look long enough, you get the impression that the sea lies just beyond them. It doesn’t lie beyond them. But the impression is enough for me.”
I asked him if it bothered him to sit here, out in the open, where anyone could approach him. He smiled faintly.
“No one approaches me here. Here, I am Monsieur Terrasse. Here, no one cares what a man in Stockholm might have said. Here, people care about whether their son’s football team wins. That, too, is a form of politeness. Perhaps the only one I can still tolerate.”
On the Nobel Prize
I brought up the subject of Stockholm, almost involuntarily. He let the question hang in the air for a moment, gazing down at his cigarette.
“I hadn’t expected it. I was having dinner with someone when the news arrived, and, frankly, I was startled. Not out of modesty. Out of something else. You see, Malraux should have received it before I did. I was too young—everyone knew that. A prize of this magnitude is not merely an honor; it is a burden. It places you on a pedestal, and anyone standing on a pedestal can no longer walk. But I *must* walk. I believe I have only just begun to write what truly matters.”
I remarked that this sounded almost like a complaint.
“It is not a complaint. It is an observation. I used the money to buy this house. That was the one truly good thing about it. Now I can work here without anyone knocking at the door. The rest is noise. In Paris, they tell me I am a saint. In Algiers, they tell me I am a traitor. Both are false; both are exhausting. In Lourmarin, they call me Monsieur Terrasse. That is more accurate.”
On Childhood
He ordered a second coffee. I asked him where he came from—what it had been like, there in the place where he grew up. His gaze shifted. It did not soften, but rather grew clearer.
“In Belcourt, a district of Algiers. My father was killed in the First World War; I was not yet a year old. I never knew him. I know only of a single gesture my mother once mentioned: that after witnessing an execution, he came home and had to vomit. It was from that memory that I later wrote my essay on the guillotine.”
“And your mother?” I asked. "My mother was almost deaf-mute. She could barely read. She cleaned in other people’s homes. There were five of us living in two rooms—with my grandmother, an uncle, and my brother. My grandmother ruled the household, an ox-hide whip in her hand. My mother didn’t speak much. In the evenings, she would sit by the window and gaze out at the street. That is one of the most powerful images of my life. Everything I have ever written stems from that. My mother’s silence, and the sun over the sea."
He paused for a moment, then spoke in a softer voice:
"We were poor. But I never felt that poverty was something to be ashamed of. It was only later—in France—that I learned one was supposed to feel shame for it. We had no money, but we had the sea. The sea is not expensive. Anyone who possesses a sea is not poor in the true sense of the word. Misery becomes truly inconsolable only where the sea is no longer to be found."
He spoke of his primary school teacher, Louis Germain—the man who had persuaded his mother and grandmother to let him attend secondary school rather than sending him off to learn a trade. It was to him, he said, that he had written one of his very first letters after arriving in Stockholm.
"Without Germain, I would have ended up a manual laborer. There are a few men in a lifetime who hold the door open for you. As you grow older, you come to realize that, without them, you would have amounted to almost nothing. It is a humility that arrives too late—but it arrives nonetheless."
On Writers
I asked him if he still had much contact with the others in Paris. He gave an almost imperceptible shrug.
“With those who are left. With René Char, above all. He lives in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, an hour from here. It was he who showed me Lourmarin—along with Grenier, my old teacher. Char is a brother. There are two or three people with whom one can truly speak; Char is one of them. When I visit him, we go out into the garden and sit together in silence. That is a privilege.”
“And Sartre?” I asked cautiously.
He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes.
“Sartre and I haven’t spoken in seven years. You know what happened—the dispute over the camps, the question of violence. He wrote that I was a good man, but one without ideas. It was a hurtful remark. Yet I regret nothing. If someone tells me that, for the sake of a noble idea, one is permitted to send a thousand men to a camp, then I walk away. That is not a position; it is a boundary. Sartre was able to cross it. I could not.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and gazed for a moment at the square, where two men were playing a game of boules.
“Things have, in general, become difficult with the Parisian world. They turned me into a statue, and then they spat on that statue. A convenient exercise, since a statue cannot fight back. I am no statue. I am a man from Belcourt trying to write a few sentences correctly. That is all.”
He mentioned Pasternak, whose nomination for the Nobel Prize he had championed; Faulkner, whom he had translated; and Melville—whom he admired for the way he could depict evil through a parable, without ever having to explain it. He spoke of Tolstoy with an almost shy affection, and of Dostoevsky as if speaking of someone with whom he had not yet finished. He had created a stage adaptation of his novel *The Demons*, which had premiered in Paris in January.
On Family
An older woman walked past and greeted him by name: Terrasse. He nodded to her, almost formally. I asked him how he was doing here alone—whether he didn't miss his family.
"Francine and the children are coming for Christmas. The twins are fourteen now—Jean and Catherine. When they’re here, I stop working. There’s no other way, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I’ve done a lot wrong in my life. I’ve hurt my wife. I know that. But the children—that’s a different matter. With the children, I am the man I ought to be."
He said this without self-pity, but rather with the precision of a man accustomed to sparing himself nothing.
"And my mother—she still lives in Algiers. I write to her; she can barely read, but she keeps the letters. The situation there is—well, as you know. I tried to speak out about it—without posturing, without slogans. I didn’t succeed in satisfying anyone. I believe in justice. But if I am told I must choose between my mother and justice, I will always choose my mother. That is something I haven’t been forgiven for."
On the World
We sat for a long time. The shadows of the plane trees shifted. I asked him how he viewed the world—now, in this very moment.
He thought for a long time before answering.
"I see a world that has grown accustomed to being evil. That is the worst part. Not the evil itself—which has always existed—but the habituation to it. We have seen the camps; we have seen the Bomb; we see what happened in Hungary, what is happening in Algeria. And we are learning to live with it, as if it were merely the weather. I refuse to learn to live with it. I will not resign myself to it, nor will I romanticize it. Both are a lie."
"What, then, remains?" I asked. "What remains is very little—and very much. What remains is to speak the truth honestly, even when it is uncomfortable. What remains is to treat others with moderation—to refuse to let oneself be made into an executioner, on one side or the other. I believe in the sun, in the sea, in a just sentence, in a friend. I believe that there is a beauty that must not be betrayed. That is not much. It is enough to work."
I remarked that this sounded almost religious. He laughed softly.
"I am not a believer in the conventional sense. But I know that there is something greater than us, and I know that it deserves one thing: honesty. If I wake up in the morning and cannot be honest, the day is already lost."
On Joy
A boy walked past, a leather ball tucked under his arm. He greeted him, and the boy waved back. Camus watched him go, and his face relaxed in a way I had never seen before.
“You ask if I experience joy. Yes. More than one might think. Do you see that lad? He’s playing against Cucuron this Saturday. I’ll be there. I once played in goal myself—in Algiers, for Racing Universitaire. My lungs forced me to quit, very early on. But what I learned on the football pitch—about men, about loyalty, about the silence of a team in the rain—I never learned anywhere else in quite the same way. If I feel joy today, it is in simple things. In a glass of wine with Char. In a match. In a day when I’ve written three good pages. In the stillness here in the morning, when the sun rises over the Luberon and everything turns golden.”
He smoked again, slowly.
“The happiness we were promised is a difficult thing. I do not believe in grand happiness. I believe in moments. In that afternoon, in the summer of 1936, when I lay on a beach near Tipasa—the water was crystal clear—and I thought to myself that this single hour justified everything. A person needs hours like that. Four or five in a lifetime. No more.”
On Lourmarin and what Remains
I asked him if he wanted to stay here—if this was his place.
“Yes. This is my place. I searched for a long time. Paris is not my place. Algiers is my place, but Algiers is closed to me—perhaps for a long time. Lourmarin is the second-best solution, and sometimes I think it is the true one. Here, I see the mountains, which remind me of the Atlas Mountains. Char once said of me that I was a man of two suns—that of Provence and that of Algeria. He wasn’t wrong.”
He nodded in the direction of the village church.
“My house is over there; it used to be a *magnanerie*—a silkworm farm. The old stones are still there, and the beams, too. My study is upstairs. I work standing up. I am working on a new novel. It is about a boy growing up without a father in a poor neighborhood. I believe it is the most honest book I have ever written. I call it *Le Premier Homme*. It will still take some time.”
“And aside from writing?” I asked. “What do you do here all day?”
“I walk. I walk a great deal. Into the vineyards, to the cemetery—which is beautiful—and down to the stadium, where I watch the boys play. I read the newspaper right here on the terrace. I talk with the baker, with the blacksmith. I know very little about wine, but Char is teaching me a thing or two. Sometimes I drive to Marseille, to the sea, and watch the ships—for me, that is a form of prayer. And the theater. It is no less important to me than writing—perhaps even more so. On a stage, for three hours, I can forget that I am Camus. That is worth a great deal.”
It was growing cooler. A man wearing a cap approached our table and asked something in Provençal. Camus replied to him, laughed briefly, and the man moved on. "I don’t think I’ll write many more books. I’ll try to write this one. Maybe one more after that. Then I’ll stop. I don’t want to become the kind of person who repeats himself. *Measure* and *courage*—those are the two words I write down for myself when I’m at a loss."
He looked at me for a long time.
"And you? What will you make of this afternoon?"
I said I didn’t know yet.
"Write down what no one else can write down," he said. "Someone else is already writing the rest. Write what you truly saw. Even if it seems small. It is never too small."
He stood up, placed a few coins on the table, and shook my hand. His coat was a little too big. He walked down the lane toward the Magnanerie—slowly, without looking back. In the square behind the church, I heard the thud of a leather ball striking a wall. The sky over the Luberon had taken on a quality of light that one can only *see*—the second sun of its life. I remained seated until darkness fell.
That I would never see him alive again—that, on January 4, 1960, a car would crash into a plane tree near Villeblevin—no one suspected any of this on that afternoon. Perhaps he did. Perhaps not even he.
S.
Postscript
The encounter described herein is fictional. Albert Camus (1913–1960) never met the author. However, the biographical and atmospheric details of the narrative are based on documented historical accounts.
In October 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the second-youngest recipient (after Rudyard Kipling). With a portion of the prize money, he purchased a former silkworm farm (*magnanerie*) in September 1958, located on Rue de l’Église in Lourmarin, at the foot of the Luberon mountains. While in the village, he used the pseudonym "Monsieur Terrasse," frequented the Café de l’Ormeau, supported the local football club—Jeunesse Sportive Lourmarinoise—by donating team kits, and, in the autumn of 1959, worked largely in solitude on his unfinished novel, *Le Premier Homme* (The First Man).
Following the early death of his father, Lucien—who was killed during the First World War—Camus grew up in abject poverty in Belcourt, a working-class district of Algiers, living with his nearly deaf-mute mother, Catherine, and his strict grandmother. His primary school teacher, Louis Germain, paved the way for his education at the Lycée Bugeaud; in November 1957, Camus dedicated his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to him. His later philosophy teacher, Jean Grenier, instilled in him a deep love for Provence.
His friendship with the poet René Char, who lived in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, was one of the most significant relationships of his later life. His rift with Jean-Paul Sartre occurred in 1952, following the controversy surrounding *L’Homme révolté* (The Rebel); the two men never spoke to each other again prior to Camus’s death. In 1957, during a discussion in Stockholm regarding the Algerian War, Camus famously remarked—to the effect that—while he believed in justice, if forced to choose, he would defend his mother; this statement drew sharp criticism from the Parisian Left. Camus was married to Francine Faure, with whom he had twins—Catherine and Jean—born in 1945. During his youth, he played as a goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire d’Alger until an outbreak of tuberculosis in 1930 brought his athletic career to an end. On January 4, 1960, Camus died in a car accident near Villeblevin while returning to Paris; found within the wreckage of his publisher Michel Gallimard’s Facel Vega was the unfinished manuscript for *Le Premier Homme*, which was published by his daughter Catherine in 1994. Albert Camus is buried in the cemetery at Lourmarin.
Camus’s direct quotations have not been reproduced verbatim; rather, the thoughts presented here draw upon documented themes found in his body of work and correspondence—particularly in *L’Homme révolté*, *Noces*, *L’Été*, his correspondence with René Char, and the posthumously published *Carnets*.
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