The Stranger

by Albert Camus

It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.

I did it just as it came to me, but I tried my best to please Raymond because I didn’t have any reason not to please him. Then I read it out loud.

he had a habit of finishing everything he said with “and I’d even say,” when really it didn’t add anything to the meaning of his sentence. Referring to Marie, he said, “She’s stunning, and I’d even say charming.”

He left with Masson and I stayed to explain to the women what had happened. Madame Masson was crying and Marie was very pale. I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.

He struck me as being very reasonable and, overall, quite pleasant, despite a nervous tic which made his mouth twitch now and then. On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but just in time, I remembered that I had killed a man.

Nevertheless I answered that I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself and that it was hard for me to tell him what he wanted to know.

“Do you want my life to be meaningless?” he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn’t have anything to do with me, and I told him so.

When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man.

Anyway, it was one of Maman’s ideas, and she often repeated it, that after a while you could get used to anything.

And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.

No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine what nights in prison are like.

I had just one impression: I was sitting across from a row of seats on a streetcar and all these anonymous passengers were looking over the new arrival to see if they could find something funny about him. I knew it was a silly idea since it wasn’t anything funny they were after but a crime. There isn’t much difference, though—in any case that was the idea that came to me.

he would like to know whether I had gone back to the spring by myself intending to kill the Arab. “No,” I said. Well, then, why was I armed and why did I return to precisely that spot? I said it just happened that way.

What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day … as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.

Besides, I have to admit that whatever interest you can get people to take in you doesn’t last very long.

And I tried to listen again, because the prosecutor started talking about my soul. He said that he had peered into it and that he had found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He said the truth was that I didn’t have a soul and that nothing human, not one of the moral principles that govern men’s hearts, was within my reach.

Especially when the emptiness of a man’s heart becomes, as we find it has in this man, an abyss threatening to swallow up society.”

The hardest time was that uncertain hour when I knew they usually set to work. After midnight, I would wait and watch. My ears had never heard so many noises or picked up such small sounds.

Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway.

For the first time in a long time I thought about Marie. The days had been long since she’d stopped writing.

Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. I wasn’t interested in her dead. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. I wasn’t even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those things.

In any case, I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t. And it just so happened that what he was talking about didn’t interest me.

“Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?” “Yes,” I said.

“No, I refuse to believe you! I know that at one time or another you’ve wished for another life.” I said of course I had, but it didn’t mean any more than wishing to be rich, to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped mouth. It was all the same.

But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another.

What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral? Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was as much my friend as Céleste, who was worth a lot more than him? What did it matter that Marie now offered her lips to a new Meursault?

For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a “fiance,” why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite.

For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.