The Fall

by Albert Camus

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Holland is a dream, monsieur, a dream of gold and smoke—smokier by day, more gilded by night.

It seemed to me that I was half unlearning what I had never learned and yet knew so well—how to live. Yes, I think it was probably then that everything began.

We are in the vestibule, cher ami.

To be sure, I occasionally pretended to take life seriously. But very soon the frivolity of seriousness struck me and I merely went on playing my role as well as I could.

Paris is beautiful; I haven’t forgotten it. I remember its twilights at about this same season. Evening falls, dry and rustling, over the roofs blue with smoke, the city rumbles, the river seems to flow backward. Then I used to wander in the streets. They wander now too, I know! They wander, pretending to hasten toward the tired wife, the forbidding home … Ah, mon ami, do you know what the solitary creature is like as he wanders in big cities?…

A hundred and fifty years ago, people became sentimental about lakes and forests.