A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

“What would you do?” Emmanuel asked. “I’d buy myself a cabin on the beach, I’d put some glue in my navel, and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing.”

His mother had been fifty-six when she died. A beautiful woman, she had enjoyed—and expected to enjoy—a life of diversion, a life of pleasure. At forty, she had been stricken by a terrible disease. She had had to give up her clothes, her cosmetics, and was reduced to hospital gowns, her face deformed by terrible swellings; her swollen legs and her weakness kept her almost immobilized, and she would grope frantically around the colorless apartment she could no longer take care of, for she was half blind as well. The diabetes she had neglected had been further aggravated by her careless life.

He had asked for this work, which really wasn’t a part of his job. But at the start, he had found it a way of escaping into life. There were living faces, familiar encounters, and a passing breath of life in which at last he felt his own heart beating. And it allowed him to avoid the faces of the three secretaries and the supervisor, Monsieur Langlois.

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.

“People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.”

“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L’lllustration. Something desperate, you know.”

We don’t have time to be ourselves. We only have time to be happy.

Zagreus took a sip of tea and set down his full cup. He drank very little, preferring to urinate only once a day. He willed himself to reduce the burden of humiliations each day brought him.

Mersault said vehemently: “I have my living to earn. My work—those eight hours a day other people can stand—my work keeps me from doing it.” He broke off and lit the cigarette he had held till now between his fingers. “And yet,” he said, the match still burning, “if I was strong enough, and patient enough …” He blew out the match and pressed the tip against the back of his left hand. “… I know what kind of life I’d have. I wouldn’t make an experiment out of my life: I would be the experiment of my life. Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s living only insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the same for everyone.”

“What I’m sure of,” he began, “is that you can’t be happy without money. That’s all. I don’t like superficiality and I don’t like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I’ve noticed is that there’s a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain ‘superior beings’ who think that money isn’t necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It’s enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That’s the only problem that’s ever interested me. Very specific. Very clear.”

“You see, Mersault, all the misery and cruelty of our civilization can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.”

“I’d like to be sure. Don’t think I’m saying that money makes happiness. I only mean that for a certain class of beings happiness is possible, provided they have time, and that having money is a way of being free of money.”

The glistening scrolls and spirals, the elaborate setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the crèches made for children at Christmas, the grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish, and overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons. The god worshipped here was the god man fears and honors, not the god who laughs with man before the warm frolic of sea and sun.

The long lonely night ahead of him, with all the time in the world to decide on the actions of a future life, the patient struggle with the thoughts eluding him on a station siding, recaptured and pursued again, the consequences reappearing and escaping once more before the dance of wires glistening under the rain and the lights. Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formulate the hope in his heart, that would resolve his anxiety. In his weakened state, he needed formulas. The night and then the day passed in this obstinate struggle with the word, the image which from now on would constitute the whole tonality of his mind, the sympathetic or miserable dream of his future. He closed his eyes. It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about. Mersault thought about his life and exercised his bewildered consciousness and his longing for happiness in a train compartment which was like one of those cells where a man learns to know what he is by what is more than himself.

He saw, for instance, that what had attached him to Marthe was vanity, not love. Even that miracle of the lips she offered him was nothing more than the delighted astonishment of a power acknowledged and awakened by the conquest. The meaning of his affair with Marthe consisted of the replacement of that initial astonishment by a certainty, the triumph of vanity over modesty. What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men’s eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it. Now he knew he was not made for such love, but for the innocent and terrible love of the dark god he would henceforth serve.

And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.

He went upstairs and out onto the terrace: the sea and the night were conversing on the beach and above the ruins.

He took walks now, but with Lucienne. He recovered his complicity with the world, but by resting his hand on Lucienne’s shoulder. Taking refuge in humanity, he escaped his secret dread. Within two days, however, Lucienne bored him. And this was the moment she chose to ask him to let her live there. They were at dinner, and Mersault had simply refused, not raising his eyes from his plate.

“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory … Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion—it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”

He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.

Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched—just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance—so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.

“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.

“No one is happy relatively—for a longer or shorter time. You’re happy or you’re not. That’s all. And death has nothing to do with it—death is an accident of happiness, in that case.” No one spoke.

for me, loving life is not going for a swim. It’s living in intoxication, intensity. Women, adventures, other countries … It’s action, making something happen. A burning, marvelous life. What I mean is—I want you to understand me—” He seemed ashamed of his excitement. “I love life too much to be satisfied with nature.” Bernard put away his stethoscope and closed his bag.

Motionless now, Mersault felt how close happiness is to tears, caught up in that silent exultation which weaves together the hopes and despairs of human life.

Conscious yet alienated, devoured by passion yet disinterested, Mersault realized that his life and his fate were completed here and that henceforth all his efforts would be to submit to this happiness and to confront its terrible truth.

He realized that after he was gone, the first man who put his arms around her would make her soften, submit. She would be offered—her body, her breasts—as she had been offered to him, and the world would continue in the warmth of her parted lips.

“In a minute, in a second,” he thought. The ascent stopped. And stone among the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless worlds. Afterword