A Happy Death

by Albert Camus

He was grateful to her for displaying in public, at his side, the beauty she offered him day after day like some delicate intoxication. An unnoticeable Marthe would have made him suffer as much as Marthe happy in the desire of other men.

A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.

‘I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or else subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.’

‘A few years ago I had everything before me – people talked to me about my life, about my future. And I said yes. I even did the things you had to do to have such things. But even back then, it was all alien to me. To devote myself to impersonality – that’s what concerned me. Not to be happy, not to be “against”. I can’t explain it, but you know what I mean.’

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

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.’

Today, in the face of abjection and solitude, his heart said: ‘No.’ And in the great distress that washed over him, Mersault realized that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission.

Mersault groped for the word, the sentence that would formulate hope in his heart, that would resolve his anxiety.

All his life – the office on the docks, his room and his nights of sleep there, the restaurant he went to, his mistress – he had pursued singlemindedly a happiness which in his heart he believed was impossible. In this he was no different from everyone else. He had played at wanting to be happy. Never had he sought happiness with a conscious and deliberate desire. Never until the day …

What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the cinema and men’s eyes turned towards her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live.

Mersault noticed Lucienne’s silence and the closed expression of her face; he decided she was probably not very intelligent, and that pleased him. There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.

Only an aeroplane permits man a more apparent solitude than the kind he discovers in a car.

But the release he hoped to find here dismayed him, this solitude he had sought so deliberately seemed even more disturbing, now that he knew its setting.

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.

Mersault, standing in the rain, still felt Marthe’s cold nose and warm lips on his cheeks. And that sudden, disinterested kiss had all the purity of the one given him by the freckled little whore in Vienna.

‘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.’

‘This place isn’t good for me, Claire, but I’m happy here. I feel in harmony with it.’ ‘Well, then you could be in harmony – longer.’ ‘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.’

‘To think the way you do,’ he said smiling, ‘you have to be either a man who lives on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.’ ‘On both, perhaps.’

Only today did his solitude become real, for only today did he feel bound to it. And to have accepted that solitude, to know that henceforth he was the master of all his days to come, filled him with the melancholy that is attached to all greatness.

Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence – they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all. And death was a kind of gesture, forever withholding water from the traveller vainly seeking to slake his thirst.