Albert Camus: Café de la Mairie, Place Saint Sulpice
ALBERT CAMUS: CONSCIENCE OF HIS GENERATION
LOCATIONS: Place Saint-Sulpice, Café de la Mairie; 5, rue Gaston-Gallimard and environs, Éditions Gallimard, Publishers
MÉTRO: Saint-Germain-des-Prés
In the end, Camus (1913–1960) came to hate Paris, longed to be “rid of it.” The gray weather, the cultural elites, the cynical politics, he detested it all, that “city without light, rising in the fog.” On his visits back home to his native Algeria he said again and again that Parisians were cold or worse. “Our intellectual society, whether leftist or rightest, is almost always frightfully mean and nasty.”1
At the same time, throughout the twenty years he lived there, his notebooks record his ambivalence about the city. Paris, he writes, reflects the beauty of the world. It is the city of his success and much personal happiness. His books were published there, his plays produced, his fame as “the conscience of his generation,” the dominant voice of humanism and a compassionate morality, caught fire here, spreading across Europe and America. His children, whom he loved, were born here as were his passionate love affairs and many friendships. Francine Faure, who, like him, was born and raised in Algeria, was his loyal Paris wife. He considered her his best friend whom “I have never stopped loving in my bad way.” Francine put up with his infidelities until she finally fell apart.
The landscape of Algeria, his homeland, was the place he loved most profoundly; his mother whom he called “his only love” lived in Algeria. Poor, half deaf, mostly mute, a widow in 1914 after the Battle of the Marne when Albert was one, a housecleaner for life, he left her and Algeria behind for the first time in March 1940 as the Germans were heading toward France.
Arriving in Paris, he moved into a seedy hotel in Montmartre in the eighteenth arrondissement. On staff at the newspaper Paris-Soir from early morning until midday, he spent the nights working on his novel The Stranger. His first three months in Paris were “cloistered,” as he put it, without women or dancing or drinking in cafés. In May 1940, he wrote to Francine on the night that he had “just finished his novel.… I think I’d forgive Paris for everything, for having allowed me to live like this, completely concentrated upon what I was doing.” The loneliness of the Montmartre streets intensified his lifelong self-consciousness as an exile, an outsider like Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger.
When the Germans invaded Paris in June, Paris-Soir and Camus joined the exodus south. The manuscript of The Stranger, in a small case, was always close by. When the newspaper folded, Camus returned to Algeria. About a year later, after severe flare-ups of the tuberculosis that ravaged his lungs, he returned to German-occupied France to live in the mountains of southern France, going to a nearby town for treatments: It was wrongly believed that living at high altitudes—three thousand feet—would enable the tubercular patient to inhale high doses of pure oxygen whereas the opposite was true. The higher the altitude the less oxygen there is in the air; thinner air gives the patient less, not more energy. His disease, in remission at times, caused him pain, exhaustion, and depression for the rest of his life. But Camus, journalist and editor, novelist, playwright, director, essayist, philosopher, and activist never stopped working like a man possessed. He expected his lungs to fail, that he would die young.
His mountain retreat was near the village of Le Chambon where Huguenot pastor Trocmé and his congregation hid and saved five thousand Jews throughout the war. Camus, an atheist, shared the pastor’s ethical commitment to the practice of resistance. Resistance was, for both men, “a way of seeing the world, one that makes manifest the moral imperative to acknowledge and respect the dignity of each and every fellow human being.”2 For Camus the world was absurd, but his absurdism became a kind of humanism: the irrational world, without meaning, assumed the meaning one gave it, as Olivier Todd puts it. The act of resistance gave the world meaning, fighting for lost causes. For the rest of his life, Camus resisted political and moral oppression. The cruel history of the war and postwar years marked him: either you resisted historical cruelty or your life was worthless.
For the Traveler
It’s still possible to walk the streets of Camus’s Paris though he might not recognize the gentrified bars and cafés where he was a regular.
He settled into Occupied Paris in late 1943, a twenty-nine-year-old writer whose novel The Stranger and essay collection The Myth of Sisyphus had been published and well-reviewed in 1942. His play Caligula would be produced soon. He had a job as a reader for his publisher, Gallimard, on the Left Bank; he became a columnist and then editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat, “one of the best-written papers in the entire history of French journalism,” to quote historian Raymond Aron. The punishment for writing anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy columns for the Resistance press was deportation to a concentration camp.
He worked on Combat in his apartment, and late into the night in the clandestine offices of Combat on the Right Bank in a building designed for the French press (1924) at 100, rue Réaumur in the Bonne Nouvelle district. Though restored, the building still stands, with its bas-reliefs of reporters, typesetters, and printers. The story is told that one night Camus and his lover, the actress Maria Casares (the Occupation had trapped Camus’s wife in Algeria) who worked as a courier for the Resistance, were stopped near the Réaumur-Sébastopol métro in a Nazi sweep. Camus was carrying a layout page (measuring 7 × 10 inches) with the heading “Combat.” He passed the page to Maria: women were not body-searched by the Nazis, at least in public. Maria, so the story goes, swallowed the incriminating page,3 a Resistance survival tactic shown in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Resistance film, Army of Shadows (1969).
Handsome as a movie star, often compared to Humphrey Bogart, Camus was as irresistible to women as beautiful women were to him; fellow writers were drawn to his celebrity, charm, and wit. Early on his novel had been reviewed with condescending praise by the not-handsome philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the pope of the Left Bank. After meeting Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir (“the Beaver” and “Castor” were her nicknames) in June 1943, the trio became friends, socializing at night in the Left Bank cafés of the district of Saint-Germain where Sorbonne intellectuals, journalists, politicians, academics, theater people, and artists met in cafés to talk, argue politics and philosophy, drink, party, tell jokes, dance, and hook up with pretty girls. During the war, collaborators and spies were also part of the mix. He was working on a second novel, The Plague, more plays, and The Rebel, a long essay about political morality that would draw the contempt of Sartre and many Left Bank intellectuals when it was published in 1951. Feeling their long-suppressed hatred, Camus realized then, in retrospect, that his café and jazz-club nightlife of the forties had been a lie: “these people were never my friends.” The drunken carousing had distracted him from the fact that in Paris he was an outsider; that his companions—many were normaliens—deluded by their own privilege and abstractions, knew nothing about the experience of poverty and the ordinary people he loved in his Mediterranean youth.
He wrote about the influence of the light of Algeria with a very un-Left Bank lyricism:
Poverty prevented me from judging that all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not all.4
Sartre got quite enough of Camus as Mediterranean man (and the darling of Parisian women). Behind his back he called Camus an Algerian street urchin.
But while it lasted, the two friends had a lot of fun together despite each man knowing they thought very different thoughts and perhaps realizing their friendship would not survive the enmities of intellectual Paris.
The cafés they liked have either closed down or like Saint-Germain itself have changed so much the writers of postwar Paris wouldn’t recognize them. The district is now the most expensive in Paris: luxury shops—Dior, Vuitton, Armani, Cartier—dominate every block. The great librairies—the legendary bookstores—unable to compete with billionaire retail have closed. La Hune is the most recent victim.
The Café de Flore (172, boulevard Saint-Germain) and Les Deux Magots (170, boulevard Saint-Germain at Place Jean-Paul-Sartre-Simone-de-Beauvoir)—métro: Saint-Germain-des-Prés—where Sartre and Camus and many other writers worked days and nights despite the Nazis strutting past, keeping warm in the Flore around the sawdust-burning stove, are decorated today with photographs of their long-dead famous customers. Inside the brass railings the tables (and outdoor terraces) and the red banquettes are crowded in all seasons with tourists and Parisian shoppers fresh from tanning parlors. Despite the glut of bling and poodles, the Deux Magots’ prospect from its east side is lovely: the tables and terrasse face the Place Sartre-Beauvoir and the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which gives the ancient district its name. (There was a church here in 542–559.) The Romanesque bell tower of the twelfth-century church rises toward the night sky like a deliverance, a reminder in stone of what Camus believed: “that history was not all.”
A few hundred yards north of the cafés of Saint-Germain, the small 150-year-old bistro Le Petit Saint Benoit at 4, rue Saint-Benoit near the corner of rue Jacob was a regular dining spot for Sartre and Camus. (Ten years earlier it had been Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s favorite.) Its simple good food and down-to-earth feeling still suggests quintessential Paris. The writer Marguerite Duras lived across the street, at no. 5, where she and her husband held Resistance meetings. One story has it that Camus acted as a lookout during the Occupation after Duras’s husband, Robert Antelme, was arrested, deported to Dachau, and it became a matter of the life and death of many Résistants in his network that his papers be removed from the apartment and destroyed.
Across boulevard Saint-Germain at no. 151, Brasserie Lipp also remains pretty much as Camus and Sartre knew it. They ate here once a week, sometimes for lunch and dinner, surrounded by the same mirrors, mosaics, and Belle Époque ceramic designs by Léon-Paul Fargue that make the place so attractive. The creation of two Alsatian refugees from the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Leonard and Flo Lipp—“Chez Lipp”—was awarded the Légion of Honor in 1958 for having the best literary and theater salon in Paris. (Reservations are required. Tel: 01.45.48.53.91.)
The basement jazz clubs of Saint-Germain where Camus and Sartre often dropped in after dinner are gone. The bar of the Pont Royal, one of their favorite hangouts, though still small and convivial now caters to well-heeled tourists. Walk west along boulevard Saint-Germain, turn right into rue du Bac, soon bearing right into rue Montalembert where at no. 7 the Hôtel Pont Royal still calls itself the Hôtel Littéraire. More upscale now than in Camus’s time (18 euros for a margarita, guests layered in luxury going and coming through the revolving doors), it’s fun to sit in the bar in early evening surrounded by photographs of the literary stars of postwar Paris—Camus, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Gide—that look down from the dark paneled walls of the gracious lobby.
The Pont Royal is remembered as the writers’ bar because it served the publishing house of Gallimard which was—and is—right around the corner at no. 5, rue Gaston-Gallimard (in Camus’s time this street was rue Sébastien-Bottin).
Afternoons Camus worked in his office as a reader for Éditions Gallimard, named for the founder and patriarch of the Gallimard family a number of whose members worked as editors and executives in the building. Resistance members held secret nighttime meetings in Gaston Gallimard’s office. After the war, Gallimard was criticized for keeping his doors open during the Occupation. Critics had perhaps forgotten the attacks of the collaborationist press on Gallimard, charging it had published books of propaganda for Israel as well as unhealthy Jewish writings by Sigmund Freud, filthy writers such as André Gide, André Malraux, Louis Aragon. Gallimard’s deals and financial support on behalf of Resistance writers as well as writers whom the Nazis ordered him to drop from the list had remained a secret, in the years of Occupation.
Camus occupied an office on a high floor with a terrace that looked out over the Left Bank. If you enter the lobby today, the receptionists are friendly but strangely clueless. Asking to see the office of Albert Camus—whose books as well as a copy of The New York Times front page reporting Camus’s Nobel Prize are displayed in a case to the left of the front entrance—I heard the amiable young women claim not to recognize the name. “Albert Camus?” “Qui est-ce?”
In 1946 Camus’s series Espoir was launched by Gallimard. Camus published some of Sartre’s friends, some of his own. In 1949 he discovered the unpublished writings of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. He read through Weil’s handwritten manuscripts in her parents’ apartment in rue Auguste-Comte (see here). Some of her themes converged with ideas he cared and wrote about passionately: a detestation of the violence and force that characterize totalitarianism; love for the Greeks, their sense of limits and measure, and for the landscapes of Italy and Spain; the scandal of the French Empire’s exploitation of its colonial populations; the hatred of the death penalty, and the immoral living conditions of workers. Both Weil and Camus were religious outsiders, not connected to any one tradition though Weil was drawn to Christianity’s commitment to the poor. Weil’s history of activist engagement on behalf of the working class Camus interpreted as a sign of deliverance from nihilism. Eventually, he published eight of her books, which gave her an international audience. Camus also published the poetry of the Resistance hero, René Char, which “dazzled” him. Camus and Char became close friends.
As the Cold War intensified in the fifties, most of the Paris Left was as partial to Soviet Communism as ordinary Parisians had been to the United States at the time of the Liberation. Camus’s The Rebel condemns communism as totalitarian, murderous, a cruel system of slavery comparable to German Nazism and the Fascisms of Italy and Spain. “An anti-communist is a dog,” wrote Sartre. For his part, Camus, who had always refused the label of “existentialism,” referred to it now as the province of “dusty old men,” who lacked all compassion.
During these years of literary success—the novel The Plague, essays, plays—Camus avoided invitations, fans, official social events, and the old cafés. The unpopularity of his idealistic politics among the cynical gauchistes reduced him to a lone voice, ignored and ridiculed. He and Francine bought an apartment at no. 29, rue Madame (having moved from no. 18, rue Séguier). From the Saint-Sulpice métro, walk south along rue Madame until you come to no. 29 on the east side of the street. The name “Camus” still appears on the buzzer of the apartment.
Weekday mornings Camus walked north on rue Madame toward his office at Gallimard, crossing Place Saint-Sulpice with the Fontaine des Quatre Points Cardinaux in the center, then stopping at the Café de La Mairie, which faces the Place. The terrace today is packed with people most afternoons, but the indoor back room (and the upstairs dining area), plain and quiet, is where Parisian regulars, like Camus himself, sit turning the pages of that day’s Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Libération while having their first coffee. No doubt the ordinariness of the café and its clientèle pleased him. From there he walked straight west to boulevard Raspail, then heading right to the Gallimard office. If you’re following in Camus’s late morning footsteps, it’s rewarding to leave his route at Place Saint-Sulpice and detour through the streets that lead into it: rue Férou (with Rimbaud’s poetry wall), rue Servandoni (where William Faulkner, Olympe de Gouges, Roland Barthes, Eugène Atget, Juliette Gréco, and others lived), and rue Garancière. This quartier holds the secret of why Paris can take such hold of you, live in your memory forever.
A few years after the fury over The Rebel came the vicious attacks on Camus for his position on the Algerian war for independence. He advocated negotiation (a civilian truce) between the government of France and the pro-independence Arab and French Algerians. Aside from René Char and Germaine Tillion (his Résistante friend whose body was recently transferred to the Panthéon) who both agreed with his antiviolence position, most of his Paris and Algerian friends deserted him. Camus, in their eyes, was a traitor to his native Algeria. (Fifty years later Camus’s prescient position now receives a new respect.) Despite the shunning by the militant Left, Camus’s next novel, The Fall, was a best seller. Then, for his writings against the death penalty which, quoting Montaigne, he called “a criminal act,” he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957. Sartre and his disciples mocked him for accepting such a bourgeois honor.
Despite the loss of friends and the ugly war in Algeria—the French army tortured the Algerian rebels just as the Nazis and the French police had tortured the Résistants on rue Lauriston (see p.)—Camus never turned a blind eye to the beauty of the world. “I put the beauty of a landscape before all else. It’s not paid for by any injustice and my heart is free there.” In his Nobel address, he named the source of that beauty: “I have never renounced the light.” Asked which French writers had most influenced him, he named “Simone Weil and René Char,” both poets of the light.
In the end, he still found joy in his nighttime walks through the streets of Paris. Observing the Square du Vert-Galant, he noted:
Night of the 15th. Stroll along the Seine. Beneath the Pont Neuf young foreigners (Scandinavians) are joined together around two of their own, a trumpeter and a banjo player, and lie on the street, couples embracing, listening to the improvisation. Farther, on one of the benches of the Pont des Arts, an Arab has stretched out, a portable radio by his head, playing Arab music.5
The vitriol of Paris intellectuals could not blind him to our common humanity.
He bought a house in Provence, in the village of Lourmarin, near René Char’s village. The closeness to the sea and to “the secret of the light” reminded him of Algeria. He worked there alone on his next novel, The First Man. The silence and isolation, the same “cloistered” life he’d known while completing The Stranger in Montmartre, helped him concentrate. His family came down for Christmas. On his way back to Paris, on January 4, 1960, carrying 144 pages of his novel, he was killed in a car crash.
Nearby
PLACE RENÉ-CHAR Métro: rue du Bac. The marker at the Place identifies Char as “Poète et Résistant,” 1907–1988. At the intersection of boulevard Saint-Germain, rue du Bac, and boulevard Raspail, the Place is along Camus’s daily route to Gallimard, now mad with traffic. Char dedicated his Leaves of Hypnos to Camus. “Nous n’appartenons à personne sinon au point d’or de cette lampe inconnue de nous…” “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us…”
