war is fought far from the battleground! Once again, the terrible walls of the modern city will fall, to deliver Helen’s beauty, “its soul serene as the untroubled waves.”

1948

1 This text, written in August 1948 and originally dedicated to the poet René Char, one of Camus’s close personal friends, first appeared in the Cahiers du Sud in 1948. The ideas that it expresses form the basis for many of the political and philosophical arguments developed in L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) in 1951. —P.T.

The end