To return to Monsieur Brisville’s book, it is amply illustrated. It was very moving to know, from his photograph, your poor papa whom I have always considered “my comrade.” Monsieur Brisville was kind enough to quote me: I will thank him for it.
I saw the ever-lengthening list of works that are about you or speak of you. And it gives me very great satisfaction to see that your fame (this is the exact truth) has not gone to your head. You have remained Camus: bravo.
I have followed with interest the many vicissitudes of the play you adapted and also staged: The Possessed. I love you too much not to wish you the greatest success: it is what you deserve. What’s more, Malraux wants to provide you with a theatre. But … can you manage all these various activities? I fear that you misuse your talents. And, permit your old friend to point out, you have a nice wife and two children who need their husband and papa. On this subject, I am going to tell you what the head of our normal school used to tell us now and then. He was very hard on us, which kept us from seeing, from feeling, that he really loved us. “Nature keeps a great book in which she scrupulously records every one of the excesses we commit.” I must say that this wise advice has often restrained me when I was about to disregard it. So listen, try to leave a blank on the page reserved for you in nature’s Great Book.
Andrée reminds me that we saw and heard you on a literary program on television, a program about The Possessed. It was moving to see you answer the questions that were asked. And I could not keep myself from making the malicious observation that you well knew I would, after all, see and hear you. That makes up a bit for your absence from Algiers. We haven’t seen you for quite a while …
Before closing, I want to tell you how troubled I am, as a secular teacher, by the menacing plots aimed at our schools. I believe that throughout my career I have respected what is most sacred in a child: the right to seek out his own truth. I loved you all and I believe I did my best not to show my opinions and thus to influence your young minds. When it was a matter of God (it was in the curriculum), I said some believed, others did not. And in the fullness of his rights, each did as he pleased. Similarly, on the subject of religion, I limited myself to listing the ones that existed, to which those who so desired belonged. To be accurate, I added that there were people who practiced no religion. I am well aware this does not please those who would like to make teachers fellow travelers for religion and, more precisely, for the Catholic religion. At the normal school of Algiers (it was then at the parc de Galland) my father, like his classmates, was required to go to Mass and take Communion every Sunday. One day, exasperated by this requirement, he put the “consecrated” host in a prayerbook and closed it! The head of the school was informed of this and did not hesitate to expel my father. That is what the promoters of the “Free school”1 (free … to think as they do) want. With the current membership of the Chamber of Deputies, I fear this plot may succeed. Le Canard Enchâiné1 reported that in one department a hundred secular schools function with a crucifix hanging on the wall. I see in that an abominable attack on the children’s minds. What may it come to in time? These thoughts make me very sad.
My dear child, I am coming to the end of my 4th page: I’m taking advantage of your time and I beg you to forgive me. All goes well here. Christian, my son-in-law, starts his 27th month in service tomorrow!
Know that, even when I do not write, I often think of all of you.
Madame Germain and I warmly embrace all four of you. Affectionately.
Louis Germain
I remember the time you came to visit our class with your fellow communicants. You were obviously proud of the suit you were wearing and the feast day you were observing. Honestly, I was happy for your pleasure, believing that if you were making your Communion it was because you wanted to. So …
- “Free” meaning private, usually Catholic, as opposed to the secular state school—Trans.
- The satirical weekly—Trans.
Acclaim for Albert Camus’s The First Man
“The First Man is perhaps the most honest book Camus ever wrote, and the most sensual.… Camus is not writing at the height of his powers, he is writing at the depth of his powers.… It is a work of genius.”
—The New Yorker
“Rending, brilliant … joyfully vivid.… The First Man has an overwhelming emotional integrity.… To read [it] is to visit a tomb and find that a spring is bubbling from it.”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A beautiful paean to the past, memory and family.… A moving novel and a welcome addition to the Camus oeuvre, The First Man underscores Camus’s lifelong celebration of existence itself.”
—San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
“Fascinating.… The First Man helps put all of Camus’s work into a clearer perspective and brings into relief what separates him from the more militant literary personalities of his day, like Malraux and Sartre.… There is humor, too, and evidence of a great capacity for affection, friendship and gratitude.… Camus’s voice has never been more personal than in The First Man.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Utterly absorbing and evocative.… Much can be gleaned along these lines from the appended interleaves and notes and sketches that detail the author’s wider vision. These items … provide an unusual and privileged window into the writer’s craft.… They demonstrate in a simple and haunting way what Albert Camus was thinking as he penned his last words.”
—Boston Book Review
“In his final project, Camus vigorously captures the tactile truths of his childhood and adolescence within a formal frame of fiction.… In The First Man, isolated young Albert Camus speaks painfully through the sentences of the world-wise artist, revealing the spare, poignant origins of his exceptional moral conscience.… With the publication of The First Man, many readers will come to love Camus again.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Heartbreaking.… Every page bears the clarity of the Camus we have read, and beyond that a lyric sense of longing.… Camus’s story is the oldest story, yet he infuses it with the intensity of childhood and the beneficence of his love for the people of Algeria. The First Man will expand posterity’s judgment of Camus and leave the reader sandblasted by feeling.”
—Miami Herald
“A bittersweet story about finding one’s place in the world without betraying one’s origins.… With The First Man we encounter a new Camus, more personal and personable. Drawing explicitly for the first time on the circumstances of his life, he is, as ever, wisely humane. But this time, he is more human as well.”
—Newsweek
“Let nobody mistake this work for a fragment of interest only to scholars and fans.… The First Man is as satisfying as a noble Greek statue some of whose limbs are missing: Our regret over the lost arms of the Venus de Milo is nothing compared to our joy over what remains.”
—Washington Post Book World
“The very unfinished quality of The First Man lends it an appealing directness … these pages … shimmer with a lyricism and sensuousness.… [Algeria] is movingly memorialized in this book, its brilliant colors, spectral light and lush scents conjured up in luxuriant detail.”
—The New York Times
“Camus obviously held high literary ambitions for his book, which was going to be large.… No one knows how The First Man would have turned out.… But what survives is complete in design, detail and density; radiant and deeply necessary.”
—Boston Globe
A Note About the Translator
David Hapgood grew up in New York, and was graduated from Swarthmore College. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Murder of Napoleon and Monte Cassino. Mr. Hapgood has translated several works from the French, including My Father’s House by Henri Troyat and The Totalitarian Temptation by Jean François Revel, for which he won the Scott-Moncrieff translation prize.
The End
