Chapter Four

 

EARLY in the morning, the fog-lamps of Mersault's car were gleaming along the coast road.  Leaving Algiers, he passed milk carts, and the warm smell of the horses made him even more aware of the morning's freshness.  It was still dark.  A last star dissolved slowly in the sky, and on the pale road he could hear only the motor's contented purr and occasionally, in the distance, the sound of hooves, the clatter of milk-cans, until out of the dark his lights glittered on the horseshoes.  Then everything vanished in the sound of speed.  He was driving faster now, and the night swiftly veered to day.

      Out of the darkness still retained between the hills, the car climbed an empty road overlooking the sea, where the morning declared itself.  Mersault accelerated.  The tiny sucking sound of the wheels grew louder on the dewy tarmac.  At each of the many turns, Mersault's braking made the tyres squeal, and as the road straightened, the sound of the motor gaining speed momentarily drowned out the soft voices of the sea rising from the beaches below.  Only an aeroplane permits man a more apparent solitude than the kind he discovers in a car.  Utterly confident of his own presence, satisfied with the precision of his gestures, Mersault could at the same time return to himself and to what concerned him.  The day lay open, now, at the end of the road.  The sun rose over the sea, awakening the fields on either side of the road, still deserted a moment before, filling them with the red fluttering of birds and insects.  Sometimes a farmer would cross one of these fields, and Mersault, rushing past, retained no more than the image of a figure with a sack bending over the moist, clinging soil.  Again and again the car brought him to the edge of slopes overlooking the sea; they grew steeper and their outline, barely suggested in the light of dawn, grew more distinct now, suddenly revealing prospects of olive-trees, pines, and whitewashed cottages.  Then another turn hurled the car towards the sea which tipped up towards Mersault like an offering glowing with salt and sleep.  Then the car hissed on the tarmac and turned back towards other hillsides and the unchanging sea.

      A month before, Mersault had announced his departure to the House above the World.  He would travel again, then settle down somewhere near Algiers.  Several weeks later he was back, convinced that travel now meant an alien way of life to him: wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.  And deep inside himself he felt a dim exhaustion.  He was eager to carry out his plan of buying a little house somewhere in the Chenoua, between the sea and the mountains, a few kilometres from the ruins of Tipasa.  When he arrived in Algiers, he had envisioned the setting of his life.  He had made a large investment in German pharmaceuticals, paid a broker to manage his holdings for him, and thereby justified his absences from Algiers and the independent life he was leading.  The investment, moreover, was more or less profitable, and he made up for his occasional losses, offering without remorse this tribute to his profound freedom.  The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with a countenance it can understand.  Indolence and cowardice do the rest.  Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.  Mersault then concerned himself with Lucienne's fate.

      She had no family, lived alone, worked as a secretary for a coal company, ate little but fruit and did Swedish exercises.  Mersault lent her books which she returned without a word.  To his questions, she replied: 'Yes, I liked it,' or else: 'It was a little sad.'  The day he decided to leave Algiers, he suggested that she live with him but continued to keep her apartment in Algiers without working, joining him when he sent for her.  He promised this with enough conviction for Lucienne to find nothing humiliating in the offer, and in fact there was nothing humiliating in it.  Lucienne often realized through her body what her mind could not understand; she agreed.  Mersault added: 'If you want, I can marry you.  But I don't see the point.'

      'Whatever you prefer,' Lucienne said.  A week later he married her and made ready to leave the city.

      Meanwhile Lucienne bought an orange canoe to skin over the blue sea.

      Mersault twisted the wheel to avoid a venturesome hen.  He was thinking of the conversation he had had with Catherine, the day he had left the House above the World - he had spent the night alone in a hotel.

      It was early in the afternoon, and because it had rained that morning, the whole bay was like a wet pane of glass, the sky utterly blank above it.  The cape at the opposite end of the bay stood out wonderfully clear, and lay, gilded by a sunbeam, like a huge summer snake upon the sea.  Patrice had finished packing and now, his arms leaning on the sill, stared greedily at this new birth of the world.

      'But if you're happy here, why are you leaving?' Catherine had asked.

      'There's a risk of being loved, little Catherine, and that would keep me from being happy.'  Coiled on the couch, her head down, Catherine stared at Patrice.  Without turning around he said: 'A lot of men complicate their lives and invent problems for themselves.  In my case, it's quite simple.  Look ...' He spoke facing the world, and Catherine felt forgotten.  She looked at Patrice's long fingers on the sill, studied his way of resting his weight on one hip, and without even seeing his eyes she knew how absorbed his gaze would be.

      'What I ...' but she broke off, still staring at Patrice.

      Little sails began riding out to sea, taking advantage of the calm.  They approached the channel, filled it with fluttering wings, and suddenly sped outwards, leaving a wake of air and water that widened in long foamy trails.  Catherine watched them make their way out to sea from where she sat, rising around Patrice like a flight of white birds.  He seemed to feel the weight of her silence and her stare, turned around, took her hands and brought them close to his own body.  'Never give up, Catherine.  You have so much inside you, and the noblest sense of happiness of all.  Don't just wait for a man to come along.  That's the mistake so many women make.  Find your happiness in yourself.'

      'I'm not complaining, Mersault,' Catherine said softly, putting one hand on Patrice's shoulder.  'The only thing that matters now is that you take good care of yourself.'  He realized then how easily his certainty could be shaken.  His heart was strangely hard.

      'You shouldn't have said that just now.'  He picked up his suitcase and went down the steep stairs, then down the path from the olive-trees to the olive-trees.  There was nothing ahead of him now except the Chenoua, a forest of ruins and wormwood, a love without hope or despair, and the memory of a life of vinegar and flowers.  He turned around.  Up above, Catherine was watching him leave, motionless.

      In a little less than two hours, Mersault was in sight of the Chenoua.  The night's last violent shadows still lingered on the slopes that plunged into the sea, while the peak glowed in the red and yellow sunlight.  There was a kind of vigorous and massive assertion of the earth here, thrusting up from the Sahel and silhouetted on the horizon, ending in this enormous bestial back which plummeted straight down into the sea.  The house Mersault had bought stood on the last slopes, a hundred yards from the water already turning golden in the heat.  There was only one storey above the ground floor, and only one room in it, but this room was enormous and overlooked the front garden and the sea through a splendid bay-window opening on to a terrace as well.  Mersault hurried up to it: the sea was already forming scarves of mist, and its blue darkened while the warm red of the terrace tiles glistened in the morning dew.  The whitewashed parapet had already been conquered by the first tendrils of a triumphant rambler-rose.  The firm white flesh of the open petals, sharp against the sea, was both voluptuous and satiating.  Downstairs, one room faced the foothills of the Chenoua, covered with fruit-trees, the other two opened on to the garden and the sea beyond.  In the garden, two pines thrust their bare trunks high into the sky, the tips alone covered with a green and yellow pelt.  From the house he could see only the space bracketed beneath the trunks.  A little steamship was moving out to sea now, and Mersault watched its entire trajectory from one pine to the other.

      Here was where he would live.  Doubtless because the beauty of the place touched his heart - why else had he bought this house?  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.  The village was not far away, a few hundred yards.  He walked out of the house.  A little path sloped down from the road towards the sea.  Following it, he noticed for the first time that he could glimpse, across the bay, the slender peninsula of Tipasa.  At its very end were silhouetted the golden columns of the temple and around them the fallen ruins among the wormwood bushes forming, at this distance, a blue-grey plumage.  On June evenings, Mersault reflected, the wind would bring the fragrance of those sun-gorged shrubs across the water towards the Chenoua.

      He had to set up his house, organize his life.  The first days passed quickly.  He whitewashed the walls, bought hangings in Algiers, began to install electricity, and as he went about his work, interrupted by the meals he took at the village café and by his dips in the sea, he forgot why he had come here and lost himself in his body's fatigue, loins aching and legs stiff, fretting over the shortage of paint or the defective installation of a light-switch in the hallway.  He slept at the café and gradually became acquainted with the village: the boys who came to play pool and ping-pong on Sunday afternoons (they would use the table all afternoon, on the basis of one drink, to the owner's great annoyance); the girls who strolled in the evening along the road overlooking the sea (they walked arm in arm, and there was a caressing, sing-song note in their voices); Perez the fisherman who supplied the hotel with fish and had only one arm.  Here, too, he met the village doctor, Bernard.  But the day the house was entirely ready, Mersault moved all his things into it and gradually recovered himself.  It was evening.  He was in the big room upstairs, and behind the window two worlds fought for the space between the two pines.  In one, almost transparent, the stars multiplied.  In the other, denser and darker, a secret palpitation of the water betrayed the sea.

      So far, he had lived sociably enough, chatting with the workmen who helped him in the house or with the owner of the café.  But now he realized that he had no-one to meet tonight, nor tomorrow, nor ever, and that he was facing his longed-for solitude at last.  From the moment he no longer had to see anyone, the next day seemed terribly imminent.  Yet he convinced himself that this was what he had wanted: nothing before him but himself for a long time - until the end.  He decided to stay where he was, smoking and thinking late into the night, but by ten he was sleepy and went to bed.  The next day he wakened very late, around ten, made his breakfast and ate it before washing or shaving.  He felt a little tired.  He had not shaved, and his hair was uncombed.  But after he had eaten, instead of going into the bathroom he wandered from room to room, leafed through a magazine, and finally, was delighted to find a light-switch that had not been attached, and set to work.  Someone knocked: the boy from the café bringing his lunch, as he had arranged the day before.  He sat down at his table just as he was, ate without appetite before the food had a chance to cool, and began to smoke, lying on the couch in the downstairs room.  When he wakened, annoyed at having fallen asleep, it was four o'clock.  He bathed then, shaved carefully, dressed and wrote two letters, one to Lucienne, the other to the three girls.  It was already very late, and growing dark.  Nonetheless he walked to the village to post his letters and returned without having met anyone.  He went upstairs and out on to the terrace: the sea and the night were conversing on the beach and above the ruins.  Mersault reflected.  The memory of this wasted day embittered him.  Tonight, at least, he would work, do something, read or go out and walk through the night.  The garden gate creaked: his dinner was coming.  He was hungry, ate happily, then felt unable to leave the house.  He decided to read late in bed.  But after the first pages his eyes closed, and the next morning he woke up late.

      The following days, Mersault tried to struggle against this encroachment.  As the days passed, filled by the creak of the gate and countless cigarettes, he was disconcerted by the variance between the gesture which had brought him to this life and this life itself.  One evening he wrote to Lucienne to come, deciding to break this solitude from which he had expected so much.  After the letter was sent, he was filled with a secret shame, but once Lucienne arrived the shame dissolved in a kind of mindless eager joy to rediscover a familiar being and the easy life her presence signified.  He made a fuss over her, and Lucienne seemed almost surprised by his solicitude, when she could tear herself away from her carefully pressed white linen dress.

      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.

      After a pause, Lucienne had added in a neutral tone of voice: 'You don't love me.'

      Mersault looked up.  Her eyes were full of tears.  He relented: 'But I never said I did, my child.'

      'I know,' Lucienne said, 'and that's why.'

      Mersault stood up and walked to the window.  Between the pines, the stars throbbed in the night sky.  And never had Patrice felt, along with his dread, so much disgust as at this moment for the days they had just passed together.  'You're a lovely girl, Lucienne.  I can't see any further than that.  It's all I ask of you.  It has to be enough for the two of us.'

      'I know,' Lucienne said.  She was sitting with her back to Patrice, scoring the tablecloth with the tip of her knife.  He walked over to her and rested a hand on the nape of her neck.

      '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's 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.'  After a pause, he added: 'I don't know if you understand what I mean.'

      'I think I understand.'  She suddenly turned her head towards Mersault.  'You're not happy?'

      'I will be,' Mersault said violently.  'I have to be.  With this night, this sea, and this flesh under my fingers?'  He had turned back towards the window and was tightening his hand on Lucienne's neck.  She said nothing.

      Then, without looking at him, 'At least you feel friendly towards me, don't you?'

      Patrice knelt beside her and bit her shoulder.  'Friendly, yes, the way I feel friendly towards the night.  You are the pleasure of my eyes, and you don't know what a place such joy has in my heart.'

      She left the next day.  And the day after that Mersault was unable to stand himself, and drove to Algiers.  He went first to the House above the World.  His friends promised to visit him at the end of the month.

      Then he decided to visit his old neighbourhood.

      His flat had been rented to a man who ran a café.  He inquired after the barrel-maker, but no-one knew anything - someone thought he had gone to Paris to look for work.  Mersault walked through the streets.  At the restaurant, Celeste had aged - but not much; René was still there, with his tuberculosis and his solemn expression.  They were all glad to see Patrice again, and he felt moved by this encounter.

      'Hey, Mersault,' Celeste told him, 'you haven't changed.  Still the same!'

      'Yes,' Mersault said.  He marvelled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so aware of what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all.  He was being judged by what he had been.  Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs for each other.  And precisely to the degree that Celeste, René and the others had known him, he had become as alien and remote to them as an uninhabited planet.  Yet he left them with affectionate farewells.  And just outside the restaurant he ran into Marthe.  As soon as he saw her he realized that he had almost forgotten her and that at the same time he had wanted to meet her.  She still had her painted goddess' face.  He desired her vaguely but without conviction.  They walked together.

      'Oh, Patrice,' she said, 'I'm so glad!  What's become of you?'

      'Nothing, as you can see.  I'm living in the country.'

      'Wonderful.  I've always dreamt of living in the country.'  And after a silence: 'You know, I'm not angry with you or anything.'

      'Yes,' Mersault said, laughing, 'you've managed to console yourself.'

      Then Marthe spoke in a tone of voice he did not recognize.  'Don't be nasty, Patrice.  I knew it would end like this some day.  You were a strange fellow.  And I was nothing but a little girl.  That's what you always used to say ... Of course when it happened I was furious.  But finally I told myself, "He's unhappy."  And you know, it's funny.  I don't know how to say it, but that was the first time that what we ... that what happened between us made me feel sad and happy at the same time.'

      Surprised, Mersault stared at her.  He suddenly realized that Marthe had always been very decent with him.  She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness.  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.  Today he understood that Marthe had been genuine with him - that she had been what she was, and that he owed her a good deal.  It was beginning to rain - just enough to reflect the lights of the street; through the shining drops he saw Marthe's suddenly serious face and felt overcome by a burst of gratitude he could not express - in the old days he might have taken it for a kind of love.  But he could find only stiff words: 'You know, Marthe, I'm very fond of you.  Even now, if there's anything I could do ...'

      She smiled: 'No.  I'm young still.  And I don't do without ...'

      He nodded.  What a distance there was between them, and yet what complicity!  He left her in front of her own house.  She had opened her umbrella, saying 'I hope we'll see each other again.'

      'Yes,' Mersault said.  She gave him a sad little smile.  'Oh, that's your little girl's face.'  She had stepped into the doorway and closed her umbrella.  Patrice held out his hand and smiled in his turn.  'Till next time, image.'  She hugged him quickly, kissed him on both cheeks and ran upstairs.  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.

      Then he went to find Lucienne, slept at her flat, and asked her to walk with him on the boulevards.  It was almost noon when they came downstairs.  Orange boats were drying in the sun like fruit cut in quarters.  The double flock of pigeons and their shadows swooped down to the docks and up again in a long, slow curve.  The sun was brilliant and the air grew stifling.  Mersault watched the red-and-black steamer slowly gain the channel, put on speed and gradually veer towards the streak of light glistening where the sky met the sea.  For the onlookers, there is a bitter sweetness in every department.  'They're lucky,' Lucienne said.

      'Yes.'  He was thinking 'No' - or at least that he didn't envy them their luck.  For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain lustre, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things.  Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.  He could hear Zagreus: 'Not the will the renounce, but the will to happiness.'  He had his arm around Lucienne, and her warm breast lay within his hand.

      That same evening, as he drove back to the Chenoua, Mersault felt a huge silence in himself as he faced the swelling waves and the steep hillsides.  By making the gesture of a fresh start, by becoming aware of his past, he had defined what he wanted and what he did not want to be.  Those wasted days he had been ashamed of seemed dangerous but necessary now.  He might have foundered then and missed his one chance, his one justification.  But after all, he had to adapt himself to everything.

      Rounding one curve after the next, Mersault steeped himself in this humiliating yet priceless truth: the conditions of the singular happiness he sought were getting up early every morning, taking a regular swim - a conscious hygiene.  He drove very fast, resolved to take advantage of his discovery in order to establish himself in a routine which would henceforth require no further effort, to harmonize his own breathing with the deepest rhythm of time, of life itself.

      The next morning he got up early and walked down to the sea.  The sky was already brilliant, and the morning full of rustling wings and crying birds.  But the sun was only touching the horizon's curve, and when Mersault stepped into the still lustreless water, he seemed to be swimming in an indeterminate darkness until, as the sun climbed higher, he thrust his arms into streaks of icy red and gold.  Then he swam back to land and walked up to his house.  His body felt alert and ready for whatever the day might bring.  Every morning, now, he came downstairs just before sunrise, and this first action controlled the rest of his day.  Moreover, these swims exhausted him, but at the same time, because of the fatigue and the energy they afforded, they gave his entire day a flavour of abandonment and happy lassitude.  Yet the hours still seemed long to him - he had not yet detached time from a carcass of habits which were still so many guide-marks to him.  He had nothing to do, and his time stretched out, measureless, before him.  Each minute recovered its miraculous value, but he did not yet recognize it for what it was.  Just as the days of a journey seem interminable whereas in an office the trajectory from Monday to Monday occurs in a flash, so Mersault, stripped of all his props, still tried to locate them in a life which had nothing but itself to consider.  Sometimes he picked up his watch and stared as the minute-hand shifted from one number to the next, marvelling that five minutes should seem so interminable.  Doubtless that watch opened the way - a painful and tormenting way - which leads to the supreme art of doing nothing.  He learned to walk; sometimes in the afternoon he would walk along the beach as far as the ruins of Tipasa; then he would lie down among the wormwood bushes, and with his hands on the warm stone would open his eyes and his heart to the intolerable grandeur of that seething sky.  He matched the pounding of his blood with the violent pulsation of the sun at two o'clock, and deep in the fierce fragrance, deafened by the invisible insects, he watched the sky turn from white to deep-blue, then pale to green, pouring down its sweetness upon the still-warm ruins.  He would walk home early then, to go to bed.  In this passage from sun to sun, his days were organized according to a rhythm whose deliberation and strangeness became as necessary to him as that of his office, his restaurant, and his sleep in his mother's room.  In both cases, he was virtually unconscious of it.  But now, in his hours of lucidity, he felt that time was his own, that in the brief interval which finds the sea red and leave it green, something eternal was represented for him in each second.  Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity - happiness was human, eternity ordinary.  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 of happiness.  Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.

      On Sundays, Mersault played pool with Perez.  The old fisherman, one arm a stump cut off above the elbow, played pool in a peculiar fashion, puffing out his chest and leaning his stump on the cue.  When they went out fishing in the morning, Perez rowed with the same skill, and Mersault admired the way he would stand in the boat, pushing one oar with his chest, the other with his good hand.  The two men got along well.  After the morning's fishing, Perez cooked cuttlefish in a hot sauce, stewing them in their own ink, and soaking up the black juice left in the pan with pieces of bread.  As they sat in the fisherman's kitchen over the sooty stove, Perez never spoke, and Mersault was grateful to him for this gift of silence.  Sometimes, after his morning swim, he would see the old man putting his boat in the sea, and he would join him.  'Shall I come with you, Perez?'

      'Get in.'

      They put the oars in the rowlocks and rowed together, Mersault being careful not to catch his feet in the trawling-hooks.  Then they would fish, and Mersault would watch the lines, gleaming to the water's surface, black and wavering underneath.  The sun broke into a thousand fragments on the sea, and Mersault breathed the heavy stifling smell that rose from it like fumes.  Sometimes Perez pulled in a little fish he would throw back, saying 'Go home to your mother.'  At eleven they rowed home and Mersault, his hands glistening with scales and his face swollen with sun, waited in his cool dark house while Perez prepared a pan of fish they would eat together in the evening.  Day after day, Mersault let himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into water.  And just as the swimmer advances by the complicity of his arms and the water which bears him up, helps him on, it was enough to make a few essential gestures - to rest one hand on a tree trunk, to take a run on the beach - in order to keep himself intact and conscious.  Thus he became one with a life in its pure state, he rediscovered a paradise given only to animals of the least or the greatest intelligence.  At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love.

      Thanks to Bernard, he also mingled with the life of the village.  He had been obliged to send for Bernard to treat some minor indisposition, and since then they had seen each other repeatedly, with pleasure.  Bernard was a silent man, but he had a kind of bitter wit that cast a gleam in his horn-rimmed spectacles.  He had practised medicine for a long time in Indochina, and at forty had retired to this corner of Algeria, where for several years he had led a tranquil life with his wife, an almost mute Indochinese who wore western suits and arranged her hair in a bun.  Bernard's capacity for indulgence enabled him to adapt himself to any milieu.  He liked the whole village, and was liked in return.  He took Mersault on his rounds.  Mersault already knew the owner of the café, a former tenor who would sing behind his bar and between two bleats of Tosca threaten his wife with a beating.  Patrice was asked to serve with Bernard on the holiday committee, and on 14th July they walked through the streets in tricolour armbands or argued with the other committee-members sitting around a zinc table sticky with aperitifs as to whether the bandstand should be decorated with ferns or palms.  There was even an attempt to lure him into an electoral contest, but Mersault had had time to know the mayor, who had 'presided over the destiny of his commune' (as he said) for the last decade, and this semi-permanent position inclined him to regard himself as Napoleon Bonaparte.  A wealthy grape-grower, he had had a Greek-style house built for himself, and proudly showed it to Mersault.  It consisted of a ground floor and second floor around a courtyard, but the mayor had spared no expense and installed a lift, which he insisted that Mersault and Bernard ride in.  And Bernard commented placidly: 'Very smooth.'  The visit had inspired Mersault with a profound admiration for the mayor, and he and Bernard wielded all their influence to keep him in the office he deserved on so many counts.

      In springtime, the little village with its close-set red roofs between the mountains and the sea overflowed with flowers - roses, hyacinths, bougainvilleas - and hummed with insects.  In the afternoons, Mersault would walk out on to his terrace and watch the village dozing under the torrent of light.  Local history consisted of a contest between Morales and Bingues, two rich Spanish landowners whom a series of speculations had transformed into millionaires, in the grip of a terrible rivalry.  When one bought a car, he chose the most expensive make; but the other, who would buy the same make, would add silver door-handles.  Morales was a genius at such tactics.  He was known in the village as the King of Spain, for on each occasion he triumphed over Bingues, who lacked imagination.  During the war, when Bingues subscribed several hundred thousand francs for a national bond drive, Morales had declared: 'I'll do better than that, I'll give you my son.'  And he had made his son, who was too young to be mobilized, volunteer.  In 1925, Bingues had driven out from Algiers in a magnificent racing Bugatti; two weeks later, Morales had built himself a hangar, and bought a plane.  The plane was still sleeping in its hangar, and was shown to visitors on Sundays.  Bingues called Morales 'that barefoot beggar', and Morales referred to Bingues as 'that lime-kiln'.

      Bernard took Mersault to visit Morales, who welcomed them warmly to his huge farm, humming with wasps and fragrant with grapes.  Wearing espadrilles and shirtsleeves because he could not endure a jacket and shoes, Morales showed them the aeroplane, the son's medal framed in the living-room, and explained the necessity of keeping foreigners out of Algeria (he was naturalized, 'but that Bingues, for instance ...'), then led them to inspect his latest acquisition.  They walked through an enormous vineyard in the middle of which was cleared space where a kind of Louis XV salon had been set up, each piece made of the most precious woods and fabrics.  Thus Morales could receive visitors to his grounds.  When Mersault courteously asked what happened when it rained, Morales shifted his cigar and, without even blinking, answered: 'I replace it.'  On his way home, Mersault spent the time arguing with Bernard over the difference between the nouveau-riche and the poet.  Morales, according to Bernard, was a poet.  Mersault declared he would have made a splendid Roman emperor during the decline.

      Some time later, Lucienne came to the Chenoua for a few days, then left.  One Sunday morning, Claire, Rose and Catherine paid Mersault a visit, as they had promised.  But Patrice was already very far from the state of mind which had driven him to Algiers during the first days of his retreat.  He was glad to see them again, even so, and brought Bernard to meet them at the stop where the big yellow bus dropped them off.  It was a magnificent day, the village full of the fine red carts of itinerant butchers, flowers everywhere, and the villagers dressed in bright colours.  At Catherine's request they took a table at the café, and the girls marvelled at all this brilliant life, divining the sea's presence behind the wall they leaned against.  As they were leaving, an astonishing burst of music exploded in a nearby street: The Toreador Song from Carmen, but performed with an exuberance which prevented the instruments from keeping in tune or time.  'The gymnastic society,' Bernard explained.  Then some twenty strange musicians appeared, each puffing on a different kind of wind-instrument.  They marched towards the café, and behind them, his hat worn over a handkerchief on the back of his head, cooling himself with a cheap fan, appeared Morales.  He had hired these musicians in the city because, as he explained, 'with this depression, life around here is too sad'.  He sat down at a table and grouped the musicians around him.  Then Morales stood up and announced with tremendous dignity, making a sweeping movement towards the audience: 'At my request, the orchestra will play "Toreador' again.'

      As they left, the girls were choking with laughter, but once they reached Mersault's house and the cool shade of the rooms which emphasized the dazzling whiteness of the sun-drenched garden walls, they discovered a silent harmony which Catherine expressed by the desire to take a sunbath on the terrace.  Mersault walked Bernard home.  This was the second time the doctor had glimpsed something of Patrice's life; they had never confided in each other, Mersault conscious that Bernard was not a happy man, and Bernard rather baffled by Mersault's way of life.  They parted without a word.  Mersault and the girls decided to make an excursion the following day, starting very early.  The Chenoua was high and difficult to climb - ahead of them lay a splendid day of sunlight and fatigue.

      At dawn they climbed the first steep slope.  Rose and Claire walked ahead, Patrice and Catherine following.  No-one spoke.  Gradually they rose above the sea, still pale in the morning mist.  Patrice felt he belonged to the mountain, its short turf powdered with saffron blossoms, his eager but weakening body a part of the icy springs, the shadows and the sunlight.  They entered into the concentrated effort of climbing, the morning air sharp in their lungs, determined to conquer the slope.  Rose and Claire, exhausted, began to slow down.  Catherine and Patrice walked on, and soon lost sight of the other two.

      'Are you all right?' Patrice asked.

      'Yes, it's beautiful.'

      The sun rose in the sky, and with it a hum of insects swelled in the growing warmth.  Soon Patrice took off his shirt and walked on bare-chested.  Sweat ran down his shoulders where the skin had peeled with sunburn.  They took a little path that seemed to follow the mountainside.  The grass was wetter here; soon a sound of springs greeted them, and in a hollow they almost stumbled over the sudden gush of coolness and shade.  They sprinkled each other, drank a little, and Catherine stretched out on the grass while Patrice, his hair black with water and curling over his forehead, stared blinking over the landscape that was covered with ruins, gleaming roads, and splinters of sunlight.  Then he sat down beside Catherine.

      'While you're alone, Mersault, tell me - are you happy now?'

      'Look,' Mersault said.  The road trembled in the sun, and the air was filled with a thousand coloured specks.  He smiled and rubbed his arms.

      'Yes, but ... Well, I wanted to ask you - of course you don't have to answer if you don't want to - ' She hesitated: 'Do you love your wife?'

      Mersault smiled: 'That's not essential.'  He gripped Catherine's shoulder and shook his head, sprinkling water into her face.  '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.'

      'Yes,' Catherine said, her eyes filled with sunlight.

      'What matters to me is a certain quality of happiness.  I can only find it in a certain struggle with its opposite - a stubborn and violent struggle.  Am I happy?  Catherine!  You know the famous formula - "if I had my life to live over again" - well, I would live it over again just the way it has been.  Of course you can't know what that means.'

      'No.'

      'And I don't know how to tell you.  If I'm happy, it's because of my bad conscience.  I had to get away and reach this solitude where I could face - in myself, I mean - what had to be faced, what was sun and what was tears ... Yes, I'm happy, in human terms.'

      Rose and Claire arrived.  They shouldered their knapsacks.  The path still followed the mountainside, keeping them in a zone of dense vegetation, prickly pears, olive-trees and jujubes.  They passed Arabs on donkeys.  Then they climbed again.  The sun poured now on each stone in the path.  At noon, crushed by the heat, drunk on fragrance and fatigue, they flung down their knapsacks and gave up reaching the top.  The slopes were sheer and full of sharp flints.  A wizened oak sheltered them in its circle of shade.  They took food out of the knapsacks and ate.  The whole mountain quivered under the light.  The cicadas were deafening as the heat assailed them under their oak.  Patrice threw himself on the ground and pressed his chest against the stones, inhaling the scorched aroma.  Under his belly he could feel the faint throbs of the mountain that seemed to be in labour.  This regular pulse and the unremitting song of the insects between the hot stones finally put him to sleep.

      When he awoke he was covered with sweat, and every muscle ached.  It must have been three in the afternoon.  The girls had vanished, but soon he heard their laughter and shouts.  It was cooler now, time to go back down.  At this moment, as they were about to start, Mersault fainted for the first time.  When he came to, he saw the cobalt sea between three anxious faces.  They walked on more slowly.  On the last slopes, Mersault asked for a rest.  The sea was turning green along with the sky, and the horizon began to blur.  On the foothills that stretched from the Chenoua around the little bay, the cypresses blackened slowly.  No-one spoke, until Claire said: 'You look tired.'

      'I'm not surprised.  Are you?'

      'It's none of my business, but I don't think this place is good for you.  It's too near the sea - too damp.  Why don't you go and live in France - in the mountains?'

      '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.'  No-one spoke.

      After a long pause, Rose said: 'I'm not convinced.'  They returned slowly, as night was falling.

      Catherine decided to send for Bernard.  Mersault was in his room; beyond the shifting shadow of the windowpanes he could see the white patch of the parapet, the sea like a strip of dark linen undulating in the transparent air, and beyond it the night sky, paler but starless.  He felt weak, and his weakness made him mysteriously lighter, gayer, and his mind grew more lucid.  When Bernard knocked, Mersault sensed he would tell him everything.  Not that his secret was a burden; it was not that kind of secret.  If he had kept it till now, it was because in certain circles a man keeps his thoughts to himself, knowing they will offend the prejudices and stupidity of others.  But today, after his exhaustion, there was a sudden longing in his body to confide.  It was the way an artist, after carefully moulding and caressing his work, at last feels the need to show it, to communicate with men - Mersault had the feeling he was going to speak now.  And without being certain he would do so, he waited impatiently for Bernard.

      From downstairs, two bursts of laughter made him smile.  And at that moment Bernard came into the room.  'Well?'

      'Well, here I am,' Mersault said.  Bernard listened to his chest, but he could tell nothing - he wanted to have an X-ray taken, if Mersault could manage to get to Algiers.  'Later,' Mersault replied.

      Bernard said nothing and sat down on the window sill.  'I don't like being ill myself,' he said.  'I know what it is.  Nothing is uglier or more degrading than illness.'

      Mersault was unconcerned.  He got up from his chair, offered Bernard a cigarette, lit his own, and said with a laugh: 'Can I ask you a question, Bernard?'

      'Of course.'

      'You never swim, you're never on the beach - why did you pick this place to live in?'

      'Oh, I don't know exactly.  It was a long time ago.'  After a pause he added: 'Besides, I've always acted on the rebound.  It's better now.  Before, I wanted to be happy, to do what had to be done, to settle down somewhere I really wanted to be, for instance.  But sentimental anticipation is always wrong.  We have to live the way it's easiest for us to live - not forcing ourselves.  I suppose it sounds a little cynical, but it's also the point of view you have to take to survive.  In Indochina I ran all over the place.  Here - here I just ruminate.  That's all.'

      'Yes,' Mersault said, still smoking, deep in his armchair and staring at the ceiling.  'But I'm not sure that all sentimental anticipation, as you call it, is wrong.  Only unreasonable sometimes.  In any case, the only experiences that interest me are precisely the ones where everything turns out to be the way you hoped it would.'

      Bernard smiled.  'Yes, a ready-made destiny.'

      'A man's destiny,' Mersault said without moving, 'is always passionately interesting, if he achieves it passionately.  And for some men, a passionate destiny is always a ready-made destiny.'

      'Yes,' Bernard said.  And he stood up deliberately and stared out at the night for a moment, his back to Mersault.  He went on without looking at him: 'You're the only man besides myself around here who lives alone.  I don't mean your wife and your friends downstairs.  I know those are episodes.  Still, even so, you seem to love life more than I do.'  He turned around.  'Because 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, marvellous 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.

      Mersault said: 'Actually, you're an idealist.'  And he had the sense that everything was enclosed in that moment which shifts from birth to death, that everything was judged and consecrated then.

      'That's because, you see,' Bernard said with a kind of sadness, 'the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.'

      'Don't believe it,' Mersault said, holding out his hand.  Bernard held his hand a long time.  'To think the way you do,' he said, smiling, 'you have to be either a man who lives on tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.'

      'On both, perhaps.'

      'Oh, I wasn't asking!'

      'I know,' Mersault said seriously.  But when Bernard was at the door, Mersault, impelled by a sudden need, called him back.

      'Yes?' the doctor said, turning around.

      'Are you capable of feeling contempt for a man?'

      'I think so.'

      'On what conditions?'

      The doctor reflected.  'It's quite simple, I think.  In cases when he was motivated by expedience or a desire for money.'

      'That is simple,' Mersault said.  'Good night, Bernard.'

      'Good night.'

      Alone, Mersault reflected.  At the point he had now reached, another man's contempt left him indifferent.  But he recognized in Bernard profound resonances which brought the two of them together.  It seemed intolerable that a part of himself should condemn the rest.  Had he acted out of expediency?  He had become aware of the essential and immoral truth that money is one of the surest and swiftest means of acquiring one's dignity.  He had managed to dispel the bitterness which besets any decent soul aware of the vile iniquities of the birth and growth of a splendid fate.  This sordid and revolting curse, whereby the poor end in poverty the life they have begun in poverty, he had rejected by using money as a weapon, opposing hatred with hatred.  And out of this beast-to-beast combat, the angel sometimes emerged, intact, wings and halo and all, in the warm breath of the sea.  It would be as it had been: he had said nothing to Bernard, and his creation would henceforth remain secret.

      The girls left around five o'clock in the afternoon of the next day.  As they got into the bus, Catherine turned back: 'Goodbye, sea,' she said.

      A moment later, three laughing faces were staring at Mersault out of the rear window, and the yellow bus vanished like a huge golden insect into the sun.  Though clear, the sky was a little heavy.  Mersault, standing alone in the road, felt a deep sense of deliverance tinged with melancholy.  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.

      Instead of taking the road, he returned through the carob-trees and the olives, following a little path which wound around the foothills and came out behind his house.  He squashed several olives, and noticed that the path was speckled with these black ovals.  At the summer's end, the carobs drench all Algeria with the smell of love, and in the evening or after the rain, it is as if the entire earth were resting, after giving itself to the sun, its womb drenched with a sperm smelling of bitter almonds.  All day, their odour had poured down from the huge trees, heavy and oppressive.  On this little path at twilight, scarcely apparent to Patrice's nostrils - like a mistress you walk with in the street after a long stifling afternoon, and who looks at you, shoulder to shoulder, among the lights and the crowd.

      Amid that smell of love and squashed, fragrant fruit, Mersault realized then that the season was ending.  A long winter would begin.  But he was ready for it, he would wait.  From this path he could not see the sea, but he could glimpse on the mountain-top certain reddish mists which heralded the dark.  On the ground, patches of sunshine paled among the shadows of the foliage.  Mersault sniffed the bitter fragrance which consecrated his wedding to the earth this afternoon.  The evening falling on the world, on the path between the olives and the gum-trees, on the vines and the red soil, near the sea which whispered softly, this evening flowed into him like a tide.  So many evenings had promised him happiness that to experience this one as happiness itself made him realize how far he had come, from hope to conquest.  In the innocence of his heart Mersault accepted this green sky and this love-soaked earth with the same thrill of passion and desire as when he had killed Zagreus in the innocence of his heart.