La Femme adultère

“To live with one’s passions presupposes that one has mastered them”: the opening story of L’Exil et le Royaume, “La Femme adultère” is a singular text in Camus’s work. Janine, its heroine, embodies the striking formula from Noces: a “singular moment… in which happiness arises from the absence of hope, and the mind finds its reason in the body.” In 1952, the year the idea of composing a collection of short stories first came to him, Camus wrote in his preface to Daniel Mauroc’s Contre-Amour: “One must live in the desert, that is all, and force it so that one day the waters of light may spring forth.”

Pierre-Eugène Clairin had been introduced to Albert Camus by Marcel Damboise, a fellow resident with him at the Villa Abd-el-Tif in Algiers in 1935. Two years earlier, he had already illustrated an edition of Noces for the Cent femmes amies des livres. 1954 marked a new collaboration between the two men, who decided to produce twelve lithographs to illustrate La Femme adultère. This is the only instance of a Camus text appearing in an illustrated first edition published at the same time as its original version, which appeared that same month, March 1954, from Éditions Gallimard. Camus turned to the Éditions de l’Empire in Algiers to publish the work, in an edition of 300 copies. It appears, however, that the book was actually printed in Paris: the workshop of the master typographer Raymond Jacquet, founded in 1946, began collaborating in 1954 with the publisher Schumann, based in Algiers. This was the first title in the “Originales illustrées” series. A success: six weeks after publication, the entire print run had sold out.