La Peste

The postwar years brought Camus growing fame. From L’Étranger to his committed writings for Combat, he remained loyal to his values, his friends, and those to whom he owed a great deal. The “gratitude” expressed here to René Lalou echoes what he expressed at the same time to his other “masters”: his teachers in Algiers and Oran — Louis Germain, Paul Mathieu, Jean Grenier, and René Lalou himself, an English teacher at the Lycée Lamoricière in Oran. It was to this city that Francine and Albert Camus, newly married in Lyon, moved at the end of 1940, settling at 67 rue d’Arzew. The couple remained there continuously until 28 March 1942.

But after the wedding came the need for work and money. L’Étranger had not yet appeared, and Camus was penniless. Through the Faure family, he met André Bénichou, a philosophy teacher at the same Lycée Lamoricière. After the Vichy government passed antisemitic laws — notably repealing the Crémieux decree and stripping Algerian Jews of French nationality — Bénichou, with other dismissed teachers, set up a private course, later known as the Cours Descartes, for Jewish children expelled from public schools. Camus taught French literature there, first in private apartments on rue Étienne, then at 18 rue Paixhans, opposite the Lycée Lamoricière.

During this period Camus saw a great deal of the Bénichous, the Choucrouns, the Faure family, and Dr. Henri Cohen. As Oran suffered a typhus epidemic, this life and these events became the “launching pad” for La Peste, published six years later, though early drafts were read to André Bénichou as early as the beginning of 1942. Camus published an extract, “Les Exilés dans la peste,” in the 1943 Swiss literary anthology Domaine français, issued by the review Messages.

Camus undoubtedly drew on the knowledge of René Lalou, author of a Histoire de la littérature française contemporaine (1922) and a Panorama de la littérature anglaise contemporaine (1927), and a fine connoisseur of Wilde, Conrad, Orwell, Stevenson and Whitman. A double agrégé in French and English, Lalou had published several important articles on Nietzsche in the early 1930s, at a time when Camus, in Algiers, was devouring Nietzsche’s Gay Science.

The two men remained friends after the war, when Lalou, alongside his teaching duties at the Lycée Lakanal and the Lycée Henri-IV, became a recognized literary critic. Camus wrote to him at length in November 1949, when Lalou questioned him on pacifism, his relationship with Sartre, and political commitment: “I joined the Combat group in 1943 … I never touched a weapon.” On Sartre: “I find in Sartre the greatest and most persuasive of talents, but his books have never had the slightest influence on me, for the very simple reason that our climates are incompatible. From an artistic point of view, let us just say that the sky of Le Havre is not that of Algiers … I do not believe that joining Garry Davis’s movement is the only way to prevent the return of the plague…” This fine letter, exhibited at the Centre Pompidou between March and May 1981 on the twentieth anniversary of Camus’s death, paid tribute to the teacher who had become a father figure to the war orphan, after the schoolteacher Louis Germain: “My true master is one of the finest (and most underrated) writers of our time, Jean Grenier. He was my teacher long ago, but to this day I have never stopped learning from him.”

The final text of La Peste was completed in December 1946; a long process of proof correction followed, through a first “passed for press” in February 1947 to the definitive version, printed on 24 May of that year. Camus set down the final point without joy: “I have the feeling that this book is a complete failure, that I have sinned through ambition, and this failure is very painful to me. I am keeping it in my drawer, like something slightly disgusting.” Camus was far from imagining that it would become a bestseller and a popular classic, the third best-selling title from Éditions Gallimard, after Le Petit Prince and L’Étranger. It was a first for Camus, who described himself as “disconcerted.” Translated into dozens of languages, the cycle of “Revolt” would weigh heavily in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature ten years later. “What we learn in a time of pestilence,” he wrote in La Peste, “is that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” While showing humanity’s capacity for solidarity and resistance, Camus warns that the lessons of such ordeals must never be forgotten: “The plague bacillus never dies or disappears entirely.”

The review copy was sent out shortly afterward from rue Sébastien-Bottin by Camus himself, who forgot no one — least of all his friends from Oran.

A fine copy, beautifully bound by Mercher in 1967.