Albert Camus

Completed for printing on 14 January 1960, this pamphlet reprints the tribute Jean-Paul Sartre published in France Observateur three days after Albert Camus’s premature and accidental death on 4 January 1960. It is a sincere text, far more than a mere formality. One might have expected the opposite, since the two great postwar intellectuals had broken with each other some years earlier, dramatically and irreversibly. But a falling-out presupposes a friendship, and Sartre and Camus had once been very close, at times inseparable.
“We had quarreled, he and I: a quarrel is nothing — even if one never sees the other again — just another way of living together without losing sight of each other in the small, narrow world granted to us. This did not stop me from thinking of him, from feeling his gaze on the page I read, on the newspaper he read, and asking myself: ‘What does he think of it? What does he think of it RIGHT NOW?’ (…) In this century, against History itself, he represented the present-day heir of that long line of moralists whose works constitute perhaps what is most original in French letters. His stubborn, narrow and pure, austere and sensual humanism waged a painful struggle against the massive and misshapen events of our time. But conversely, through the obstinacy of his refusals, he reaffirmed, at the heart of our era, against the Machiavellians, against the golden calf of realism, the existence of the moral fact.”

It was later reprinted in Situations IV, but had first appeared in this separate, small-run edition, published — very likely surreptitiously — by the Belgian publisher Pierre Aelberts in his Brimborions series.
Rare on this paper.