La Peste

In June 1959, Camus had just left Lourmarin, where he had stayed from April 28 to May 28 and made progress on the first part of Le Premier Homme. Back in Paris, he was wholly occupied with the theater. His adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Les Possédés, which opened at the Théâtre Antoine on January 30, was a major success and remained on the bill until the summer break; as late as May 30, Camus took part in a public discussion following a performance. The production continued and was preparing to tour France and Europe. At the same time, Camus was in negotiations with Malraux: he hoped to take over direction of the Théâtre Récamier and was already working on assembling a future company. He had already met with Malraux on the matter, the subsidy order had just been signed, and the writer expected his appointment to be imminent. So much so that, on June 25, he sent the Ministry of Cultural Affairs “theoretical proposals for a New Theater” and, a few days later, attended the Conservatoire competition as a spectator in search of young actors.

It is in this Parisian context that Camus, in June 1959, offered his wishes of “luck and courage” to Marcel Varlet. Was he a candidate for the stage of the Théâtre Récamier, the very place of Camus’s prospective appointment?

Twelve years after the novel’s publication, this June 1959 inscription takes on a particular resonance, coming as Camus was engaged in new projects in which theater played a central role. A few months later, on January 4, 1960, Camus died in the Villeblevin accident, leaving in his bag the unfinished manuscript of Le Premier Homme.

Published in 1947, La Peste immediately became one of the great postwar books: a critical and popular success, it established the Camusian grammar of honor and measure. Begun as early as 1941, in Oran — as a terrible typhus epidemic was spreading across Algeria — the novel transposes into a plague fable the experience of historical evil and of “an evil that spreads terror”: a chronicle told at human scale, in which lucid, collective struggle answers the contagion of murderous ideologies. Underlying it, La Peste nourished the reflection Camus would pursue on stage (Caligula, revived and reworked, L’État de siège, Les Justes) and in adaptation (Larivey, Calderón, Lope de Vega).

The definitive text of La Peste, whose first lines were written as early as 1942, was completed in the course of December 1946. The final point was set down without joy: “I have the feeling that this book is a total failure, that I have sinned through ambition, and this failure is very painful to me. I am keeping it in my drawer, like something rather 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. Translated into dozens of languages, the “Revolt” cycle would weigh in his favor when the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded ten years later. “What we learn in a time of pestilence is that there are more things to admire in men than to despise,” he wrote in La Peste. While showing humanity’s capacity for solidarity and struggle, Camus warns that the lessons of such ordeals must never be forgotten: “The plague bacillus never dies or disappears entirely.”

A fine copy, in which the recipient kept a press clipping on the death of Camus.