“I am boiling inside and out. Everything is burning, my soul, body, outside, inside, heart, flesh… Do you understand? Do you really understand,” she told him. Maria Casares
“Everywhere I turn I see the night,” Camus wrote pleadingly to Casares after their split. “Without you I have lost my strength. I want to die.” Albert Camus
His last letter to her was dated December 30, 1959 — five days before his death aged 46.
“Last letter,” Camus wrote prophetically, although he may have been referring to the final letter of the year, or the last one before they saw each other again.
He told her that he would be returning to Paris from his family home in Lourmarin in Provence “by road” on January 4, although he had also bought a train ticket.
“See you soon, my superb. I am so happy at the idea of seeing you again that I laugh just writing it… I kiss you and I hold you to me until Tuesday when we will start again.”
Camus never returned to Paris, dying instantly when his publisher Michel Gallimard’s sports car hit a plane tree an hour south of the French capital. Gallimard died of his injuries six days later.
