6 - ALBERT CAMUS to MARIA CASARES
Saturday 4 pm in the afternoon (1st july 1944)
The trip has been good and without troubles. Left at 7:20 in the morning we drove till 9 am, then walked seven kilometers to go by a marshalling yard that was bombed the day before ; at 11 o’clock, we took another train till noon. We waited two hours at Meaux waiting for them to give us another train. Forty five minutes after, new change of train and at 5 pm, we arrived. I was exhausted like a black dog, but glad to be finished with it. They have offered me a house to which a wing had been bombed in 1940; but the rest was habitable. But it’s covered in dust and I’ll need 48 hours to turn this decent with the help of a brave women from the country.
Let’s go to the description. The country, it’s a small valley to which the two slopes are covered with cultures and average trees. It’s fresh here, there are water sounds and grass’ smells, cows, some beautiful children and birds’ songs. By climbing up a little, we reach plateau more cleared where we can breath better. The town : some houses and brave people. As for the house it is buried in the middle of a quite big garden full of trees and behind the last roses of summer (they are not red). It is in the shadow of the old church and the upper part of the garden is a sunlit meadow just under the flying buttresses of the church. We can take sunbath there. I am settling in a bedroom and an office on the first floor. When it will be done, I will describe it to you.
I think that Michel [Gallimard] could move with me at least. Pierre and Janine will without doubt be sleeping elsewhere. I wait impatiently their arrival to decide all of that and mostly because I hope they will give news about you.
I write you all of this as clearly as I can because I think what you want first is precise information. But my thinking is very different : since thursday night it is with you that I live. I felt like I had badly left you and this separation, in the middle of so much uncertainties, under a sky so full of dangers, is difficult for me to bear. My hope is that you will come. If you can do it by car, do it, it will be easier. Or else, you will have to do that very long trip I did. There’s the bike too and there I could come to you. Don’t forget your promise, my darling, I live for it at the moment. I believe I could find peace in this country. With some trees, the wind, a river, I could redo that interior silent I lost so long ago. But this isn’t possible if I have to bear your absence and run after your image and its souvenir. I don’t have the intention to play the desperate at all, nor to make myself go. Now on from Monday, I will put myself to work and I will work, that is certain. But I want you to help me and to come -that you come above all ! You and me we met here and loved in the fever, the impatience or the danger. I don’t regret anything and the days I just lived seemed to me sufficient to justify a life. But there is another way to love, a fullness more secret and more harmonious, which is not less beautiful and which I know that we will be capable of too. It is here where we will find the time. Don’t forget this, ma petite Maria and make sure that we still have a chance for our love.
In a few hours you will play. Today and tomorrow my thought will be with you. I will wait that moment when you sit down while saying that this is marvelous, I will wait for the third act with that scream I loved so much. Oh ! my darling, how hard it is to be far from what we love. I am deprived from your face and there is nothing else in the world I cherished more.
Write to me a lot and often, don’t leave me alone. I will wait as long as I have to, I feel an infinite patient in everything that concerns you. But at the same time I have an impatience in the blood that hurts me, a will to burn everything and to devore everything, it is my love for you. Goodbye, small victory. Stay close to me in thought and come, come quick, I beg of you. I kiss you with all my passion.
You can write as agreed at Mme Parain, in Verdelot, Seine-et-Marne.
*Feeling threatened because of his clandestins activities as the director of the newspaper Combat, Albert Camus has to leave Paris to take shelter. He joins on a bicycle and on train the house of his friend the philosophe Brice Parain, head of the editorial secretariat of Gaston Gallimard, in Verdelot (Seine-et-marne), in the company of two nephews of Gaston Gallimard, Pierre (son of Jacques) and Michel (son of Raymond), and the wife of the first, Janine (born Jeanne Thomesset) -who will go on to marry in a second marriage, in october 1946, Michel. Albert Camus will now sign his letter with the name Michel.
