It’s a very long time since I first read Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. It remains the only book I’ve ever read from
beginning to end in French: and it was
in a class at school. Rereading it now I see
there is some walking in it, after all Meursault is walking on the beach when
he commits the murder.
Surprisingly perhaps, there are a couple of sentences
that I’ve remembered over the years.
They come towards the end of the book when Meursault is in prison. To
save everybody’s blushes I’ll quote the Penguin Classics translation by Sandra
Smith.
”I realized then that a man who had only lived a
single day could easily live a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him
from getting bored.”
I still think it’s a great couple of sentences,
although now that I think about it I don’t believe that boredom per se would be
the biggest problem I’d have in prison.
Anyway, arriving at that sentence again I find that it
comes at the end of a longish paragraph in which Meursault does indeed try to
find a cure for boredom. “I finally stopped
being bored altogether from the moment I learned how to remember. Sometimes I started thinking about my bedroom
and I would imagine starting at one end and walking around it in a circle while
mentally listing all the things I passed.”
Well, knock me down with a feather: you (or at least
I) can’t read this without being reminded of Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room (Voyage autour de ma chamber - which I have not read in French), the hero of which does indeed walk
around his room looking at his possessions, and then goes on voyages of memory,
although of course in this case the objects are actually there there.
Did Camus read de Maistre? I can’t find any hard evidence that he did - although
Camus is not exactly an open book to me. But in the correspondence of Camus there’s
this – a postcard from Camus to “JG”
“M. Jacob sent me my horoscope. I am side by side with people as remarkable
as Luther and Xavier de Maistre.” Online
sources in fact suggest they didn’t share anything like the same birthday, but
I suppose “side by side” is open to interpretation..
It's not all that easy to find photographs of Camus walking, but there’s this: I think he’s rehearsing a play:
