The Fall by Albert Camus Read Free Book Online Page A

time. Strange, isn’t it? But that’s the way it was,
mon cher compatriote
. Some cry: “Love me!” Others: “Don’t love me!” But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: “Don’t love me and be faithful to me!”
    Except that the proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person. As a result of beginning over and over again, one gets in the habit. Soon the speech comes without thinking and the reflex follows; and one day you find yourself taking without really desiring. Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.
    This is what happened eventually and there’s no point in telling you who she was except that, without really stirring me, she had attracted me by her passive, avid manner. Frankly, it was a shabby experience, as I should have expected. But I never had any complexes and soon forgot the person, whom I didn’t see again. I thought she hadn’t noticed anything and didn’t even imagine she could have an opinion. Besides, in my eyes her passive manner cut her off from the world. A few weekslater, however, I learned that she had related my deficiencies to a third person. At once I felt as if I had been somewhat deceived; she wasn’t so passive as I had thought and she didn’t lack judgment. Then I shrugged my shoulders and pretended to laugh. I even laughed outright; clearly the incident was unimportant. If there is any realm in which modesty ought to be the rule, isn’t it sex with all the unforeseeable there is in it? But no, each of us tries to show up to advantage, even in solitude. Despite having shrugged my shoulders, what was my behavior in fact? I saw that woman again a little later and did everything necessary to charm her and really take her back. It was not very difficult, for
they
don’t like either to end on a failure. From that moment onward, without really intending it, I began, in fact, to mortify her in every way. I would give her up and take her back, force her to give herself at inappropriate times and in inappropriate places, treat her so brutally, in every regard, that eventually I attached myself to her as I imagine the jailer is bound to his prisoner. And this kept up till the day when, in the violent disorder of painful and constrained pleasure, she paid a tributealoud to what was enslaving her. That very day I began to move away from her. I have forgotten her since.
    I’ll agree with you, despite your polite silence, that that adventure is not very pretty. But just think of your life,
mon cher compatriote!
Search your memory and perhaps you will find some similar story that you’ll tell me later on. In my case, when that business came to mind, I again began to laugh. But it was another kind of laugh, rather like the one I had heard on the Pont des Arts. I was laughing at my speeches and my pleadings in court. Even more at my court pleading than at my speeches to women. To them, at least, I did not lie much. Instinct spoke clearly, without subterfuges, in my attitude. The act of love, for instance, is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself. Ultimately in that regrettable story, even more than in my other affairs, I had been more outspoken than I thought; I had declared who I was and how I could live. Despite appearances, I was therefore more worthy in my private life—even when (one might say: especially when) I behaved as I have told you—than in my great professional flights about innocence and justice. At least, seeing myself act with others, I couldn’t deceive myself as to the truth of my nature. No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures—have I read that or did I think it myself,
mon cher compatriote?
    When I examined thus the trouble I had in separating definitively from a woman—a trouble which used to involve me in so many simultaneous liaisons—I didn’t blame my softheartedness. That was not what