Susan Cahill

Or, as biographer Barbara Goldsmith tells it, that at the turn of the century, wealthy Parisians saw commitment to an insane asylum the solution to the problem of a wife with a mind of her own?

If you’re following in Camus’s late morning footsteps, it’s rewarding to leave his route at Place Saint-Sulpice and detour through the streets that lead into it: rue Férou (with Rimbaud’s poetry wall), rue Servandoni (where William Faulkner, Olympe de Gouges, Roland Barthes, Eugène Atget, Juliette Gréco, and others lived), and rue Garancière. This quartier holds the secret of why Paris can take such hold of you, live in your memory forever.

Despite the loss of friends and the ugly war in Algeria—the French army tortured the Algerian rebels just as the Nazis and the French police had tortured the Résistants on rue Lauriston (see p.)—Camus never turned a blind eye to the beauty of the world. “I put the beauty of a landscape before all else. It’s not paid for by any injustice and my heart is free there.” In his Nobel address, he named the source of that beauty: “I have never renounced the light.” Asked which French writers had most influenced him, he named “Simone Weil and René Char,” both poets of the light.