My dear child, I am writing to you from a café in Nice where I have been stranded, crushed by heat and sorrow. I don’t need to tell you what makes me despair, and the helplessness in which I find myself. You know it well besides, and you have something else to do and to feel. My dear, dear love, it seems to me that I could never again write or tell you anything but my tenderness, the infinite tenderness of my heart. After having phoned you, I called Marseille again. Finally, there was nothing to be done and there was nothing to do. So I let go of everything, with the sound of your voice still in my ear, the dreadful fear of worrying you a little more, of weighing on you… I let go and I cried with you.
My love, my only, my great love, I will come back soon - I will probably not be able to do anything for your poor heart, to compensate for the terrible and unfairness of this life. But at least I will watch over you and spare you the little things, the troubles, the servitudes, all that a man can do for the woman he loves. Think of nothing but him, her too, and your grief. Mix well their memory, what they had was beautiful and great, with what you are. Make them revive in you. And I will help you with everything else, I will never abandon you, there is at least one being that you can dispose of entirely, I mean entirely. I cannot live any longer for the small days, I can no longer stand all these beings without deep quality. There is you, your sorrow, your present loneliness and the immense love that is mine.
Even what I am saying to you now is too much. It is a silence to your pain that I wanted to send you. It is my love, my heart, the friendship of the soul… I love you so much, I love you, that’s all, and without a reservation. I kiss you, my darling, sadly, but with all my strength.
Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, February 18, 1950 [#199]*
*On the letterhead of the Café Monnot, Place Masséna, in Nice.
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