Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944-1959

ISBN: 0525656618

Author: Camus, Albert

Condition: New

The impassioned correspondence between the Nobel Prize-winning author and the renowned Spanish-born French actress who appeared in his plays, tracing the extreme highs and lows of their all-consuming love affair-a bestseller in France, translated for the first time into EnglishAlbert. Albert chri. Write me sweet, passionate things. Tell me you love me and how you love me. Tell me youll take me to the sea one day-any sea at all-and that well spend time on the shore and in the water. Tell me youll always be with me. Tell me about you, and especially today, talk to me about us. -Maria Casars to Albert Camus, February 1, 1950Its said that the affair began on June 6, 1944, the day the Allied forces landed in Normandy. The twenty-one-year-old Casars was starring in a production of the thirty-year-old Camuss play The Misunderstanding-and one thing (an after-party hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) led to another.Though their fling would be cut short by the end of the Occupation-and the return to Paris of Camuss wife, Francine-the two were destined to meet again: four years later, to the day, they crossed paths by chance on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.Over the next twelve years, without interruption-until the car wreck of January 4, 1960, that stole Camuss life-the author and actress would correspond furiously, their words swelling and shimmering and surging like the ocean.Ah! Its so hard to leave you, your dear face will again fade into the night, but Ill find you once more in this ocean you love, at the time of evening when the sky takes on the color of your eyes. -Albert Camus to Maria Casars, June 1, 1949Across 865 letters of immense and exquisite emotion, they cry and laugh and bicker and beg, make and break promises, talk Stendhal and Proust and Orwell, French theater, sickness, death, writers block, and, most of all, they pine-leaving behind a record of one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.