Carte postale adressée à madame Quentin depuis la Grèce

Autograph postcard signed by Albert Camus, addressed to Madame Quentin, his housekeeper, at 86 rue de Varenne, Paris; 10 lines in black ink, including the address. Photographic postcard published in Chios by N. P. Chaviaras (no. 108), depicting the waterfront windmills of Tampakika, bearing two cancelled Greek postage stamps. Written during his stopover at Chios on the writer's second journey to Greece.

"Très cordial souvenir. Je serai à Paris le 6 juillet au soir. J'espère que tout va bien pour vous. Votre Albert Camus."

For Camus, Greece was a destination he had long yearned to visit. In 1939, he had planned to embark on a voyage retracing the wanderings of Ulysses, at a time when, as he recalled in « Prométhée aux Enfers », a young man of modest means could still dream of « traverser une mer à la rencontre de la lumière ». The outbreak of war thwarted his plans, and it was from afar that he wrote in « L’Exil d’Hélène »: « Nous avons exilé la beauté, les Grecs ont pris les armes pour elle. » He finally discovered the country in the spring of 1955 and, on the eve of his departure, reflected that those twenty days seemed to him « une seule et longue source de lumière ». He returned from 9 June to 6 July 1958, only a few months after receiving the Nobel Prize, for a cruise from Rhodes to the Sporades aboard a sailing yacht chartered by Michel Gallimard, accompanied by Maria Casarès, the Gallimards and the painter Mario Prassinos. A solitary swim at Rhodes brought back memories of « ces matins de la Madrague, il y a vingt ans ».

For Greece was to him another name for Algeria: as early as 1937, in his Algiers lecture on Mediterranean culture, he traced to Athens, and not to Rome, the origin of the sunlit world in which he had grown up, and it was among the ruins of Tipasa, « habitée par les dieux », that he had known his first pagan nuptials. In that summer of 1958, as war was tearing his native land apart, the islands of the Aegean gave him back, intact, the light of his Algiers youth.

On 20 June, he recorded in his Carnets: « nous entrons à Chios par un beau soir tranquille ». The following day, he travelled across the island, among its enormous olive trees and red earth, and sent another postcard to Jean Grenier, his former teacher. The yacht sailed for Mytilene on 22 June. A year later, at Lourmarin, the sound of a tractor was enough to recall « le moteur de bateau dans le port de Chios écrasé de chaleur ». Amid the happiness of this journey, Camus nevertheless took care to inform the woman who looked after his Paris home in the rue de Chanaleilles of the precise date of his return, just as he would do again in his letter of 23 December 1959, in which he announced his return for 4 January 1960, the very day of his death.

A precious record of Camus's second and final journey to Greece, written in his own hand during the two-day stopover at Chios, and a touching testament to his unfailing thoughtfulness towards Madame Quentin.