Lettre autographe signée à B..., proche ami de la khâgne africaine : "J'ai l'Algérie sur le cœur et elle pèse lourd."

Unpublished autograph letter signed by Albert Camus, addressed to one of his childhood friends, written in black ink on two sheets of Nrf letterhead. With several underlinings and additions in the author's hand.
Very faint foxing not affecting the text, and two usual folds from mailing.
Unpublished letter from Albert Camus to a fellow student from the memorable African khâgne, written at the height of the Algerian War.

Bound by a shared passion for literature and political engagement, the students and professors of the 1932–1933 class, immortalized in a famous group photograph, maintained strong ties throughout their lives despite tragic events and distance. Camus's letter is a response to a request from B***, who had become a teacher of classical literature and the author of several novels published in Algiers, asking Camus to intercede with Gallimard regarding the publication of his latest manuscript.
From Algiers, Albert Camus appeared crowned with literary success, yet the author of L'Homme révolté was in fact experiencing the darkest years of his life. His uncompromising analysis of ideologies and rebellion had earned him the hostility of the Parisian intelligentsia, led by his former friend Jean-Paul Sartre. Despite the support of a few loyal friends, Camus was deeply shaken by this sudden disaffection. For nearly five years, he published almost nothing apart from earlier writings and a few short texts on Algeria, where he returned four times between 1951 and 1956 in search of “not happiness – but rather a certain sadness.” In April 1956, he had just completed La Chute, his darkest and most introspective work, which would be published a month later. Algeria remained his only beacon, as he writes here to B***: “I have never truly left Algeria.”
During those five years, Camus had envisioned literary gatherings in Algiers, theatre festivals in Tipasa, and North African literary prizes—but the uprising put an end to these projects. The Algerian writer, criticized for refusing to take sides between colonial rule and independence, once again faced the ideological dualism he condemned in L'Homme révolté: “Yes, once again we are trapped between two fanaticisms.” B***’s letter thus evokes for Camus both the enchanted Algeria of his youth: “glad to see you immersed up to the neck in Algerian soil”, and the irremediable loss of a homeland from which he feels “forever (and more than ever) exiled,” while his friend's literary hopes bring Camus back to his own creative drought of the past five years: “You err on the side of excess, at times. But exuberance can be shaped, like a tree, whereas dryness…”
Camus’s enthusiastic reply reveals his deep affection for this childhood friend and all he represents: “Hey! No, I certainly haven’t forgotten you.”
The letter offers occasion to recall their former classmates from the Lycée Bugeaud. Those he still sees: “now and then, I get news via Mathieu, Belamich, or Fréminville, whom I still see, or Boyer, once”, and those who are gone: “moved […] to find the memory of Coulombel […] whom I was very fond of.” The figure of Philippe Coulombel, who died in aerial service in Tipasa, would haunt Camus and inspire a planned character in one of his novels.
Yet the most significant person evoked in the letter is their shared teacher, the origin of their literary vocations and Camus’s enduring mentor: “Grenier remains my good master. […] For twenty-five years, I have never ceased to feel friendship for him.” Still, in April 1956, it is above all Algeria that occupies Camus’s thoughts and suffuses every line: “I would have liked to talk with you about the ‘situation.’ I carry Algeria on my heart and it weighs heavy.” Just a few months earlier, the fierce backlash to his “Appeal for a Civil Truce” delivered in Algiers on January 22 had intensified his sense of helplessness in the face of mounting extremism.
Camus had dreamed of transforming colonization into partnership, of reconciliation between the “two peoples” of Algeria. But his call for peace drew sharp criticism and death threats, forcing him to return to France where, met with similar incomprehension, he resolved to write no more about Algeria “so as to add neither to its suffering nor to the foolishness written about it.” His letter to B*** thus ends on a note of uncertain hope: “I hope, in any case, to see you in Algiers if I return there.” In this context, Camus’s literary advice to his friend reveals the soul-searching of a disillusioned and isolated writer: “The trouble is that publishers these days mainly look for reasons not to publish. A single reservation is enough—unless the book is ‘commercial’ or thought to be so.”
This Algeria, which he rediscovers with pleasure in B***’s books: “I had read with a sense of kinship Mon Bled and Broussailles,” and “was amused and carried along by the rest—the characters, the verve, and the atmosphere,” Camus explicitly encourages him to move beyond it: “Why not take on a less local theme, a story in which everyone might recognize themselves? You have the breath, the strength.”
Yet beyond politics, literature, and memory, it is in the turn of a seemingly simple phrase that Camus confides his inner fear—mingled with longing—for a life absent of writing: “Time is needed for it too, I know. A profession, a family—that is something, and enough to fill a life.” That life would become the one lived by the protagonist of his final, unfinished novel: Le Premier Homme.
Deeply moved by this warm recollection of his youth, the future Nobel Laureate concludes his letter with a modest and profoundly sincere: “Thank you for writing to me.”
A beautiful unpublished letter intertwining the two great and enduring obsessions of Camus: writing and Algeria.