The Death of Camus
Scholar and teacher, WILLIAM BITTNER, Who is currently Fulbright Professor at the Free University of Berlin, is the author of THE NOVELS OF WALDO FRANK and is at work on a biogr aphy of Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Bittner was in France at the time of the death of Albert Camus and has twice since retraced the author’s journey from Lourmarin to Paris.
View This Story as a PDF
See this story as it appeared in the pages of The Atlantic magazine.
A FEW minutes before two o’clock on the afternoon of January 4, 1960, Madame Choquart of Villeblevin, a village eighteen miles east of Fontainebleau, drew her ancient Peugeot to a halt at the stop sign before entering Route Nationale Number Five. The highway at that point runs nearly three miles in a perfectly straight line, bordered with tall plane trees — a classic example of France’s beautiful but somewhat impractical highways.
To Madame Choquart’s left the road was clear; off to her right an old man was chugging along on a motor bike, and behind him, coming at a good rate of speed, was a large and luxurious-looking car. As she watched it, the car, which she now realized was moving at grande vitesse, seemed to take to the air, wobble crazily on the road, then leap to the right. With a tremendous crash it struck the sturdy trunk of one of the trees and, scattering parts, among them the grille and one front wheel, slewed around and slammed sidewise against the next tree.
