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

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 English

Albert. Albert chéri. Write me sweet, passionate things. Tell me you love me and how you love me. Tell me you’ll take me to the sea one day—any sea at all—and that we’ll spend time on the shore and in the water. Tell me you’ll always be with me. Tell me about you, and especially today, talk to me about us. —Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, February 1, 1950

It’s said that the affair began on June 6, 1944, the day the Allied forces landed in Normandy. The twenty-one-year-old Casarès was starring in a production of the thirty-year-old Camus’s 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 Camus’s 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 Camus’s life—the author and actress would correspond furiously, their words swelling and shimmering and surging like the ocean. 

Ah! It’s so hard to leave you, your dear face will again fade into the night, but I’ll 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 Casarès, June 1, 1949

Across 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, writer’s block, and, most of all, they pine—leaving behind a record of one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.

About the Author :
Born in Algeria in 1913, ALBERT CAMUS published The Stranger—now one of the most widely read novels of this century—in 1942. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. MARIA CASARÈS (1922–1996) was a Spanish-born French actress, known for her roles in the films Les Enfants du Paradis and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and in the plays of Shakespeare and Cocteau. SANDRA SMITH is a prize-winning translator of more than forty books, including works by Irène Némirovsky, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Guy de Maupassant. CORY STOCKWELL is the translator of Brigitte Giraud’s Live Fast.

Review :
“The letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès are, for those of us who are Camusians, invaluable as probably the best and most candid X-ray of Camus’s heart that exists. But this correspondence is also an equally remarkable document as a kind of extended diary of an emancipated and gifted woman who chose to maintain an ‘impossible’ love that she regarded as essential to her existence. The back and forth between them is uniquely tender, intelligent, grown-up, and, in the end, tragic. People will be reading these letters as long as love exists.” —Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and The King in the Window

“[The letters] are a fascinating insight into [Camus’s] true personality. Sometimes, they’re just plain beautiful. . . . [Casarès] is passionate, sometimes paranoid, often funny and never intimidated. . . . It will take a particularly devoted (and time-rich) reader to study the entire 1,200 pages. But whoever dips in and out will discover not only a poignant testimony to love’s crimes against our peace of mind, but also a catwalk of famous figures.” —Financial Times

"Dazzling . . . Passion on the page . . . Some of the greatest love letters since those of Abelard and Heloise, the ill-fated medieval couple . . . Camus writes with lasting power [and] Casarès is no less deep and deeply in love. . . . As we read, we realize that whatever we are learning from these long-dead lovers pales against what we can learn about ourselves. Read this book as a guide to loving and a guide to writing. Read it for sustenance." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)