CHINAR SHADE : THE LAST JOURNEY OF ALBERT CAMUS

( A Simple Grave inside Lourmarin Cemetery)

(L to R .. Prof Jean Grenier , Camus's widow and Gallimard)

( The Pallbearers )

The Last Journey Of Albert Camus

"You didn’t even try to know what I am,

Listen, my friend ;

Loving me was never meant to be easy.

I don’t want ceremonies.

I don’t want customs.

I want a love that’s empty,

Quiet,

And real.

Your gold,

Your sky,

Your riches ;

All of it is dust to me.

Trembling lips.

One whisper of faith.

One heart that won’t stop beating.

One tear that refuses to fall.

That’s it.

That’s all I own.

These are my pearls,

My diamonds,

My entire world.

Loving me was never meant to be easy,

My friend."...( Ali Sardar Jafri)

On 6 January 1960, the village of Lourmarin in the Luberon ( France ) received back the man it had adopted. Three days earlier, Albert Camus had died instantly in a car crash at Villeblin, near Sens. The car was driven by his publisher and friend, Michel Gallimard. Michel would die a few days later. True to Camus’s own wishes, there was no state funeral, no lying-in-state in Paris, no national eulogy. Instead, the burial was arranged quickly, quietly, and privately in the Provençal cemetery where Camus had bought a house four years before, drawn there by his old teacher Jean Grenier.

About thirty to forty people gathered in the winter light. Family came first: Francine Camus in black, veiled, with their twelve-year-old twins, Catherine and Jean. Around them stood the small circle that had shaped Camus’s life and work. There were no speeches at the graveside. The priest said a brief service. The only sounds were wind in the olive trees and footsteps on gravel.

The coffin itself was plain pine, without ornament or insignia. Six men carried it from the hearse to the grave. They were Gaston Gallimard, the publisher who had brought Camus to Gallimard in 1942 and stood by him through every controversy; Robert Gallimard, Michel’s brother, bearing the double grief of the crash; René Char, poet and Resistance comrade, who had hidden and fought with Camus in the south; Louis Guilloux, the novelist who had encouraged Camus’s early writing; and two men from Lourmarin who stepped forward from the village to help bear one of their own.

They walked a short distance through streets Camus knew well, past the house where he wrote, past the café where he watched local football. At the cemetery, the coffin was lowered into earth already familiar with sun and drought. Grass and wild herbs grew around the stone. Visitors would later leave pebbles, notes, and metro tickets, but that day there was only restraint.

The modesty of the cortège was deliberate. It reflected Camus’s distaste for spectacle and his love for this “solemn and austere” landscape. He was returned to the earth not as a Nobel laureate, but as a neighbour, carried to his rest by friends, editors, and the village that had become his home.The players from the village football team joined all. Camus had gifted them T shirts and patronised them affectionately. Camus's teacher , guide and friend Prof Jean Grenier was at Sorbonne . He was shocked . He also joined the funeral . Grenier wrote this :

“He prevented me from being a humanist in the sense that it is understood today ; I mean a man blinded by narrow certainties. Albert had followed me to Lourmarin. He wrote to me: ‘I am following in your footsteps.’ And then, suddenly, he was gone.”(Source: Albert Camus: Souvenirs, Editions Gallimard, Publishers, Paris 1968) .

And Camus had repeatedly expressed his gratitude to Prof Jean Grenier, his philosophy teacher at the University of Algiers. In a letter to Prof Grenier, Camus wrote this:

" J’ai eu la chance d’avoir un maître. Il s’appelait Jean Grenier. Votre livre Les Îles m’a donné à la fois un terrain de réflexion et une forme. C’est à vous que je dois le plus essentiel.Je vous dois presque tout, et presque tout ce que j’ai écrit vous le doit aussi. "

" I was lucky to have a teacher. His name was Jean Grenier. Your book 'Les Îles' gave me both a terrain for reflection and a form. It is to you that I owe the most essential.I owe you almost everything, and almost everything that I have written also owes it to you."

( Avtar Mota )

(1)

In another letter to Prof Jean Grenier, Camus wrote this in the concluding paragraph:

"Sometimes it seems I no longer have anything to say to anyone except to you (and to my mother, with whom I never speak, of course). And in everything I intend to do, I would be at quite a loss if I could not turn to you. Write to me in spite of my silence....To you and yours, very affectionately.".... Albert Camus

(2)

When Albert Camus published L'Envers et l'Endroit in 1937 and dedicated it to his teacher Jean Grenier, people in Algiers began calling Camus "Grenier's disciple." Grenier rejected the label, telling Camus that the work mattered more than any pedestal. He was also a steady presence in Camus's personal life: when Camus confessed his infidelities and struggles, Grenier listened without judgment instead of moralising. Camus later wrote that he owed Grenier the same "upright heart" his wife Francine had shown him: quiet honesty, loyalty, and support without lectures.

(3)

Jean Grenier loved Albert Camus with a profound, paternal and intellectual devotion. Grenier was Camus’ philosophy teacher at the Lycée in Algiers in 1929, and became his lifelong mentor and friend. Camus dedicated L’Envers et l’Endroit to him and called him “mon maître”, while Grenier, after Camus’ death in 1960, devoted the rest of his life to preserving his memory in books like ; Albert Camus: Souvenirs. What made their bond unusual was its Eastern inflection: Grenier introduced young Camus not only to Greek thought but also to the Eastern thought ;to the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist detachment, and Laozi’s Tao , which shaped Camus’ ideas of living without illusions yet with dignity, of accepting the absurd without despair. It was a classical bond of master and disciple: Grenier gave Camus philosophy, the Mediterranean sun, and an Eastern sense of inner stillness, and Camus gave Grenier’s ideas a voice the world would hear.

(4)

Grenier taught the Greek "measure" and the Gita's "nishkama action" to Camus.Camus adopted this as a Mediterranean alternative to European abstraction. Grenier taught Camus that happiness was not in conquering, but in limiting oneself. That became Camus’s lifelong stance: neither victim nor executioner, neither saint nor revolutionary.

(a)

"La mesure est la vertu des dieux et des hommes heureux.”

“Measure is the virtue of the gods and of happy men.”

(b)

"Agir sans espoir et sans désespoir.”

“To act without hope and without despair.”

(5)

Without Grenier, there would be no Meursault walking on the beach, and no Sisyphus smiling at his rock. Grenier gave Camus permission to write from Algiers, from the body, and from limits. He taught him that philosophy could be lyrical, that ethics could be modest, and that freedom lay in saying yes to the world as it is. As Camus put it nearly twenty years after first reading his teacher: the phrases stayed with him, because the life behind them did.