(Paris) A complete manuscript of the famous novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, unusual because it is considered to be subsequent to the book’s publication, was sold for 656,000 euros ($977,000) on Wednesday in Paris, the house of Tajan auction.
This amount includes costs, the winning bid having reached 500,000 euros. The auction house’s estimate was 500,000 to 800,000 euros.
Nothing has been disclosed about the buyer.
If Camus wrote the date “April 1940” at the end of the manuscript, experts agree that it was written in 1944, two years after the publication of The Stranger.
This novel was written in the spring of 1940 in Paris, corrected until September 1941, before being published by Gallimard in May 1942.
According to the testimony of the author’s wife, Francine Camus, and various clues such as nods to later works, the manuscript was made in July 1944, for a bibliophile.
Certain passages are “covered with erasures, additions between the lines and in the margins, all strewn with arrows and references” and “Camus composes 14 sketches in the margins, which sometimes have the appearance of hidden jokes”, details the auction house.
Albert Camus, future Nobel Prize winner in 1957, lived in occupied Paris with meager resources. For a buyer whose name is lost, he covered his tracks by putting a certain amount of care into this original enterprise.
This piece has already been the subject of two auctions, in 1958 and 1991.
The Stranger, first printed in 4,400 copies, became a bestseller then one of the classics of French literature, which sold millions of copies.
A young Algerian office worker, Meursault, recounts a murder he committed for reasons that remain unclear, with the victim being an Arab whose name is never given.