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Albert Camus’s Adultery — Or How to Make Everyone Miserable
Love versus duty
Every day people betray their partners. Those who swore their love would last forever end up in bed with someone else because “this time it’s for real”. Why do we fall for such a cliché over again?
Love is a universal drug.
And Albert Camus wasn’t immune to it either. When he slept with María Casares, he was already famous and married while Miss Casares barely came of age.
Couldn’t he end the affair before things got out of control? Why did he keep on sitting on two chairs? If he couldn’t live without the girl, why didn’t he say goodbye to his wife?
Was he a narcissist? An insecure guy pretending to be a decadent intellectual? Who ends up misleading two partners?
It can happen to anyone. There is something magnetic about adultery. You resist it until it sucks you in.
The magnetic attraction
“On the morning of June 6, 1944, the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. That same night, Albert Camus and María Casares landed in bed together.” — Robert Zaretsky, LA Review of Books
