Sartre and Beauvoir mourned the wartime Camus, not the man who died

Evidence

Beauvoir heard the news about Camus from Claude Lanzmann, who phoned her at Sartre’s apartment. She put down the phone, shaking, and told herself not to be upset. Come now, she said to herself: you are not even close to Camus any more. Then she looked out of Sartre’s window, watching the sun set over the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church, unable either to weep properly or to feel better. What she mourned, she decided, was not the forty-six-year-old Camus who had just died, but the young freedom fighter of the war years — the friend they had lost long ago. Sartre felt this way too: for both of them, the true Camus was that of the Resistance and The Stranger, not the later one. They never forgave him for his political views, but Sartre wrote a generous obituary in France-Observateur. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 940

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general theme of how intellectual friendships curdle over politics — echoes the larger narrative of Sartre and Camus’s break from earlier chapters.