No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures: The Crazy Love Life of Albert Camus

Simone                                                 Maria                                                    Francine

Football-loving, sun-worshipping, French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, was an absurdly stylish and good-looking man who always had an eye for the ladies ...

In 1934, whilst still a student at the University of Algiers and working odd jobs to make some money, he tied the knot with Simone Hié, daughter of a wealthy eye doctor. Sadly, things didn't turn out for the best. Mutual infidelity and an increasingly serious drug habit on her side meant that the marriage failed within just a couple of years.

Camus then married the very talented and very striking pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, in 1940. She bore him twins five years later and the marriage lasted until his fatal car crash in 1960, despite Camus's numerous affairs, including - most significantly - his obsessive, on-off relationship with the distinguished stage and screen actress Maria Casares.       

The Fall (1956), described by Sartre as perhaps the most beautiful and least understood of Camus's works, is the confession of a successful and celebrated man brought to a point of emotional and intellectual crisis when he fails to come to the aid of a drowning woman. If the former is a self-portrait, then the latter is poor Francine, who overlooked her husband's constant womanising and allowed him his erotic freedom for many years until, finally, this gentle, kind-hearted woman cracked and suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Not only was Francine hospitalised and subjected to electroshock therapy, but she also attempted suicide. Her depression grew so severe that she would withdraw from the world for prolonged periods, staring straight ahead whilst endlessly repeating the name Maria Casares. Doubtless, her mental fragility had several causes, but the pain and humiliation she experienced due to Camus's open infidelity can't have helped.    

In a letter written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957), Camus claimed that he had never stopped loving Francine - albeit in his own admittedly shitty manner. He also claimed that she had forgiven him. I don't know if that's true, but, after her death in 1979, Francine was buried with her husband in Lourmarin - where they had spent an idyllic last summer together twenty years earlier - in a tomb surrounded by flowers. 

Not that Camus had changed his libidinous ways following Francine's breakdown. Indeed, in the last days of his life he was still sending passionate love letters to at least four mistresses, including Maria Casares, who, arguably, was the only woman Camus truly respected as an equal and to whom he felt tied by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, by heart and flesh.


Afternote 

The daughter of a wealthy Spanish Republican, Maria Casares was an extraordinary woman, fully capable as one commentator has written of playing Don Juana to Camus's Don Juan, though often resentful of the fact that he refused to leave his wife and children for her. Casares discussed her often stormy sixteen-year relationship with Camus in her 1980 autobiography Résidente privilégiée. 

Readers may also be interested to know that 860 of the letters exchanged between Camus and Casares (his petite mouette) have recently been published in a lengthy volume entitled Correspondance, ed. Béatrice Vaillant (Editions Gallimard, 2017). In her introduction to the book, Catherine Camus writes that these letters not only make the world a bigger and brighter place, but demonstrate that beyond absurdity and revolt ... lies love.   

Xanthippe

I: The Nietzschean View of Marriage

Nietzsche famously declares that all great philosophers are instinctive bachelors who dislike marriage as well as that which might persuade them into it. For a free spirit, the prospect of settling down to a domestic life with a little woman by their side and a pair of slippers by the bed is anathema. They dream of living on mountain top or in those unexplored realms of dangerous knowledge. Home sweet home strikes them as a kind of cosy prison built in the name of Love. 

And Nietzsche even provides us with a convenient list of unmarried philosophers to prove his point; a list that includes Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer - and, of course - himself. None of these thinkers ever wed and, what's more, it's almost impossible to imagine them married.

A philosopher who has tied the knot, concludes Nietzsche, belongs to comedy - as the case of Socrates proves. Whether the latter wed ironically in order to demonstrate this point, as Nietzsche claims, I don't know. But the fact is, Socrates - an undoubtedly great philosopher - did marry and I'd like to say a few words about his wife ...

II: The Blonde Horse

Xanthippe was an Athenian from a possibly noble (certainly privileged) family, who, despite her name, is believed to have had flaming red hair. She was also much younger than her husband, to whom she bore three sons. Plato portrays her in the Phaedo as a devoted wife and mother, but she is described in other works - such as Xenophon's Symposium - as difficult and argumentative.

Socrates, however, is said to have found these latter characteristics attractive and crucial to his own development as a philosopher; perhaps less so after she allegedly emptied a chamber pot over his head in a fit of jealous rage, although even this he accepted with philosophical grace, saying: "After the thunder comes the rain."

This, and other stories of her violent temper, have rightly or wrongly left us with the impression that Xanthippe was - to put it crudely - a bit of a bitch. Indeed, her name has now come to mean any sharp-tongued and assertive woman. In Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, for example, Petruchio famously compares Katherine to Xanthippe. More recently, the sarcastic and rebellious teen character played by Dylan Gelula in the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is named after Socrates's wife.

Ultimately, who's to know what kind of woman Xanthippe was - or why she agreed to her parents suggestion that she marry an ugly, elderly, penniless philosopher who spent a good deal of time drinking with his friends whilst pursuing his love of wisdom (and young boys). Nevertheless, she stuck with him to the bitter end, which shows fidelity on her part and indicates that he must have had something about him that she found lovable.