The Story Archive

The Fall

Albert Camus · 1956 CE · Novel · French · Contemporary

In a sailors' bar in the Amsterdam docks, a Frenchman who introduces himself as a judge-penitent buys a stranger a gin and begins, over five evenings, an account of the successful Paris advocate he used to be. He describes the pleasure he took defending widows and orphans, and then a night on a bridge over the Seine that put an end to it. Camus wrote it after the public break with Sartre, and made the city's concentric canals his narrator's circles of hell.

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