"To lose one's life is insignificant, and I will have that courage when it is necessary.
But to see the meaning of this life dissipate, to witness the disappearance of our reason for existence—this is what is unbearable.
One cannot live without a reason."
.:. Albert Camus, from Caligola (1938) .:.
"If Nature condemns man to death, let man at least not do it," he used to say (as he was against the death penalty).
Ironically, on January 4, 1960, Albert Camus, "Nobel Prize for Literature" (awarded three years earlier), died in a car accident while riding in a Facel Vega FV3B, in which his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was driving the car, also lost his life: near Villeblevin, close to Sens (Yonne) and on the way to Paris, the driver lost control of the vehicle he was driving at possibly around 140 km/h in a straight line before crashing into a plane tree.
Gallimard died instantly, Camus was pulled from the car unconscious and with severe injuries, and shortly after was pronounced dead.
Gallimard's daughter and wife, sitting in the back, survived; Camus was not yet 50 years old.
In any case, his life would have been short as between '59 and the beginning of '60, the health conditions of the forty-six-year-old Camus were already very precarious (both of his lungs were long affected by tuberculosis, as well as damage from smoking) to the point that due to his frail health, he had to decline the position of director of the "Comédie Française" or "Théâtre-Français" (which was founded in 1680 and since 1799 is located in the heart of the "Palais-Royal" in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. It is the only French state theatre that has a permanent company of actors, the "Troupe des Comédiens français"), offered to him by André Malraux, a writer and at the time Minister of French Culture.
