Joseph on Nostr: The Adulterous Wife by Albert Camus is a short story about a middle-aged woman, ...

The Adulterous Wife by Albert Camus is a short story about a middle-aged woman, Jeanine, who is trapped in an emotionless marriage. The story is included in a collection published as a book titled Exile and the Kingdom. As written by Camus, while on a business trip in Algeria with her husband, the fictional Jeanine has this experience after climbing the long staircase of a ruined castle to view the horizon:

“In the advancing afternoon, the light softened gently; the crystalline sharpness dissolved. At the same time, in the heart of a woman brought there by chance alone, a knot tightened by years, habit, and boredom was slowly loosening. She looked at the nomad encampment. She had not even seen the men who were living there, nothing was moving among the black tents, and yet she could think only of them, of their existence, which she had hardly known of until today. Homeless, remote from the world, they were a handful of men wandering through the vast territory her gaze had discovered, and which was nonetheless only a trivial part of a still greater space, whose dizzying course stopped only thousands of kilometers farther south, where the first river finally waters the forest. Since the beginning, on the dry earth of this measureless land scraped to the bone, a few men ceaselessly made their way, possessing nothing but serving no one, the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom. Janine did not know why this idea filled her with a sadness so sweet and so vast that she closed her eyes. She only knew that this kingdom had been promised to her from time immemorial, and that it would never be hers, never again, except perhaps in that fleeting moment when she opened her eyes once more on the suddenly still sky and its streams of fixed light, as the voices rising from the Arab town fell suddenly quiet. It seemed to her that the turning Earth had simply stopped, and that from now on no one would grow old or die. Everywhere, henceforth, life was suspended, except in her heart, where at that very moment someone was weeping with pain and wonder.”

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