A Happy Death

At 10am on a bright, sunny day in Algiers, Patrice Mersault carries a suitcase toward Zagreus’s villa. Zagreus’s legs have been amputated, and Mersault finds him sitting in his wheelchair, reading. Mersault enters without a word and opens his case to reveal a revolver and a letter in a white envelope. The letter contains Zagreus’s apparent suicide note.

Mersault is “expressionless.” He reads the letter to Zagreus and empties the money from the man’s safe. Zagreus silently watches. When Mersault places the gun against Zagreus’s head, Zagreus’s eyes “fill with tears” (8). Mersault shoots Zagreus in the head, and leaves the gun in the dead man’s hand. He steps outside, studies the world around him, and then returns home and sleeps until the middle of the afternoon.

On a hot summer afternoon some time before the events of Chapter 1, a dock worker is injured. Mersault exits his office on the docks and inspects the “ugly wound from which blood [is] dripping” (9). Together with a fellow clerk named Emmanuel, he hitches a lift on a passing truck and visits a restaurant. Mersault, Emmanuel, and the restaurant owner Celeste discuss what they would do if they were rich.