During his stay in Mallorca, Albert Camús wrote about the feelings that his visit to the San Francisco cloister aroused in him.
There lay all my love of life: a silent passion for what would perhaps escape me, a bitterness beneath a flame. Every day, I left this cloister as if I had been wrenched away from myself, inscribed for a short instant in the eternity of the world. And I know full well why I thought then of the unseeing eyes of the Doric Apollos or of Giotto's burning and rigid figures. It is because in that moment, I truly understood all that such countries could bestow on me. I like the fact that on the shores of the Mediterranean you can find certainties and rules of life, that you can satisfy your own logic and justify optimism and the sense of being part of something larger. For in the end, what struck me then was not a world made to fit man - but which closed in on man.
«Amour de vivre», L’envers et l’endroit, 1937
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Francesca Gelabert Desnoyer.
(Algèria, 1913 – França, 1960). The Nobel prize-winner and famous author of L’étranger and La peste, Camus is one of he greatest exponents of existentialist thought in literature. Camus was forced to leave his country of birth for political reasons and, in a Europe threatened by Fascism, became active in the Communist party and openly rejected dictatorships, especially Franco. He was an actor, stage director and contributed to newspapers such as Paris-Soir and Le Monde Libertaire. The grandson of Menorcans who had emigrated to Algeria, he was raised by his mother and Menorcan grandmother following the premature death of his father, something that strengthened his links with Menorca. He visited Majorca in 1935, and his experiences of this journey are recorded in his first book, L’envers et l’endroit.
In Majorca Camus found himself reunited with a landscape that reminded him of his home, and he discovered the Mediterranean as a communal space of culture, something that constituted one of the foundations of his own way of thinking. Over the few months he was in Majorca, even though he was staying in Palma (in all likelihood close to the cloisters of Sant Francesc (Saint Francis) where he himself writes that he spent many hours) he was also interested in other parts of the island. Valldemossa had a great impact on him, and he also visited Sóller, Pollença and Felanitx, towns that he mentions in some of his articles.
The Majorca and Palma that Camus knew have little to do with today’s reality: life and customs have changed, but despite that there is still the essence that captivated him. In Palma, he liked to walk around the narrow streets of the old town and contemplate the image of the city bathing in the sea from the cathedral.
At the cloisters of Sant Francesc, as he himself explains, he discovered a place of inspiring intimacy and reflection. It is the most representative Gothic cloister of the city and it is surrounded by a collection of one-hundred-and-fifteen slender columns, supporting magnificent ogee arches. The current church, although Gothic in structure, presents remarkable Baroque elements such as its main façade. The tomb of Ramon Llull is located inside.
