He is back in Algeria, at the Roman ruins of Tipasa, after years of war and the quarrels of postwar Paris. The summer is not optimism. In the essay it is something he learns, finally, inside a winter that remains winter. L’Étranger and The Myth of Sisyphus had already refused easy consolation. This sentence is not a retraction. It is what remained when the refusal was complete. He was killed in a car crash in 1960, with an unused train ticket in his pocket.