The First Man retraces the entire journey to discover his secret: he is not the first. Every person is the first man; no one is. That is why he falls at his mother's feet.

The wind swept away all the clouds, and the light, the whitest and strongest, falls from the sky. A strange feeling all morning that I have been in this place for many years, that I am in my home, and the different language does not bother me.

A strange feeling of devastation and melancholy. When I was 20 years old, poor and naked, I encountered true glory. My mother. November 7, 45 years old. Just as I wanted, a day of solitude and thought. To start practicing this indifference that must be completed by my fifties. On that day, I will prevail.

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

Mom was operated on. L.'s telegram arrives Saturday morning. The next evening, a plane at three in the morning. Seven o'clock in Algiers. Always the same impression in the vicinity of the White House: my land. And yet the sky is gray, the air light and spongy. I settle in the clinic, in the heights above Algiers.

Between 1951 and 1959, Camus writes Summer, The Fall, Exile, and The Kingdom, reacting to the tragedy of the Algerian war, to the controversy surrounding The Rebel, making two trips to Greece, Italy, and receiving the Nobel Prize...

These notebooks, the last ones, often work notes, ultimately become his personal diary and confirm the persistent search for harmony "through the most difficult paths, the turmoils, the struggles." Among the diary entries, we find notes for future writing projects and, of course, The First Man, his last unfinished book, which would be published 34 years after his death in the terrible car accident of January 4, 1960.

At the end of the book, there is a detailed index of the three volumes.