In his biography of Camus, Herbert Lottman tells an amusing story of how Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir spent a drunken evening in various bistros on the Left Bank. As the dawn was breaking, Sartre and Camus walked back across a bridge over the Seine, and Sartre commented, "To think that in a few hours I'm going to talk about the writer's responsibility [at the Sorbonne].'¹