A single long confession delivered across several nights in an Amsterdam bar. A former Parisian lawyer now calls himself a 'judge-penitent,' and his monologue spirals around guilt, innocence, and the terrible question of whether anyone can ever truly be good. Camus wrote this in the shadow of his break with Sartre, and the novel crackles with self-accusation. The prose moves like smoke, intimate and suffocating. You realize only gradually that you are the one being addressed, that the trap has already closed around you.