Handwritten ‘draft’ of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger

Text appears to have been copied out and backdated by Camus in 1944, possibly as a way to raise funds during Nazi occupation

A handwritten manuscript of the classic French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus has sold for more than €650,000 (£553,000) at auction, despite bafflement over the reasons for which the Nobel prize-winning author appeared to have faked and backdated it.

The bound, 104-page draft of Camus’s novel about a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab man went under the hammer in Paris on Wednesday.