Albert Cossery was one of the last and quirkiest links to the postwar glory days of St-Germain-des-Prés.

Born in Egypt in 1913, and Parisian since 1945, this sparing writer, assiduous ladies’ man and dandy of the Latin Quarter was the boon companion of Albert Camus, and friend of Henry Miller (who mentions him in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch), Boris Vian and Juliette Gréco, among others.

Above all, Cossery elevated idleness to an art form. Apart from writing eight slender, slowly honed volumes of prose, his was a life dedicated to contemplation and pleasure.

From the small room in the Hôtel Louisiane that was his home throughout his French existence, he walked, dined, lived, thought and composed, famously, at the rate of one or two sentences a week. An Egyptian writer who thought in Arabic and translated into French, he identified with the world of oriental outsiders, beggars and idlers, the resourceful visionaries and philosophers of the street.

Free of the dark pessimism of E. M. Cioran, a fellow inhabitant of the Latin Quarter with whom he has often been compared, Cossery had no time for angst, and decried “the inept thought put out by illustrious thinkers from cold climes which consists in denying the Edenic simplicity of the world”. To strive, to own, to devote one’s life to practical ends — all that was a waste of life.

Cossery, whose own thinking seemed unclouded by a sense of the tragic, preferred to wait under time’s tree until its fruits fell ripe into his hand. Asked if he did not get bored, he would reply: “I can’t get bored, I am with Monsieur Cossery.”

He was born in Cairo in 1913, to an illiterate mother and a father with a private income from inherited property. Not unduly plagued by the work ethic, they inhabited a milieu where French was the second language. In Cairo, where he was educated at a school run by the Christian Brothers and developed a love of classical literature, Cossery published a volume of poems, Morsures, at the age of 18. His first novel, Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu (Men Forgotten by God, 1944) was enthused over by Miller. Having worked briefly as a steward on a liner between Port Said and New York, Cossery came to Paris in 1945 and moved in to the Louisiane.

His first French work, and probably his best, Mendiants and Orgueilleux (1955, Proud Beggars) was set among vagrants and outsiders in Cairo, while the plot is driven by the murder of a prostitute and the subsequent investigation. The protagonist, Gohar, a professor, has chosen a life unburdened by material possessions.

Such was the world evoked by Cossery up to his last novel, Les couleurs de l’infamie (1999), about a young pickpocket in Cairo. Also highly rated, this book has yet to be translated, although it has been adapted into a graphic novel.

All through his Parisian life Cossery kept up a routine of attendance at

St-Germain brasseries and watering holes (the Flore, Lipp, the Drugstore). He would always be neatly turned out in smart suit with a bright tie and pocket handkerchief. In his later years he was recognised by the Académie Française and the Société des Gens de Lettres, and won the Prix Méditerranée: “About time,” he said. He lived on his royalties and the generosity of his friends, and liked to show his hands and say: “They have not worked for 2,000 years.”

A Pharaoh by national descent, he became something of a sphinx when an operation for throat cancer left him almost voiceless in 1998. But whenever Cossery had something to say, to journalist or friends, he would jot it down in a notebook. This “idler in the fertile valley”, to borrow the title of one of his books, was gracious as well as caustic.

Albert Cossery, writer, was born on November 3, 1913. He died on June 22, 2008, aged 94