"Darkness at Noon" was commenced in German while Koestler was living in Paris, and as he describes in the first chapter of Scum of the Earth, completed in the summer of 1939 just outside the village of Belvédère in the Alpes-Maritimes where he was staying with his companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who translated it into English while she was living with him. For decades the German text was thought to have been lost during the escape of Koestler and Hardy from Paris in May 1940, just before the German occupation of France. However, a copy had been sent to Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht. Rupert Hart-Davis, Koestler's editor at Jonathan Cape in London had misgivings about the English text but agreed to publish it when a request to Oprecht for his copy went unanswered. At Hart-Davis' prompting, and unable to reach Koestler, Hardy changed the title from "The Vicious Circle" to "Darkness at Noon". The new title is a reference to Job 5:14: ""They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night”-" a description of the moral dilemmas faced by the book's protagonist, as well as Koestler's own escape from the Nazis. In August 2015, Oprecht's copy was identified in a Zurich library by a doctoral candidate of the University of Kassel. The original German manuscript was published as "Sonnenfinsternis" ("Solar Eclipse") in May 2018 by Elsinor Verlag. A new professional English translation based on the newfound text was published in 2019.