The invalid's story critical thinking answers

The Plague

by

Albert Camus

[Translated by Stuart Gilbert]

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It is as reasonable to represent

one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists

by that which exists not.

DANIEL DEFOE

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Translation Copyright 1948 by Stuart Gilbert

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in French as La Peste. Copyright 1947 by Librairie Gallimard. By arrangement with Librairie Gallimard.

THE MODERN LIBRARY

is published by Random House, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

part I

part II

part III

part IV

part V

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PART I The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran. Everyone agreed that, considering their somewhat extraordinary character, they were out of place there. For its ordinariness is what strikes one first about the town of Oran, which is merely a large French port on the Algerian coast, headquarters of the Prefect of a French Department. The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centers in other parts of the world. How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves— a thoroughly negative place, in short? The seasons are discriminated only in the sky. All that tells you of spring's coming is the feel of the air, or the baskets of flowers brought in from the suburbs by peddlers; it's a spring cried in the marketplaces. During the summer the sun bakes the houses bone-dry, sprinkles our walls with grayish dust, and you have no option but to survive those days of fire indoors, behind closed shutters. In autumn, on the other hand, we have deluges of mud. Only winter brings really pleasant weather. Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, "doing business." Naturally they don't eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, seabathing, going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week in making money, as much as possible. In the evening, on leaving the office, they forgather, at an hour that never varies, in the cafes, stroll the same boulevard, or take the air on their balconies. The passions of the young are violent and short-lived; the vices of older men seldom range beyond an addiction to bowling, to

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banquets and "socials," or clubs where large sums change hands on the fall of a card. It will be said, no doubt, that these habits are not peculiar to our town; really all our contemporaries are much the same. Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card-tables, in cafes and in small- talk what time is left for living. Nevertheless there still exist towns and countries where people have now and then an inkling of something different. In general it doesn't change their lives. Still, they have had an intimation, and that's so much to the good. Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern. Hence I see no need to dwell on the manner of loving in our town. The men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called "the act of love," or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love one another without knowing much about it. What is more exceptional in our town is the difficulty one may experience there in dying. "Difficulty," perhaps, is not the right word, 'discomfort" would come nearer. Being ill :s never agreeable but there are towns that stand by you, so to speak, when you are sick; in which you can, after a fashion, let yourself go. An invalid needs small attentions, he likes to have something to rely on, and that's natural enough. But at Oran the violent extremes of temperature, the exigencies of business, the uninspiring surroundings, the sudden nightfalls, and the very nature of its pleasures call for good health. An invalid feels out of it there. Think what it must be for a dying man, trapped behind hundreds of walls all sizzling with heat, while the whole population, sitting in cafes or hanging on the telephone, is discussing shipments, bills of lading, discounts! It will then be obvious what discomfort attends death, even modern death, when it waylays you under such conditions in a dry place. These somewhat haphazard observations may give a fair idea of what our town is like. However, we must not exaggerate. Really, all that was to be conveyed was the banality of the town's appearance and of life in it. But you can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits. And since habits are precisely what our town encourages,

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all is for the best. Viewed from this angle, its life is not particularly exciting; that must be admitted. But, at least, social unrest is quite unknown among us. And our frank-spoken, amiable, and industrious citizens have always inspired a reasonable esteem in visitors. Treeless, glamour-less, soulless, the town of Oran ends by seeming restful and, after a while, you go complacently to sleep there. It is only fair to add that Oran is grafted on to a unique landscape, in the center of a bare plateau, ringed with luminous hills and above a perfectly shaped bay. All we may regret is the town's being so disposed that it turns its back on the bay, with the result that it's impossible to see the sea, you always have to go to look for it. Such being the normal life of Oran, it will be easily understood that our fellow citizens had not the faintest reason to apprehend the incidents that took place in the spring of the year in question and were (as we subsequently realized) premonitory signs of the grave events we are to chronicle. To some, these events will seem quite natural; to others, all but incredible. But, obviously, a narrator cannot take account of these differences of outlook. His business is only to say: "This is what happened," when he knows that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace, and that there are thousands of eyewitnesses who can appraise in their hearts the truth of what he writes. In any case the narrator (whose identity will be made known in due course) would have little claim to competence for a task like this, had not chance put him in the way of gathering much information, and had he not been, by the force of things, closely involved in all that he proposes to narrate. This is his justification for playing the part of a historian. Naturally, a historian, even an amateur, always has data, personal or at second hand, to guide him. The present narrator has three kinds of data: first, what he saw himself; secondly, the accounts of other eyewitnesses (thanks to the part he played, he was enabled to learn their personal impressions from all those figuring in this chronicle); and, lastly, documents that subsequently came into his hands. He proposes to draw on these records whenever this seems desirable, and to employ them as he thinks best. He also proposes . . .

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But perhaps the time has come to drop preliminaries and cautionary remarks and to launch into the narrative proper. The account of the first days needs giving in some detail. When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing. On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and, without giving it a further thought, continued on his way downstairs. Only when he was stepping out into the street did it occur to him that a dead rat had no business to be on his landing, and he turned back to ask the concierge of the building to see to its removal. It was not until he noticed old M. Michel's reaction to the news that he realized the peculiar nature of his discovery. Personally, he had thought the presence of the dead rat rather odd, no more than that; the concierge, however, was genuinely outraged. On one point he was categorical: "There weren't no rats here." In vain the doctor assured him that there was a rat, presumably dead, on the second-floor landing; M. Michel's conviction wasn't to be shaken. There "weren't no rats in the building," he repeated, so someone must have brought this one from outside. Some youngster trying to be funny, most likely. That evening, when Dr. Rieux was standing in the entrance, feeling for the latch-key in his pocket before starting up the stairs to his apartment, he saw a big rat coming toward him from the dark end of the passage. It moved uncertainly, and its fur was sopping wet. The animal stopped and seemed to be trying to get its balance, moved forward again toward the doctor, halted again, then spun round on itself with a little squeal and fell on its side. Its mouth was slightly open and blood was spurting from it. After gazing at it for a moment, the doctor went upstairs. He wasn't thinking about the rat. That glimpse of spurting blood had switched his thoughts back to something that had been on his mind all day. His wife, who had been ill for a year now, was due to leave next day for a sanatorium in the mountains. He found her lying down in the

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bedroom, resting, as he had asked her to do, in view of the exhausting journey before her. She gave him a smile. "Do you know, I'm feeling ever so much better!" she said. The doctor gazed down at the face that turned toward him in the glow of the bedside lamp. His wife was thirty, and the long illness had left its mark on her face. Yet the thought that came to Rieux's mind as he gazed at her was: "How young she looks, almost like a little girl!" But perhaps that was because of the smile, which effaced all else. "Now try to sleep," he counseled. "The nurse is coming at eleven, you know, and you have to catch the midday train." He kissed the slightly moist forehead. The smile escorted him to the door. Next day, April 17, at eight o'clock the concierge buttonholed the doctor as he was going out. Some young scallywags, he said, had dumped three dead rats in the hall. They'd obviously been caught in traps with very strong springs, as they were bleeding profusely. The concierge had lingered in the doorway for quite a while, holding the rats by their legs and keeping a sharp eye on the passers-by, on the off chance that the miscreants would give themselves away by grinning or by some facetious remark. His watch had been in vain. "But I'll nab 'em all right," said M. Michel hopefully. Much puzzled, Rieux decided to begin his round in the outskirts of the town, where his poorer patients lived. The scavenging in these districts was done late in the morning and, as he drove his car along the straight, dusty streets, he cast glances at the garbage cans aligned along the edge of the sidewalk. In one street alone the doctor counted as many as a dozen rats deposited on the vegetable and other refuse in the cans. He found his first patient, an asthma case of long standing, in bed, in a room that served as both dining-room and bedroom and overlooked the street. The invalid was an old Spaniard with a hard, rugged face. Placed on the coverlet in front of him were two pots containing dried peas.

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When the doctor entered, the old man was sitting up, bending his neck back, gasping and wheezing in his efforts to recover his breath. His wife brought a bowl of water. "Well, doctor," he said, while the injection was being made, "they're coming out, have you noticed?" "The rats, he means," his wife explained. "The man next door found three." "They're coming out, you can see them in all the trash cans. It's hunger!" Rieux soon discovered that the rats were the great topic of conversation in that part of the town. After his round of visits he drove home. "There's a telegram for you, sir, upstairs," M. Michel informed him. The doctor asked him if he'd seen any more rats. "No," the concierge replied, "there ain't been any more. I'm keeping a sharp lookout, you know. Those youngsters wouldn't dare when I'm around." The telegram informed Rieux that his mother would be arriving next day. She was going to keep house for her son during his wife's absence. When the doctor entered his apartment he found the nurse already there. He looked at his wife. She was in a tailor-made suit, and he noticed that she had used rouge. He smiled to her. "That's splendid," he said. "You're looking very nice." A few minutes later he was seeing her into the sleeping-car. She glanced round the compartment. "It's too expensive for us really, isn't it?" "It had to be done," Rieux replied. "What's this story about rats that's going round?"

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"I can't explain it. It certainly is queer, but it'll pass." Then hurriedly he begged her to forgive him; he felt he should have looked after her better, he'd been most remiss. When she shook her head, as if to make him stop, he added: "Anyhow, once you're back everything will be better. We'll make a fresh start." "That's it!" Her eyes were sparkling. "Let's make a fresh start." But then she turned her head and seemed to be gazing through the car window at the people on the platform, jostling one another in their haste. The hissing of the locomotive reached their ears. Gently he called his wife's first name; when she looked round he saw her face wet with tears. "Don't," he murmured. Behind the tears the smile returned, a little tense. She drew a deep breath. "Now off you go! Everything will be all right." He took her in his arms, then stepped back on the platform. Now he could only see her smile through the window. "Please, dear," he said, "take great care of yourself." But she could not hear him. As he was leaving the platform, near the exit he met M. Othon, the police magistrate, holding his small boy by the hand. The doctor asked him if he was going away. Tall and dark, M. Othon had something of the air of what used to be called a man of the world, and something of an undertaker's assistant. "No," the magistrate replied, "I've come to meet Madame Othon, who's been to present her respects to my family."

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The engine whistled. "These rats, now—" the magistrate began. Rieux made a brief movement in the direction of the train, then turned back toward the exit. "The rats?" he said. "It's nothing." The only impression of that moment which, afterwards, he could recall was the passing of a railroadman with a box full of dead rats under his arm. Early in the afternoon of that day, when his consultations were beginning, a young man called on Rieux. The doctor gathered that he had called before, in the morning, and was a journalist by profession. His name was Raymond Rambert. Short, square-shouldered, with a determined-looking face and keen, intelligent eyes, he gave the impression of someone who could keep his end up in any circumstances. He wore a sports type of clothes. He came straight to the point. His newspaper, one of the leading Paris dailies, had commissioned him to make a report on the living-conditions prevailing among the Arab population, and especially on the sanitary conditions. Rieux replied that these conditions were not good. But, before he said any more, he wanted to know if the journalist would be allowed to tell the truth. "Certainly," Rambert replied. "I mean," Rieux explained, "would you be allowed to publish an unqualified condemnation of the present state of things?" "Unqualified? Well, no, I couldn't go that far. But surely things aren't quite so bad as that?" "No," Rieux said quietly, they weren't so bad as that. He had put the question solely to find out if Rambert could or couldn't state the facts

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without paltering with the truth. "I've no use for statements in which something is kept back," he added. "That is why I shall not furnish information in support of yours." The journalist smiled. "You talk the language of Saint-Just." Without raising his voice Rieux said he knew nothing about that. The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in—though he had much liking for his fellow men—and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth. His shoulders hunched, Rambert gazed at the doctor for some moments without speaking. Then, "I think I understand you," he said, getting up from his chair. The doctor accompanied him to the door. "It's good of you to take it like that," he said. "Yes, yes, I understand," Rambert repeated, with what seemed a hint of impatience in his voice. "Sorry to have troubled you." When shaking hands with him, Rieux suggested that if he was out for curious stories for his paper, he might say something about the extraordinary number of dead rats that were being found in the town just now. "Ah!" Rambert exclaimed. "That certainly interests me." On his way out at five for another round of visits, the doctor passed on the stairway a stocky, youngish man, with a big, deeply furrowed face and bushy eyebrows. He had met him once or twice in the top-floor apartment, which was occupied by some male Spanish dancers. Puffing a cigarette, Jean Tarrou was gazing down at the convulsions of a rat dying on the step in front of him. He looked up, and his gray eyes remained fixed on the doctor for some moments; then, after wishing him good day, he remarked that it was rather odd, the way all these rats were coming out of their holes to die.

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"Very odd," Rieux agreed, "and it ends by getting on one's nerves." "In a way, doctor, only in a way. We've not seen anything of the sort before, that's all. Personally I find it interesting, yes, definitely interesting." Tarrou ran his fingers through his hair to brush it off his forehead, looked again at the rat, which had now stopped moving, then smiled toward Rieux. "But really, doctor, it's the concierge's headache, isn't it?" As it so happened, the concierge was the next person Rieux encountered. He was leaning against the wall beside the street door; he was looking tired and his normally rubicund face had lost its color. "Yes, I know," the old man told Rieux, who had informed him of the latest casualty among the rats. "I keep finding 'em by twos and threes. But it's the same thing in the other houses in the street." He seemed depressed and worried, and was scratching his neck absentmindedly. Rieux asked him how he felt. The concierge wouldn't go so far as to say he was feeling ill. Still he wasn't quite up to the mark. In his opinion it was just due to worry; these damned rats had given him "a shock, like." It would be a relief when they stopped coming out and dying all over the place. Next morning—it was April 18—when the doctor was bringing back his mother from the station, he found M. Michel looking still more out of sorts. The stairway from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, ten or a dozen of them. The garbage cans of all the houses in the street were full of rats. The doctor's mother took it quite calmly. "It's like that sometimes," she said vaguely. She was a small woman with silver hair and dark, gentle eyes. "I'm so glad to be with you again, Bernard," she added. "The rats can't change that, anyhow."

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He nodded. It was a fact that everything seemed easy when she was there. However, he rang up the Municipal Office. He knew the man in charge of the department concerned with the extermination of vermin and he asked him if he'd heard about all the rats that were coming out to die in the open. Yes, Mercier knew all about it; in fact, fifty rats had been found in his offices, which were near the wharves. To tell the truth, he was rather perturbed; did the doctor think it meant anything serious? Rieux couldn't give a definite opinion, but he thought the sanitary service should take action of some kind. Mercier agreed. "And, if you think it's really worth the trouble, I'll get an order issued as well." "It certainly is worth the trouble," Rieux replied. His charwoman had just told him that several hundred dead rats had been collected in the big factory where her husband worked. It was about this time that our townsfolk began to show signs of uneasiness. For, from April 18 onwards, quantities of dead or dying rats were found in factories and warehouses. In some cases the animals were killed to put an end to their agony. From the outer suburbs to the center of the town, in all the byways where the doctor's duties took him, in every thoroughfare, rats were piled up in garbage cans or lying in long lines in the gutters. The evening papers that day took up the matter and inquired whether or not the city fathers were going to take steps, and what emergency measures were contemplated, to abate this particularly disgusting nuisance. Actually the municipality had not contemplated doing anything at all, but now a meeting was convened to discuss the situation. An order was transmitted to the sanitary service to collect the dead rats at daybreak every morning. When the rats had been collected, two municipal trucks were to take them to be burned in the town incinerator. But the situation worsened in the following days. There were more and more dead vermin in the streets, and the collectors had bigger truckloads

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every morning. On the fourth day the rats began to come out and die in batches. From basements, cellars, and sewers they emerged in long wavering files into the light of day, swayed helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of the horrified onlookers. At night, in passages and alleys, their shrill little death-cries could be clearly heard. In the mornings the bodies were found lining the gutters, each with a gout of blood, like a red flower, on its tapering muzzle; some were bloated and already beginning to rot, others rigid, with their whiskers still erect. Even in the busy heart of the town you found them piled in little heaps on landings and in backyards. Some stole forth to die singly in the halls of public offices, in school playgrounds, and even on cafe terraces. Our townsfolk were amazed to find such busy centers as the Place d'Armes, the boulevards, the promenade along the waterfront, dotted with repulsive little corpses. After the daily clean-up of the town, which took place at sunrise, there was a brief respite; then gradually the rats began to appear again in numbers that went on increasing throughout the day. People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of a still warm body. It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails. You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto so tranquil, and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature shoot up and the blood seething like wildfire in his veins. Things went so far that the Ransdoc Information Bureau (inquiries on all subjects promptly and accurately answered), which ran a free- information talk on the radio, by way of publicity, began its talk by announcing that no less than 6,231 rats had been collected and burned in a single day, April 25. Giving as it did an ampler and more precise view of the scene daily enacted before our eyes, this amazing figure administered a jolt to the public nerves. Hitherto people had merely grumbled at a stupid, rather obnoxious visitation; they now realized that this strange phenomenon, whose scope could not be measured and whose origins escaped detection, had something vaguely menacing about it. Only the old Spaniard whom Dr. Rieux was treating for asthma went on rubbing his hands and chuckling: "They're coming out, they're coming out," with senile glee.

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On April 28, when the Ransdoc Bureau announced that 8,ooo rats had been collected, a wave of something like panic swept the town. There was a demand for drastic measures, the authorities were accused of slackness, and people who had( houses on the coast spoke of moving there, early in the year though it was. But next day the bureau informed them that the phenomenon had abruptly ended and the sanitary service had collected only a trifling number of rats. Everyone breathed more freely. It was, however, on this same day, at noon, that Dr. Rieux, when parking his car in front of the apartment house where he lived, noticed the concierge coming toward him from the end of the street. He was dragging himself along, his head bent, arms and legs curiously splayed out, with the jerky movements of a clockwork doll. The old man was leaning on the arm of a priest whom the doctor knew. It was Father Paneloux, a learned and militant Jesuit, whom he had met occasionally and who was very highly thought of in our town, even in circles quite indifferent to religion. Rieux waited for the two men to draw up to him. M. Michel's eyes were fever-bright and he was breathing wheezily. The old man explained that, feeling "a bit off color," he had gone out to take the air. But he had started feeling pains in all sorts of places—in his neck, armpits, and groin—and had been obliged to turn back and ask Father Paneloux to give him an arm. "It's just swellings," he said. "I must have strained myself somehow." Leaning out of the window of the car, the doctor ran his hand over the base of Michel's neck; a hard lump, like a knot in wood, had formed there. "Go to bed at once, and take your temperature. I'll come to see you this afternoon." When the old man had gone, Rieux asked Father Paneloux what he made of this queer business about the rats. "Oh, I suppose it's an epidemic they've been having." The Father's eyes were smiling behind his big round glasses.

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After lunch, while Rieux was reading for the second time the telegram his wife had sent him from the sanatorium, announcing her arrival, the phone rang. It was one of his former patients, a clerk in the Municipal Office, ringing him up. He had suffered for a long time from a constriction of the aorta, and, as he was poor, Rieux had charged no fee. "Thanks, doctor, for remembering me. But this time it's somebody else. The man next door has had an accident. Please come at once." He sounded out of breath. Rieux thought quickly; yes, he could see the concierge afterwards. A few minutes later he was entering a small house in the rue Faidherbe, on the outskirts of the town. Halfway up the drafty, foul-smelling stairs, he saw Joseph Grand, the clerk, hurrying down to meet him. He was a man of about fifty years of age, tall and drooping, with narrow shoulders, thin limbs, and a yellowish mustache. "He looks better now," he told Rieux, "but I really thought his number was up." He blew his nose vigorously. On the top floor, the third, Rieux noticed something scrawled in red chalk on a door on the left: Come in, I’ve hanged myself. They entered the room. A rope dangled from a hanging lamp above a chair lying on its side. The dining-room table had been pushed into a corner. But the rope hung empty. "I got him down just in time." Grand seemed always to have trouble in finding his words, though he expressed himself in the simplest possible way. "I was going out and I heard a noise. When I saw that writing on the door, I thought it was a—a prank. Only, then I heard a funny sort of groan; it made my blood run cold, as they say." He scratched his head. "That must be a painful way of—of doing it, I should think. Naturally I went in." Grand had opened a door and they were standing on the threshold of a bright but scantily furnished bedroom. There was a brass bedstead against one of the walls, and a plump

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little man was lying there, breathing heavily. He gazed at them with bloodshot eyes. Rieux stopped short. In the intervals of the man's breathing he seemed to hear the little squeals of rats. But he couldn't see anything moving in the corners of the room. Then he went to the bedside. Evidently the man had not fallen from a sufficient height, or very suddenly, for the collar-bone had held. Naturally there was some asphyxia. An X-ray photograph would be needed. Meanwhile the doctor gave him a camphor injection and assured him he would be all right in a few days. "Thanks, doctor," the man mumbled. When Rieux asked Grand if he had notified the police, he hung his head. "Well, as a matter of fact, I haven't. The first thing, I thought, was to—" "Quite so," Rieux cut in. "I'll see to it." But the invalid made a fretful gesture and sat up in bed. He felt much better, he explained; really it wasn't worth the trouble. "Don't feel alarmed," Rieux said. "It's little more than a formality. Anyhow, I have to report this to the police." "Oh!" The man slumped back on the bed and started sobbing weakly. Grand, who had been twiddling his mustache while they were speaking, went up to the bed. "Come, Monsieur Cottard," he said. "Try to understand. People could say the doctor was to blame, if you took it into your head to have another shot at it." Cottard assured him tearfully that there wasn't the least risk of that; he'd had a sort of crazy fit, but it had passed and all he wanted now was to be left in peace. Rieux was writing a prescription.

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"Very well," he said. "We'll say no more about it for the present. I'll come and see you again in a day or two. But don't do anything silly." On the landing he told Grand that he was obliged to make a report, but would ask the police inspector to hold up the inquiry for a couple of days. "But somebody should watch Cottard tonight," he added. "Has he any relations?" "Not that I know of. But I can very well stay with him. I can't say I really know him, but one's got to help a neighbor, hasn't one?" As he walked down the stairs Rieux caught himself glancing into the darker corners, and he asked Grand if the rats had quite disappeared in his part of the town. Grand had no idea. True, he'd heard some talk about rats, but he never paid much attention to gossip like that. "I've other things to think about," he added. Rieux, who was in a hurry to get away, was already shaking his hand. There was a letter to write to his wife, and he wanted to see the concierge first. News-venders were shouting the latest news—that the rats had disappeared. But Rieux found his patient leaning over the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his belly and the other to his neck, vomiting pinkish bile into a slop-pail. After retching for some moments, the man lay back again, gasping. His temperature was 103, the ganglia of his neck and limbs were swollen, and two black patches were developing on his thighs. He now complained of internal pains. "It's like fire," he whimpered. "The bastard's burning me inside." He could hardly get the words through his fever-crusted lips and he gazed at the doctor with bulging eyes that his headache had suffused with tears. His wife cast an anxious look at Rieux, who said nothing.

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"Please, doctor," she said, "what is it?" "It might be—almost anything. There's nothing definite as yet. Keep him on a light diet and give him plenty to drink." The sick man had been complaining of a raging thirst. On returning to his apartment Rieux rang up his colleague Richard, one of the leading practitioners in the town. "No," Richard said, "I can't say I've noticed anything exceptional." "No cases of fever with local inflammation?" "Wait a bit! I have two cases with inflamed ganglia." "Abnormally so?" "Well," Richard said, "that depends on what you mean by 'normal.'" Anyhow, that night the porter was running a temperature of 104 and in delirium, always babbling about "them rats." Rieux tried a fixation abscess. When he felt the sting of the turpentine, the old man yelled: "The bastards!" The ganglia had become still larger and felt like lumps of solid fibrous matter embedded in the flesh. Mme Michel had completely broken down. "Sit up with him," the doctor said, "and call me if necessary." Next day, April 30, the sky was blue and slightly misty. A warm, gentle breeze was blowing, bringing with it a smell of flowers from the outlying suburbs. The morning noises of the streets sounded louder, gayer than usual. For everyone in our little town this day brought the promise of a new lease of life, now that the shadow of fear under which they had been living for a week had lifted. Rieux, too, was in an optimistic mood when he went down to see the concierge; he had been cheered up by a letter from his wife that had come with the first mail.

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Old M. Michel's temperature had gone down to 99 and, though he still looked very weak, he was smiling. "He's better, doctor, isn't he?" his wife inquired. "Well, it's a bit too early to say." At noon the sick man's temperature shot up abruptly to 104, he was in constant delirium and had started vomiting again. The ganglia in the neck were painful to the touch, and the old man seemed to be straining to hold his head as far as possible from his body. His wife sat at the foot of the bed, her hands on the counterpane, gently clasping his feet. She gazed at Rieux imploringly. "Listen," he said, "we'll have to move him to a hospital and try a special treatment. I'll ring up for the ambulance." Two hours later the doctor and Mme Michel were in the ambulance bending over the sick man. Rambling words were issuing from the gaping mouth, thickly coated now .vith sordes. He kept on repeating: "Them rats! Them damned rats!" His face had gone livid, a grayish green, his lips were bloodless, his breath came in sudden gasps. His limbs spread out by the ganglia, embedded in the berth as if he were trying to bury himself in it or a voice from the depths of the earth were summoning him below, the unhappy man seemed to be stifling under some unseen pressure. His wife was sobbing. "Isn't there any hope left, doctor?" "He's dead," said Rieux. Michel's death marked, one might say, the end of the first period, that of bewildering portents, and the beginning of another, relatively more trying, in which the perplexity of the early days gradually gave place to panic. Reviewing that first phase in the light of subsequent events, our townsfolk realized that they had never dreamed it possible that our little town should be chosen out for the scene of such grotesque happenings

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as the wholesale death of rats in broad daylight or the decease of concierges through exotic maladies. In this respect they were wrong, and their views obviously called for revision. Still, if things had gone thus far and no farther, force of habit would doubtless have gained the day, as usual. But other members of our community, not all menials or poor people, were to follow the path down which M. Michel had led the way. And it was then that fear, and with fear serious reflection, began. However, before entering on a detailed account of the next phase, the narrator proposes to give the opinion of another witness on the period that has been described. Jean Tarrou, whose acquaintance we have already made at the beginning of this narrative, had come to Oran some weeks before and was staying in a big hotel in the center of the town. Apparently he had private means and was not engaged in business. But though he gradually became a familiar figure in our midst, no one knew where he hailed from or what had brought him to Oran. He was often to be seen in public and at the beginning of spring was seen on one or other of the beaches almost every day; obviously he was fond of swimming. Good-humored, always ready with a smile, he seemed an addict of all normal pleasures without being their slave. In fact, the only habit he was known to have was that of cultivating the society of the Spanish dancers and musicians who abound in our town. His notebooks comprise a sort of chronicle of those strange early days we all lived through. But an unusual type of chronicle, since the writer seems to make a point of understatement, and at first sight we might almost imagine that Tarrou had a habit of observing events and people through the wrong end of a telescope. In those chaotic times he set himself to recording the history of what the normal historian passes over. Obviously we may deplore this curious kink in his character and suspect in him a lack of proper feeling. All the same, it is undeniable that these notebooks, which form a sort of discursive diary, supply the chronicler of the period with a host of seeming-trivial details which yet have their importance, and whose very oddity should be enough to prevent the reader from passing hasty judgment on this singular man. The earliest entries made by Jean Tarrou synchronize with his coming to Oran. From the outset they reveal a paradoxical satisfaction at the discovery of a town so intrinsically ugly. We find in them a minute

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description of the two bronze lions adorning the Municipal Office, and appropriate comments on the lack of trees, the hideousness of the houses, and the absurd lay-out of the town. Tarrou sprinkles his descriptions with bits of conversation overheard in streetcars and in the streets, never adding a comment on them except— this comes somewhat later—in the report of a dialogue concerning a man named Camps. It was a chat between two streetcar conductors. "You knew Camps, didn't you?" asked one of them. "Camps? A tall chap with a black mustache?" "That's him. A switchman." "Ah yes, I remember now." "Well, he's dead." "Oh? When did he die?" "After that business about the rats." "You don't say so! What did he die of?" "I couldn't say exactly. Some kind of fever. Of course, he never was what you might call fit. He got abscesses under the arms, and they did him in, it seems." "Still, he didn't look that different from other people." "I wouldn't say that. He had a weak chest and he used to play the trombone in the town band. It's hard on the lungs, blowing a trombone." "Ah, if you've got weak lungs, it don't do you any good, blowing down a big instrument like that." After jotting down this dialogue Tarrou went on to speculate why Camps had joined a band when it was so clearly inadvisable, and what obscure motive had led him to risk his life for the sake of parading the streets on Sunday mornings. We gather that Tarrou was agreeably impressed by a little scene that took place daily on the balcony of a house facing his window. His room at the hotel looked on to a small side street and there were always several cats sleeping in the shadow of the walls. Every day, soon after lunch, at a time when most people stayed indoors, enjoying a siesta, a dapper little old man stepped out on the balcony on the other side of the street. He had a soldierly bearing, very erect, and affected a military style of dressing; his snow-white hair was always brushed to perfect smoothness. Leaning over the balcony he would call: "Pussy! Pussy!" in a voice at once haughty and endearing. The cats blinked up at him with sleep-pale eyes, but made no move as yet. He then proceeded to tear some paper into scraps and let them fall into the street; interested by the fluttering shower of white butterflies, the cats came forward, lifting

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tentative paws toward the last scraps of paper. Then, taking careful aim, the old man would spit vigorously at the cats and, whenever a liquid missile hit the quarry, would beam with delight. Lastly, Tarrou seemed to have been quite fascinated by the commercial character of the town, whose aspect, activities, and even pleasures all seemed to be dictated by considerations of business. This idiosyncrasy— the term he uses in his diary—was warmly approved of by Tarrou; indeed, one of his appreciative comments ends on the exclamation: "At last!" These are the only passages in which our visitor's record, at this period, strikes a seemingly personal note. Its significance and the earnestness behind it might escape the reader on a casual perusal. For example, after describing how the discovery of a dead rat led the hotel cashier to make an error in his bill, Tarrou added: "Query: How contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth." Then, immediately following these eccentricities of thought and expression, we come on a detailed description of the streetcar service in the town, the structure of the cars, their indeterminate color, their unvarying dirtiness—and he concludes his observations with a "Very odd," which explains -nothing. So much by way of introduction to Tarrou's comments on the phenomenon of the rats. "The little old fellow opposite is quite disconsolate today. There are no more cats. The sight of all those dead rats strewn about the street may have excited their hunting instinct; anyhow, they all have vanished. To my thinking, there's no question of their eating the dead rats. Mine, I remember, turned up their noses at dead things. All the same, they're probably busy hunting in the cellars—hence the old boy's plight. His

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hair isn't as well brushed as usual, and he looks less alert, less military. You can see he is worried. After a few moments he went back into the room. But first he spat once—on emptiness. "In town today a streetcar was stopped because a dead rat had been found in it. (Query: How did it get there?) Two or three women promptly alighted. The rat was thrown out. The car went on. "The night watchman at the hotel, a level-headed man, assured me that all these rats meant trouble coming. 'When the rat leave a ship . . .' I replied that this held good for ships, but for towns it hadn't yet been demonstrated. But he stuck to his point. I asked what sort of 'trouble' we might expect. That he couldn't say; disasters always come out of the blue. But he wouldn't be surprised if there were an earthquake brewing. I admitted that was possible, and then he asked if the prospect didn't alarm me. " 'The only thing I'm interested in,' I told him, 'is acquiring peace of mind.' "He understood me perfectly. "I find a family that has its meals in this hotel quite interesting. The father is a tall, thin man, always dressed in black and wearing a starched collar. The top of his head is bald, with two tufts of gray hair on each side. His small, beady eyes, narrow nose, and hard, straight mouth make him look like a well-brought-up owl. He is always first at the door of the restaurant, stands aside to let his wife—a tiny woman, like a black mouse—go in, and then comes in himself with a small boy and girl, dressed like performing poodles, at his heels. When they are at the table he remains standing till his wife is seated and only then the two poodles can perch themselves on their chairs. He uses no terms of endearment to his family, addresses politely spiteful remarks to his wife, and bluntly tells the kids what he thinks of them. " 'Nicole, you're behaving quite disgracefully.' "The little girl is on the brink of tears—which is as it should be.

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"This morning the small boy was all excitement about the rats, and started saying something on the subject. " 'Philippe, one doesn't talk of rats at table. For the future I forbid you to use the word.' " 'Your father's right,' approved the mouse. "The two poodles buried their noses in their plates, and the owl acknowledged thanks by a curt, perfunctory nod. "This excellent example notwithstanding, everybody in town is talking about the rats, and the local newspaper has taken a hand. The town- topics column, usually very varied, is now devoted exclusively to a campaign against the local authorities. 'Are our city fathers aware that the decaying bodies of these rodents constitute a grave danger to the population?' The manager of the hotel can talk of nothing else. But he has a personal grievance, too; that dead rats should be found in the elevator of a three-star hotel seems to him the end of all things. To console him, I said: 'But, you know, everybody's in the same boat.' " 'That's just it,' he replied. 'Now we're like everybody else.' "He was the first to tell me about the outbreak of this queer kind of fever which is causing much alarm. One of his chambermaids has got it. " 'But I feel sure it's not contagious,' he hastened to assure me. "I told him it was all the same to me. " 'Ah, I understand, sir. You're like me, you're a fatalist.' "I had said nothing of the kind and, what's more, am not a fatalist. I told him so. . . ." From this point onwards Tarrou's entries deal in some detail with the curious fever that was causing much anxiety among the public. When

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noting that the little old man, now that the rats had ceased appearing, had regained his cats and was studiously perfecting his shooting, Tarrou adds that a dozen or so cases of this fever were known to have occurred, and most had ended fatally. For the light it may throw on the narrative that follows, Tarrou's description of Dr. Rieux may be suitably inserted here. So far as the narrator can judge, it is fairly accurate. "Looks about thirty-five. Moderate height. Broad shoulders. Almost rectangular face. Dark, steady eyes, but prominent jaws. A biggish, well- modeled nose. Black hair, cropped very close. A curving mouth with thick, usually tight-set lips. With his tanned skin, the black down on his hands and arms, the dark but becoming suits he always wears, he reminds one of a Sicilian peasant. "He walks quickly. When crossing a street, he steps off the sidewalk without changing his pace, but two out of three times makes a little hop when he steps on to the sidewalk on the other side. He is absentminded and, when driving his car, often leaves his side-signals on after he has turned a corner. Always bareheaded. Looks knowledgeable." Tarrou's figures were correct. Dr. Rieux was only too well aware of the serious turn things had taken. After seeing to the isolation of the concierge's body, he had rung up Richard and asked what he made of these inguinal-fever cases. "I can make nothing of them," Richard confessed. "There have been two deaths, one in forty-eight hours, the other in three days. And the second patient showed all the signs of convalescence when I visited him on the second day." "Please let me know if you have other cases," Rieux said. He rang up some other colleagues. As a result of these inquiries he gathered that there had been some twenty cases of the same type within

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the last few days. Almost all had ended fatally. He then advised Richard, who was chairman of the local Medical Association, to have any fresh cases put into isolation wards. "Sorry," Richard said, "but I can't do anything about it. An order to that effect can be issued only by the Prefect. Anyhow, what grounds have you for supposing there's danger of contagion?" "No definite grounds. But the symptoms are definitely alarming." Richard, however, repeated that "such measures were outside his province." The most he could do was to put the matter up to the Prefect. But while these talks were going on, the weather changed for the worse. On the day following old Michel's death the sky clouded up and there were brief torrential downpours, each of which was followed by some hours of muggy heat. The aspect of the sea, too, changed; its dark-blue translucency had gone and, under the lowering sky, it had steely or silvery glints that hurt the eyes to look at. The damp heat of the spring made everyone long for the coming of the dry, clean summer heat. On the town, humped snail-wise on its plateau and shut off almost everywhere from the sea, a mood of listlessness descended. Hemmed in by lines and lines of whitewashed walls, walking between rows of dusty shops, or riding in the dingy yellow streetcars, you felt, as it were, trapped by the climate. This, however, was not the case with Rieux's old Spanish patient, who welcomed this weather with enthusiasm. "It cooks you," he said. "Just the thing for asthma." Certainly it "cooked you," but exactly like a fever. Indeed, "the whole town was running a temperature; such anyhow was the impression Dr. Rieux could not shake off as he drove to the rue Faidherbe for the inquiry into Cottard's attempted suicide. That this impression was unreasonable he knew, and he attributed it to nervous exhaustion; he had certainly his full share of worries just at present. In fact, it was high time to put the brakes on and try to get his nerves into some sort of order.

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On reaching his destination he found that the police inspector hadn't turned up yet. Grand, who met him on the landing, suggested they should wait in his place, leaving the door open. The municipal clerk had two rooms, both very sparsely furnished. The only objects to catch the eye were a bookshelf on which lay two or three dictionaries, and a small blackboard on which one could just read two half-obliterated words: "flowery avenues." Grand announced that Cottard had had a good night. But he'd waked up this morning with pains in his head and feeling very low. Grand, too, looked tired and overwrought; he kept pacing up and down the room, opening and closing a portfolio crammed with sheets of manuscript that lay on the table. Meanwhile, however, he informed the doctor that he really knew very little about Cottard, but believed him to have private means in a small way. Cottard was a queer bird. For a long while their relations went no farther than wishing each other good-day when they met on the stairs. "I've only had two conversations with him. Some days ago I upset a box of colored chalks I was bringing home, on the landing. They were red and blue chalks. Just then Cottard came out of his room and he helped me pick them up. He asked me what I wanted colored chalks for." Grand had then explained to him that he was trying to brush up his Latin. He'd learned it at school, of course, but his memories had grown blurred. "You see, doctor, I've been told that a knowledge of Latin gives one a better understanding of the real meanings of French words." So he wrote Latin words on his blackboard, then copied out again in blue chalk the part of each word that changed in conjugation or declension, and in red chalk the part of the word that never varied. "I'm not sure if Cottard followed this very clearly, but he seemed interested and asked me for a red chalk. That rather surprised me, but after all— Of course I couldn't guess the use he'd put it to."

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Rieux asked what was the subject of their second conversation. But just then the inspector came, accompanied by a clerk, and said he wished to begin by hearing Grand's statement. The doctor noticed that Grand, when referring to Cottard, always called him "the unfortunate man," and at one moment used even the expression "his grim resolve." When discussing the possible motives for the attempted suicide, Grand showed an almost finical anxiety over his choice of words. Finally he elected for the expression "a secret grief." The inspector asked if there had been anything in Cottard's manner that suggested what he called his "intent to felo-de-se." "He knocked at my door yesterday," Grand said, "and asked me for a match. I gave him a box. He said he was sorry to disturb me but that, as we were neighbors, he hoped I wouldn't mind. He assured me he'd bring back my box, but I told him to keep it." The inspector asked Grand if he'd noticed anything queer about Cottard. "What struck me as queer was that he always seemed to want to start a conversation. But he should have seen I was busy with my work." Grand turned to Rieux and added rather shyly: "Some private work." The inspector now said that he must see the invalid and hear what he had to say. Rieux thought it would be wiser to prepare Cottard for the visit. When he entered the bedroom he found Cottard, who was wearing a gray flannel nightshirt, sitting up in bed and gazing at the door with a scared expression on his face. "It's the police, isn't it?" "Yes," Rieux said, "but don't get flustered. There are only some formalities to be gone through, and then you'll be left in peace." Cottard replied that all this was quite needless, to his thinking, and anyhow he didn't like the police. Rieux showed some irritation.

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"I don't love them either. It's only a matter of answering a few questions as briefly and correctly as you can, and then you'll be through with it." Cottard said nothing and Rieux began to move to the door. He had hardly taken a step when the little man called him back and, as soon as he was at the bedside, gripped his hands. "They can't be rough with an invalid, a man who's hanged himself, can they, doctor?" Rieux gazed down at him for a moment, then assured him that there was no question of anything like that, and in any case he was here to protect his patient. This seemed to relieve Cottard, and Rieux went out to get the inspector. After Grand's deposition had been read out, Cottard was asked to state the exact motive of his act. He merely replied, without looking at the police officer, that "a secret grief" described it well enough. The inspector then asked him peremptorily if he intended to "have another go at it." Showing more animation, Cottard said certainly not, his one wish was to be left in peace. "Allow me to point out, my man," the police officer rejoined with asperity, "that just now it's you who're troubling the peace of others." Rieux signed to him not to continue, and he left it at that. "A good hour wasted!" the inspector sighed when the door closed behind them. "As you can guess, we've other things to think about, what with this fever everybody's talking of." He then asked the doctor if there was any serious danger to the town; Rieux answered that he couldn't say. "It must be the weather," the police officer decided. "That's what it is." No doubt it was the weather. As the day wore on, everything grew sticky to the touch, and Rieux felt his anxiety increasing after each visit. That evening a neighbor of his old patient in the suburbs started vomiting, pressing his hand to his groin, and running a high fever

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accompanied by delirium. The ganglia were much bigger than M. Michel's. One of them was beginning to suppurate, and presently split open like an overripe fruit. On returning to his apartment, Rieux rang up the medical-stores depot for the district. In his professional diary for the day the only entry was: "Negative reply." Already he was receiving calls for similar cases from various parts of the town. Obviously the abscesses had to be lanced. Two crisscross strokes, and the ganglion disgorged a mixture of blood and pus. Their limbs stretched out as far as they could manage, the sick man went on bleeding. Dark patches appeared on their legs and stomachs; sometimes a ganglion would stop suppurating, then suddenly swell again. Usually the sick man died, in a stench of corruption. The local press, so lavish of news about the rats, now had nothing to say. For rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street. Meanwhile, government and municipal officials were putting their heads together. So long as each individual doctor had come across only two or three cases, no one had thought of taking action. But it was merely a matter of adding up the figures and, once this had been done, the total was startling. In a very few days the number of cases had risen by leaps and bounds, and it became evident to all observers of this strange malady that a real epidemic had set in. This was the state of affairs when Castel, one of Rieux's colleagues and a much older man than he, came to see him. "Naturally," he said to Rieux, "you know what it is." "I'm waiting for the result of the post-mortems." "Well, 7 know. And I don't need any post-mortems. I was in China for a good part of my career, and I saw some cases in Paris twenty years ago. Only no one dared to call them by their name on that occasion. The usual taboo, of course; the public mustn't be alarmed, that wouldn't do at all. And then, as one of my colleagues said, 'It's unthinkable. Everyone knows it's ceased to appear in western Europe.' Yes, everyone knew that—except the dead men. Come now, Rieux, you know as well as I do what it is."

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Rieux pondered. He was looking out of the window of his surgery, at the tall cliff that closed the half-circle of the bay on the far horizon. Though blue, the sky had a dull sheen that was softening as the light declined. "Yes, Castel," he replied. "It's hardly credible. But everything points to its being plague." Castel got up and began walking toward the door. "You know," the old doctor said, "what they're going to tell us? That it vanished from temperate countries long ago." " 'Vanished'? What does that word really mean?" Rieux shrugged his shoulders. "Yes. And don't forget. Just under twenty years ago, in Paris too." "Right. Let's hope it won't prove any worse this time than it did then. But really it's incredible." The word "plague" had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor's uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was torn between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But

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though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend's company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, had without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal. For the simple reason that, when a man is a doctor, he comes to have his own ideas of physical suffering, and to acquire somewhat more imagination than the average. Looking from his window at the town, outwardly quite unchanged, the doctor felt little more than a faint qualm for the future, a vague unease. He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to

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Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day. Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces? In any case the figures of those old historians, like Procopius, weren't to be relied on; that was common knowledge. Seventy years ago, at Canton, forty thousand rats died of plague before the disease spread to the inhabitants. But, again, in the Canton epidemic there was no reliable way of counting up the rats. A very rough estimate was all that could be made, with, obviously, a wide margin for error. "Let's see," the doctor murmured to himself, "supposing the length of a rat to be ten inches, forty thousand rats placed end to end would make a line of . . ." He pulled himself up sharply. He was letting his imagination play pranks—the last thing wanted just now. A few cases, he told himself, don't make an epidemic; they merely call for serious precautions. He must fix his mind, first of all, on the observed facts: stupor and extreme prostration, buboes, intense thirst, delirium, dark blotches on the body, internal dilatation, and, in conclusion ... In conclusion, some words came back to the doctor's mind; aptly enough, the concluding sentence of the description of the symptoms given in his medical handbook: "The pulse becomes fluttering, dicrotic, and intermittent, and death ensues as the result of the slightest movement." Yes, in conclusion, the patient's life hung on a thread, and three people out of four (he remembered the exact figures) were too impatient not to make the very slight movement that snapped the thread. The doctor was still looking out of the window. Beyond it lay the tranquil radiance of a cool spring sky; inside the room a word was echoing still, the word "plague." A word that conjured up in the doctor's mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes, from which were rising the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it's possible to be at once so dull and happy. A

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tranquillity so casual and thoughtless seemed almost effortlessly to give the lie to those old pictures of the plague: Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London's ghoul-haunted darkness—nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain. No, all those horrors were not near enough as yet even to ruffle the equanimity of that spring afternoon. The clang of an unseen streetcar came through the window, briskly refuting cruelty and pain. Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world. And, gazing in the direction of the bay, Dr. Rieux called to mind the plague-fires of which Lucretius tells, which the Athenians kindled on the seashore. The dead were brought there after nightfall, but there was not room enough, and the living fought one another with torches for a space where to lay those who had been dear to them; for they had rather engage in bloody conflicts than abandon their dead to the waves. A picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumbrous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky. Yes, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility. . . . But these extravagant forebodings dwindled in the light of reason. True, the word "plague" had been uttered; true, at this very moment one or two victims were being seized and laid low by the disease. Still, that could stop, or be stopped. It was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing what needed to be done. Then the plague would come to an end, because it was unthinkable, or, rather, because one thought of it on misleading lines. If, as was most likely, it died out, all would be well. If not, one would know it anyhow for what it was and what steps should be taken for coping with and finally overcoming it.

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The doctor opened the window, and at once the noises of the town grew louder. The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a near-by workshop. Rieux pulled himself together. There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done. The doctor's musings had reached this point when the visit of Joseph Grand was announced. Grand's duties as clerk in the Municipal Office were varied, and he was sometimes employed in the statistical department on compiling the figures of births, marriages, and deaths. Thus it had fallen to him to add up the number of deaths during the last few days, and, being of an obliging disposition, he had volunteered to bring a copy of the latest figures to the doctor. Grand, who was waving a sheet of paper, was accompanied by his neighbor, Cottard. "The figures are going up, doctor. Eleven deaths in forty-eight hours." Rieux shook hands with Cottard and asked him how he was feeling. Grand put in a word explaining that Cottard was bent on thanking the doctor and apologizing for the trouble he had given. But Rieux was gazing frowningly at the figures on the sheet of paper. "Well," he said, "perhaps we'd better make up our minds to call this disease by its name. So far we've been only shillyshallying. Look here, I'm off to the laboratory; like to come with me?"

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"Quite so, quite so," Grand said as he went down the stairs at the doctor's heels. "I, too, believe in calling things by their name. But what's the name in this case?" "That I shan't say, and anyhow you wouldn't gain, anything by knowing." "You see," Grand smiled. "It's not so easy after all!" They started off toward the Place d'Armes. Cottard still kept silent. The streets were beginning to fill up. The brief dusk of our town was already giving place to night, and the first stars glimmered above the still clearly marked horizon. A few moments later all the street-lamps went on, dimming the sky, and the voices in the street seemed to rise a tone. "Excuse me," Grand said at the corner of the Place d'Armes, "but I must catch my car now. My evenings are sacred. As we say in my part of the world: 'Never put off to tomorrow—'" Rieux had already noticed Grand's trick of professing to quote some turn of speech from "his part of the world" (he hailed from Montélimar), and following up with some such hackneyed expression as "lost in dreams," or "pretty as a picture." "That's so," Cottard put in. "You can never budge him from his den after dinner." Rieux asked Grand if he was doing extra work for the municipality. Grand said no, he was working on his own account. "Really?" Rieux said, to keep the conversation going. "And are you getting on well with it?" "Considering I've been at it for years, it would be surprising if I wasn't. Though in one sense there hasn't been much progress." "May one know"—the doctor halted—"what it is that you're engaged on?" Grand put a hand up to his hat and tugged it down upon his big, protruding ears, then murmured some half-inaudible remark from which

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Rieux seemed to gather that Grand's work was connected with "the growth of a personality." Then he-turned rather hastily and a moment later was hurrying, with short, quick steps, under the fig trees lining the boulevard de la Marne. When they were at the laboratory gate, Cottard told the doctor that he would greatly like to see him and ask his advice about something. Rieux, who was fingering in his pocket the sheet of paper with the figures on it, said he'd better call during his consulting-hours; then, changing his mind, told him he would be in his part of the town next day and would drop in to see him at the end of the afternoon. On leaving Cottard the doctor noticed that he was thinking of Grand, trying to picture him in the midst of an outbreak of plague—not an outbreak like the present one, which would probably not prove serious, but like one of the great visitations of the past. "He's the kind of man who always escapes in such cases." Rieux remembered having read somewhere that the plague spared weak constitutions and chose its victims chiefly among the robust. Still thinking of Grand, he decided that he was something of a "mystery man" in his small way. True, at first sight, Grand manifested both the outward signs and typical manner of a humble employee in the local administration. Tall and thin, he seemed lost in the garments that he always chose a size too large, under the illusion that they would wear longer. Though he still had most of the teeth in his lower jaw, all the upper ones were gone, with the result that when he smiled, raising his upper lip—the lower scarcely moved—his mouth looked like a small black hole let into his face. Also he had the walk of a shy young priest, sidling along walls and slipping mouselike into doorways, and he exuded a faint odor of smoke and basement rooms; in short, he had all the attributes of insignificance. Indeed, it cost an effort to picture him otherwise than bent over a desk, studiously revising the tariff of the town baths or gathering for a junior secretary the materials of a report on the new garbage-collection tax. Even before you knew what his employment was, you had a feeling that he'd been brought into the world for the sole purpose of performing the discreet but needful duties of a temporary assistant municipal clerk on a salary of sixty-two francs, thirty centimes a day.

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This was, in fact, the entry that he made each month in the staff register at the Municipal Office, in the column Post in Which Employed. When twenty-two years previously—after obtaining a matriculation certificate beyond which, for lack of money, he was unable to progress—he was given this temporary post, he had been led to expect, or so he said, speedy "confirmation" in it. It was only a matter of proving his ability to cope with the delicate problems raised by the administration of our city. Once confirmed, they had assured him, he couldn't fail to be promoted to a grade that would enable him to live quite comfortably. Ambition, certainly, was not the spur that activated Joseph Grand; that he would swear to, wryly smiling. All he desired was the prospect of a life suitably insured on the material side by honest work, enabling him to devote his leisure to his hobbies. If he'd accepted the post offered him, it was from honorable motives and, if he might say so, loyalty to an ideal. But this "temporary" state of things had gone on and on, the cost of living rose by leaps and bounds, and Grand's pay, in spite of some statutory rises, was still a mere pittance. He had confided this to Rieux, but nobody else seemed aware of his position. And here lies Grand's originality, or anyhow an indication of it. He could certainly have brought to official notice, if not his rights—of which he wasn't sure—at least the promises given him. But, for one thing, the departmental head who had made them had been dead for some time and, furthermore, Grand no longer remembered their exact terms. And lastly—this was the real trouble—Joseph Grand couldn't find his words. This peculiarity, as Rieux had noticed, was really the key to the personality of our worthy fellow citizen. And this it was which always prevented him from writing the mildly protesting letter he had in mind, or taking the steps the situation called for. According to him, he felt a particular aversion from talking about his "rights"—the word was one that gave him pause—and likewise from mentioning a "promise" —which would have implied that he was claiming his due and thus bespoken an audacity incompatible with the humble post he filled. On the other hand, he refused to use expressions such as "your kindness," "gratitude," or even "solicit," which, to his thinking, were incompatible with his personal dignity. Thus, owing to his inability to find the right words, he had gone on performing his obscure, ill-paid duties until a somewhat advanced age. Also—this, anyhow, was what he told Dr. Rieux—he had

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come, after long experience, to realize that he could always count on living within his means; all he had to do was to scale down his needs to his income. Thus he confirmed the wisdom of an opinion often voiced by our mayor, a business magnate of the town, when he insisted vehemently that in the last analysis (he emphasized this choice expression, which indeed clinched his argument) there was no reason to believe that anyone had ever died of hunger in the town. In any case, the austere, not to say ascetic fife of Joseph Grand was, in the last analysis, a guarantee against any anxiety in this respect. He went on looking for his words. In a certain sense it might well be said that his was an exemplary life. He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as -elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to. Without a blush he confessed to dearly loving his nephews and sister, his only surviving near relation, whom he went to France to visit every other year. He admitted that the thought of his parents, whom he lost when he was very young, often gave him a pang. He did not conceal the fact that he had a special affection for a church bell in his part of the town which started pealing very melodiously at about five every afternoon. Yet to express such emotions, simple as they were, the least word cost him a terrible effort. And this difficulty in finding his words had come to be the bane of his life. "Oh, doctor," he would exclaim, "how I'd like to learn to express myself!" He brought the subject up each time he met Rieux. That evening, as he watched Grand's receding form, it flashed on the doctor what it was that Grand was trying to convey; he was evidently writing a book or something of the sort. And quaintly enough, as he made his way to the laboratory, this thought reassured him. He realized how absurd it was, but he simply couldn't believe that a pestilence on the great scale could befall a town where people like Grand were to be found, obscure functionaries cultivating harmless eccentricities. To be precise, he couldn't picture such eccentricities existing in a plague- stricken community, and he concluded that the chances were all against the plague's making any headway among our fellow citizens.

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NEXT day, by dint of a persistence that many thought ill-advised, Rieux persuaded the authorities to convene a health committee at the Prefect's office. “People in town are getting nervous, that's a fact," Dr. Richard admitted. "And of course all sorts of wild rumors are going round. The Prefect said to me, 'Take prompt action if you like, but don't attract attention.' He personally is convinced that it's a false alarm." Rieux gave Castel a lift to the Prefect's office. "Do you know," Castel said when they were in the car, "that we haven't a gram of serum in the whole district?" "I know. I rang up the depot. The director seemed quite startled. It'll have to be sent from Paris." "Let's hope they're quick about it." "I sent a wire yesterday," Rieux said. The Prefect greeted them amiably enough, but one could see his nerves were on edge. "Let's make a start, gentlemen," he said. "Need I review the situation?" Richard thought that wasn't necessary. He and his colleagues were acquainted with the facts. The only question was what measures should be adopted. "The question," old Castel cut in almost rudely, "is to know whether it's plague or not." Two or three of the doctors present protested. The others seemed to hesitate. The Prefect gave a start and hurriedly glanced toward the door

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to make sure it had prevented this outrageous remark from being overheard in the corridor Richard said that in his opinion the great thing was not to take an alarmist view. All that could be said at present was that we had to deal with a special type of fever, with inguinal complications; in medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions. Old Castel, who was placidly chewing his draggled yellow mustache, raised his pale, bright eyes and gazed at Rieux. Then, after sweeping the other members of the committee with a friendly glance, he said that he knew quite well that it was plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were this to be officially admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps. This was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the facts and, if it would ease their minds, he was quite prepared to say it wasn't plague. The Prefect seemed ruffled and remarked that, in any case, this line of argument seemed to him unsound. "The important thing," Castel replied, "isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think." Rieux, who had said nothing so far, was asked for his opinion. "We are dealing," he said, "with a fever of a typhoidal nature, accompanied by vomiting and buboes. I have incised these buboes and had the pus analyzed; our laboratory analyst believes he has identified the plague bacillus. But I am bound to add that there are specific modifications that don't quite tally with the classical description of the plague bacillus." Richard pointed out that this justified a policy of wait-and-see; anyhow, it would be wise to await the statistical report on the series of analyses that had been going on for several days. "When a microbe," Rieux said, "after a short intermission can quadruple in three days' time the volume of the spleen, can swell the mesenteric ganglia to the size of an orange and give them the consistency of gruel, a policy of wait-and-see is, to say the least of it, unwise. The foci of infection are

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steadily extending. Judging by the rapidity with which the disease is spreading, it may well, unless we can stop it, kill off half the town before two months are out. That being so, it has small importance whether you call it plague or some rare kind of fever. The important thing is to prevent its killing off half the population of this town." Richard said it was a mistake to paint too gloomy a picture, and, moreover, the disease hadn't been proved to be contagious; indeed, relatives of his patients, living under the same roof, had escaped it. "But others have died," Rieux observed. "And obviously contagion is never absolute; otherwise you'd have a constant mathematical progression and the death-rate would rocket up catastrophically. It's not a question of painting too black a picture. It's a question of taking precautions." Richard, however, summing up the situation as he saw it, pointed out that, if the epidemic did not cease spontaneously, it would be necessary to apply the rigorous prophylactic measures laid down in the Code. And, to do this, it would be necessary to admit officially that plague had broken out. But of this there was no absolute certainty; therefore any hasty action was to be deprecated. Rieux stuck to his guns. "The point isn't whether the measures provided for in the Code are rigorous, but whether they are needful to prevent the death of half the population. All the rest is a matter of administrative action, and I needn't remind you that our constitution has provided for such emergencies by empowering prefects to issue the necessary orders." "Quite true," the Prefect assented, "but I shall need your professional declaration that the epidemic is one of plague." "If we don't make that declaration," Rieux said, "there's a risk that half the population may be wiped out." Richard cut in with some impatience.

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"The truth is that our colleague is convinced it's plague; his description of the syndrome proved it." Rieux replied that he had not described a "syndrome," but merely what he'd seen with his own eyes. And what he'd seen was buboes, and high fever accompanied by delirium, ending fatally within forty-eight hours. Could Dr. Richard take the responsibility of declaring that the epidemic would die out without the imposition of rigorous prophylactic measures? Richard hesitated, then fixed his eyes on Rieux. "Please answer me quite frankly. Are you absolutely convinced it's plague?" "You're stating the problem wrongly. It's not a question of the term I use; it's a question of time." "Your view, I take it," the Prefect put in, "is this. Even if it isn't plague, the prophylactic measures enjoined by law for coping with a state of plague should be put into force immediately?" "If you insist on my having a View,' that conveys it accurately enough." The doctors confabulated. Richard was their spokesman: "It comes to this. We are to take the responsibility of acting as though the epidemic were plague." This way of putting it met with general approval. "It doesn't matter to me," Rieux said, "how you phrase it. My point is that we should not act as if there were no likelihood that half the population would be wiped out; for then it would be." Followed by scowls and protestations, Rieux left the committee-room. Some minutes later, as he was driving down a back street redolent of fried fish and urine, a woman screaming in agony, her groin dripping blood, stretched out her arms toward him.

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ON the day after the committee meeting the fever notched another small advance. It even found its way into the papers, but discreetly; only a few brief references to it were made. On the following day, however, Rieux observed that small official notices had been just put up about the town, though in places where they would not attract much attention. It was hard to find in these notices any indication that the authorities were facing the situation squarely. The measures enjoined were far from Draconian and one had the feeling that many concessions had been made to a desire not to alarm the public. The instructions began with a bald statement that a few cases of a malignant fever had been reported in Oran; it was not possible as yet to say if this fever was contagious. The symptoms were not so marked as to be really perturbing and the authorities felt sure they could rely on the townspeople to treat the situation with composure. None the less, guided by a spirit of prudence that all would appreciate, the Prefect was putting into force some precautionary measures. If these measures were carefully studied and properly applied, they would obviate any risk of an epidemic. This being so, the Prefect felt no doubt that everybody in his jurisdiction would wholeheartedly second his personal efforts. The notice outlined the general program that the authorities had drawn up. It included a systematic extermination of the rat population by injecting poison gas into the sewers, and a strict supervision of the water-supply. The townspeople were advised to practice extreme cleanliness, and any who found fleas on their persons were directed to call at the municipal dispensaries. Also heads of households were ordered promptly to report any fever case diagnosed by their doctors and to permit the isolation of sick members of their families in special wards at the hospital. These wards, it was explained, were equipped to provide patients with immediate treatment and ensure the maximum prospect of recovery. Some supplementary regulations enjoined compulsory disinfection of the sickroom and of the vehicle in which the patient traveled. For the rest, the Prefect confined himself to advising all who had been in contact with the patient to consult the sanitary inspector and strictly to follow his advice.

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Dr. Rieux swung round brusquely from the poster and started back to his surgery. Grand, who was awaiting him there, raised his arms dramatically when the doctor entered. "Yes," Rieux said, "I know. The figures are rising." On the previous day ten deaths had been reported. The doctor told Grand that he might be seeing him in the evening, as he had promised to visit Cottard. "An excellent idea," Grand said. "You'll do him good. As a matter of fact, I find him greatly changed." "In what way?" "He's become amiable." "Wasn't he amiable before?" Grand seemed at a loss. He couldn't say that Cottard used to be unamiable; the term wouldn't have been correct. But Cottard was a silent, secretive man, with something about him that made Grand think of a wild boar. His bedroom, meals at a cheap restaurant, some rather mysterious comings and goings—these were the sum of Cottard's days. He described himself as a traveling salesman in wines and spirits. Now and then he was visited by two or three men, presumably customers. Sometimes in the evening he would go to a movie across the way. In this connection Grand mentioned a detail he had noticed—that Cottard seemed to have a preference for gangster films. But the thing that had struck him most about the man was his aloofness, not to say his mistrust of everyone he met. And now, so Grand said, there had been a complete change. "I don't quite know how to put it, but I must say I've an impression that he is trying to make himself agreeable to all and sundry, to be in

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everybody's good books. Nowadays he often talks to me, he suggests we should go out together, and I can't bring myself to refuse. What's more, he interests me, and of course I saved his life." Since his attempt at suicide Cottard had had no more visitors. In the streets, in shops, he was always trying to strike up friendships. To the grocer he was all affability; no one could take more pains than he to show his interest in the tobacconist's gossip. "This particular tobacconist—a woman, by the way," Grand explained, "is a holy terror. I told Cottard so, but he replied that I was prejudiced and she had plenty of good points, only one had to find them out." On two or three occasions Cottard had invited Grand to come with him to the luxury restaurants and cafes of the town, which he had recently taken to patronizing. "There's a pleasant atmosphere in them," he explained, "and then one's in good company." Grand noticed that the staff made much of Cottard and he soon discovered why, when he saw the lavish tips his companion gave. The traveling salesman seemed greatly to appreciate the amiability shown him in return for his largesse. One day when the head waiter had escorted him to the door and helped him into his overcoat, Cottard said to Grand: "He's a nice fellow, and he'd make a good witness." "A witness? I don't follow." Cottard hesitated before answering. "Well, he could say I'm not really a bad kind of man." But his humor had its ups and downs. One day when the grocer had shown less affability, he came home in a tearing rage. "He's siding with the others, the swine!"

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"With what others?" "The whole damned lot of them." Grand had personally witnessed an odd scene that took place at the tobacconist's. An animated conversation was in progress and the woman behind the counter started airing her views about a murder case that had created some stir in Algiers. A young commercial employee had killed an Algerian on a beach. "I always say," the woman began, "if they clapped all that scum in jail, decent folks could breathe more freely." She was too much startled by Cottard's reaction—he dashed out of the shop without a word of excuse—to continue. Grand and the woman gazed after him, dumbfounded. Subsequently Grand reported to the doctor other changes in Cottard's character. Cottard had always professed very liberal ideas, as his pet dictum on economic questions, "Big fish eat little fish," implied. But now the only Oran newspaper he bought was the conservative organ, and one could hardly help suspecting that he made a point of reading it in public places. Somewhat of the same order was a request he made to Grand shortly before he left his sick-bed; Grand mentioned he was going to the post office and Cottard asked him to be kind enough to dispatch a money order for a hundred francs to a sister living at a distance, mentioning that he sent her this sum every month. Then, just when Grand was leaving the room, he called him back. "No, send her two hundred francs. That'll be a nice surprise for her. She believes I never give her a thought. But actually I'm devoted to her." Not long after this he made some curious remarks to Grand in the course of conversation. He had badgered Grand into telling him about the somewhat mysterious "private work" to which Grand gave his evenings. "I know!" Cottard exclaimed. "You're writing a book, aren't you?" "Something of the kind. But it's not so simple as that."

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"Ah!" Cottard sighed. "I only wish I had a knack for writing." When Grand showed his surprise, Cottard explained with some embarrassment that being a literary man must make things easier in lots of ways. "Why?" Grand asked. "Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him." "It looks," said Rieux to Grand on the morning when the official notices were posted, "as if this business of the rats had addled his brain, as it has done for so many other people. That's all it is. Or perhaps he's scared of the 'fever.'" "I doubt it, doctor. If you want to know my opinion, he—" He paused; with a machine-gun rattle from its exhaust the "deratization" van was clattering by. Rieux kept silent until it was possible to make himself audible, then asked, without much interest, what Grand's opinion was. "He's a man with something pretty serious on his conscience," Grand said gravely. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. As the inspector had said, he'd other fish to fry. That afternoon Rieux had another talk with Castel. The serum had not yet come. "In any case," Rieux said, "I wonder if it will be much use. This bacillus is such a queer one." "There," Castel said, "I don't agree with you. These little brutes always have an air of originality. But, at bottom, it's always the same thing."

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"That's your theory, anyhow. Actually, of course, we know next to nothing on the subject." "I grant you, it's only my theory. Still, in a sense, that goes for everybody." Throughout the day the doctor was conscious that the slightly dazed feeling that came over him whenever he thought about the plague was growing more pronounced. Finally he realized that he was afraid! On two occasions he entered crowded cafes. Like Cottard he felt a need for friendly contacts, human warmth. A stupid instinct, Rieux told himself; still, it served to remind him that he'd promised to visit the traveling salesman. Cottard was standing beside the dining-table when the doctor entered his room that evening. A detective story lay open on the tablecloth. But the night was closing in and it would have been difficult to read in the growing darkness. Most likely Cottard had been sitting musing in the twilight until he heard the ring at his door. Rieux asked how he was feeling. Cottard sat down and replied rather grumpily that he was feeling tolerably well, adding that he'd feel still better if only he could be sure of being left in peace. Rieux remarked that one couldn't always be alone. "That's not what I meant. I was thinking of people who take an interest in you only to make trouble for you." When Rieux said nothing, he went on: "Mind you, that's not my case. Only I've been reading that detective story. It's about a poor devil who's arrested one fine morning, all of a sudden. People had been taking an interest in him and he knew nothing about it. They were talking about him in offices, entering his name on card indexes. Now, do you think that's fair? Do you think people have a right to treat a man like that?" "Well," Rieux said, "that depends. In one sense I agree, nobody has the right. But all that's beside the mark. What's important is for you to go out a bit. It's a mistake staying indoors too much." Cottard seemed vexed and said that on the contrary he was always going out, and, if need arose, all the people in the street could vouch for him. What's more, he knew lots of people in other parts of the town.

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"Do you know Monsieur Rigaud, the architect? He's a friend of mine." The room was in almost complete darkness. Outside, the street was growing noisier and a sort of murmur of relief greeted the moment when all the street-lamps lit up, all together. Rieux went out on the balcony, and Cottard followed him. From the outlying districts—as happens every evening in our town—a gentle breeze wafted a murmur of voices, smells of roasting meat, a gay, perfumed tide of freedom sounding on its way, as the streets filled up with noisy young people released from shops and offices. Nightfall, with its deep, remote baying of unseen ships, the rumor rising from the sea, and the happy tumult of the crowd— that first hour of darkness which in the past had always had a special charm for Rieux—seemed today charged with menace, because of all he knew. "How about turning on the lights?" he suggested when they went back into the room. After this had been done, the little man gazed at him, blinking his eyes. "Tell me, doctor. Suppose I fell ill, would you put me in your ward at the hospital?" "Why not?" Cottard then inquired if it ever happened that a person in a hospital or a nursing home was arrested. Rieux said it had been known to happen, but all depended on the invalid's condition. "You know, doctor," Cottard said, "I've confidence in you." Then he asked the doctor if he'd be kind enough to give him a lift, as he was going into town. In the center of the town the streets were already growing less crowded and the lights fewer. Children were playing in front of the doorways. At Cottard's request the doctor stopped his car beside one of the groups of children. They were playing hopscotch and

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making a great deal of noise. One of them, a boy with sleek, neatly parted hair and a grubby face, stared hard at Rieux with bright, bold eyes. The doctor looked away. Standing on the sidewalk Cottard shook his head. He then said in a hoarse, rather labored voice, casting uneasy glances over his shoulder: "Everybody's talking about an epidemic. Is there anything in it, doctor?" "People always talk," Rieux replied. "That's only to be expected." "You're right. And if we have ten deaths they'll think it's the end of the world. But it's not that we need here." The engine was ticking over. Rieux had his hand on the clutch. But he was looking again at the boy who was still watching him with an oddly grave intentness. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the child smiled, showing all his teeth. "Yes? And what do we need here?" Rieux asked, returning the child's smile. Abruptly Cottard gripped the door of the car and, as he turned to go, almost shouted in a rageful, passionate voice: "An earthquake! A big one!" There was no earthquake, and the whole of the following day was spent, so far as Rieux was concerned, in long drives to every corner of the town, in parleyings with the families of the sick and arguments with the invalids themselves. Never had Rieux known his profession to weigh on him so heavily. Hitherto his patients had helped to lighten his task; they gladly put themselves into his hands. For the first time the doctor felt they were keeping aloof, wrapping themselves up in their malady with a sort of bemused hostility. It was a struggle to which he wasn't yet accustomed. And when, at ten that evening, he parked his car outside the home of his old asthma patient—his last visit of the day— it was an effort for Rieux to drag himself from his seat. For some moments he lingered, gazing up the dark street, watching the stars appear and disappear in the blackness of the sky.

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When Rieux entered the room, the old man was sitting up in bed, at his usual occupation, counting out dried peas from one pan to another. On seeing his visitor he looked up, beaming with delight. "Well, doctor? It's cholera, isn't it?" "Where on earth did you get that idea from?" "It's in the paper, and the radio said it, too." "No, it's not cholera." "Anyhow," the old man chuckled excitedly, "the big bugs are laying it on thick. Got the jitters, haven't they?" "Don't you believe a word of it," the doctor said. He had examined the old man and now was sitting in the middle of the dingy little dining-room. Yes, despite what he had said, he was afraid. He knew that in this suburb alone eight or ten unhappy people, cowering over their buboes, would be awaiting his visit next morning. In only two or three cases had incision of the buboes caused any improvement. For most of them it would mean going to the hospital, and he knew how poor people feel about hospitals. "I don't want them trying their experiments on him," had said the wife one of his patients. But he wouldn't be experimented on; he would die, that was all. That the regulations now in force were inadequate was lamentably clear. As for the "specially equipped" wards, he knew what they amounted to: two outbuildings from which the other patients had been hastily evacuated, whose windows had been hermetically sealed, and round which a sanitary cordon had been set. The only hope was that the outbreak would die a natural death; it certainly wouldn't be arrested by the measures the authorities had so far devised. Nevertheless, that night the official communique was still optimistic. On the following day Ransdoc announced that the rules laid down by the local administration had won

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general approval and already thirty sick persons had reported. Castel rang up Rieux. "How many beds are there in the special wards?" "Eighty." "Surely there are far more than thirty cases in the town?" "Don't forget there are two sorts of cases: those who take fright, and those—they're the majority—who don't have time to do so." "I see. Are they checking up on the burials?" "No. I told Richard over the phone that energetic measures were needed, not just words; we'd got to set up a real barrier against the disease, otherwise we might just as well do nothing." "Yes? And what did he say?" "Nothing doing. He hadn't the powers. In my opinion, it's going to get worse." That was so. Within three days both wards were full. According to Richard, there was talk of requisitioning a school and opening an auxiliary hospital. Meanwhile Rieux continued incising buboes and waiting for the anti-plague serum. Castel went back to his old books and spent long hours in the public library. "Those rats died of plague," was his conclusion, "or of something extremely like it. And they've loosed on the town tens of thousands of fleas, which will spread the infection in geometrical progression unless it's checked in time." Rieux said nothing. About this time the weather appeared set fair, and the sun had drawn up the last puddles left by the recent rain. There was a serene blue sky flooded with golden light each morning, with sometimes a drone of

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planes in the rising heat—all seemed well with the world. And yet within four days the fever had made four startling strides: sixteen deaths, twenty-four, twenty-eight, and thirty-two. On the fourth day the opening of the auxiliary hospital in the premises of a primary school was officially announced. The local population, who so far had made a point of masking their anxiety by facetious comments, now seemed tongue-tied and went their ways with gloomy faces. Rieux decided to ring up the Prefect. "The regulations don't go anywhere near far enough." "Yes," the Prefect replied. "I've seen the statistics and, as you say, they're most perturbing." "They're more than perturbing; they're conclusive." "I'll ask government for orders." When Rieux next met Castel, the Prefect's remark was still rankling. "Orders!" he said scornfully. "When what's needed is imagination." "Any news of the serum?" "It'll come this week." The Prefect sent instructions to Rieux, through Richard, asking him to draw up a minute to be transmitted for orders to the central administration of the colony. Rieux included in it a clinical diagnosis and statistics of the epidemic. On that day forty deaths were reported. The Prefect took the responsibility, as he put it, of tightening up the new regulations. Compulsory declaration of all cases of fever and their isolation were to be strictly enforced. The residences of sick people were to be shut up and disinfected; persons living in the same house were to go into quarantine; burials were to be supervised by the local authorities—in a manner which will be described later on. Next day the serum arrived by plane. There was enough for immediate requirements, but not enough if the epidemic were to spread. In reply to his telegram

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Rieux was informed that the emergency reserve stock was exhausted, but that a new supply was in preparation. Meanwhile, from all the outlying districts, spring was making its progress into the town. Thousands of roses wilted in the flower-venders' baskets in the market-places and along the streets, and the air was heavy with their cloying perfume. Outwardly, indeed, this spring was like any other. The streetcars were always packed at the rush hours, empty and untidy during the rest of the day. Tarrou watched the little old man, and the little old man spat on the cats. Grand hurried home every evening to his mysterious literary activities. Cottard went his usual desultory ways, and M. Othon, the magistrate, continued to parade his menagerie. The old Spaniard decanted his dried peas from pan to pan, and sometimes you encountered Rambert, the journalist, looking interested as ever in all he saw. In the evening the usual crowd thronged the streets and the lines lengthened outside the picture-houses. Moreover, the epidemic seemed to be on the wane; on some days only ten or so deaths were notified. Then, all of a sudden, the figure shot up again, vertically. On the day when the death- roll touched thirty, Dr. Rieux read an official telegram that the Prefect had just handed him, remarking: "So they've got alarmed at last." The telegram ran: Proclaim a state of plague stop close the town.

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PART II From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible. And no doubt he would have continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly be came a feeling in which all shared alike and—together with fear—the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead. One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gates was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it. Mothers and children, lovers, husbands and wives, who had a few days previously taken it for granted that their parting would be a short one, who had kissed one another good-by on the platform and exchanged a few trivial remarks, sure as they were of seeing one another again after a few days or, at most, a few weeks, duped by our blind human faith in the near future and little if at all diverted from their normal interests by this leave-taking—all these people found themselves, without the least warning, hopelessly cut off, prevented from seeing one another again, or even communicating with one another. For actually the closing of the gates took place some hours before the official order was made known to the public, and, naturally enough, it was impossible to take individual cases of hardship into account. It might indeed be said that the first effect of this brutal visitation was to compel our townspeople to act as if they had no feelings as individuals. During the first part of the day on which the prohibition to leave the town came into force the Prefect's office was besieged by a crowd of applicants advancing pleas of equal cogency but equally impossible to take into consideration. Indeed, it needed several days for us to realize that we were completely cornered; that words like "special arrangements," "favor," and "priority" had lost all effective meaning.

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Even the small satisfaction of writing letters was denied us. It came to this: not only had the town ceased to be in touch with the rest of the world by normal means of communication, but also—according to a second notification— all correspondence was forbidden, to obviate the risk of letters' carrying infection outside the town. In the early days a favored few managed to persuade the sentries at the gates to allow them to get messages through to the outside world. But that was only at the beginning of the epidemic, when the sentries found it natural to obey their feelings of humanity. Later on, when these same sentries had had the gravity of the situation drummed into them, they flatly refused to take responsibilities whose possible after-effects they could not foresee. At first, telephone calls to other towns were allowed, but this led to such crowding of the telephone booths and delays on the lines that for some days they also were prohibited, and thereafter limited to what were called "urgent cases," such as deaths, marriages, and births. So we had to fall back on telegrams. People linked together by friendship, affection, or physical love found themselves reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of a ten-word telegram. And since, in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearnings, soon declined to the exchange of such trite formulas as: "Am well. Always thinking of you. Love." Some few of us, however, persisted in writing letters and gave much time to hatching plans for corresponding with the outside world; but almost always these plans came to nothing. Even on the rare occasions when they succeeded, we could not know this, since we received no answer. For weeks on end we were reduced to starting the same letter over and over again recopying the same scraps of news and the same personal appeals, with the result that after a certain time the living words, into which we had as it were transfused our hearts' blood, were drained of any meaning. Thereafter we went on copying them mechanically, trying, through the dead phrases, to convey some notion of our ordeal. And in the long run, to these sterile, reiterated monologues, these futile colloquies with a blank wall, even the banal formulas of a telegram came to seem preferable. Also, after some days—when it was clear that no one had the least hope of being able to leave our town—inquiries began to be made whether the

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return of people who had gone away before the outbreak would be permitted. After some days' consideration of the matter the authorities replied affirmatively. They pointed out, however, that in no case would persons who returned be allowed to leave the town again; once here, they would have to stay, whatever happened. Some families—actually very few—refused to take the position seriously and in their eagerness to have the absent members of the family with them again, cast prudence to the winds and wired to them to take this opportunity of returning. But very soon those who were prisoners of the plague realized the terrible danger to which this would expose their relatives, and sadly resigned themselves to their absence. At the height of the epidemic we saw only one case in which natural emotions overcame the fear of death in a particularly painful form. It was not, as might be expected, the case of two young people, whose passion made them yearn for each other's nearness at whatever cost of pain. The two were old Dr. Castel and his wife, and they had been married for very many years. Mme Castel had gone on a visit to a neighboring town some days before the epidemic started. They weren't one of those exemplary married couples of the Darby-and-Joan pattern; on the contrary, the narrator has grounds for saying that, in all probability, neither partner felt quite sure the marriage was all that could have been desired. But this ruthless, protracted separation enabled them to realize that they could not live apart, and in the sudden glow of this discovery the risk of plague seemed insignificant. That was an exception. For most people it was obvious that the separation must last until the end of the epidemic. And for every one of us the ruling emotion of his life— which he had imagined he knew through and through (the people of Oran, as has been said, have simple passions)—took on a new aspect. Husbands who had had complete faith in their wives found, to their surprise, that they were jealous; and lovers had the same experience. Men who had pictured themselves as Don Juans became models of fidelity. Sons who had lived beside their mothers hardly giving them a glance fell to picturing with poignant regret each wrinkle in the absent face that memory cast upon the screen. This drastic, clean-cut deprivation and our complete ignorance of what the future held in store had taken us unawares; we were unable to react against the mute appeal of presences, still so near and already so far, which haunted us daylong. In fact, our suffering was twofold; our own

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to start with, and then the imagined suffering of the absent one, son, mother, wife, or mistress. Under other circumstances our townsfolk would probably have found an outlet in increased activity, a more sociable life. But the plague forced inactivity on them, limiting their movements to the same dull round inside the town, and throwing them, day after day, on the illusive solace of their memories. For in their aimless walks they kept on coming back to the same streets and usually, owing to the smallness of the town, these were streets in which, in happier days, they had walked with those who now were absent. Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile. And the narrator is convinced that he can set down here, as holding good for all, the feeling he personally had and to which many of his friends confessed. It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile—that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. Sometimes we toyed with our imagination, composing ourselves to wait for a ring at the bell announcing somebody's return, or for the sound of a familiar footstep on the stairs; but, though we might deliberately stay at home at the hour when a traveler coming by the evening train would normally have arrived, and though we might contrive to forget for the moment that no trains were running, that game of make-believe, for obvious reasons, could not last. Always a moment came when we had to face the fact that no trains were coming in. And then we realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea—anyhow, as soon as could be—once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it. It is noteworthy that our townspeople very quickly desisted, even in public, from a habit one might have expected them to form—that of trying to figure out the probable duration of their exile. The reason was this: when the most pessimistic had fixed it at, say, six months; when they had drunk in advance the dregs of bitterness of those six black months, and painfully screwed up their courage to the sticking-place,

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straining all their remaining energy to endure valiantly the long ordeal of all those weeks and days —when they had done this, some friend they met, an article in a newspaper, a vague suspicion, or a flash of foresight would suggest that, after all, there was no reason why the epidemic shouldn't last more than six months; why not a year, or even more? At such moments the collapse of their courage, willpower, and endurance was so abrupt that they felt they could never drag themselves out of the pit of despond into which they had fallen. Therefore they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future, and always to keep, so to speak, their eyes fixed on the ground at their feet. But, naturally enough, this prudence, this habit of feinting with their predicament and refusing to put up a fight, was ill rewarded. For, while averting that revulsion which they found so unbearable, they also deprived themselves of those redeeming moments, frequent enough when all is told, when by conjuring up pictures of a reunion to be, they could forget about the plague. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress. Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose. Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had a savor only of regret. For they would have wished to add to it all that they regretted having left undone, while they might yet have done it, with the man or woman whose return they now awaited; just as in all the activities, even the relatively happy ones, of their life as prisoners they kept vainly trying to include the absent one. And thus there was always something missing in their lives. Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, we were much like those whom men's justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars. Thus the only way of escaping from that intolerable leisure was to set the trains running again in one's imagination and in filling the silence with the fancied tinkle of a doorbell, in practice obstinately mute. Still, if it was an exile, it was, for most of us, exile in one's own home. And though the narrator experienced only the common form of exile, he

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cannot forget the case of those who, like Rambert the journalist and a good many others, had to endure an aggravated deprivation, since, being travelers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were, they were cut off both from the person with whom they wanted to be and from their homes as well. In the general exile they were the most exiled; since while time gave rise for them, as for us all, to the suffering appropriate to it, there was also for them the space factor; they were obsessed by it and at every moment knocked their heads against the walls of this huge and alien lazar-house secluding them from their lost homes. These were the people, no doubt, whom one often saw wandering forlornly in the dusty town at all hours of the day, silently invoking nightfalls known to them alone and the daysprings of their happier land. And they fed their despondency with fleeting intimations, messages as disconcerting as a flight of swallows, a dew-fall at sundown, or those queer glints the sun sometimes dapples on empty streets. As for that outside world, which can always offer an escape from everything, they shut their eyes to it, bent as they were on cherishing the all-too-real phantoms of their imagination and conjuring up with all their might pictures of a land where a special play of light, two or three hills, a favorite tree, a woman's smile, composed for them a world that nothing could replace. To come at last, and more specifically, to the case of parted lovers, who present the greatest interest and of whom the narrator is, perhaps, better qualified to speak—their minds were the prey of different emotions, notably remorse. For their present position enabled them to take stock of their feelings with a sort of feverish objectivity. And, in these conditions, it was rare for them not to detect their own shortcomings. What first brought these home to them was the trouble they experienced in summoning up any clear picture of what the absent one was doing. They came to deplore their ignorance of the way in which that person used to spend his or her days, and reproached themselves for having troubled too little about this in the past, and for having affected to think that, for a lover, the occupations of the loved one when they are not together could be a matter of indifference and not a source of joy. Once this had been brought home to them, they could retrace the course of their love and see where it had fallen short. In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the

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fact that ours has never risen above the average. But memory is less disposed to compromise. And, in a very definite way, this misfortune which had come from outside and befallen a whole town did more than inflict on us an unmerited distress with which we might well be indignant. It also incited us to create our own suffering and thus to accept frustration as a natural state. This was one of the tricks the pestilence had of diverting attention and confounding issues. Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility. For instance, some of our fellow citizens became subject to a curious kind of servitude, which put them at the mercy of the sun and the rain. Looking at them, you had an impression that for the first time in their lives they were becoming, as some would say, weather-conscious. A burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world, while rainy days gave a dark cast to their faces and their mood. A few weeks before, they had been free of this absurd subservience to the weather, because they had not to face life alone; the person they were living with held, to some extent, the foreground of their little world. But from now on it was different; they seemed at the mercy of the sky's caprices—in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally. Moreover, in this extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbor; each had to bear the load of his troubles alone. If, by some chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, usually wounded him. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren't talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced. Whether friendly or hostile, the reply always missed fire, and the attempt to communicate had to be given up. This was true of those at least for whom silence was unbearable, and since the others could not find the truly expressive word, they resigned themselves to using the current coin of language,

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the commonplaces of plain narrative, of anecdote, and of their daily paper. So in these cases, too, even the sincerest grief had to make do with the set phrases of ordinary conversation. Only on these terms could the prisoners of the plague ensure the sympathy of their concierge and the interest of their hearers. Nevertheless—and this point is most important—however bitter their distress and however heavy their hearts, for all their emptiness, it can be truly said of these exiles that in the early period of the plague they could account themselves privileged. For at the precise moment when the residents of the town began to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the person whom they longed to meet again. The egoism of love made them immune to the general distress and, if they thought of the plague, it was only in so far as it might threaten to make their separation eternal. Thus in the very heart of the epidemic they maintained a saving indifference, which one was tempted to take for composure. Their despair saved them from panic, thus their misfortune had a good side. For instance, if it happened that one of them was carried off by the disease, it was almost always without his having had time to realize it. Snatched suddenly from his long, silent communion with a wraith of memory, he was plunged straightway into the densest silence of all. He'd had no time for anything. WHile our townspeople were trying to come to terms with their sudden isolation, the plague was posting sentries at the gates and turning away ships bound for Oran. No vehicle had entered the town since the gates were closed. From that day onwards one had the impression that all cars were moving in circles. The harbor, too, presented a strange appearance to those who looked down on it from the top of the boulevards. The commercial activity that hitherto made it one of the chief ports on the coast had ceased abruptly. Only a few ships, detained in quarantine, were anchored in the bay. But the gaunt, idle cranes on the wharves, tip-carts lying on their sides, neglected heaps of sacks and barrels—all testified that commerce, too, had died of plague.

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In spite of such unusual sights our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them. There were feelings all could share, such as fear and separation, but personal interests, too, continued to occupy the foreground of their thoughts. Nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself what the disease connoted. Most people were chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests. They were worried and irritated —but these are not feelings with which to confront plague. Their first reaction, for instance, was to abuse the authorities. The Prefect's riposte to criticisms echoed by the press —Could not the regulations be modified and made less stringent?—was somewhat unexpected. Hitherto neither the newspapers nor the Ransdoc Information Bureau had been given any official statistics relating to the epidemic. Now the Prefect supplied them daily to the bureau, with the request that they should be broadcast once a week. In this, too, the reaction of the public was slower than might have been expected. Thus the bare statement that three hundred and two deaths had taken place in the third week of plague failed to strike their imagination. For one thing, all the three hundred and two deaths might not have been due to plague. Also, no one in the town had any idea of the average weekly death-rate in ordinary times. The population of the town was about two hundred thousand. There was no knowing if the present death-rate were really so abnormal. This is, in fact, the kind of statistics that nobody ever troubles much about—notwithstanding that its interest is obvious. The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death- rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth. For in the fifth week there were three hundred and twenty-one deaths, and three hundred and forty-five in the sixth. These figures, anyhow, spoke for themselves. Yet they were still not sensational enough to prevent our townsfolk, perturbed though they were, from persisting in the idea that what was happening was a sort of accident, disagreeable enough, but certainly of a temporary order. So they went on strolling about the town as usual and sitting at the tables on cafe terraces. Generally speaking, they did not lack courage, bandied more jokes than lamentations, and made a show of accepting

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cheerfully unpleasantnesses that obviously could be only passing. In short, they kept up appearances. However, toward the end of the month, about the time of the Week of Prayer which will be described later on, there were more serious developments, altering the whole aspect of the town. To begin with, the Prefect took measures controlling the traffic and the food-supply. Gasoline was rationed and restrictions were placed on the sale of foodstuffs. Reductions were ordered in the use of electricity. Only necessaries were brought by road or air to Oran. Thus the traffic thinned out progressively until hardly any private cars were on the roads; luxury shops closed overnight, and others began to put up "Sold Out" notices, while crowds of buyers stood waiting at their doors. Oran assumed a novel appearance. You saw more pedestrians, and in the slack hours numbers of people, reduced to idleness because shops and a good many offices were closed, crowded the streets and cafes. For the present they were not unemployed; merely on holiday. So it was that on fine days, toward three in the afternoon, Oran brought to mind a city where public rejoicings are in progress, shops are shut, and traffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets. Naturally the picture-houses benefited by the situation and made money hand over fist. They had one difficulty, however—to provide a change of program, since the circulation of films in the region had been suspended. After a fortnight the various cinemas were obliged to exchange films and, after a further lapse of time, to show always the same program. In spite of this their takings did not fall off. The cafes, thanks to the big stocks accumulated in a town where the wine-and-liquor trade holds pride of place, were equally able to cater for their patrons. And, to tell the truth, there was much heavy drinking. One of the cafes had the brilliant idea of putting up a slogan: "The best protection against infection is a bottle of good wine," which confirmed an already prevalent opinion that alcohol is a safeguard against infectious disease. Every night, toward two a.m., quite a number of drunken men, ejected from the cafes, staggered down the streets, vociferating optimism. Yet all these changes were, in one sense, so fantastic and had been made so precipitately that it wasn't easy to regard them as likely to have any

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permanence. With the result that we went on focusing our attention on our personal feelings. When leaving the hospital two days after the gates were closed, Dr. Rieux met Cottard in the street. The little man was beaming with satisfaction. Rieux congratulated him on his appearance. "Yes," Cottard said, "I'm feeling very fit. Never was fitter in my life. But tell me, doctor. This blasted plague, what about it? Getting to look mighty serious, isn't it?" When the doctor nodded, he continued exuberantly: "And there's no reason for it to stop now. This town's going to be in an unholy mess, by the look of things." They walked a little way together. Cottard told the story of a grocer in his street who had laid by masses of canned provisions with the idea of selling them later on at a big profit. When the ambulance men came to fetch him he had several dozen cans of meat under his bed. "He died in the hospital. There's no money in plague, that's sure." Cottard was a mine of stories of this kind, true or false, about the epidemic. One of them was about a man with all the symptoms and running a high fever who dashed out into the street, flung himself on the first woman he met, and embraced her, yelling that he'd "got it." "Good for him!" was Cottard's comment. But his next remark seemed to belie his gleeful exclamation. "Anyhow, we'll all be nuts before long, unless Tm much mistaken." It was on the afternoon of the same day that Grand at last unburdened himself to Rieux. Noticing Mme Rieux's photograph on the desk, he looked at the doctor inquiringly. Rieux told him that his wife was under treatment in a sanatorium some distance from the town. "In one way," Grand said, "that's lucky." The doctor agreed that it was lucky in a sense; but, he added, the great thing was that his wife should recover. "Yes," Grand said, "I understand." And then, for the first time since Rieux had made his acquaintance, he became quite voluble. Though he still had trouble over his words he

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succeeded nearly always in finding them; indeed, it was as if for years he'd been thinking over what he now said. When in his teens, he had married a very young girl, one of a poor family living near by. It was, in fact, in order to marry that he'd abandoned his studies and taken up his present job. Neither he nor Jeanne ever stirred from their part of the town. In his courting days he used to go to see her at her home, and the family were inclined to make fun of her bashful, silent admirer. Her father was a railroadman. When off duty, he spent most of the time seated in a corner beside the window gazing meditatively at the passers-by, his enormous hands splayed out on his thighs. His wife was always busy with domestic duties, in which Jeanne gave her a hand. Jeanne was so tiny that it always made Grand nervous to see her crossing a street, the vehicles bearing down on her looked so gigantic. Then one day shortly before Christmas they went out for a short walk together and stopped to admire a gaily decorated shop- window. After gazing ecstatically at it for some moments, Jeanne turned to him. "Oh, isn't it lovely!" He squeezed her wrist. It was thus that the marriage had come about. The rest of the story, to Grand's thinking, was very simple. The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love. As the head of the office where Grand was employed hadn't kept his promise, Jeanne, too, had to work outside. At this point a little imagination was needed to grasp what Grand was trying to convey. Owing largely to fatigue, he gradually lost grip of himself, had less and less to say, and failed to keep alive the feeling in his wife that she was loved. An overworked husband, poverty, the gradual loss of hope in a better future, silent evenings at home—what chance had any passion of surviving such conditions? Probably Jeanne had suffered. And yet she'd stayed; of course one may often suffer a long time without knowing it. Thus years went by. Then, one day, she left him. Naturally she hadn't gone alone. "I was very fond of you, but now I'm so tired. I'm not happy to go, but one needn't be happy to make another start." That, more or less, was what she'd said in her letter. Grand, too, had suffered. And he, too, might—as Rieux pointed out— have made a fresh start. But no, he had lost faith. Only, he couldn't stop

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thinking about her. What he'd have liked to do was to write her a letter justifying himself. "But it's not easy," he told Rieux. "I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me—only I couldn't." Grand produced from his pocket something that looked like a check duster and blew his nose noisily. Then he wiped his mustache. Rieux gazed at him in silence. "Forgive me, doctor," Grand added hastily, "but—how shall I put it?—I feel you're to be trusted. That's why I can talk to you about these things. And then, you see, I get all worked up." Obviously Grand's thoughts were leagues away from the plague. That evening Rieux sent a telegram to his wife telling her that the town was closed, that she must go on taking great care of herself, and that she was in his thoughts. One evening when he was leaving the hospital—it was about three weeks after the closing of the gates—Rieux found a young man waiting for him in the street. "You remember me, don't you?" Rieux believed he did, but couldn't quite place him. "I called on you just before this trouble started," the young man said, "for information about the living-conditions in the Arab quarter. My name is Raymond Rambert." "Ah yes, of course. Well, you've now the makings of a good story for your paper." Rambert, who gave the impression of being much less self-assured than he had seemed on the first occasion when they met, said it wasn't that

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he'd come about. He wanted to know if the doctor would kindly give him some help. "I must apologize," he continued, "but really I don't know a soul here, and the local representative of my paper is a complete dud." Rieux said he had to go to a dispensary in the center of the town and suggested they should walk there together. Their way lay through the narrow streets of the Negro district. Evening was coming on, but the town, once so noisy at this hour, was strangely still. The only sounds were some bugle-calls echoing through the air, still golden with the end of daylight; the army, anyhow, was making a show of carrying on as usual. Meanwhile, as they walked down the steep little streets flanked by blue, mauve, and saffron-yellow walls, Rambert talked incessantly, as if his nerves were out of hand. He had left his wife in Paris, he said. Well, she wasn't actually his wife, but it came to the same thing. The moment the town was put into quarantine he had sent her a wire. His impression then was that this state of things was quite temporary, and all he'd tried to do was to get a letter through to her. But the post-office officials had vetoed this, his colleagues of the local press said they could do nothing for him, and a clerk in the Prefect's office had laughed in his face. It was only after waiting in line for a couple of hours that he had managed to get a telegram accepted: All goes well. Hope to see you soon. But next morning, when he woke up, it had dawned on him that, after all, there was absolutely no knowing how long this business was going to last. So he'd decided to leave the town at once. Being able, thanks to his professional status, to pull some strings, he had secured an interview with a high official in the Prefect's office. He had explained that his presence in Oran was purely accidental, he had no connection with the town and no reasons for staying in it; that being so, he surely was entitled to leave, even if, once outside the town, he had to undergo a spell of quarantine. The official told him he quite appreciated his position, but no exceptions could be made. He would, however, see if anything could be done, though he could hold out little hope of a quick decision, as the authorities were taking a very serious view of the situation.

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"But, confound it," Rambert exclaimed, "I don't belong here!" "Quite so. Anyhow, let's hope the epidemic will soon be over." Finally, he had tried to console Rambert by pointing out that, as a journalist, he had an excellent subject to his hand in Oran; indeed, when one came to think of it, no event, however disagreeable in some ways, but had its bright side. Whereat Rambert had shrugged his shoulders petulantly and walked out. They had come to the center of the town. "It's so damn silly, doctor, isn't it? The truth is I wasn't brought into the world to write newspaper articles. But it's quite likely I was brought into the world to live with a woman. That's reasonable enough, isn't it?" Rieux replied cautiously that there might be something in what he said. The central boulevards were not so crowded as usual. The few people about were hurrying to distant homes. Not a smile was to be seen on any face. Rieux guessed that this was a result of the latest Ransdoc announcement. After twenty-four hours our townspepole would begin to hope again. But on the days when they were announced, the statistics were too fresh in everybody's memory. "The truth," Rambert remarked abruptly, "is that she and I have been together only a short time, and we suit each other perfectly." When Rieux said nothing, he continued: "I can see I'm boring you. Sorry. All I wanted to know was whether you couldn't possibly give me a certificate stating that I haven't got this damned disease. It might make things easier, I think." Rieux nodded. A small boy had just run against his legs and fallen; he set him on his feet again. Walking on, they came to the Place d'Armes. Gray with dust, the palms and fig trees drooped despondently around a statue of the Republic, which too was coated with grime and dust. They stopped beside the statue. Rieux stamped his feet on the flagstones to shake off the coat of white dust that had gathered on them. His hat pushed slightly back, his shirt-collar gaping under a loosely knotted tie,

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his cheeks ill-shaven, the journalist had the sulky, stubborn look of a young man who feels himself deeply injured. "Please don't doubt I understand you," Rieux said, "but you must see your argument doesn't hold water. I can't give you that certificate because I don't know whether you have the disease or not, and even if I did, how could I certify that between the moment of leaving my consulting-room and your arrival at the Prefect's office you wouldn't be infected? And even if I did—" "And even if you did—?" "Even if I gave you a certificate, it wouldn't help." "Why not?" "Because there are thousands of people placed as you are in this town, and there can't be any question of allowing them to leave it." "Even supposing they haven't got plague?" "That's not a sufficient reason. Oh, I know it's an absurd situation, but we're all involved in it, and we've got to accept it as it is." "But I don't belong here." "Unfortunately, from now on you'll belong here, like everybody else." Rambert raised his voice a little. "But, damn it, doctor, can't you see it's a matter of common human feeling? Or don't you realize what this sort of separation means to people who are fond of each other?" Rieux was silent for a moment, then said he understood it perfectly. He wished nothing better than that Rambert should be allowed to return to his wife and that all who loved one another and were parted should come together again. Only the law was the law, plague had broken out, and he could only do what had to be done.

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"No," Rambert said bitterly, "you can't understand. You're using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of abstractions." The doctor glanced up at the statue of the Republic, then said he did not know if he was using the language of reason, but he knew he was using the language of the facts as everybody could see them—which wasn't necessarily the same thing. The journalist tugged at his tie to straighten it. "So, I take it, I can't count on help from you. Very good. But"—his tone was challenging—"leave this town I shall." The doctor repeated that he quite understood, but all that was none of his business. "Excuse me, but it is your business." Rambert raised his voice again. "I approached you because I'd been told you played a large part in drawing up the orders that have been issued. So I thought that in one case anyhow you could unmake what you'd helped to make. But you don't care; you never gave a thought to anybody, you didn't take the case of people who are separated into account." Rieux admitted this was true up to a point; he'd preferred not to take such cases into account. "Ah, I see now!" Rambert exclaimed. "You'll soon be talking about the interests of the general public. But public welfare is merely the sum total of the private welfares of each of us." The doctor seemed abruptly to come out of a dream. "Oh, come!" he said. "There's that, but there's much more to it than that. It doesn't do to rush to conclusions, you know. But you've no reason to feel angered. I assure you that if you find a way out of your quandary, I shall be extremely pleased. Only, there are things that my official position debars me from doing."

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Rambert tossed his head petulantly. "Yes, yes, I was wrong to show annoyance. And I've taken up too much of your time already." Rieux asked him to let him know how he got on with his project, and not to bear him a grudge for not having been more amenable. He was sure, he added, that there was some common ground on which they could meet. Rambert looked perplexed. Then, "Yes," he said after a short silence, "I rather think so, too—in spite of myself, and of all you've just been saying." He paused. "Still, I can't agree with you." Pulling down his hat over his eyes, he walked quickly away. Rieux saw him enter the hotel where Tarrou was staying. After a moment the doctor gave a slight nod, as if approving of some thought that had crossed his mind. Yes, the journalist was right in refusing to be balked of happiness. But was he right in reproaching him, Rieux, with living in a world of abstractions? Could that term "abstraction" really apply to these days he spent in his hospital while the plague was battening on the town, raising its death-toll to five hundred victims a week? Yes, an element of abstraction, of a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you've got to get busy with it. And so much Rieux knew: that this wasn't the easiest course. Running this auxiliary hospital, for instance, of which he was in charge—there were now three such hospitals—was no light task. He had had an anteroom, leading into his surgery, installed, equipped for dealing with patients on arrival. The floor had been excavated and replaced by a shallow lake of water and cresylic acid, in the center of which was a sort of island made of bricks. The patient was carried to the island, rapidly undressed, and his clothes dropped into the disinfectant water. After being washed, dried, and dressed in one of the coarse hospital nightshirts, he was taken to Rieux for examination, then carried to one of the wards. This hospital, a requisitioned schoolhouse, now contained five hundred beds, almost all of which were occupied. After

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the reception of the patients, which he personally supervised, Rieux injected serum, lanced buboes, checked the statistics again, and returned for his afternoon consultations. Only when night was setting in did he start on his round of visits, and he never got home till a very late hour. On the previous night his mother, when handing him a telegram from his wife, had remarked that his hands were shaking. "Yes," he said. "But it's only a matter of sticking to it, and my nerves will steady down, you'll see." He had a robust constitution and, as yet, wasn't really tired. Still his visits, for one thing, were beginning to put a great strain on his endurance. Once the epidemic was diagnosed, the patient had to be evacuated forthwith. Then indeed began "abstraction" and a tussle with the family, who knew they would not see the sick man again until he was dead or cured. "Have some pity, doctor!" It was Mme Loret, mother of the chambermaid at Tarrou's hotel, who made the appeal. An unnecessary appeal; of course he had pity. But what purpose could it serve? He had to telephone, and soon the ambulance could be heard clanging down the street. (At first the neighbors used to open windows and watch. Later they promptly shut them.) Then came a second phase of conflict, tears and pleadings—abstraction, in a word. In those fever-hot, nerve-ridden sickrooms crazy scenes took place. But the issue was always the same. The patient was removed. Then Rieux, too, could leave. In the early days he had merely telephoned, then rushed off to see other patients, without waiting for the ambulance. But no sooner was he gone than the family locked and barred their doors, preferring contact with the plague to a parting whose issue they now knew only too well. There followed objurgations, screams, batterings on the door, action by the police, and later armed force; the patient was taken by storm. Thus during the first few weeks Rieux was compelled to stay with the patient till the ambulance came. Later, when each doctor was accompanied by a volunteer police officer, Rieux could hurry away to the next patient. But, to begin with, every evening was like that evening when he was called in for Mme Loret's daughter. He was shown into a small apartment decorated with fans and artificial flowers. The mother greeted him with a faltering smile.

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"Oh, I do hope it's not the fever everyone's talking about." Lifting the coverlet and chemise, he gazed in silence at the red blotches on the girl's thighs and stomach, the swollen ganglia. After one glance the mother broke into shrill, uncontrollable cries of grief. And every evening mothers wailed thus, with a distraught abstraction, as their eyes fell on those fatal stigmata on limbs and bellies; every evening hands gripped Rieux's arms, there was a rush of useless words, promises, and tears; every evening the nearing tocsin of the ambulance provoked scenes as vain as every form of grief. Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes, renewed again and again. Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous; perhaps only one factor changed, and that was Rieux himself. Standing at the foot of the statue of the Republic that evening, he felt it; all he was conscious of was a bleak indifference steadily gaining on him as he gazed at the door of the hotel Rambert had just entered. After these wearing weeks, after all those nightfalls when the townsfolk poured into the streets to roam them aimlessly, Rieux had learned that he need no longer steel himself against pity. One grows out of pity when it's useless. And in this feeling that his heart had slowly closed in on itself, the doctor found a solace, his only solace, for the almost unendurable burden of his days. This, he knew, would make his task easier, and therefore he was glad of it. When he came home at two in the morning and his mother was shocked at the blank look he gave her, she was deploring precisely the sole alleviation Rieux could then experience. To fight abstraction you must have something of it in your own make-up. But how could Rambert be expected to grasp that? Abstraction for him was all that stood in the way of his happiness. Indeed, Rieux had to admit the journalist was right, in one sense. But he knew, too, that abstraction sometimes proves itself stronger than happiness; and then, if only then, it has to be taken into account. And this was what was going to happen to Rambert, as the doctor was to learn when, much later, Rambert told him more about himself. Thus he was enabled to follow, and on a different plane, the dreary struggle in progress between each man's happiness and the abstractions of the plague—which constituted the whole life of our town over a long period of time.

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BUT where some saw abstraction others saw the truth. The first month of the plague ended gloomily, with a violent recrudescence of the epidemic and a dramatic sermon preached by Father Paneloux, the Jesuit priest who had given an arm to old Michel when he was tottering home at the start of his illness. Father Paneloux had already made his mark with frequent contributions to the Oran Geographical Society; these dealt chiefly with ancient inscriptions, on which he was an authority. But he had also reached a wider, non-specialist public with a series of lectures on present-day individualism. In these he had shown himself a stalwart champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and purest, equally remote from modern laxity and the obscurantism of the past. On these occasions he had not shrunk from trouncing his hearers with some vigorous home-truths. Hence his local celebrity. Toward the end of the month the ecclesiastical authorities in our town resolved to do battle against the plague with the weapons appropriate to them, and organized a Week of Prayer. These manifestations of public piety were to be concluded on Sunday by a High Mass celebrated under the auspices of St. Roch, the plague-stricken saint, and Father Paneloux was asked to preach the sermon. For a fortnight he desisted from the research work on St. Augustine and the African Church that had won for him a high place in his Order. A man of a passionate, fiery temperament, he flung himself wholeheartedly into the task assigned him. The sermon was a topic" of conversation long before it was delivered and, in its way, it marks an important date in the history of the period. There were large attendances at the services of the Week of Prayer. It must not, however, be assumed that in normal times the townsfolk of Oran are particularly devout. On Sunday mornings, for instance, sea- bathing competes seriously with churchgoing. Nor must it be thought that they had seen a great light and had a sudden change of heart. But, for one thing, now that the town was closed and the harbor out of bounds, there was no question of bathing; moreover, they were in a quite exceptional frame of mind and, though in their heart of hearts they

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were far from recognizing the enormity of what had come on them, they couldn't help feeling, for obvious reasons, that decidedly something had changed. Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn't yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events. With regard to religion—as to many other problems—plague had induced in them a curious frame of mind, as remote from indifference as from fervor; the best name to give it, perhaps, might be "objectivity." Most of those who took part in the Week of Prayer would have echoed a remark made by one of the churchgoers in Dr. Rieux's hearing: "Anyhow, it can't do any harm." Even Tarrou, after recording in his notebook that in such cases the Chinese fall to playing tambourines before the Genius of Plague, observed that there was no means of telling whether, in practice, tambourines proved more efficacious than prophylactic measures. He merely added that, to decide the point, we should need first to ascertain if a Genius of Plague actually existed, and our ignorance on this point nullified any opinions we might form. In any case the Cathedral was practically always full of worshippers throughout the Week of Prayer. For the first two or three days many stayed outside, under the palms and pomegranate trees in the garden in front of the porch, and listened from a distance to the swelling tide of prayers and invocations whose backwash filled the neighboring streets. But once an example had been given, they began to enter the Cathedral and join timidly in the responses. And on the Sunday of the sermon a huge congregation filled the nave, overflowing on to the steps and precincts. The sky had clouded up on the previous day, and now it was raining heavily. Those in the open unfurled umbrellas. The air inside the Cathedral was heavy with fumes of incense and the smell of wet clothes when Father Paneloux stepped into the pulpit. He was a stockily built man, of medium height. When he leaned on the edge of the pulpit, grasping the woodwork with his big hands, all one saw was a black, massive torso and, above it, two rosy cheeks overhung

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by steel-rimmed spectacles. He had a powerful, rather emotional delivery, which carried to a great distance, and when he launched at the congregation his opening phrase in clear, emphatic tones: "Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it" there was a flutter that extended to the crowd massed in the rain outside the porch. In strict logic what came next did not seem to follow from this dramatic opening. Only as the sermon proceeded did it become apparent to the congregation that, by a skillful oratorical device, Father Paneloux had launched at them, like a fisticuff, the gist of his whole discourse. After launching it he went on at once to quote a text from Exodus relating to the plague of Egypt, and said: "The first time this scourge appears in history, it was wielded to strike down the enemies of God. Pharaoh set himself up against the divine will, and the plague beat him to his knees. Thus from the dawn of recorded history the scourge of God has humbled the proud of heart and laid low those who hardened themselves against Him. Ponder this well, my friends, and fall on your knees." The downpour had increased in violence, and these words, striking through a silence intensified by the drumming of raindrops on the chancel windows, carried such conviction that, after a momentary hesitation, some of the worshippers slipped forward from their seats on to their knees. Others felt it right to follow their example, and the movement gradually spread until presently everyone was kneeling, from end to end of the cathedral. No sound, except an occasional creak of chairs, accompanied the movement. Then Paneloux drew himself up to his full height, took a deep breath, and continued his sermon in a voice that gathered strength as it proceeded. "If today the plague is in your midst, that is because the hour has struck for taking thought. The just man need have no fear, but the evildoer has good cause to tremble. For plague is the flail of God and the world His threshing-floor, and implacably He will thresh out His harvest until the wheat is separated from the chaff. There will be more chaff than wheat, few chosen of the many called. Yet this calamity was not willed by God. Too long this world of ours has connived at evil, too long has it counted on the divine mercy, on God's forgiveness. Repentance was enough, men

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thought; nothing was forbidden. Everyone felt comfortably assured; when the day came, he would surely turn from his sins and repent. Pending that day, the easiest course was to surrender all along the line; divine compassion would do the rest. For a long while God gazed down on this town with eyes of compassion; but He grew weary of waiting, His eternal hope was too long deferred, and now He has turned His face away from us. And so, God's light withdrawn, we walk in darkness, in the thick darkness of this plague." Someone in the congregation gave a little snort, like that of a restive horse. After a short silence the preacher continued in a lower tone. "We read in the Golden Legend that in the time of King Umberto Italy was swept by plague and its greatest ravages took place in Rome and Pavia. So dreadful were these that the living hardly sufficed to bury the dead. And a good angel was made visible to human eyes, giving his orders to an evil angel who bore a great hunting-spear, and bidding him strike the houses; and as many strokes as he dealt a house, so many dead were carried out of it." Here Paneloux stretched forth his two short arms toward the open porch, as if pointing to something behind the tumbling curtain of the rain. "My brothers," he cried, "that fatal hunt is up, and harrying our streets today. See him there, that angel of the pestilence, comely as Lucifer, shining like Evil's very self! He is hovering above your roofs with his great spear in his right hand, poised to strike, while his left hand is stretched toward one or other of your houses. Maybe at this very moment his finger is pointing to your door, the red spear crashing on its panels, and even now the plague is entering your home and settling down in your bedroom to await your return. Patient and watchful, ineluctable as the order of the scheme of things, it bides its time. No earthly power, nay, not even—mark me well—the vaunted might of human science can avail you to avert that hand once it is stretched toward you. And winnowed like corn on the blood-stained threshing-floor of suffering, you will be cast away with the chaff."

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At this point the Father reverted with heightened eloquence to the symbol of the flail. He bade his hearers picture a huge wooden bar whirling above the town, striking at random, swinging up again in a shower of drops of blood, and spreading carnage and suffering on earth, "for the seedtime that shall prepare the harvest of the truth." At the end of his long phrase Father Paneloux paused; his hair was straggling over his forehead, his body shaken by tremors that his hands communicated to the pulpit. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, but vibrant with accusation. "Yes, the hour has come for serious thought. You fondly imagined it was enough to visit God on Sundays, and thus you could make free of your weekdays. You believed some brief formalities, some bendings of the knee, would recompense Him well enough for your criminal indifference. But God is not mocked. These brief encounters could not sate the fierce hunger of His love. He wished to see you longer and more often; that is His manner of loving and, indeed, it is the only manner of loving. And this is why, wearied of waiting for you to come to Him, He loosed on you this visitation; as He has visited all the cities that offended against Him since the dawn of history. Now you are learning your lesson, the lesson that was learned by Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Job and Pharaoh, by all that hardened their hearts against Him. And like them you have been beholding mankind and all creation with new eyes, since the gates of this city closed on you and on the pestilence. Now, at last, you know the hour has struck to bend your thoughts to first and last things." A wet wind was sweeping up the nave, making the candle-flames bend and flicker. The pungency of burning wax, coughs, a stifled sneeze, rose toward Father Paneloux, who, reverting to his exordium with a subtlety that was much appreciated, went on in a calm, almost matter-of-fact voice: "Many of you are wondering, I know, what I am leading up to. I wish to lead you to the truth and teach you to rejoice, yes, rejoice—in spite of all that I have been telling you. For the time is past when a helping hand or mere words of good advice could set you on the right path. Today the truth is a command. It is a red spear sternly pointing to the narrow path, the one way of salvation. And thus, my brothers, at last

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it is revealed to you, the divine compassion which has ordained good and evil in everything; wrath and pity; the plague and your salvation. This same pestilence which is slaying you works for your good and points your path. "Many centuries ago the Christians of Abyssinia saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life. Those who were not yet stricken wrapped round them sheets in which men had died of plague, so as to make sure of their death. I grant you such a frenzied quest of salvation was not to be commended. It shows an overhaste—indeed, a presumptuousness, which we can but deplore. No man should seek to force God's hand or to hurry on the appointed hour, and from a practice that aims at speeding up the order of events which God has ordained unalterably from all time, it is but a step to heresy. Yet we can learn a salutary lesson from the zeal, excessive though it was, of those Abyssinian Christians. Much of it is alien to our more enlightened spirits, and yet it gives us a glimpse of that radiant eternal light which glows, a small still flame, in the dark core of human suffering. And this light, too, illuminates the shadowed paths that lead towards deliverance. It reveals the will of God in action, unfailingly transforming evil into good. And once again today it is leading us through the dark valley of fears and groans towards the holy silence, the well- spring of all life. This, my friends, is the vast consolation I would hold out to you, so that when you leave this house of God you will carry away with you not only words of wrath, but a message, too, of comfort for your hearts." Everyone supposed that the sermon had ended. Outside, the rain had ceased and watery sunshine was yellowing the Cathedral square. Vague sounds of voices came from the streets, and a low hum of traffic, the speech of an awakening town. Discreetly, with a subdued rustling, the congregation gathered together their belongings. However, the Father had a few more words to say. He told them that after having made it clear that this plague came from God for the punishment of their sins, he would not have recourse, in concluding, to an eloquence that, considering the tragic nature of the occasion, would be out of keeping. He hoped and believed that all of them now saw their position in its true light. But, before leaving the pulpit, he would like to tell them of

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something he had been reading in an old chronicle of the Black Death at Marseille. In it Mathieu Marais, the chronicler, laments his lot; he says he has been cast into hell to languish without succor and without hope. Well, Mathieu Marais was blind! Never more intensely than today had he, Father Paneloux, felt the immanence of divine succor and Christian hope granted to all alike. He hoped against hope that, despite all the horrors of these dark days, despite the groans of men and women in agony, our fellow citizens would offer up to heaven that one prayer which is truly Christian, a prayer of love. And God would see to the rest. IT is hard to say if this sermon had any effect on our townsfolk. M. Othon, the magistrate, assured Dr. Rieux that he had found the preacher's arguments "absolutely irrefutable." But not everyone took so unqualified a view. To some the sermon simply brought home the fact that they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment. And while a good many people adapted themselves to confinement and carried on their humdrum lives as before, there were others who rebelled and whose one idea now was to break loose from the prison-house. At first the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But, now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration under that blue dome of sky, already beginning to sizzle in the fires of summer, they had a vague sensation that their whole lives were threatened by the present turn of events, and in the evening, when the cooler air revived their energy, this feeling of being locked in like criminals prompted them sometimes to foolhardy acts. It is noteworthy—this may or may not have been due to mere coincidence—that this Sunday of the sermon marked the beginning of something like a widespread panic in the town, and it took so deep a hold as to lead one to suspect that only now had the true nature of their

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situation dawned on our townspeople. Seen from this angle, the atmosphere of the town was somewhat changed. But, actually, it was a problem whether the change was in the atmosphere or in their hearts. A few days after the sermon, when Rieux, on his way to one of the outlying districts of the town, was discussing the change with Grand, he collided in the darkness with a man who was standing in the middle of the pavement swaying from side to side without trying to advance. At the same moment the street-lamps, which were being lit later and later in the evening, went on suddenly, and a lamp just behind Rieux and his companion threw its light full on the man's face. His eyes were shut and he was laughing soundlessly. Big drops of sweat were rolling down the face convulsed with silent merriment. "A lunatic at large," Grand observed. Rieux took his arm and was shepherding him on when he noticed that Grand was trembling violently. "If things go on as they are going," Rieux remarked, "the whole town will be a madhouse." He felt exhausted, his throat was parched. "Let's have a drink." They turned into a small cafe. The only light came from a lamp over the bar, the heavy air had a curious reddish tinge, and for no apparent reason everyone was speaking in undertones. To the doctor's surprise Grand asked for a small glass of straight liquor, which he drank off at a gulp. "Fiery stuff!" he observed; then, a moment later, suggested making a move. Out in the street it seemed to Rieux that the night was full of whispers. Somewhere in the black depths above the street-lamps there was a low soughing that brought to his mind that unseen flail threshing incessantly the languid air of which Paneloux had spoken. "Happily, happily," Grand muttered, then paused. Rieux asked him what he had been going to say.

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"Happily, I've my work." "Ah yes," Rieux said. "That's something, anyhow." Then, so as not to hear that eerie whistling in the air, he asked Grand if he was getting good results. "Well, yes, I think I'm making headway." "Have you much more to do?" Grand began to show an animation unlike his usual self, and his voice took ardor from the liquor he had drunk. "I don't know. But that's not the point, doctor; yes, I can assure you that's not the point." It was too dark to see clearly, but Rieux had the impression that he was waving his arms. He seemed to be working himself up to say something, and when he spoke, the words came with a rush. "What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up— after he's read it through, of course—and say to his staff: 'Gentlemen, hats off!'" Rieux was dumbfounded, and, to add to his amazement, he saw, or seemed to see, the man beside him making as if to take off his hat with a sweeping gesture, bringing his hand to his head, then holding his arm out straight in front of him. That queer whistling overhead seemed to gather force. "So you see," Grand added, "it's got to be flawless." Though he knew little of the literary world, Rieux had a suspicion that things didn't happen in it quite so picturesquely—that, for instance, publishers do not keep their hats on in their offices. But, of course, one never can tell, and Rieux preferred to hold his peace. Try as he might to shut his ears to it, he still was listening to that eerie sound above, the

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whispering of the plague. They had reached the part of the town where Grand lived and, as it was on a slight eminence, they felt the cool night breeze fanning their cheeks and at the same time carrying away from them the noises of the town. Grand went on talking, but Rieux failed to follow all the worthy man was saying. All he gathered was that the work he was engaged on ran to a great many pages, and he was at almost excruciating pains to bring it to perfection. "Evenings, whole weeks, spent on one word, just think! Sometimes on a mere conjunction!" Grand stopped abruptly and seized the doctor by a button of his coat. The words came stumbling out of his almost toothless mouth. "I'd like you to understand, doctor. I grant you it's easy enough to choose between a 'but' and an 'and.' It's a bit more difficult to decide between 'and' and 'then.' But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an 'and' or leave it out." "Yes," Rieux said, "I see your point." He started walking again. Grand looked abashed, then stepped forward and drew level. "Sorry," he said awkwardly. "I don't know what's come over me this evening." Rieux patted his shoulder encouragingly, saying he'd been much interested in what Grand had said and would like to help him. This seemed to reassure Grand, and when they reached his place he suggested, after some slight hesitation, that the doctor should come in for a moment. Rieux agreed. They entered the dining-room and Grand gave him a chair beside a table strewn with sheets of paper covered with writing in a microscopic hand, criscrossed with corrections. "Yes, that's it," he said in answer to the doctor's questioning glance. "But won't you drink something? I've some wine."

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Rieux declined. He was bending over the manuscript. "No, don't look," Grand said. "It's my opening phrase, and it's giving trouble, no end of trouble." He too was gazing at the sheets of paper on the table, and his hand seemed irresistibly drawn to one of them. Finally he picked it up and held it to the shadeless electric bulb so that the light shone through. The paper shook in his hand and Rieux noticed that his forehead was moist with sweat. "Sit down," he said, "and read it to me." "Yes." There was a timid gratitude in Grand's eyes and smile. "I think I'd like you to hear it." He waited for a while, still gazing at the writing, then sat down. Meanwhile Rieux was listening to the curious buzzing sound that was rising from the streets as if in answer to the soughings of the plague. At that moment he had a preternaturally vivid awareness of the town stretched out below, a victim world secluded and apart, and of the groans of agony stifled in its darkness. Then, pitched low but clear, Grand's voice came to his ears. "One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne." Silence returned, and with it the vague murmur of the prostrate town. Grand had put down the sheet and was still staring at it. After a while he looked up. "What do you think of it?" Rieux replied that this opening phrase had whetted his curiosity; he'd like to hear what followed. Whereat Grand told him he'd got it all wrong. He seemed excited and slapped the papers on the table with the flat of his hand.

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"That's only a rough draft. Once I've succeeded in rendering perfectly the picture in my mind's eye, once my words have the exact tempo of this ride—the horse is trotting, one-two-three, one-two-three, see what I mean?—the rest will come more easily and, what's even more important, the illusion will be such that from the very first words it will be possible to say: 'Hats off!'. But before that, he admitted, there was lots of hard work to be done. He'd never dream of handing that sentence to the printer in its present form. For though it sometimes satisfied him, he was fully aware it didn't quite hit the mark as yet, and also that to some extent it had a facility of tone approximating, remotely perhaps, but recognizably, to the commonplace. That was more or less what he was saying when they heard the sound of people running in the street below the window. Rieux stood up. "Just wait and see what I make of it," Grand said, and, glancing toward the window, added: "When all this is over." But then the sound of hurried footsteps came again. Rieux was already halfway down the stairs, and when he stepped out into the street two men brushed past him. They seemed to be on their way to one of the town gates. In fact, what with the heat and the plague, some of our fellow citizens were losing their heads; there had already been some scenes of violence and nightly attempts were made to elude the sentries and escape to the outside world. OThers, too, Rambert for example, were trying to escape from this atmosphere of growing panic, but with more skill and persistence, if not with greater success. For a while Rambert had gone on struggling with officialdom. If he was to be believed, he had always thought that perseverance would win through, inevitably, and, as he pointed out, resourcefulness in emergency was up his street, in a manner of speaking. So he plodded away, calling on all sorts of officials and others whose influence would have had weight in normal conditions. But, as things

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were, such influence was unavailing. For the most part they were men with well-defined and sound ideas on everything concerning exports, banking, the fruit or wine trade; men of proved ability in handling problems relating to insurance, the interpretation of ill-drawn contracts, and the like; of high qualifications and evident good intentions. That, in fact, was what struck one most—the excellence of their intentions. But as regards plague their competence was practically nil. However, whenever opportunity arose, Rambert had tackled each of them and pleaded his cause. The gist of his argument was always the same: that he was a stranger to our town and, that being so, his case deserved special consideration. Mostly the men he talked to conceded this point readily enough. But usually they added that a good number of other people were in a like case, and thus his position was not so exceptional as he seemed to suppose. To this Rambert could reply that this did not affect the substance of his argument in any way. He was then told that it did affect the position, already difficult, of the authorities, who were against showing any favoritism and thus running the risk of creating what, with obvious repugnance, they called "a precedent." In conversation with Dr. Rieux, Rambert classified the people whom he had approached in various categories. Those who used the arguments mentioned above he called the sticklers. Besides these there were the consolers, who assured him that the present state of things couldn't possibly last and, when asked for definite suggestions, fobbed him off by telling him he was making too much fuss about a passing inconvenience. Then there were the very important persons who asked the visitor to leave a brief note of his case and informed him they would decide on it in due course; the triflers, who offered him billeting warrants or gave the addresses of lodgings; the red-tape merchants, who made him fill up a form and promptly interred it in a file; overworked officials, who raised their arms to heaven, and much-harassed officials who simply looked away; and, finally, the traditionalists—these were by far the greatest number—who referred Rambert to another office or recommended some new method of approach.

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These fruitless interviews had thoroughly worn out the journalist; on the credit side he had obtained much insight into the inner workings of a municipal office and a Prefect's headquarters, by dint of sitting for hours on imitation-leather sofas, confronted by posters urging him to invest in savings bonds exempt from income-tax, or to enlist in the colonial army; and by dint of entering offices where human faces were as blank as the filing-cabinets and the dusty records on the shelves behind them. The only thing gained by all this expenditure of energy, Rambert told Rieux with a hint of bitterness, was that it served to keep his mind off his predicament. In fact, the rapid progress of the plague practically escaped his notice. Also, it made the days pass more quickly and, given the situation in which the whole town was placed, it might be said that every day lived through brought everyone, provided he survived, twenty-four hours nearer the end of his ordeal. Rieux could but admit the truth of this reasoning, but to his mind its truth was of rather too general an order. At one moment Rambert had a gleam of hope. A form was sent him from the Prefect's office with instructions that he was to fill in carefully all the blanks. It included questions concerning his identity, his family, his present and former sources of income; in fact, he was to give what is known as a.curriculum vitae. He got an impression that inquiries were on foot with a view to drawing up a list of persons who might be instructed to leave the town and return to their homes. Some vague information gleaned from an employee in one of the offices confirmed this impression. But on going further into the matter and finally discovering the office from which the form had emanated, he was told that this information was being collected with a view to certain contingencies. "What contingencies?" he asked. He then learned that the contingency was the possibility of his falling ill and dying of plague; the data supplied would enable the authorities to notify his family and also to decide if the hospital expenses should be borne by the municipality or if, in due course, they could be recovered from his relatives. On the face of it this implied that he was not completely cut off from the woman who was awaiting his return, since the powers that be were obviously giving heed to both of them. But that was no consolation. The really remarkable thing, and Rambert was

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greatly struck by this, was the way in which, in the very midst of catastrophe, offices could go on functioning serenely and take initiatives of no immediate relevance, and often unknown to the highest authority, purely and simply because they had been created originally for this purpose. The next phase was at once the easiest and the hardest for Rambert. It was a period of sheer lethargy. He had gone the round of-offices, taken every step that could be taken, and realized that for the present all avenues of that kind were closed to him. So now he drifted aimlessly from cafe to cafe. In the mornings he would sit on the terrace of one of them and read a newspaper in the hope of finding some indication that the epidemic was on the wane. He would gaze at the faces of the passers- by, often turning away disgustedly from their look of unrelieved gloom, and after reading for the nth time the shopsigns on the other side of the street, the advertisements of popular drinks that were no longer procurable, would rise and walk again at random in the yellow streets. Thus he killed time till nightfall, moving about the town and stopping now and then at a cafe or restaurant. One evening Rieux noticed him hovering round the door of a cafe, unable to make up his mind to enter. At last he decided to go in and sat down at a table at the back of the room. It was the time when, acting under orders, cafe-proprietors deferred as long as possible turning on their lights. Gray dusk was seeping into the room, the pink of sunset glowed in the wall mirrors, and the marble-topped tables glimmered white in the gathering darkness. Seated in the empty cafe, .Rambert looked pathetically lost, a mere shade among the shadows, and Rieux guessed this was the hour when he felt most derelict. It was, indeed, the hour of day when all the prisoners of the town realized their dereliction and each was thinking that something, no matter what, must be done to hasten their deliverance. Rieux turned hurriedly away. Rambert also spent a certain amount of time at the railroad station. No one was allowed on the platforms. But the waiting-rooms, which could be entered from outside, remained open and, being cool and dark, were often patronized by beggars on very hot days. Rambert spent much time studying the timetables, reading the prohibitions against spitting, and the passengers' regulations. After that he sat down in a corner. An old cast-iron stove, which had been stone-cold for months, rose like a sort of

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landmark in the middle of the room, surrounded by figure-of-eight patterns on the floor, the traceries of long-past sprinklings. Posters on the walls gaily invited tourists to a carefree holiday at Cannes or Bandol. And in his corner Rambert savored that bitter sense of freedom which comes of total deprivation. The evocations which at that time he found most poignant were—anyhow according to what he told Rieux—those of Paris. There rose before his eyes, unsummoned, vistas of old stones and riverbanks, the pigeons of the Palais-Royal, the Gare du Nord, quiet old streets round the Pantheon, and many another scene of the city he'd never known he loved so much, and these mental pictures killed all desire for any form of action. Rieux felt fairly sure he was identifying these scenes with memories of his love. And when one day Rambert told him that he liked waking up at four in the morning and thinking of his beloved Paris, the doctor guessed easily enough, basing this on his own experience, that that was his favorite time for conjuring up pictures of the woman from whom he now was parted. This was, indeed, the hour when he could feel surest she was wholly his. Till four in the morning one is seldom doing anything and at that hour, even if the night has been a night of betrayal, one is asleep. Yes, everyone sleeps at that hour, and this is reassuring, since the great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again. Shortly after Father Paneloux's sermon the hot weather set in with a vengeance. On the day following the unseasonable downpour of that Sunday, summer blazed out above the housetops. First a strong, scorching wind blew steadily for a whole day, drying up the walls. And then the sun took charge, incessant waves of heat and light swept the town daylong, and but for arcaded streets and the interiors of houses, everything lay naked to the dazzling impact of the light. The sun stalked our townsfolk along every byway, into every nook; and when they paused, it struck. Since this first onslaught of the heat synchronized with a startling increase in the number of victims—there were now nearly seven

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hundred deaths a week—a mood of profound discouragement settled on the town. In the suburbs little was left of the wonted animation between the long flat streets and the terraced houses; ordinarily people living in these districts used to spend the best part of the day on their doorsteps, but now every door was shut, nobody was to be seen, even the Venetian blinds stayed down, and there was no knowing if it was the heat or the plague that they were trying to shut out. In some houses groans could be heard. At first, when that happened, people often gathered outside and listened, prompted by curiosity or compassion. But under the prolonged strain it seemed that hearts had toughened; people lived beside those groans or walked past them as though they had become the normal speech of men. As a result of the fighting at the gates, in the course of which the police had had to use their revolvers, a spirit of lawlessness was abroad. Some had certainly been wounded in these brushes with the police, but in the town, where, owing to the combined influences of heat and terror, everything was exaggerated, there was talk of deaths. One thing, anyhow, was certain; discontent was on the increase and, fearing worse to come, the local officials debated lengthily on the measures to be taken if the populace, goaded to frenzy by the epidemic, got completely out of hand. The newspapers published new regulations reiterating the orders against attempting to leave the town and warning those who infringed them that they were liable to long terms of imprisonment. A system of patrols was instituted and often in the empty, sweltering streets, heralded by a clatter of horse hoofs on the cobbles, a detachment of mounted police would make its way between the parallel lines of close-shut windows. Now and again a gunshot was heard; the special brigade recently detailed to destroy cats and dogs, as possible carriers of infection, was at work. And these whipcrack sounds startling the silence increased the nervous tension already existing in the town. For in the heat and stillness, and for the troubled hearts of our townsfolk, anything, even the least sound, had a heightened significance. The varying aspects of the sky, the very smells rising from the soil that mark each change of season, were taken notice of for the first time. Everyone realized with dismay that hot weather would favor the epidemic, and it was clear that summer was setting in. The cries of swifts

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in the evening air above the housetops were growing shriller. And the sky, too, had lost the spaciousness of those June twilights when our horizons seem infinitely remote. In the markets the flowers no longer came in buds; they were already in full bloom, and after the morning's marketing the dusty pavements were littered with trampled petals. It was plain to see that spring had spent itself, lavished its ardor on the myriads of flowers that were bursting everywhere into bloom, and now was being crushed out by the twofold onslaught of heat and plague. For our fellow citizens that summer sky, and the streets thick in dust, gray as their present lives, had the same ominous import as the hundred deaths now weighing daily on the town. That incessant sunlight and those bright hours associated with siesta or with holidays no longer invited, as in the past, to frolics and flirtation on the beaches. Now they rang hollow in the silence of the closed town, they had lost the golden spell of happier summers. Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure. That, indeed, was one of the great changes brought by the epidemic. Hitherto all of us welcomed summer in with pleasant anticipation. The town was open to the sea and its young folk made free of the beaches. But this summer, for all its nearness, the sea was out of bounds; young limbs had no longer the run of its delights. What could we do under these conditions? It is Tarrou once again who paints the most faithful picture of our life in those days. Needless to say, he outlines the progress of the plague and he, too, notes that a new phase of the epidemic was ushered in when the radio announced no longer weekly totals, but ninety-two, a hundred and seven, and a hundred and thirty deaths in a day. "The newspapers and the authorities are playing ball with the plague. They fancy they're scoring off it because a hundred and thirty is a smaller figure than nine hundred and ten." He also records such striking or moving incidents of the epidemic as came under his notice; that, for instance, of the woman in a lonely street who abruptly opened a shuttered window just above his head and gave two loud shrieks before closing the shutters again on the dark interior of a bedroom. But he also noted that peppermint lozenges had vanished from the drugstores, because there was a popular belief that when sucking them you were proof against contagion.

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He went on watching his pet specimen on the opposite balcony. It seemed that tragedy had come to the ancient small-game hunter as well. One morning there had been gunshots in the street and, as Tarrou put it, "some gobs of lead" had killed off most of the cats and scared away the others; anyhow they were no longer about. That day the little old man went on to his balcony at the usual hour, showed some surprise, and, leaning on the rail, closely scanned the corners of the street. Then he settled down to wait, fretfully tapping the balustrade with his right hand. After staying there for some time he tore up a few sheets of paper, went back into his room, and came out again. After another longish wait he retreated again into the room, slamming the french windows behind him. He followed the same procedure daily during the rest of the week, and the sadness and bewilderment on the old face deepened as the days went by. On the eighth day Tarrou waited in vain for his appearance; the windows stayed resolutely closed on all too comprehensible distress. This entry ends with Tarrou's summing up. "It is forbidden to spit on cats in plague-time." In another context Tarrou notes that, on coming home in the evenings, he invariably saw the night watchman pacing the hall, like a sentry on his beat. The man never failed to remind everyone he met that he'd foreseen what was happening. Tarrou agreed that he'd predicted a disaster, but reminded him that the event predicted by him was an earthquake. To which the old fellow replied: "Ah, if only it had been an earthquake! A good bad shock, and there you are! You count the dead and living, and that's an end of it. But this here damned disease—even them who haven't got it can't think of anything else." The manager of the hotel was equally downhearted. In the early days travelers, unable to leave the town, had kept on their rooms. But one by one, seeing that the epidemic showed no sign of abating, they moved out to stay with friends. And the same cause that had led to all the rooms' being occupied now kept them empty, since there were no newcomers to the town. Tarrou was one of the very few remaining guests, and the manager never lost an opportunity of informing him that, were he not reluctant to put these gentlemen to inconvenience, he would have closed the hotel long ago. He often asked Tarrou to say how long he thought the epidemic would last. "They say," Tarrou informed him, "that cold weather stamps out diseases of this type." The manager looked aghast.

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"But, my dear sir, it's never really cold in these parts. And, anyhow, that would mean it's going to last many months more." Moreover, he was sure that for a long while to come travelers would give the town a wide berth. This epidemic spelt the ruin of the tourist trade, in fact. After a short absence M. Othon, the owlish paterfamilias, made a reappearance in the restaurant, but accompanied only by the two "performing poodles," his offspring. On inquiry it came out that Mme Othon was in quarantine; she had been nursing her mother, who had succumbed to plague. "I don't like it a bit," the manager told Tarrou. "Quarantine or not, she's under suspicion, which means that they are, too." Tarrou pointed out that, if it came to that, everyone was "under suspicion." But the manager had his own ideas and was not to be shaken out of them. "No, sir. You and I, we're not under suspicion. But they certainly are." However, M. Othon was impervious to such considerations and would not let the plague change his habits. He entered the restaurant with his wonted dignity, sat down in front of his children, and addressed to them at intervals the same nicely worded, unamiable remarks. Only the small boy looked somewhat different; dressed in black like his sister, a little more shrunken than before, he now seemed a miniature replica of his father. The night watchman, who had no liking for M. Othon, had said of him to Tarrou: "That fine gentleman will pass out with his clothes on. All dressed up and ready to go. So he won't need no laying-out." Tarrou has some comments on the sermon preached by Paneloux: "I can understand that type of fervor and find it not displeasing. At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth—in other words, to silence. So let's wait."

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Tarrou also records that he had a long talk with Dr. Rieux; all he remembered was that it had "good results." In this connection he notes the color of Mme Rieux's, the doctor's mother's, eyes, a limpid brown, and makes the odd observation that a gaze revealing so much goodness of heart would always triumph over plague. He has also a good deal to say about Rieux's asthma patient. He went with the doctor to see him, immediately after their conversation. The old man greeted Tarrou with a chuckle and rubbed his hands cheerfully. He was sitting up in bed with the usual two pans of dried peas in front of him. "Ah, here's another of 'em!" he exclaimed when he saw Tarrou. "It's a topsy-turvy world all right, more doctors than patients. Because it's mowing them down, ain't it, more and more. That priest's right; we were asking for it." Next day Tarrou came to see him without warning. From Tarrou's notes we gather that the old man, a dry-goods dealer by occupation, decided at the age of fifty that he'd done enough work for a lifetime. He took to his bed and never left it again—but not because of his asthma, which would not have prevented his getting about. A small fixed income had seen him through to his present age, seventy- five, and the years had not damped his cheerfulness. He couldn't bear the sight of a watch, and indeed there wasn't one in the whole house. "Watches," he said, "are silly gadgets, and dear at that." He worked out the time—that is to say, the time for meals—with his two saucepans, one of which was always full of peas when he woke in the morning. He filled the other, pea by pea, at a constant, carefully regulated speed. Thus time for him was reckoned by these pans and he could take his bearings in it at any moment of the day. "Every fifteen pans," he said, "it's feeding-time. What could be simpler?" If his wife was to be trusted, he had given signs of his vocation at a very early age. Nothing, in fact, had ever interested him; his work, friendship, cafes, music, women, outings—to all he was indifferent. He had never left his home town except once when he had been called to Algiers for family affairs, and even then he had alighted from the train at the first station after Oran, incapable of continuing the adventure. He took the first train back.

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To Tarrou, who had shown surprise at the secluded life he led, he had given the following explanation, more or less. According to religion, the first half of a man's life is an upgrade; the second goes downhill. On the descending days he has no claim, they may be snatched from him at any moment; thus he can do nothing with them and the best thing, precisely, is to do nothing with them. He obviously had no compunction about contradicting himself, for a few minutes later he told Tarrou that God did not exist, since otherwise there would be no need for priests. But, from some observations which followed, Tarrou realized that the old fellow's philosophy was closely involved with the irritation caused by the house-to-house collections in aid of charities, which took place almost incessantly in that part of the town. What completed the picture of the old man was a desire he expressed several times, and which seemed deeply rooted: the desire to die at a very advanced age. "Is he a saint?" Tarrou asked himself, and answered: "Yes, if saintliness is an aggregate of habits." Meanwhile Tarrou was compiling a longish description of a day in the plague-stricken town; it was to give a full and accurate picture of the life of our fellow citizens during that summer. "Nobody laughs," Tarrou observes, "except the drunks, and they laugh too much." After which he embarks on his description. "At daybreak light breaths of air fan the still empty streets. At this hour, between the night's victims and the death-agonies of the coming day, it is as if for a while plague .stays its hand and takes breath. AH shops are shut. But on some a notice: Closed owing to plague, shows that when the others open presently, these will not. Still half-asleep, the newsboys do not yet cry the news but, lounging at street corners, offer their wares to the lamp-posts, with the vague gestures of sleepwalkers. Soon, awakened by the early streetcars, they will fan out through the town, holding at arm's length sheets on which the word PLAGUE looms large. Will there be a plague autumn? Professor B. says: 'No.' Toll of the 94th day of plague: 124 deaths. "In spite of the growing shortage of paper, which has compelled some dailies to reduce their pages, a new paper has been launched: the Plague Chronicle, which sets out 'to inform our townspeople, with scrupulous

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veracity, of the daily progress or recession of the disease; to supply them with the most authoritative opinions available as to its future course; to offer the hospitality of its columns to all, in whatever walk of life, who wish to join in combating the epidemic; to keep up the morale of the populace; to publish the latest orders issued by the authorities; and to centralize the efforts of all who desire to give active and wholehearted help in the present emergency.' Actually this newspaper very soon came to devote its columns to advertisements of new, 'infallible' antidotes against plague. "Toward six in the morning all these papers are being sold to the lines that begin to form outside the shops over an hour before they open; then to the passengers alighting from the streetcars coming in, packed to capacity, from the suburbs. The cars are now the only means of transport, and they have much difficulty in progressing, what with people standing on the running-boards and hanging in clusters from the handrails. A queer thing is how the passengers all try to keep their backs turned to their neighbors, twisting themselves into grotesque attitudes in the attempt—the idea being, of course, to avoid contagion. At every stop a cataract of men and women is disgorged, each in haste to put a safe distance between himself or herself and the rest. "When the first cars have gone by, the town gradually wakes up, early cafes open their doors, and you see an array of cards on the counter: No Coffee, Bring Your Own Sugar, and the like. Next the shops open and the streets grow livelier. And meanwhile the light is swelling and the sky, even at this early hour, beginning to grow leaden-hued with heat. This is the time when those who have nothing to do venture out on the boulevards. Most of them seem determined to counteract the plague by a lavish display of luxury. Daily, about eleven, you see a sort of dress parade of youths and girls, who make you realize the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity. If the epidemic spreads, morals too will broaden, and we may see again the saturnalia of Milan, men and women dancing round the graves. "At noon, in a flash, all the restaurants fill up. Very quickly small groups of people unable to find a seat form at the doors. Because of the intense heat the sky is losing its brightness. Under big awnings the aspirants to

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food wait their turn, aligned along the curbs of streets gaping and sizzling in the fires of noon. The reason for the restaurants' being so crowded is that they solve for many the feeding problem. But they do nothing to allay the fear of contagion. Many of the customers spend several minutes methodically wiping their plates. Not long ago some restaurants put up notices: Our plates, knives, and forks guaranteed sterilized. But gradually they discontinued publicity of this order, since their customers came in any case. People, moreover, spend very freely. Choice wines, or wines alleged to be such, the costliest extras—a mood of reckless extravagance is setting in. It seems that there was something like a panic in a restaurant because a customer suddenly felt ill, went very white, and staggered precipitately to the door. "Toward two o'clock the town slowly empties, it is the time when silence, sunlight, dust, and plague have the streets to themselves. Wave after wave of heat flows over the frontage of the tall gray houses during these long, languid hours. Thus the afternoon wears on, slowly merging into an evening that settles down like a red winding-sheet on the serried tumult of the town. At the start of the great heat, for some unascertained reason, the evenings found the streets almost empty. But now the least ripple of cooler air brings an easing of the strain, if not a flutter of hope. Then all stream out into the open, drug themselves with talking, start arguing or love-making, and in the last glow of sunset the town, freighted with lovers two by two and loud with voices, drifts like a helmless ship into the throbbing darkness. In vain a zealous evangelist with a felt hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God. "In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, dusty nightfall into a sort of hectic exaltation, an unkempt freedom fevering their blood.