The Plague

by Albert Camus

convenient way of getting to know a town is to find out how people work there,

how they love and how they die.

To the very extent that our town encourages routine, one might say that all is for the best. Admittedly, seen like that, life is not too exciting. At least disorder is unknown among us.

‘Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist’s waiting-room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one’s balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one’s seat; etc.’

The only thing I’m interested in,” I said, “is to find inner peace.”

The press, which had had so much to say about the business of the rats, fell silent. This is because rats die in the street and people in their bedrooms; and newspapers are only concerned with the street.

in a pestilence when it descends upon us. There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.

war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting.

Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves.

they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves. The people of our town were no more guilty than anyone else, they merely forgot to be modest and thought that everything was still possible for them, which implied that pestilence was impossible. They

Why should they have thought about the plague, which negates the future, negates journeys and debate? They considered themselves free and no one will ever be free as long as there is plague, pestilence and famine.

Figures drifted through his head and he thought that the thirty or so great plagues recorded in history had caused nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has fought a war, one hardly knows any more what a dead person is. And if a dead man has no significance unless one has seen him dead, a hundred million bodies spread through history are just a mist drifting through the imagination.

Athens stricken, abandoned by its birds; Chinese towns full of people dying in silence; the convicts of Marseille piling dripping corpses into holes; the building of the great wall in Provence in the hope of holding back the raging wind of plague; Jaffa and its ghastly beggars; beds, damp and rotten, sticking to the earth floor of the hospital in Constantinople; sick people dragged along by hooks; the carnival of masked doctors during the Black Death; the living copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; the carts of the dead in a London paralysed with terror; and days and nights filled, everywhere and always, with the endless cries of men. All this was not yet powerful enough to destroy the peace of the day.

But even to find the words to express such simple emotions cost him an enormous effort. In the end this problem had become his main worry. ‘Oh, doctor,’ he would say. ‘I wish I could learn to express myself.’

One might say that the first effect of this sudden and brutal attack of the disease was to force the citizens of our town to act as though they had no individual feelings.

painful passions were reduced to a periodic exchange of stock phrases such as ‘Am well’, ‘Thinking of you’, ‘Affectionately yours’.

there is no love which cannot to be surpassed, yet we accept with a greater or lesser degree of equanimity that ours shall remain merely average.

Here too the most authentic sufferings were habitually translated into the banal clichés of conversation.

The egotism of love protected them in the midst of the general distress and, if they did think about the plague, it was always and only to the extent that it risked making their separation eternal.

A working man, poverty, a narrowing of possibilities, the silent evenings around the table: there is no place for passion in such a universe.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

‘The first time that this tribulation appeared in history, it was to strike down the enemies of God. Pharaoh opposed the designs of the Eternal and the plague brought him to his knees. Since the beginning of history, the scourge of God has brought down the proud and the blind beneath His feet. Think on this and fall to your knees.’

‘Ah! If only it had been an earthquake! A good shake and that’s it … One counts the dead, one counts the living and the whole thing’s over and done with. But this rotten bastard of a disease! Even those who don’t have it, carry it in their hearts.’

‘No one laughs except drunks,’ Tarrou wrote, ‘and they laugh too much.’

by giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.

The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened.

People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows ...

So, because the plague became the responsibility of some of us, it appeared to be what it really was – a matter that concerned everybody.

But there always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that two and two make four is punished by death.

He said yes without hesitating, with his habitual goodwill. He asked only to be useful in small ways.

‘Only artists know how to use their eyes.’

He had thought of lightening it by dropping ‘de Boulogne’, assuming that everyone would understand ‘the Bois’. But then the sentence appeared to attach the flowers to the Bois instead of to the avenues: ‘flowers of the Bois’. He also considered writing: ‘the avenues of the Bois full of flowers’; but this left one uncertain whether the flowers belonged with the Bois or with the avenues, and this tormented him. It is true that some evenings he seemed even more tired than Rieux.

This would be to give truth its due, to give the sum of two and two its total of four, and to give heroism the secondary place that it deserves, just after – but never before – the generous demand of happiness.

‘To love or to die together, there is nothing else to be done. They are too far away.’

It was at this moment, in the night full of fleeting ambulances, that, as he would later tell Dr Rieux, he noticed that in all this time he had to some extent forgotten his wife, applying his mind entirely to the search for a breach in the walls that separated them.

There were no longer any individual destinies, but a collective history that was the plague, and feelings shared by all.

The trouble is, there is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence and, if only because they last so long, great misfortunes are monotonous.

everyone had banal feelings.

While up to this point they had fiercely subtracted their suffering from the sum of collective misfortune, now they accepted it as part of the whole.

The truth must be told: the plague had taken away from all of them the power of love or even of friendship, for love demands some future, and for us there was only the here and now.

That time in the evening, which for believers is the occasion for an examination of conscience, is hard for the prisoner or the exile who has only the void to examine.

‘In short, the plague suits him. It has made an accomplice out of a solitary man who did not want to be solitary.

‘The only thing we’ve got left is statistics.’

you’ve got to mean what you say. It’s too tiring to lie.’

But Rieux sat up and said firmly that this was ridiculous and that there was no shame in choosing happiness. ‘Yes,’ said Rambert. ‘But there may be shame in being happy all by oneself.’

give in to the divine will, even when it was incomprehensible.

‘the love of God is a difficult love. It assumes a total abandonment of oneself and contempt for one’s person. But it alone can wipe away the suffering and death of children, it alone makes them necessary because it is impossible to understand such things, so we have no alternative except to desire them. This is the hard lesson that I wanted to share with you. This is the faith – cruel in the eyes of man, decisive in the eyes of God – which we must try to reach. We must try to make ourselves equal to this awful image. On this peak, everything will be confounded and made equal, and the truth will break forth from apparent injustice.

As for those who love them, they have also forgotten them because they must be exhausting themselves in appeals and schemes to get them out. The more they think about getting them out, the less they think about the person to be got out.

had indirectly supported the deaths of thousands of men, that I had even caused their deaths by approving the actions and principles that inevitably led to them.

With time I have simply noticed that even those who are better than the rest cannot avoid killing or letting others be killed because it is in the logic of how they live and we cannot make a gesture in this world without taking the risk of bringing death.