The Plague

by Albert Camus

deeply entrenched in their idiotic human faith in the future,

But, though this was exile, in most cases it was exile at home.

It must be said that people drank a lot. After one café put up a notice saying that ‘microbes hate the honest grape’, the idea that alcohol protects you against infection – something that the public already found it natural to believe – became still more firmly anchored in their minds.

in the situation in which the whole town found itself, you might say that every day that went by brought each man, provided he did not die, closer to the end of his troubles.

‘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.’

At this time, between the last to die at night and the first dead of the day, it seems as though the plague relaxes its efforts for a moment and pauses for breath.

‘Only artists know how to use their eyes.’

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

Without memory and without hope, they settled into the present. In truth, everything became present for them.

‘But you know, I feel more solidarity with the defeated than with saints. I don’t think I have any taste for heroism and sainthood. What interests me is to be a man.’ ‘Yes, we are looking for the same thing, but I am less ambitious.’

After all, it’s silly to live only in the plague. Of course a man should fight for the victims. But if he ceases to love anything else, then what is the point in fighting?’

Shortly before they arrived, the smell of iodine and seaweed told them that the sea was there. Only then did they hear it.

In some people, the plague had embedded such deep scepticism that they could not get rid of it, so there was no longer anywhere for hope to attach itself in them.

Certainly, these people had hopes, but they stored them up and kept them in reserve, refusing to draw on them before they really had the right to do so. And this waiting, this silent watch, somewhere between agony and joy, seemed to them more cruel still, in the midst of the general rejoicing.

He wanted to know if one could imagine that the plague might change nothing in the town and that everything would begin again as before, that is to say, as though nothing had happened. Tarrou thought that the plague would and would not change the town; that, of course, the greatest desire of our fellow-citizens was and would be to behave as though nothing had happened, and that, consequently, in a sense nothing would have changed; but that, in another sense, one cannot forget everything, with the best will in the world, so the plague would leave its mark, at least on people’s hearts.

This human form, which had been so close to him, was now pierced with spears, burnt up with a superhuman fire and twisted by all the malevolent winds of the skies; it was sinking before his eyes into the waters of the plague and he could do nothing to prevent its wreck.

All that a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory.

And he held her in both arms, pressing her head to him, seeing only the familiar hair, and letting his tears flow without knowing if they came from his present happiness or from a pain too long repressed, but sure at least that they would prevent him from verifying if this face buried into the hollow of his shoulder was the one about which he had so long dreamed or rather that of a stranger.

They knew now that if there is one thing that one can always desire and sometimes obtain, it is human affection.

He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.

Cultivate reasonable joyfulness to prevent sadness from disrupting the flow of your blood, leaving it vulnerable to decay.

You must not, you must never, get used to seeing people die like flies in our streets, the way they are now,

And you will continue to fight against the terrible confusion in which those who refuse to care for others die in solitude while those who make the sacrifice die in great numbers.

The soul remains the strongest when it has been soothed.