The Plague

by Albert Camus

Before the plague he was welcomed as a savior. He was going to make them right with a couple of pills or an injection, and people took him by the arm on his way to the sickroom. Flattering, but dangerous. Now, on the

contrary, he came accompanied by soldiers, and they had to hammer on the door with rifle-butts before the family would open it. They would have liked to drag him, drag the whole human race, with them to the grave. Yes, it was quite true that men can’t do without their fellow men; that he was as helpless as these unhappy people and he, too, deserved the same faint thrill of pity that he allowed himself once he had left them.

They developed a tendency to shirk every movement that didn’t seem absolutely necessary or called for efforts that seemed too great to be worth while. Thus these men were led to break, oftener and oftener, the rules of hygiene they themselves had instituted, to omit some of the numerous disinfections they should have practiced, and sometimes to visit the homes of people suffering from pneumonic plague without taking steps to safeguard themselves against infection, because they had been notified only at the last moment and could not be bothered with returning to a sanitary service station, sometimes a considerable distance away, to have the necessary instillations. There lay the real danger; for the energy they devoted to righting the disease made them all the more liable to it. In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.

He is happily at one with all around him, with their superstitions, their groundless panics, the susceptibilities of people whose nerves are always on the stretch; with their fixed idea of talking the least possible about plague and nevertheless talking of it all the time; with their abject terror at the slightest headache, now they know headache to be an early symptom of the disease; and, lastly, with their

frayed, irritable sensibility that takes offense at trifling oversights and brings tears to their eyes over the loss of a trouser-button.”

Showing more animation, Rieux told him that was sheer nonsense; there was nothing shameful in preferring happiness. “Certainly,” Rambert replied. “But it may be shameful to be happy by oneself.”

“For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves. Yet that is what I’m doing, though why I do not know.”

weariness is a kind of madness. And there are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.”

“No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”

the one thing these prophecies had in common was that, ultimately, all were reassuring. Unfortunately, though, the plague was not.

history proved that epidemics have a way of recrudescing when least expected.

“Rieux,” Tarrou said in a quite ordinary tone, “do you realize that you’ve never tried to find out anything about me, the man I am? Can I regard you as a friend?” “Yes, of course, we’re friends; only so far we haven’t had much time to show it.”

Tarrou is right. Friends share details of their life with others.

The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses.

Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true.

Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.”

“Too long! It’s lasted too long. All the time one’s wanting to let oneself go, and then one day one has to. Oh, doctor, I know I look a quiet sort, just like anybody else. But it’s always been a terrible effort only to be, just normal. And now, well, even that’s too much for me.” He stopped dead. He was trembling violently, his eyes were fever-bright. Rieux took his hand; it was burning hot. “You must go home.”

Rieux was horrified by the rapid change that had come over his face, ravaged by the fires of the disease consuming him. However, he seemed more lucid and almost immediately asked them to get his manuscript from the drawer where he always kept it. When Tarrou handed him the sheets, he pressed them to his chest without looking at them, then held them out to the doctor, indicating by a gesture that he was to read them. There were some fifty pages of manuscript. Glancing through them, Rieux saw that the bulk of the writing consisted of the same sentence written again and again with small variants, simplifications or elaborations.

“No, doctor. It’s too late, no time...” His breast heaved painfully, then suddenly he said in a loud, shrill

voice: “Burn it!” The doctor hesitated, but Grand repeated his injunction in so violent a tone and with such agony in his voice that Rieux walked across to the fireplace and dropped the sheets on the dying fire. It blazed up, and there was a sudden flood of light, a fleeting warmth, in the room. When the doctor came back to the bed, Grand had his back turned, his face almost touching the wall. After injecting the serum Rieux whispered to his friend that Grand wouldn’t last the night, and Tarrou volunteered to stay with him. The doctor approved.

All the same, this new development was the talk of the town, and people began to nurse hopes none the less heartfelt for being unavowed. All else took a back place; that daily there were new victims counted for little beside that staggering fact: the weekly total showed a decrease.

Some of them plague had imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature; they had become allergic to hope in any form. Thus even when the plague had run its course, they went on living by its standards. They were, in short, behind the times.

quailed

But, to look at it from another angle, one can’t forget everything, however great one’s wish to do so; the plague was bound to leave traces, anyhow, in people’s hearts.

But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she, or he, would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.

Tarrou had lived a life riddled with contradictions and had never known hope’s solace.

That, no doubt, explains Dr. Rieux’s composure on receiving next morning the news of his wife’s death. He was in the surgery. His mother came in, almost running, and handed him a telegram; then went back to the hall to give the telegraph-boy a tip. When she returned, her son was holding the telegram open in his hand. She looked at him, but his eyes were resolutely fixed on the window; it was flooded with the

effulgence of the morning sun rising above the harbor. “Bernard,” she said gently. The doctor turned and looked at her almost as if she were a stranger. “The telegram?” “Yes,” he said, “that’s it. A week ago.” Mme Rieux turned her face toward the window. Rieux kept silent for a while. Then he told his mother not to cry, he’d been expecting it, but it was hard all the same. And he knew, in saying this, that this suffering was nothing new. For many months, and for the last two days, it was the selfsame suffering going on and on.

a man, pointing to some place charged for him with sad yet tender associations, would say to the girl or woman beside him: “This is where, one evening just like this, I longed for you so desperately, and you weren’t there!”

they denied that we had ever been that hag-ridden populace a part of which was daily fed into a furnace and went up in oily fumes, while the rest, in shackled impotence, waited their turn.

among unremitting waves of fear and agonized revolt, the horror that such things could be, always a great voice had been ringing in the ears of these forlorn, panicked people, a voice calling them back to the land of their desire, a homeland.

he was thinking it has no importance whether such things have or have not a meaning; all we need consider is the answer given to men’s hope.

And for some time, anyhow, they would be happy. They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Rieux was thinking it was only right that those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love should enter, if only now and then, into their reward.

THIS chronicle is drawing to an end, and this seems to be the moment for Dr. Bernard Rieux to confess that he is the narrator.

Thus he can truly say there was not one of their anxieties in which he did not share, no predicament of theirs that was not his.

Also he’d made a fresh start with his phrase. “I’ve cut out all the adjectives.”

he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.