The Plague

by Albert Camus

“I don’t agree with you. These little brutes always have an air of originality. But, at bottom, it’s always the same thing.”

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

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.”

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.

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.

But from now on it was different; they seemed at the mercy of the sky’s caprices, in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally.

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.

Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous;

One grows out of pity when it’s useless.

when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead.

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.

Rambert was 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.”

On the whole, men are more good than bad;

There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.

genuine enough. But it could be expressed only in the conventional language with which men try to express what unites them with mankind in general;

“Oran, we’re with you!” they called emotionally. But not, the doctor told himself, to love or to die together? “and that’s the only way.

You had to look closely and take thought to realize that plague was here. For it betrayed its presence only by negative signs.

Small fleecy clouds, which presently the sun would swallow at a gulp, were drifting across the sky.

he’s incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he’s incapable of anything really worth while.”

“Man is an idea, and a precious small idea, once he turns his back on love.

But actually it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-August, the plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.

A smell of brine and seaweed came from the unseen, storm-tossed sea.

under its despotic rule everyone, from the warden down to the humblest delinquent, was under sentence and, perhaps for the first time, impartial justice reigned in the prison.

During the second phase of the plague their memory failed them, too. Not that they had forgotten the face itself, but, what came to the same thing, it had lost fleshly substance and they no longer saw it in memory’s mirror.

Thus, while during the first weeks they were apt to complain that only shadows remained to them of what their love had been and meant, they now came to learn that even shadows can waste away, losing the faint hues of life that memory may give.

And by the end of their long sundering they had also lost the power of imagining the intimacy that once was theirs or understanding what it can be to live with someone whose life is wrapped up in yours.

Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them.

For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

Sometimes the mood of melancholy that descended on them with the nightfall acted as a sort of warning, not always fulfilled, however, that old memories were floating up to the surface.

amidst noxious fumes and the muted clang of ambulances, all of us ate the same sour bread of exile, unconsciously waiting for the same reunion, the same miracle of peace regained.

No doubt our love persisted, but in practice it served nothing; it was an inert mass within us, sterile as crime or a life sentence. It had declined on a patience that led nowhere, a dogged expectation.

to be raised to a vastly higher power to make it comparable with the gnawing pain of separation, since this latter came from a hunger fierce to the point of insatiability. In any case, if the reader

The smile of benevolent irony that always played on it had seemed to endow it with perpetual youth; now, abruptly left out of control, with a trickle of saliva between the slightly parted lips, it betrayed its age and the wastage of the years. And, seeing this, Rieux felt a lump come to his throat.

morning. “Don’t you believe in God?” she asked him. On Rambert’s admitting he did not, she said again that “that explained it.” “Yes,” she added, “you’re right. You must go back to her. Or else what would be left you?”

Whenever any of them spoke through the mask, the muslin bulged and grew moist over the lips. This gave a sort of unreality to the conversation; it was like a colloquy of statues.

was as if his frail frame were bending before the fierce breath of the plague, breaking under the reiterated gusts of fever.

And then, at one with the tortured child, he struggled to sustain him with all the remaining strength of his own body. But, linked for a few moments, the rhythms of their heartbeats soon fell apart, the child escaped him, and again he knew his impotence.

mouth still gaping, but silent now, the child was lying among the tumbled blankets, a small, shrunken form, with the tears still wet on his cheeks.

And when this source ran dry, they commissioned journalists to write up forecasts, and, in this respect at least, the journalists proved themselves equal to their prototypes of earlier ages.

circumstances, we should bear in mind. Appearances notwithstanding, all trials, however cruel, worked together for good to the Christian. And, indeed, what a Christian should always seek in his hour of trial was to discern that good, in what it consisted and how best he could turn it to account.

Many centuries previously a profane writer had claimed to reveal a secret of the Church by declaring that purgatory did not exist. He wished to convey that there could be no half measures, there was only the alternative between heaven and hell; you were either saved or damned. That, according to Paneloux, was a heresy that could spring only from a blind, disordered soul. Nevertheless, there may well have been periods of history when purgatory could not be hoped for; periods when it was impossible to speak of venial sin. Every sin was deadly, and any indifference criminal. It was all or it was nothing.

was saying that the total acceptance of which he had been speaking was not to be taken in the limited sense usually given to the words; he was not thinking of mere resignation or even of that harder virtue, humility. It involved humiliation, but a humiliation to which the person humiliated gave full assent. True, the agony of a child was humiliating to the heart and to the mind. But that was why we had to come to terms with

“When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed.