hroughout September and October the town lay prostrate, at the mercy of the plague. There was nothing to do but to “markT time,” and some hundreds of thousands of men and women went on doing this, through weeks that seemed interminable. Mist, heat, and rain rang their changes in our streets. From the south came silent coveys of starlings and thrushes, ying very high, but always giving the town a wide berth, as though the strange implement of the plague described by Paneloux, the giant ail whirling and shrilling over the house tops, warned them o us. At the beginning of October torrents of rain swept the streets clean. And all the time nothing more important befell us than that multitudinous marking time.
It was now that Rieux and his friends came to realize how exhausted they were. Indeed, the workers in the sanitary squads had given up trying to cope with their fatigue. Rieux noticed the change coming over his associates, and himself as well, and it took the form of a strange indierence to everything. Men, for instance, who hitherto had shown a keen interest in every scrap of news concerning the plague now displayed none at all. Rambert, who had been temporarily put in charge of a quarantine station—his hotel had been taken over for this purpose—could state at any moment the exact number of persons under his observation, and every detail of the procedure he had laid down for the prompt evacuation of those who suddenly developed symptoms of the disease was rmly xed in his mind. The same was true of the statistics of the eects of anti-plague inoculations on the persons in his quarantine station.
Nevertheless, he could not have told you the week’s total of plague
deaths, and he could not even have said if the gure was rising or falling. And meanwhile, in spite of everything, he had not lost hope of being able to “make his get-away” from one day to another.
As for the others, working themselves almost to a standstill throughout the day and far into the night, they never bothered to read a newspaper or listen to the radio. When told of some unlooked-for recovery, they made a show of interest, but actually received the news with the stolid indierence that we may imagine the ghting man in a great war to feel who, worn out by the incessant strain and mindful only of the duties daily assigned to him, has ceased even to hope for the decisive battle or the bugle-call of armistice.
Though he still worked out methodically the gures relating to the plague, Grand would certainly have been quite unable to say to what they pointed. Unlike Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou, who obviously had great powers of endurance, he had never had good health. And now, in addition to his duties in the Municipal Oce, he had his night work and his secretarial post under Rieux. One could see that the strain was telling on him, and if he managed to keep going, it was thanks to two or three xed ideas, one of which was to take, the moment the plague ended, a complete vacation, of a week at least, which he would devote, “hats o,” to his work in progress. He was also becoming subject to accesses of sentimentality and at such times would unburden himself to Rieux about Jeanne.
Where was she now, he wondered; did her thoughts sometimes turn to him when she read the papers? It was Grand to whom one day Rieux caught himself talking—much to his own surprise—about his wife, and in the most commonplace terms—something he had never done as yet to anyone.
Doubtful how far he could trust his wife’s telegrams—their tone was always reassuring—he had decided to wire the house physician of the sanatorium. The reply informed him that her condition had worsened, but everything was being done to arrest further progress of the disease. He had kept the news to himself so far and could only put it down to his nervous exhaustion that he passed it on to Grand. After talking to the doctor about Jeanne, Grand had asked
some questions about Mme. Rieux and, on hearing Rieux’s reply, said: “You know, it’s wonderful, the cures they bring o nowadays.”
Rieux agreed, merely adding that the long separation was beginning to tell on him, and, what was more, he might have helped his wife to make a good recovery; whereas, as things were, she must be feeling terribly lonely. After which he fell silent and gave only evasive answers to Grand’s further questions.
The others were in much the same state. Tarrou held his own better, but the entries in his diary show that while his curiosity had kept its depth, it had lost its diversity. Indeed, throughout this period the only person, apparently, who really interested him was Cottard. In the evening, at Rieux’s apartment, where he had come to live now that the hotel was requisitioned as a quarantine center, he paid little or no attention to Grand and the doctor when they read over the day’s statistics. At the earliest opportunity he switched the conversation over to his pet subject, small details of the daily life at Oran.
More perhaps than any of them, Dr. Castel showed signs of wear and tear. On the day when he came to tell Rieux that the anti- plague serum was ready, and they decided to try it for the rst time on M. Othon’s small son, whose case seemed all but hopeless, Rieux suddenly noticed, while he was announcing the latest statistics, that Castel was slumped in his chair, sound asleep. The dierence in his old friend’s face shocked him. 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.
It was by such lapses that Rieux could gauge his exhaustion. His sensibility was getting out of hand. Kept under all the time, it had grown hard and brittle and seemed to snap completely now and then, leaving him the prey of his emotions. No resource was left him but to tighten the stranglehold on his feelings and harden his heart protectively. For he knew this was the only way of carrying on. In any case, he had few illusions left, and fatigue was robbing him of even these remaining few. He knew that, over a period whose end
he could not glimpse, his task was no longer to cure but to diagnose.
To detect, to see, to describe, to register, and then condemn—that was his present function. Sometimes a woman would clutch his sleeve, crying shrilly: “Doctor, you’ll save him, won’t you?” But he wasn’t there for saving life; he was there to order a sick man’s evacuation. How futile was the hatred he saw on faces then! “You haven’t a heart!” a woman told him on one occasion. She was wrong; he had one. It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning. He had just enough heart for that, as things were now. How could that heart have suced for saving life?
No, it wasn’t medical aid that he dispensed in those crowded days —only information. Obviously that could hardly be reckoned a man’s job. Yet, when all was said and done, who, in that terror- stricken, decimated populace, had scope for any activity worthy of his manhood? Indeed, for Rieux his exhaustion was a blessing in disguise. Had he been less tired, his senses more alert, that all- pervading odor of death might have made him sentimental. But when a man has had only four hours’ sleep, he isn’t sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice—hideous, witless justice. And those others, the men and women under sentence to death, shared his bleak enlightenment. 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 rie-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.
Such, anyhow, were the thoughts that in those endless-seeming weeks ran in the doctor’s mind, along with thoughts about his
severance from his wife. And such, too, were his friends’ thoughts, judging by the look he saw on their faces. But the most dangerous eect of the exhaustion steadily gaining on all engaged in the ght against the epidemic did not consist in their relative indierence to outside events and the feelings of others, but in the slackness and supineness that they allowed to invade their personal lives. They developed a tendency to shirk every movement that didn’t seem absolutely necessary or called for eorts 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 suering from pneumonic plague without taking steps to safeguard themselves against infection, because they had been notied 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 injections. There lay the real danger; for the energy they devoted to ghting 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.
There was, however, one man in the town who seemed neither exhausted nor discouraged; indeed, the living image of contentment.
It was Cottard. Though maintaining contact with Rieux and Rambert, he still kept rather aloof, whereas he deliberately cultivated Tarrou, seeing him as often as Tarrou’s scanty leisure permitted. He had two reasons for this: one, that Tarrou knew all about his case, and the other, that he always gave him a cordial welcome and made him feel at ease. That was one of the remarkable things about Tarrou; no matter how much work he had put in, he was always a ready listener and an agreeable companion. Even when, some evenings, he seemed completely worn out, the next day brought him a new lease of energy. “Tarrou’s a fellow one can talk to,” Cottard once told Rambert, “because he’s really human. He always understands.”
This may explain why the entries in Tarrou’s diary of this period tend to converge on Cottard’s personality. It is obvious that Tarrou
was attempting to give a full-length picture of the man and noted all his reactions and reections, whether as conveyed to him by Cottard or interpreted by himself. Under the heading “Cottard and his Relations with the Plague,” we nd a series of notes covering several pages and, in the narrator’s opinion, these are well worth summarizing here.
One of the entries gives Tarrou’s general impression of Cottard at this time: “He is blossoming out. Expanding in geniality and good humor.” For Cottard was anything but upset by the turn events were taking. Sometimes in Tarrou’s company he voiced his true feelings in remarks of this order: “Getting worse every day, isn’t it? Well, anyhow, everyone’s in the same boat.”
“Obviously,” Tarrou comments, “he’s in the same peril of death as everyone else, but that’s just the point; he’s in it with the others. And then I’m pretty sure he doesn’t seriously think he runs much personal risk. He has got the idea into his head, apparently—and perhaps it’s not so farfetched as it seems—that a man suering from a dangerous ailment or grave anxiety is allergic to other ailments and anxieties. ‘Have you noticed,’ he asked me, ‘that no one ever runs two diseases at once? Let’s suppose you have an incurable disease like cancer or a galloping consumption—well, you’ll never get plague or typhus; it’s a physical impossibility. In fact, one might go farther; have you ever heard of a man with cancer being killed in an auto smash?’ This theory, for what it’s worth, keeps Cottard cheerful. The thing he’d most detest is being cut o from others; he’d rather be one of a beleaguered crowd than a prisoner alone.
The plague has put an eective stop to police inquiries, sleuthings, warrants of arrest, and so forth. Come to that, we have no police nowadays; no crimes past or present, no more criminals—only condemned men hoping for the most capricious of pardons; and among these are the police themselves.”
Thus Cottard (if we may trust Tarrou’s diagnosis) had good grounds for viewing the symptoms of mental confusion and distress in those around him with an understanding and an indulgent satisfaction that might have found expression in the remark: “Prate away, my friends—but I had it rst!”
“When I suggested to him,” Tarrou continues, “that the surest way of not being cut o from others was having a clean conscience, he frowned. ‘If that is so, everyone’s always cut o from everyone else.’ And a moment later he added: ‘Say what you like, Tarrou, but let me tell you this: the one way of making people hang together is to give ’em a spell of plague. You’ve only got to look around you.’ Of course I see his point, and I understand how congenial our present mode of life must be to him. How could he fail to recognize at every turn reactions that were his; the eorts everyone makes to keep on the right side of other people; the obligingness sometimes shown in helping someone who has lost his way, and the ill humor shown at other times; the way people ock to the luxury restaurants, their pleasure at being there and their reluctance to leave; the crowds lining up daily at the picture-houses, lling theaters and music halls and even dance halls, and ooding boisterously out into the squares and avenues; the shrinking from every contact and, notwithstanding, the craving for human warmth that urges people to one another, body to body, sex to sex? Cottard has been through all that obviously—with one exception; we may rule out women in his case. With that mug of his! And I should say that when tempted to visit a brothel he refrains; it might give him a bad name and be held up against him one day.
“In short, this epidemic has done him proud. Of a lonely man who hated loneliness it has made an accomplice. Yes, ‘accomplice’ is the word that ts, and doesn’t he relish his complicity! 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 xed 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 oense at triing oversights and brings tears to their eyes over the loss of a trouser-button.”
Tarrou often went out with Cottard in the evening, and he describes how they would plunge together into the dark crowds lling the streets at nightfall; how they mingled, shoulder to
shoulder, in the black-and-white moving mass lit here and there by the tful gleam of a street-lamp; and how they let themselves be swept along with the human herd toward resorts of pleasure whose companionable warmth seemed a safeguard from the plague’s cold breath. What Cottard had some months previously been looking for in public places, luxury and the lavish life, the frenzied orgies he had dreamed of without being able to procure them—these were now the quest of a whole populace. Though prices soared inevitably, never had so much money been squandered, and while bare necessities were often lacking, never had so much been spent on superuities. All the recreations of leisure, due though it now was to unemployment, multiplied a hundredfold. Sometimes Tarrou and Cottard would follow for some minutes one of those amorous couples who in the past would have tried to hide the passion drawing them to each other, but now, pressed closely to each other’s side, paraded the streets among the crowd, with the trancelike self- absorption of great lovers, oblivious of the people around them.
Cottard watched them gloatingly. “Good work, my dears!” he’d exclaim. “Go to it!” Even his voice had changed, grown louder; as Tarrou wrote, he was “blossoming out” in the congenial atmosphere of mass excitement, fantastically large tips clinking on café tables, love-aairs shaping under his eyes.
However, Tarrou seemed to detect little if any spitefulness in Cottard’s attitude. His “I’ve been through the mill myself” had more pity than triumph in it. “I suspect,” Tarrou wrote, “that he’s getting quite fond of these people shut up under their little patch of sky within their city walls. For instance, he’d like to explain to them, if he had a chance, that it isn’t so terrible as all that. ‘You hear them saying,’ he told me, ‘ “After the plague I’ll do this or that.” … They’re eating their hearts out instead of staying put. And they don’t even realize their privileges. Take my case: could I say “After my arrest I’ll do this or that”? Arrest’s a beginning, not an end. Whereas plague.… Do you know what I think? They’re fretting simply because they won’t let themselves go. And I know what I’m talking about.’
“Yes, he knows what he’s talking about,” Tarrou added. “He has an insight into the anomalies in the lives of the people here who, though they have an instinctive craving for human contacts, can’t bring themselves to yield to it, because of the mistrust that keeps them apart. For it’s common knowledge that you can’t trust your neighbor; he may pass the disease to you without your knowing it, and take advantage of a moment of inadvertence on your part to infect you. When one has spent one’s days, as Cottard has, seeing a possible police spy in everyone, even in persons he feels drawn to, it’s easy to understand this reaction. One can have fellow-feelings toward people who are haunted by the idea that when they least expect it plague may lay its cold hand on their shoulders, and is, perhaps, about to do so at the very moment when one is congratulating oneself on being safe and sound. So far as this is possible, he is at ease under a reign of terror. But I suspect that, just because he has been through it before them, he can’t wholly share with them the agony of this feeling of uncertainty that never leaves them. It comes to this: like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment. But since he, personally, has learned what it is to live in a state of constant fear, he nds it normal that others should come to know this state. Or perhaps it should be put like this: fear seems to him more bearable under these conditions than it was when he had to bear its burden alone. In this respect he’s wrong, and this makes him harder to understand than other people.
Still, after all, that’s why he is worth a greater eort to understand.”
Tarrou’s notes end with a story illustrating the curious state of mind arrived at no less by Cottard than by other dwellers in the plague-stricken town. The story re-creates as nearly as may be the curiously feverish atmosphere of this period, and that is why the narrator attaches importance to it.
One evening Cottard and Tarrou went to the Municipal Opera House, where Gluck’s Orpheus was being given. Cottard had invited Tarrou. A touring operatic company had come to Oran in the spring for a series of performances. Marooned there by the outbreak of plague and nding themselves in diculties, the company and the
management of the opera house had come to an agreement under which they were to give one performance a week until further notice. Thus for several months our theater had been resounding every Friday evening with the melodious laments of Orpheus and Eurydice’s vain appeals. None the less, the opera continued in high favor and played regularly to full houses. From their seats, the most expensive, Cottard and Tarrou could look down at the orchestra seats lled to capacity with the cream of Oran society. It was interesting to see how careful they were, as they went to their places, to make an elegant entrance. While the musicians were discreetly tuning up, men in evening dress could be seen moving from one row to another, bowing gracefully to friends under the ood of light bathing the proscenium. In the soft hum of well- mannered conversation they regained the condence denied them when they walked the dark streets of the town; evening dress was a sure charm against plague.
Throughout the rst act Orpheus lamented suavely his lost Eurydice, with women in Grecian tunics singing melodious comments on his plight, and love was hymned in alternating strophes. The audience showed their appreciation in discreet applause. Only a few people noticed that in his song of the second act Orpheus introduced some tremolos not in the score and voiced an almost exaggerated emotion when begging the lord of the Underworld to be moved by his tears. Some rather jerky movements he indulged in gave our connoisseurs of stagecraft an impression of clever, if slightly overdone, eects, intended to bring out the emotion of the words he sang.
Not until the big duet between Orpheus and Eurydice in the third act—at the precise moment when Eurydice was slipping from her lover—did a utter of surprise run through the house. And as though the singer had been waiting for this cue or, more likely, because the faint sounds that came to him from the orchestra seats conrmed what he was feeling, he chose this moment to stagger grotesquely to the footlights, his arms and legs splayed out under his antique robe, and fall down in the middle of the property sheepfold, always out of place, but now, in the eyes of the spectators,
signicantly, appallingly so. For at the same moment the orchestra stopped playing, the audience rose and began to leave the auditorium, slowly and silently at rst, like worshippers leaving church when the service ends, or a death-chamber after a farewell visit to the dead, women lifting their skirts and moving with bowed heads, men steering the ladies by the elbow to prevent their brushing against the tip-up seats at the ends of the rows. But gradually their movements quickened, whispers rose to exclamations, and nally the crowd stampeded toward the exits, wedged together in the bottlenecks, and pouring out into the street in a confused mass, with shrill cries of dismay.
Cottard and Tarrou, who had merely risen from their seats, gazed down at what was a dramatic picture of their life in those days: plague on the stage in the guise of a disarticulated mummer, and in the auditorium the toys of luxury, so futile now, forgotten fans and lace shawls derelict on the red plush seats.
