hen leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr.
Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot. It was aW dead rat lying in the middle of the landing. On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side and, without giving it a further thought, continued on his way downstairs. Only when he was stepping out into the street did it occur to him that a dead rat had no business to be on his landing, and he turned back to ask the concierge of the building to see to its removal. It was not until he noticed old M. Michel’s reaction to the news that he realized the peculiar nature of his discovery. Personally, he had thought the presence of the dead rat rather odd, no more than that; the concierge, however, was genuinely outraged. On one point he was categorical: “There weren’t no rats here.” In vain the doctor assured him that there was a rat, presumably dead, on the second-oor landing; M. Michel’s conviction wasn’t to be shaken. There “weren’t no rats in the building,” he repeated, so someone must have brought this one from outside. Some youngster trying to be funny, most likely.
That evening, when Dr. Rieux was standing in the entrance, feeling for the latch-key in his pocket before starting up the stairs to his apartment, he saw a big rat coming toward him from the dark end of the passage. It moved uncertainly, and its fur was sopping wet. The animal stopped and seemed to be trying to get its balance, moved forward again toward the doctor, halted again, then spun around on itself with a little squeal and fell on its side. Its mouth was slightly open and blood was spurting from it. After gazing at it for a moment, the doctor went upstairs.
He wasn’t thinking about the rat. That glimpse of spurting blood had switched his thoughts back to something that had been on his mind all day. His wife, who had been ill for a year now, was due to leave next day for a sanatorium in the mountains. He found her lying down in the bedroom, resting, as he had asked her to do, in view of the exhausting journey before her. She gave him a smile.
“Do you know, I’m feeling ever so much better!” she said.
The doctor gazed down at the face that turned toward him in the glow of the bedside lamp. His wife was thirty, and the long illness had left its mark on her face. Yet the thought that came to Rieux’s mind as he gazed at her was: How young she looks, almost like a little girl! But perhaps that was because of the smile, which eaced all else.
“Now try to sleep,” he counseled. “The nurse is coming at eleven, you know, and you have to catch the midday train.”
He kissed the slightly moist forehead. The smile escorted him to the door.
Next day, April 17, at eight o’clock the concierge buttonholed the doctor as he was going out. Some young scallywags, he said, had dumped three dead rats in the hall. They’d obviously been caught in traps with very strong springs, as they were bleeding profusely. The concierge had lingered in the doorway for quite a while, holding the rats by their legs and keeping a sharp eye on the passers-by, on the o chance that the miscreants would give themselves away by grinning or by some facetious remark. His watch had been in vain.
“But I’ll nab ’em all right,” said M. Michel hopefully.
Much puzzled, Rieux decided to begin his round in the outskirts of the town, where his poorer patients lived. The scavenging in these districts was done late in the morning and, as he drove his car along the straight, dusty streets, he cast glances at the garbage cans aligned along the edge of the sidewalk. In one street alone the doctor counted as many as a dozen rats deposited on the vegetable and other refuse in the cans.
He found his rst patient, an asthma case of long standing, in bed, in a room that served as both dining-room and bedroom and overlooked the street. The invalid was an old Spaniard with a hard,
rugged face. Placed on the coverlet in front of him were two pots containing dried peas. When the doctor entered, the old man was sitting up, bending his neck back, gasping and wheezing in his eorts to recover his breath. His wife brought a bowl of water.
“Well, Doctor,” he said, while the injection was being made, “they’re coming out, have you noticed?”
“The rats, he means,” his wife explained. “The man next door found three.”
“They’re coming out, you can see them in all the trash cans. It’s hunger!”
Rieux soon discovered that the rats were the great topic of conversation in that part of the town. After his round of visits he drove home.
“There’s a telegram for you, sir, upstairs,” M. Michel informed him.
The doctor asked him if he’d seen any more rats.
“No,” the concierge replied, “there ain’t been any more. I’m keeping a sharp lookout, you know. Those youngsters wouldn’t dare when I’m around.”
The telegram informed Rieux that his mother would be arriving next day. She was going to keep house for her son during his wife’s absence. When the doctor entered his apartment he found the nurse already there. He looked at his wife. She was in a tailor-made suit, and he noticed that she had used rouge. He smiled to her.
“That’s splendid,” he said. “You’re looking very nice.”
A few minutes later he was seeing her into the sleeping-car. She glanced round the compartment.
“It’s too expensive for us really, isn’t it?”
“It had to be done,” Rieux replied.
“What’s this story about rats that’s going round?”
“I can’t explain it. It certainly is queer, but it’ll pass.”
Then hurriedly he begged her to forgive him; he felt he should have looked after her better, he’d been most remiss. When she shook her head, as if to make him stop, he added: “Anyhow, once you’re back everything will be better. We’ll make a fresh start.”
“That’s it!” Her eyes were sparkling. “Let’s make a fresh start.”
But then she turned her head and seemed to be gazing through the car window at the people on the platform, jostling one another in their haste. The hissing of the locomotive reached their ears.
Gently he called his wife’s rst name; when she looked round he
saw her face wet with tears.
“Don’t,” he murmured.
Behind the tears the smile returned, a little tense. She drew a deep breath.
“Now o you go! Everything will be all right.”
He took her in his arms, then stepped back on the platform. Now he could only see her smile through the window.
“Please, dear,” he said, “take great care of yourself.”
But she could not hear him.
As he was leaving the platform, near the exit he met M. Othon, the police magistrate, holding his small boy by the hand. The doctor asked him if he was going away.
Tall and dark, M. Othon had something of the air of what used to be called a man of the world, and something of an undertaker’s assistant.
“No,” the magistrate replied, “I’ve come to meet Madame Othon, who’s been to present her respects to my family.”
The engine whistled.
“These rats, now—” the magistrate began.
Rieux made a brief movement in the direction of the train, then
turned back toward the exit.
“The rats?” he said. “It’s nothing.”
The only impression of that moment which, afterwards, he could recall was the passing of the railroadman with a box full of dead rats under his arm.
Early in the afternoon of that day, when his consultations were beginning, a young man called on Rieux. The doctor gathered that he had called before, in the morning, and was a journalist by profession. His name was Raymond Rambert. Short, square- shouldered, with a determined-looking face and keen, intelligent eyes, he gave the impression of someone who could keep his end up in any circumstances. He wore a sports type of clothes. He came
straight to the point. His newspaper, one of the leading Paris dailies, had commissioned him to make a report on the living conditions prevailing among the Arab population, and especially on the sanitary conditions.
Rieux replied that these conditions were not good. But, before he said any more, he wanted to know if the journalist would be
allowed to tell the truth.
“Certainly,” Rambert replied.
“I mean,” Rieux explained, “would you be allowed to publish an unqualied condemnation of the present state of things?”
“Unqualied? Well, no, I couldn’t go that far. But surely things aren’t quite so bad as that?”
“No,” Rieux said quietly, they weren’t so bad as that. He had put the question solely to nd out if Rambert could or couldn’t state the facts without paltering with the truth. “I’ve no use for statements in which something is kept back,” he added. “That is why I shall not furnish information in support of yours.”
The journalist smiled. “You talk the language of Saint-Just.”
Without raising his voice Rieux said he knew nothing about that.
The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in—though he had much liking for his fellow men—and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth.
His shoulders hunched, Rambert gazed at the doctor for some moments without speaking. Then, “I think I understand you,” he
said, getting up from his chair.
The doctor accompanied him to the door.
“It’s good of you to take it like that,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I understand,” Rambert repeated, with what seemed a hint of impatience in his voice. “Sorry to have troubled you.”
When shaking hands with him, Rieux suggested that if he was out for curious stories for his paper, he might say something about the extraordinary number of dead rats that were being found in the town just now.
“Ah!” Rambert exclaimed. “That certainly interests me.”
On his way out at ve for another round of visits, the doctor passed on the stairway a stocky, youngish man, with a big, deeply furrowed face and bushy eyebrows. He had met him once or twice in the top-oor apartment, which was occupied by some male Spanish dancers. Pung a cigarette, Jean Tarrou was gazing down at the convulsions of a rat dying on the step in front of him. He looked up, and his gray eyes remained xed on the doctor for some moments; then, after wishing him good day, he remarked that it was rather odd, the way all these rats were coming out of their holes to die.
“Very odd,” Rieux agreed, “and it ends by getting on one’s nerves.”
“In a way, Doctor, only in a way. We’ve not seen anything of the sort before, that’s all. Personally I nd it interesting, yes, denitely interesting.”
Tarrou ran his ngers through his hair to brush it o his forehead, looking again at the rat, which had now stopped moving, then smiled toward Rieux.
“But really, Doctor, it’s the concierge’s headache, isn’t it?”
As it so happened, the concierge was the next person Rieux encountered. He was leaning against the wall beside the street door; he was looking tired and his normally rubicund face had lost its color.
“Yes, I know,” the old man told Rieux, who had informed him of the latest casualty among the rats. “I keep nding ’em by twos and threes. But it’s the same thing in the other houses in the street.”
He seemed depressed and worried, and was scratching his neck absentmindedly. Rieux asked him how he felt. The concierge wouldn’t go so far as to say he was feeling ill. Still he wasn’t quite up to the mark. In his opinion it was just due to worry; these damned rats had given him “a shock, like.” It would be a relief when they stopped coming out and dying all over the place.
Next morning—it was April 18—when the doctor was bringing back his mother from the station, he found M. Michel looking still more out of sorts. The stairway from the cellar to the attics was
strewn with dead rats, ten or a dozen of them. The garbage cans of all the houses in the street were full of rats.
The doctor’s mother took it quite calmly.
“It’s like that sometimes,” she said vaguely. She was a small woman with silver hair and dark, gentle eyes. “I’m so glad to be with you again, Bernard,” she added. “The rats can’t change that, anyhow.”
He nodded. It was a fact that everything seemed easy when she was there.
However, he rang up the Municipal Oce. He knew the man in charge of the department concerned with the extermination of vermin and he asked him if he’d heard about all the rats that were coming out to die in the open. Yes, Mercier knew all about it; in fact, fty rats had been found in his oces, which were near the wharves. To tell the truth, he was rather perturbed; did the doctor think it meant anything serious? Rieux couldn’t give a denite opinion, but he thought the sanitary service should take action of some kind.
Mercier agreed. “And, if you think it’s really worth the trouble, I’ll get an order issued as well.”
“It certainly is worth the trouble,” Rieux replied.
His charwoman had just told him that several hundred dead rats had been collected in the big factory where her husband worked.
It was about this time that our townsfolk began to show signs of uneasiness. For, from April 18 onwards, quantities of dead or dying rats were found in factories and warehouses. In some cases the animals were killed to put an end to their agony. From the outer suburbs to the center of the town, in all the byways where the doctor’s duties took him, in every thoroughfare, rats were piled up in garbage cans or lying in long lines in the gutters. The evening papers that day took up the matter and inquired whether or not the city fathers were going to take steps, and what emergency measures were contemplated, to abate this particularly disgusting nuisance.
Actually the municipality had not contemplated doing anything at all, but now a meeting was convened to discuss the situation. An order was transmitted to the sanitary service to collect the dead rats
at daybreak every morning. When the rats had been collected, two municipal trucks were to take them to be burned in the town incinerator.
But the situation worsened in the following days. There were more and more dead vermin in the streets, and the collectors had bigger truckloads every morning. On the fourth day the rats began to come out and die in batches. From basements, cellars, and sewers they emerged in long wavering les into the light of day, swayed helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of the horried onlookers. At night, in passages and alleys, their shrill little death-cries could be clearly heard. In the mornings the bodies were found lining the gutters, each with a gout of blood, like a red ower, on its tapering muzzle; some were bloated and already beginning to rot, others rigid, with their whiskers still erect. Even in the busy heart of the town you found them piled in little heaps on landings and in backyards. Some stole forth to die singly in the halls of public oces, in school playgrounds, and even on café terraces.
Our townsfolk were amazed to nd such busy centers as the Place d’Armes, the boulevards, the promenade along the waterfront, dotted with repulsive little corpses. After the daily clean-up of the town, which took place at sunrise, there was a brief respite; then gradually the rats began to appear again in numbers that went on increasing throughout the day. People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body. It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus- clots that had been forming in its entrails. You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto so tranquil, and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature shoot up and the blood seething like wildre in his veins.
Things went so far that the Ransdoc Information Bureau (inquiries on all subjects promptly and accurately answered), which ran a free- information talk on the radio, by way of publicity, began its talk by announcing that no less than 6,231 rats had been collected and burned in a single day, April 25. Giving as it did an ampler and
more precise view of the scene daily enacted before our eyes, this amazing gure administered a jolt to the public nerves. Hitherto people had merely grumbled at a stupid, rather obnoxious visitation; they now realized that this strange phenomenon, whose scope could not be measured and whose origins escaped detection, had something vaguely menacing about it. Only the old Spaniard whom Dr. Rieux was treating for asthma went on rubbing his hands and chuckling: “They’re coming out, they’re coming out,” with senile glee.
On April 28, when the Ransdoc Bureau announced that 8,000 rats had been collected, a wave of something like panic swept the town.
There was a demand for drastic measures, the authorities were accused of slackness, and people who had houses on the coast spoke of moving there, early in the year though it was. But next day the bureau informed them that the phenomenon had abruptly ended and the sanitary service had collected only a triing number of rats.
Everyone breathed more freely.
It was, however, on this same day, at noon, that Dr. Rieux, when parking his car in front of the apartment house where he lived, noticed the concierge coming toward him from the end of the street.
He was dragging himself along, his head bent, arms and legs curiously splayed out, with the jerky movements of a clockwork doll. The old man was leaning on the arm of a priest whom the doctor knew. It was Father Paneloux, a learned and militant Jesuit, whom he had met occasionally and who was very highly thought of in our town, even in circles quite indierent to religion. Rieux waited for the two men to draw up to him. M. Michel’s eyes were fever-bright and he was breathing wheezily. The old man explained that, feeling “a bit o color,” he had gone out to take the air. But he had started feeling pains in all sorts of places—in his neck, armpits, and groin—and had been obliged to turn back and ask Father Paneloux to give him an arm.
“It’s just swellings,” he said. “I must have strained myself somehow.”
Leaning out of the window of the car, the doctor ran his hand over the base of Michel’s neck; a hard lump, like a knot in wood,
had formed there.
“Go to bed at once, and take your temperature. I’ll come to see you this afternoon.”
When the old man had gone, Rieux asked Father Paneloux what he made of this queer business about the rats.
“Oh, I suppose it’s an epidemic they’ve been having.” The Father’s eyes were smiling behind his big round glasses.
After lunch, while Rieux was reading for the second time the telegram his wife had sent him from the sanatorium, announcing her arrival, the phone rang. It was one of his former patients, a clerk in the Municipal Oce, ringing him up. He had suered for a long time from a constriction of the aorta, and, as he was poor, Rieux had charged no fee.
“Thanks, Doctor, for remembering me. But this time it’s somebody else. The man next door has had an accident. Please come at once.”
He sounded out of breath.
Rieux thought quickly; yes, he could see the concierge afterwards.
A few minutes later he was entering a small house in the rue Faidherbe, on the outskirts of the town. Halfway up the drafty, foul- smelling stairs, he saw Joseph Grand, the clerk, hurrying down to meet him. He was a man of about fty years of age, tall and drooping, with narrow shoulders, thin limbs, and a yellowish mustache.
“He looks better now,” he told Rieux, “but I really thought his number was up.” He blew his nose vigorously.
On the top oor, the third, Rieux noticed something scrawled in red chalk on a door on the left: Come in, I’ve hanged myself.
They entered the room. A rope dangled from a hanging lamp above a chair lying on its side. The dining-room table had been pushed into a corner. But the rope hung empty.
“I got him down just in time.” Grand seemed always to have trouble in nding his words, though he expressed himself in the simplest possible way. “I was going out and I heard a noise. When I saw that writing on the door, I thought it was a—a prank. Only, then I heard a funny sort of groan; it made my blood run cold, as
they say.” He scratched his head. “That must be a painful way of— of doing it, I should think. Naturally I went in.”
Grand had opened a door and they were standing on the threshold of a bright but scantily furnished bedroom. There was a brass bedstead against one of the walls, and a plump little man was lying there, breathing heavily. He gazed at them with bloodshot eyes. Rieux stopped short. In the intervals of the man’s breathing he seemed to hear the little squeals of rats. But he couldn’t see anything moving in the corners of the room. Then he went to the bedside. Evidently the man had not fallen from a sucient height, or very suddenly, for the collar-bone had held. Naturally there was some asphyxia. An X-ray photograph would be needed. Meanwhile the doctor gave him a camphor injection and assured him he would
be all right in a few days.
“Thanks, Doctor,” the man mumbled.
When Rieux asked Grand if he had notied the police, he hung his head.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. The rst thing I thought, was to—”
“Quite so,” Rieux cut in. “I’ll see to it.”
But the invalid made a fretful gesture and sat up in bed. He felt much better, he explained; really it wasn’t worth the trouble.
“Don’t feel alarmed,” Rieux said. “It’s little more than a formality.
Anyhow, I have to report this to the police.”
“Oh!” The man slumped back on the bed and started sobbing weakly.
Grand, who had been twiddling his mustache while they were speaking, went up to the bed.
“Come, Monsieur Cottard,” he said. “Try to understand. People could say the doctor was to blame, if you took it into your head to have another shot at it.”
Cottard assured him tearfully that there wasn’t the least risk of that; he’d had a sort of crazy t, but it had passed and all he wanted now was to be left in peace. Rieux was writing a prescription.
“Very well,” he said. “We’ll say no more about it for the present.
I’ll come and see you again in a day or two. But don’t do anything
silly.”
On the landing he told Grand that he was obliged to make a report, but would ask the police inspector to hold up the inquiry for a couple of days.
“But somebody should watch Cottard tonight,” he added. “Has he any relations?”
“Not that I know of. But I can very well stay with him. I can’t say I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?”
As he walked down the stairs Rieux caught himself glancing into the darker corners, and he asked Grand if the rats had quite disappeared in his part of the town.
Grand had no idea. True, he’d heard some talk about rats, but he never paid much attention to gossip like that. “I’ve other things to think about,” he added.
Rieux, who was in a hurry to get away, was already shaking his hand. There was a letter to write to his wife, and he wanted to see the concierge rst.
News-venders were shouting the latest news—that the rats had disappeared. But Rieux found his patient leaning over the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his belly and the other to his neck, vomiting pinkish bile into a slop-pail. After retching for some minutes, the man lay back again, gasping. His temperature was 103, the ganglia of his neck and limbs were swollen, and two black patches were developing on his thighs. He now complained of internal pains.
“It’s like re,” he whimpered. “The bastard’s burning me inside.”
He could hardly get the words through his fever-crusted lips and he gazed at the doctor with bulging eyes that his headache had suused with tears. His wife cast an anxious look at Rieux, who said nothing.
“Please, Doctor,” she said, “what is it?”
“It might be—almost anything. There’s nothing denite as yet.
Keep him on a light diet and give him plenty to drink.”
The sick man had been complaining of a raging thirst.
On returning to his apartment Rieux rang up his colleague Richard, one of the leading practitioners in the town.
“No,” Richard said, “I can’t say I’ve noticed anything exceptional.”
“No cases of fever with local inammation?”
“Wait a bit! I have two cases with inamed ganglia.”
“Abnormally so?”
“Well,” Richard said, “that depends on what you mean by ‘normal.’ ”
Anyhow, that night the porter was running a temperature of 104 and in delirium, always babbling about “them rats.” Rieux tried a xation abscess. When he felt the sting of the turpentine, the old man yelled: “The bastards!”
The ganglia had become still larger and felt like lumps of solid brous matter embedded in the esh. Mme. Michel had completely broken down.
“Sit up with him,” the doctor said, “and call me if necessary.”
Next day, April 30, the sky was blue and slightly misty. A warm, gentle breeze was blowing, bringing with it a smell of owers from the outlying suburbs. The morning noises of the streets sounded louder, gayer than usual. For everyone in our little town this day brought the promise of a new lease on life, now that the shadow of fear under which they had been living for a week had lifted. Rieux, too, was in an optimistic mood when he went down to see the concierge; he had been cheered up by a letter from his wife that had come with the rst mail.
Old M. Michel’s temperature had gone down to 99 and, though he still looked very weak, he was smiling.
“He’s better, Doctor, isn’t he?” his wife inquired.
“Well, it’s a bit too early to say.”
At noon the sick man’s temperature shot up abruptly to 104, he was in constant delirium and had started vomiting again. The ganglia in the neck were painful to the touch, and the old man seemed to be straining to hold his head as far as possible from his body. His wife sat at the foot of the bed, her hands on the counterpane, gently clasping his feet. She gazed at Rieux imploringly.
“Listen,” he said, “we’ll have to move him to a hospital and try a special treatment. I’ll ring up for the ambulance.”
Two hours later the doctor and Mme. Michel were in the ambulance bending over the sick man. Rambling words were issuing from the gaping mouth, thickly coated now with sordes. He kept on repeating: “Them rats! Them damned rats!” His face had gone livid, a grayish green, his lips were bloodless, his breath came in sudden gasps. His limbs spread out by the ganglia, embedded in the berth as if he were trying to bury himself in it or a voice from the depths of the earth were summoning him below, the unhappy man seemed to be stiing under some unseen pressure. His wife was sobbing.
“Isn’t there any hope left, Doctor?”
“He’s dead,” said Rieux.
