I appreciated the broad-shouldered Dr. Bernard Rieux, an unassuming 35-year-old physician given to absentmindedness whose demonstrated loyalty to his poorer and most at-risk patients oriented me to recognize medical students, residents, and practicing physicians who still held to the intent to be humane and to exercise a social conscience. Soon after the morning he stepped on something soft – a dead rat – Rieux, torn between conflicting fears and confidence, was the first among his colleagues to utter the word ‘plague’. It took city officials several meetings to be convinced to act. Once the epidemic was diagnosed, the patient had to be evacuated forthwith. Then began a tussle with the family, who knew they would not see the sick one again until dead or cured. “Have some pity, Doctor!” – Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes renewed again and again. . . . He needed no longer steel himself against pity. One grows out of pity when it’s useless. . . . He admitted to a close friend, “I have no idea what’s awaiting me or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment, I know this – there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they’ll think things over and so shall I. But what’s wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can. Against whom? I haven’t a notion. When I entered this profession, I did it because it was particularly difficult for a workman’s son like myself. And then I had to see people die. I saw that I could never get hardened to it.” At midnight before going to bed, Rieux sometimes turned on the radio to hear well-meaning speakers call out fervently to the quarantined city, “Oran, Oran, we’re with you!” But he reminded himself, “They are too remote.” To diagnose, to register, and then to condemn -- he was not with the patient to save life; he was there to order the patient’s evacuation. “You haven’t a heart!” a woman once told him. . . . Had he not been so exhausted, had his senses been sharper, the odor of death might have touched his sentiments. . . . “A man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.” . . . As the survivors celebrated the plague’s receding after killing thousands, Rieux chose instead to draft a chronicle so that he would not be among those who hold their peace but would bear witness for the plague stricken victims. The mothers, husbands, wives, and lovers who had lost all joy now that the loved one lay under a layer of quicklime in a death-pit or was a mere handful of indistinctive ashes in a gray mound -- who gave a thought to these lonely mourners? Rieux knew what the jubilant crowds did not know -- that the plague bides its time dormant in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves until rousing its rats again to send them forth to die in a happy city.
I returned again and again to the good-humored but estranged son of a successful prosecuting attorney Jean Tarrou, a youngish traveler of private means new to Oran who seemed an addict of all normal pleasures without being their slave. A faithful diarist given to understatement, he had a habit of observing events and people through the wrong end of a telescope. He set himself to recording the history of what the normal historian passes over . . . seemingly trivial details which yet have their importance. He struck up a friendship with Rieux, accompanying him on home visits and giving him a safe conversation partner. Sitting across from Rieux at his office desk, Tarrou spoke frankly, “In a fortnight, or a month at most, you’ll serve no purpose here. Things will have got out of hand.” He continued as Rieux nodded, “The sanitary department is inefficient – understaffed, for one thing – and you’re worked off your feet. . . . Why not call for voluntary help? . . . I’ve drawn up a plan for voluntary groups of helpers. Get me empowered to try out my plan. . . . I have friends in many walks of life; they’ll form a nucleus to start from. And, of course, I’ll take part in it myself.” Rieux replied, “I need hardly tell you that I accept your suggestion most gladly. But I take it you know that such work of this kind may prove fatal to the worker.” . . . Tarrou continued to make detailed journal entries, though working long hours with the sanitation squads and shielding the overworked Rieux left him thinner, his eyes and features blurred with fatigue, his shoulders sagged. . . . He understood the plague as metaphor as well as physical horror. As he explained to Rieux, “I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it or feel at ease in that condition. . . . I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. . . . All I maintain is that there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. . . . I came to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak – and to act – quite clearly. . . . I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim’s side, so as to reduce the damage done.” Two days after an official communiqué fed optimism that the plague was ending, Tarrou’s diary ended with shaky handwriting – “Feeling very tired tonight.” Ganglia swelled under his burning skin. There was a rumbling in his chest. Rieux could only watch his friend’s struggle. He had before him only a mask-like face, inert, from which the smile had gone forever. This human form, his friend’s, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck. He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty-handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless. And thus, when the end came with a short hollow groan, the tears that blinded Rieux’s eyes were tears of impotence. Tarrou had “lost the match”, as he put it. But he endured the experience without flinching and lucid. Rieux received word the next morning of his own wife’s death, a tuberculosis victim who died alone in a sanitarium miles from the quarantined city.
I returned again and again to the good-humored but estranged son of a successful prosecuting attorney Jean Tarrou, a youngish traveler of private means new to Oran who seemed an addict of all normal pleasures without being their slave. A faithful diarist given to understatement, he had a habit of observing events and people through the wrong end of a telescope. He set himself to recording the history of what the normal historian passes over . . . seemingly trivial details which yet have their importance. He struck up a friendship with Rieux, accompanying him on home visits and giving him a safe conversation partner. Sitting across from Rieux at his office desk, Tarrou spoke frankly, “In a fortnight, or a month at most, you’ll serve no purpose here. Things will have got out of hand.” He continued as Rieux nodded, “The sanitary department is inefficient – understaffed, for one thing – and you’re worked off your feet. . . . Why not call for voluntary help? . . . I’ve drawn up a plan for voluntary groups of helpers. Get me empowered to try out my plan. . . . I have friends in many walks of life; they’ll form a nucleus to start from. And, of course, I’ll take part in it myself.” Rieux replied, “I need hardly tell you that I accept your suggestion most gladly. But I take it you know that such work of this kind may prove fatal to the worker.” . . . Tarrou continued to make detailed journal entries, though working long hours with the sanitation squads and shielding the overworked Rieux left him thinner, his eyes and features blurred with fatigue, his shoulders sagged. . . . He understood the plague as metaphor as well as physical horror. As he explained to Rieux, “I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it or feel at ease in that condition. . . . I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague stricken, and that’s the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. . . . All I maintain is that there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. . . . I came to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak – and to act – quite clearly. . . . I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That’s why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim’s side, so as to reduce the damage done.” Two days after an official communiqué fed optimism that the plague was ending, Tarrou’s diary ended with shaky handwriting – “Feeling very tired tonight.” Ganglia swelled under his burning skin. There was a rumbling in his chest. Rieux could only watch his friend’s struggle. He had before him only a mask-like face, inert, from which the smile had gone forever. This human form, his friend’s, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck. He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty-handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless. And thus, when the end came with a short hollow groan, the tears that blinded Rieux’s eyes were tears of impotence. Tarrou had “lost the match”, as he put it. But he endured the experience without flinching and lucid. Rieux received word the next morning of his own wife’s death, a tuberculosis victim who died alone in a sanitarium miles from the quarantined city.
