I recoiled from the militant Jesuit priest Father Paneloux, an Augustinian scholar celebrated even among those indifferent to religion for his study of ancient inscriptions and for his trouncing series of public lectures on present-day individualism. The ecclesiastical authorities, toward the end of the first month of plague, organized a Week of Prayer that culminated with a sermon by the fiery tempered Paneloux. The large audiences, alarmed, but far from desperate, hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence. With a violent storm pelting the cathedral, the stocky bespectacled Paneloux leaned on the edge of the pulpit and launched at the congregation the gist of his discourse in clear, emphatic tones: “Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.” No one could miss his point – “The just man need have no fear, but the evildoer has good cause to tremble. For plague is the flail of God and the world His threshing floor. . . . Maybe at this very moment his finger is pointing to your door. . . . No earthly power, nay, not even – mark me well – the vaunted might of human science can avail you to avert that hand once it is stretched toward you. Some, including the Othon boy’s father, found Paneloux’s arguments irrefutable. Some felt sentenced. Some panicked. Some rebelled. Tarrou added to his diary – “At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, i.e., to silence.” Rieux confessed to Tarrou, “I’ve seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment. . . . Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.” At Tarrou’s invitation, Paneloux joined the sanitation squads. He spent his entire time in hospitals and places where he came in contact with plague . . . in the forefront of the fight. . . . Paneloux leaned against the wall by the Othon boy’s bedside, his face drawn in grief. The child’s death wail fluttered out into silence as Paneloux sank to his knees repeating in vain, “My God, spare this child!” They had already seen children die, but they had never yet watched a child’s agony minute by minute. They had never had to witness over so long a period the death throes of an innocent child. Once outside, Rieux turned toward Paneloux, “There are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.” Paneloux said in a low voice, “I understand. That sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human understanding. But perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.” Rieux gazed at him, then shook his head, “No, Father. I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I will refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” Paneloux had been working on an essay entitled “Is a Priest Justified in Consulting a Doctor?” Humbled by working so close to death, he presented the thesis in a second sermon – “My brethren, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything? . . . The love of God is a hard love. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children. It alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours. That is the hard lesson I would share with you today. That is the faith, cruel in men’s eyes and crucial in God’s, which we must ever strive to compass.” Paneloux soon after began to feel run-down and, though without the specific symptoms of plague, died bedridden gazing at the crucifix that hung above the head of his bed.
I agonized with the short, square-shouldered young journalist Raymond Rambert, on assignment for a Paris newspaper to report on the sanitary conditions prevailing among Oran’s Arab population. When Rieux informed him about the extraordinary number of dead rats that were being found, he exclaimed, “Ah! That certainly interests me.” Rambert soon discovered the story was far bigger than he could have imagined. The officials’ decision to quarantine the city trapped him, one of the many travelers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were cut off from the person with whom they wanted to be and from their homes as well. Pained by separation from his fiancé, Rambert exclaimed, “But confound it, I don’t belong here!” Longing for happiness and baffled by fruitless interviews with officials, he turned to the criminal element in search of a way to sneak past the guarded gates. Wrestling with his determination to escape over against Tarrou’s commitment to the sanitation squads, he listened to the weary Rieux’s reminder, “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is common decency.” Still fighting to prevent the plague from besting him, Rambert gazed at Rieux and Tarrou, “You two. I suppose you’ve nothing to lose in all this. It’s easier, that way, to be on the side of the angels.” Draining his glass, Rieux said to Tarrou, “Come along. We’ve work to do.” As they walked away, Tarrou turned and looked at Rambert, “I suppose you don’t know that Rieux’s wife is in a sanatorium a hundred miles or so away.” The next day, still fancying he had the power of choice, Rambert called the doctor, “Would you agree to my working with you until I find some way of getting out of the town?” “Certainly, Rambert. Thanks.” When the chance to escape came, Rambert chose to stay, explaining to Rieux, “Until now I always felt a stranger in this town and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.” . . . Rambert’s fiancé arrived on one of the first trains to enter Oran on the day the city gates were reopened. Rambert felt a nervous tremor at the thought that soon he would have to confront a love and a devotion that the plague had slowly refined to a pale abstraction. If only he could put the clock back and be once more the man who, at the outbreak of the epidemic, had had only one thought and one desire: to escape and return to the woman he loved! But that, he knew, was out of the question now; he had changed too greatly. The plague had forced on him a detachment which, try as he might, he couldn’t think away and which like a formless fear haunted his mind. He hadn’t had time to pull himself together. Happiness was bearing down on him full speed, the event outrunning expectation. . . . He hadn’t time to see that form running toward him; already she had flung herself upon his breast. And with his arms locked around her, pressing to his shoulder the head of which he saw only the familiar hair, he let his tears flow freely, unknowing if they rose from present joy or from sorrow too long repressed; aware only that they would prevent his making sure if the face buried in the hollow of his shoulder was the face of which he had dreamed so often or, instead, a stranger’s face. For the moment, he wished to behave like all those others around him who believed, or made believe, that plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.
I agonized with the short, square-shouldered young journalist Raymond Rambert, on assignment for a Paris newspaper to report on the sanitary conditions prevailing among Oran’s Arab population. When Rieux informed him about the extraordinary number of dead rats that were being found, he exclaimed, “Ah! That certainly interests me.” Rambert soon discovered the story was far bigger than he could have imagined. The officials’ decision to quarantine the city trapped him, one of the many travelers caught by the plague and forced to stay where they were cut off from the person with whom they wanted to be and from their homes as well. Pained by separation from his fiancé, Rambert exclaimed, “But confound it, I don’t belong here!” Longing for happiness and baffled by fruitless interviews with officials, he turned to the criminal element in search of a way to sneak past the guarded gates. Wrestling with his determination to escape over against Tarrou’s commitment to the sanitation squads, he listened to the weary Rieux’s reminder, “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is common decency.” Still fighting to prevent the plague from besting him, Rambert gazed at Rieux and Tarrou, “You two. I suppose you’ve nothing to lose in all this. It’s easier, that way, to be on the side of the angels.” Draining his glass, Rieux said to Tarrou, “Come along. We’ve work to do.” As they walked away, Tarrou turned and looked at Rambert, “I suppose you don’t know that Rieux’s wife is in a sanatorium a hundred miles or so away.” The next day, still fancying he had the power of choice, Rambert called the doctor, “Would you agree to my working with you until I find some way of getting out of the town?” “Certainly, Rambert. Thanks.” When the chance to escape came, Rambert chose to stay, explaining to Rieux, “Until now I always felt a stranger in this town and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.” . . . Rambert’s fiancé arrived on one of the first trains to enter Oran on the day the city gates were reopened. Rambert felt a nervous tremor at the thought that soon he would have to confront a love and a devotion that the plague had slowly refined to a pale abstraction. If only he could put the clock back and be once more the man who, at the outbreak of the epidemic, had had only one thought and one desire: to escape and return to the woman he loved! But that, he knew, was out of the question now; he had changed too greatly. The plague had forced on him a detachment which, try as he might, he couldn’t think away and which like a formless fear haunted his mind. He hadn’t had time to pull himself together. Happiness was bearing down on him full speed, the event outrunning expectation. . . . He hadn’t time to see that form running toward him; already she had flung herself upon his breast. And with his arms locked around her, pressing to his shoulder the head of which he saw only the familiar hair, he let his tears flow freely, unknowing if they rose from present joy or from sorrow too long repressed; aware only that they would prevent his making sure if the face buried in the hollow of his shoulder was the face of which he had dreamed so often or, instead, a stranger’s face. For the moment, he wished to behave like all those others around him who believed, or made believe, that plague can come and go without changing anything in men’s hearts.
