But everything points to its being plague.”
Castel got up and began walking toward the door.
“You know,” the old doctor said, “what they’re going to tell us?
That it vanished from temperate countries long ago.”
“ ‘Vanished’? What does that word really mean?” Rieux shrugged his shoulders.
“Yes.
And don’t forget. Just under twenty years ago, in Paris too.”
“Right. Let’s hope it won’t prove any worse this time than it did then.
But really it’s incredible.”
The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time.
At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor’s uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk.
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was torn between conflicting fears and confidence.
When a war breaks out, people say:
“It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.”
But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.
A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions.
Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible.
They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views.
How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.
They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend’s company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, had without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal.
For the simple reason that, when a man is a doctor, he comes to have his own ideas of physical suffering, and to acquire somewhat more imagination than the average.
Looking from his window at the town, outwardly quite unchanged, the doctor felt little more than a faint qualm for the future, a vague unease.
He tried to recall what he had read about the disease.
Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths.
But what are a hundred million deaths?
When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while.
And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day.
Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema.
Yes, that was how it should be done.
You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass.
But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces?
In any case the figures of those old historians, like Procopius, weren’t to be relied on; that was common knowledge.
Seventy years ago, at Canton, forty thousand rats died of plague before the disease spread to the inhabitants.
But, again, in the Canton epidemic there was no reliable way of counting up the rats.
A very rough estimate was all that could be made, with, obviously, a wide margin for error.
“Let’s see,” the doctor murmured to himself, “supposing the length of a rat to be ten inches, forty thousand rats placed end to end would make a line of …”
He pulled himself up sharply.
He was letting his imagination play pranks—the last thing wanted just now.
A few cases, he told himself, don’t make an epidemic; they merely call for serious precautions.
He must fix his mind, first of all, on the observed facts: stupor and extreme prostration, buboes, intense thirst, delirium, dark blotches on the body, internal dilatation, and, in conclusion … In conclusion, some words came back to the doctor’s mind; aptly enough, the concluding sentence of the description of the symptoms given in his medical handbook:
“The pulse becomes fluttering, dicrotic, and intermittent, and death ensues as the result of the slightest movement.”
Yes, in conclusion, the patient’s life hung on a thread, and three people out of four (he remembered the exact figures) were too impatient not to make the very slight movement that snapped the thread.
The doctor was still looking out of the window.