To begin with, the Prefect took measures controlling the traffic and the food-supply.
Gas was rationed and restrictions were placed on the sale of foodstuffs.
Reductions were ordered in the use of electricity.
Only necessaries were brought by road or air to Oran.
Thus the traffic thinned out progressively until hardly any private cars were on the roads; luxury shops closed overnight, and others began to put up “Sold Out” notices, while crowds of buyers stood waiting at their doors.
Oran assumed a novel appearance.
You saw more pedestrians, and in the slack hours numbers of people, reduced to idleness because shops and a good many offices were closed, crowded the streets and cafes.
For the present they were not unemployed; merely on holiday.
So it was that on fine days, toward three in the afternoon, Oran brought to mind a city where public rejoicings are in progress, shops are shut, and traffic is stopped to give a merry-making populace the freedom of the streets.
Naturally the picture-houses benefited by the situation and made money hand over fist.
They had one difficulty, however—to provide a change of program, since the circulation of films in the region had been suspended.
After a fortnight the various cinemas were obliged to exchange films and, after a further lapse of time, to show always the same program.
In spite of this their takings did not fall off.
The cafes, thanks to the big stocks accumulated in a town where the wine-and-liquor trade holds pride of place, were equally able to cater to their patrons.
And, to tell the truth, there was much heavy drinking. One of the cafes had the brilliant idea of putting up a slogan: “The best protection against infection is a bottle of good wine,” which confirmed an already prevalent opinion that alcohol is a safeguard against infectious disease.
Every night, toward 2 A.M., quite a number of drunken men, ejected from the cafes, staggered down the streets, vociferating optimism.
Yet all these changes were, in one sense, so fantastic and had been made so precipitately that it wasn’t easy to regard them as likely to have any permanence.
With the result that we went on focusing our attention on our personal feelings.
When leaving the hospital two days after the gates were closed, Dr. Rieux met Cottard in the street. The little man was beaming with satisfaction.
Rieux congratulated him on his appearance.
“Yes,” Cottard said, “I’m feeling very fit. Never was fitter in my life. But tell me, Doctor. This blasted plague, what about it? Getting to look mighty serious, isn’t it?”
When the doctor nodded, he continued exuberantly:
“And there’s no reason for it to stop now.
This town’s going to be in an unholy mess, by the look of things.”
They walked a little way together.
Cottard told the story of a grocer in his street who had laid by masses of canned provisions with the idea of selling them later on at a big profit. When the ambulance men came to fetch him he had several dozen cans of meat under his bed.
“He died in the hospital. There’s no money in plague, that’s sure.”
Cottard was a mine of stories of this kind, true or false, about the epidemic.
One of them was about a man with all the symptoms and running a high fever who dashed out into the street, flung himself on the first woman he met, and embraced her, yelling that he’d “got it.”
“Good for him!” was Cottard’s comment. But his next remark seemed to belie his gleeful exclamation. “Anyhow, we’ll all be nuts before long, unless I’m much mistaken.”
It was on the afternoon of the same day that Grand at last unburdened himself to Rieux.
Noticing Mme. Rieux’s photograph on the desk, he looked at the doctor inquiringly.
Rieux told him that his wife was under treatment in a sanatorium some distance from the town.
“In one way,” Grand said, “that’s lucky.”
The doctor agreed that it was lucky in a sense; but, he added, the great thing was that his wife should recover.
“Yes,” Grand said, “I understand.”
And then, for the first time since Rieux had made his acquaintance, he became quite voluble.
Though he still had trouble over his words he succeeded nearly always in finding them; indeed, it was as if for years he’d been thinking over what he now said.
When in his teens, he had married a very young girl, one of a poor family living near by.
It was, in fact, in order to marry that he’d abandoned his studies and taken up his present job.
Neither he nor Jeanne ever stirred from their part of the town.
In his courting days he used to go to see her at her home, and the family were inclined to make fun of her bashful, silent admirer.
Her father was a railroadman.
When off duty, he spent most of the time seated in a corner beside the window gazing meditatively at the passers-by, his enormous hands splayed out on his thighs.
His wife was always busy with domestic duties, in which Jeanne gave her a hand.
Jeanne was so tiny that it always made Grand nervous to see her crossing a street, the vehicles bearing down on her looked so gigantic.
Then one day shortly before Christmas they went out for a short walk together and stopped to admire a gaily decorated shop-window. After gazing ecstatically at it for some moments, Jeanne turned to him.
“Oh, isn’t it lovely!”
He squeezed her wrist.
It was thus that the marriage had come about.