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 unqualified condemnation of the present state of things?”
“Unqualified? 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 find 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 five 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-floor apartment, which was occupied by some male Spanish dancers.
Puffing 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 fixed 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 find it interesting, yes, definitely interesting.”
Tarrou ran his fingers through his hair to brush it off 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 finding ’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 Office. 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, fifty rats had been found in his offices, 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 definite 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.