There was a letter to write to his wife, and he wanted to see the concierge first.
News-venders were shouting the latest news—that the rats had disappeared.
But Rieux found his patient leaning over the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his belly and the other to his neck, vomiting pinkish bile into a slop-pail.
After retching for some minutes, the man lay back again, gasping.
His temperature was 103, the ganglia of his neck and limbs were swollen, and two black patches were developing on his thighs.
He now complained of internal pains.
“It’s like fire,” he whimpered. “The bastard’s burning me inside.”
He could hardly get the words through his fever-crusted lips and he gazed at the doctor with bulging eyes that his headache had suffused with tears.
His wife cast an anxious look at Rieux, who said nothing.
“Please, Doctor,” she said, “what is it?”
“It might be—almost anything.
There’s nothing definite as yet.
Keep him on a light diet and give him plenty to drink.”
The sick man had been complaining of a raging thirst.
On returning to his apartment Rieux rang up his colleague Richard, one of the leading practitioners in the town.
“No,” Richard said, “I can’t say I’ve noticed anything exceptional.”
“No cases of fever with local inflammation?”
“Wait a bit! I have two cases with inflamed ganglia.”
“Abnormally so?”
“Well,” Richard said, “that depends on what you mean by ‘normal.’ ” Anyhow, that night the porter was running a temperature of 104 and in delirium, always babbling about “them rats.”
Rieux tried a fixation abscess.
When he felt the sting of the turpentine, the old man yelled:
“The bastards!”
The ganglia had become still larger and felt like lumps of solid fibrous matter embedded in the flesh.
Mme. Michel had completely broken down.
“Sit up with him,” the doctor said, “and call me if necessary.”
Next day, April 30, the sky was blue and slightly misty.
A warm, gentle breeze was blowing, bringing with it a smell of flowers from the outlying suburbs.
The morning noises of the streets sounded louder, gayer than usual.
For everyone in our little town this day brought the promise of a new lease on life, now that the shadow of fear under which they had been living for a week had lifted.
Rieux, too, was in an optimistic mood when he went down to see the concierge; he had been cheered up by a letter from his wife that had come with the first mail.
Old M. Michel’s temperature had gone down to 99 and, though he still looked very weak, he was smiling.
“He’s better, Doctor, isn’t he?” his wife inquired.
“Well, it’s a bit too early to say.”
At noon the sick man’s temperature shot up abruptly to 104, he was in constant delirium and had started vomiting again.
The ganglia in the neck were painful to the touch, and the old man seemed to be straining to hold his head as far as possible from his body.
His wife sat at the foot of the bed, her hands on the counterpane, gently clasping his feet.
She gazed at Rieux imploringly.
“Listen,” he said, “we’ll have to move him to a hospital and try a special treatment.
I’ll ring up for the ambulance.”
Two hours later the doctor and Mme. Michel were in the ambulance bending over the sick man.
Rambling words were issuing from the gaping mouth, thickly coated now with sordes. He kept on repeating:
“Them rats!
Them damned rats!”
His face had gone livid, a grayish green, his lips were bloodless, his breath came in sudden gasps. His limbs spread out by the ganglia, embedded in the berth as if he were trying to bury himself in it or a voice from the depths of the earth were summoning him below, the unhappy man seemed to be stifling under some unseen pressure.
His wife was sobbing.
“Isn’t there any hope left, Doctor?”
“He’s dead,” said Rieux.
Michel’s death marked, one might say, the end of the first period, that of bewildering portents, and the beginning of another, relatively more trying, in which the perplexity of the early days gradually gave place to panic.
Reviewing that first phase in the light of subsequent events, our townsfolk realized that they had never dreamed it possible that our little town should be chosen out for the scene of such grotesque happenings as the wholesale death of rats in broad daylight or the decease of concierges through exotic maladies.