In 1947 Gailliard published Albert Camus’ LE PESTE or THE PLAGUE.
The novel tells a tale of the Bubonic Plague hitting the Moroccan city of Oran. The citizens first notice dead rats in the streets and then people exponentially succumbed to the deadly epidemic. The Prefect at first slow to understand the enormity of the threat, finally closed the city.
100%.
The city is off-limits to anyone. Armed guards prevented any exit from the city. All essential services were suspended by decree. Oran was cut off to the world.
That is our world today.
No travel. No bars. No restaurants. No schools.
Nothing, but the dread of uncertainty, because death came from more than ‘le Peste’.
FROM THE PLAGUE
“As a result of the fighting at the gates, in the course of which the police had had to use their revolvers, a spirit of lawlessness was abroad. Some had certainly been wounded in these brushes with the police, but in the town, where, owing to the combined influences of heat and terror, everything was exaggerated, there was talk of deaths.”
Uncertainty breeds more uncertainy.
FROM THE PLAGUE
Once in the street, they realized it must be quite late, eleven perhaps. All was silence in the town, except for some vague rustlings. An ambulance bell clanged faintly in the distance. They stepped into the car and Rieux started the engine.
“You must come to the hospital tomorrow,” he said, “for an injection. But, before embarking on this adventure, you’d better know your chances of coming out of it alive; they’re one in three.”
“That sort of reckoning doesn’t hold water; you know it, doctor, as well as I. A hundred years ago plague wiped out the entire population of a town in Persia, with one exception. And the sole survivor was precisely the man whose job it was to wash the dead bodies, and who carried on throughout the epidemic.”
“He pulled off his one-in-three chance, that’s all.” Rieux had lowered his voice.
“But you’re right; we know next to nothing on the subject.”
Camus was right, except at present we know nothing.
Even those at the front lines saw the meaninglessness of the struggle.
FROM THE PLAGUE
To Rambert the next two days seemed endless. He looked up Rieux and described to him the latest developments, then accompanied the doctor on one of his calls. He took leave of him on the doorstep of a house where a patient, suspected to have plague, was awaiting him. There was a sound of footsteps and voices in the hall; the family were
being warned of the doctor’s visit.
“I hope Tarrou will be on time,” Rieux murmured. He looked worn out.
“Is the epidemic getting out of hand?” Rambert asked.
Rieux said it wasn’t that; indeed, the death-graph was rising less steeply. Only they lacked adequate means of coping with the disease.
“We’re short of equipment. In all the armies of the world a shortage of equipment
is usually compensated for by manpower. But we’re short of man-power, too.”
“Haven’t doctors and trained assistants been sent from other towns?”
“Yes,” Rieux said. “Ten doctors and a hundred helpers. That sounds a lot, no doubt. But it’s barely enough to cope with the present state of affairs. And it will be quite inadequate if things get worse.”
Rambert, who had been listening to the sounds within the house, turned to Rieux with a friendly smile.
“Yes,” he said, “you’d better make haste to win your battle.” Then a shadow crossed his face. “You know,” he added in a low tone: “it’s not because of that I’m leaving.”
Camus hated that critics considered ‘Le Peste’ an existential novel and I agree with him, if his editors had cut 50000 words.
THE PLAGUE is face to face with the true horror.
FROM THE PLAGUE
The first step taken was to bury the dead by night, which obviously permitted a more summary procedure. The bodies were piled into ambulances in larger and larger numbers. And the few belated wayfarers who, in defiance of the= regulations, were abroad in the outlying districts after curfew hour, or whose duties took them there, often saw the long white ambulances hurtling past, making the nightbound streets reverberate with the dull clangor of their bells.
The corpses were tipped pell-mell into the pits and had hardly settled into place when spadefuls of quicklime began to sear their faces and the earth covered them.
“Bring out the dead.”
Death wants them all.
FROM THE PLAGUE
From the body, naked under an army blanket, rose a smell of damp wool and stale sweat. The boy had gritted his teeth again. Then very gradually he relaxed, bringing his arms and legs back toward the center of the bed, still
without speaking or opening his eyes, and his breathing seemed to quicken. Rieux looked at Tarrou, who hastily lowered his eyes.
They had already seen children die, for many months now death had shown no favoritism, but they had never yet watched a child’s agony minute by minute, as they had now been doing since daybreak. Needless to say, the pain inflicted on these innocent victims had always seemed to them to be what in fact it was: an abominable thing. But
hitherto they had felt its abomination in, so to speak, an abstract way; they had never had to witness over so long a period the death-throes of an innocent child.
And just then the boy had a sudden spasm, as if something had bitten him in the stomach, and uttered a long, shrill wail. For moments that seemed endless he stayed in a queer, contorted position, his body racked by convulsive tremors; it was as if his frail frame were bending before the fierce breath of the plague, breaking under the reiterated gusts of fever. Then the storm-wind passed, there came a lull, and he relaxed a little; the
fever seemed to recede, leaving him gasping for breath on a dank, pestilential shore, lost in a languor that already looked like death. When for the third time the fiery wave broke on him, lifting him a little, the child curled himself up and shrank away to the edge of the bed, as if in terror of the flames advancing on him, licking his limbs. A moment later, after tossing his head wildly to and fro, he flung off the blanket. From between the inflamed eyelids big tears welled up and trickled down the sunken, leaden-hued cheeks.
When the spasm had passed, utterly exhausted, tensing his thin legs and arms, on which, within forty-eight hours, the flesh had wasted to the bone, the child lay flat, racked on the tumbled bed, in a grotesque parody of crucifixion.
And then everyone is saved without any explanation from their Gods or doctors or government.
FROM THE PLAGUE – The last paragraph.
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
THE END
A great novel but without a single mention of an Arab.
They mattered not to the French.
Therein lays the great failing of this novel.
Racism, but what else can you expect from les Blancs.
