It would be fair to say that the first result of this illness’ brutal invasion was to force our fellow citizens to act as if they didn’t have individual feelings. In the first hours of the day when the decree went into effect, the prefecture was assailed by a crowd of claimants who laid out, by phone and in person, situations that were uniquely

facile

As a result, they compelled themselves never to think of the date of their release, to no longer think of the future, and to keep their eyes down, so to speak.

banal

Impatient with their present, enemies with their past, and deprived of a future, we very much resembled those who had been sent to live behind bars by human justice or human hate.

Even when the doctor had admitted, in front of his friend, that a scattered handful of patients, without warning, had just died of plague, the danger remained unreal to him.

dead rat

Then the plague would stop because the plague was unimaginable or because it had been wrongly imagined. If it stopped, as was likely, everything would be fine. In the opposite case, they would know what it was and if there was any way to deal with it early so they could defeat it later. The

Richard thought they shouldn’t paint such a dark picture, and that besides, the contagion hadn’t been proved, as the relatives of these patients were still unscathed. “But others are dead,” remarked Rieux. “And of course, contagion is never absolute, if it were, there would be infinite exponential growth and a staggering population decline. It’s