The Plague

With autumn arriving in Oran, all engaged in fighting the plague show signs of physical and emotional exhaustion as they toil around the clock. During a brief break from assisting the sanitary squad, Tarrou accompanies a newly wealthy Cottard on a visit to the opera, where the same performing company performs Orpheus night after night. Other attendees, pleased to be out on the town, somehow imagine that their elegant garb might ward off plague, but upon watching a performance laden with death—the death of Eurydice in the opera’s story is followed with the onstage collapse of the plague-stricken actor playing Orpheus—they leave in gasps of horror as their evening’s entertainment reflects current circumstances all too accurately.

When Castel announces that his anti-plague serum is ready, he and Rieux decide to test it on the plague-stricken son of Othon, a local magistrate who treats his family unkindly, since the boy’s death is all but certain. The boy dies a protracted, miserable death, his small, wasted body on the bed “in a grotesque parody of crucifixion” (104). The child’s death prompts Paneloux to deliver a second sermon in which he cites this