It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to
represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.
DANIEL DEFOE
PART I
The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran. Everyone agreed
that, considering their somewhat extraordinary character, they were out of place there.
For its ordinariness is what strikes one first about the town of Oran, which is merely a
large French port on the Algerian coast, headquarters of the Prefect of a French
Department.
The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time
to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centers in other parts
of the w... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
PART II
From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised
as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen
had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible. And no doubt he would
have continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that
all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to
adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as
individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in
which all shared alike and, together with fear, the greatest affliction of the long period of
exile that lay ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
PART III
Thus week by week the prisoners of plague put up what fight they could. Some, like
Rambert, even contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power
of choice. But actually it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-August, the
plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual
destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.
Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the
crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these. That is why the narrator thinks this
moment, registering the climax of the summer heat and the disease, the best for
describing, on general lines and by way o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
PART IV
Throughout September and October the town lay prostrate, at the mercy of the plague.
There was nothing to do but to "mark time," and some hundreds of thousands of men and
women went on doing this, through weeks that seemed interminable.
Mist, heat, and rain rang their changes in our streets. From the south came silent
coveys of starlings and thrushes, flying very high, but always giving the town a wide
berth, as though the strange implement of the plague described by Paneloux, the giant
flail whirling and shrilling over the housetops, warned them off us. At the beginning of
October torrents of rain swept the streets clean.
And all the time nothing more important befell us than that multitudinous mark... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
PART V
Though this sudden setback of the plague was as welcome as it was unlooked-for, our
townsfolk were in no hurry to jubilate. While intensifying their desire to be set free, the
terrible months they had lived through had taught them prudence, and they had come to
count less and less on a speedy end of the epidemic. All the same, this new development
was the talk of the town, and people began to nurse hopes none the less heartfelt for being
unavowed. All else took a back place; that daily there were new victims counted for little
beside that staggering fact: the weekly total showed a decrease. One of the signs that a
return to the golden age of health was secretly awaited was that our fellow citizens,
careful though they ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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