«Yes, I know,» the old man told Rieux, who had informed him of the latest casualty among the rats. «I keep finding ’em by twos and threes. But it’s the same thing in the other houses in the street.»
He seemed depressed and worried, and was scratching his neck absentmindedly. Rieux asked him how he felt. The concierge wouldn’t go so far as to say he was feeling ill. Still he wasn’t quite up to the mark. In his opinion it was just due to worry; these damned rats had given him «a shock, like.» It would be a relief when they stopped coming out and dying all over the place.
Next morning, it was April 18, when the doctor was bringing back his mother from the station, he found M. Michel looking still more out of sorts. The stairway from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, ten or a dozen of them.
The garbage cans of all the houses in the street were full of rats. The doctor’s mother took it quite calmly.
«It’s like that sometimes,» she said vaguely. She was a small woman with silver hair and dark, gentle eyes. «I’m so glad to be with you again, Bernard,» she added. «The rats can’t change that, anyhow.»
He nodded. It was a fact that everything seemed easy when she was there. However, he rang up the Municipal Office. He knew the man in charge of the department concerned with the extermination of vermin and he asked him if he’d heard about all the rats that were coming out to die in the open. Yes, Mercier knew all about it; in fact, fifty rats had been found in his offices, which were near the wharves. To tell the truth, he was rather perturbed; did the doctor think it meant anything serious? Rieux couldn’t give a definite opinion, but he thought the sanitary service should take action of some kind.
Mercier agreed. «And, if you think it’s really worth the trouble, I’ll get an order issued as well.»
«It certainly is worth the trouble,» Rieux replied.
His charwoman had just told him that several hundred dead rats had been collected in the big factory where her husband worked.
It was about this time that our townsfolk began to show signs of uneasiness. For, from April 18 onwards, quantities of dead or dying rats were found in factories and warehouses. In some cases the animals were killed to put an end to their agony.
From the outer suburbs to the center of the town, in all the byways where the doctor’s duties took him, in every thoroughfare, rats were piled up in garbage cans or lying in long lines in the gutters. The evening papers that day took up the matter and inquired whether or not the city fathers were going to take steps, and what emergency measures were contemplated, to abate this particularly disgusting nuisance. Actually the municipality had not contemplated doing anything at all, but now a meeting was convened to discuss the situation.
An order was transmitted to the sanitary service to collect the dead rats at daybreak every morning. When the rats had been collected, two municipal trucks were to take them to be burned in the town incinerator.
But the situation worsened in the following days. There were more and more dead vermin in the streets, and the collectors had bigger truckloads every morning.
On the fourth day the rats began to come out and die in batches. From basements, cellars, and sewers they emerged in long wavering files into the light of day, swayed helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of the horrified onlookers.
At night, in passages and alleys, their shrill little death-cries could be clearly heard. In the mornings the bodies were found lining the gutters, each with a gout of blood, like a red flower, on its tapering muzzle; some were bloated and already beginning to rot, others rigid, with their whiskers still erect. Even in the busy heart of the town you found them piled in little heaps on landings and in backyards. Some stole forth to die singly in the halls of public offices, in school playgrounds, and even on cafe terraces. Our townsfolk were amazed to find such busy centers as the Place d’Armes, the boulevards, the promenade along the waterfront, dotted with repulsive little corpses.
After the daily clean-up of the town, which took place at sunrise, there was a brief respite; then gradually the rats began to appear again in numbers that went on increasing throughout the day. People out at night would often feel underfoot the squelchy roundness of a still warm body. It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its secreted humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails. You must picture the consternation of our little town, hitherto so tranquil, and now, out of the blue, shaken to its core, like a quite healthy man who all of a sudden feels his temperature shoot up and the blood seething like wildfire in his veins.
Things went so far that the Ransdoc Information Bureau (inquiries on all subjects promptly and accurately answered), which ran a free-information talk on the radio, by way of publicity, began its talk by announcing that no less than 6,231 rats had been collected and burned in a single day, April 25. Giving as it did an ampler and more precise view of the scene daily enacted before our eyes, this amazing figure administered a jolt to the public nerves.
Hitherto people had merely grumbled at a stupid, rather obnoxious visitation; they now realized that this strange phenomenon, whose scope could not be measured and whose origins escaped detection, had something vaguely menacing about it. Only the old Spaniard whom Dr. Rieux was treating for asthma went on rubbing his hands and chuckling: «They’re coming out, they’re coming out,» with senile glee.
On April 28, when the Ransdoc Bureau announced that 8,ooo rats had been collected, a wave of something like panic swept the town.
There was a demand for drastic measures, the authorities were accused of slackness, and people who had houses on the coast spoke of moving there, early in the year though it was. But next day the bureau informed them that the phenomenon had abruptly ended and the sanitary service had collected only a trifling number of rats. Everyone breathed more freely.
It was, however, on this same day, at noon, that Dr. Rieux, when parking his car in front of the apartment house where he lived, noticed the concierge coming toward him from the end of the street. He was dragging himself along, his head bent, arms and legs curiously splayed out, with the jerky movements of a clockwork doll. The old man was leaning on the arm of a priest whom the doctor knew. It was Father Paneloux, a learned and militant Jesuit, whom he had met occasionally and who was very highly thought of in our town, even in circles quite indifferent to religion. Rieux waited for the two men to draw up to him.
M. Michel’s eyes were fever-bright and he was breathing wheezily. The old man explained that, feeling «a bit off color,» he had gone out to take the air. But he had started feeling pains in all sorts of places, in his neck, armpits, and groin, and had been obliged to turn back and ask Father Paneloux to give him an arm.
«It’s just swellings,» he said. «I must have strained myself somehow.» Leaning out of the window of the car, the doctor ran his hand over the base of
Michel’s neck; a hard lump, like a knot in wood, had formed there.
«Go to bed at once, and take your temperature. I’ll come to see you this afternoon.»
When the old man had gone, Rieux asked Father Paneloux what he made of this queer business about the rats.
«Oh, I suppose it’s an epidemic they’ve been having.» The Father’s eyes were smiling behind his big round glasses.
After lunch, while Rieux was reading for the second time the telegram his wife had sent him from the sanatorium, announcing her arrival, the phone rang. It was one of his former patients, a clerk in the Municipal Office, ringing him up. He had suffered for a long time from a constriction of the aorta, and, as he was poor, Rieux had charged no fee.
«Thanks, doctor, for remembering me. But this time it’s somebody else. The man next door has had an accident. Please come at once.» He sounded out of breath.
Rieux thought quickly; yes, he could see the concierge afterwards. A few minutes later he was entering a small house in the rue Faidherbe, on the outskirts of the town. Halfway up the drafty, foul-smelling stairs, he saw Joseph Grand, the clerk, hurrying down to meet him. He was a man of about fifty years of age, tall and drooping, with narrow shoulders, thin limbs, and a yellowish mustache.
«He looks better now,» he told Rieux, «but I really thought his number was up.» He blew his nose vigorously.
On the top floor, the third, Rieux noticed something scrawled in red chalk on a door on the left: Come in, I’ve hanged myself.
They entered the room. A rope dangled from a hanging lamp above a chair lying on its side. The dining-room table had been pushed into a corner. But the
