How 'The Plague' ends...

By Camus, for whom this time of pestilence was the 'period of abstractions'...

“One of the signs that a return to the golden age of health was secretly awaited was that our fellow citizens, careful though they were not to voice their hope, now began to talk in, it is true, a carefully detached tone of the new order of life that would set in after the plague...

“But in reality behind these mild aspirations lurked wild, extravagant hopes, and often one of us, becoming aware of this, would hastily add that, even on the rosiest view, you couldn’t expect the plague to stop from one day to another...

“All agreed that the amenities of the past couldn’t be restored at once; destruction is an easier, speedier process than reconstruction...

“All that could be said was that the disease seemed to be leaving as unaccountably as it had come...

"Our strategy had not changed, but whereas yesterday it had obviously failed, today it seemed triumphant. Indeed, one’s chief impression was that the epidemic had called a retreat after reaching all its objectives; it had, so to speak, achieved its purpose...

“The truth was that for many months the town had been stifling under an airless shroud, in which a rent had now been made, and every Monday when he turned on the radio, each of us learned that the rift was widening; soon he would be able to breathe freely. It was at best a negative solace, with no immediate impact on men’s lives...

“The change, no doubt, was slight. Yet, however slight, it proved what a vast forward stride our townsfolk had made in the way of hope. And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended...

“It must, however, be admitted that our fellow citizens’ reactions during that month were diverse to the point of incoherence. More precisely, they fluctuated between high optimism and extreme depression...

“Some of them plague had imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature; they had become allergic to hope in any form. Thus even when the plague had run its course, they went on living by its standards. They were, in short, behind the times...

"No doubt the plague was not yet ended, a fact of which they were to be reminded; still, in imagination they could already hear, weeks in advance, trains whistling on their way to an outside world that had no limit, and steamers hooting as they put out from the harbour across shining seas...

“All a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.”