The doctor opened the window, and at once the noises of the town grew louder. The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a nearby work-shop. Rieux pulled himself together. There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere thread and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
The doctor's musings had reached this point when the visit of Joseph Grand was announced. Grand's duties as clerk in the Municipal Office were varied, and he was sometimes employed in the statistical department on compiling the figures of births, marriages, and deaths. Thus it had fallen to him to add up the number of deaths during the last few days, and, being of an obliging disposition, he had volunteered to bring a copy of the latest figures to the doctor.
Grand, who was waving a sheet of paper, was accompanied by his neighbor, Cottard.
"The figures are going up, doctor. Eleven deaths in forty-eight hours.”
Rieux shook hands with Cottard and asked him how he was feeling. Grand put in a word explaining that Cottard was bent on thanking the doctor and apologizing for the trouble he had given. But Rieux was gazing frowningly at the figures on the sheet of paper.
“Well, "he said, "perhaps we'd better make up our minds to call this disease by its name. So far we've been only shillyshallying. Look here, I'm off to the laboratory; like to come with me?”
“Quite so, quite so, "Grand said as he went down the stairs at the doctor's heels. “I, too, believe in calling things by their name. But what's the name in this case?”
“That I shan't say, and anyhow you wouldn't gain anything by knowing.” You see," Grand smiled. "It's not easy after all!”
They started off toward the Place d'Armes. Cottard still kept silent. The streets were beginning to fill up. The brief dusk of our town was already giving place to night, and the first stars glimmered above the still clearly marked horizon. A few moments later all the streetlamps went on, dimming the sky, and the voices in the street seemed to rise a tone.
“Excuse me,” Grand said at the corner of the Place d'Armes, “but I must catch my car now. My evenings are sacred. As we say in my part of the world: 'Never put off to tomorrow-'”
Rieux had already noticed Grand's trick of professing to quote some turn of speech from “his part of the world”(he hailed from Montélimar), and following up with some such hackneyed expression as “lost in dreams,” or “pretty as a picture.”
“That's so,” Cottard put in. “You can never budge him from his den after dinner.”
Rieux asked Grand if he was doing extra work for the municipality. Grand said no, he was working on his own account.
“Really?” Rieux said, to keep the conversation going. “And are you getting on well with it?”
“Considering I've been at it for years, it would be surprising if I wasn't. Though in one sense there hasn't been much progress.”
“May one know”-the doctor halted-“what it is that you're engaged on?”
Grand put a hand up to his hat and tugged it down upon his big, protruding ears, then murmured some half-inaudible remark from which Rieux seemed to gather that Grand's work was connected with "the growth of a personality." Then he turned rather hastily and a moment later was hurrying, with short, quick steps, under the fig trees lining the boulevard de la Marne.
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