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he'd gotten trapped, he had to get out, there was some
mistake, he had to be put in touch with the underworld,
who were going to smuggle him out the gate, and he spent
most of the book racing around trying to make arrangements
and meet people. Never got there; became a hero of sorts,
philosophical, inward mam, served his fellow men. He worked
for the man who is really the hero of the book, a Dr. Reiux.
Medical doctor who analysed the plague, really led the town.
An atheist, a fatalist, a man who noticed one of the
peculiarities of this plague, that it usually struck the
robust and left the consumptive to the end. He was a philosopher
devoted to good works, who saw the rewards of life as being
something like this, "For having known friendships and
remembering it, and knowing affection and remembering it,
all a man can win in a conflict is knowledge and memories."
And it was this man who sterilized, met with the sick, arranged
through the Prefect for the burial, worked twenty hours a
day doing good with no hope of reward and no belief in
redemption, no belief in the goodness of it all. Dutiful,
stoic, humanist.

The first to join him as a lay medical team member,
John Tarrou, a newcomer, a heavy man, smoked a pipe. In
the words of the author, an addict of lifes normal pleasures
without being a slave to any. He was a historian, that is
to say, he kept a notebook of the events to which the narrator,

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