On the other hand the book is also about plague in human history, and it is clear that Camus in the aftermath of World War 2 learned much about plagues such as the Black Death in 14 th-century Europe (and North Africa), the Great Plague of England in 1665, and outbreaks in Algeria from its seizure by the French in 1830. Camus formally begins the action in La Peste with the rapidly escalating deaths of rats and ends it on the likelihood of the rats’ return, and in fact the actual plague of 1945 was initiated by infestation of rats bearing ectoparasites. So in the book the English translation limits the plague to the partly imaginary and partly real one by the 33-year-old Camus set in the Algerian coastal city of Oran in the early 1940s when it sustained a much less severe real plague, other outbreaks of which appeared all over the Mediterranean coasts of Egypt, Algeria and (worst of all) Morocco. It can mean whatever Moses demanded God inflict on the Egyptians from the deaths of the firstborn and their beasts, to the disease striking down livestock, the proliferation of frogs and flies, the transformation of water to blood, &c. ‘ La Peste’ is French for ‘the plague’ but it is also French for ‘plague’, meaning as a genre, disease, human condition. Image: The Triumph Of Death by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c1562 Source: Museo del Prado. And if they were French there would be no problem. If they were American, nothing would happen because the men would be too busy talking business to join the lady. If they were English, nothing would happen because they hadn’t been introduced. If they were Italian, the woman would kill one of the men. If they were Spanish, one man wouId kill the other.

What would happen if two men and a woman were wrecked on a desert island? As befits the language whose people are the subject of subtler sex jokes by Anglophones, ‘the’ in French is declined in gender (as well as number). But are we right? The French use the definite article differently. But all of them seem to have agreed in translate ‘ La’ as ‘The’. There may also have been other translations, some perhaps the work of half-starved skeletal tubercular figures acutely resembling Camus himself but left in miserable anonymity by Barrabas-like publishers. Over 50 years later it was translated by Robin Buss. La Peste was promptly translated on publication by James Joyce’s Parisian friend, editor and contemporary Stuart Gilbert, as The Plague (1948). We can start with the old chestnut ‘these things are so much better in the original’ (much employed in the 1950s by lecturers quoting from a source translated from the Bulgarian). Clarity on the plague -on all plagues upon us! Owen Dudley Edwards reads the words of La Peste, looks at the history, and judges this as medical fiction, which might help our honesty with medical facts.

The plague robin buss