Nevertheless—and this point is most important—however bitter
their distress and however heavy their hearts, for all their emptiness, it can
be truly said of these exiles that in the early period of the plague they could
account themselves privileged. For at the precise moment when the residents of
the town began to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the person whom
they longed to meet again. The egoism of love made them immune to the general distress
and, if they thought of the plague, it was only in so far as it might threaten
to make their separation eternal. Thus in the very heart of the epidemic they
maintained a saving indifference, which one was tempted to take for composure. Their
despair saved them from panic, their misfortune had a good side. For instance,
if it happened that one of them was carried off by the disease, it was almost
always without his having had time to realize it. Snatched suddenly from his
long, silent communion with a wraith of memory, he was plunged straightaway into
the densest silence of all. He’d had no time for anything.
— Albert Camus
The Plague (1947)
