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Father Paneloux’s fever keeps rising and his coughing grows harsher, tormenting him throughout the day. In the evening he finally coughs up a red clot. Through his violent fever he remains outwardly calm and detached. The next morning he is found dead, half hanging out of his bed, his eyes blank and expressionless. On his medical file the doctors record his case as “Doubtful".

The question was asked quite naturally, and Rieux answered it just as naturally. He said that he had spent a great deal of time in hospitals, and that this had gradually drawn him toward the idea of collective suffering. He knew, he said, that sometimes one must act without hope of reward, without belief in final justice. But he also thought, like Paneloux, that the plague had good sides: it forced people to act.

"A few moments later the doctor shook his head. The journalist was right in his longing for happiness. But was he also right when he accused him? You live in a world of abstractions. Were they really abstractions, those days in his hospital when the plague was doing double duty while, now, an average of five hundred victims were falling each week? Yes, all suffering has something abstract and unreal about it."