In today’s pages we get one of the strangest moments of the book so far: the opera company of Orpheus & Eurydice, trapped in Oran, performs the opera over and over again every week for months to a packed house. In the third act, a singer collapses, presumably of the plague, and the audience files out leaving their “fans and lace stoles” behind, “luxury that had become useless.” We also pick back up with Rambert’s quest to get out of the town, “choosing happiness,” as Rieux says. Somehow I still feel sure that Rambert is not going to get out … 

FOR TOMORROW: Next 7 pages, to the end of the paragraph beginning “The light spread through the ward,” in section 3 of Part IV