...of death

The night that followed was not one of struggle but of silence. In his room, Rieux, now dressed, cut off from the world and standing over this dead body, felt the surprising calm that many nights ago he had felt on the rooftops above the plague, after the attack on the gates. Already at that time he had been thinking about the silence that rose from the beds where he had left men to die. It was always the same pause, the same solemn interval, the same lull that followed a battle, it was the silence of defeat. But in the case of the silence that enfolded his friend, it was so compact, and harmonized so closely with the silence of the streets and the town liberated from the plague, that Rieux really felt that this time it was the definitive defeat, the one that ends wars an makes of peace itself an irremediable suffering. The doctor did not know whether Tarrou in the end had found peace, but at this moment at least, he thought he knew that there would no longer be any peace possible for himself, any more than there is an armistice for the mother torn from her son or the man who buries his friend.

[The Plague, Camut, A.]