Page "The Plague" Paragraph 27

* Joseph Grand: Joseph Grand is a fifty-year-old clerk for the city government.

He is tall and thin and always wears clothes a size too large for him.

Poorly paid, he lives an austere life, but he is capable of deep affection.

In his spare time, Grand polishes up his Latin, and he is also writing a book, but he is such a perfectionist that he continually rewrites the first sentence and can get no further.

One of his problems in life is that he can rarely find the correct words to express what he means.

Grand tells Rieux that he married while still in his teens, but overwork and poverty took their toll ( Grand did not receive the career advancement that he had been promised ), and his wife Jeanne left him.

He tried but failed to write a letter to her, and he still grieves for his loss .</ br > Grand is a neighbor of Cottard, and it is he who calls Rieux for help, when Cottard tries to commit suicide.

When the plague takes a grip on the town, Grand joins the team of volunteers, acting as general secretary, recording all the statistics.

Rieux regards him as " the true embodiment of the quiet courage that inspired the sanitary groups.

" Grand catches the plague himself and asks Rieux to burn his manuscript.

But then he makes an unexpected recovery.

At the end of the novel, Grand says he is much happier ; he has written to Jeanne and made a fresh start on his book.