It is true that each time that sanitary measures were relaxed by the authorities—such, for instance, as the perfect isolation of the patients—an increase in the number of lepers was noticeable. When this was observed the old-time ordinances were enforced again with vigor. It was thus in 1371 the Provost of Paris issued an edict enjoining all lepers to leave the Capital within fifteen days, under heavy corporal and pecuniary penalties; and in 1388, all lepers were forbidden to enter Paris without special permission; in 1402 this restriction was renewed, “under penalty of being taken by the executioner and his deputies and detained for a month on a diet of bread and water, and afterwards perpetual banishment from the kingdom.” Finally, in April, 1488, it was announced “all persons attacked by that abominable, very dangerous and contagious malady known as leprosy, must leave Paris before Easter and retire to their hospitals from the date of issuance of this edict, under penalty of imprisonment for a month on bread and water; and, where they had property, the sequestration of their houses and jewels and arbitrary corporal punishment; it was permitted them, however, to send things to them by servants, the latter being in health.”
We can understand from this how these poor wretches, at different epochs, were accused of horrible crimes, among other things poisoning rivers, wells, and fountains. As regards this accusation, says the author of the Dictionnaire des Mœurs des Francais, Philip le Long burned a certain number of these poor devils at the stake and confiscated their wealth, giving it to the Order of Malta and St. Lazare.
The historians and chronicalers of the eleventh and twelfth century often designated the person attacked by leprosy by the name of mesel, mezel, meseau or mesiaus. Meantime Barbazin pretends that it is necessary to make a distinction.[29]
Mesel, according to Barbazin, was a person covered with sores and ulcers, while the leper was an insensible man. He thinks that mesellerie was at its origin a different affection than leprosy, and that these two diseases have been wrongly confounded. “They have both served,” says he, “to designate a frightful disease, that is reputed the most dangerous of all maladies.”
As supporting this assertion of Barbazin, we have found in the Romanesque tongue some documents strongly confirming this point. They appear more interesting, inasmuch as they have heretofore been unknown to medical literature, as, for instance:
“Seneschal, I now demand of you, said he (Saint Louis), which you love better, whether you be mesiaus, or whether you commit a mortal sin; and I, who never have lied, responded that rather would I commit thirty mortal sins than be mesiaus.” (Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis.)
The leprosy, however, was not an absolute cause for divorce, as we note in the following passage: “A man can leave his wife only for fornication, and not alone for leprosy, and lepers may marry; and one may cancel marriage if the husband become leper, and the same may be said of the bride.”
In the same manuscript another analogous fact shows the invalidation of the marital act for the reason of mesellerie complicated by impotence or barrenness.
“A woman who through impotence has lost that which is necessary to her, so that he cannot cohabit with her, for the reason that he is mesiaus, may marry another, telling the latter, however, that the first she married was worth nothing, not even an infant, as he could not cohabit; that nothing can prevent cohabitation in marriage nor the begetting of children.”
Individuals attacked by mesellerie were in reality outside the pale of the law. For we read in fact in the “Coutume de Beauvoisis, cap. 39,” that “mesiaus must not be called on as witnesses, for custom accords them no place in the conversation of gentlemen.”