"There is no count. It is abandoned. Who shall count? The tellers die themselves ere the record is made. Poublanc made a list yesterday--now----"
"He is not dead? My God I he is not dead?" The other nodded his head solemnly. After which he said:
"He lies on his doorstep--dead. He was struck this morning--now----!"
* * * * * *
It was a charnel-house to which the Cordon entered! The second Sheriff had spoken truly!
Yet, at this time, but half of the ninety thousand[[4]] who were to die in Marseilles of this pestilence had achieved their doom. Still, all was bad enough--awful, heart-rending! Not since ten thousand people died daily in Rome, in the first century of the Christian era, had so horrible a blight fallen upon any city. Nor had any city presented so terrible a sight as did Marseilles now when the women entered it, while glancing shudderingly to right and left as they passed along.
The dead lay unburied in the streets where they had fallen--men, women, and children being huddled together in heaps; it seemed even as if, after one heap had lain there for some hours, another had fallen on top of it, so that one might suppose that these second layers of dead represented those who, coming forth to search for their kindred and friends, had in their turn been stricken and fallen over them. There were also the bodies of many dogs lying stretched by the sides of the human victims, it being thought afterwards that they had taken the infection through sniffing at and caressing those who were dear to them. Yet--heart-rending as such a sight as this was to see, and doubly so as the women regarded it, partly under the rays of the moon and partly by aid of the flames of the fires which had been lit to destroy the contagion if possible--there was still worse to be witnessed.
This was the sight of those still left alive.
The women who had once formed the chain of female emigrants, and who, unfettered at last, marched along in company towards a spot where the Sheriff had said they would be able to sleep in peace for the remainder of the night, were now passing down a public promenade which ran for some three hundred yards through the principal part of the city. This promenade was known as Le Cours, and was bordered on each side by trees, mostly acacias and limes, which in summer threw a pleasant shade over the sitters and strollers during the day time, and, in the evening of the same season, had often served as a place for summer evening fetes to be held in, for open-air balmasqués, and as a rendezvous for lovers. Now the picture it presented was frightful!
In its midst there was a fountain with water gushing from the lips of fauns, nymphs, and satyrs into a basin beneath, and at that fountain the moon showed poor stricken men drinking copiously to cool their burning thirst, or leaning over the smooth sides of the basin and holding their extended tongues in the water. Or they lay gasping with their heads against the stone-work, in their endeavours to cool the heat of their throbbing brains, and to still, if might be, the splitting headaches which racked them. For clothes, many had nothing about them but a counterpane snatched hastily from off a bed ere they had rushed forth in agony unspeakable; often, too, when they had left their houses fully dressed, they had torn off their apparel in their inability to bear the warmth imparted by the garments. Yet numbers of them were not poor--if outward signs were sure testimony of wealth. One woman--young, perhaps beautiful, ere stricken by the disfiguring signs of the pest--was resplendent on breast and neck and hands with jewels that glittered in the moonbeams. Doubtless she had seized all she owned ere rushing from her house in misery!