Sickened by the sordid calculations of this criminal, Walter Clarges turned away, then, addressing the man once more, he said:
"I will go seek through the city for my wife. If I find her not I will return to you. You will tell me if the cordon I have spoken of arrives. Will you not?" and again he had recourse to the usual mode of obtaining favours.
"Ay! never fear. If they come in you shall know of it."
Whereon Walter Clarges took his way down Le Cours and traversed the rows of dead and dying who lay all around him at his horse's feet, seeing as he went along the same horrors that, in the coming midnight, his wife and her companions in misery were also to gaze upon. The daylight showed him more than the dark of twelve hours later was to show to them, yet robbed, perhaps, the surroundings of some of those tragic shadows and black suggestions which night ever brings, or, at least, hints at.
It was almost incredible that the ravages of an all devouring plague, accompanied in human minds by the most terrible fear that can haunt them--the fear of a swift-approaching, loathsome death--could have so transformed an always gay, and generally brilliant, city into such a place as it had now become. Incredible, also, that those who still lived while dreading a death that might creep stealthily on them at any moment, could act towards those already dead with the callous indifference which they actually exhibited.
He saw some convicts flinging bodies from windows, high up in the houses, down into the streets, where they would lie till some steps could be taken for gathering and removing them--and he shuddered while seeing that now and again the wretches laughed, even though the very work that they were about might be at the moment impregnating them with the disease itself. He saw a pretty woman--a once pretty woman--flung forth in a sheet; an old man hurled naked from a window; while a little babe would sometimes excite their derision, if, in the flight to earth, anything happened that might be considered sufficient to arouse it. He saw, too, lost children shrieking for their parents--long afterwards it came to his knowledge that, in this time of trouble and disorder, some strange mistakes had been made with these little creatures. He learnt that beggars' offspring had undoubtedly become confused with the children of rich merchants who had died from the pest, and that the reverse had also happened. In one case, many years afterwards (the account of which reached England and was much discussed) a merchant's child had been mistaken for that of an outcast woman, and had eventually earned its living as a domestic servant working for the very pauper child who had, by another mistake, been put in possession of the wealth the other should have inherited.
Still, he went on; nerved, steeled to endure such sights; determined that neither regiments of dead, nor battalions of dying, nor scores of frightened, trembling inhabitants fleeing to what they hoped might be safety in some distant, untouched village, should prevent him from seeking for the woman he had loved madly since first his eyes rested on her. The woman he had won for his wife only to lose a few hours later!
Through terrible spectacles he went, scanning every female form and face, looking for women who might be clad in the coarse sacking of the convict emigrée; peering at dying women and at dead. And he knew, he could not fail to recognise, how awful a grip this pest had got on the city, not only by the forms he saw lying about, but by the action of the living. Monks and priests were passing to and fro, one holding a can of broth, another administering the liquid to the stricken; yet all, he observed, pressing hard to their own nostrils the aromatically-steeped cloths with which they endeavoured to preserve their own lives. He saw, too, an old and reverend bishop passing across a market place, attended by some of his priests, who gave benedictions to all around him and wept even as he did so. A bishop, who, calm with that holy calm which he was surely fitted to be the possessor of, disdained to do more than wear around his neck the bandage which might preserve him from contagion. He pressed nothing to his lips, but, instead, used those lips to utter prayers and to bestow blessings all around him. This was, although Walter knew it not, the saintly Belsunce de Castelmoron, the Reverend Bishop of Marseilles, of whom Pope afterwards wrote:
"Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath,
When nature sickened, and each gate was Death?"
Of convicts, galley slaves, there were many everywhere, since, as soon as one batch sent from the vessels lying at the Quai de Riveneuve was decimated, or more than decimated, another was turned into the city to assist in removing the dead, and, where possible, burying them within the city ramparts and port-walls, which had been discovered to be not entirely solid but to possess large vacant spaces within them that might serve as catacombs. And, also, they were removing many to the churches, the vaults of which were opened, and, when stuffed full of the dead, were filled with quicklime and closed up again, it remaining doubtful, however, if the churches themselves could be used for worship for many years to come.