Has anyone ever inquired of her: Oh, my sovereign mistress! thou good and blessed Earth! art thou pleased with the deeds we do upon thee? Can it please thee, perchance, to see us root up thy beauteous fresh woods from off thee, leaving thy tormented body all naked in the blaze of the Sun? Can it please thee to see us constrain thy flowing rivers within narrow basins, dry up thy lakes and leave thee athirst? Can it please thee to see us tear open thy body, break it up into little fragments, and compel these fragments to produce meat and drink for us? Can it please thee to see us drench thy flowery meads with blood and hide away the bones of our dead in thy bosom? Can it please thee that we live upon thee here, and bless and curse thee that thou mayest nourish us, and rack our brains as to how we may best multiply our species in those portions of the earth where men are still but few?
Nevertheless, the Earth patiently endures all this ill-treatment. Only now and then does she tremble with a fleeting horror, and then the palaces heaped upon her totter to their very foundations. Yet are there any among us who understand the hint?
And then for centuries afterwards she gives not a single sign of life. She puts up with her naughty children as every good mother does. She overlooks and hides away their faults and endures in their stead the visitations of Heaven. She is never angry with them, she never punishes them. She cherishes and nourishes them, and expects no gratitude in return. She only pines and pines, she only frets within herself, she only grieves and is anxious about the fate of her children, her selfish, heartless children: grief and anguish, the nastiness and the wickedness of man slowly undermine her strength and suddenly the Earth sickens.
Oh! how man falls down and perishes when the earth is sick!—like the parasitical aphis-grub from the jaundiced leaves!
New sorts of death for which there is no name appear in the midst of the terrified peoples, and a breath of air carries off the bravest and the strongest. In vain they shut themselves up within stone walls, anoint their bodies with salutary balms, and hold their very breath. Death invisible stalks through the fast-closed doors and seeks out them that fear him. No vitiated air, no contagion is necessary; men have but to hear the name of this strange death and they tremble and die.
This is no mere mortal malady, the Earth, the Earth herself is sick.
And how comical too this terror is!
I remember those times. I was only a child then, I fancy, and the general terror affected me but little; nay, the novelty of the situation rather diverted me. We were not allowed to go to school, we had a vacation for an indefinite period at which I was much delighted I must confess. Our towns were separated from each other by military cordons, and all strangers passing to and fro were rigorously examined. My good father, whose gentle, serious face is one of my most pleasant memories, buckled on his silver-hilted sword and went off himself to mount guard somewhere. I had greater confidence in that sword than in the whole English navy. My blessed, thoughtful, mother hung round each of our necks little bags with large bits of camphor in them, in the beneficial effects of which we believed absolutely, and strictly forbade us to eat melons and peaches. And we were good dutiful children and strictly obeyed her commands. And yet in that very year, just as if Nature had resolved to be satirical at our expense, our gardens and orchards overflowed with an abundance of magnificent fruit. And there we allowed them all to rot. We had a doctor in those days, a fine old fellow, who, when the danger was at its height, went fearlessly from house to house. He had white hair, rosy cheeks, and a slim, erect figure, and was always cracking jokes with us. He used to say: "No funk, no risk of Death!" and would pick up the beautiful golden melons before our eyes and eat them with the best appetite in the world, and he took no harm from them, for he feared no danger. You had only to live regularly and trust in God, he used to say. He would laugh when we asked him: "Is it true that the air is full of tiny scarce visible insects, the inhaling of which brings about the disease?" "If you believe in these insects you had better keep your mouths shut lest they fly into them while you are talking," he would say. And subsequently when we heard the drowsy monotonous tolling of the bells and the funeral dirges sung day after day, morning and evening, beneath our windows, and saw orphans following in the track of the lumbering corpse-carts; when they told us that everyone in the neighbouring houses had died off in two days, and we saw all the windows of the house opposite fast-closed, and not a soul looking through them; at such a time it was good to fold one's hands in prayer and reflect that we were still all together, and that not one of us had been taken away, but God had preserved us from all calamity. Our hope was weak, for there was no foundation for it to build upon, but our faith was strong and all-sufficing.
Such is the sole impression I have retained of that memorable year.