Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

Villari, Macaulay, and others have declined to accept the Descrizione as an authentic product of Machiavelli’s pen. They cannot reconcile its garrulous obscenity with the stern cold-blooded restraint of the author of the Principe—the frivolity of the one with the sinewy manhood of the other. They seem to forget that, so far back as 1502, amid the stirring life of the camp of Caesar Borgia, he had found leisure to write similar puerilities to his friends in Florence. Political rectitude, or if we may not ascribe this to Machiavelli, political sagacity is no guarantee of moral righteousness, and sensuality is not the exclusive property of the young. Moral levity, as the history of pestilence shows, is a usual product of the constant imminence of danger and death; and with Machiavelli political degradation had left moral levity in sole possession of the field.

A copy of the discredited production still actually exists in the handwriting of Machiavelli, with revisions inserted in the manuscript in that of his friend Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi. Villari advances the strange suggestion, that Machiavelli had merely copied out what Strozzi had composed. Is it not equally reasonable to suppose that Machiavelli had used an actual letter of Strozzi, as the basis of a casual composition? This would explain the fact that it is cast in epistolary form, as well as the apparent discrepancy of style. Francesco Berni (c. 1490-1536), a contemporary of Machiavelli, has apostrophized plague in one of his satirical poems or capitoli. A cleric, to whom indolent pleasure was the be-all and end-all of existence, he must surely stand alone among writers as one who would hug the pestilence to him as a friend.

‘The pestilence time is good—a fig for other times.... Firstly, it carries off the rabble, it destroys them, makes holes among them and thins them out—like a housewife among the geese at Allhallowtide! In the churches there are none to press upon you. Besides, none keep any record of buying or borrowing. Yea, buy and make debts, for there will be no creditors to trouble you. And if a creditor should come, tell him that your head aches, that your arm pricks, he straight will go away, and will not turn him round! If you go out, no one will cross your path: rather is place yielded to you, and honour done you, especially if you are clothed in rags. You are lord of yourself and lord of others. You can watch the folk’s strange antics and laugh at others’ fear. Life has then new laws: every pleasure is allowed.... Above all, there need be no work done. It is a choice life, serene and large: time passes very gaily from dinner time to supper.’[171]

In a.d. 1530 there was plague in Geneva,[172] which is memorable as the occasion of an accusation against certain persons of disseminating the disease by means of concocted poisons. In the spring of the year a dissolute young man, one Michael Caddod, was seen to throw down a handkerchief near a shop. Some one picked it up, and its foul smell aroused suspicion. Caddod was forthwith put to torture, and in his agony implicated Jean Placet, an unqualified surgeon in charge of the pest-house, together with his wife, son, and servant, and one Dom Jehan Dufour, priest and confessor to the pest-house. Under the influence of torture, they were driven to admit, that they had sworn solemnly on a Book of Hours to join in spreading the plague, so as to enable them to pillage the sick. Placet and his wife, they said, had prepared the poison from poultices that had been used on discharging buboes, by drying them to powder and then adding veratrum. Caddod and his wife undertook to spread it about the streets, while Placet and his wife administered it to patients in the pest-house with promptly fatal results. Suspicion fell on Placet, and a barber-surgeon, Bastian Granger, with his assistant, was instructed to keep an eye on his doings. Madame Placet was equal to the occasion and gave the pair short shrift with a dose of poison in their food. In the end Placet and Caddod were convicted. Their hands were first cut off in front of the houses of their supposed victims. Next their flesh was cruelly lacerated with red-hot pincers, and finally the headsman’s axe put a merciful end to their sufferings. Young Placet’s age obtained for him the lenient treatment of hanging, while Dufour was first unfrocked and then hanged. A rapid decline of the plague ensued on so acceptable a sacrifice.

A few years later, in January 1545, a recurrence of plague in Geneva raised anew the phantom of another plague plot. This time the bailiff ordered the arrest of the two men, Bernard Dallinge and Jehan Lentille. They were alleged to have cut off the foot of a corpse that had fallen from the gallows, and used it as an ingredient of a plague ointment that they smeared on the handles of doors. By March, confessions extracted from them by torture had served to implicate no less than forty persons. All were accused of having sworn to spread the disease broadcast, and of having actually smeared door-handles and locks. When searched, boxes of ointment were found in their possession. The craze for carrying antipestilential remedies made this an easy matter, but for all that their guilt was manifest. Calvin, in a letter of March 27, 1545, addressed to Myconius, seems to credit their guilt, but the State records of Geneva show that he mercifully advocated strangling instead of mutilation and the stake. As in the case of Servetus, he was less concerned about their deaths than the manner of their dying. Nineteen men and seven women—Catholics perhaps—profited by his clemency, and were executed without preliminary torture. The Nuremberg Chronicle says that in 1494 all the beggars were driven out of Nuremberg, because they were believed to spread the plague.

The leaders of medicine were no more exempt than the people from the promptings of fanatical fear. Ambroise Paré[173] echoes the crude suspicions that Guy de Chauliac had expressed at the time of the Black Death. This is his advice to the magistrates in time of pestilence: ‘What shall I add? They must keep an eye on certain thieves, murderers, poisoners, worse than inhuman, who grease and smear the walls and doors of rich houses with matter from buboes and carbuncles and other excretions of the plague-stricken, so as to infect the houses and thus be enabled to break into them, pillage and strip them, and even strangle the poor sick in their beds: which was done at Lyons in the year 1565. God! what punishment such fellows deserve: but this I leave to the discretion of the magistrates, who have charge of such duties.’

Paré recommended, as a prophylactic, the wearing of an amulet of arsenic. It was to be worn over the heart in order that ‘the heart might become accustomed to poison, and so be the less injured when other poisons sought it’.

The pandemic of a.d. 1565 was the occasion of a great impetus to the production of the so-called Mystery and Miracle plays, particularly in the south-east parts of France. Mystery plays aimed for the most part at setting forth the central mysteries of the New Testament, such as the Incarnation, the Nativity, the Passion, and the Redemption. Miracle plays dealt with the legends of the great saints of the Church, but in practice the distinction of Miracle and Mystery came to be ignored in the play. The purpose of each, in time of plague, was to appease an angered God by glorifying His majesty, either directly or through the medium of His saints. The origin and prime purpose of these plays had almost certainly been educational, for the instruction of a populace unable to read for themselves: and they originated out of the worship of the Christian Church. Christianity, when adopted as the State religion, had dealt the death-blow to the vicious spectacles of the amphitheatre that were all that survived of the ancient classical drama. Christianity was also destined to become the parent of the modern drama, by the introduction into public worship, not later than the fifth century a.d., of living pictures to illustrate and expound its teaching. Mystery and Miracle plays alike were evolved from this simple liturgical origin. The transformation had been effected at any rate as early as the twelfth century, and by a.d. 1380 a complete Miracle play was produced in the presence of Charles IV.

Successive epidemics of plague had led to the adoption of these plays as instruments of intercession, and the pandemic of 1565 gave a great impetus to this development. When the district of Maurienne was in the grip of the plague in 1564, the people vowed to present in the following year the Miracle play of their patron saint St. Martin, if only their town were spared. No less than seventy-four actors, all drawn from the working class, devoted themselves to learning and rehearsing the various parts of the play. Money as well as time was freely afforded, for the people themselves undertook the expenses of staging, scenery, and music. The marginal notes of the play, which has been recently published, show that the stage was erected beside the wall of a church. Later, as the control of the performances passed out of the hands of the Church into those of lay associations, the plays came to be performed away from the churches, a separation that paved the way for the secularization of the drama by the introduction of a non-religious atmosphere. This play is in dialect and arranged for presentation on two days. At the first performance the central theme was the life of St. Martin as a soldier, at the second his life as a bishop, and with it were shown certain of his miraculous cures.

This play is but one of many that have recently been published: other towns followed the example of St. Martin de la Porte. Villard-le-Lans vowed and played the ‘Mystery of the Passion’ and the ‘Miracle of Saint Sebastian’: Modane the ‘Mystery of the Last Judgement’: Termignan and Sollières the ‘Miracle of Saint Laurence’, and so on. Local authors, commonly the priest or the notary, compiled the various plays.