PLATE XXX LA PESTE DANS LA VILLE DE MARSEILLE EN 1720
By J. F. de Troy (Face Page 207)
J. F. de Troy the younger (1679-1752), himself an eye-witness of this plague, painted a [masterly picture], which is now in the city Musée. It was executed for Chevalier Rose in 1722. It depicts him seated on a white horse calmly directing the work of the convicts, who have been assigned to him, as they clear the esplanade of La Tourette of the accumulation of decomposing corpses. The sheriffs, also on horseback, aid the Chevalier in his task. The ground is strewn with corpses, which the convicts seize and hurl into the gaping mouths of the open vaults in the bastions. They work in furious haste, impelled by the foul odour of the bodies and the knowledge of the hazard of their task. Ferocity is depicted in their faces, haste in all the movements of their bodies. The whole scene is full of life and movement and spirit. In the sky hover angels shaking flaming torches. The colouring has been managed with wonderful effect to convey the feeling that sky and earth alike are filled with a poisonous and sickly miasma.
In another picture in the Santé at Marseilles Guérin has treated the same subject in a dull conventional manner. Chevalier Rose, bearing the dead body of a woman, fills the centre of the picture. Behind him a ludicrous boy is holding a white horse with one hand, and his nose with the other, and is bestowing on his nose a tenacious grip that would have been more appropriately bestowed on the horse. Convicts are dragging away the dead bodies that litter the ground.
The two large pictures by Michel Serre are of interest rather as pictorial records of old Marseilles, than as contributions to the artistic presentation of plague. One represents the Cours de Marseille, now known as the Cours Belsunce, during the plague. It is a handsome boulevard bordered on either side by trees, beneath which are seen tents hastily erected as temporary dwellings by those who have fled from their plague-contaminated dwellings to the shelter of the streets. Death and disease have followed them and are rampant on every side. Buriers are seen collecting the dead and carrying them off in carts. This picture has been engraved by Rigaud, and is figured in Crowle’s Illustrated Pennant’s London, vol. x, p. 93; also in Gaffarel’s La Peste de 1720, p. 304.
The other picture by Serre shows the open space in front of the Hôtel de Ville together with part of the port of Marseilles. The scenes resemble those of his other picture, and we are reminded also that many took refuge in boats and anchored off the harbour, in the vain belief that plague could not reach them there. The space before the Town Hall became one heap of decomposing bodies that were landed from the boats or had drifted ashore from the waters of the harbour. Crowle[194] figures this picture as well as the preceding, so, too, does Gaffarel.[195]
With the departure of plague from Marseilles, the disease had wellnigh disappeared from Europe. In the Levant it still flourished for a while. Patrick Russell, physician to the British factory at Aleppo, wrote a treatise on an epidemic that occurred during his residence there from 1760-2. Again, in 1771 it gained a footing at Moscow, claiming there no less than 80,000 victims. It was in vain that the people thronged the miraculous ikon of the Virgin at the Varvarka gate. Fearing the great concourse, the archbishop had the ikon removed to the Chudok monastery, but such was the fury of the maddened people, that they threatened to raze the building to the ground if the ikon were not restored. The archbishop yielded, but too late, for the mob dragged him from his monastery and massacred him in the open street. From that day the plague began to wane. So plague was banished from Europe by the worship of a picture, and with dramatic appropriateness the curtain fell on the final act in a scene of human sacrifice.
PLATE XXXI LES PESTIFÉRÉS DE JAFFA