For the evil in the future is no evil, and this it is that laughs theorists and legislators to scorn! the reckoning which shall come hereafter ever is forgotten, against but a little measure of advantage offered in the present. The vengeance of Heaven, is it sure? we trust that it is far off. The axe, and the gibbet? “Chance” may save us from them; and though that deliverance hangs on the one ace cast with two dies, every sinner believes that it will be his own! The thief plans a robbery—executes it—escapes with the booty—and the “chance” that has saved him brings a hundred to the gallows! The projector trades against probability—wins in the teeth of principle—His very blindness—which could not see the risk—passes for sagacity, and crowds are beggared who follow his example! This “chance” it is—this “hope”—which makes fools—and fools are villains—of us all! Its seeds are rooted in the strongest minds; and in the weak they flourish even to insanity. The liar elects to speak on “hope.” The gamester arranges to live (in a castle) upon it. But woman’s brain—there is its chosen seat of quicksand empire!—where to desire an impossibility, and to account upon it, are but as one. Hope it is that makes her frail. Hope makes her false. Hope makes her the dupe of those who care not for her, and the curse of those who do. She fires a palace, and “hopes” that it will not burn. Casts herself into the sea, and “hopes” that the waters will quit their bed to leave her upon land. Her confidence—and this perhaps is the case with all of us—becomes invariably more unbounded in proportion with the real desperateness of her condition. And the worst of all is—that, as human nature is constituted, for nothing of all this is there any remedy!
And “Hope” worked strange wonders in the earlier stages of the plague; especially among those who had all to gain and little to lose; a sort of persons, whose fearlessness, and spirit of reliance, since the world began, has always been proverbial. There is a point to which you civilise mankind; but beyond which education cannot go. You seem to tame the wolf, while he sees you hold the whip over him: but—blood will have its way—he flies at your throat at last, if you give him opportunity. Man’s instinct makes him war on man! ’Tis trash! my strength must be my neighbour’s weakness. The miller, when his granaries are full, laughs loud, and well he laughs—he buys a lordship—out of the ruined harvest. What is that flood that wastes my neighbour’s fields but blessing, so it doubles, in the common market, the produce of my own? Go to! they who gain by the dead, when did they love the living? When agues thrive, do not the sextons delve merrily? Does not the surgeon fatten on the miseries, the headsman on the vices of mankind? In no general blessing yet did all men ever find contentment; in no common infliction have there not always been some who saw a good. Battles and blood make soldiers generals. Revolts and revolutions peasants princes. Out of broken windows, as the adage tells us, do there not arise rich glaziers? And he who wants a fortune may find one even in the PLAGUE.
And, accordingly, among the most curious results of the visitation, when it first began to show its strength in Florence, was the extra quantity of actual rejoicing, as well as of mourning; the great increase of hilarity in the midst of tears; and the decided, immediate gain to individuals, which arose out of the thinning in the numbers of the community. Husbands, many, wept for the death of their wives; wives, often, for the death of their husbands; both, constantly, for the deaths of their children; for these were, generally, losses, at least in some sort, of present sources of happiness; disturbances of long habit and existing arrangements; and no benefit (to balance) accruing to the survivor. But sons did not always mourn for their fathers—nephews for their uncles—younger brothers, destined to exertion and poverty, for their elders, who had shut them from title and estate: those who were the best disposed to do all this, often could not do it; their wants, in spite of themselves, were relieved, and their desires of pleasure administered to—they thought that they grieved for the fate of the dead—perhaps they did grieve; but before the bell had ceased tolling, they would not have had him live again. For even the comparatively poor who died, had something to leave behind them, which was an object to those as poor, or poorer, than themselves. Very soon the constant occurrence of such falls of fortune began to make men expect and look for them. They could not help recollecting the fact, that there was one particular life stood between them and happiness. The possibility of a change would just present itself—the wish, perhaps not yet. And among the labouring classes, too, the diminished number of hands at work in every calling soon gave the remainder high rates of wages, which they spent in idleness and excess. The mere passage of wealth into fresh hands, always unthrifty, created an immense demand out of the very general mourning and distress for articles of cost and luxury. All who had been rich, had not drank choice wines, or maintained brilliant equipages. All who rose from poverty did so—often to the most prodigal dissipation of their means—on the instant. Until even the very same calamity which in a few months made the city absolutely a desert, in its outset actually gave a new and increased impulse to its pleasurable and commercial movements!
In the mean time, however, the shroud-maker plied his needle almost as rapidly as the maker of new robes; and, as the fury of the pestilence increased, all this jollity, which at first had some show of the mirth of madness about it, ran on till, like the merriment produced by wine in company, by degrees, it broke into bloodshed and misrule. In the beginning of the scourge, the succession to an estate or a title had not carried with it—as of course—a notice that the inheritor was only tenant for an hour. But when the deaths had risen to more than a hundred a-day in the city, and when the man who became heir to an estate in one twenty-four hours left it to somebody else—or perhaps left it without a claimant—in the next, this general state of insecurity, added to the extraordinary description of hands into which property passed, seemed first to repeal all sanity and principle; and soon led to the wildest and most unheard-of outrages.
The successor to a splendid mansion—the fifth or sixth remove perhaps within a month—seized possession—it might be, with a title—but certainly without waiting for the forms of law to ratify it. Great quantities of personal property, of houses and movables especially, were sometimes left in a few hours without any certain claimants at all; and ruffians and outcasts—the police of the city being virtually almost extinct—fought and scrambled for the right of rifling such possessions in open day. Antonio Malespini, the servant of a goldsmith who had fled the city and died under the walls of Pisa, produced a will, alleged to have been left by his master, bequeathing to him the whole of his effects. On the very next day, this title passing undisputed, there were twenty claimants for similar successions! From inheriting after those who had fled and died, it was but one step farther to presume the death, and a man’s flight then at once conveyed his effects to those who stayed behind. And within the expiration of eight-and-forty hours farther (no interference by the authorities taking place), both lie and forgery began to be considered unnecessary; and the rights of health and strength became the only rights acknowledged in the new community.
It was then that the general tumult and terror reached its height; and that Florence appeared like a city delivered over to pillage, in which each man made his best of what came next him; or rather like a vast ship tost in a tempest, under which she could not choose but founder, and where each man, according to the usage of desperate mariners, resolved to live, at common cost, the short while longer that existence lasted. Domestics, left in charge of their masters’ houses, burst open the cellars and cabinets, and used the treasure as their own. The richest garments were seen worn by common beggars; the most costly wines intoxicated the lowest of the population. All safe people fled the city at every hazard, or shut themselves up, and refused to communicate even with each other; and a scarcity of food—in the very excess of valuables and money—began to aggravate the general distress. Those physicians who still lived now made off, with one consent, to secure what they had gained. The monks barred the gates of their convents: some would say no mass; and scarce any would confess the sick any longer. Some men lay dead or dying in their houses, and none would come to aid or bury them. Others were found with marks of violence on their bodies and their chambers rifled; and none could say, nor did any inquire, who had done it. The hired nurses, it was reported, poisoned their patients; and one beldam confessed afterwards to having caused the death of five women, by administering the eau forte (aqua fortis) to them instead of common water. Brute strength, and freedom from the plague, became the only sources of power; and the slave spat in the face of his master. Those few who still dwelt within the city, or near it, watched armed, and shut their doors by day; for murders were done even in the broad light. The cemeteries now became choked, and there was more room in the streets and market places. Houses got cheap, and graves were hard to come by. The great fosse which had been hastily opened and consecrated, at the back of the Spedale St Martino, ran over with bodies, from all ranks, ages, and conditions, which night after night were cast promiscuously into it. And, to quote the words used by a writer of the time, in describing the state of Florence at the close of the malady—almost for want of matter to feed upon—“Worth was useless; strength gone; glory sullied; title was buried; honours were forgotten; greatness humiliated; dignity scorned;—and of the good and of the evil equally perished the memory!”
It was on one night, however, about this time, in the month of October, when the ravages of the plague were at their height; when no stranger, unless he were insane, or sought his death, could have been expected to enter Florence, nor any inhabitant any longer abided there, but such to whom it would have been ruin as bad as death to leave it;—it was on one night while affairs were in this condition—the night of the vigil of St Luke—that two horsemen, moving on a track once the most frequented of all Italy, but to which the tread of travellers had now become almost a thing forgotten, were seen rapidly stretching towards the city from the eastward, by the road that led from the direction of Arezzo.
The foremost rider was a cavalier scarce twenty years, apparently, of age; clad simply, but elegantly, in the travelling dress of a Tuscan gentleman of that day. His vest, which was of the richest velvet, slashed and embroidered in the fashion of the time, was covered, on back and breast, by the strong “Jazeran,” or scaled corslet, which was the armour then generally worn in Italy, and which, while it was less cumbrous than complete steel, was yet fully proof against the thrust either of lance or poniard. A belt of gold, four fingers broad, drawn tightly round the waist, and clasped by a jewel of price in front, marked the division between the bottom of the “Camiciuola,” or upper garment, and the long breeches and stockings of woven silk,—the “Calzoni alla pantalona”—which, with yellow Morocco boots and massy spurs of gold, terminated the lower portion of the figure. And the broad “mantello” or cloak, of ample extent—on foot or horseback, still the constant equipment of every Italian gentleman—gathered plaidlike round the body, clinging upon the bridle shoulder, and passing under the right arm, so as to clothe the bust and loins, yet leave the sword-hand free—swelled with the damp and unwholesome “libeccio” which blew in the rider’s face, and seemed to bring a death in every gust, as he lifted his strong horse, all dust and foaming—plunging with short springs, and gathered almost upon its haunches—down the last sharp pitch of hill which marked the boundary of the Apennines, and carried the traveller forward into the fair valley of the Arno.
The hard unbeaten road clattered hollow beneath the footsteps of the steeds, as both the strangers plied onwards, at a steady yet rapid pace, in the direction of Florence. Did they know the peril to which they went? It seemed they did, or should do so: for the long arm of the calamity reaching to the distance, spoke already too plainly to be mistaken. The whole route along which they were passing had but a short time back been lined with populous and flourishing villages: the houses yet remained, but every door and window now was barred and bolted; and the hare and the rabbit gazed on the passenger through the broken hedges in every garden. Three months since, and, if the moon shone bright, looking down from that raised road into the vale beneath, a hundred palaces were seen rearing their marble fronts amid the delicious woods and waters of the Val d’Arno! Three months since, and, if the night was dark, the very tapers that glistened in those mansions, from their bowers and lattices, showed in the deep vale like a world of stars below the gazer’s path, in mimic rivalry of those that reigned above! Now, all was solitude on the near approach, and gloom and darkness in the distance. The marble mansions, black and silent, stood like the sepulchres of former greatness, for the spirits that gave life to them had departed. No song, sung by Italy’s voices, rose from the cot of the peasant; there was no music of dancing feet; no tinkling of the guitar or the theorba. There stood the village church! but its doors hung open, swinging on their hinges with every blast. The village inn remained: but no smoke poured now from its chimney; and the branch that should have invited the traveller was dead and leafless. Here and there a few stray dogs, lean and masterless, who seemed to have grown wild as the hares and foxes had grown tame, barked and sneaked off as the strangers approached. The frogs croaked hoarsely in the marsh land; and the lizard rustled through the long rank grass that grew upon the tops of the cabins or loose stone wall. But other tokens of inhabitancy—or even of existence—in their path, the travellers found none.