In 1575, descended upon Milan the contagion which immortalized the charity of St Charles Borromeo. Fifty-four years later, in 1629, that unfortunate city was again exposed to the calamities of which Manzoni[379] has made a painting far superior to the celebrated picture by Boccaccio.
In 1660, the scourge was renewed in Europe and, in those two pestilences of 1629 and 1660, were reproduced the same symptoms of delirium as in the plague of Constantinople.
"Marseilles," says M. Lemontey[380], "was in 1720 concluding the festivals which had signalized the passage of Mademoiselle de Valois[381], married to the Duke of Modena[382]. Beside the galleys still decorated with garlands and filled with musicians lay some vessels which brought from the ports of Syria the most terrible calamity."
The fatal ship of which M. Lemontey speaks, having exhibited a clean bill, was for a moment admitted to pratique. That moment was enough to poison the air: a storm increased the evil, and the plague spread to the crash of thunder.
The gates of the city and the windows of the houses were closed. In the midst of the general silence, sometimes a window was heard to open and a corpse to fall. The walls streamed with its cankered blood, and dogs without a master waited below to devour it. In one quarter, all of whose inhabitants had died, they had been walled up at home, as though to prevent death from leaving the house. From these avenues of great family-tombs, one came to open places in which the pavement was covered with sick and dying persons stretched on mattresses and abandoned without aid. Carcases lay half rotten with old clothes mixed with mud; other corpses stood upright against the walls, in the attitude in which they had expired.
All had fled, even the doctors; the bishop, M. de Belsunce[383], wrote:
"They ought to abolish the doctors, or at least to give us abler and less timorous ones. I have had great difficulty in having one hundred and fifty half-rotten corpses, which were lying around my house, removed."
Earlier plagues.
One day, the galley-slaves hesitated to fulfil their funeral functions: the apostle climbed into one of the tumbrils, sat down on a heap of corpses and ordered the convicts to proceed; death and virtue went off to the cemetery, drawn by vice and crime filled with dread and admiration. On the Esplanade de la Tourette, beside the sea, bodies had been lying for three weeks; and these, exposed to the sun and melted by its rays, offered merely an infected lake to the sight On this surface of liquefied flesh, only the worms imparted some movement to crushed, vague forms which might possess human shape.
When the contagion began to relax, M. de Belsunce, at the head of his clergy, repaired to the church of the Accoules; mounting on an esplanade commanding a view of Marseilles, the harbours and the sea, he gave the benediction, even as the Pope, in Rome, blesses the city and the world: what braver and purer hand could there be to bring down the blessings of Heaven upon so many misfortunes?