[375] Casimir Périer, the Premier, died of consumption on the 16th of May 1832.—T.
[376] Marcus Annæus Lucanus, known as Lucan (39-65), the author of the Pharsalia etc.—T.
[377] Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), the author of the Decamerone, the hundred stones supposed to be told by a society of seven ladies and three gentlemen to shut out the horrors of the great plague of Florence in 1348.—T.
[378] Hippocrates (circa 460 B.C.—circa 377 B.C.), the famous Greek physician. "His alleged study of the great plague at Athens is not corroborated by a comparison with Thucydides' account" (Mahaffy: History of Classical Greek Literature).—T.
[379] In his Promessi Sposi.—T.
[380] Pierre Édouard Lemontey (1762-1826), elected a member of the French Academy in 1817, author of an Essai sur l'établissement monarchique de Louis XIV. and of the Histoire de la régence, from which latter work, published after his death, the above extract is quoted.—T.
[381] Charlotte Mademoiselle de Valois (1700-1761), daughter of the Regent Philippe II. Duc d'Orléans, and married in 1720 to ...
[382] Francis III. Duke of Modena (1698-1780).—T.
[383] Henri François Xavier de Belsunce de Castel Moron (1671-1755), a Jesuit father promoted to the See of Marseilles in 1709. He behaved with the greatest heroism during the plague which devastated the town in 1720 and 1721; and afterwards persistently refused promotion to a more important see.—T.
[384] After ravaging Asia and then Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Galicia, Austria, the cholera, passing over Western Europe, swooped down upon England. It declared itself on the 12th of February 1832 in London, whence it was not to disappear until the first week in May. On the 15th of March, it was noted at Calais. It struck its first victim in Paris, in the Rue Mazarine, on the 26th of March. The epidemic did not come to an end before the 30th of September, having lasted 189 days, during which the number of deaths from cholera amounted to 18,406. The population of Paris at that time was only 645,698 souls: the death-rate from cholera alone, therefore, was over 23 per 1,000.—B.