Page:Manzoni - The Betrothed, 1834.djvu/391

. Two or three days after, he published a decree, prescribing public rejoicings on the birth of Prince Charles, the first son of Philip IV., without troubling himself with the danger which would result from so great a concourse of people at such a time; just as if things were going on in their ordinary course, and no dreadful evil was hanging over them.

This man was the celebrated Ambrose Spinola, who died a few months after, and during this very war which he had so much at heart,—not in the field, but in his bed, and through grief and vexation at the treatment he experienced from those whose interests he had served. History has loudly extolled his merits; she has been silent upon his base inhumanity in risking the dissemination of that worst of mortal calamities, plague, over a country committed to his trust.

But that which diminishes our astonishment at his indifference is the indifference of the people themselves, of that part of the population which the contagion had not yet reached, but who had so many motives to dread it. The scarcity of the preceding year, the exactions of the army, and the anxiety of mind which had been endured, appeared to them more than sufficient to explain the mortality of the surrounding country. They heard with a smile of incredulity and contempt any who hazarded a word on the danger, or who even mentioned the plague. The same incredulity, the same blindness, the same obstinacy, prevailed in the senate, the council of ten, and in all the judicial bodies. Cardinal Frederick alone enjoined his curates to impress upon the people the importance of declaring every case, and of sequestrating all infected or suspected goods. The Tribunal of Health, prompted by the two physicians, who fully apprehended the danger, did take some tardy measures; but in vain. A proclamation to prevent the entrance of strangers into the city was not published until the 29th of November. This was too late; the plague was already in Milan.

It must be difficult, however interesting, to discover the first cause of a calamity which swept off so many thousands of the inhabitants of the city; but both Tadino and