Page:Manzoni - The Betrothed, 1834.djvu/395

 was thrown into the utmost confusion; the owners of houses purified all infected places; strangers were stopped in the streets on suspicion, and conducted to prison, where they underwent long interrogatories which naturally ended in proving none of these absurd and imaginary practices against them. The Tribunal of Health published a decree, offering a reward to whomsoever should discover the author or authors of this attempt; but they did this, as they wrote to the governor, only to satisfy the people and calm their fears,—a weak and dangerous expedient, and calculated to confirm the popular belief.

In the mean time many attributed this story of the poisoned ointment to the revenge of Gonsalvo Fernandez de Cordova; others to Cardinal Richelieu, in order the more easily to get possession of Milan; others again affixed the crime to various Milanese gentlemen.

There were still many who were not persuaded that it was the plague, because if it were, every one infected would die of it; whereas a few recovered. To dissipate every doubt, the Tribunal of Health made use of an expedient conformable to the necessity of the occasion; they made an address to the eyes, such as the spirit of the times suggested. On one of the days of the feast of Pentecost, the inhabitants of the city were accustomed to go to the burying ground of San Gregorio, beyond the eastern gate, in order to pray for the dead in the last plague. Turning the season of devotion into one of amusement, every one was attired in his best; on that day a whole family, among others, had died of the plague. At the hour in which the concourse was most numerous, the dead bodies of this family were, by order of the Tribunal of Health, drawn naked on a carriage towards this same burying ground; so that the crowd might behold for themselves the manifest traces, the hideous impress of the disease. A cry of alarm and horror arose wherever the car passed; their incredulity was at least shaken, but it is probable that the great concourse tended to spread the infection.

Still it was not absolutely the plague; the use of the word was prohibited, it was a pestilential fever, the adjective was preferred to the substantive,—then, not the true