Page:Manzoni - The Betrothed, 1834.djvu/403

 windows, to listen to their complaints, and to give them words of consolation and encouragement. Having thus thrown himself into the midst of the contagion, it was truly wonderful that he never was attacked by it.

In seasons of public calamity, when confusion takes the place of order, we often behold a display of the sublimest virtue, but more frequently, alas! an increase of vice and crime. Instances of the latter were not wanting during the present unhappy period. The profligate, spared by the plague, found in the common confusion, and in the slackening of the restraints of law, new occasions for mischief, and new assurances of impunity. And further, power itself had passed into the hands of the boldest among them. There were scarcely found for the functions of monatti and apparitori any, but those over whom the attraction of rapine and licence had more sway than dread of the contagion. Strict rules had been prescribed to them, and severe penalties threatened for infringing them, which had some power for awhile; but the number of deaths, and the increasing desolation, and the universal alarm, soon relieved them from all superintendence, and they constituted themselves (the monatti in particular) the arbiters of every thing. They entered houses as masters and enemies; and, not to mention their robberies, and the cruel treatment which those unhappy persons experienced whom the plague condemned to their authority, they applied their infected and criminal hands to those in health, threatening to carry them to the lazaretto, unless they purchased their exemption with money. At other times they refused to carry off the dead bodies already in a state of putrefaction, without a high price being paid them; it is even said, that they designedly let fall from their carts infected clothing, in order to propagate the infection from which their wealth was derived. Many ruffians, too, assuming the garb of these wretches, carried on extensive robberies in the houses of the sick, dying, and helpless.

In the same proportion as vice increased, folly increased; the foolish idea was again revived of poisonings; the dread of this fantastic danger beset and tormented the minds of