Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/414

404 differentiate its various types. But it showed itself then, as it still remains, fatal in a greater proportion of cases than any other disease to which humanity is subject.

The distribution of its germs through the Mediterranean lands was quickly accomplished. In the fall of 1347 Constantinople was more than decimated. The shores of the Ægean were quickly infected, and before the close of the year Sicily, the cities and towns of southern Italy, and all the ports of the Adriatic were alike prostrate under the scourge. A Sicilian tells how "a most deadly pestilence sprang up over the entire island. It happened that in the month of October, in the year of our Lord 1347, about the beginning of the month, twelve Genoese ships flying from the divine vengeance which our Lord for their sins had sent upon them, put into the port Messina, bringing with them such a sickness clinging to their very bones that, did anyone speak to them, he was directly struck with a mortal sickness from which there was no escape. Flight profited nothing, for the sickness already contracted and clinging to the fugitives was only carried wherever they sought refuge. Some of those who fled fell on the roads and dragged themselves to die in the fields, the woods, the valleys."

By the springtime the storm had spent its fury in the south of Italy, but it had passed on northward. It was in April of 1348, Boccaccio tells us, that the malady appeared in the fair city of Florence. There while human nature was resolved into its most primitive elements, as he describes in the introduction to the Decameron, his little group of story tellers gathered in a country house about two miles outside of the city trying to avoid the pestilence, or at least to make what time should remain pass more cheerfully in the recounting of sad or merry tales. The occasional pathos, the frequent salacity, and the unvarying humor and grace of the tales stand out boldly in Boccaccio's setting of them against the dark background of the mournful remembrance of that most fatal plague so terrible yet in the memories of us all. In the city the sick were lying deserted by friends, family, servants, physicians and even by the priest, as implacable death crept upon them; palaces stood deserted and unfastened, jewels and rich garments lying unguarded, except by the dread of infection; the bodies of the dead were being hastily dragged from the houses, carried to the cemeteries and deposited in long rows in pits, with no bells rung, no rites said, no solemn chant or mourning of friends; while outside the city the story tellers of the Decameron were passing away the time governed by the one rule that none should bring to them any news of the plague-stricken outer world.

Not only Boccaccio in Florence, but Petrarch in Parma, writes in the midst of the plague: "Where are now our pleasant friends? Where the loved faces? Where their cheering words? Where their