Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/415

Rh sweet and gentle conversation? We were surrounded by a crowd of friends; now we are almost alone." And he might well see the world darkening around him, for had not Laura just died of the plague at Avignon? The 'great mortality' was indeed no respecter of persons. It is true that the poor died in greater numbers in proportion to the closeness and insalubrity of their dwellings and to their lack of power of resistance from insufficient food. But the list of the great ones of the earth who died is a long one. One of the earliest victims of the plague on its entrance into Europe was Andronicus, the son of the Emperor at Constantinople. The King and Queen of Arragon both died from it. Joan, the daughter of Edward III., on her way to Castile to be married, was smitten suddenly at Bordeaux and died, escaping, it is true, the worse fate of living to be the wife of Pedro the Cruel. Great churchmen died in all parts of Europe—the archbishop of Cantania, the archbishop of Canterbury, the archbishop of Drontheim; bishops and abbots in every country. Of the twelve city magistrates of Montpellier, in France, ten died; of the twenty-four prominent physicians, twenty. Nobles and burghers, ecclesiastics and lawyers fared but little better than the great masses, except that their names are mentioned, while the hundreds of thousands of lesser men died unknown.

The Mediterranean was then still the middle of the world, and the pestilence, like art and literature and money, was distributed readily from Italy to all parts of Europe. Before the year 1348 was over it was in France, Switzerland and Germany, and had obtained a foothold in the southern seaports of England. The next year it passed still further northward through England, Scotland and Ireland. It was carried from England to Scandinavia by a London ship, all of whose crew died, leaving the boat with its fatal cargo to be cast on the Norwegian coast at Bergen. During the same year and the succeeding spring, it had passed down the Valley of the Rhine, through the Netherlands and northern Germany, until the year 1350 saw 'the great mortality,' its harvest reaped for that season, passing out of the northern and western portals of Europe to the all-purifying waters of the great ocean.

But during those four years of devastation what experiences had humanity gone through! We can look back now and see only dimly through the mist. The figures are blurred and their movements indistinct. The light of imagination fails to illuminate a condition so different from normal experience. Only here and there a clear light is cast upon some spot by a record made at the time. In the inn of a little town in Spain a French pilgrim returning from the tomb of St. James of Campostella, after supping with the host, who with two daughters and one servant had alone so far survived of his entire family and