Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/192

172 his blood flowed; they tore from him not only his clothes, but also his hair, and cut off his lips and nose; and one blackguard tied a rope to the feet of the corpse and dragged it through the streets, crying out, "Voilà le cholera-morbus!" A very beautiful woman, pale with rage, with bare breasts and bloody hands, was present, and as the corpse passed her she kicked it. She laughed to me, and begged for a few francs reward for her dainty work wherewith to buy a mourning-dress, because her mother had died a few hours before of poison.

It appeared the next day by the newspapers that the wretched men who had been so cruelly murdered were all quite innocent, that the suspicious powders found on them consisted of camphor or chlorine, or some other kind of remedy against the cholera, and that those who were said to have been poisoned had died naturally of the prevailing epidemic. The mob here, like the same everywhere, being quick to rage and readily led to cruelty, became at once appeased, and deplored with touching sorrow its rash deeds when it heard the voice of reason. With such voices the newspapers succeeded the next day in calming and quieting the populace, and it may be proclaimed, as a