ighty cemeteries are packed with dead.
Magnificent processions of princes and of great prelates march through
the town by day; they are followed by the riot of the Mascarade des
Conards, a burlesque throng of some two thousand fantastic dresses
careering madly up and down the streets, chased by the "Clercs de la
Basoche," or racing after every sober citizen in sight. It is lucky if
the Huguenots have not seized the town and filled the churches with a
mob of fanatics, smashing everything with hammers, and making bonfires
of the sacred vestments in the streets, or if the Catholics are not
just taking their revenge by burning their enemies alive or murdering
Protestant children in their little beds. Even on ordinary days there
is horror enough only too visible. You need not go so far as the
gibbets just above the town where corpses are clattering in chains
beneath the wind; on the Place du Vieux Marche a sacrilegious priest
is being slowly strangled; in the Parvis Notre Dame a blasphemer's
throat is cut; close by the churchyard, a murderer's hand is chopped
off, and he is hurried away to execution on the scaffold by the
Halles. From a by-street the leper's bell sounds fitfully, and out of
the darkened house beyond, men in St. Michael's livery are bearing the
last victims of the Plague to burial within the city walls. In 1522
there were 50,000 of such burials in Rouen alone in six months. Every
gallant who goes by with his feathered cap and velvet cloak, his
tightly-fitting hose and slashed shoes, every lady in her purple hat
and stiff-starched ruff, her gold-brocaded stomacher, and her sweeping
skirt, every soldier swaggering his rapier, every sailor rolling home
from sea, every monk mumbling his prayers over a rosary--all alike are
breathing an infected poisonous air. The young girls from the country
feel it most and fly from it the quickest, coming in to sell their
eggs and chickens, with their woollen petticoats and gaily coloured
headdress, or meeting some lover of the town at a dark corner in the
narrow, damp, ill-ventilated streets. Here and there a silent figure
clad in blue stalks from one house to another and leaves the mark of a
great white cross upon the fast-shut door or shutters, for within
there is the Plague. And upon every passer-by outside there blows
continually the invisible blast of pestilence from the countless
graveyards pent up in the choking circuit of the walls. From the
thirteenth century onwards t