re is no doubt that the scene had its origin
not merely in the imagination of the sixteenth century, but reached
further back to the hideous "Danse Macabre" of the fourteenth century,
when the Black Death was slaying high and low so fast that men were
seized with a panic of hysterical convulsion and leaped frenziedly
about the streets and churches, even in the cemeteries themselves. The
numberless carvings on the cathedrals, representing the Devil and his
myrmidons struggling for mastery with a living soul, provided an easy
and instant suggestion. But by degrees the religious quality of the
mania lessened and grew weaker. At last the purely material horror of
extinction overcame everything else. It was no longer the Devil who
seized a maddened ring of men and women and danced them screaming into
hell. Now it was Death himself who clutched every man by the sleeve
and hurried him into the over-crowded ever-hungry sepulchre. If this
was one thought of the rich who thought at all, it was also the only
consolation of the poor, and therefore no more appropriate carvings
for the poor man's cemetery of St. Maclou could be imagined by the
workman of the sixteenth century.

But if the poor had their Danse Macabre, the great ones of the city
spared nothing to impress on their survivors that the magnificence of
their lives should follow them even to the tomb. In the Chapelle de la
Vierge of Rouen Cathedral are two of the most famous funereal
monuments of the sixteenth century, and in one of these you will
notice a very remarkable example of the way in which the sculptors of
the rich understood their task. Their orders, no doubt, were to give
of their best to celebrate the dead man's greatness; their designs
were evidently as unfettered by suggestion as by expense; and they had
their inevitable revenge. Beneath the magnificent figure of the knight
in armour lies the corpse, naked in death and as poor as the beggar in
the street. In the Louvre you may see a monument by Germain Pilon that
is even more suggestive of this feeling on the part of the artist. It
is the tomb of Madame de Birague, Valentina Balbiani.[64] Under a
sumptuous dress, covered with sculpture so delicate that the marble
looks like lace, a thin and shrunken form can be distinguished. The
wasted hand holds a tiny book whose pages it has no strength to turn.
Her little dog tries vainly to awake her from a slumber that is
eternal. A corpse that is almost a skeleton lies