ddle and lower classes
in Paris through the Middle Ages was that common to all mediaeval cities,
and would seem to modern ideas all but unendurable. To the absence of
law, municipal, protective, or sanitary, the disregard of life and
property, the pestiferous condition of houses and streets, to famine,
war, pestilence, and constant internal discords, were added the
intemperances of the seasons--apparently much more severe than at
present--and the ravages of wild beasts. The Seine--quite regardless of
the praise the Emperor Julian had bestowed upon its moderation and
uniform flow--was constantly bursting its bonds and devastating with
inundation the Cite and the adjoining shores; the excessive cold of the
winters is a constant source of complaint in the local annals. That of
1433-1434 was heralded by a "formidable wind" which, on the 7th of
October, raged for nine consecutive hours, demolishing many houses and
uprooting many trees,--three hundred of the latter in the wood of
Vincennes alone. The frost commenced on the 31st of December and
continued uninterruptedly for eighty days; for forty days the snow fell
continuously, night and day; toward the end of March, freezing weather
returned, and lasted till Easter, the 17th of April. In one tree alone
there were found a hundred and forty birds dead with cold. In 1437 and
1438 the wolves penetrated into the city, by way of the river, and
devoured women and children, in the last week of September, 1437, while
the king was in the city, "fourteen persons, big and little, between
Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Antoine." There was one most monstrous
beast, called Courtaud, because he had no tail, that was an object of
special terror. "But the wolves, for the Parisians, were less to be
feared than the seigneurs and the brigands called _escorcheurs_, which
followed in their train."

In 1348, the Black Plague, coming from Egypt and Syria, reached Paris
and destroyed eighty thousand inhabitants. At the Hotel-Dieu, the dead
numbered five hundred a day, and the nuns who served as nurses perished
so rapidly that they had to be constantly renewed. Charles V, _le
Sage_, died on the 16th of September, 1380, "after a reign of sixteen
years, during which the people, although they had been crushed by such
taxation that 'many were forced to sell their beds in order to pay,' had
yet had much less to complain of than during the preceding reign, and,
still more, than they would have during that w