Weight o f Numbers

85

averages: for every 100 deaths in a normal year, Munich counted 155 in an abnormal year; Augsburg 195; Bayreuth 487; Landsburg 556 and Strauling 702. Children under a year old were primarily affected on each occasion, and women tended to be more susceptible than men. Descriptions and examples must be compared - in the same way as all these figures have to be investigated and compared - because they often present the same drama, list the same more or less effective measures (quarantines, surveill ance, inhalants, disinfection, roadblocks, close confinement, health certificates - Gesundheitspsse in Germany, cartas de salud in Spain), the same panicstricken suspicions and the same social pattern. At the first sign of the disease, the rich whenever possible took hurried flight to their country houses; no one thought of anything but himself: the plague making us cruel, as doggs, one to another noted Samuel Pepys in August 1665.17 6 And Montaigne tells how he wandered in search of a roof when the epidemic reached his estate, serving six months miserably as a guide to his distracted family, frightening their friends and themselves and causing horror wherever they tried to settle .177 The poor remained alone, penned up in the contaminated town where the State fed them, isolated them, blockaded them and kept them under observation. Boccaccios Decameron is a series of conversations and stories told in a villa near Florence at the time of the Black Death. Matre Nicolas Versoris, lawyer in the Paris Parlement, left his lodgings in August 1523. But three days after he reached his pupils country house at the Grange Batelire, then outside Paris, his wife died of the disease - an exception that confirms the value of the customary precaution. The plague in Paris in that summer of 1523 once again struck at the poor. Versoris wrote in his Livre de Raison: death was principally directed towards the poor so that only a very few of the Paris porters, who used to run errands for a few pence and who had lived there in large numbers before the misfortune, were left.... As for the district of Petiz Champs, the whole area was cleared of poor people who previously lived there in large numbers.178 One bourgeois from Toulouse placidly wrote in 1561: the aforesaid contagious disease only attacks poor people . .. let God in his mercy be satisfied with that. ... The rich protect themselves against it.179 J.-P. Sartre was right when he wrote, The plague only exaggerates the relationship between the classes: it strikes at the poor and spares the rich. In Savoy, when an epidemic was over, rich people, before returning to their carefully disinfected houses, would instal a poor woman inside for a few weeks, as a sort of guinea pig, to test at risk of her life whether the danger had really departed180 Plague also multiplied what we would call dereliction of duty: municipal magistrates, officers and prelates forgot their responsibilities; in France whole parlements emigrated (Grenoble 1467, 1589, 1596; Bordeaux 1471, 1585; Besan on 1519; Rennes 1563, 1564). Cardinal dArmagnac quite naturally forsook his town of Avignon, when it was affected by the disease in 1580, for Bedarrides and then Sorgues; he only returned after ten months absence when all danger