constrained by poverty, they stayed in their quarters, in their houses,
where they sickened by thousands a day, and, being without service or help
of any kind, were, so to speak, irredeemably devoted to the death which
overtook them. Many died daily or nightly in the public streets; of many
others, who died at home, the departure was hardly observed by their
neighbours, until the stench of their putrefying bodies carried the tidings;
and what with their corpses and the corpses of others who died on every hand
the whole place was a sepulchre.

It was the common practice of most of the neighbours, moved no less by fear
of contamination by the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the
deceased, to drag the corpses out of the houses with their own hands, aided,
perhaps, by a porter, if a porter was to be had, and to lay them in front of
the doors, where any one who made the round might have seen, especially in
the morning, more of them than he could count; afterwards they would have
biers brought up, or, in default, planks, whereon they laid them. Nor was it
once or twice only that one and the same bier carried two or three corpses
at once; but quite a considerable number of such cases occurred, one bier
sufficing for husband and wife, two or three brothers, father and son, and
so forth. And times without number it happened, that, as two priests,
bearing the cross, were on their way to perform the last office for some
one, three or four biers were brought up by the porters in rear of them, so
that, whereas the priests supposed that they had but one corpse to bury,
they discovered that there were six or eight, or sometimes more. Nor, for
all their number, were their obsequies honoured by either tears or lights or
crowds of mourners; rather, it was come to this, that a dead man was then of
no more account than a dead goat would be to-day. From all which it is
abundantly manifest, that that lesson of patient resignation, which the
sages were never able to learn from the slight and infrequent mishaps which
occur in the natural course of events, was now brought home even to the