• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Madam,& ed ... for a little while. Flies were thick on the lower portion of the heap, making an obscene humming noise, writhing in iridescent waves over their feed. On top of all, like an offering, lay a naked maiden, pale and lovely, her golden hair serving as a funeral pall. Even as we passed, death-defying scavengers climbed on the human pile, searching for jewellery.

Outside the city gate, men were digging trenches. The dead would be thrown in, up to the top, and some little dirt shoveled over them. The men who dared to handle the corpses often followed them within a few hours. As I saw and smelled their sweat, I knew these were braver than any of King Arthur’s knights. What Galahad would have fled before, and Lancelot would have avoided altogether, these men faced unflinchingly.

Suddenly I realized that I knew not what had become of Holbein’s body. Had it been properly attended to? Surely so!

WILL:

No. Holbein was consigned to just such a trench-interment, where he decayed cheek-by-jowl with a tavernkeeper or a wet-nurse, and their dust is now mingled.

The plague brought about moral dislocations in every aspect of life. Neighbourliness evaporated, as everyone fled from the sick and refused to touch them, leaving only extortionists, whose greed exceeded their fear, to tend the dying.

The plague, and fear of it, reduced people to such terror that they forgot themselves and let their true natures reign. The Seven Deadly Sins stood revealed, glaring and gigantic, in every man, woman, and child.

Pride? There were groups who withdrew from the plague-ridden people around them and, shutting themselves off completely, thought themselves safe if they embraced “moderation” and “tranquillity.” They ate the most delicate viands and drank the finest wines, listened to sweet music, and admitted no one to their quarters, although neighbours were beating on their doors, begging for help. Not only did they refuse entrance to other people, they even refused any news of what was happening beyond their immediate quarters, in London or the realm itself.

Pride wears many hats: another is bravado, as when Charles, Duc D’Orleans, Francis’s favourite son (for the plague raged in France as well) rushed into a plague-stricken house and punctured the feather mattresses with his sword, shouting, “Never yet has a son of France died of plague,” and died of plague on schedule three days later. Then there was the pride of not fleeing, of standing at one’s post stalwartly, as Wolsey had done.

Avarice bared its face boldly, with all fear of reprisal and castigation gone. The scavengers, as Hal described, picking over the bloated victims; the extortionistic rates charged for the simplest services; the “pickmen” who appeared, like ghouls, to charge for carrying biers to a burial place, all “respectable” people having fled. Avarice propelled men forward to grasp at positions and possessions abandoned by their rightful owners.

Envy and anger joined hands in letting inferiors wear their masters’ clothes and exercise their masters’ offices, like evil children let loose to romp in cultivated fields. The anger of the underlings expressed itself in the glee they took in tossing their masters into unmarked graves or in leaving them to decay in public view: the ultimate shame and degradation. Squire Holmes, who had once worn los erstwhile servants.

Gluttony, even in this poisonous time, managed to find a niche for itself. Since one might be dead tomorrow, should not one die with a surfeit in one’s belly, one’s lips still sticky with spiced wine? There were those who declared that they would as lief die of overindulgence as plague and, in fact, thought they would cheat the plague thereby. So they caroused, eating and drinking continuously, feasting on dead men’s stores, going from house to house scavenging, not for gold, but for meat and drink. They passed their last days in an oblivion of wine and pastries.

Others, of course, embraced lust as their answer to plague, preferring to die by an onslaught