he city has been swept with the desolating
scourge of hideous disease. It was in 1348, when the ravages of the
Black Death were at their highest and 100,000 persons died of it in
Rouen that this cemetery of St. Maclou was founded.

[Illustration: THE CEMETERY OF ST. MACLOU]

Within the central space of the square court that you can see to-day
is the actual ground which formed this ancient graveyard. Formerly
there were two altars in it, one to the Slayer of the infernal Dragon,
the mighty Saint of Sepulchres, the protector of the dead, St.
Michael; the other to the souls of the dead themselves. In many a
country churchyard in France at the present day you may see a tall
lonely shaft that rises above the tombs, generally with a tiny belfry
at its summit, which holds the bell that rings at midnight to call the
wandering ghosts to rest; and at its base this "Lanterne des Morts"
carries a small slab of stone on which offerings were placed at night.
It was the Confrerie de St. Michel who had charge of this, and of the
burying arrangements of the city, and they bore upon their hats the
image of their patron-saint as a badge of their sad calling. Twice
before 1505 this graveyard had to be enlarged; by 1526 three of the
galleries that now surround it had been built, those to the west and
south and east. The northern side was finished only in 1640. Of the
older work there are still thirty-one columns standing, some eleven
feet apart, carved with subjects from the famous "Dance of Death," the
"Danse Macabre" of Rouen.

But these curtains that circumscribe the Bed of Death have other
emblems carved upon them too; there is a double frieze of oak above
the pillars, and on it appears the skull and crossbones, the spade and
mattock, the fragments of pitiful anatomy that marked the ghastly
trade of sexton in the sixteenth century. In the covered galleries, as
they were originally, the richer burgesses were buried, though not one
of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the
poor proletariat, who had gone through life marked with a yellow cross
upon their arms, and found in death an undistinguished and promiscuous
burial. Looking down upon them all in their last troubled sleep, were
the figures carved in high relief upon each pillar, groups that are so
mutilated now that only by the careful drawings and descriptions left
by M. Langlois long ago can we trace faintly what was placed there by
Denys Leselin the car