might of universal life had been swallowed up within her; as
if life and death and all things thenceforth lay fast in her bowels;
as if in return for all her suffering, she was teeming at last with
Nature herself.

CHAPTER IX.

THE DEVIL A PHYSICIAN.

That still and dismal scene of the Bride of Corinth, is repeated
literally from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. While it was
yet night, just before the daybreak, the two lovers, Man and Nature,
meet again, embrace with rapture, and, at that same moment--horrible
to tell!--behold themselves attacked by fearful plagues. We seem still
to hear the loved one saying to her lover, "It is all over: thy hair
will be white to-morrow. I am dead, and thou too wilt die."

Three dreadful blows happen in these three centuries. In the first we
have a loathsome changing of the outer man, diseases of the skin,
above all, leprosy. In the second, the evil turns inwards, becomes a
grotesque excitement of the nerves, a fit of epileptic dancing. Then
all grows calm, but the blood is changed, and ulcers prepare the way
for syphilis, the scourge of the fifteenth century.

* * * * *

Among the chief diseases of the Middle Ages, so far as one can look
therein, to speak generally, had been hunger, weakness, poverty of
blood, that kind of consumption which is visible in the sculptures of
that time. The blood was like clear water, and scrofulous ailments
were rife everywhere. Barring the well-paid doctors, Jew or Arab, of
the kings, the art of medicine was practised only with, holy water at
the church door. Thither on Sundays, after the service, would come a
crowd of sick, to whom words like these were spoken: "You have sinned
and God has afflicted you. Be thankful: so much the less will you
suffer in the next world. Resign yourselves to suffer and to die. The
Church has prayers for the dead." Weak, languishing, hopeless, with no
desire to live, they followed this counsel faithfully, and let life go
its way.

A fatal discouragement, a wretched state of things, that would have
prolonged without end these ages of lead, and debarred them from all
progress! Worst of all things is it to resign oneself so readily, to
welcome death with so much docility, to have strength for nothing, to
desire nothing. Of more worth was that new era, that close of the
Middle Ages, which at the cost of cruel sufferings first enabled us to
regain our former energy; namely