t the Palais-Royal, at barely twenty-four years of age; her
health, her beauty, and her wit were not proof against the irregular life
she had led. Ere long a more terrible cry arose from one of the chief
cities of the kingdom. "The plague," they said, "is at Marseilles,
brought, none knows how, on board a ship from the East." The terrible
malady had by this time been brooding for a month in the most populous
quarters without anybody's daring to give it its real name. "The public
welfare demands," said Chancellor d'Aguesseau, "that the people should be
persuaded that the plague is not contagious, and that the ministry should
behave as if it were persuaded of the contrary." Meanwhile emigration
was commencing at Marseilles; the rich folks had all taken flight; the
majority of the public functionaries, unfaithful to their duty, had
imitated them, when, on the 31st of July, 1720, the Parliament of Aix,
scared at the contagion, drew round Marseilles a sanitary line,
proclaiming the penalty of death against all who should dare to pass it;
the mayor (_viguier_) and the four sheriffs were left alone, and without
resources to confront a populace bewildered by fear, suffering, and, ere
long, famine. Then shone forth that grandeur of the human soul, which
displays itself in the hour of terror, as if to testify of the divine
image still existing amidst the wreck of us. Whilst the Parliament was
flying from threatened Aix, and hurrying affrighted from town to town,
accompanied or pursued in its route by the commandant of the province,
all that while the Bishop of Marseilles, Monseigneur de Belzunce, the
sheriffs Estelle and Moustier, and a simple officer of health, Chevalier
Roze, sufficed in the depopulated town for all duties and all acts of
devotion.

The plague showed a preference for attacking robust men, young people,
and women in the flower of their age; it disdained the old and the sick;
there was none to care for the dying, none to bury the dead. The doctors
of Marseilles had fled, or dared not approach the dying without
precautions, which redoubled the terror. "The doctors ought to be
abolished," wrote Dubois to the Archbishop of Aix, "or ordered to show
more ability and less cowardice, for it is a great calamity."

Some young doctors, arriving from Montpellier, raised the courage of
their desponding brethren, and the sick no longer perished without help.
Rallying round the bishop, the priests, assisted by the mem