Black Death Part 3

Within a given region, the plague could complete its extermination within three to six months before evaporating, vanishing as suddenly as it came, leaving the living to wonder if it might return.

In bigger cities, though, where people lived crushed together in tighter proximity, the pestilence found a way to endure.

It could hibernate through the cold months, lying dormant and patient before flourishing again in the warmth of spring, when rats began to venture forth from their relative isolation and the pestilence would sweep through its human hosts for another handful of merciless months.

While the data is spotty, it appears that women were more susceptible to Yersinia, the plague bacterium, given their increased exposure to fleas as a result of being more housebound than their male counterparts.

Victims in part of the very domestic spaces meant to shelter them.

And yet, in a detail almost too strange to believe, as common as fleas were in a medieval household, they went essentially unmentioned in the record.

Rats only rarely warranted a comment.

The very agents of annihilation moved unseen, unnamed, unsuspected, surely a sad irony and perhaps the plague's cruelest joke.

Surging northward from Paris, the plague hit northern France, and the scourge continued without mercy.

A French contemporary, La Gravière, notes of a cemetery in Rouen that bodies decayed in putrefaction in the palates where they had to breathe their last.

The dead denied even the dignity of burial, left to rot where they fell.

Burial space was becoming prime real estate, and clergy, those meant to usher souls into the next world, were dying off in droves, leaving the dead with no one left to pray over them.

Divine wrath had to be appeased, so the city of Rouen banned all activities that could be offensive to God.

Gambling, cursing, and drinking were noted in particular, as if silence and sobriety alone might turn back the tide of corpses.

The coastal province of Normandy was hit hardest in the summer of 1348.

Winter had slowed the plague's crawl northward, but only delayed the inevitable.

It held breath before the next blow fell.

As the plague left its all-too-familiar stamp, black flags were raised in church towers throughout the province.

The meaning of this practice is not recorded, but it hardly needs to be.

A silent, fluttering language of death, understood by anyone who saw it rise.

And yet, in the face of all this, defiance took strange forms.

In an unspecified northern French village, people were observed dancing to horns and drums.

When asked why, the villagers declared that while their neighbors were dying daily all around them, their own village had yet to suffer, and they believed they could keep the pestilence at bay by the jollity that is in us.

That is why we dance.

Whether triumph or desperation, one cannot say.