CHAPTER I

An invasion of cholera--Aspect of Paris--Medicine and the scourge --Proclamation of the Prefect of Police--The supposed poisoners--Harel's newspaper paragraph--Mademoiselle Dupont--Eugène Durieu and Anicet Bourgeois--Catherine (not Howard) and the cholera--First performance of _Mari de la veuve_--A horoscope which did not come true

Meantime, France had been anxiously following the progress of cholera for some time past. Starting from India, it had taken the route of the great magnetic currents, had crossed Persia, reached St. Petersburg and stopped at London. The Channel alone separated it from us. But what is the distance between Dover and Calais to a giant who has just done three thousand leagues? So it crossed the Channel at a single stride. I remember the day when it struck its first blow: the sky was sapphire blue; the sun very powerful. All nature was being born again, with its beautiful green robe and the colours of youth and of health on its cheeks. The Tuileries was studded with women as a greensward is with flowers; revolutionary risings had died down for some time, leaving society a little peace and permitting spectators to venture out to the theatres. Suddenly, a terrible cry went forth, uttered in a voice like those mentioned in the Bible which thrill through the atmosphere, hurling maledictions on the earth from the skies: "The cholera is in Paris!" They added: "A man has just died in the rue Chauchat; he was literally struck down dead!" It was exactly as though a veil of crape was stretched between the blue sky and the bright sun and Paris. People rushed out into the streets and fled to their homes, shouting: "The cholera! the cholera!" as, seventeen years before, they had shouted: "The Cossacks!" But, no matter how well they closed their doors and windows, the terrible demon of Asia slipped in through the chinks of the shutters and through the keyholes of the doors. Then people attempted to fight it. Science came forward and tried to wrestle with it at close quarters. It touched it with its finger-tips, and science was floored. Science rose stunned but not vanquished; and began to study the disease. Sometimes, people died in three hours' time; at others, in even less time still. The sick man, or, rather, the condemned, suddenly felt a slight shivering: then came the first stage of cold, then cramp, then the terrible and ceaseless dysentery; next the circulation was stopped by the thickening of the blood; the capillaries were altered; the sick man became black and died. But none of these stages was positively fixed; they might follow or precede or intermingle with one another; each separate constitution brought its own variety of the malady. Further, these were but symptoms; people died with symptoms as of some unknown disease. The corpse was visible, but the assassin invisible! It struck and the blow was seen, but it was useless to search for the dagger. People were doctored by guesswork; as a man surprised by a thief in the night strikes out into the gloom by chance, hoping to hit the thief, so science wielded its sword in the darkness. In Russia, they treated cholera with ice. The attacks there presented the symptoms of typhoid. Opinion was divided on this point. Some administered tonics, that is to say, punch, warm wine, Bordeaux and Madeira. Others, thinking only of the abdominal pains, treated them with both the systems in vogue at that period, either by the physiological system of Broussais, which consisted in bleeding the sick and putting leeches on the stomach and abdomen--a treatment which attempted to attack the inflammatory part of the disease--or by opiates, calmatives and soothing medicines, like opium, belladonna and hellebore--this was to deal with the pain more than the disease. Others, again, tried warmth, hot-air baths, rubbing, burning iron. When the cold stage was attacked in time, and by energetic reaction they succeeded in overcoming the cold, the patient was generally saved. All the same, they only saved about one out of every ten! This was the reverse of the tithe.

The scourge struck the poorer classes by preference, but it did not spare the rich. The hospitals were crowded with terrible rapidity. A man would fall ill in his home; two neighbours put him on a stretcher and carried him to the nearest hospital. The sick man often died before he got there, and one, if not both, of the carriers would take his place upon the stretcher. A ring of frightened faces would form round the dead, and a cry would sound from the crowd. A man with one of his hands to his chest and the other to his body would writhe like an epileptic, fall to the ground, roll on the pavement, turn blue and expire. The crowd would disperse terrified, lifting hands to heaven, turning their heads behind them and flying for the sake of flight, for the danger was everywhere; it did not understand the distinctions the doctors made between the three words: epidemic, endemic and contagious.

The doctors were heroic! Never general on the bloodiest field of battle ran dangers equal to those to which the man of science exposed himself in the midst of the hospitals or as he went from bed to bed in the town. The Sisters of Charity were saints and often martyrs. The strangest rumours got abroad, springing from one knows not where, and repeated by the people with curses and menaces. They said that it was the fault of the Government, which, to get rid of the surplus population filling up Paris, caused poison to be thrown into the fountains and into the casks of the wine merchants. Paris seemed to be seized with madness; those even whose offices made it a duty to reassure others were afraid. On 2 April, the Prefect of Police, M. Gisquet, addressed the following circular to the Police Commissaries:--

"MONSIEUR LE COMMISSAIRE,--The appearance of the cholera-germ in the capital, the source of active anxiety and of real sorrow for all good citizens, has given the perpetual enemies of order a fresh opportunity for spreading infamous calumnies against the Government throughout the population; people have dared to say that the cholera is nothing short of poisoning effected by the agents of those in authority in order to decrease the population and to turn aside the general attention from political questions.

_"I am informed that, to give credit to these atrocious conjectures, certain wretches have conceived the project of going through the public-houses and butchers' shops with bottles and packets of poison, either to throw into the fountains or wine casks or on to the meat, or simply to seem to do so and then get arrested in the very act by accomplices, who, after having made out that they were attached to the police, will countenance their escape, and, finally, set everything at work to demonstrate the reality of the odious accusation directed against authority._

"I need only point out such designs to you, monsieur, to make you feel the necessity of redoubling your vigilance over the establishment of dealers in liquids and butchers' shops, and to urge you to warn the inhabitants against attempts which they have a personal and powerful interest in preventing. If such audacious attempts are carried out, I need hardly tell you how important it will be to seize the culprits and to place them in the hands of justice. It is a task in which you will be seconded by all friends of order and by all respectable people.--Receive, etc.

"GISQUET"

An hour after the appearance of such a circular, the Prefect of Police ought to have been prosecuted. But nothing was done. M. Gisquet answered a blunder by a libel. It was no longer the agents of the Government who poisoned the fountains and wine casks to reduce the population and turn attention away from political affairs, it was the Republicans who threw bottles of poison over the butchers' stalls to depopulate the Government of Louis-Philippe! One could understand the first accusation, which sprang out of ignorance; but the second! which came from authority and from such a quarter! a quarter which ought to be the best informed on such affairs as these! The people only asked not to have to believe in the presence of the plague: that invisible enemy, which struck from the heart of the clouds, irritated the people by its invisibility. They refused to believe that one could die of an atmospheric poison, from so pure a sky and so radiant a sun. A material, visible, palpable cause would do its business much more effectually--at all events, revenge could be taken on a tangible cause. Placards containing nearly the same accusations were pasted up. The same day crowds collected round these placards and then they took themselves off to the barriers. Poor unfortunate wretches were knocked down by sticks, assassinated by knife-thrusts, torn by the nails of women and the teeth of dogs. A man would be pointed at with a finger--pursued, attacked and killed! I saw one of these terrible executions from a distance. The crowd moved towards the barrier: one could count the heads by the thousand, each one a wave of that angry ocean; a great number of butcher-boys with their aprons spotted with blood were mixed up in that frightful sea, each apron among all those waves like a crest of foam. Paris threatened to become worse than a great charnel-house: it threatened to become a vast slaughter-house. The prefect was obliged to retract and to recognise that an assassin, a murderer, a poisoner who escaped all capture, had broken loose, and was hiding himself in Paris. That assassin, murderer and poisoner was the cholera!

Oh! who ever saw Paris at that time would forget it, with its implacable blue sky, its mocking sun, its deserted walks, its solitary boulevards, its streets strewn with hearses and haunted by phantoms? Places of public entertainment looked like immense tombs. Harel put the following paragraph in the newspapers during the performances of _Dix ans de la vie d'une femme:_--

"It has been noticed with surprise that theatres are the only public places where, whatever the number of spectators, no case of cholera had yet appeared. We present this INCONTESTABLE fact for scientific investigation."

Poor Harel! He still had his wits about him, when nobody else had any left or even dreamt of such a thing! It was the Terror of 1793 on a grand scale. In 1793, the worst days counted their thirty or thirty-five victims. Now, the newspapers admitted to between seven and eight hundred deaths per day! It was a strange thing! But other diseases seemed to have disappeared; they were stayed from sheer stupefaction; death had no longer any but the one way of striking. One left a friend at night, shook his hand, saying, _"Au revoir_!" and, th next day, a voice would come from one knew not where, out of chaos, would whisper in one's ear--

"You knew such and such a person?"

"Yes ... Well?"

"He is dead!"

One had said _au revoir_; it was _adieu_ one ought to have said instead.

Soon, there was a shortness of coffins: in that terrible _steeplechase_ between death and the coffin-makers, the latter were outdistanced. They wrapped the bodies in tapestries; they rumbled along ten, fifteen, twenty, to the church at once. Relatives followed the common carts or not, as the case might be. Each knew the number of his own dead and mourned them. A mass was said for all collectively; then they wended their way to the cemetery, and tipped the contents of the tapestry into the common grave, and covered them all over with a shroud of lime.

The 18th of April was the crisis of the first outbreak--the numbers rose to nearly a thousand! At that time, I lived, as I have said, in the rue Saint-Lazare, in the square d'Orléans, and I saw from my windows every day fifty to sixty funerals pass on their way to the Montmartre cemetery. It was with this prospect before my eyes that I wrote one of my gayest comedies: _Le Mari de la veuve._ This is how the play came about. Mademoiselle Dupont, the excellent soubrette of the Comédie-Française, who laughed with such rosy lips and white teeth, she who was the most impudent Martine I have ever seen, had obtained a benefit performance. I had known her more at Firmin's house privately than at the theatre; she had never acted in any of my plays. One morning--it was, so far as I can recollect, the very day before 29 March, on which day the cholera was to burst forth--she came to see me. Everything was ready for her benefit. She came to ask me to write her a narrative scene. It was Saturday, I think: the performance was to take place on the following Tuesday or Wednesday. There was no time to lose. I am stupid at improvising anything appropriate to such an occasion as this; and yet how could I refuse the charming soubrette a demand of so little importance?

"Defer the performance until Saturday," I said to her, "and, instead of one scene, I will write you a one-act comedy."

"Will you promise to do this?"

"On my honour!"

"I will go and see if it be possible, and I will return in an hour's time."

Twenty minutes later I received a note from Mademoiselle Dupont telling me she had obtained a respite of twelve days, and asking me to make a part in it for Mademoiselle Mars. I had not been on very friendly terms with Mademoiselle Mars since _Antony,_ and she had not taken the trouble to make it up with me.

Now I had one friend, a man of infinite cleverness, head or second in command at the Home Offices,--a friend who has since made his name in the Government. He was called, and happily still calls himself, Eugène Durieu. I had met him two or three times during the past year, and every time he had given me the subject for a play, either in one act, or two or in three. But I do not know why we had never yet settled anything. I wrote to him and he came to me.

"Let us look over your subjects," I said; "I want a play in one act for Mademoiselle Dupont's benefit"--

"Are you crazy? She is billed for next Tuesday!"

"It is put off for a week."

"And you think a play could be written, read, distributed, learned and played between now and then?"

"I will do my part."

"Really."

"A day to write the play, one to get it re-copied, one for reading it; there will still be seven days for the rehearsals; a luxurious allowance!"

Eugène Durieu recognised the correctness of the calculation and gave me the benefit of his ideas. We thought of the subject of _Le Mari de la veuve_; but the plan was a long way from completion.

"Listen!" I said to Durieu, "it is noon; I have business until five o'clock. Anicet Bourgeois wishes to have his turn at the Théâtre-Français; why, I don't know. Some whim of his! Go and find him for me; settle the outlines of the drama with him, return together at half-past four and we will dine together. In the evening we will arrange the numbering of the scenes; I can set to work on the play to-night or to-morrow morning, and, in any case, at whatever time I start upon it, it shall be finished twenty-four hours later."

Durieu left at a run. I returned at five, as I had said, and found my two collaborators at the task. The foundations were not yet laid; I came to the rescue. They left me at midnight, leaving me a number of scenes nearly completed. The next day, as I had promised, I set to work. I was at my third or fourth scene when the chambermaid entered, looking terrified and as pale as death.

"Ah! Monsieur! Monsieur! Monsieur!" she said.

"Well, what is the matter, Catherine?"

"Ah! Monsieur it is ... My God! My God!"

"What?"

"It is the cholera ... Ah! Monsieur, I have the cramp!"

"The cholera is in Paris?"

"Yes, monsieur, it is, the scoundrel!"

"_Diable!_ Are you sure what you say is true?"

"A man has just died in the rue Chauchat, monsieur. He had only been dead a quarter of an hour, and he is already as black as a nigger!"

"How did they treat him?"

"By rubbing, monsieur; but it was no use ... Black, monsieur--quite black!"

"Perhaps they rubbed him with a blacking-brush."

"Oh, monsieur, you may joke!... Rue Chauchat, monsieur, in the rue Chauchat!"

Now, the rue Chauchat is next to the rue Saint-Lazare. What could prevent the cholera in leaving the rue Chauchat from passing along the rue Saint-Lazare and knocking at my own door?

"If the cholera rings, do not open to it, Catherine," I resumed. "I am going to see what is happening."

I took up my hat and went out. Then it was that I saw with my own eyes the spectacle of terror that I have tried to describe. I returned home, very much disinclined to write my comedy, I confess, and I wrote to Mademoiselle Dupont:--

"MA BELLE MARTINE,--I presume that when you settled the day for your performance you had reckoned without the cholera. It has just come from London and made its début two hours ago in the rue Chauchat. Its début is making such a commotion that it will, I am afraid, spoil your takings. What ought I to do about the one-act comedy?--Yours always, ALEX. DUMAS"

Mademoiselle Dupont was at home, and I received the following reply by the same messenger as had taken my letter:--

"MY DEAR DUMAS,--My benefit has been on the way for such a long time that I want it done with, one way or another. Finish your play, then, I beseech you; it must take its chance.--Always yours, DUPONT"

So I returned to _Le Mari de la veuve._ The play was finished in twenty-four hours, as I had promised. The principal part pleased Mademoiselle Mars, and she accepted it. Her presence in a play was a guarantee for speed. Indeed, we have already said how honest Mademoiselle Mars was in theatrical matters and with authors. She came punctually to the rehearsals, in spite of the cholera, and enraged me just as much over one act as she would have done over a five-act play. Each day she found some thing to correct; and I had to take the play home and make the correction there. This was how _Le Mari de la veuve_ was created, with that funereal background of which I have just been telling you. The play was exquisitely mounted: the five parts it contained were filled by Mademoiselle Mars, Monrose, Anaïs, Menjaud and Mademoiselle Dupont.

The play was performed on the appointed day. The cholera had proved a troublesome competitor; there were not five hundred people in the theatre. The play had but a moderate success and obtained even a round of hissing. After Menjaud had been caught in a shower, he re-entered the castle shaking himself.

"What weather!" he said; "I am as drenched as College wine!"

A spectator hissed; no doubt some schoolmaster. The saying, though, was not mine; I had heard it said to Soulié a few days before, and had utilised it because I thought it so funny.

It was a fresh proof to me of the truth of the saying that what suits one person to perfection jars on another. I have hunted in all the newspapers for an account of the performance and cannot find any trace of it except in the _Annuaire historique_ by Lesur and the _Gazette de France._ My readers will allow me to lay before them the twofold appreciation offered by criticism on the work: it is short and sincere. Here is Lesur's--

THÉÂTRE-FRANÇAIS

"_Performance for the benefit of Mademoiselle Dupuis ..."_

[In the first place, Lesur is wrong: he should have said _Mademoiselle Dupont_.]

"_Le Mari de la veuve,_ a Comedy in one Act, in prose by M....

"No theatrical performance on a Benefit day ever offered a more melancholy aspect and a more scanty assembly. The cholera had invaded Paris; the town was given over to terror, riot ran rife through the street, drums beat at the hour for the opening of the box office. There were very few spectators that night bold enough to breathe the smell of camphor and lime in the solitudes of the Théâtre-Français in order to judge the merits of the new play. Under these circumstances, the absent hardly lost much.

"A few pleasant incidents and witty sayings, and the talent of Mademoiselle Mars, might be able to support this slight work for a _dozen or so of performances._

"The author, who, doubtless, is not blind as to the unimportant nature of the play, maintains his anonymity."

That is one! Now let us pass on to the _Gazette de_ _France._

"A short Comedy has recently been performed: _Le Mari de_ _la veuve,_ by M. Alexandre Dumas, which, although the dialogue is written with plenty of go and naturalness, offers very little in the way of common sense as to plot and truth of characterisation; but the play is so agreeably acted by Monrose, Menjaud, Mademoiselle Mars and Mademoiselle Dupont, that it ought to cause great amusement and much laughter among those who are inclined to make fun of the quibblers and silent indifference of the smaller newspapers against the Théâtre-Français, and to go oftener to this theatre than to _Atar-Gull_ or to _Madame Gibou."_

The play has now been performed over three hundred times since its first appearance.