Let us pass over this very important description that Procopius gives of the moral effect of this epidemic on the people, of the scenes of wild and heart-rending terror, of curious examples of egotism and sublime devotion, of instances of blind superstition developed in a great city under the influence of fear and the dread of a very problematical contagion. Evagre, the scholastic, another Greek historian of the sixth century, recounts in his works the story of the plague at Constantinople. He states that he frequently observed that persons recovering from a first and second attack subsequently died on a third attack; also that persons flying from an infected locality were often taken sick after many days of an incubating period, falling ill in their places of refuge in the midst of populations free, up to that time, from the pestilence. In following the progress of this epidemic from the Orient to the Occident, it was noticed that it always commenced at the sea-ports and then traveled inland. The disease was carried much more easily by ships than it could be at the present time, inasmuch as there were no quarantines and no pest-houses for isolating patients. It entered France by the Mediterranean Sea. It was in 549 that the plague struck Gaul. “During this time,” says Gregory of Tours, “the malady known as the _inguinal disease_ ravaged many sections and the province of Arles was cruelly depopulated.”[11] This illustrious historian wrote in another passage: “We learned this year that the town of Narbonne was devastated by the _groin disease_, of so deadly a type that when one was attacked he generally succumbed. Felix, the Bishop of Nantes, was stricken down and appeared to be desperately ill. The fever having ceased, the humor broke out on his limbs, which were covered with pustules. It was after the application of a plaster covered with cantharides that his limbs rotted off, and he ceased to live in the seventieth year of his age. “Before the plague reached Auvergne it had involved most all the rest of the country. Here the epidemic attacked the people in 567, and so great was the mortality that it is utterly impossible to give even the approximate number of deaths. Populations perished _en masse_. On a single Sunday morning three hundred bodies were counted in St. Peter’s chapel at Clermont awaiting funeral service. Death came suddenly; it struck the axilla or groin, forming a sore like a serpent that bit so cruelly that men rendered up their souls to God on the second or third day of the attack, many being so violent as to lose their senses. At this time Lyons, Bourges, Chalons, and Dijon were almost depopulated by the pestilence.” In 590 the towns of Avignon and Viviers were cruelly ravaged by the _inguinal disease_.