The gates of the city and the windows of the houses were closed. In the midst of the general silence, sometimes a window was heard to open and a corpse to fall. The walls streamed with its cankered blood, and dogs without a master waited below to devour it. In one quarter, all of whose inhabitants had died, they had been walled up at home, as though to prevent death from leaving the house. From these avenues of great family-tombs, one came to open places in which the pavement was covered with sick and dying persons stretched on mattresses and abandoned without aid. Carcases lay half rotten with old clothes mixed with mud; other corpses stood upright against the walls, in the attitude in which they had expired. All had fled, even the doctors; the bishop, M. de Belsunce[383], wrote: "They ought to abolish the doctors, or at least to give us abler and less timorous ones. I have had great difficulty in having one hundred and fifty half-rotten corpses, which were lying around my house, removed." [Sidenote: Earlier plagues.] One day, the galley-slaves hesitated to fulfil their funeral functions: the apostle climbed into one of the tumbrils, sat down on a heap of corpses and ordered the convicts to proceed; death and virtue went off to the cemetery, drawn by vice and crime filled with dread and admiration. On the Esplanade de la Tourette, beside the sea, bodies had been lying for three weeks; and these, exposed to the sun and melted by its rays, offered merely an infected lake to the sight On this surface of liquefied flesh, only the worms imparted some movement to crushed, vague forms which might possess human shape. When the contagion began to relax, M. de Belsunce, at the head of his clergy, repaired to the church of the _Accoules_; mounting on an esplanade commanding a view of Marseilles, the harbours and the sea, he gave the benediction, even as the Pope, in Rome, blesses the city and the world: what braver and purer hand could there be to bring down the blessings of Heaven upon so many misfortunes? It was thus that the plague devastated Marseilles and, five years after these calamities, the following inscription was placed upon the frontage of the Town Hall, resembling the pompous epitaphs which we read on a sepulchre: MASSILIA PHOCENSIUM FILIA, ROMÆ SOROR, CARTHAGINIS TERROR, ATHENARUM ÆMULA. PARIS, RUE D'ENFER, _May_ 1832. The cholera, starting from the delta of the Ganges in 1817, has spread over a space measuring 2,200 leagues from north to south and 3,500 leagues from east to west; it has wasted 1,400 towns and mowed down 40,000,000 inhabitants. We have a chart tracing the conqueror's march. It has taken fifteen years to come from India to Paris: this means going as fast as Bonaparte; the latter occupied almost the same number of years in passing from Cadiz to Moscow, and he caused the death of only two or three millions of men.