Plague and famine weighed heavily upon Chartres throughout the sixteenth century; not less heavily the wars of François I. and of Henry IV., and the continual contributions in money which she was called upon to make in order to enable them to be waged. Year by year, under the three curses of that age--plague, soldiers, and impositions--the exhaustion of the city increased. She was able, however, to receive with sufficient magnificence the occasional visits of kings and princes. Particularly splendid was the reception accorded to Mary Queen of Scots, when, at the age of six, she was brought here in state by the Constable de Montmorency and the Duc d’Aumale. And the period in which Jean de Beauce wrought the Clocher and the Clôture of the Cathedral cannot have been one of abject poverty. Royal visits to the town were not altogether wasteful. Not only did they, in the ordinary course of things, stimulate trade, but they also served the cause of sanitation. For on such great occasions, and on such occasions only, the streets were cleaned. Street police was still quite in its infancy; hygiene an art scarce beginning to be practised. We find mention of an order in 1526 forbidding swineherds to allow the animals in their charge (_bêtes porchines de M. S. Antoine_) to wander about the streets. But this was an unpopular measure, and stood rather as a pious opinion of the more enlightened than as an effective piece of legislation. Things were but little better than they had been when the heir of Louis-le-Gros, riding in the Rue S. Jean in Paris, was thrown from his horse by an abbot’s pig, and died of his injuries. The vile odour that arose from the narrow, ill-paved, uncleansed passages called streets, filled with the rotting garbage which so tempted the pigs, is not pleasant even to imagine. Little wonder that here, as at Paris, where the same reign of mud and dirt obtained, the plague broke out again and again. In one of these outbreaks Chartres lost no less than 8000 of its inhabitants. As in Paris, and later in London, the houses tainted by the plague were marked with a cross, and persons who were infected by it were obliged to carry a white wand in the streets. But people have always been curiously slow to learn the lessons of sanitation. The open sewer, the filthy water, the system of burial, the state of the dwelling-houses, the tradition of personal uncleanliness, these were all powerful friends of the pest in every mediæval town.