He also cites a case
where a patient "was brought unto death's door and so remained
until the witch was taken and carried away by the constable, when
he began at once to recover and was soon well."[[86]]
In France we see, during generation after generation, a
similar history evolved; pestilence after pestilence came, and
was met by various fetiches. Noteworthy is the plague at
Marseilles near the beginning of the last century. The chronicles
of its sway are ghastly. They speak of great heaps of the
unburied dead in the public places, "forming pestilential
volcanoes"; of plague-stricken men and women in delirium
wandering naked through the streets; of churches and shrines
thronged with great crowds shrieking for mercy; of other crowds
flinging themselves into the wildest debauchery; of robber bands
assassinating the dying and plundering the dead; of three
thousand neglected children collected in one hospital and then
left to die; and of the death-roll numbering at last fifty
thousand out of a population of less than ninety thousand.
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