Paris, Rue d’Enfer, May 1832.

Starting from the Ganges in 1817, Cholera has spread over an area measuring five and a half thousand miles north to south, and eight thousand seven hundred and fifty miles east to west; it has devastated fourteen hundred towns and reaped a harvest of forty million people. There is a map that plots the conqueror’s march. It has taken fifteen years to travel from India to Paris: that is as swift as Bonaparte: the latter took almost the same number of years to go from Cadiz to Moscow, and he caused the death of only two or three million men.

What is cholera? Is it a deadly wind? Is it tiny insects which we swallow and which devour us? What is this mighty Black Death, armed with a scythe, which, crossing mountains and seas, comes like one of those awe-inspiring juggernauts worshipped on the shores of the Ganges to crush us under its chariot wheels on the banks of the Seine? This scourge if it had fallen on us in a religious age, if it had spread in an era accustomed to the poetry of morality and popular belief, would have left behind a striking picture. Imagine a pall by way of a flag flying from the height of Notre Dame’s towers, the cannon firing single shots at intervals, to warn the imprudent traveller to turn back; a cordon of troops surrounding the city allowing no one to enter or leave; the churches filled with groaning crowds; priests chanting day and night their prayers of perpetual agony; the Viaticum carried from house to house with bell and candle; the bells constantly tolling the funeral knell; monks, crucifix in hand, at the crossroads summoning the people to repentance, preaching the wrath and judgement of God, manifested by the corpses already blackened by hellfire.

Then the shuttered shops, the Pontiff surrounded by his clergy, marching, with every priest at the head of his own parishioners, to fetch the reliquary of St Geneviève; the holy relics carried round the city, preceded by a long procession of diverse religious orders, guilds, corporations, congregations of penitents, groups of veiled women, university scholars, alms-house ministers, and soldiers weapon-less or with their weapons reversed; the Miserere sung by priests, mingling with the hymns of girls and young children; all, at given signals, prostrating themselves silently and rising again to utter new plaints.

There is nothing of that today; cholera comes to us in an age of philanthropy, unbelief, the Press, and practical administration. This unimaginative scourge found no old cloisters, no monks, no vaults, no Gothic tombs; like the Terror of 1793, it strayed in broad daylight with a mocking air, through a new and unfamiliar world, accompanied by bulletins reciting the remedies used against it, the number of victims it had claimed, its progress, the hopes of seeing an end to it, the precautions to be taken to guard against it, what to eat, and how best to dress. Yet everyone continued to go about their business, and the theatres were full. I have seen drunkards sitting at a little wooden table by an inn-door, drinking a toast while raising their glasses: ‘A health to you, Morbus!’ Morbus (Pestilence) came running, in gratitude, and they fell dead beneath the table. The children played at cholera, calling it Nicholas Morbus and Morbus the Villain. Yet the cholera brought terror: bright sunshine, the crowd’s indifference, the course of everyday life, continuing everywhere, gave these days of plague a strange character and a new kind of horror. Aches and pains were felt in every limb; a dry, cold northern wind parched the mouth; the air had a certain metallic quality that gripped the throat. In the Rue du Cherche-Midi, wagons from the artillery depot carted the dead away. In the Rue de Sèvres, which was extensively affected, especially along the one side, the hearses came and went from door to door; they were inadequate to the demand; people called from the windows: ‘The hearse, over here!’ The driver would answer that he was full and could not serve everyone. One of my friends, Monsieur Pouqueville, on his way to dine at my house on Easter Sunday, arriving at the Boulevard du Montparnasse, was stopped by a succession of biers almost all of them carried on men’s shoulders. In this procession, he noticed the coffin of a young girl on which a wreath of white roses had been laid. The smell of chlorine left a sickly atmosphere in the wake of this floral cortege.

In the Place de la Bourse, where processions of workmen, singing La Parisienne would meet, funerals were often seen making their way towards the Montmartre cemetery as late as eleven at night, by the light of torches dipped in pitch. The Pont-Neuf was crowded with litters laden with patients for the hospitals, or the dead, who had expired during the journey. The toll at the Pont des Arts was suspended for several days. The booths vanished, and while the north-east wind blew, all the stallholders and shopkeepers on the embankments closed for business. One met carts covered with tarpaulins, preceded by the undertaker, with a registrar dressed in mourning clothes at the head, holding a list in his hand. There was a lack of these officials; they were obliged to send for more to Saint-Germain, La Villette, and Saint-Cloud. Other hearses would be laden with five or six coffins all roped together. Omnibuses and hackney-carriages served the same purpose; it was not unusual to see a cabriolet adorned with a corpse laid across the apron. A few of the dead were carried to the churches; a priest sprinkled holy water over these faithful ones gathered together for the passage to eternity.

In Athens, the people once believed the wells near the Piraeus had been poisoned; in Paris, tradesmen were accused of poisoning wine, spirits, sweets and other foodstuffs. Several individuals were attacked, dragged through the gutters, and hurled into the Seine. The authorities were themselves to blame for issuing faulty or criminal advice.

How did the scourge pass from London to Paris, like a spark of electricity? No one knows. This capricious form of death would settle on some piece of ground, or a house, and leave everything in the neighbourhood of the infested spot untouched; then it would retrace its steps and seize on what it had forgotten. One night I felt an attack; I was seized with shivering and cramp in my legs; I did not wish to ring the bell, for fear of alarming Madame de Chateaubriand. I rose; I piled everything I could find in my room onto the bed, and crawling under the blankets again, by sweating copiously, pulled through. But I was left aching all over, and it was in this wretched state that I was forced to write my pamphlet on Madame la Duchesse de Berry’s 12000 francs.

I should not have been too sorry to go, carried off under the arm of Vishnu’s eldest son, whose distant glance killed Bonaparte on his rocky isle at the gateway to the Southern Seas. If all mankind, stricken with a common contagion, were to die, what would happen? Nothing: the Earth, depopulated, would continue on its solitary way, needing no other astronomer to plot its course than He who measures it out through all eternity; it would present no difference to the inhabitants of other planets; they would see it accomplishing its usual functions; on its surface, our petty works, our cities, and our monuments would be replaced by wilderness, restored to the sovereignty of lions; no gap would be apparent in the universe. And yet that human intelligence would be lacking which scans the stars, and even rises to the knowledge of their Creator. How great you are, O immensity of the works of God, in which the genius of man, which is equal to the whole of Nature, would no more be missed, if it vanished, than the smallest atom removed from Creation!