Isn't it already too late? On July 31, 1720, the parliament of Aix forbade the Marseillais to leave the city, and the inhabitants of Provence to enter into contact with them. The kingdom's oldest city, the "gateway to the Orient", is now cut off from the world. Damned. Leper.
It was necessary to resolve to put the Marseille city under a bell, to enclose it in its misfortune. For weeks, evil crept sneakily into the old city, slipping under the gates of the gnarly and unhealthy streets. Marie Dauplan, a 58-year-old laundrywoman, fell first, on June 20, struck down in a few hours at her home, rue Belle-Table. A week later, a tailor, Michel Cresp, died with his wife. On July 1, two women were discovered on rue de l'Echelle, with buboes around their mouths.
Mountains of fabrics and Oriental sheets
Against all evidence, doctors do not detect the plague. It had mowed half the city in 1580, but since then, the killer bacillus, while continuing to wreak havoc in the Levant, had been forgotten in the city of Marseille. Out of amnesia and neglect, Marseille has dropped its guard. Fatal error ... As for the notables, they prefer as often to look elsewhere, where their interests flourish. In this summer of 1720, they converge on the Beaucaire side, 80 km away. In anticipation of the great fair which is held there from July 22, the merchants of Marseille brought from the East mountains of cloths and sheets.
Le Grand-Saint-Antoine, which dropped anchor in the port of Marseille on May 25, brought back from the Levant (Syria and Lebanon) for 300,000 pounds of silk and cotton balls. A small fortune that must swell the pockets of several sponsors, starting with the captain of the boat, or one of the most prominent magistrates in the city. Except that nothing goes as planned ...
Around the port, the victims multiply at the beginning of July: ten, twenty, fifty expire daily ... Little by little, the doctors dispatched to the scene make the connection: all the dead have been in contact with the goods of Grand-Saint- Antoine: the laundress, the tailor, to the porters in charge of unloading them. The boat should never have had the right to dock so close to the city: ten people had died on board, carried away by lightning fevers, before its arrival on May 25! The ship should logically have been placed in extended quarantine, and its cargo burned down. But a sordid mixture of pressures and incompetences decided otherwise.
It is now too late to stop the ongoing disaster. "In our city, health is very good," dare to write the Marseille aldermen (magistrates in charge of municipal affairs) on July 24. On the 31st, Marseille is put under a bell, and simmers in its pestilential bath. Gangrene eats away at the other districts, the corpses are buried under quicklime, then thrown into the street. At the end of August, at the height of the crisis, the ghost town becomes depopulated with a thousand inhabitants a day! "God declares war on his people," prophesies a city priest, who will lose - until the end of the epidemic, in October - more than a third of his population, estimated at 90,000 people.
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As for the sanitary cordon erected around the Marseille city, it does not stop anything. Provence, where the wealthiest Marseillais fled to their country houses, is in turn attacked by rat fleas. Until distant Gévaudan, which will have to do with another "beast" half a century later.
