Since this Saturday, April 3, it is all of metropolitan France that is affected by the restrictions of the new confinement announced Wednesday by Emmanuel Macron for nearly a month.
Schools will remain closed for three weeks, and telecommuting highly recommended.
Travel throughout France is authorized until Monday to allow French people who can "go to isolate themselves", or send the children to the grandparents.
As expected, there was a big rush in the stations and on the roads.
This greening, the Tuscan writer Boccaccio had imagined in a story that has become legendary: “the Decameron”, written during the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century.
The worst scourge in the history of mankind.
“How many valiant men, how many beautiful ladies […] dined in the morning with their parents, companions and friends, and in the evening, supper in the other world with their dead.
At the beginning of the "Decameron" was horror.
In the first pages of his monumental collection, Boccaccio describes a more real, more earthly "hell" than that imagined half a century earlier by Dante in his "Divine Comedy".
Eight months of epidemic and 100,000 dead in Florence
Landed in November 1347 by the port of Marseille, the plague settled in Florence at the beginning of March 1348. It lurked there for eight months, the purging of a hundred thousand lives ... two thirds of its inhabitants!
No city in Europe (30 to 50% of the population decimated in four years of the pandemic) has paid a greater price for the "black death".
Even Paris, the largest city at the end of the Middle Ages, will not cry so much.
Tears ?
The survivors no longer have the time, the taste, or even the idea.
“Almost all came to this degree of cruelty to abandon and flee the sick and everything that had belonged to them;
and in doing so, each believed to guarantee his own salvation, ”he testifies.
“And something stronger and almost unbelievable, fathers and mothers refused to see and take care of their children, as if they had not belonged to them.
"
COR18254
The great plague of Florence of 1348. Leemage / Bianchetti
"The deadly pestilence", details the author, causes "swelling of the size of an ordinary apple", others as large as "eggs".
When it does not cause buboes in the armpits or groin, the disease gangrene the lungs or causes sinister black spots, heralding certain death.
"What gave more strength to this plague was that it communicated itself from the sick to the healthy, in the same way as the fire when one approaches it of a great quantity of dry or anointed matter.
“Social ties, political institutions, solidarities, the very structures of society… nothing can resist the scourge.
The medieval world he sees collapsing before his eyes, this son of rich merchants has already traveled.
He traveled to Paris, lived in Naples, Rome, before returning to Florence for family matters.
To the accounts, this admirer of Dante and friend of Petrarch, Tuscan like him, prefers poetry.
As the plague reaped its dead, it clings to words like a lifeline.
To write the nightmare is to exorcise it.
He attacks his “Decameron” the following year.
After a nightmarish introduction, his story takes a luminous turn.
One “Tuesday morning”, seven young women of the Florentine elite meet in front of the Santa-Maria-Novella church, after mass.
Pampinea, the oldest (28 years old), offers them to isolate themselves in the countryside.
All agree that they lack male company.
Three young people are immediately enlisted, without being asked.
Ten stories a day for ten days
A few kilometers from the walls where Florence expires, the ten heroes unearth a castle on the heights of Fiesole.
Reading Boccace, they found the key to paradise.
"Here are the gardens, here are the meadows and other places that are full of delight."
The picture looks like the one Botticelli, another native of Florence, will paint in 140 years.
They get drunk on floral scents, taste juicy fruits, rock themselves in the streaming water, play music, chat merrily, striving to forget "the shadow of the dead" and "bestial preoccupations" .
Coronavirus Newsletter
Update on the Covid-19 epidemic
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
This dream confinement lasts fourteen days, of which ten (deca-hemeron… ten days in Greek) will be devoted to very peaceful games: telling the best possible story.
Each morning, the king or queen of the day launches the theme on which the stories of their comrades must be wound up.
The fourth day is dedicated to "those who had loves ending in a tragic end".
In the eighth, they compose on the "tricks that women have played on their husbands".
All the specters of existence - love, sex (omnipresent), death, joys… - unfold.
We laugh with this groom who comes out exhausted from a convent where the nuns are never satisfied.
Only the plague, too busy killing elsewhere, is forgotten.
These hundred adventures, by turns epic, tragic, funny or satirical, spare no one.
The nobles, the beggars, the bourgeois, the defrocked priests… All take it for their rank.
From its release in 1353, the “Decameron” was a triumph.
On the literary level, this masterpiece launches the genre of the short story and imposes a little more the Italian instead of the Latin.
Many saw it as an airlock from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Let's not forget the fun.
Even today, its reading is worth all the escapes.
Le “Décaméron”,
by Boccace, Editions Gallimard, “Classic Folio” collection.