But a panic is not easily shaken off,nor is any fear so difficult to combat and defeat as the fear of the invisible.The terrors which food and drink had for a time thrust out presently returned with sevenfold force.Men looked uneasily in one another's faces,and from them to the haze which veiled all distant objects.They muttered of the heat,which was sudden,strange,and abnormal at that time of the year.And by-and-by they had other things to speak of.We met a man,who ran beside us and begged of us,crying out in a dreadful voice that his wife and four children lay unburied in the house.A little farther on,beside a well,the corpse of a woman with a child at her breast lay poisoning the water;she had crawled to it to appease her thirst,and died of the draught.Last of all,in,a beech-wood near Lotier we came upon a lady living in her coach,with one or two panic-stricken women for her only attendants.Her husband was in Paris,she told me;half her servants were dead,the rest had fled.Still she retained in a remarkable degree both courage and courtesy,and accepting with fortitude my reasons and excuses for perforce leaving her in such a plight,gave me a clear account of Bruhl and his party,who had passed her some,hours before.The picture of this lady gazing after us with perfect good-breeding,as we rode away at speed,followed by the lamentations of her women,remains with me to this day;filling my mind at once with admiration and melancholy.For,as I learned later,she fell ill of the plague where we left her in the beech-wood,and died in a night with both her servants.
The intelligence we had from her inspired us to push forward,sparing neither spur nor horseflesh,in the hope that we might overtake Bruhl before night should expose his captives to fresh hardships and dangers.But the pitch to which the dismal sights and sounds I have mentioned,and a hundred like them,had raised the fears of my following did much to balk my endeavours.For a while,indeed,under the influence of momentary excitement,they spurred their horses to the gallop,as if their minds were made up to face the worst;but presently they checked them despite all my efforts,and,lagging slowly and more slowly,seemed to lose all spirit and energy.The desolation which met our eyes on every side,no less than the death-like stillness which prevailed,even the birds,as it seemed to us,being silent,chilled the most reckless to the heart.Maignan's face lost its colour,his voice its ring.As for the rest,starting at a sound and wincing if a leather galled them,they glanced backwards twice for once they looked forwards,and held themselves ready to take to their heels and be gone at the least alarm.
