A copy of the discredited production still actually exists in the handwriting of Machiavelli, with revisions inserted in the manuscript in that of his friend Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi. Villari advances the strange suggestion, that Machiavelli had merely copied out what Strozzi had composed. Is it not equally reasonable to suppose that Machiavelli had used an actual letter of Strozzi, as the basis of a casual composition? This would explain the fact that it is cast in epistolary form, as well as the apparent discrepancy of style. Francesco Berni (_c._ 1490-1536), a contemporary of Machiavelli, has apostrophized plague in one of his satirical poems or _capitoli_. A cleric, to whom indolent pleasure was the be-all and end-all of existence, he must surely stand alone among writers as one who would hug the pestilence to him as a friend.
‘The pestilence time is good—a fig for other times.... Firstly, it carries off the rabble, it destroys them, makes holes among them and thins them out—like a housewife among the geese at Allhallowtide! In the churches there are none to press upon you. Besides, none keep any record of buying or borrowing. Yea, buy and make debts, for there will be no creditors to trouble you. And if a creditor should come, tell him that your head aches, that your arm pricks, he straight will go away, and will not turn him round! If you go out, no one will cross your path: rather is place yielded to you, and honour done you, especially if you are clothed in rags. You are lord of yourself and lord of others. You can watch the folk’s strange antics and laugh at others’ fear. Life has then new laws: every pleasure is allowed.... Above all, there need be no work done. It is a choice life, serene and large: time passes very gaily from dinner time to supper.’[171]
In A.D. 1530 there was plague in Geneva,[172] which is memorable as the occasion of an accusation against certain persons of disseminating the disease by means of concocted poisons. In the spring of the year a dissolute young man, one Michael Caddod, was seen to throw down a handkerchief near a shop. Some one picked it up, and its foul smell aroused suspicion. Caddod was forthwith put to torture, and in his agony implicated Jean Placet, an unqualified surgeon in charge of the pest-house, together with his wife, son, and servant, and one Dom Jehan Dufour, priest and confessor to the pest-house. Under the influence of torture, they were driven to admit, that they had sworn solemnly on a Book of Hours to join in spreading the plague, so as to enable them to pillage the sick. Placet and his wife, they said, had prepared the poison from poultices that had been used on discharging buboes, by drying them to powder and then adding veratrum. Caddod and his wife undertook to spread it about the streets, while Placet and his wife administered it to patients in the pest-house with promptly fatal results. Suspicion fell on Placet, and a barber-surgeon, Bastian Granger, with his assistant, was instructed to keep an eye on his doings. Madame Placet was equal to the occasion and gave the pair short shrift with a dose of poison in their food. In the end Placet and Caddod were convicted. Their hands were first cut off in front of the houses of their supposed victims. Next their flesh was cruelly lacerated with red-hot pincers, and finally the headsman’s axe put a merciful end to their sufferings. Young Placet’s age obtained for him the lenient treatment of hanging, while Dufour was first unfrocked and then hanged. A rapid decline of the plague ensued on so acceptable a sacrifice.