That which follows has perhaps the merit that it is at once a bulletin written on the field of battle during the fight, and thus bears the impress and colour of the moment. Thucydides the historian and Boccaccio the novelist have certainly left us better sketches of the kind, but I doubt whether they had sufficient calmness, while the cholera of their day was raging most terribly around, to sketch them so beautifully and in such a masterly manner as off-hand articles for the Universal Daily Gazette of Florence or Pisa.[1]
I shall, in the following pages, remain true to a principle which I have followed from the beginning of the book, which is to change nothing and to let it be printed as it was originally written, excepting, perhaps, putting in or taking out a
- ↑ In justice to Heine it should be observed that while this sentence might be misunderstood as declaring that neither Thucidydes nor Boccaccio could write so beautifully as himself under the circumstances, it really means that they could not have sketched so well as they did had they been exposed as our author was. It is less ambiguous in the French version—"Je doute s'ils eussent eu l'âme assez calme pour les faire si belles et si savantes, si pendant que le cholera de leur temps," &c. The twelve following lines are wanting in the French.—Translator.
where in heaps for many months. It is only yesterday, as I now write (April 29, 1892), that I saw in the National Museum of Florence the marvellous groups in wax, modelled after the piles of corpses in the streets in the Great Plague commemorated by Boccaccio. Yet even this appears to have been as much surpassed in its turn by the earlier scourges as the cholera of 1832 surpassed the influenza of 1891.
