42
" Montaigne’s circumscribed sense of where his duty lay became most apparent in June 1585, when Bordeaux suffered a heat wave rapidly followed by an outbreak of plague: a particularly destructive combination. The epidemic lasted until December, and during those few months more than 14,000 people died in the city, almost a third of its population. More people were killed than in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres across the whole country, yet, as often happens with epidemics occurring in time of war, it left little trace on historical memory. In any case, plague was common. So frequent were outbreaks in the sixteenth century that it is easy to forget how catastrophic they were, each time, for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in them. "
― Sarah Bakewell , How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer