The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

Corpulent and insecure, Philip was a man of profound contradictions. Though he fought like a lion at Crécy and planned a Viking funeral for himself—the royal heart was to be sent to a church in Bourgfontaine; the royal entrails to a monastic house in Paris so as to double the number of prayers offered up in repose of the royal soul—Philip fled Paris almost as soon as the pestilence arrived. Over the next year, one catches glimpses of him at Fontainebleau, at Melun, and at the casket of his plague-dead queen, the ill-tempered Jeanne of Burgundy, but Philip does not emerge into full public view again until the early 1350s, when he shocked Paris with a heinous betrayal. The high-minded moralist who hated to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain—in Philip’s France blasphemers had their upper lip cut off—stole his eldest son’s bride-to-be, the beautiful Blanche of Navarre, a few months before the couple were to be married.