In 1586, the essayist Montaigne had to leave Bordeaux, where he was mayor, when the plague arrived. He and his family wandered around for six months in search of somewhere to live, but merely frightened old friends and caused horror wherever they appeared. In Savoy, rich people would first install a poor woman in their disinfected house for a few weeks, as a guinea pig, before they returned. Samuel Pepys wrote about ‘the plague making us cruel, as dogs, one to another’.5
