A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at
Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of
those possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the
same time at Metz, the streets of which place are said to have
been filled with eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their
ploughs, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic
duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city
became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires
were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild
enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery,
availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary
livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants
their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those
possessed, and greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection.
Above a hundred unmarried women were seen raving about in
consecrated and unconsecrated places, and the consequences were
soon perceived. Gangs of idle vagabonds, who understood how to
imitate to the life the gestures and convulsions of those really
affected, roved from place to place seeking maintenance and
adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this
disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of
this kind the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance
as by the reality.
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