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- Another year of joy & grief,
Another year of hope and fear:
O Mother, is life long or brief?
We hasten while we linger here.
-Christina Rossetti
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- In the middle ages, the extreme fear of announcing a death bears testimony to the intermingling of primitive ritual and passionate emotionalism. The death of her father is kept a secret from the countess of Charolais, who is pregnant. During an illness of Philip the Good, the court does not dare to announce to him a single death touching him at all nearly; Adolphus of Cleves is forbidden to go into mourning for his wife, out of consideration for the duke, who is ill. The chancellor Nicolas Rolin dies: the duke is left in ignorance of his decease. Yet he begins to suspect it and asks the bishop of Tournay, who has come to visit him, to tell him the truth. "My liege, says the bishop - in sooth, he is dead, indeed, for he is old and broken, and cannot live long. - Dea! says the duke, I do not ask that. I ask if he is truly dead and gone. - Ha! my liege- the bishop retorts, he is not dead, but paralysed on one side, and therefore practically dead. - The duke grows angry. - Vechy merveilles! Tell me clearly, now, whether he is dead. Only then says the bishop: Yes, truly, my liege, he is really dead."
Does not this curious way of announcing death suggest some trace of ancient superstition, more even than the wish to spare a sick man? The anxiety to exclude systematically the thought of death denotes a state of mind analogous to that of Louis XI, who would never again wear the dress he had on, nor use the horse he was riding at the moment when evil tidings were announced to him, and who even had a part of the forest of Loches cut down where the tidings of the death of a new-born son were brought to him.
- J. Huizinga
The Waning of the Middle Ages
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