Rabid Read online

  So in the medieval era, while popular storytelling lionized the hunter, the church’s symbology denigrated both him and his devoted canine huntmates; indeed, it sanctified the very animal they most avidly sought to kill. The genius of the Hubert myth is in its clever fusion of these two somewhat opposed views. Hubert, the noble-born huntsman who finds glory and mystery in the chase, is the hero, and yet the particular form of his glory is in his submission to the stag, rather than the other way around. As the huntsman to whom God revealed Himself in the chase, he becomes, in the saint-crazed cults of medieval Europe, a supernatural master of the hunt and a guardian against the most savage spirit of the dog, as incarnated in the rabid bite. The myth concludes with Hubert leaving the hunting life and entering the priesthood, after the stag tells him to call upon the local bishop. “Go and seek Lambert,” boomed the heavenly voice, “and he will instruct you.”

  Now, as for that elusive truth. We do know a few stray facts. There was a Hubert, and there was a Lambert. The latter, at the time of Hubert’s supposed conversion, was the bishop of Maastricht, in what is now the Netherlands. We also know that in roughly the year 700, while on a trip to the nearby town of Liège, Lambert was murdered, though there are two differing and equally implausible accounts that describe the precise manner of his death. One places the doomed Lambert in a villa, lying on the floor during his murder, arms extended portentously in the position of the cross; another has him at the altar, with the assassin hurling a javelin from the congregation and piercing his heart. Here, of course, we are almost certainly back in the realm of myth. (As for the fate of the murderer, who both accounts agree was a miscreant called Dodo, we are assured that divine justice was soon done, as “his hidden parts were made rotten and stinking” and then “cast forth through his mouth.”)

  Consequently elevated to the position of bishop, the historical Hubert looked into Lambert’s life and uncovered many miraculous doings. The pope soon agreed to a beatification. To house Lambert’s body and effects, Hubert built a new church in Liège, the site of the martyrdom, and made it the seat of his bishopric. And after Hubert’s own, significantly more peaceful demise in the year 727, his underlings performed a similar trick on his behalf: another inquiry, written up as an official hagiography, discovered Hubert’s own set of otherworldly interventions. To a region stricken by drought, he had brought rain. In one town, he had doused a fire. He had healed the afflicted—though none from rabies as of yet. Most dramatically, as monks had discovered some time after his death, Hubert’s very body had failed to decay: “Briefly approaching the tomb with great fear, beholding a light from within, they discovered his glorious body in the tomb solid and incorrupt.” The corpse even emitted a “miraculously sweet smell.”

  As Hubert himself had proved with the transfer of Lambert’s relics to Liège, the remains of a new saint represented a sort of spiritual and economic windfall. Some decades after Hubert’s death, a struggling abbey in the village of Andage petitioned the current bishop, Waltcaud, to allow it to obtain Hubert’s body and holy effects. Some three years elapsed before the bishop was able to bring the question to the Frankish emperor, Louis the Pious; he, in turn, left the question to the local synod, which eventually gave its assent. In the year 825, Hubert’s remains were brought to Andage, where the abbey, and soon the town, were renamed Saint-Hubert in his honor. The saint’s cult quickly grew, and with steady donations from seven centuries of sufferers and supplicants the abbey grew, too; after it burned in 1525, it was rebuilt on an even grander scale throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century. In 1607, the abbey’s hospice, which succored those patients for whom prayer did not suffice, was relocated below the abbey to a new building.

  Today, more than five hundred years later, that former hospice houses an upscale hotel and wine bar, called L’Ancien Hôpital, whose friendly young hoteliers, Hans and Ann Swaan–Van Tilborg, live there with their young son, Andreas. The hospital’s original seventeenth-century chapel remains intact, now a somewhat gloomy but (we can attest) rather comfortable guest room where guests can commune with the spirits of agonized hydrophobes while soaking in a Jacuzzi tub. One can re-create the journey to Saint-Hubert in considerably more comfort, too, with high-speed rail available for most of the journey. The trip does require a switch to a local in Liège, a drab burg whose ecclesiastical roots gave way to heavy industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—when it became known for coal and steel—and whose fortunes in the twenty-first have been diminished by competition from China. Then, from the nearby town of Libramont, the way is made by a punctual local bus with a laconic driver. Upon arrival in Saint-Hubert, if the forty-five-euro prix fixe at the former hospital strikes one as too steep, one can fully gorge for just a few euros on pommes frites and curry ketchup from the snack shop down the street. Catty-corner is the soaring facade of the mammoth church that grew from Saint-Hubert’s tiny abbey over the centuries, a behemoth that during the 1920s was elevated by Pope Pius XI to the rank of Basilica minor.

  Inside the church, visitors are greeted by a compact and serene docent of indeterminable age, Marie-Françoise Rakotovao. A native of Madagascar, Rakotovao speaks French, is learning Dutch, and is kind enough to give an English-language tour to two quizzical Americans. Though pilgrims no longer come for hydrophobia cures, the docent waxes passionate about how, at least in a metaphorical way, the healing power of Saint Hubert remains relevant to the contemporary seeker. “We have our own rabies here,” she proclaims, clutching a hand to her chest. “We are depressed. Something is wrong in our hearts. Something is wrong in our minds.”

  Throughout the basilica, in stone and enamel and wood, countless elaborate depictions attest to Hubert’s conversion legend. At the Basilica of Saint Hubert, the stag rears his holy head everywhere: carved in stone on high pedestals, next to the praying angels; in a series of meticulous woodcuts in the choir, laying out the full legend; on a statue of Hubert on the church’s very facade, peering out from behind his robes, small and docile and doglike. A full hunting party appears in aravishing oil painting that dominates the nave, the saint’s dogs cowering in confusion as the saint prostrates himself before the noble buck. The entire Hubert myth, it should be mentioned, was not original to him: it was pilfered wholesale from the almost identical legend of Saint Eustace, a former Roman general who lived in the first century A.D. (Eustace suffered enough in life, if said legend holds: he and his entire family were roasted to death inside a bronze statue of a bull.)

  Perhaps it is fitting, then—karmic, even, if we may borrow from a different creed—that so much would be quite literally stolen from Saint Hubert in the centuries after his death. Visitors can tour the crypt where his relics were once kept, but these disappeared long ago, in 1568, when the abbey was raided by the Huguenots. In the worst blow of all, the marauders also made off with Saint Hubert himself—a barbaric theft of not just the abbey’s soul but its livelihood.* In the absence of the body, attention shifted to his sacred vestment, which dates from the twelfth century (that is, four hundred years after the actual saint). Overlooked somehow by the rampaging Huguenots, the moldering stole now sits alone in a gilded display case, the centerpiece of a modest reliquary in the church’s southern transept.

  Most crucial to our own quest is an unassuming metal ring, affixed to the wall across from the vestment case, between two red padded benches. This was the site of la taille, the holy rabies treatment. From a white paper bag, the type that might normally cradle a croissant, our guide shakes out some original instruments of this treatment—a broad, dull scalpel, a metal nail the size of a golf tee—the sight of which spurs, in a visitor, the sort of sinking terror one imagines a patient felt at this point in his pilgrimage. Bound to the sturdy ring in the wall, presumably to prevent a last-minute change of plans, the patient was slashed across the forehead, and in this wound was placed a thread from the venerated vestment. The wound was then bound for nine days, during which time the patient remained in the abbey, prayin
g and fasting, dressing all in white. Combing of the hair was strictly forbidden. On the tenth day, a priest removed the bandage and burned it.

  During our visit, we asked Rakotovao when the last administration of la taille occurred at the basilica. The answer: 1919, or some four decades after the invention of the rabies vaccine. Contemplating the majesty all around, one can perhaps understand why. No set of shots in a drab doctor’s office could infuse the prevention of rabies with such a connection to history, to the natural world, to the symbology of faith. La taille was literally a form of communion, except that the blood poured was one’s own—shed so that the sins of the dog might be forgiven.

  If there was a dualism of the dog in medieval Europe, it broke down not within each dog but between rich owners and poor. The nobility carried on the Greek veneration of the well-bred dog, and in particular the hunting hound. The French aristocrat Gaston III, Count of Foix, writes in his widely read (and imitated) hunting book Livre de chasse—written circa 1388—about the ideal running hound, the chien baut, in which commingle all the finest canine attributes: not just beauty and obedience, but a nearly supernatural ability to track prey and to communicate with human masters. “The chien baut must not give up on its beast, not for rain nor wind nor heat nor any other weather,” writes Gaston, “and it must hunt its beast all day without the aid of man, just as if man were with it always.” (Gaston said he had encountered only three chiens bauts during his long life of hunting.) The Castilian king Alfonso XI recommended that the finest alaunts, a medieval hunting breed closely related to the mastiff, be allowed to live in the palace; one Portuguese prince of the fourteenth century so loved his two alaunts, Bravor and Rebez, that they slept on either side of him in his bed. Devotion to the hunt extended to the clergy as well. One medieval archbishop of Canterbury kept twenty hunting grounds of his own, while even Thomas à Becket, when serving as Henry II’s ambassador to France, insisted that hunting dogs accompany him in his retinue.

  Medieval love of the hound was not entirely a masculine province. Among the best-loved English treatises on hunting is the fifteenth-century Boke of Saint Albans, written by one Juliana Berners, prioress of the Sopwell nunnery. Penned entirely in verse, Berners’s book limns the look of the ideal greyhound: “A grehounde sholde be heeded lyke a snake: and neckyd lyke a drake: fotyd lyke a catte: tayllyd lyke a ratte,”* and so on. Indeed, the highborn woman’s devotion to hounds—and vice versa—is a common trope in accounts of medieval life, particularly regarding those women who, like Berners, resided in convents. Chaucer’s own Prioress, in The Canterbury Tales, travels with “small houndes” that she “fedde with rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-breed,” that is, white bread. (Such a fondness for dogs among nuns is amply documented in real life, too. In 1387, at roughly the same time that Chaucer was writing his “Prioress’s Tale,” the bishop William of Wykeham upbraided one particular abbey in stark terms, noting that “the alms that should be given to the poor are devoured,” and the church itself “foully defiled,” by the “hunting dogs and other hounds” in residence at the abbey. Therefore, he went on, “we strictly command and enjoin you, Lady Abbess, that you remove the dogs altogether and that you suffer them never henceforth, not any such hounds, to abide within the precincts of your nunnery.”)†

  For the poor, though, the dog took on a decidedly different cast of meaning. Medieval towns and cities were no less amenable to the scourge of semi-wild dogs than were their Roman, Greek, Egyptian, or even Mesopotamian precursors. Some of the poor did own dogs, and occasionally kept them in houses, but these likely were seen as working animals, the cost of whose nourishment (which mattered dearly in lives lived so close to bone) had to be offset through useful farm labor on their parts. A dog could be a terrible liability in a feudal society: peasants whose dogs romped in the wrong forest could incur fines, as seen in this list of English public records from the reign of Edward II: “From John de Maunchestre for one dog, 3s. From Wilto le Seriaunte for one dog, 3s…. From Wilto de Huntyngtone for one dog, because he was poor, 12d.” In other accounts, peasants who took game from the preserves of their betters found themselves blinded, castrated, or even killed. Such draconian enforcement of the hunt as a noble privilege extended so far as to include preemptive rules about dogs. It was standard practice for all commoners’ dogs living near the royal hunting forest to be “expeditated,” that is, rendered unable to run by having one or more claws hacked from a foot. Peasants could not even legally own greyhounds in England, a prohibition that dated to the eleventh century.

  Should anyone doubt the dark heart of the dog, as revealed to medieval minds, he can find particularly vivid testimony in accounts of the Black Death, which ravaged three continents between 1347 and 1350, culling (by some estimates) more than half the population of Europe and then returning intermittently for centuries. These devastating epidemics transformed half-tamed neighborhood dogs into demonic corpse eaters. Agnolo di Tura, a shoemaker in Siena, Italy, recounted seeing, during the 1347 outbreak there, “many dead throughout the city who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured their bodies.” About a 1429 resurgence in Cairo, one chronicle reports grave diggers carving out giant trenches into which bodies were slowly heaped, while dogs fed on their outer extremities. A Florentine priest described, during a 1630 plague, bodies thrown in piles

  as if they were mounds of hay or piles of wood; only, I say, if they had been hay or wood they would have been stacked more neatly; but they will be stacked there haphazardly, some half covered, some with an arm exposed, some with their head and some with their feet left as prey for the meals of dogs and other beasts.

  In painted plague scenes, dogs nosing at the corpses of the dead became a stock trope; the expression “six feet under” originated from a London health ordinance during the plague of 1665 there, with the famous prescription intended to keep men from being unearthed by man’s best friend.

  As we know today, the pathogen that causes bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, is a particularly deadly zoonosis, which persisted in its decimation of human populations only through its reservoirs in the rat. (Today Y. pestis is also known to crop up sporadically from marmots and prairie dogs.) Indeed, the animal nature of the infection was crucial to its unprecedented rates of fatality. In humans alone, an epidemic that wipes out more than a third of its victims will tend to snuff itself out for lack of new hosts, or at least evolve into a less virulent strain. But the rats—which do die from the disease, but at a far lower rate than humans—could scurry from town to town with impunity.

  From the pathogen’s perspective, humans are what epidemiologists call an “accidental host” of many zoonoses, meaning that the pathogen usually fails to complete its life cycle in man alone. In other words, it can “afford” (evolutionarily speaking) to kill humans at staggering rates, because its natural reservoir is elsewhere. Rabies’ residence in people is also, by these standards, accidental, though its inability to spread through humans largely boils down to issues of anatomy and behavior: although the virus does express itself in human saliva, humans lack a propensity to bite and the sharpened teeth with which to do it effectively. In the case of plague, the bacterium has evolved to pass most efficiently from rat to rat through a flea’s digestive tract. The millions of vulnerable humans whose skins those fleas afflicted were history’s largest class of collateral victims.

  Medieval scholars, medical and otherwise, had no inkling that the plague was originating in their rodent neighbors. The preeminent Arab physician Ibn Sīna does make an intriguing offhand remark, in his Canon of Medicine, about how a sign of pestilence is the emergence of mice and other animals, who run about as if inebriated. But in 1349, one of his intellectual heirs, Ibn Khātimah, wrote a tract theorizing that the new and terrible worldwide plague was essentially caused by bad air. He believed that in those instances where thousands died in a single day, the air had become entirely corrupted such that it was almost a different substance, like in
wells where dead animals have been cooped up to decay.

  The explanations of Christian scholars and physicians were roughly comparable. Gentile of Foligno thought the bad air entered victims through their wide pores—the wider the pores, the more susceptible the person—and was then drawn into the heart. A tractate from the medical faculty of the University of Paris held that the air had been corrupted by noxious vapors, brought on by the movement of the planets but exacerbated by the southerly winds of late. Alfonso of Córdoba likewise blamed astronomic happenings for the plague’s onset but felt that its continuing spread was due to a few very crafty individuals, taking out their enemies: