Eben Diskin

I

On July 31st, 1518, a woman stepped onto the Rue de Maroquin and started to dance. She was about thirty, red-haired and attractive, and did not look insane. But she must have been. At about nine-thirty in the morning, a half-hour before the Ecclesiastical Procession was set to walk down the same road, she stood in the middle of the street and moved to a melody no one else could hear. She twirled on her heels and tossed back her hair, rolled her hips and clicked her shoes on the cobblestones. The spectators cried, “Troffea! Troffea! Look there, it’s Frau Troffea!”
            Frau Troffea was a schoolteacher, well-known and well-admired in Strasbourg, and yet she had planted herself directly in the way of the procession. It was unlike Troffea to mock the church. She always gave to collections, confessed twice a week, and was currently educating her students about the beheading of John the Baptist. Yet there she danced, obstructing the newly appointed Bishop Delacroix as daylight poured over the cathedral spire.
            The clerics marched with great solemnity from the Place Gutenburg toward Strasbourg Cathedral, and Bishop Delacroix was most solemn of all. When Frau Troffea did not move aside he had a flurry of terrible premonitions. She looked like a woman possessed, existing in another world with sounds only she could hear. The people of Strasbourg had never seen anything like it — an Ecclesiastical Procession made to walk around a woman dancing on the street. It seemed to upend the natural order of things. For the bishop, a bad omen indeed.
            By dusk everyone drifted away to their homes and beds, gossiping as they went about the strange woman on the Maroquin. Troffea danced dreamily under the waxing moon. Come morning she would disappear, they thought. Surely she would disappear, and the curious dancing would be merely a bizarre memory. 

II

Strasbourg was not a ravaged city, but it was a melancholy one. It had not always been so. In the previous century — the Happy Century, the elder citizens called it — the sandstone cathedral was completed, and it was taller than the Egyptian pyramids. The detail was so intricate it was almost inconceivable. Crowds gathered day and night to study the tympanum depicting Christ in childhood, the magi, and Herod’s Massacre; they memorized the statues in the jamb, female Virtues trampling the beasts of Sin underfoot; they pored over the precision, the beauty; they circled the octagonal tower and entered to meet the gaze of the rose window, alight with every earthly color. The astronomical clock signaled the hour. A sound more powerful than any groan from the depths of Giza.
            God was popular in the Happy Century. He had just given France victory over England. Though they weren’t privy to the details, the people of Strasbourg suspected their country had gained some parcels of land and maybe some gold too. At the very least, a few more years of life had been earned for the boys who had gone to fight in Rouen and Castillon.
            In the young years of this new century — plainly called the 16th — God had fallen out of favor. The Great Pox caused boils to bubble under the skin and sent the sufferer into fits of agony. Leprosy shortened fingers and curled toes, filled the eyes with pus, stained the skin, and once the man was completely undone, it killed him. Despite it all, some still said, “better to bleed in Strasbourg than perish abroad.”
            France had got itself entangled again, not only with Englishmen this time, but Spaniards, Swiss, Italians, and God knew who else. By 1512 Strasbourg seemed to be missing half its men. Husbands returned to diseased, terminal women. Wives embraced limbless heroes, and their wails reverberated louder than the chimes of the astronomical clock.
            The second decade of this new, seemingly Unhappy Century was dragging to a pitiful end when Frau Troffea took to the street.

III

By midmorning the next day, few were absent from the scene on the Rue de Maroquin. Elie Blanchet was one of them. Elie lived in the Petite-France quarter among the fishermen, and worked as a barber by the river. Most of the barber surgeons had gone to Italy to amputate legs, bandage the wounded, and leech blood from sickly soldiers. Not Elie. The idea of men dying around him, dying in his arms, bleeding out over their bandages, made him nauseous, and he often wondered if he was in the wrong profession. Though trained as a surgeon Elie preferred the shears and the razor, only occasionally performing minor surgical procedures when moved by a particularly anguished patient. Some called him a coward, but none disputed that his hands were the steadiest in Strasbourg. 
            It was Monday, and the shop was curiously slow. Fishermen usually poured in on these warm, windless days — fish were scarce in such conditions — but today they were all watching the curious dancing woman on the Maroquin.
            Marius the clockmaker walked in. As punctual as his timepieces, he appeared every third Monday for some conceited conversation and a trim.
            “Streets smell like carp,” he said, pinching his nose. “They always smell like carp.”
            Elie cleaned his shears and smiled, for Marius’ complaints were always the same.
            “That means the fishermen’s nets are full lately. Otherwise we’d have no fish in the market and nothing to eat.”
             “Ah, yes, carp and pickerel, carp and pickerel. Beggars come to my door, skin peeling or red with boils. If it wasn’t the only thing to eat these days I would happily give them a sack of fish just to get it out of my house. Carp and pickerel. Remember when we had good food in the market? Maybe the woman on the Maroquin will say a prayer for us.”
            “You mean the madwoman? Is she still there?”
            “They say so. They also say three others joined her in the night. A coach driver, a drunk, and a little girl. All dancing. It’s bad for business. Instead of remembering to buy a timepiece, people are watching a woman dance around all day. She should be arrested and sent to Italy,” he continued with a chuckle. “Might distract the Spaniards with a waltz. That’s how wars are won. One side takes its eye off the target.”
            Sometimes Elie wanted to squish Marius under his thumb. He could have done it too. At twenty-three years old the barber stood tall at over six feet with hands like rakes, while Marius was a hunched, balding little thing. All the watchmaker talked about was what was good for business and what was not, and Elie began to think he was not a man at all but a giant ticking automaton.
            A customer with dark hair sat down, waiting his turn, while Marius droned on about war. He described the Alpine region as if he had been there. He outlined tactics he would employ as general of the infantry, and explained how easily he could kill someone with a falchion blade.
            “Oh!” he cried, slapping his hand to his cheek. Elie had nicked him with the shears. “Careful, or I will look like one of the boys returning from Italy, missing hands, legs and ears.”
            Elie whipped the smock from his neck and tossed a handful of powder in his face. Abruptly, the appointment was over. As the watchmaker left the shop and rounded the corner he felt a hand on his shoulder. Turning, he saw the dark-haired customer looking at once fierce and melancholy.
            “Have you no heart,” he said to a fearful Marius, “to say such things to Elie Blanchet?”
            Marius was quick to cower. “What do you mean?”
            “Blanchet’s brother perished three years ago on the plains of Marignano. He took a bullet to the arm. It was amputated, they say, but still he did not survive.”
            “His brother! My God, I didn’t know he had one. What was his name?”
            “I would not ask,” said the man, already turning back toward the barber shop, “or next time he’ll take off the whole ear.”      

IV
             
On a typical day sundown meant fishing boats docking in the pier, men crossing the covered bridges on their way home, and women flooding out of the markets, but today sundown meant silence. Elie passed onto the Boulevard de la Victoire, where half-timbered houses craned over him, and not a soul was in sight except a pair of boys in the road.
            Each held the end of a rope, trying to pull the other into a puddle of mud. Elie was no stranger to Tug-O-War. He had been good at it as a child, though he only ever had one opponent.
             Tristan Blanchet was four minutes younger than Elie, but not nearly the physical specimen. He was six inches shorter and shaped like a globe, with small, slippery hands. Tristan lost all their games of strength, but laughed his good spirited laugh until he fooled everyone into thinking he had won. That is why, when he announced his intention to fight in the king’s infantry four years ago, there was much astonishment in the Blanchet house. He did not have the temperament for war. He was the boy with a weak grip who always fell in the mud. He played squire while Elie hacked through the trees and slew cyclopes, and yet the squire was going to war and the knight was not. Indeed, Elie was a beast of a man, with arms like tree-trunks and a hard, confident face, but the very idea of war — of blood-stained falchions, of canon-blasts, of dead men — scared him white.
            Today, the smaller boy pulled the larger into the mud. Elie scratched his face and walked past them toward the Rue de Maroquin. The cathedral came into view, and for the first time since he could remember, his eyes were drawn away from the spire. Now he understood why the streets were desolate, why no one roamed the Petit-France quarter. It seemed all the people of Strasbourg — certainly all of his customers — were on the Rue de Maroquin, gathered at the foot of the cathedral.
            “Maybe Marius has a point,” he thought. “Maybe it is bad for business.”

V

From his private apartments in the cathedral, Bishop Delacroix watched the scene unfold. That morning there had been four dancers. Now, at sundown, he saw sixteen. One by one they joined the madwoman, all of them corrupted by the same spirit, jolting their feet with nervous, excitable energy. With each new dancer the crowd grew, applauding and hollering like an audience at a theatre.
            Delacroix looked at Frau Troffea with disdain. To obstruct yesterday’s procession, she must be an agent of Martin Luther, an envoy of heretic philosophies. If she had vandalized the North Portal or held a priest hostage, he could have had her jailed, but she merely danced, a smile on her face — on all their faces. It was like they had forgotten the times they were living in, oblivious to disease, and famine, and war.
            “Fishermen, weavers, a twelve-year-old girl, a coach-driver, some drunks and a fire-haired heretic,” he stewed, pacing before the window. “No, it is not Martin Luther’s doing. Could it be God’s work? Because I turned away those beggars last week without giving them my blessing? I prayed for them that night, my Lord, but the sight of their pockmarked faces was too much to bear. Black skin and rotting fingers. That’s your fault, not mine.”
            He regretted his words just then and said a silent prayer. Servants of God are notoriously mild-mannered, but Delacroix had a violent temper. He never directed it toward a man or woman, only God himself.
            “Of all the doorsteps, why send this woman to mine? A thousand cities, a thousand ages of the world, but she appears here, today, at the very start of my bishopric to make a mockery of me. You are many things, Lord, but rational is not one of them.”
            As usual, God did not reply. Delacroix sank into his chair and stared out the window. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen — a seventeenth dancer had now stepped forward. A man who resembled a tree. He stood awkwardly at first, his hands like leafy branches at his sides, and then he began to move. Stiffly, as if against all his natural instincts, he tossed his hands in the air and turned clockwise. He looked as if he had never danced in his life.
            “Your sense of humor is dark indeed,” said the bishop. “That is the most melancholy dancer I have ever seen.”

VI

Moments ago Elie Blanchet had merely been a spectator. The little girl danced as a child would, and the drunkard moved like a drunkard, but Elie had never seen a dancing barber before, and had no guesses about what it should look like. Besides, what would his mother say? Tristan always joked that she was tougher than a Swiss vanguard. They might aim their guns at your heart, but their bullets didn’t pierce as deep as Louise Blanchet’s words.
            She may have been the only mother in France who never wanted boys. “If I’d had a daughter, she wouldn’t be so cowardly,” she often told Elie.
            A broad woman, with shoulders like a steer and a head of wild black hair, she bore a faint resemblance to Frau Troffea. But Troffea smiled, and Elie did not think his mother had ever smiled. Perhaps when she got Tristan’s letters from Italy, but those were slight, barely-there smiles. They lingered only a second before fading into the gray stone of her face. Tristan was born an awkward boy, doomed to take up an unremarkable trade, an unremarkable wife, and disappear into one of Strasbourg’s arcades. As luck would have it, Italy got him first. He had killed men and chased honor.
             "Tristan would dance,” thought Elie. “His feet are clumsier than mine, but he would dance and look foolish and mother would applaud anyway, because heroes are allowed to be foolish.”
            Again Troffea tapped her heel on the cobblestone. Two, three, four times, almost melodically. As if tugged by an invisible hand, Elie stepped out of the crowd and with the timidity of a child, looked for instruction, for someone to tell him what to do next. But the dancers would not have noticed a falling star, no less Elie standing nervously among them. His hands tingled with fear, and he was about to retreat backwards into anonymity when cheers rose from the crowd around him.
            “Allez! Allez!” they shouted, smiles on all their faces.
            Though he was not relaxed by any measure, the tingling had left his hands. It felt absurd that only two hours ago he had been trimming a man’s head. A traceable line did not exist between the barbershop and the Maroquin. To explain logically how he had come from there, and arrived here, would have been impossible. At first it concerned him. Then he moved his feet, raised his hands to the sky as if they were lifted by strings from heaven, and everything else fell away.

VII
           
Two and a half weeks passed, and the audience on the Rue de Maroquin had disappeared. Not because the dancers had dispersed, but because the audience got bored of being an audience. Like theatergoers leaping from their seats onto the stage, the people of Strasbourg — gradually, then in great floods — joined the oval of dancers until the Maroquin bristled like the body of an enormous, colorful centipede. Maybe a hundred. Maybe two hundred. They were too many to count, and too diverse to catalogue, though the gendarmes certainly tried.
            At the request of the Royal Provost, the gendarmes corralled dancers into designated areas. Mounted and armored, as if responding to an English incursion, they directed the dancers into the grain market and guild halls in an effort to clear the thoroughfares. Mainly, though, it was to placate Bishop Delacroix. The largest gathering on the Rue de Maroquin was directly in front of the cathedral’s West Portal, and Delacroix complained that they were blocking the way into the church.
            The Provost was not a religious man and not very concerned with church attendance, but wanted nothing to do with God’s wrath. The gendarmes had never seen such agreeability. They were used to wars, where there was always resistance, no laughing and certainly no pirouetting. The dancers, however, went along obediently, as long as they could keep dancing.
            They were led to the grain market, a bazaar of blue and yellow canopies; to the Bakers Guild, a covered pavilion abutting Madame Colette’s bakery, where the air smelled like cinnamon tarts; to the Painter’s Guild, a spacious hall of colorful canvases; and to the Fraternity of Stonemasons, whose quarry sat where the River Ill met the North Gate. That was where Elie found himself, amid dust and rock.
            An apprentice of the Painter’s Guild, a young man of rare ability, became enthralled by the dancers. Battle-scarred men danced the Carola with clean, handsome women. Unwashed bakers danced the Galliard with courtiers. Landlords danced with tenants whose rent was overdue, and children with boils and blackened skin twirled together. Mesmerized by mirth and merriment, the painter never guessed that they hadn’t had a proper meal in days, and naught to drink but rainwater. Their legs were sore from standing, their arms tired from swinging. All the muscles in their body melted under the August sun, but ecstasy threw a bright, beautiful curtain before their pain.
            The young artist, not yet allowed patrons of his own, set up his canvas and started with the first thing that captured his eye. A gendarme spun Frau Troffea in a circle, and the artist dipped his brush in scarlet.  

VIII

Sunday came and the Cathedral of Strasbourg was empty. Quiet as a windless grotto, the only living thing inside was Bishop Delacroix, and even he didn’t seem alive. After pacing the ambulatory for the past hour, he now sat on the floor bathed in light from the colorful windows.
            “You have a knack for omens,” he said, staring skyward at the domed ceiling. “Now it’s obvious the glory of the last century is nothing but a fond, distant memory, and the way ahead is dark. If war and disease weren’t enough, you had to send a dancing madwoman to make your point. There is no salvation in sight for Strasbourg.” He stretched out his arms as if for an embrace. “But must you compromise my authority too? I will be remembered forever as ‘the bishop who drove Christ out of Strasbourg’ and it’s your fault!”
            Delacroix fell silent. He heard the whistling of a flute outside, accompanied by the buoyant rhythm of a dulcimer. It came from the east, then travelled closer toward the Rue de Maroquin and the cathedral. The twang of a lute joined in softly. The musicians were right on schedule.
            That morning, on finding all the pews empty, Delacroix had appealed to the Royal Provost.
            “No argument will persuade them,” he pleaded. “They cannot hear anything except the music in their heads. So let us speak their language. Give them flute-players and harpists, give them a tune, and they may follow it to the pews.”
            The plucking of harp strings soon joined the other instruments and Delacroix felt, for an awful moment, like Martin Luther himself. A heretic nailing notes to doors, using trickery to amass a following. His mind was lost in a maze of its own construction.

IX

The musicians’ music trickled into every home, every business, onto every river barge and over the green hills of Alsace. Though the mason’s quarry was far from the thoroughfares the melodies still floated there on a dusty wind. Elie heard the music, but he was not aware of it. It reached his ears but lingered on the lobes, so deep was his state of reverie.
                It had been nearly a week. Occasional rain kept him nourished, but he grew weak from hunger, from heat, from exhaustion. Dust blew up noses. The sun bore down, and though men had coughing fits or were soaked in sweat, they did not seem to care. Elie’s thoughts, which had been many and rapid, now dripped like honey from a pot. They did not matter to him anymore. No one mattered, nothing mattered, except dancing.
                “Look at him,” Elie mused, vaguely aware that a man had just collapsed in front of him. The man was missing an ear, probably from the fighting in Italy. “Guns didn’t get him, or the falchions, but dancing will be his death. Funny. They will give him a grand tomb. Maybe I will have a view of it from the little rock they will give me.”
                Elie’s thoughts were coherent, but came to him through a thick fog, and he scarcely comprehended them. The earless soldier turned pale and rolled onto his side. He did not seem to suffer. His face was not in agony, but serene as an ebbing tide.
                “He will be looked-for. Found. Wept over. They will say words about him. Certainly, he was no coward.”
                Elie himself was not impervious to the heat. His head was cloudy. His body burned like the innards of a volcano, and he kept glimpsing strange things around him. Marius, the annoying watchmaker, sitting calmly on an ashlar block waiting for his haircut. Two children playing Tug-O-War.
                “She will not look for me,” he thought, a headache raging behind his eyes. “What a disgrace, to die dancing. Girls are meant to dance. If only I was one, she would understand. Or if I was missing an ear. Then she would look for me.”
                A dizzy spell overcame him, and he steadied himself against a face of granite. Death was not distant. Elie knew it, slipping in and out of consciousness until he could not keep his eyes open. Every muscle was spent. Every organ deflated. The will to dance had fled his body like a poltergeist, and through fluttering lids he saw a stately man in front of him. A sergeant with gold epaulets, with medals gleaming on the breast. One arm was missing, but with the other he rested his hand on his stomach in dignified fashion. He smiled at Elie but Elie could not smile back. The bones in his face had stopped working. He just closed his eyes and plunged into a black unconsciousness.  

X

The heroes of Italy were the first to stop dancing. Their bodies caved like thin straw, while the rest danced with unbroken rhythm. After the soldiers were the diseased and sickly. Those with the Great Pox had dramatic heat flashes, which even the euphoria of dancing could not mask. Many fainted as they stumbled out of the guild halls and through the North Gate, and a few never again rose to their feet.
            In the pavilion of the Baker’s Guild, a woman sank to her knees and then lay motionless on her stomach. Her muscles were strained to the point of explosion. Her body was like gelatin. A man in the Painter’s Guild, covered in boils, had one of those boils explode in the heat, and passed out from the pain. Even the young and healthy were overcome with fatigue.
            Disheartened by his fruitless exchanges with God, Bishop Delacroix walked aimlessly through the streets. Stepping over exhausted bodies, squeezing through crowds of dancers struggling to carry on, to lift their heavy feet, the scene reminded him of a battlefield without the blood. He reached the North Gate and overlooked the quarry. There the ruin was greatest, or it seemed so, because the dust kicked up by dancing feet stirred like a sandstorm. Delacroix remembered the starving nomads in the desert Sinai.
             “Look at them,” he thought. “Happy to dance and die, yet I, trying to save them all, am miserable.” He removed the cloth about his head and let it fall to the ground. “I may have mistreated those beggars with the Pox, but God, if this dancing plague is your doing, you are more wretched than I.”
             With those words he returned to the cathedral, surveyed the empty house of worship and climbed atop a pew. With a shiver and a sigh he hummed along to the flutes and danced a modest dance.
            The doors opened. Drawn by the music, a girl twirled into the cathedral, and she was followed by her father. A few young men trickled in behind, their feet moving to the music, and Delacroix saw them but did not come down from the pew. He had no words for them, no explanations, so they just danced together in silence in the nave of the great cathedral.
           
            Elsewhere, the scene in the Painter’s Guild had turned dire. One by one the dancers became aware of their own suffering, and dispossessed of their impish spirit, descended into misery. The young artist sat unmoved by the window. He was determined to capture the scene no matter what terrible new form it took. Only when one woman abruptly stopped dancing did he rest his brush. Frau Troffea stood hunched, her hand clutching her chest, breathing faster and faster until she crumbled to the floor. She got to one knee and tossed her red hair, tried to stand but fell backwards. For the first time since she stepped out onto the Rue de Maroquin, her body stopped moving.
            The passing of Frau Troffea shook the artist. He couldn’t continue painting with her body lying there like stone. The scene had changed. It was not the same picture anymore. Glancing soberly behind him, the young artist fled the Guild with the canvas under his arm.

XI

A candle flickered on the nightstand, lending light to a black room. The apothecary had intended to catch a few hours of sleep, but his patient’s condition was improving. Dehydration and heat exhaustion had left him inert and unresponsive for nearly twelve hours. He was not expected to see the sunrise. About midnight he opened his eyes to a dim silhouette sitting in the corner, and the apothecary sprang from his chair and stooped over the bed.
            “He is awake, Mrs. Blanchet! Or so it seems.”
            The woman came quickly into the room, her face long and tired. She knelt by the bedside and put her hand to Elie’s cheek.
            “He looks pale. See to that.”
            The apothecary had grown somewhat fearful of Mrs. Blanchet and obediently went to fetch food from the kitchen.
            “You are better now, aren’t you, Elie?” she said sternly.
            He thought he was having a fever dream, and nodded unconvincingly.
            “Good. No more dancing, do you hear? No more. Dangerous business for the weak-hearted.”
            The apothecary returned with a goblet of water and a flank of beef. He set them down on the nightstand and laughed.
            “I told her you were not likely to wake today, but she cooked it anyhow. It’s not too cold.”
            Louise Blanchet scowled at the apothecary. “He is tired. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?”
            “I should stay to make sure the food goes down. Hunger nearly killed him, you know.”
            “Did it? I found him lying there like a plank of wood, didn’t I? I hauled him here and put him in bed and asked him, ‘Elie, tell me right now. Are you alive or dead?’ And hearing no answer, I decided that he was not dead, but as you say, ‘nearly.’ I did all of that and I don’t plan to do it again. Goodnight now.”
            The apothecary left Mrs. Blanchet alone with her son. For the first time he could remember, Elie looked up at his mother and was not afraid of her.
            “Eat that,” she ordered, “and forget about work tomorrow. People are too busy dancing or dying to get a haircut anyway.”
            She turned to leave but Elie held her back by the fabric of her gown.
            “You came to the quarry?” he sputtered weakly.
            Mrs. Blanchet looked at the flank of beef, at the candle, the open window — everywhere but into Elie’s eyes.
            “I lost one boy already. Losing another is unacceptable.”
            She left the room in a huff.

XII

The dancing epidemic was over. Many recovered and returned to their daily routines as though there had been no interruption. Others, especially those weakened by battle wounds, had perished. Those who survived followed the music to the cathedral that Sunday, joining their fellow dancers, and widows and widowers, to pray for the fallen. Elie and his mother sat in front. Everywhere Elie saw people he recognized. He remembered one man from the Rue de Maroquin, when he first entered the oval.  Across the aisle was the dancing weaver, her hair long and black. The gendarme who had led Elie through the North Gate sat in front of him, and nearby was a beggar who had danced with him in the quarry. Everyone’s eyes wandered, searching their memory, and the mood was not somber but nearly nostalgic.
            Bishop Delacroix stood behind the altar. They were waiting for him to draw back the curtain and explain what had happened. They were waiting for enlightenment. But he had prepared no sermon, no inspired address.
            “I wish I could wave my hand through the fog and point yonder,” he began, “toward a port at the edge of the water. But the horizon is endless, and my boat is wayward. God’s puzzles are not always solvable. We had words, He and I, but our conversations turned sour so I shut my lips. Perhaps that was best.”
            The bishop looked out at his congregation and saw confused, frightened faces. At last they found their way to his pews, but they had looked happier in the grip of the dancing plague.
            “I will not pretend to speak for God, only as Bishop Delacroix, who prayed night and day for Him to lift this plague from our city. Of all the sinful people and all the corrupt cities in the world, I cursed Him for possessing Strasbourg with this sickness. I think, though, that it wasn’t a sickness at all. Not a plague, or a curse, but I suspect a baptism of sorts. A boiling bath that relaxes, cleanses, and burns the skin all at once.”
            He reached below the altar and drew a flute from the base.
            “Consider it a blessing. Having emerged from the bath, we are cleansed of disease, of war, of nonsense. Tabula rasa. That’s the future of Strasbourg.” 
            Delacroix blew a note on the flute, adjusted his fingers, and carried on with a sweet, soulful melody.
 
            When Mass was over crowds poured out of Strasbourg Cathedral. Elie and his mother crossed the covered bridge over the river Ill where artists and musicians lingered. One artist caught Elie’s eye. He was not peddling a collection of hastily drawn pictures, as most did, but a single painting rife with color and detail. Countless figures crowded the canvas. Some were ugly, some had missing fingers or warts on their faces, and yet they were leaping with delight, waving their hands in careless abandon. The woman in the foreground — red-haired and beaming, in the midst of a graceful twirl — was the centerpiece of a chaotic celebration.
            Elie turned to the young painter and said,
            “What do you call it?”
            The painter looked around cautiously.
            “I have a name in my head but apprentices aren’t supposed to name paintings, let alone paint them. Do you promise not to tell anyone at the Guild?”
            “I promise.”
            “Well then,” the painter drew himself up proudly. “I call it The Happy Century.”
             “Happy century!” said Mrs. Blanchet, incredulously. “Young man, your satire is not appreciated.”
            Elie knew about the Happy Century, but had always linked those words with a bygone age. Nothing about this century had been happy. Even its most jubilant moment, the dancing epidemic — he preferred to call it an extravaganza — was fraught with suffering. But it felt, somehow, like a necessary suffering, an exorcism of Strasbourg’s more traumatic demons. Mindless dancing was no architectural marvel or victory over the English, but it was extraordinary in its own way. It was brilliantly absurd, beautifully confusing, and it would never happen again in this generation or the next. Perhaps that was enough to save this new century.
            As Elie left with his mother, he caught the young painter’s eye, which seemed to answer,
            “Not enough, but a start.”