A Town Danced Until People Died. The Cure Was More Music.

Élodie Marchetti had restored eleven hundred documents for the city of Strasbourg, and she had never once hummed while she worked.

She noticed it on a Tuesday. She was lifting a ledger out of a humidity chamber, a thin book bound in cracked calfskin, and she realized she had been humming for some time. Three notes, rising. Then a skip. Then the same three notes again.

She stopped. The room went quiet except for the dehumidifier. Her foot was tapping. She made it stop, too.

The ledger belonged to a choirmaster. It recorded payments, and the payments were from the summer of 1518, which was why it had been flagged for her. Everyone in Strasbourg knew what had happened that summer, the way everyone in a town knows its one famous disaster.

In July of 1518, a woman stepped into a street in Strasbourg and began to dance.¹ She did not stop. She danced through the afternoon and into the night and through the next day, until her feet bled through her shoes. Within a week, others had joined her. Within a month, dozens of people were dancing in the streets, unable to stop, weeping and begging for help while their bodies kept moving.²

The city's doctors examined them. They ruled out curses and the stars. They decided it was a natural illness, caused by hot blood.³ And they prescribed the cure.

More dancing.

The city council cleared out two guild halls and a grain market. They built a wooden stage. And they hired musicians, drummers and pipers, to play for the dancers day and night, so they could dance the fever out of their bodies.⁴

The choirmaster's ledger was the receipt.

Élodie ran her gloved finger down the columns. Payments to pipers. Payments to drummers. Payments to "strong men" whose job, according to a note in the margin, was to hold the dancers upright when they could no longer stand, so the music could keep working on them.

Some of the dancers died. The chronicles of the time say so, though no one agrees on how many.⁵ Hearts gave out. Bodies simply collapsed in the heat. And the musicians kept playing.

On the last page of the ledger, someone had tucked a loose sheet of paper. It was music. Handwritten, in brown ink that had once been black. No title. No composer. Just a single line of notes, and at the bottom, a sentence in old German that Élodie translated twice to be sure.

Played on the eighth day. After this, they did not stop again.

She did not play it. She told herself that firmly, later, as if it mattered. She did not play it. She only read it. She was a conservator; reading notes was part of documenting a page. She looked at the line of music and her mind did what any trained mind does with written music. It heard it.

Three notes, rising. A skip. The same three notes again.

She set the page down. Her hand was shaking. Her foot was tapping, and this time when she told it to stop, it took a long moment to listen.