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The Dance of Death  " With its grim ironic prediction of life as a merry dance towards the grave, the danse macabre  was a product of the later Middle Ages that had survived until the sixteenth century, when, as the medieval world view faded, it lost its moral force ... The tradition dates back to the Black Death, but the earliest surviving source for the dance is the sequence of illustrated verses inscribed in 1524 on the walls of the cemetery of Holy Innocents in Paris." Rosemary Hill, 2023, Times Witness : History in the Age of Romanticism , Penguin Books, p 243. "The Danse Macabre consists of the dead, or a personification of death, summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave ... The effect is both frivolous and terrifying ... The deathly horrors of the 14th century such as recurring famines, the Hundred Years War in France, and, most of all, the Black Death ... The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death ... increased th...