Fans of Downton Abbey, I wonder if you remember this scene from episode 8, Season 2, when many people at Downton are falling ill with Spanish flu (the year being 1918).

As one after another person staggers away from the dinner table with fever, Maggie Smith, as the Dowager Countess, remarks: “Wasn’t there a masked ball in Paris? When cholera broke out? Half the guests were dead before they left the ballroom.”

Her son, Lord Grantham, replies, “Thank you, Mamá. That’s cheered us up no end.”

The writers have done their history homework. The Parisian ball to which she’s referring happened during a deadly cholera outbreak in 1832, which claimed at least 19,000 lives. As recorded by German poet, Heinrich Heine, cholera struck suddenly at the society ball, where masked entertainers were performing.

“Suddenly the merriest of the harlequins felt a chill in his legs, took off his mask, and to the amazement of all revealed a violet-blue face,” Heine wrote. “It was soon discovered that this was no joke; the laughter died, and several wagon loads were driven directly from the ball to the Hotel-Dieu, the main hospital, where they arrived in their gaudy fancy dress and promptly died, too….”

On a related note–my son was reading Poe’s Masque of the Red Death for school, and the plot line sounds eerily similar to what happened at the Paris ball. In Poe’s story, masked revelers suddenly begin dying of a fictitious disease, which he describes as “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores.” The story was published in 1842—ten years after the Paris ball Heine wrote about. Poe may have modeled the Red Death after tuberculosis, as pretty much everyone close to Poe had expired from that disease. And yet, it also sounds a lot like cholera. There was  an outbreak of cholera in Poe’s hometown of Baltimore in 1831, and he can’t have failed to witness its ravages up close.

As we nonfiction writers like to say, you can’t make this stuff up.