The town of Chatillon-sur-Seine lies about 100 miles south-east of Paris, north of Dijon, and exactly 300 years ago today, on March 16th, 1699, the inhabitants arose to a rather nasty shock.
From the records of the French Academy of Sciences, we learn that there fell in several parts of the town "a kind of rain or reddish liquor, thick and putrid, like a shower of blood. Large drops were seen imprinted against walls, and one wall was even splashed on both sides."
The history books contain a myriad of references to what people thought of as being "showers of blood".
Homer, for example, relates how a "shower of blood" fell on the heroes of ancient Greece as a harbinger of death; Plutarch theorised that bloody vapours, distilled from the corpses of the slain after great battles, condensed in the clouds and fell to earth again as crimson rain; and in Italy in 1117 the showers of blood caused such a panic that a meeting, not of meteorologists, but of bishops, was held in Milan to consider what their origin might be.
For the most part, these scarlet visitations were ascribed to divine or satanic interference with the elements. Some commentators, however, got closer to the truth. The Venerable Bede, for example, writing in the 8th century, said that rain thicker than usual might become blood-red "and so deceive the uninstructed".
A later colleague suggested something similar, but hedged his bets: "What the vulgar call a shower of blood is generally a mere fall of vapours tinted with vermilion or red chalk, but when blood actually does fall, which it would be difficult to deny takes place, it is a miracle due to the will of God."
The citizens of Chatillonsur-Seine, or one of them at least, were not inclined to panic about the 1699 occurrence. A local commentator noted that since both sides of a wall had been affected, it would "lead one to believe that this rain was composed of stagnant and muddy waters, carried into the air by a hurricane from neighbouring marshes."
Of this theory, a meteorologist would be obliged to caution, as did Michael Fish on a famous occasion several years ago, that hurricanes do not occur in France.
But there are also a few recorded cases on the Continent of the red deposits being, not meteorological in origin but, rather unappealingly, the excrement left by a recent plague of butterflies.