You’re now on Quai de la Quarantaine, a name that recalls an old health practice once vital in major ports. The word “quarantine”, or quarantine in english, comes from the Italian quarantina, meaning forty days, a symbolic length of time rooted in both the Bible and ancient medicine. People believed that after forty days, a disease could no longer spread. In practice, this meant that ships arriving from afar had to drop anchor; crews and passengers stayed in isolation, and goods were left out in the open air or disinfected before being allowed into town. For Honfleur, this wasn’t just precaution, it was survival. The port endured terrible ordeals, like the plague of 1631, which dragged on for eighteen months, and several cholera outbreaks in the nineteenth century. In the modern era, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Honfleur was a colonial port, bustling with foreign trade and constant health risks. Quai de la Quarantaine still bears the memory of those strict measures which, harsh as they were, shielded the population from deadly diseases brought in from the sea.