[Sidenote: Miracle of the "Cimetiere des Innocents."]

The smile of Heaven, it was said by the Roman Catholic clergy, rested upon the effort to extirpate heresy in France. They convinced the people of the truth of their assertion by pointing to an unusual phenomenon which they declared to be evidently miraculous. In the Cimetiere des Innocents and before a small chapel of the Virgin Mary, there grew a white hawthorn, which, according to some accounts, had for several years been to all appearance dead. Great then was the surprise of those who, on the eventful St. Bartholomew's Day, beheld the tree covered with a great profusion of blossoms as fragrant as those flowers which the hawthorn usually puts forth in May. It was true that no good reason could be assigned why the wonder might not with greater propriety be explained, as the Protestants afterward suggested, rather as a mark of Heaven's sympathy with oppressed innocence. But no doubts entered the minds of the Parisian ecclesiastics. They spread abroad the fame of the prodigy. They rang the church-bells in token of joy, and invited the blood-stained populace to witness the sight, and gain new courage in their murderous work. It may well be doubted whether either the hawthorn or the virgin of the neighboring chapel wrought the wonderful cures recorded by the curate of Meriot.[1051] But certainly the reported intervention of Heaven setting its seal upon treacherous assassination prolonged the slaughter of Huguenots. "It seemed," says Claude Haton, reflecting the popular belief, "that God, by this miracle, approved and accepted as well-pleasing to Him the Catholic uprising and the death of His great enemy the admiral and his followers, who for twelve years had been audaciously rending His seamless coat, which is His true Church and His Bride."[1052] And so, what with the encouragement afforded by the wonderful thorn-tree of the Cimetiere des Innocents—what with the continuous fair weather, which was interpreted after the same manner, the task of extirpating the heretical Huguenots was prosecuted with a perseverance that never flagged. It is true that the greater part of the work was done in the first three or four days; but it was not terminated for several weeks, and many a Huguenot, coming out of his place of concealment with the hope that time might have caused the passions of his enemies to become less violent, was murdered in cold blood by those who coveted his property. Several thousand persons were butchered in Paris alone during the first few days, besides these later victims; precisely how many, it is useless and perhaps impossible to fix with certainty.[1053]

[Sidenote: The king's first letter to Mandelot.]

Meantime it became necessary to explain to the world the extraordinary tragedy which had been enacted on so conspicuous a stage. Each of the different parties to the nefarious compact, with that easy faith which characterizes great criminals, had expected to satisfy its own resentment at the sole expense of the honor and reputation of the others. The king and his mother, while securing the death of Coligny and a few other personal enemies, were not unwilling to have the world believe that the entire occurrence had been an outburst of the old animosity of the Guises against the Chatillons. In fact, this was distinctly stated in the circular letter of Charles IX., despatched on the very Sunday on which the massacre began, to the governors of the principal cities of the realm. "Monsieur de Mandelot"—so runs one of these extraordinary epistles—"you have learned what I wrote to you, the day before yesterday, respecting the wounding of the admiral, and how that I was about to do my utmost in the investigation of the case and the punishment of the guilty, wherein nothing has been forgotten. Since then it has happened that the members of the house of Guise, and the other lords and gentlemen who are their adherents, and who have no small influence in this city, as everybody knows, having received certain information that the friends of the admiral intended to avenge this wound upon them—since they suspected them of being its cause and occasion—became so much excited that, between the one party and the other, there arose a great and lamentable commotion. The body of guards which had been posted around the admiral's house was overpowered, and he was killed with some other gentlemen, as there have also been others massacred in various parts of this city. This was done so furiously that it was impossible to apply such a remedy as could have been desired; for I had as much as I could do in employing my guards and other forces to retain my superiority in this castle of the Louvre,[1054] so as afterward to take measures for allaying the commotion throughout the city. At the present hour it has, thank God, subsided! It occurred through the private quarrel which has long existed between these two houses. Always foreseeing that some bad consequences would result from it, I have heretofore done all that I could to appease it, as every one knows. There is in this nothing leading to the rupture of the Edict of Pacification, which, on the contrary, I intend to be maintained as much as ever."[1055]

In view of the undeniable fact that Charles affixed his signature to this letter in the midst of a horrible massacre for which he himself had given the signal, which he still directed, and concerning whose progress he received hourly bulletins from the municipal authorities, it must be admitted that the king showed himself no novice in the ignoble art of shameless misrepresentation.

[Sidenote: Guise throws the responsibility on the king.]

Guise, on his part, was not less solicitous to relieve himself of responsibility, and to lay the burden upon the king's shoulders. We have seen that, at the very moment of Coligny's assassination, he began to repeat the words: "It is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!" as his warrant for the crime. As the massacre grew in extent he and his associates became more reluctant to be held accountable for it,[1056] and at last they forced Charles to acknowledge himself its sole author. The queen mother and Anjou, it is said, were mainly instrumental in leading the monarch to take this unexpected step. His original intention had been to compel the Guises to leave the capital immediately after the death of Coligny—a movement which would have given color to the theory of their guilt. But it was not difficult for Catharine and Henry to convince him that by so doing he would only render more irreconcilable the enmity between the Guises and the Montmorencies, who plainly exhibited their intention to exact vengeance for the death of their illustrious kinsman, the admiral. In short, he would purchase brief respite from trouble at the price of a fresh civil war, more cruel than any which had preceded.[1057]

[Sidenote: The king accepts it.]

[Sidenote: The "Lit de Justice."]

It was on Tuesday morning, the twenty-sixth of August, that the king formally and publicly assumed the weighty responsibility. After hearing a solemn mass, to render thanks to Almighty God for his happy deliverance from his enemies, Charles, accompanied by his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Alencon, by the King of Navarre, and by a numerous body of his principal lords, proceeded to the parliament house, and there, in the presence of all the chambers, held his "Lit de Justice."[1058] He opened this extraordinary meeting by an address, in which he dilated upon the intolerable insults he had, from his very childhood, experienced at the hands of Coligny, and many other culprits, who had made religion a pretext for rebellion. His attempts to secure peace by large concessions had emboldened Coligny so far that he had at last ventured to conspire to kill him, his mother, and his brothers, and even the King of Navarre, although a Huguenot like himself; intending to place the Prince of Conde upon the throne, and subsequently to put him also out of the way, and appropriate the regal authority after the destruction of the entire royal family. In order to ward off so horrible a blow, he had, he said, been compelled to resort to extreme measures of rigor. He desired all men to know that the steps taken on the preceding Sunday for the punishment of the guilty had been in accordance with his orders. He is even reported to have gone farther, and to have invoked the aid of parliament in condemning the memory and confiscating the property of those against whom he had alleged such abominable crimes.[1059]

[Sidenote: Servile reply of parliament.]

[Sidenote: Christopher de Thou.]

To this allocution the parliament replied with all servility. Christopher de Thou, the first president, lauded the prudence of a monarch who had known how to bear patiently repeated insults, and at last to crush a conspiracy so dangerous to the quiet of the realm. And he quoted with approval the infamous apothegm of Louis the Eleventh: "Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare." The solitary suggestion that breathed any manly spirit was that of Pibrac, the "avocat-general," to the effect that orders should be published to put an end to the work of murder and robbery—a request which Charles readily granted.[1060] Never had the supreme tribunal of justice abased itself more ignobly than when it listened so complaisantly to the king, and approved without qualification an organized massacre perpetrated unblushingly under its very eyes. As for the distinguished man who lent himself to be the mouthpiece of adulation worse than slavish, we are less inclined to commiserate the difficulty of his position than to pity the ingenuous historian who strives to touch leniently upon a fault of his father which he can neither conceal nor palliate.[1061] We may credit his assertion that his father remonstrated with the king in private with respect to that for which he had praised him in public, and that Christopher de Thou marked his detestation of that ill-starred day by applying to it the lines of Statius:

Excidat illa dies aevo, ne postera credant Saecula: nos certe taceamus, et obruta multa Nocte tegi propriae patiamur crimina gentis.

But we cannot forget that this was not the first time that Christopher de Thou "accommodated" his words or his actions to the supposed "exigencies of the times." He was a member of that commission that sentenced Louis of Conde to death, in deference to the desires of another king and his uncles, the Guises; and the prince would doubtless have lost his head in consequence, but for the sudden death of Francis the Second. Since that time he had repeatedly acquiesced in the bloody sentences of the Parisian parliament. His voice was never heard opposing the proscription instituted in the late civil wars, even in the case of the atrocious sentence against Gaspard de Coligny. If we concede to his son that no one was of a less sanguinary or of a milder disposition than President De Thou, we must also insist that few judges on the bench displayed less magnanimity or conscientiousness.[1062]

[Sidenote: Ineffectual effort to inculpate Coligny.]

But it was not a simple congratulatory address that Charles, or his mother, required of his parliament. Tyrannical power is rarely satisfied with the mere acquiescence of servile judges; it demands, and ordinarily obtains from them, a positive indorsement of its schemes of successful villainy. It was necessary—especially, as we shall see later, after the cry of horror was heard that rose toward heaven from all parts of Europe on receipt of the tidings of the massacre in Paris and elsewhere—to palliate its atrocity by affixing to the slain Huguenots, and above all to Coligny, a note of rebellious and murderous designs against the king and the royal family. And here again the Parliament of Paris was as pliant as its rulers could desire. Coligny's papers, both in Paris and at Chatillon-sur-Loing, were subjected to close scrutiny; but nothing could be discovered to warrant the suspicion that any seditious design had ever been entertained by him. In default of something better, therefore, the queen mother endeavored to make capital out of two passages of these private manuscripts. In one—it was, we are told, the will of the admiral, written toward the end of the third civil war[1063]—he dissuaded Charles from assigning to his brothers appanages that might diminish the authority of the crown. Catharine triumphantly showed it to Alencon. "See!" said she; "this is your good friend the admiral, whom you so greatly loved and respected!" "I know not," replied the young prince, "how much of a friend he was to me; but certainly he showed by this advice how much he loved the king."[1064] With Walsingham a similar attempt was made to deprive the murdered hero of Queen Elizabeth's sympathy, but with as little success. "To the end you may see how little your mistress was beholden to him," said Catharine de' Medici one day to the English ambassador, "you may see a discourse found with his testament, made at such time as he was sick at Rochel, wherein, amongst other advices that he gave to the king my son, this is one, that he willed him in any case to keep the queen, your mistress, and the King of Spain as low as he could, as a thing that tended much to the safety and maintenance of this crown." "To that I answered," says Walsingham, "that in this point, howsoever he was affected towards the queen my mistress, he showed himself a most true and faithful subject to the crown of France, and the Queen's Majestie, my mistress, made the more account of him, for that she knew him faithfully affected to the same."[1065]

[Sidenote: Coligny's memory declared infamous.]

[Sidenote: Petty indignities.]

The complete absence of proof of all designs save the most patriotic, and, on the other hand, the clear evidence that Coligny sought for the quiet and growth of the religious community to which he belonged, only in connection with the honor and prosperity of his own country, did not deter the pliant parliament from pursuing the course prescribed for it. A little more than two months after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (October the twenty-seventh, 1572), the admiral's sentence was formally pronounced. He was proclaimed a traitor and the author of a conspiracy against the king; his goods were confiscated, his memory declared infamous. His children were degraded from their rank as nobles, and pronounced "ignoble, villains, roturiers, infamous, unworthy, and incapable of making a will, or of holding offices, dignities or possessions in France." It was ordered that his castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing should be razed to the ground, never to be rebuilt, and that the site should be sown with salt; that the trees of the park should be cut down to half their height, and a monumental pillar be erected on the spot, with a copy of this decree inscribed upon it. His portraits and statues were to be destroyed; his arms, wherever found, to be dragged at the horse's tail and publicly destroyed by the hangman; his body—if any fragments could be obtained, or, if not, his effigy—was to be dragged on a hurdle, and hung first on the Greve and then on a loftier gibbet at Montfaucon. Finally, public prayers and a solemn procession were ordered to take place in Paris on every successive anniversary of the feast of St. Bartholomew.[1066]

Thus was the memory of one of the noblest characters that illustrated the sixteenth century pursued with envenomed hatred, after death had placed Coligny himself beyond the power of the murderous queen mother to inflict more substantial injury upon him. To his mortal remains all that malice could do had already been done. What remained of a mutilated body had been taken from the hands of those precocious criminals, the boys of Paris, and hung up by the feet upon the gallows at Montfaucon.[1067] A great part of the capital had gone out to look upon the grateful sight. Charles the Ninth was of the number of the visitors, and, when others showed signs of disgust at the stench arising from the putrefaction of a corpse long unburied, is said to have exclaimed "that the smell of a dead enemy is very sweet."[1068] Great was the merriment of the low populace; copious were the effusions of wit. Jacques Copp de Vellay, in his poetical diatribe, published with privilege—"Le Deluge des Huguenotz"—sings with great delight of

Mont-Faulcon, ou les attend Ce grand Gaspar au curedent, Attache par les piedz sans teste.[1069]

At last, four or five days after Coligny's death, a body of thirty or forty horse, sent by Marshal Montmorency, took down the remains by night, and gave them decent burial.[1070]

[Sidenote: A jubilee procession.]

[Sidenote: Charles declares that he will maintain his edict.]

Not content with the public admission of his responsibility for the massacre which he had made before the parliament, Charles with his court participated two days later (Thursday, the twenty-eighth of August) in the celebration of a jubilee, and walked in a procession through the streets of Paris; at successive "stations" rendering thanks to Heaven, with fair show of devotion, for the preservation of his own life, and the lives of his brothers and of the King of Navarre. It would have served greatly to give a color of plausibility to the report of the conspiracy of the Huguenots, could Navarre and Conde have been prevailed upon to appear in the king's company on this occasion. But it must be mentioned to their honor, that they were proof against the persuasions as well as the threats of Charles.[1071] The same day a royal declaration was published, reiterating the allegations made in the Palais de Justice, but protesting that the king was determined to maintain his edict of pacification. As, however, the Protestants were forbidden for the present from holding any public or private assemblies for worship, it must be admitted that they were not far wrong in regarding the declaration as only another part of the trap cunningly devised for their destruction.[1072]

[Sidenote: Forced conversion of Navarre and Conde.]

Although the conversion of the young King of Navarre and his cousin, the Prince of Conde, did not occur until some weeks later, it may be appropriately mentioned here. No means were left untried to gain them over to the Roman Catholic religion. The sophistries of monks were supplemented by the more dangerous persuasions of a renegade Protestant minister, Hugues Sureau du Rosier, formerly one of the pastors of the church of Orleans.[1073] Whatever excuse his arguments may have furnished by covering their renunciation of their faith with the decent cloak of conviction, fear was certainly the chief instrument in effecting the desired change in the Huguenot princes. There is no room for doubt that the character of Charles underwent a marked change, as we shall see later, from the time that he consented to the massacre. He became more sullen, more violent, more impatient of contradiction or opposition. It is not at all unlikely that a mind never fully under control of reason, and now assuredly thrown from its poise by a desperation engendered of remorse for the fearful crime he had reluctantly approved, at times formed the resolution to kill the obstinate King of Navarre and his cousin. On one occasion Charles is said to have been deterred by the supplications of his young wife from going in person to destroy them.[1074] At length, when the alternative of death or the Bastile was the only one presented, the courage of the Bourbons began to falter. Navarre was the first to yield, and his sister, the excellent Catharine de Bourbon, followed his example. On the thirteenth of September the ambassador Walsingham wrote: "They prepare Bastile for some persons of quality. It is thought that it is for the Prince of Conde and his brethren."[1075] But three days later (the sixteenth of September) he wrote again: "On Sunday last, which was the fourteenth of this month, the young Princess of Conde was constrained to go to mass, being threatened otherwise to go to prison, and so consequently to be made away. The Prince of Conde hath also yielded to hear mass upon Sunday next, being otherwise threatened to go to the Bastile, where he is not like long to serve."[1076] Such conversions did not promise to prove very sincere. They were accepted, however, by the king and his mother; although both Navarre and Conde were detained at court rather as prisoners than as free princes. Pope Gregory the Thirteenth received the submission of both cousins to the authority of the See of Rome, recognized the validity of their marriages, and formally admitted them to his favor, by a special bull of the twenty-seventh of October, 1572.[1077] In return for these concessions Henry of Navarre repealed the ordinances which his mother had made for the government of Bearn, and re-established the Roman Catholic worship.[1078]

FOOTNOTES:

[925] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 25, 26.

[926] No dispensation was ever granted until after the marriage, and after Henry of Navarre's simulated conversion to Roman Catholicism. Then, of course, there was no need of further hesitation, and the document was granted, of which a copy is printed in Documents historiques inedits, i. 713-715. The bull is dated Oct. 27, 1572. There is, then, no necessity for Mr. Henry White's uncertainty (Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 370): "The new pope, Gregory XIII., appears to have been more compliant, or the letter stating that a dispensation was on the road must have been a forgery."

[927] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.), 569; Lo stratagema di Carlo IX. re di Francia, contro gli Ugonotti, rebelli di Dio e suoi; descritto dal signor Camillo Capilupi, e mandato di Roma al signor Alfonzo Capilupi. Ce stratageme est cy apres mis en Francois avec un avertissement au lecteur. 1574. Orig. ed., p. 22.

[928] Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX. (Cimber et Danjou, vii. 78.)

[929] "Avec certain formulaire que les uns et les autres n'improuvoyent point." Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, vii. 79.

[930] As De Thou here speaks as an eye-witness of the marriage, I follow his description very closely. Histoire univ., iv. (liv. lii.) 469, 470. Agrippa d'Aubigne was not in Paris (Memoires, edit. Pantheon, p. 478), and his account is meagre and deficient in originality. Hist. univ., ii. 12 (liv. i., c. 3). It is quite in keeping with the brave Gascon's character, that, having come to Paris some days before, in order to obtain a commission to command a company of soldiers which he had raised for the war in Flanders, he had been obliged to leave almost instantly upon his arrival, because he had acted as the second of a friend in a duel, and wounded in the face an archer who endeavored to arrest him. Tavannes makes Coligny suggest the removal of the ensigns taken from the Protestants as "marques de troubles," and playfully claim for himself the 50,000 crowns promised to any one who should bring the admiral's head. Memoires, ed. Petitot, iii. 293.

[931] Memoires de l'Etat, ubi supra, pp. 79, 80; De Thou, ubi supra. I have not deemed it out of place to describe some of the diversions with which the French court occupied itself on the eve of the massacre. The connection between reckless merriment and cold-blooded cruelty is often startlingly close. Besides this, the finances of the country were so hopelessly involved, as the consequence of the late civil wars, that this lavish expenditure was particularly ill-timed. If old Gaspard de Tavannes was as blunt as his son represents him to have been, he gave Charles some good, but, like most good, unheeded advice. "Sire," said he, a propos of the extravagance of the court at Guise's marriage in 1570, "you should make a feast, and instead of the singers who are brought in artificial clouds, you should bring those who would tell you this truth: 'You are dolts! You spend your money in festivals, in pomps and masks, and do not pay your men-at-arms nor your soldiers; foreigners will beat you!'" Memoires, ed. Petitot, iii. 183.

[932] I had translated this letter from the copy given by the Memoires de l'estat de France (apud Archives curieuses, vii. 80, 81), which agrees substantially with, and was probably derived from, the version given in Hotman's Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 106, 107. On comparing it, however, with the transcript of the original autograph in the remarkable collection of the late Col. Henri Tronchin, given by M. Jules Bonnet in the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. francais, i. (1853), 369, I discover extraordinary discrepancies, and find that, in addition to a different phraseology in every sentence, one clause is inserted by Hotman of which there is not a trace in the Tronchin MS. I refer to the words: "Soyez asseuree de ma part que, parmi ces festins et passe-temps, je ne donneray fascherie a personne"—which would, of course, point to the prevailing fears of a collision between the admiral and the young Duke of Guise, or his retainers, whose hatred of Coligny was so well known that Charles IX. had issued a special injunction to the parties to keep the peace. The letter contains at the commencement of the postscript a playful allusion to the hope of his wife soon to be a mother.

[933] Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 88, 89; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 570. The mechanical part of these exhibitions was well executed. In the "enfer" there were "un grand nombre de diables et petis diabloteaux faisans infinies singeries et tintamarres avec une grande roue tournant dedans ledit enfer, toute environnee de clochettes." The singer, Etienne le Roy, was again the "deus ex machina," coming from heaven and returning thither, in the character of Mercury mounted upon a gigantic bird. The final explosion inspired so much consternation among the spectators, that it effectually cleared the hall.

[934] They were married at Blandy, a castle belonging to the Marquise de Rothelin, near Melun, where its ruins are still to be seen (Saint-Fargeau, Dict. des communes de France, s. v.), about a week before the marriage of Navarre, August 10, 1572. Tocsain contre les massacreurs (Arch. curieuses, vii. 42). Marie of Cleves was a daughter of the Duke of Nevers, and sister of Catharine of Cleves, Prince Porcien's widow, whom Henry of Guise had married in Sept., 1570. Journal de Jehan de la Fosse, 146.

[935] It is astonishing to see what considerable distances the Protestants were obliged to go in order to enjoy any religious privileges, and what fatigue they willingly underwent in order to avail themselves of them. In 1563, immediately after the close of the first civil war, instead of being assigned a place for worship in the suburbs, according to the terms of the edict, the Protestants of Troyes were told to go to Ceant-en-Othe—full eight leagues, or about twenty-four miles; nor could they obtain justice by any remonstrances with the court! As they went to Ceant, in spite of its inconvenient distance, and of the death of several children taken thither to be baptized, the Romanists, in 1570, actually proposed to remove the Protestant preche still farther off, to Villenauxe, thirteen leagues from Troyes! Happily, after a while, they availed themselves of the hospitality of a feudal lord nearer by. Recordon, Le protestantisme en Champagne (MSS. of N. Pithou), 136, etc., 149, 163.

[936] Ibid., pp. 168, 169. The Roman Catholics of Troyes sent, about the middle of August, two deputies to get the Protestant place of worship removed from Isle-au-Mont, who were present at the massacre.

[937] Baschet, La diplomatie venitienne, p. 540.

[938] This confession exists in manuscript in the National Library of Paris (Fonds de Bouhier, 59), under the heading: "Discours du Roy Henry troisiesme a un personnage d'honneur et de qualite estant pres de sa majeste, sur les causes et motifs de la St. Barthelemy." It is printed in an appendix to the Memoires de Villeroy (Petitot ed., xliv. 496-510). Its authenticity is vouched for by Matthieu, the historiographer of Louis XIII., and is corroborated by its remarkable agreement with what we can learn from other sources. Cf., especially, Soldan, Frankreich und die Bartholomaeusnacht, 224-226. Some suppose that M. de Souvre, and not Miron, was the person with whom the conversation at Cracow was held. Martin, Hist. de France, x. 315.

[939] Discours du Roy Henry III., Mem. de Villeroy, 499, 500.

[940] See J. Bonnet, Vie d'Olympia Morata (Paris, 1850), 20, etc.

[941] Discours du Roy Henry III., ibid., p. 501. The nuncio, Salviati, informs us that young Guise urged his mother herself to kill Coligny.

[942] The article on the massacre in the North British Review for October, 1869—an article to which I shall have occasion more than once to refer—brings forward a number of passages in the diplomatic correspondence, especially of the minor Italian states, pointing in this direction. They can all, I am convinced, be satisfactorily explained, without admitting the conclusion, to which the writer evidently leans, of a distinct, though not a long premeditation.

[943] "Mad. la Regente venuta in differenza di lui, risolvendosi pochi giorni prima, gli la fece tirare, e senza saputa del Re, ma con participatione di M. di Angiu, di Mad. de Nemours, e di M. di Guisa suo figlio; e se moriva subito non si ammazzava altri," etc. Salviati, desp. of Sept. 22, 1572, apud Mackintosh, Hist. of England, vol. iii., Appendix K. It will be remembered that these despatches were given to Sir James Mackintosh by M. de Chateaubriand, who had obtained them from the Vatican. I need not say how much more trustworthy are the secret despatches of one so well informed as the nuncio, than the sensational "Stratagema" of Capilupi, which pretends (ed. of 1574, p. 26) that Charles placed Maurevel in the house from which he shot at Coligny, on discovering that the admiral had formed the plan of firing Paris the next night. To believe these champions of orthodoxy, the Huguenots were born with a special passion for incendiary exploits. It does not seem to strike them that burning and pillaging Paris would not be likely to appear to Coligny a probable means of furthering the war in Flanders. Besides, what need is there of any such Huguenot plot, even according to Capilupi's own view, since he carries back the premeditation of the massacre on the part of Charles at least four years?

[944] Le Reveille-Matin des Francois, etc., Archives curieuses, vii. 173; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi (1574), i. 33. It has been customary to interpret this language and similar expressions as covertly referring to the massacre which was then four days off. But this seems absurd. Certainly, if Charles was privy to the plan for Coligny's murder, he must have expected him to be killed on Friday—that is, within less than two days. If so, what peculiar significance in the four days? For, if a general massacre had been at first contemplated, no interval of two days would have been allowed. Everybody must have known that if the arquebuse shot had done its work, and Coligny had been killed on the spot, every Huguenot would have been far from the walls of Paris long before Sunday. As it was, it was only the admiral's confidence, and the impossibility of moving him with safety, that detained them.

[945] Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 1574. Orig. ed., pp. 24, 25, and the concurrent French version, pp. 42, 43. This version is incorporated verbatim in the Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX. (Archives curieuses), vii. 89, 90. In like manner the "Memoires," which are in great part a mere compilation, take page after page from the "Reveille-Matin."

[946] "Ainsi qu'il sortoit presentement du Louvre, pour aller disner en son logis." Charles's letter of the same day to La Mothe Fenelon, Corresp. dipl., vii. 322.

[947] It is of little moment whether the assassin at his window was screened by a lattice, or by a curtain, as De Thou says, or by bundles of straw, as Capilupi states. I prefer the account of the "Reveille-Matin," as the author tells us that he was one of the twelve or fifteen gentlemen in Coligny's suite—"entre lesquels j'estoy" (p. 174). So the Latin ed., Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, i. 34.

[948] The Rue de Bethisy was the continuation of the Rue des Fosses Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, through which he was walking when he was shot. In the sixteenth century the street bore the former name, beginning at the Rue de l'Arbre Sec, at the corner of which Coligny appears to have lodged. In later times the name was confined to the part east of Rue de Roule. Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, iv. 259. The extension of the Rue de Rivoli, under the auspices of Napoleon III., has not only destroyed the house in which Coligny was murdered, but obliterated the Rue de Bethisy itself.

[949] "Qu'il n'aviendroit que ce qu'il plairoit a Dieu." Reveille-Matin, 175; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi (1574), i. 35; Memoires de l'estat, 94.

[950] See ante, chapter xvi.

[951] Reveille-Matin, ubi sup., 175; and Euseb. Philad. Dialogi. i. 34, 35; Memoires de l'estat, ubi sup., 93, etc.; Jean de Serres (1575), iv. fol. 25; Tocsain contre les Massacreurs (orig. ed.), 113, etc.; Registres du Bureau de la ville de Paris (Archives curieuses, vii. 211); despatch of Salviati of Aug. 22. App. F to Mackintosh, Hist. of England, iii. 354; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 574; Jehan de la Fosse, 147, 148; Baschet. La diplomatie venit., 548.

[952] Memoires de l'estat, ubi sup., 94; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fols. 25, 26; Reveille-Matin, 176; Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 35; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 574.

[953] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, Archives cur., vii. 45; Reveille-Matin, 177; Memoires de l'estat, 98.

[954] Gasparis Colinii Vita (1574), 108-110; Memoires de l'estat de Charles IX., ubi supra, 94-98. The two accounts are evidently from the same hand.

[955] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 98.

[956] Damville, Meru and Thore, were sons of the constable. Their eldest brother, Marshal Francis de Montmorency, whose greatest vice was his sluggishness and his devotion to his ease, had left Paris a few days before, on the pretext of going to the chase. His absence at the time of the massacre was supposed to have saved not only his life, but that of his brothers. The Guises would gladly have destroyed a family whose influence and superior antiquity had for a generation been obnoxious to their ambitious designs; but it was too hazardous to leave the head of the family to avenge his murdered brothers.

[957] There was no need of going far, Coligny responded, to discover the author. "Qu'on en demande a Monsieur de Guise, il dira qui est celuy qui m'a preste une telle charite; mais Dieu ne me soit jamais en aide si je demande vengeance d'un tel outrage." Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 104, 105.

[958] Gasparis Colinii Vita, 114-121; Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 102-106. The two accounts agree almost word for word. There is a briefer narrative in Reveille-Matin, 178, 179; and Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, i. 37.

[959] Discours du roy Henry III., ubi supra, 502-505.

[960] Le roi a Mandelot, 22 aout, Correspondance du roi Charles IX. et du sieur de Mandelot (Paris, 1830), 36, 37.

[961] Corresp. dipl. de La Mothe Fenelon, vii. 322, 323.

[962] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 106, 107.

[963] Ibid., 108.

[964] There is here, however, a direct contradiction, which I shall not attempt to reconcile, between the account of Henry and that of the younger Tavannes, who represents Retz as one of the most violent in his recommendations. According to Tavannes, it was his father, Marshal Tavannes, that advocated moderation. In other respects the two accounts are strongly corroborative of each other.

[965] Discours du roy Henry III., 505-508.

[966] Memoires de Gaspard de Saulx, seigneur de Tavannes, by his son, Jean de Saulx, vicomte de Tavannes (Petitot edition), iii. 293, 294.

[967] "Reginam quidem certum est dictitare solitam, edita strage, 'se tantum sex hominum interfectorum sanguinem in suam conscientiam recipere.'" Jean de Serres (ed. of 1575), iv., fol. 29. The whole passage is interesting.

[968] "Le roy Henry quatriesme disoit que ce qu'il ne m'avoit tenu promesse estoit en vengeance des services faicts par le sieur de Tavannes mon pere aux batailles de Jarnac et Montcontour, mais le principal, parce qu'il l'accusoit d'avoir conseille la Sainct Barthelemy; ce qu'il disoit a ses familiers, et a tort, parce que ledict sieur de Tavannes en ce temps-la fut cause qu'il ne courust la mesme fortune que le sieur admiral de Coligny." Memoires de Tavannes (Petitot edit.), iii. 222.

[969] To ascribe the conduct of Catharine de' Medici herself to any such motive is the extreme of absurdity. Even the author of the "Tocsain contre les massacreurs" rejects the supposition without hesitation. (Original edition, p. 157.) Catharine was certainly a free-thinker, probably an atheist.

[970] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 108.

[971] Ibid., 109.

[972] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 110, 111.

[973] Ibid., 111; Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 124.

[974] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 112.

[975] Reveille-Matin, ubi supra, 179; Memoires de l'estat, ubi sup., 113.

[976] Capilupi, 30, 31; Mem. de l'estat, ubi sup., 107, 108.

[977] Extrait des Registres et Croniques du Bureau de la ville de Paris, Archives curieuses, vii. 213.

[978] The successive orders are given in the Archives curieuses, vii. 215-217.

[979] Discours du roy Henry III., 509.

[980] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 121; Mem. de l'estat, ubi sup., 116; Jean de Serres, iv. (1575), fol. 31.

[981] Jean de Serres, iv. (1575), fol. 30.

[982] Mem. de l'estat, ubi sup., 117, 118; Jean de Serres (1575), iv. 32.

[983] The startling inconsistency evidently struck Capilupi very strongly, for he tries to reconcile it, but succeeds only poorly. According to him, it was either a ruse to throw Charles IX. off his guard by a pretence of confidence in his good faith, or an act of consummate folly. Any way, great thanks are due to Heaven! "Et sia stato fatto questo da lui, o con arte, per dimostrar di non dubitare della fede del Re, per tanto piu assicurar sua Maesta, fin che fosse in termine d'effettuar i diabolici suoi pensieri; o vero scioccamente, non diffidando veramente di cosa alcuna; in tutti modi si ha da riconoscer da gratia particolare di Dio," etc. Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 1574, 80.

[984] The topography of the massacre is made the subject of a paper, entitled: "Les victimes de la Saint-Barthelemy," Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., ix. (1860) 34-44.

[985] G. Colinii Vita (1575), 127. Mem. de l'estat, ubi sup., 114.

[986] Mem. de l'estat, 118, 119; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 32; Reveille-Matin, 180; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi (1574), 39, 40.

[987] Joh. Wilh. von Botzheim, in his narrative, gives several versions of the words. According to one they were: "Behem—'N'est tu pas Admiral?' Admiralius—'Ouy, je le suis. Mais vous estes bien un jeune souldat pour parler ainsi avec un vieil capitaine, pour le moins au respect de ma vielesse.' Behem—'Je suis assez aage (age) por te faire ta reste.'" Cyclopica illa atque inaudita hactenus detestanda atque execranda laniena, quae facta est Lutetia, Aureliis, etc., published in F. W. Ebeling, Archivalische Beitraege zur Geschichte Frankreichs unter Carl IX. (Leipsic, 1872), 107, 108.

[988] Capilupi puts in Besme's mouth the words: "Now, traitor, restore to me the blood of my master, which thou didst impiously take away from me!" It is not at all improbable that he used some such expression. Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 34.

[989] Jean de Serres, De statu reipub. et rel. (1575), iv., fols. 32, 33; Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 119-122; Vita Gasparis Colinii Castellonii, magni quondam Franciae Amirallii (sine loco, 1575), pp. 127-131; 178-180. These latter accounts, which agree perfectly, are the best. Reveille-Matin, ubi sup., 182, and Euseb. Philad. Dialogi (1574), i. 39, 40; Tocsain contre les massacreurs (Rheims, 1579), 121-123; Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX. (1574), 33, etc.; Journal d'un cure ligueur (Jehan de la Fosse), 148, 149; Relation of Olaegui, secretary of D. de Cuniga, Spanish ambassador at Paris; Particularites inedites sur la St. Barthelemi, Gachard in Bulletins de l'Academie royale de Belgique, xvi. (1849), 252, 253; Alva's bulletin prepared for distribution, ibid., ix. (1842), 563. Both are very inaccurate. De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 584, 585; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 16 (liv. i., c. 4).

[990] "Le lundy d'apres, ayant la teste ostee et les parties honteuses coupees par les petits enfans, fut d'iceulx petits enfans qui estoient jusques au nombre de 2 ou 300, traine, le ventre en haut, parmy les ruisseaux de la ville de Paris." Jehan de la Fosse, 149. See the long account in Von Botzheim's narration, ubi supra, 113.

[991] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 122.

[992] Letter of Mandelot to Charles IX., Sept. 5, 1572, Correspondance du roi Charles IX. et du sieur de Mandelot (Edited by P. Paris, Paris, 1830), 56-58.

[993] Of this memorable enterprise Coligny has left "Memoires" which are contained in the collection of Petitot, etc. It is the only military treatise we possess coming from the admiral's hand, and it enters into the subject with technical minuteness. The destruction by his royal murderers of the admiral's papers (including diaries that would have thrown great light upon the transactions of the last two years of his life), see Vita Gasparis Colinii (1575), i. 138, was an irretrievable loss to history. We are told also of a much more recent act of vandalism, not even palliated by the miserable excuse of political expediency: "In 1810, an inhabitant of Chatillon having discovered in the solitary remaining tower of the old castle a walled chamber wherein were the archives of the Coligny family and of the family of Luxemburg, burned all the papers from motives of private interest. Some fragments that escaped this conflagration, and which are preserved in the mairie, prove that a correspondence between Catharine de' Medici and Coligny had been laid away in this repository." Bulletin de la Societe de l'histoire du prot. francais, iii. (1854) 351.

[994] Ante, chapter xiii.

[995] Testament olographe de l'amiral Coligny, Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. francais, i. (1852) 263, etc. The authenticity of this document, though called in question on historical grounds, has been conclusively established by M. Jules Bonnet, Bulletin, xxiv. (1875) 332-335.

[996] Alberi, Relazioni Venete, vol. iv., 1st series, apud Baschet, La diplomatie venitienne, i. 536, 537. There is, however, the greatest improbability in the story that Coligny advanced such claims in his own behalf as his admirers made for him. We may reject as apocryphal—for they stand in palpable contradiction with the whole tenor of his utterances—the words ascribed by Lord Macaulay to the great Huguenot hero (History of England, New York, 1879, iv. 488): "'In one respect,' said the Admiral Coligni, 'I may claim superiority over Alexander, over Scipio, over Caesar. They won great battles, it is true. I have lost four great battles; and yet I show to the enemy a more formidable front than ever.'" Cf. Davila, bk. v., p. 179.

[997] Vita Gasparis Colinii (1575), pp. 133-137, translated by D. D. Scott, under the title, "Memoirs of the Admiral de Coligny," 183-187. I have abridged the account by omitting some less important particulars.

[998] Discours sur les causes de l'execution faicte es personnes de ceux qui avoient conjure contre le Roy et son estat. A Paris, a l'olivier de P. l'Huillier, rue St. Jacques. 1572. Avec privilege. (Archives curieuses, vii. 231-249.) Capilupi, Lo stratagema di Carlo IX., 1574, p. 26.

[999] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 123; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 30; Reveille-Matin, 182; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, i. 40.

[1000] "La Royne ma mere respond, que s'il plaisoit a Dieu je n'auroit point de mal; mais quoy que ce fust, il falloit que j'allasse, de peur de leur faire soupconner quelque chose qui empeschast l'effect."

[1001] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 32, 33.

[1002] See ante, chapter xvi.

[1003] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 123, 124; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 34; Reveille-Matin, 182; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, i. 40; Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 125, 126.

[1004] Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18 (liv. i., c. 4).

[1005] Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, 345.

[1006] Reveille-Matin, ubi supra, 183; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, i. 40; Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 126. Charles was not generally so complaisant. Fervaques in vain interceded for his friend Captain Moneins. Tocsain, 126.

[1007] Mem. de l'estat, ubi sup., 124; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 35; Reveille-Matin, 182; Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 40; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 590.

[1008] "Avec une contenance fort esmeue et abatue." Mem. de l'estat. "Humilissimo animo et consternate ore." Jean de Serres, ubi supra.

[1009] Jean de Serres's "consternatiori tamen animo" is an evident misprint for "constantiori tamen animo."

[1010] Memoires de l'estat, 124, 125; Jean de Serres, iv., fol. 35 verso; Reveille-Matin, 183; Eusebii Philad. Dial. (1574), i. 40; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 590; Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. univ., ii. 19 (liv. i., c. 4).

[1011] Eusebii Phil. Dialogi, i. 40, 41; Reveille-Matin, ubi sup., 183, copied verbatim in Mem. de l'estat, 126. The Reveille-Matin removes the apparent contradiction between the various accounts respecting the bell that gave the signal for the massacre by showing that both bells were rung. So also Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 16 (liv. i., c. 4), after mentioning how Catharine, for the time being, removed Charles's hesitation by alleging the necessity of cutting off the corrupt members in order to save the Church, the Bride of Christ, and citing the saying: "Che pieta lor ser crudele. Che crudelta lor ser pietosa," adds: "Le roi se resout, et elle avance le tocsain du Palais, en faisant sonner une heure et demie devant celui de Sainct Germain de l'Auxerrois." By neglecting the clue thus given, the chronological order of the events of the day has been lost by a number of historians. It will be noticed that the number of the royal guards reported to have been slain was, strangely enough, derived from that of the Huguenot gentlemen butchered in the Louvre by those very guards. The story may have been perpetuated by misapprehension of the facts; it could have arisen only from wilful falsehood.

[1012] Tocsain contre les massacreurs (Rheims, 1579), 124, 125; Reveille-Matin, 126; Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, i. 41; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 586.

[1013] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 125; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 586; Euseb. Philad. Dialogi, ubi supra.

[1014] "The courtiers and the soldiers of the royal guard were the executioners of this commission on the (Huguenot) noblesse, terminating, they said, by the sword and general disorder, those processes which pens and paper and the order of justice had hitherto failed to bring to an issue." Reveille-Matin, ubi supra, 184; Eusebii Philad. Dialogi, i 41; Memoires de l'estat, 127.

[1015] Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18.

[1016] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 136, 137.

[1017] Reveille-Matin, ubi supra, 184, 185; Eusebii Philad. Dial., i. 42; Mem. de l'estat, 127; Jean de Serres (1575), iv. 38; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 588; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 18. The minor details of the story are given, with variations, by different authors. D'Aubigne gives us Biron's answer to the commands and menaces with which Madame de la Chataigneraie sought to gain possession of young La Force: "I would certainly intrust him in the hands of his relative, in order to take care of him, but not in the hands of his next heir, who took too great care of him yesterday morning," ii. 21. It must be noted, however, that the "Memoires authentiques de Jacques Nompar de Caumont, Duc de la Force, Marechal de France, recueillis par le Marquis de la Grange" (Paris, 1843), i. 2-37, so far from accusing the sister of La Force, ascribe the persistent attempts to secure his death solely to Archan (or Larchant), who had married this sister; and they state that, at her death, she left her property, including what she had inherited from her husband, to her brother.

[1018] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 146

[1019] Mem. de l'estat, 146; Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 129, 130; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 592; Claude Haton, ii. 678; Agrippa d'Aubigne, ii. 20.

[1020] Tocsain, 136.

[1021] Mem. de l'estat, 146.

[1022] "Radices, atque etiam radicum fibras, funditus evellas." Pii Quinti Epistolae, 111. See ante, chapter xvi., p. 308.

[1023] Mem. de l'estat, 147. The children of other cities emulated the example of those of Paris. In Provins, in the month of October, 1572, a Huguenot, Jean Crespin, after having been hung by the officers of justice, was taken down from the gallows by "les petis enfans de Provins, de l'age de douze ans et au dessoubz," to the number of more than one hundred. By these mimic judges he was declared unworthy to be dragged save by his feet, and, his punishment by hanging being reckoned too light, he was roasted in a fire of straw, and presently thrown into the river. Numbers of older persons looked on, approving and encouraging the children; a few good Catholics were grieved to see such cruelty practised on a dead body. Mem. de Claude Haton, ii. 704-706.

[1024] Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 128.

[1025] "On en remarqua qui avoient les yeux attaches sur le corps du Baron du Pont, pour voir si elles y trouveroient quelque cause ou quelque marque de l'impuissance qu'on lui reprochoit." De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 587. See Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 45, and Jean de Serres (1575) iv., fol. 39.

[1026] "Le Roy, la Royne mere, et leurs courtisans, rioyent a gorge desployee." Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 132.

[1027] The prevot, echevins, etc., "du tout, auroient, d'heure en heure, rendu compte et tesmoignage a sadicte Majeste." Extrait des registres et croniques du bureau de la ville de Paris, Archives curieuses, vii. 215.

[1028] Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra.

[1029] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, Rheims, 1579, p. 140.

[1030] Ibid., ubi supra.

[1031] Brantome, Homines illustres francais, M. de Thavannes.

[1032] "Declarant (Alencon) qu'il ne pouvoit approuver vn tel desordre, ny qu'on rompit si ouvertement la foy promise, qui fut cause que sa mere luy dit en termes clairs que s'il bougeoit elle le feroit ietter dans vn sac aual l'eau." Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 141.

[1033] Ib., 133.

[1034] De Thou, iv. 592.

[1035] His son, Jacques Merlin, at a later time pastor at La Rochelle, although he does not mention the particulars of his father's escape, in the journal published for the first time by M. Gaberel in an appendix to the second vol. of his Histoire de l'eglise de Geneve, pp. 153-207, alludes to it—"fut deliure par une grace de Dieu speciale" (p. 155).

[1036] Memoires de Sully (London, 1748), i. pp. 29, 30.

[1037] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 131; Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 142, etc. De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 592, 593. Strange to say, Von Botzheim was so far misinformed, that he makes Charpentier weep for the fate of Ramus! Archival. Beitraege, p. 117.

[1038] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 596; Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX. (Cimber et Danjou, vii. 137-142, and in M. Buchon's biographical notice prefixed to the "Commentaires"). An appreciative chapter on Pierre de la Place and his works may be read in Victor Bujeaud, Chronique protestante de l'Angoumois (Angouleme, 1860), 50-66.

[1039] Cahors is over 300 miles in a straight line from Paris, more than 400 miles—153 leagues—by the roads.

[1040] De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 594, 595; Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. univ., ii. 23.

[1041] The incident of Charles IX.'s firing upon the Huguenots has been of late the subject of much discussion. M. Fournier and M. Mery have denied the existence, in 1572, of the pavilion at which tradition makes the king to have stationed himself. See Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. francais, v. (1857) 332, etc. It has, I think, been conclusively shown that they are mistaken. The pavilion was in existence. But, besides, there is no reason why an incident should be deemed apocryphal because of a popular mistake in assigning the spot of its occurrence. The "Reveille-Matin" and the Eusebii Philadelphi Dialogi, published in 1574, are the earliest documents that refer to it. They place Charles at the window of his own room. So does Brantome, writing considerably later. Jean de Serres (in the fourth vol. of his Commentaria de statu, etc. (fol. 37), published in 1575) says: "Regem quoque ex hypaethrio (i.e., from a covered gallery) aiunt, adhibitis, ut solebat, diris contenta voce conclamare, et tormento etiam ipsum ejaculari." Agrippa d'Aubigne alludes to it not only in his Histoire universelle (ii. 19, 21), but in his Tragiques (Bulletin, vii. 185), a poem which he commenced as early as in 1577 (See Bulletin, x. 202). M. Henri Bordier has been so fortunate as to discover and has reprinted a contemporary engraving of the massacre, in which Charles is represented as excitedly looking on the slaughter from a window in the Louvre, while behind him stand two halberdiers and several noblemen (Bulletin, x. 106, 107). The question is discussed in an able and exhaustive manner by MM. Fournier, Ludovic Lalanne, Bernard, Berty, Bordier, and others, in the Bulletin, v. 332-340; vi. 118-126; vii. 182-187; x. 5-11, 105-107, 199-204.

[1042] The Porte de Bussy, or Bucy, was the first gate toward the west on the southern side of the Seine. During the reign of Francis I. and his successors of the house of Valois, the walls of Paris were of small compass. In this quarter their general direction is well marked out by the Rue Mazarine. The circuit started from the Tour de Nesle, which was nearly opposite the eastern front of the Louvre—the short Rue de Bussy fixes the situation of the gate where Guise was delayed. A little west of this is the abbey church of St. Germain-des-Pres, which gave its name to the suburb opposite the Louvre and the Tuileries. This quaint pile—the oldest church, or, indeed, edifice of any kind in Paris—after being built in the sixth century, and injured by the Normans in the ninth, was rebuilt and dedicated in 1163 A.D., by Alexander III. in person. On that occasion the Bishop of Paris was not even permitted by the jealous monks to be present, on the ground that the abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres was exempt from his jurisdiction. The pontiff confirmed their position, and his sermon, instead of being an exposition of the Gospel, was devoted to setting forth the privileges accorded to the abbey by St. Germain, Bishop of Paris, in 886. Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, ii. 79-84.

[1043] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 138, 139; Reveille-Matin, 186-188; Mem. de l'estat, 129-131.

[1044] See Henry White, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 460.

[1045] Valued at from 100,000 to 200,000 crowns, Reveille-Matin, 190; Mem. de l'estat, 151. The interesting anonymous letter from Heidelberg, Dec. 22, 1573, published first by the Marquis de Noailles in his "Henri de Valois et la Pologne en 1572" (Paris, 1867), iii. 533, from the MSS. of Prince Czartoryski, alludes to the costly jewels which Henry, now king-elect of Poland, made to the elector palatine, his host, and remarks: "Fortasse magna haec fuisse videbitur liberalitas et rege digna, at parva certe vel nulla potius fuit, si vel sumptibus quos illustrissimus noster princeps in deducendo et excipiendo hoc hospite sustinuit conferamus, vel si unde haec dona sint profecta expendamus. Ipse siquidem rex (Henry) ne teruncium pro iis solvisse, sed ex taberna cujusdam praedivitis aurifabri Parisiensis, quam scelerati sui ministri in strage illa nobilium ut alias multas diripuerunt, accepisse ea fertur."

[1046] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 150. Versailles, which thus passed into the hands of the family of Marshal Retz—the Gondi family—was an old castle situated in the midst of an almost unbroken forest. The Gondi family sold it to Louis XIII., who built a hunting lodge, afterward transmuted by Louis XIV. into the magnificent palace, which, for more than a century, was the favorite residence of the most splendid court in Europe. The mode in which the title was acquired did not augur well for the justice or the morality which was to reign there. M. L. Lacour has contributed an animated sketch, "Versailles et les protestants de France," to the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. fr., viii. (1859) 352-367.

[1047] Discours sur les causes de l'execution, ubi supra, 249.

[1048] Royal orders of Aug. 25th, Aug. 27th, etc. Order of the Prevot des marchands, Aug. 30th. Registres du bureau de la ville, Archives curieuses, vii. 222-230. Euseb. Philadelphi Dialog., i. 45.

[1049] Registres du bureau de la ville, pp. 222, 223.

[1050] Ibid., p. 227.

[1051] "Aucuns malades languissans, ayant ouy ce miracle, se firent porter audit cymetiere pour veoir laditte espine; lesquelz, estans la avec ferme foy, firent leur priere a Dieu en l'honneur de nostre dame la vierge Marie et devant son ymage qui est en laditte chapelle, pour recouvrer leur sante, et, apres leur oraison faicte, s'en retournerent en leurs maisons sains et guaris de leur maladie, chose tres-veritable et bien approuvee." Mem. de Claude Haton, ii. 682.

[1052] Ibid., ubi supra; Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 146; Reveille-Matin, 193, 194; Mem. de l'estat, 155; Jean de Serres, iv., fol. 41; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 596.

[1053] Dr. White (Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 459) has tabulated the estimates, nine in number, afforded by twenty-one distinct authorities. The lowest estimate—1,000 victims—is that of the Abbe Caveyrac, whose undisguised aim was to place the number as low as possible, so as to palliate the atrocity of the massacre. Being based apparently upon the number of the names of victims that have been recorded, it may be dismissed as unworthy of consideration. The highest estimate, of 10,000, though adopted by such writers as the authors of the Reveille-Matin and the Memoires de l'estat de France, is vague or excessive. The Tocsain and Agrippa d'Aubigne are, perhaps, too moderate in respectively stating the number as 2,000 and 3,000. On the whole, it appears to me, the contribution of Paris to the massacre of the Huguenots may be set down with the greatest probability at between 4,000 and 5,000 persons of all ages and conditions. Von Botzheim, who estimates the total at 8,000 (F. W. Ebeling, Archivalische Beitraege, p. 120), makes 500 of these to be women (Ibid., p. 119).

[1054] In other letters Charles had even the effrontery to represent the King of Navarre as having been in like danger with his brothers and himself. See Eusebii Philadelphi Dialog. (1574), i. 45: "se quidem metu propriae salutis in arcem Luparam (the Louvre) compulsum illic se continuisse, una cum fratre charissimo Rege Navarrae, et dilectissimo Principe Condensi, ut in communi periculo eundem fortunae exitum experirentur!"

[1055] Correspondance du roi Charles IX. et du sieur de Mandelot, 39-41. Letter to the Governor of Burgundy, apud Mem. de l'estat, ubi sup., 133-135.

[1056] It was undoubtedly with the object of showing that they were not the prime movers in the massacre, or, as the author of the Mem. de l'estat expresses himself, that they had no particular quarrel save with Admiral Coligny, that Henry of Guise and his uncle actually rescued a few Huguenots from the hands of those who were about to put them to death. Reveille-Matin, 188; Memoires de l'estat, 150.

[1057] Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 154, from Reveille-Matin, 192; De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 597, 598; Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 47.

[1058] It was while Charles was on his way to the Palais de Justice that a gentleman in his train, and not far from him, was recognized as being a Protestant, and was killed. The king, hearing the disturbance, turned around; but, on being informed that it was a Huguenot whom they were putting to death, lightly said: "Let us go on. Would to God that he were the last!" Reveille-Matin, 194 (copied in Mem. de l'estat, 157); Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 50.

[1059] De Thou, whom I have chiefly followed, iv. (liv. lii.) 599; Tocsain contre les massacreurs, 142; Reveille-Matin, 193, 194; Euseb. Phil. Dial., i. 49; Mem. de l'estat, 156; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 43; Capilupi, 45; Relation of Olaegui, secretary of Don Diego de Cuniga, Spanish ambassador at Paris, to be laid before Philip II., Simancas MSS., apud Bulletins de l'Acad. Roy. des Sciences, etc., de Belgique, vol. xvi. (1849) 254.

[1060] De Thou, Tocsain, etc., ubi supra.

[1061] Returning to the unpleasant theme in a subsequent book of his noble history (iv. (liv. liii.) 644), Jacques Auguste de Thou remarks, with an integrity which cannot swerve even out of consideration for filial respect: "Ce qu'il y avoit de deplorable, etoit de voir des personnes respectables par leur piete, leur science, et leur integrite, revetues des premieres charges du Royaume, ennemies d'ailleurs de tout deguisement et de tout artifice, tels que Morvilliers, de Thou, Pibrac, Montluc et Bellievre, louer contre leurs sentimens, ou excuser par complaisance une action qu'ils detestoient dans le coeur, sans y etre engages par aucun motif de crainte ou d'esperance; mais dans la fausse persuasion ou ils etoient que les circonstances presentes et le bien de l'Etat demandoient qu'ils tinssent ce langage."

[1062] The case stands much worse if we accept the statement of the author of the Memoires de l'estat de France sous Charles IX., who, after contrasting the honorable conduct of President La Vaquerie, in the time of Louis XI., with that of Christopher de Thou, adds: "Mais cestui-ci n'avoit garde de faire le semblable; il prend trop de plaisir a toute sorte d'injustice pour s'y vouloir opposer." (Ubi supra, pp. 156, 157.) So, also, Euseb. Philad. Dial., i. 50: "Nam quomodo sese injustitiae viriliter opponeret, qui ex ea tam uberes fructus colligit?" The Mem. de l'estat accuse him of having instigated the murder of Rouillard—a counsellor of parliament and canon of Notre Dame, and one of a very few Roman Catholics that were assassinated—because the latter loved justice, and had prosecuted one of the first president's friends (p. 148). According to the historian De Thou, on the other hand (iv. 593), Rouillard was "homme inquiet, querelleux, et ennemi des officiers des compagnies de ville."

[1063] The passage is not in the will in the admiral's own handwriting, dated Archiac, June 5, 1569, a facsimile of which has been accurately lithographed by the French Protestant Historical Society, and which has also been printed in the Bulletin, i. (1852) 263-268. See ante, p. 461, 462.

[1064] Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 153; Gasparis Colinii Vita (1575), 131.

[1065] "The said discourse was all written with his own hand." Walsingham to Smith, Sept. 14, 1572; Digges, 241, 242; Mem. de l'estat, ubi supra, 153; Gasparis Colinii Vita, 131, 132.

[1066] Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fols. 57, 58; Eusebii Philadelphi Dial. (1574), i. 82, 83; Reveille-Matin, 203-205; De Thou, iv. (liv. liii.) 645, 646. For many years the disgraceful commemorative procession was faithfully observed.

[1067] The slight eminence of Montfaucon, the Tyburn of Paris, was between the Faubourg St. Martin and the Faubourg du Temple, near the site of the Hopital St. Louis. See Dulaure, Atlas de Paris.

[1068] "Il les en reprit et leur dist: 'Je ne bousche comme vous autres, car l'odeur de son ennemy est tres-bonne'—odeur certes point bonne et la parolle aussi mauvaise." Brantome, Le Roy Charles IX., edit. Lalanne, v. 258. The original authority for this odious remark is Papyrius Masson (1575) in his life of Charles IX., which Brantome had under his eyes: "Servis foetorem non ferentibus, hostis mortui odor bonus est inquit." Le Laboureur, iii. 16.

[1069] Le deluge des Huguenots avec leur Tumbeau, 1572. Reprinted in Archives curieuses, vii. 251-259.

[1070] Tocsain contre les massacreurs, Rheims, 1579, p. 143. It has been well remarked by a writer in the Bulletin de la Soc. de l'hist. du prot. francais (iii. 346) as one of the paradoxes of history, that Coligny's mangled remains, "after being carefully subjected to the most ignominious treatment, were saved from the annihilation to which they appeared to be infallibly condemned, and have been transmitted from place to place, and from hand to hand, until our own days, and better preserved for three centuries than many other illustrious corpses carefully laid up in costly mausoleums!" Marshal Montmorency placed the admiral's body in a lead coffin in his castle of Chantilly, whence he sent it to Montauban. Francois de Coligny brought it back to Chatillon-sur-Loing, when, in 1599, the sentence of parliament was formally rescinded. In 1786 it was taken to Maupertuis and placed in a black marble sarcophagus. Since 1851 it has been resting in its new tomb under the ruins of that part of the castle of Chatillon where Coligny was probably born. Bulletin, iii. 346-351.

[1071] Tocsain contre les Massacreurs, 146; Reveille-Matin, 195; Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 51; Mem. de l'estat, 161; Jean de Serres, iv., fol. 44 verso.

[1072] The text of the declaration is to be found in the Memoires de Claude Haton, ii. 683-685, in the Recueil des anciennes lois francaises (Isambert), xiv. 257, etc., and in the Memoires de l'estat, ubi supra, 162-164. See De Thou, iv. (liv. lii.) 600. The Reveille-Matin calls attention (p. 196) to the circumstance that in the first copies of the document the name of Navarre did not occur; but that in the next issue the admiral's unhappy and detestable conspiracy was represented as directed against "la personne dudit sieur roy et contre son estat, la royne sa mere, messieurs ses freres, le roy de Navarre, princes et seigneurs estans pres d'eulx." The policy of introducing Navarre, and, by implication, Conde, among the proposed victims of the Huguenots, was certainly sufficiently bold and reckless. See ante, p. 490.

[1073] See De Thou, iv. (liv. liii.), 630; Jean de Serres, iv., fols. 53, 54.

[1074] Euseb. Philadelphi Dial., i. 52.

[1075] Digges, 239, 240.

[1076] Ibid., 245

[1077] Documents historiques inedits, i. 713-715.

[1078] Agrippa d'Aubigne, Hist. univ., ii. 30; Jean de Serres (1575), iv., fol. 55.



CHAPTER XIX.

THE MASSACRE IN THE PROVINCES, AND THE RECEPTION OF THE TIDINGS ABROAD.

[Sidenote: The massacre in the provinces.]

The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day would have been terrible enough had it been confined to Paris, for its victims in that single city were to be reckoned by thousands. Charles the Ninth himself, on the third day, admitted in a letter to Mondoucet, his envoy in the Netherlands, that "a very great number of the adherents of the new religion who were in this city had been massacred and cut to pieces."[1079] But this was little in comparison with the multitudes that were yet to lose their lives in other parts of France. Here, however, the enterprise assumed a different character. Not only did it not commence on the same day as in the capital, but it began at different dates in different places. It is evident that there had been no well-concerted plan long entertained and freely communicated to the governors of the provinces and cities. On the contrary, the greatest variety of procedure prevailed—all tending, nevertheless, to the same end of the total destruction of the Protestants. And this was intended from the very moment the project of the Parisian butchery was hastily and inconsiderately adopted by the king. Charles meant to be as good as his word when he announced his determination that not a single Huguenot should survive to reproach him with what he had done. More frightful than his most passionate outburst of bloodthirsty frenzy is the cool calculation with which he, or the minister who wrote the words he subscribed, predicts the chain of successive murders in provincial France, scarcely one of which had as yet been attempted. "It is probable," he said, in the same letter of the twenty-sixth of August, that has just been cited, "that the fire thus kindled will go coursing through all the cities of my kingdom, which, following the example of what has been done in this city, will assure themselves of all the adherents of the said religion."[1080]

[Sidenote: Verbal orders.]

No mere surmise, founded upon the probable effects of the exhibition of cruelty in Paris, led to the penning of this sentence. Charles had purposely fired the train which was to explode with the utmost violence at almost every point of his wide dominions. "As it has pleased God," he wrote to Mondoucet, "to bring matters to the state in which they now are, I do not intend to neglect the opportunity not only to re-establish, if I shall be able, lasting quietness in my kingdom, but also to serve Christendom."[1081] Accordingly, secret orders, for the most part verbal, had already been sent in all directions, commanding the provinces to imitate the example set by Paris. The reality of these orders does not rest upon conjecture, but is attested by documentary evidence over the king's own hand. As we have seen in the last chapter, Charles published, on the twenty-eighth of August, a declaration of his motives and intentions. This was despatched to the governors of the provinces and to other high officers, in company with a circular letter, of which the final sentence deserves particular notice. "Moreover," says the king, "whatever verbal command I may have given to those whom I sent to you, as well as to my other governors and lieutenants-general, at a time when I had just reason to fear some inauspicious events, from having discovered the conspiracy which the admiral was making against me, I have revoked and revoke it completely, intending that nothing therein contained be put into execution by you or by others; for such is my pleasure."[1082]

[Sidenote: Instructions to Montsoreau at Saumur.]

What was the import of these orders? The manuscripts in the archives of Angers seem to leave no room for doubt. This city was the capital of the Duchy of Anjou, given in appanage to Henry, the king's brother, and was, consequently, under his special government. On Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August, the duke sent to the Governor of Saumur a short note running thus: "Monsieur de Montsoreau, I have instructed the sieur de Puigaillard to write to you respecting a matter that concerns the service of the king, my lord and brother, as well as my own. You will, therefore, not fail to believe and to do whatever he may tell you, just as if it were I myself." In the same package with these credentials Montsoreau[1083] received a letter from Puigaillard, like himself a knight of the royal order of St. Michael, which reveals only too clearly the purpose of the king and his Brother. "Monsieur mon compagnon, I will not fail to acquaint you with the fact that, on Sunday morning the king caused a very great execution to be made against the Huguenots; so much so that the admiral and all the Huguenots that were in this city were killed. And his Majesty's will is that the same be done wherever there are any to be found. Accordingly, if you desire ever to do a service that may be agreeable to the king and to Monsieur (the Duke of Anjou), you must go to Saumur with the greatest possible number of your friends, and put to death all that you can find there of the principal Huguenots.... Having made this execution at Saumur, I beg you to go to Angers and do the same, with the assistance of the captain of the castle. And you must not expect to receive any other command from the king, nor from Monseigneur, for they will send you none, inasmuch as they depend upon what I write you. You must use diligence in this affair, and lose as little time as possible. I am very sorry that I cannot be there to help you in putting this into execution."[1084]

[Sidenote: Two kinds of letters.]

The statement of the author of the Memoires de l'estat de France is, therefore, in full agreement with the ascertained facts of the case. He informs us that, soon after the Parisian massacre commenced, the secret council by which the plan had been drawn up despatched two widely differing kinds of letters. The first were of a private character, and were addressed to governors of cities and to seditious Roman Catholics where there were many Protestants, by which they were instigated to murder and rapine;[1085] the others were public, and were addressed to the same functionaries, their object being to amuse and entrap the professors of the reformed faith. And in addition to the double sets of written instructions, the same author says that messengers were sent to various points, to give orders for special executions.[1086] We shall not find it very difficult to account for the rapidity with which the massacre spread to the provincial towns—of which the secretary of the Spanish ambassador, in his hurried journey from Paris to Madrid, was an eye-witness[1087]—if we bear in mind the previous ripeness of the lowest classes of the Roman Catholic population for the perpetration of any possible acts of insult and injury toward their Protestant fellow-citizens. The time had come for the seed sown broadcast by monk and priest in Lenten and Advent discourses to bear its legitimate harvest in the pitiless murder of heretics.

[Sidenote: The massacre at Meaux.]

Meaux was naturally one of the first of smaller cities to catch the contagion from the capital. Not only was it the nearest city that contained any considerable body of Huguenots, but, if we may credit the report current among them, Catharine, in virtue of her rank as Countess of Meaux, had placed it first upon the roll. It is not impossible that the circumstance that this was the cradle of Protestantism in France may have secured it this distinction. About the middle of Sunday afternoon a courier reached Meaux, and at once made his way to the residence of the procureur-du-roi, one Cosset. The nature of the message he bore may be inferred from the fact that secret orders were at once given to those persons upon whom Cosset thought that he could rely, to be in readiness about nightfall. So completely had every outlet from Paris been sealed, that it had proved almost impossible for a Protestant to find the means of escaping to carry the tidings abroad. Consequently the adherents of the reformed faith were yet in ignorance of the impending catastrophe. At the time appointed, Cosset and his followers seized the gates of Meaux. It was the hour when the peaceable and unsuspecting people were at supper. The Protestants could now easily be found, and few escaped arrest, either that evening or on the succeeding day. Happily, however, a large number of Huguenots resided in a quarter of Meaux known as the "Grand Marche," and separated from the main part of the town by the river Marne. The inhabitants of the Grand Marche received timely warning of their danger; and the men fled by night for temporary refuge to the neighboring villages. It was scarcely dawn on Monday morning when the work of plunder begun. By eight o'clock little was left of the goods of the Huguenots on this side of the Marne, and the pillagers crossed the bridge to the Grand Marche. Finding only the women, who had remained in the vain hope of saving their family possessions, the papists wreaked their fury upon them. About twenty-five of these unhappy persons were murdered in cold blood;[1088] others were so severely beaten that they died within a few days; a few were shamefully dishonored. In most cases, if not in all, outward acquiescence in the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church would have saved the lives of the victims, but the Huguenot women were constant and would yield no hypocritical consent. One poor woman, the wife of "Nicholas the cap-maker," was being dragged to mass, when her bold and impolitic expressions of detestation of the service so enraged her conductors, that, being at that moment upon the bridge which unites the two portions of the city, they stabbed her and threw her body into the river. In a short time the Grand Marche, which the precise chronicler tells us contained more than four hundred houses, was robbed of everything which could be removed, for not the most insignificant article escaped the cupidity of the Roman Catholic populace.[1089]

These were but the preliminaries of the general massacre. The prisons were full of Huguenots, whom it was necessary to put out of the way. Late in the day, on Tuesday the twenty-sixth, Cosset and his band made their appearance. They were provided with a list of their destined victims, more than two hundred in number. Of a score or two the names have been preserved, with their respective avocations. They were merchants, judicial officers, industrious artisans—in short, the representatives of the better class of the population of Meaux. Not one escaped. The murderous band were stationed in the courtyard of the prison, while Cosset, armed with a pistol in either hand, mounted the steps, and by his roll summoned the Protestants to the slaughter awaiting them below. The bloody work was long and tedious. The assassins adjourned awhile for their supper, and, unable to complete the task before weariness blunted the edge of their ferocity, reserved a part of the Protestants for the next day. None the less was the task accomplished with thoroughness, and the exultant cutthroats now had leisure to pursue the fugitives of the Grand Marche to the villages in which they had taken refuge.[1090]

[Sidenote: The massacre at Troyes.]

The news of the Parisian massacre reached Troyes, the flourishing capital of Champagne, on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August, and spread great alarm among the Protestants, who, with the recent disturbances[1091] still fresh in their memories, apprehended immediate death. But their enemies for the time confined themselves to closing the gates to prevent their escape. It was not until Saturday, the thirtieth, that the "bailli," Anne de Vaudrey, sieur de St. Phalle, sent throughout the city and brought all the Protestants to the prisons. Meantime one of the most turbulent of the Roman Catholics, named Pierre Belin, had been in Paris, having been deputed, some weeks before, to endeavor to procure the removal of the place of worship of the reformed from the castle of Isle-au-Mont, two or three leagues from the city, to some more distant and inconvenient spot. He remained in the capital until the Saturday after the massacre, and started that day for Troyes, with a copy of the declaration of Thursday forbidding injury to the persons and goods of unoffending Protestants, and ordering the release of any that might have been imprisoned. It was believed, indeed, that he was commissioned to give the declaration to the bailli for publication. On Wednesday, the third of September, he reached Troyes. As he rode through the streets, he inquired again and again whether the Huguenots at Troyes were all killed as they were elsewhere. When interrogated by peaceable Roman Catholics respecting a rumor that the king had revoked his sanguinary orders, he boldly denied its truth, accompanying his words with oaths and imprecations. Finding the bailli, he had no difficulty in persuading him to suppress the royal order, and to convene a council, at which Belin was introduced as the bearer of verbal instructions, and a bishop was brought forward to confirm them. Belin and the bishop maintained that the royal pleasure was that the heretics of Troyes should all be murdered on the following Saturday night, without distinction of rank, sex, or age, and their bodies be exposed in the streets to the sight of those who should on the morrow join in a solemn procession to be held in honor of the achievement. A writing attached to the neck of each was to contain the words: "Seditious persons and rebels against the king, who have conspired against his Majesty."

The task of butchering the helpless Huguenots in the prison was first proposed to the public hangman. He refused to take any part in it: this, he said, was no duty of his office, and he would consent to perform it only when all the forms of law should have been observed. Other persons were found more pliable, and, under the leadership of one Perremet, the bloody scenes of the prison of Meaux were re-enacted, on Thursday, the fourth day of September, in that of Troyes. How many were the victims we know not; we have, however, the names of over thirty, apparently the most prominent of the number. Others were assassinated in the streets. At last, when all had been done that malice could effect, the king's declaration, which promised protection to the Huguenots, was published on Friday, the fifth of September.[1092]

[Sidenote: The great bloodshed at Orleans.]

In Orleans, a city once the headquarters of the Huguenots, where their iconoclastic assaults upon the churches during the first civil war had left permanent memorials of their former supremacy, the massacre assumed the largest proportions. One of the king's court preachers, Arnauld Sorbin, better known as M. de Sainte Foy, had written from Paris letters instigating the inhabitants of Orleans to imitate the example of the capital, and the letters came to hand with the earliest tidings of the Parisian massacre. The first murder took place on Monday. M. de Champeaux, a royal counsellor and a Protestant, who as yet was in ignorance of the events of St. Bartholomew's Day, received late on Monday the visit of Tessier, surnamed La Court, the leader of the assassins of Orleans, and some of his followers. Imagining it to be a friendly call—for they were acquaintances—Champeaux received them courteously, and invited them to sup with him. The meal over, his guests recounted the story of the tragic occurrence at Paris, and, before he was well over his surprise and horror, asked him for his purse. The unhappy host, still mistaking the character of those whom he had entertained, at first regarded the demand as a pleasantry; but when he had been convinced of his error and had complied, his treacherous visitors instantly stabbed him to death in his very dining-room.[1093] The general butchery began on Tuesday night, in the neighborhood of the ramparts, where the Protestants were most numerous, and from Wednesday to Saturday there was no intermission in the slaughter. Here, more even than elsewhere, the murderers distinguished themselves by their profanity and their undisguised hatred of the Protestant faith and worship. "Where is your God?" "Where are your prayers and your psalms?" "Where is the God they invoke so much? Let Him save, if He can." Such were the expressions with which the blows of the assassin were interlarded. At times he thought to aggravate his victim's sufferings by singing snatches of favorite psalms from the Huguenot psalm-book. It might be the forty-third, so appropriate to the condition of oppressed innocence, in its quaint old French garb:

Revenge-moi, pren la querelle De moi, Seigneur, de ta merci, Contre la gent fausse et cruelle: De l'homme rempli de cautelle, Et en sa malice endurci, Delivre moi aussi.

Or it might be the fifty-first—the words never more sincerely accepted, even when chanted to all the perfection of choral music, in the Sistine Chapel or in St. Peter's, than when, in the ears of constant sufferers for their Christian faith, ribald voices contemptuously sang or drawled the familiar lines:

Misericorde au povre vicieux, Dieu tout-puissant, selon ta grand' clemence.[1094]

"These execrable outrages," adds the chronicler who gives us this interesting information, "did not in the least unnerve the Protestants, who died with great constancy; and, if some were shaken (as were some, but in very small numbers), this in no wise lessened the patience and endurance of the rest."[1095] The number of the killed was great. The murderers themselves boasted of the slaughter of more than twelve hundred men and of one hundred and fifty women, besides a large number of children of nine years old and under. And there was a dreary uniformity in the method of their death. They were shot with pistols, then stripped, and dragged to the river, or thrown into the city moat.[1096] But it is, after all, not the numbers of nameless victims whose honorable deaths leave no distinct impression upon the mind, but the individual instances of Christian heroism, teaching lessons of imitable human virtues, that speak most directly to the sympathies of the reader of an age so long posterior. The records of French Protestantism are full of these, and one or two of the most striking that occurred in Orleans deserve mention. M. de Coudray—whom the Roman Catholics had in vain endeavored on previous occasions to shake—seeing his house beset and no prospect of deliverance, himself opened the door of his dwelling to the murderers, telling them, with wonderful assurance of faith: "You do but hasten the coming of that blessedness which I have long been expecting."[1097] Whereupon they killed him, in the midst of his invocation of his God. Another Huguenot, De St. Thomas, a schoolmaster, died uttering words as courageous as ever fell from lips of early Christian martyrs: "Why! do you think that you move me by your blasphemies and acts of cruelty? It is not within your power to deprive me of the assurance of the grace of my God. Strike as much as you please; I fear not your blows."[1098] Sometimes the dying men were allowed a few moments to utter a final prayer; but, if their zeal led them too far, their impatient murderers cut short their devotions with oaths and curses, and exclaimed: "Here are people that take a great while to pray to their God!"[1099] Of resistance there was little, so far were the Huguenots from having collected arms and prepared for such a conspiracy as was imputed to them. If a Huguenot teacher of fencing killed one or two of his assailants, or if a few gentlemen at different places kept them at bay awhile with stones or other missiles, this, so far from proving their evil intentions, on the contrary, furnishes undeniable proof of the very different results that might have ensued had their means of defence been equal to their courage. For fifteen days after the principal massacre the work went on more quietly, the dead bodies being still thrown into the ditch—where wolves, which in the sixteenth century abounded in the valley of the Loire, were permitted to feed upon them undisturbed—or into the river, of whose fish, fattened upon this human carrion, the people feared to eat.[1100]

[Sidenote: Massacre at Bourges.]

At Bourges the news of the massacre was received late on Tuesday. Meantime, some of the more sagacious of the Huguenots (among others, the celebrated Francis Hotman, at this time a professor of law in the University of Bourges), alarmed by the wounding of Admiral Coligny, had fled from the city. Even after the news came, the massacre was but partial. Although the mayor, Jean Joupitre, had received sealed orders (lettres de cachet) instructing him as to the part he was to take, the municipal officers, knowing the ill-will the Guises had always borne to the Huguenots, were in doubt how far the king countenanced the bloody work. But the royal letter of the thirtieth of August, accompanying the declaration of the twenty-eighth, to which reference was made above,[1101] so far from putting an end to the disorder, only rendered it more general. Bourges became the scene of another of those butcheries of Huguenots first gathered in the public prisons, of which there are so many similar instances that it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the orders to effect them emanated from a single source at court.[1102]

[Sidenote: At Angers.]

We have already been admitted to the secret of the instructions sent by the Duke of Anjou, through Puigaillard, to M. de Montsoreau, for the destruction of the Huguenots of Saumur and Angers. Certainly there was on his part no lack of readiness to fulfil his sanguinary commission; but the local officers were less zealous, and many of the Protestants were merely thrown into prison. Montsoreau's first exploit at Angers deserves particular mention. M. de la Riviere, the first reformed pastor of Paris, of whom I have spoken in a previous chapter, was at this time residing in Angers, and Montsoreau seems to have been acquainted with him. Going straight to his house, the governor met the pastor's wife, whom, according to the gallant custom prevailing, especially among the Trench courtiers, he first kissed, and then inquired for her husband. He was told that he was walking in his garden, and thither his hostess led him. After courteously embracing him, Montsoreau thus abruptly disclosed the object of his visit: "Monsieur de la Riviere, do you know why I am come? The king has ordered me to kill you, and that at once. I have a special commission to this effect, as you will know from these letters." While saying this he exhibited a pistol which he held in his hand. "I know of no crime that I have done," calmly replied De la Riviere; and then, after obtaining permission to offer a brief prayer to God, he fearlessly presented his breast to the cowardly assassin. Montsoreau did not complete the extermination of the Huguenots of Angers, and Puigaillard soon after arrived to prosecute it; but the Protestant prisoners whom he was to have murdered knew his venal disposition, and found little difficulty in purchasing their liberation.[1103]

[Sidenote: Butchery at Lyons.]

The important city of Lyons, inhabited by a population intensely hostile to the Reformation, had for its governor M. de Mandelot, a decided partisan of the Roman Catholic faction. The municipal authorities, however, either surpassed him in zeal, or, as is more probable, were less apprehensive of the dangers to be incurred by assuming the responsibility of a massacre; for of all the "echevins," only two opposed the violent measures of their associates. The written protest which they insisted upon entering on the official records is still extant.[1104] The first tidings of the wounding of Coligny by Maurevel reached Lyons on Wednesday morning, the twenty-seventh of August, in a letter from Charles the Ninth to Governor Mandelot, similar in tenor to those which were despatched to every other part of France.[1105] Although the king spoke only of displeasure at the outrage, and of his determination to avenge it, the populace interpreted the event according to their wishes, and instantly circulated reports of the murder of the admiral and all his adherents. The Roman Catholics, long discontented with the toleration extended to those who dissented from the creed of the dominant church, were jubilant and menacing; the Protestants were disheartened, but exhibited a self-control only to be accounted for by the long years of oppression which had wellnigh broken their spirit. The next day came the news of the events of Sunday, and, in the afternoon, letters from Masso and Rubys, prominent citizens of Lyons then at Paris, who said that they had been instructed by the king to order the authorities to copy the example of the capital. The fanatical party was now clamorous; but Mandelot, cautious and politic, would act on no such instructions, although he had taken the precaution of closing the gates, and of commanding the Protestants, on pain of imprisonment, to remain in their houses. Friday morning came, and with it the arrival of Sieur du Peyrat from court, bearing the royal letter written on the day of the massacre, in which it was represented as the exclusive work of the Guises, and the king strenuously enjoined the maintenance of the Edict of Pacification.[1106] These were the public instructions sent to Mandelot; but they were not all. There is a suspicious little postscript to the letter: "Monsieur de Mandelot, you will give credit to the bearer respecting the matter which I have charged him to tell you."[1107] What these verbal orders were which the king, not venturing to commit to paper, commissioned Du Peyrat to communicate, the reply of the governor himself distinctly reveals; it was the arrest of the Protestants and the confiscation of their property.[1108] Still more perplexed as to what course to pursue, Mandelot held a long private conference with the messenger, while the echevins impatiently awaited its conclusion. The governor now called in the municipal officers for consultation, and with them agreed to order the immediate imprisonment of the Huguenots. He was not, however, even yet fully convinced of the propriety of this step, for scarcely had he given the order when he recalled it.[1109] Fearing that the troops at his disposal might prove insufficient, and dreading with good reason lest the employment of the city militia for this purpose might lead to scenes of disorder which he would find himself powerless to control, he preferred to send for such reinforcements as the neighboring noblemen of the province could furnish.[1110] Meantime, the commotion throughout Lyons had rapidly increased. On Thursday and Friday nights many members of the Reformed Church had been dragged from their houses as if to prison, but most of them had been barbarously despatched by the way. Among others, one of the ministers, Monsieur Jacques l'Anglois, was stabbed and thrown into the river. On Saturday morning Mandelot, seeing the confusion hourly increasing, deemed it impolitic to wait any longer for the troops he was expecting, and resolved upon effecting his purpose by ruse. He therefore published a proclamation by sound of trumpet, bidding all the Huguenots to assemble at his house to hear the good pleasure of the king. The Huguenots, deceived by the professions of his Majesty, came in great numbers; but no sooner had they all arrived, than they were seized by the soldiers and hurried away to prison. The common prison, "La Roanne," being too contracted to contain so large a multitude, three hundred or more were placed in that of the Archbishop's palace, and others in the cloisters of the Celestine Monks and the Gray Friars. At the same time an inventory was being made of all the goods belonging to Protestants throughout the city.