WITH some proofs, forged or real, in her hand that he was in personal danger, the queen-mother presented herself to her son. She told him that at the moment that he was speaking the Huguenots were arming. Sixteen thousand of them intended to assemble in the morning, seize the palace, destroy herself, the Duke of Anjou, and the Catholic noblemen, and carry off Charles.

The conspiracy, she said, extended through France. The chiefs of the congregations were waiting for a signal from Coligny to rise in every province and town. The Catholics had discovered the plot, and did not mean to sit still and be murdered. If the king refused to act with them, they would choose another leader; and whatever happened, he would be himself destroyed.

Unable to say that the story could not be true, Charles looked inquiringly at Tavannes and De Nevers, and they both confirmed the queen-mother's words. Shaking his incredulity with reminders

| of Amboise and Meaux, Catherine went on to say that one man was the cause of all the troubles in the realm. The admiral aspired to rule all France, and she admitted, with Anjou and the Guises, had conspired to kill him to save the king and the country. She dropped all disguise. The king, she said, must now assist them, or all would be lost. The first blow had failed, but it must be repeated at once. The admiral, with the rest of the Huguenot leaders, must die.

A grown man, in the possession of his senses, would have suspected the story from the proposal with which it ended. Had there been truth in it, the hands which could murder could arrest; the conspirators could be taken in their beds, and, if found guilty, could be legally punished. It was easy to say, however, that the Huguenots were present in such force that the only safety was in surprise. Charles was a weak passionate boy, alone in the dark conclave of iniquity. He stormed,

raved, wept, implored, spoke of his honour, his plighted word; swore at one moment that the admiral should not be touched, then prayed them to try other means. But, clear, cold, and venomous, Catherine told him it was too late. If there was a judicial inquiry, the Guises would shield themselves by telling all that they knew. They would betray her; they would betray his brother; and, fairly or unfairly, they would not spare himself. He might protest his innocence, but the world would not believe him. For an hour and a half the king continued to struggle.

"Is it

"You refuse, then," Catherine said at last. "If it be so, your mother and your brother must care for themselves. Permit us to go." The king scowled at her. that you are afraid, sire?" she hissed in his ear. "By God's death," he cried, springing to his feet, "since you will kill the admiral, kill them all. Kill all the Huguenots in France, that none may be left to reproach me. Mort Dieu ! Kill them all!"

He dashed out of the cabinet. A list of those who were to die was instantly drawn up. Navarre and Condé were first included; but Catherine prudently reflected that to kill the Bourbons would make the Guises too strong. Five or six names were added to the admiral's, and these Catherine afterwards asserted were all that it was intended should suffer. Even she herself, perhaps, was not prepared for the horrors that

would follow when the mob were let loose upon their prey.

Guise

1;

Night had now fallen. and Aumale were still lurking in the city, and came with the Duke of Montpensier at Catherine's summons. The persons who were to be killed were in different parts of the town. Each took charge of a district. Montpensier promised to see to the palace; Guise and his uncle undertook the admiral and below these, the word went out to the leaders of the alreadyorganised sections, who had been disappointed once, but whose hour was now come. The Catholics were to recognise one another in the confusion by a white handkerchief on the left arm and a white cross in their caps. The royal guard, Catholics to a man, were instruments ready made for the work. Guise assembled the officers; he told them that the Huguenots were preparing to rise, and that the king had ordered their instant punishment. The officers asked no questions, and desired no better service. The business was to begin at dawn. The signal would be the tolling of the great bell at the Palace of Justice, and the first death was to be Coligny's. The soldiers stole to their posts. Twelve hundred lay along the Seine, between the river and the Hôtel de Ville ; other companies watched at the Louvre. As the darkness waned, the queen-mother went down to the gate. The stillness of the dawn was broken by an accidental pistol-shot. Her heart sank, and

she sent off a messenger to tell Guise to pause. But it was too late. A minute later the bell boomed out, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew had commenced. | The admiral was feverish with his wounds, and had not slept. The surgeon and a Huguenot minister, named Malin, had passed the night with him. At the first sounds he imagined that there was an émeute of the Catholics at the court; but the crash of his own gate, and shots and shrieks in the court below the window told him that, whatever was the cause, his own life was in danger. He sat up in his bed. "M. Malin," he said, “pray for me; I have long expected this." Some of his attendants rushed half-dressed into the room. "Gentlemen, save yourselves," he said to them; "I commend my soul to my Saviour." They scattered, escaping or trying to escape by the roofs and balconies; a German servant alone remained with him. The door was burst open immediately after, and the officer who was in charge of the house, a Bohemian servant of Guise, and a renegade Huguenot soldier, rushed in with drawn swords.

The window was open. "Is it done?" cried Guise from the court below, "is it done? Fling him out, that we may see him." Still breathing, the admiral was hurled upon the pavement. The Bastard of Angoulême wiped the blood from his face, to be sure of his identity, and then kicking him as he lay, shouted, "So far well. Courage, my brave boys! now for the rest." One of the Duc de Nevers's people hacked off the head. A rope was knotted about the ankles, and the corpse was dragged out into the street amidst the howling crowd. Teligny, who was in the adjoining house, had sprung out of bed at the first disturbance, ran down into the court, and climbed by a ladder to the roof. From behind a parapet he saw his father-in-law murdered, and, scrambling on the tiles, concealed himself in a garret; but he was soon tracked, torn from his hiding-place, and thrown upon the stones with a dagger in his side. Rochefoucault and the rest of the admiral's friends, who lodged in the neighbourhood, were disposed of in the same way, and so complete was the surprise, that there was not the most faint attempt at

Montpensier had been no less successful in the Louvre. The staircases were all beset. The retinues of the King of Navarre and the prince had been lodged in the palace at Charles's particular desire. Their names were called over, and as they descended unarmed into the quadrangle, they

were hewn in pieces. There, in heaps, they fell below the royal window under the eyes of the miserable king, who was forced forward between his mother and his brother, that he might be seen as the accomplice of the massacre. Most of the victims were killed upon the spot. Some fled wounded up the stairs, and were slaughtered in the presence of the princesses. One gentleman rushed bleeding into the apartment of the newly-married Margaret, clung to her dress, and was hardly saved by her intercession. By seven o'clock the work which Guise and his immediate friends had undertaken was finished, with but one failure. The Count Montgomery and the Vidame of Chartres lodged in the Faubourg St. Germain, across the water, on the outskirts of the town. A party of assassins had been sent to despatch them, but had loitered on the way to do some private murdering on their own account. When the news reached Montgomery that Paris was up, he supposed, like Coligny, that the Catholics had risen against the Court. He ran down the river's bank with a handful of men behind him, opposite the Tuileries, intending to cross to help his friends; but the boats were all secured on the other side. The soldiers shot at him from under the palace. It was said it rests only on the worthless authority of Brantome Charles himself, in his frenzy, snatched a gun from a servant, and fired at him also.

that

Mont

gomery did not wait for further explanation. He, the Vidame, and a few others, sprang on their horses, rode for their lives, and escaped to England.

All

The mob, meanwhile, was in full enjoyment. Long possessed with the accursed formulas of the priests, they believed that the enemies of God were given into their hands. While dukes and lords were killing at the Louvre, the bands of the sections imitated them with more than success; men, women, and even children, striving which should be the first in the pious work of murder. Catholic Paris was at the business, and every Huguenot household had neighbours to know and denounce them. Through street and lane and quay and causeway, the air rung with yells and curses, pistol-shots and crashing windows; the roadways were strewed with mangled bodies, the doors were blocked by the dead and dying. From garret, closet, roof, or stable, crouching creatures were torn, shrieking out, and stabbed and hacked at; boys practised their hands by strangling babies in their cradles, and headless bodies were trailed along the trottoirs. Carts struggled through the crowd carrying the dead in piles to the Seine, which, by special Providence, was that morning in flood, to assist in sweeping heresy away. Under the sanction of the great cause, lust, avarice, fear, malice, and revenge, all had free indulgence, and glutted themselves to nausea. Even the distinctions of