CHAP XXIII 1572 Aug. 24 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-that Charles himself in his frenzy snatched a gun from a servant and fired at him also. Montgomery 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. 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. All 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 rang 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 creed itself СНАР XXIII became at last confounded; and every man or woman who had a quarrel to avenge, a lawsuit to settle, a wife or husband grown inconvenient, or a prospective 24 inheritance if obstacles could be removed, found a ready road to the object of their desires. Towards midday some of the quieter people attempted to restore order. A party of the town police made their way to the palace. Charles caught eagerly at their offers of service, and bade them do their utmost to put the people down; but it was all in vain. The soldiers, maddened with plunder and blood, could not be brought to assist, and without them nothing could be done. All that afternoon and night, and the next day and the day after, the horrible scenes continued, till the flames burnt down at last for want of fuel. The number who perished in Paris was computed variously from two to ten thousand. In this, as in all such instances, the lowest estimate is probably the nearest to the truth. The massacre was completed-completed in Paris, only, as it proved, to be continued elsewhere. It was assuming a form, however, considerably larger than anything which the contrivers of it had contemplated; and it became a question what explanation of such a business should be given to the world. The age was not tender-hearted; but a scene of this kind was as yet unprecedented, and transcended far the worst atrocities which had been witnessed in the Netherlands. The opinion of Europe would require some account of it, and the Court at first thought that half the truth might represent the whole. On the 24th, while the havoc was at its height, circulars went round to the provinces that a quarrel had broken out between the Houses of Guise and Coligny; that the Admiral and many more had been unfortu nately killed, and that the King himself had been in CHAP XXIII 1572 August danger through his efforts to control the people. The governors of the different towns were commanded to repress at once any symptoms of disorder which might show themselves, and particularly to allow no injury to be done to the Huguenots. Aumale and Guise had gone in pursuit of Montgomery, and at the moment were not in Paris. The Queen-mother used the opportunity to burden them with the entire responsibility. But her genius had overshot its mark, and she was not to escape so easily. Guise returned in the evening to find the odium cast upon himself. He at once insisted that the circulars should be recalled. The Parlement of Paris was assembled, and the King was compelled to admit publicly that the troops had received their orders from himself. The story of the Huguenot conspiracy was revived, systematised, and supported by pretended confessions made at the moment of death by men who could now offer no contradiction. The Protestants of the provinces, finding themselves denounced. from the throne, were likely instantly to take arms to defend themselves. Couriers were therefore despatched with second orders that they should be dealt with as they had been dealt with at Paris; and at Lyons, Orleans, Rouen, Bourdeaux, Toulon, Meaux, in half the towns and villages of France, the bloody drama was played once again. The King, thrown out into the hideous torrent of blood, became drunk with frenzy, and let slaughter have its way, till even Guise himself affected to be shocked, and interposed to put an end to it; not, however, till, according to the belief of the times, a hundred thousand men, women, and children had been miserably murdered.' 1 The number again may be hoped to have been prodigiously exaggerated; with all large figures, when unsupported by exact statistics, it is safe to divide at least by ten. The guilt of such enormous wickedness may be distinguished from its cause. The guilt was the Queenmother's; the cause was Catholic fanaticism. Catherine de Medici had designed the political murder of a few inconvenient persons, with a wicked expectation that their friends in return might kill Guise and his uncle, whose power was troublesome to her. The massacre was the spontaneous work of theological frenzy heated to the boiling point. No imaginable army of murderers could have been provided by the most accomplished conspirator to have executed such a work in such a way. The actors in it were the willing instruments of teachers of religion as sincere in their madness as themselves. The equity of history requires that men be tried by the standard of their times. The citizens of Paris and Orleans may be pardoned if they were not more enlightened than the Sovereign Pontiff of Christendom and the Most Catholic King of Spain. Philip, when the news reached him, is said to have laughed for the first and only time in his life. He was happy in being saved from a combination which had threatened him with the loss of his Low Countries. But a deeper source of gratification to him was the public evidence that his brother-in-law no longer intended to tamper with heresy, that France was in no further danger of following England into schism, and that the seamless robe of the Saviour was not to be parted among His executioners. At Rome, in the circle of the saints, the delight was even more unbounded. Where the blood was flowing the voice of humanity could not utterly be stifled, and expressions of displeasure began early to be heard.1 In 1 'It is much lamented to see the King's cruelty even by the Papists. Many be sorry that so monstrous, a CHAP XXIII 1572 September СНАР XXIII the Holy City there was a universal outpouring of thanksgiving to the Father who had taken pity on His chil1572 dren. The cannon were fired at St. Angelo, the streets September were illuminated, Pope Gregory with his cardinals walked in procession from sanctuary to sanctuary to offer their sacrifice of adoring gratitude. As, for an act of hostility committed five centuries before, a prophet of Israel commanded the extermination of an entire nation; as then the baby was not spared at the breast, the mother with child, the aged, and the sick were slaughtered in their beds-all murdered; as the hideous fury was extended to the cattle in the field, and all living things were piled together in a gory mass of carnage: so another slaughter of scarce inferior horror had again been perpetrated in the name of religion, and the Vicar of Christ, like a second Samuel, bestowed upon the deed the especial blessing of the Almighty. The scene of the massacre was painted by the Pope's orders, with an inscription immortalising his own gratification and approval. He struck a commemorative medal, with on the one side his own image, on the other the destroying Angel immolating the Huguenots. He despatched Cardinal Orsini to Paris to congratulate the King; and the assassins of Lyons, on whose hands the blood of the innocents was scarcely dry, knelt before the holy man in the cathedral as he passed through, and received his apostolic blessing. Such was the judgment upon the massacre in the |