gates of the city so that none could go out or come in, to arm the people, and have them in readiness in their proper wards. The organized soldiery were conveniently disposed under their commanders. A conspiracy and threatened rising of the Huguenots were the pretext for these arrangements; but the soldiers and the leaders of the mob needed no such inducement to reconcile them to the task of putting to death the heretics. As the dawn approached, Guise, with the bastard Angouleme, a son of Henry II., moved with a strong force silently through the streets to the lodgings of the Admiral, where the King's guards, who had been stationed there for his protection, were ready to side with the assassins. Coligny heard the tumult; divined its nature; calmly commended his soul to Christ; told his friends that he was ready to die; bade them escape, and was pierced with the swords of the hired murderers who flung his body from the window upon the pavement, that Guise might be satisfied that the work was completely done, and trample on the lifeless hero whom he had hated. Guise had ordered that every true Catholic should tie a white band upon his arm, and fasten a white cross to his hat. A distinguished painter, Millais, has depicted, in "The Huguenot Lover," a scene that might naturally have occurred. A maiden, in whose countenance tenderness is mingled with terror, is gazing up into the face of her lover, about whose arm she is trying to bind a white scarf-which he gently but firmly resists. The houses of the Huguenots were registered; there was no difficulty in finding the victims.

At early dawn the great bell of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois tolled out the signal, and the slaughter began. Even the hardhearted Marshal Tavannes, who superintended the soldiery, says: "Blood and death fill the streets with such horror that even their majesties, who were the authors of it, within the Louvre cannot avoid fear; all the Huguenots are indiscriminately slain, making no defence;" "many women and children are slain by the furious populace; two thousand are massacred." Catherine de Medici and her two sons had come to the front of the Louvre "to see the execution commence." This same Tavannes, with savage ferocity, cried to his men: "Kill, kill! bleeding is as good in August as in May!" The Protes

tant noblemen who were near Coligny, placed there for his defence, were murdered. La Rochefoucauld, who had spent the previous evening with the King until 11 o'clock, and whom Charles had tried to detain for the night in order to save him, was stabbed to the heart. Teligini, Coligny's son-in-law, a man beloved by all, was butchered by a valet of Anjou. Brion, the white-haired preceptor of the Marquis of Conti, the young brother of Condé, was massacred in the arms of the child, who begged in vain that the life of his teacher might be spared. Among the killed was Peter Ramus, a renowned scholar and philosopher, who was detested as a Protestant and as an opponent of Aristotle, and fell a victim to the jealousy of his rival, Charpentier. Private revenge and avarice seized on the occasion to strike down those who were hated, or whose property was coveted.

Among the most revolting features of the massacre were the part taken by women and children in the work of death, and the brutality with which the corpses of the dead were mutilated, and dragged through the streets. The tumult, as a writer has. said, was like that "of hell. The clanging bells, the crashing doors, the musket shots, the rush of armed men, the shrieks of their victims, and high over all the yells of the mob, fiercer and more pitiless than hungry wolves, made such an uproar that the stoutest hearts shrank appalled, and the sanest appear to have lost their reason."* On the evening before, Margaret of Valois had been bidden by her mother to retire to her own room. Her sister Claude caught her by the arm and begged her not to go, an interference which Catherine sharply rebuked. "I departed," says Margaret, "alarmed and amazed, not knowing what I had to dread." She found the King of Navarre's apartments filled with Huguenot gentlemen, talking of the demand which they would make of the King, the next day, for the punishment of the Duke of Guise. At dawn, her husband went out with them to the tennis-court, to wait for Charles to rise. She fell asleep, but an hour later was awakened by a man calling out, "Navarre," "Navarre." The nurse opened the door, when a wounded gentleman, pursued by four soldiers, rushed in and flung himself upon her bed. *Henry White: Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 413.

She sprang up, followed by the man, who still clung to heras it soon appeared, for protection. The captain of the guards was fortunately at hand. He drove out the soldiers, and the life of the wounded man was saved. The friends, guards and servants of Navaare and Condé were slain. Two hundred bodies lay under the windows of the palace. They were inspected, at a later hour, by the ladies of the Court, who commented on them with a shameless indecency, that would be incredible were it not attested by good evidence. The Princes themselves had been summoned to the King's chamber. Charles, excited to fury, demanded of them to abjure their heresy. "The Mass, or Death!" he cried. Navarre, politic though brave, reminded him of his promises, and required time to consider. Condé firmly refused. Three days were given them in which to make their decision. They finally conformed, to save their lives; and these converts, made in this way, were graciously accepted by the Pope. In the course of the massacre, there were many who narrowly escaped death. A little boy, the son of La Force, saw his brother and father killed, and lay, pretending to be dead, all the day under their bodies, until he heard from a bystander an expression of pity for the slain, to whom he revealed himself, and was saved. Sully, afterwards prime minister of Henry IV., then in his 12th year, escaped almost by miracle.

The slaughter once begun, could not easily be stopped. Several days passed before the scenes of robbery and murder came to an end. Capilupi, who wrote his account immediately after the massacre, under the direction of the Cardinal of Lorraine, referring to Sunday, the principal day, says: "It was a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder." Orders were sent to the other principal towns of France, where the massacre of the Huguenots was carried forward with like circumstances of cruelty. Not less than twenty thousand persons of both sexes, and of every age, were killed in obedience to the command of the Court.

On the first evening after the massacre, the King had sent out messages, ascribing the whole to a conflict of the hostile houses of Guise and Chatillon. Soon it was found necessary,

as well as expedient, to assume the responsibility for the dreadful transaction, and to declare that the massacre was made necessary by a dangerous conspiracy of the Huguenots against the King and government. To carry out this false pretension, several of the Huguenot leaders, who had escaped with their lives, were put through the forms of a judicial process, convicted, and executed. Henry of Navarre was compelled to be one of the spectators of the death of these innocent men.

In all Protestant countries, the report of the great Massacre called out a feeling of unmixed reprobation and horror. Burghley told La Mothe-Fénelon, the French Ambassador, that "the Paris massacre was the most horrible crime which had been committed since the crucifixion of Christ." John Knox said to Du Croc, the French Minister in Scotland; "Go, tell your King, that God's vengeance shall never depart from him nor from his house; that his name shall remain an execration to posterity; and that none proceeding from his loins shall enjoy the kingdom in peace unless he repent." The Emperor Maximilian II., Catholic though he was, expressed the strong condemnation which was felt by all whose hearts were not hardened by sectarian animosity. On the contrary, in Rome and in Madrid, the seats of the Catholic Reaction, there was joy and thanksgiving. Philip II., who, it is said, laughed aloud for the first time in his life, was profuse in his congratulations. The event was celebrated at Rome by the ringing of bells, bonfires, and solemn processions. An inscription over the church of St. Louis, where a Te Deum was chanted, described Charles IX. as an avenging angel, despatched from heaven to sweep his kingdom of heretics. A medal was struck by Gregory XIII to commemorate the massacre-bearing on one face the inscription "Hugonotorum Strages"-Slaughter of the Huguenots-together with the figure of an avenging angel engaged in destroying them. Three frescoes were painted by Vasari in the Vatican, according to the Pope's order, describing the attack upon the Admiral, the King in his council plotting the massacre, and the massacre itself. This painting bears the inscription: Pontifex Colignii necem probat-the Pope approves the killing of Coligny. It is pretended by some that the authori

ties at Rome were deceived by the story of a Huguenot conspiracy against the King's life, which the massacre prevented from being carried out. But Charles did not bring forward this story until the 26th of August. On the 24th, he wrote to his Ambassador at Rome-Ferraz-that the slaughter resulted from a conflict of the two families of Guise and Chatillon. Salviati himself, the Nuncio of the Pope, said that no person of sense believed the tale of a conspiracy. The Nuncio's despatches put the Court of Rome in immediate possession of the real facts. The Cardinal of Lorraine claimed at Rome that the massacre was the product of long deceit and premeditation. The circumstance that Muretus, in his inhuman panegyric of the murderers, delivered in Rome four months after the event, charges a conspiracy upon the slain Huguenots, does not prove that any body believed it. It is probable that few, if any, were deceived by the fiction of a Huguenot plot-an afterthought of Catherine and the King. The exultation at Rome and Madrid was over the destruction of heretics, and the downfall of the anti-Spanish party in France. The rejoicings of the Vatican were kept up, after the massacre at Paris, as the reports of the continuation of the tragedy reached Rome form other parts of the kingdom. It was simply a fanatical joy over the murder of apostates from the Roman Catholic religion.

The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, like the whole course of events in the sixteenth century, was due to a mingling of political and religious motives. It was not political ambition and rivalry alone, nor was it religious fanaticism alone, that gave rise to this terrible event, but both united. But personal motives were, also, closely interwoven with these agencies. The principal, most responsible author of the crime, was Catherine de Medici. It sprang out of her jealousy of Coligny's influence, and her fear of being supplanted. Anjou, her companion in guilt, was moved by the same inducements. Their confederates, Henry of Guise and his mother, were stimulated by revenge, mingled with the ambition and resentment of polit ical aspirants who saw themselves on the verge of a downfall. But the instrument by which these individuals accomplished their design was the fanaticism which the reactionary Catholic movement had kindled in the populace and soldiery of Paris.