SAINT BARTHOLOMEW'S
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SAINT BARTHOLOMEW'S
well to kill the Admiral, I agree, but all the Huguenots
in France must likewise perish, so that not one be left
later to upbraid me." Cavalli, the Venetian Am-
bassador, maintained in his report that the king held
out for an hour and a half, finally yielding because of
Catherine's threat to leave France and the fear that
his brother, the Duke of Anjou, might be named
captain-general of the Catholics. Margaret of Valois
stated in her account that it was Rets, his former
tutor, whom Catherine sent to reason with him, who
eventually succeeded in obtaining the king's consent.
Is it then true, as certain documents claim, that,
toward midnight, Charles IX again hesitated? Per-
haps. At any rate, it was he who, on 24 August, a
little after midnight, ordered Le Charron, Prevot des
Marchands, in charge of the Paris police, to call to
arms the captains arid bourgeois of the quarters in
order that he (the king) and the city might be pro-
tected against the Huguenot conspirators. Catherine
and the Duke of Anjou had previously secured the
assistance of Marcel, former Prevot des Marchands.
Whilst Le Charron, without any great enthusiasm,
marshalled the bourgeoisie who were to quell a
possible uprising of Huguenots, Marcel drew up the
masses, over whom he had unlimited influence, and
who, together with the royal troops, were to attack
and plunder the Huguenots. The royal troops were
especially commissioned to kill the Huguenot nobles;
the mob, mobilized by Marcel, was to threaten the
bourgeois troops in case the latter should venture
to side with the Huguenots. Charles IX and Cath-
erine decided that the massacre should not begin in
the city till the admiral had been slain, and after-
wards Catherine claimed that she took upon her con-
science the blood of only six of the dead, Coligny and
five others; however, having deliberately fired the
passions of the multitude, over whom Marcel had
absolute control, she should be held responsible for
all the blood shed.
The Massacre. — Toward midnight the troops took up arms in and around the Louvre, and Coligny's abode was surrounded. A little before daybreak the sound of a pistol-shot so terrified Charles IX and his mother that, in a moment of remorse, they despatched a nobleman to Guise to bid him refrain from any attack on the admiral, but the order came too late, Coligny had already been slain. Scarcely had the Duke of Guise heard the bell of Saint-Germain I'Au.xerrois than he started with a few men toward the Coligny mansion. Bcsme, one of the duke's intimates, went up to the admiral's room. "Are you Coligny?" he asked. "I am," the admiral replied. "Young man, you should respect my years. How- ever, do as you please; you will not be shortening my life to any great extent." Besme plunged a dagger into the admiral's breast and flung his body out of the window. The Bastard of Angoulcme and the Duke of Guise, who were without, kicked the corpse and an Italian, a servant of the Duke of Nevers, cut off its head. Immediately the king's guards and the nobles on the side of the Guises slew all the Protestant nobles whom Charles IX, but a few days previously, when he wanted to protect the admiral against the intrigues of the Guises, had carefully lodged in the admiral's neighbourhood. La Rochefoucauld, with whom that very night Charles IX had jested till eleven o'clock, was stabbed by a masked valet; Teligny, Coligny's son-in-law, was killed on a roof by a musket-shot, and the Seigneur de la Force and one of his sons had their throats cut, the other son, a child of twelve, remaining hidden beneath their corpses for a day. The servants of Henry of Bourbon and the Prince of Conde who dwelt iii the Louvre were murdered under the vestibule by Swi.ss mercen- aries. One nobleman fled to the apartment of Mar- garet, who had just married Henry of Bourbon, and she obtained his pardon. Whilst their servants were
being slaughtered Henry of Bourbon and the Prince
of Conde were ordered to appear before the king,
who tried to make them abjure, but they refused.
After that the massacre spread through Paris, and Cruc6, a goldsmith, Koerver, a bookseller, and Pezou, a butcher, battered in the doors of the Huguenot houses. A tradition, long credited, claims that Charles IX stationed himself on a balcony of the Louvre and fired upon his subjects; Brantome, how- ever, supposed that the king took aim from the win- dows of his sleeping apartment. But nothing is more uncertain as the balcony on which he was said to have stood was not there in 1572, and in none of the accounts of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew sent to their governments by the various diplomatists then in Paris does this detail figure. It was first mentioned in a book published at Basel in 1573: "Dialogue auquel sont trait^es plusieurs choses advenues aux Luth<iriens et Huguenots de France" and reprinted in 1574 under the title: "Le reveille matin des Fran^ais". This libel is the work of Barnaud, a native of Dauphin^, a Protestant greatly disliked by his co-religionists, and whose calumnies caused a Protestant nobleman to insult him in public. 'The "Tocsin contre les auteurs du Massacre de France", another narration of the Massacre of St. Bartholo- mew, that appeared in 1579, makes no allusion to this sinister pastime of Charles IX, and the accounts given of it twenty years afterwards by Brantome and d'Aubigne do not agree. Moreover, the anecdote quoted by Voltaire, according to which the Marechal de Tessc had known a gentleman then over a hundred years old who was supposed to have loaded Charles IX's musket, is extremely doubtful, and the absolute silence of those diplomatists who addressed to their respective governments detailed reports of the massacre must ever remain a strong argument against this tradition.
On the following morning blood flowed in streams; the houses of the rich were pillaged regardless of the religious opinions of their owners. "To be a Hugue- not," emphatically declares Mezeray, the historian, "was to have money, enviable position, or avaricious heirs." When at eleven o'clock in the morning the Prevot Le Charron came to inform the king of this epidemic of crime, an edict was issued forbidding a continuation of the slaughter; but the massacre was prolonged for several days more, and on 25 August Ramus, the celebrated philosopher, was assassinated in spite of the formal prohibition of the king and queen. The number of victims is unknown. Thirty- five livres were paid to the grave-diggers of the Ceme- tery of the Innocents for the interment of 1100 corp.ses; but many were thrown into the Seine. Ranke and Henri Martin estimate the number of victims in Paris at 2000. In the provinces also massacres oc- curred. On the evening of 24 August, a messenger brought to the Provost of Orleans a letter bearing the royal seal and ordering him to treat all Huguenots like those of Paris and to exterminate them, "taking care to let nothing leak out and by shrewd dissimula- tion to surprise them all". Only that day the king had written to M. d'Eguilly, Governor of Chartres, that there was question merely of a quarrel between Guise and Coligny. On 25 August an order was is- sued to kill the factious; on the next day the king solemnly announced in open session that his decision of 24 August was the only means of frustrating the plot; on 27 August he again began to prohibit all murder; and on the following day he solemnly de- clared that the punishment of the admiral and his ac- complices was due not to their religion but to their conspiracy against the Court, and he despatched let- ters bidding the governors to repress the factionists; on 30 August he ordered the people of Bourges to kill any Huguenots who should congregate, but revoked " all verbal commands that he had issued when he had
