The Story of Paris

by Thomas Okey

CHAPTER XII

Rise of the Guises—Huguenot and Catholic—the Massacre of St. Bartholomew

"Beware of Montmorency and curb the power of the Guises," was the counsel of the dying Francis to his son. Henry II., dull and heavy-witted that he was, neglected the advice, and the Guises flourished in the sun of royal favour. The first Duke of Guise and founder of his renowned house was Claude, a poor cadet of René II., Duke of Lorraine. He succeeded in allying by marriage his eldest son and successor, Francis, to the House of Bourbon; his second son, Charles, became Cardinal of Lorraine, and his daughter, wife to James V. of Scotland. Duke Francis, by his military genius and wise statesmanship; Charles, by his learning and subtle wit, exalted their house to the lofty eminence it enjoyed during the stirring period that now opens. In 1558, after the disastrous defeat of Montmorency at St. Quentin, when Paris lay at the mercy of the Spanish and English armies, the duke was recalled from Italy and made Lieutenant-General of the realm. By a short and brilliant campaign, he expelled the English from Calais, and recovered in three weeks the territory held by them for more than two hundred years. Francis gained an unbounded popularity, and rose to the highest pinnacle of success; but short time was left to his royal master wherein to enjoy a reflected glory. On the 27th June 1559, lists were erected across the Rue St. Antoine, between the Tournelles and the Bastille. The peace with Spain, and the double marriage of the king's daughter to Philip II. of Spain and of his sister to the Duke of Savoy, were to be celebrated by a magnificent tournament in which the king, proud of his strength and bodily address, was to hold the field with the Duke of Guise and the princes against all comers. For three days the king distinguished himself by his triumphant prowess, and at length challenged the Count Montgomery de Lorge, captain of the Scottish Guards; the captain prayed to be excused, but the king insisted and the course was run. Several lances were broken, but in the last encounter, the stout captain failed to lower his shivered lance quickly enough, and the broken truncheon struck the royal visor, lifted it and penetrated the king's eye. Henry fell senseless and was carried to the palace of the Tournelles, where he died after an agony of eleven days. Fifteen years later, Montgomery was captured fighting with the Huguenots, and beheaded on the Place de Grève while Catherine de' Medici looked on "pour goûter," says Félibien quaintly, "le plaisir de se voir vangée de la mort de son mary." The tower in the interior of the Palais de Justice, where the unhappy Scottish noble was imprisoned after his capture, was known as the Tour Montgomery, until demolished in the reign of Louis XVI. There was, however, little love lost between Henry's queen, Catherine de' Medici, and her royal husband, who had long neglected her for the maturer charms of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers.

West Wing of Louvre by Pierre Lescot.
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Henry saw Lescot's admirable design for the reconstruction of the west wing of the Louvre completed. The architect had associated a famous sculptor, Jean Goujon, with him, who executed the beautiful figures in low relief which still adorn the quadrangle front between the Pavilion de l'Horloge and the south-west angle, and the noble Caryatides, which support the musicians' gallery in the Salle Basse, or Grande Salle of Charles V.'s Louvre, now known as the Salle des Caryatides. The agreement, dated 5th September 1550, awards forty-six livres each for the four plaster models and eighty crowns each for the four carved figures. Lescot preserved the external wall of the old château as the kernel of his new wing, and the enormous strength of the original building of Philip Augustus may be estimated by the fact that the embrasures of each of the five casements of the first floor looking westwards now serve as offices. So grandement satisfait was Henry with the perfection of Lescot's work, that he determined to continue it along the remaining three wings, that the court of the Louvre might be a cour non-pareille. The south wing was, however, only begun when his tragic death occurred, and the present inconsequent and huge fabric is the work of a whole tribe of architects, whose intermittent activities extended over the reigns of nine French sovereigns.

Lescot and Goujon were also associated in the construction of the most beautiful Renaissance fountain in Paris, the Fontaine des Innocents, which formerly stood against the old church of the Innocents at the corner of the Rue aux Fers. It was while working on one of the figures of this fountain that Jean Goujon is traditionally said to have been shot as a Huguenot during the massacre of St. Bartholomew.[111]

Tritons and Nereids from the Old Fontaine des Innocents.
Jean Goujon.
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Europe was now in travail of a new era, and unhappy France reeled under the tempest of the Reformation. A daring spirit of enquiry and of revolt challenged every principle on which the social fabric had been based, and the only refuge in the coming storm in France was the Monarchy. Never had its power been more absolute. The king's will was law—a harbour of safety, indeed, if he were strong and wise and virtuous: a veritable quicksand, if feeble and vicious. And to pilot the state of France in these stormy times, Henry II. left a sickly progeny of four princes, miserable puppets, whose favours were disputed for thirty years by ambitious and fanatical nobles, queens and courtesans.

Francis II., a poor creature of sixteen years, the slave of his wife Marie Stuart and of the Guises, was called king of France for seventeen months. He it was who sat daily by Mary in the royal garden, on the terrace at Amboise overlooking the Loire, and, surrounded by his brothers and the ladies of the court, gazed at the revolting and merciless executions of the Protestant conspirators,[112] who, under the Prince of Condé, had plotted to destroy the Guises and to free the king from their influence. It was the first act in a horrible drama, a dread pursuivant of the civil and religious wars which were to culminate in the massacre of St. Bartholomew at Paris. The stake was a high one, for the victory of the reformers would sound the death-knell of the Catholic cause in Europe. There is little reason to doubt that the queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, who now emerges into prominence, was genuinely sincere in her disapproval of the horrors of Amboise, and in her efforts to bring milder counsels to bear in dealing with the Huguenots whom she feared less than the Guises; but the fierce passions roused by civil and religious hatred were uncontrollable. When the Huguenot noble, Villemongis, was led to the scaffold at Amboise, he dipped his hands in the blood of his slaughtered comrades, and, lifting them to heaven, cried: "Lord, behold the blood of Thy children; Thou wilt avenge them." It has been truly said that the grass soon grows over blood, shed on the battle-field; never over blood shed on the scaffold. Treachery and assassination were the interludes of plots and battles, and the thirst for vengeance during thirty years was never slaked. In 1563 the Duke of Guise was shot in the back by a fanatical Huguenot, and as the wounded Prince of Condé was surrendering his sword to the Duke of Anjou after the defeat of 1569, the Baron de Montesquieu, brave et vaillant gentilhomme, says Brantôme, rode up, exclaiming: "Mort Dieu! kill him! kill him!" and blew out the wounded captive's brains with a pistol shot.

The treaty of St. Germain, which has so often been charged on Catherine as an act of perfidy, was rather an imperative necessity, if respite were to be had from the misery into which the land had fallen. Its conditions were honourably carried out, and Catholic excesses were impartially and severely repressed. Charles IX., who was now twenty years of age and strongly attached to Coligny, began to assert his independence of the queen-mother and of the Guises,[113] and his first movement was in the direction of conciliation. The young king offered the hand of his fair sister, Princess Marguerite, to Henry of Navarre, and received the Admiral and Jeanne of Navarre with much honour at court. Pressure was brought to bear upon him, but, pope or no pope, said Charles, he was determined to conclude the marriage and himself would take Margot by the hand in open church and give her away. The party of the Guises, and especially Paris, were furious. The capital, with the provost, the Parlement, the university, the prelates, the religious orders, had always been hostile to the Huguenots. The people could with difficulty be restrained at times from assuming the office of executioners as Protestants were led to the stake. Any one who did not uncover as he passed the image of the Virgin at the street corners, or who omitted to bend the knee as the Host was carried by, was attacked as a Lutheran. When the heralds published the peace with the Huguenots at the crossways of Paris, filth and mud were thrown at them, and they went in danger of their lives: now Coligny and his Huguenots were holding their heads high in Paris, proud and insolent and a heretic prince of Navarre was to wed the king's sister.

Jeanne of Navarre died soon after her arrival at court,[114] but the alliance was hurried on. The betrothal took place in the Louvre, and on Sunday, 17th August 1572, a high dais was erected outside Notre Dame for the celebration of the marriage. When the ceremony had been performed by the Cardinal de Bourbon, Henry conducted his bride to the choir of the cathedral, and went walking in the bishop's garden while mass was sung. The office ended, he returned and led his wife to the bishop's palace to dinner, and a magnificent state supper at the Louvre concluded this momentous day. Three days of balls, masquerades and tourneys followed, amid the murmuring of a sullen populace. These were the noces vermeilles—the red nuptials—of Marguerite of France and Henry of Navarre.

Meanwhile Catherine and Charles had differed on a matter of foreign policy. Her support of the Prince of Orange against Spain in the Netherlands was conditional on an alliance with England and the marriage of her son the Duke of Alençon with Elizabeth. But the English Queen's habitual duplicity made any reliance on her word impossible and when Marie learned that Elizabeth, while professing her inclination for the Duke and her desire to aid the Protestant cause in Flanders, was protesting to her Council that she would never marry a boy with a pock-spoiled face, and was in secret communication with Alva, to turn the situation to her own profit, she flung herself into Guise's arms and abandoned Coligny and the Huguenots: for the disastrous defeat of the Protestants at Mons and the growing fury of the Catholic fanatics at Paris, threatened to wreck the throne, and while Elizabeth was toying with these tremendous issues the furies were let loose. Charles still chivalrously determined to stand by Coligny. Catherine, terrified at the result of her own work, and resolved to regain her ascendency, conspired with her third son, the Prince of Anjou, the future Henry III., to destroy and have done with the Protestants. Coligny had often been warned of the danger he would run in Paris, but the stout old soldier knew no fear, and came to take part in the festivities of the wedding. The sounds of revelry had barely died away when Coligny, who was returning from the Louvre, by the east gate, the Porte Bourbon, to his hôtel, walking slowly and reading a petition, was fired at from a window as he passed the cloister of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and wounded in the arm. He stopped and noted the house whence the smoke came: it was the house of the preceptor of the Duke of Guise. The king was playing at tennis when the news reached him: he flung down his racquet, exclaiming, "What! shall I never be in peace? must I suffer new trouble every day?" and went moody and pensive to his chamber. In a few moments the Prince of Condé and Henry of Navarre burst in, uttering indignant protests, and begged permission to leave Paris. Charles assured them he would do justice, and that they might safely remain: in the afternoon he went with his mother and the princes to visit the admiral. The king asked to be left alone in the wounded man's chamber, remained a long time with him, and protesting that though the wound was his friend's, the grief was his own, swore to avenge him.

Coligny once again was warned by his friends to beware of the court, but he refused to distrust Charles. Many and conflicting are the reports of what followed. We shall not be accused of any Protestant bias if we base our story mainly on that of the two learned Benedictine priests[115] who are responsible for five solid tomes of the Histoire de la Ville de Paris. On the morrow of the attempt on Coligny's life, the queen-mother invited Charles and his brother of Anjou to walk, after dinner, in the garden of her new palace in the Tuileries:[116] they were joined by the chief Catholic leaders, and a grand council was held. The queen dwelt on the perilous situation of the monarchy and the Catholic cause, and urged that now was the time to act: Coligny lay wounded; Navarre and Condé were in their power at the Louvre; for ten Huguenots in Paris the Catholics could oppose a thousand armed men; rid France of the Huguenot chiefs and a formidable evil were averted. Her course was approved, but the leaders shrank from including the two princes of Navarre and Condé: they were to be given their choice—recantation or death. By order of the king 12,000 arquebusiers were placed along the river and the streets, and arms were carried into the Louvre. The admiral's friends, alarmed at the sinister preparations, protested to Charles but were reassured and told to take Cosseins and fifty arquebusiers to guard his house. The provost of Paris was then summoned by the Duke of Guise and ordered to arm and organise the citizens and proceed to the Hôtel de Ville at midnight. The king, Guise said, would not lose so fair an opportunity of exterminating the Huguenots. The Catholic citizens were to tie a piece of white linen on their left arm and place a white cross in their caps that they might be recognised by their friends. At midnight the windows of their houses were to be illuminated by torches, and at the first sound of the great bell at the Palais de Justice the bloody work was to begin. Meanwhile Catherine, doubtful of Charles, repaired to his chamber with Anjou and her councillors to fix his wavering purpose; she heaped bitter reproaches upon him, worked on his fears with stories of a vast Huguenot conspiracy and hinted that cowardice prevented him from seizing the fairest opportunity that God had ever offered, to free himself from his enemies. She repeated an Italian prelate's vicious epigram: "Che pietà lor ser crudel, che crudeltà lor ser pietosa,"[117] and concluded by threatening to leave the court with the Duke of Anjou rather than witness the destruction of the Catholic cause. Charles, who had listened sullenly, and, if we may believe Anjou, for a long while angrily refused to sacrifice Coligny, was at length stung by the taunt of cowardice and broke into a delirium of passion; he swore by la mort dieu to compass the death of every Huguenot in France, that none might be left to reproach him afterwards.

Catherine de' Medici.
French School, 16th Century.
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Catherine gave him no time for farther vacillation. The great bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois was rung, and at two in the morning of Sunday, St. Bartholomew's Day, 24th August 1572, the Duke of Guise and his followers issued forth to do their Sabbath morning's work. Cosseins saw his leader coming and knew what was expected of him. Guise, who believed the blood of his murdered father lay on Coligny's head, made sure of his vengeance. The admiral's door was forced, his servants were poignarded, and Besme, a German in the service of Guise, followed by others, burst into his room. The old man stood erect in his robe de chambre, facing his murderers. "Art thou the admiral?" demanded Besme. "I am he," answered Coligny with unfaltering voice and, gazing steadily at the naked sword pointed at his breast, added, "Young man, thou shouldst show more respect to my white hairs; yet canst thou shorten but little my brief life." For answer he was pierced by Besme's sword and stabbed to death by his companions. Guise stood waiting in the street below and the body was flung down to him from the window. He wiped the blood from the old man's face, looked at it, and said, "It is he!" Spurning the body with his foot he cried, "Courage, soldiers! we have begun well; now for the others, the king commands it." Meanwhile the bell of the Palais de Justice, answering that of St. Germain, was booming forth its awful summons, and the citizens hastened to perform their part.

All the Huguenot nobles dwelling near the admiral were pitilessly murdered, and a similar carnage took place at the Louvre. Marguerite, the young bride of Navarre, in her Memoirs, tells of the horrors of that morning, how, when half-asleep, a wounded Huguenot nobleman rushed into her chamber, pursued by four archers, and flung himself on her bed imploring protection, followed by a captain of the guard from whom she gained his life. She entreated the captain to lead her to her sister's room, and as she fled thither, more dead than alive, another fugitive was hewn down by a hallebardier only three paces from her; she fell fainting in the captain's arms. Meanwhile Charles, the queen-mother, and Anjou, after the violent scene in the king's chamber, had lain down for two hours' rest and then went to a window which overlooked the basse-cour of the Louvre, to see the "beginning of the executions." If we may believe Henry's story, they had not been there long before the sound of a pistol shot filled them with dread and remorse, and a messenger was sent to bid Guise spare the admiral and stay the whole undertaking; but the nobleman who had been sent returned saying that Guise had told him it was too late: the admiral was dead, and the executions had begun all over the city. A dozen Protestant nobles of the suites of Condé and Navarre, who at the king's invitation had taken up their quarters in the Louvre, were seized; one was even dragged from a sick-bed: all were taken to the courtyard and hewn in pieces by the Swiss guards under the eyes of Charles, who cried: "Let none escape." Meantime the Catholic leaders had been scouring the streets on horseback, shouting to the people that a Huguenot conspiracy to murder the king had been discovered, and that it was the king's wish that all the Huguenots should be destroyed.

A list of the Huguenots in Paris had been prepared and all their houses marked. None was spared. Old and young, women and children, were pitilessly butchered. All that awful Sunday the orgy of slaughter and pillage went on; every gate of the city had been closed and the keys brought to the king. Night fell and the carnage was not stayed. Two days yet and two nights the city was a prey to the ministers of death, and some Catholics, denounced by personal enemies, were involved in the massacre. The resplendent August sun, the fair sky and serene atmosphere were held to be a divine augury, and a white thorn in the cemetery of the Innocents blooming out of season was hailed as a miracle and a visible token from God that the Catholic religion was to blossom again by the destruction of the Huguenots. The murders did not wholly cease until September. Various were the estimates of the slain—20,000, 5,000, 2,000. A goldsmith named Cruce went about displaying his robust arm and boasting that he had accounted for 400 Huguenots. The streets, the front of the Louvre, the public places were blocked by dead bodies; tumbrils[118] were hired to throw them into the Seine, which literally for days ran red with blood.

Petite Galerie of the Louvre.
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The princes of Navarre and Condé saw the privacy of their chambers violated by a posse of archers on St. Bartholomew's morning; they were forced to dress and were haled before the king, who with a fierce look and glaring eyes, swore at them, reproached them for waging war upon him, and ordered them to change their religion. On their refusal he grew furious with rage, and by dint of threats wrung from them a promise to go to mass.

Charles is said to have stood at a window in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre and to have fired across the river with a long arquebus on some Huguenots who, being lodged on the southern side, in the Huguenot quarter, known as la petite Genève, had escaped massacre, and were riding up to learn what was passing. The statement is much canvassed by authorities. It is at least permissible to doubt the assertion, since the first floor[119] of the Petite Galerie, where the king is traditionally believed to have placed himself, was not in existence before the time of Henry IV. If the ground floor be meant, a further difficulty arises from the fact that the southern end was not furnished with a window in Charles IX.'s time.

On the 26th of August the king was forced to avow responsibility before the Parlement for measures which he alleged had been necessary to suppress a Huguenot insurrection aiming at the assassination of himself and the royal family and the destruction of the Catholic religion in France. The ears of the Catholic princes of Europe and of the pope were abused by this specious lie; they believed that the Catholic cause had been saved from ruin; the so-called victory was hailed with transports of joy, and a medal was struck in Rome to celebrate the defeat of the Huguenots.[120]

Such was the massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris. The death-roll of the victims is known to the Recording Angel alone. It was a tremendous folly no less than an indelible crime, for it steeled the heart of every Protestant to avenge his slaughtered brethren. To "take Paris justice" became synonymous with assassination all over Protestant Europe.

Many of the Huguenot leaders escaped from Paris while the soldiers sent to despatch them were pillaging, and the flames of civil strife burst forth fiercer than ever. The court had prepared for massacre, not for war; and while the king was receiving the felicitations of the courts of Spain and Rome, he was forced by the Peace of La Rochelle to concede liberty of conscience to the Protestants and to restore their sequestered estates and offices. After two years of agony of mind and remorse, Charles IX. lay dying of consumption, abandoned by all save his faithful Huguenot nurse. The blood flowing from his nostrils seemed a token of God's wrath; and moaning "Ah! ma mie, what bloodshed! what murders! I am lost! I am lost!" the poor crowned wretch passed to his account. He had not yet reached his twenty-fourth year.