Thus came to be planned that most tremendous crime, fixed for the festival of St. Bartholomew, ostensibly for the triumph of the Catholic Church, but in reality to compass the death of the Queen’s political enemies—Navarre, Condé, and Coligni—and to crush the freedom of thought and opinion brought in by liberty of conscience and a purer faith.
This was the Court to which Henry of Navarre came, to be lodged under the roof of the Louvre, and to marry the Princess Marguerite!
The marriage took place on the 18th of August, 1572, at Notre-Dame.[12] The outspoken Charles had said that, in giving his sister Margot to the King of Navarre, he gave her to all the Huguenots in his kingdom. The Princess tells us she wore a royal crown and a state mantle of blue velvet, wrought with gold embroidery, four yards long. It was held up by three princesses; and she further wore a corset, forming the body of her dress, covered with brilliants, and the crown jewels. The streets through which she passed were dressed with scaffoldings, lined with cloth of gold, to accommodate the spectators, all the way from the Archbishop’s palace to Notre-Dame.
A few nights after, Admiral Coligni was shot at, with an arquebuse, by a man standing at a barred window in the street of the Fossés Saint-Germain, as he returned from playing a game of rackets with the King, at the Louvre, to his lodgings at the Hôtel de Saint-Pierre, in the Rue Béthisy. He was walking along slowly, reading a paper; the finger of his right hand was broken, and he was otherwise grievously wounded. The assassin, Maurévert, was a fellow known to be in the pay of Henri, Duc de Guise. The house from which the shot was fired
