CAUMONT DE LA FORCE.
1572.
During the massacre of St. Bartholomew the murderers found their way into the Rue de la Seine, where lived Monsieur de la Force and his two sons, who were noted for their courageous profession of the condemned doctrines. Monsieur de la Force was strongly urged by his brother to escape, but he refused, because his eldest son, who had been very ill, was not yet able to travel, and he would not leave him behind. He had barely taken his heroic resolution before he was surrounded and made prisoner by a band of zealots, red-handed from the work of death. They threatened him, but desisted for a time when he offered their chief two thousand crowns of ransom. He was then led away with his two sons to a house in the Rue des Petits-Champs, and left there in the custody of two Swiss soldiers, after he had given his solemn word of honour that he would not try to escape. The soldiers felt some pity for the hapless gentleman, and gave him to understand that they would not stand in the way of his flight; but he was a slave to his word, and he refused either to move himself or to allow even his youngest son to be taken to a place of safety.
On the next day, according to the Memoirs of La Force, Count Coconas, with a party of fifty soldiers, came to the house in the Rue des Petits-Champs, and told Monsieur de la Force that he had come to fetch him by order of Monsieur the King’s brother. There was a purposed vagueness in the words which did not escape the unhappy gentleman’s notice, and he asked where he was to be taken, at the same time beginning to make some few alterations in his dress, as if he thought it best to pretend to believe what he had heard. But Coconas spared him this trouble, and at the same time relieved himself of the irksomeness of concealment, by tearing hat and cloak out of his hands before he could put them on. Then both father and sons knew what was intended for them, and began to prepare their minds for death. It soon became evident that they were not being conducted to the apartments of Monsieur in the Louvre; but when De la Force pointed this out to the escort, and complained bitterly of the breach of faith towards him after his offer of ransom had been accepted, they answered not a word, but pushed their victims on towards the slaughterhouse.
The father, bareheaded and without his cloak, walked first; the sons, in the same half-naked condition, followed—the elder, who could scarcely move, but to whom terror had given a little strength, being second; and the younger the last in the dismal column. In this way they were taken the entire length of the Rue des Petits-Champs, until they came to the rampart, when the officer in charge, without a word of warning, called out, “Kill! kill!” and in an instant, a circle of soldiers was formed round the victims, and the daggers were at work. The eldest son fell first with the cry, “O my God, I am dead!” The father, turning instinctively to help him, was struck as he was bending over the body, and fell across him—his shield even in death. The youngest son, by nothing less than a miracle of presence of mind, repeated his brother’s cry before a single dagger had reached him, and fell with the others, though his skin was not so much as scratched. But his body was covered all over with the blood that welled from their wounds, and the assassins stripped him almost naked without once suspecting that he had not received a mortal thrust. When they had treated all their victims in this way, they left their naked and still warm bodies with the contemptuous expression, “There they lie, all three.”
The eldest son was quite dead; his diseased frame had probably offered no resistance to the shock of the first blow; the father was mortally wounded, but he lay a long while gasping out his life, while the frame of his youngest and unhurt child, who had nestled close to him the better to feign death, vibrated to every shudder. The child was, of course, quite conscious, and perhaps his position was the more pitiable of the two, for he lay side by side with death, or worse than death, without daring to stir or to utter a single cry of horror, lest he should bring the assassins back. He remained in this sickening companionship till about four in the afternoon, when some persons crept out of the neighbouring houses to look at the bodies and secure what few valuables the soldiers had left behind. One of these marauders, a marker at tennis, in taking off the stockings of the living child, turned him over with his face to the sky, with the exclamation, “Alas! poor little one, what harm has he done?” “I am not dead,” whispered young Caumont, raising himself gently: “pray, pray, save my life!”
“Hush!” said the man; “keep quiet: they are still there,” and pointing to a group of the murderers who were still hovering about the place, he went away, but returned after a little while, when the coast was clear, and told the child to get up. He had brought a tattered, dirty cloak with him, which he threw over Caumont’s naked shoulders; and in this guise of poverty and wretchedness he drove the child before him through the streets, pretending that he was chastising a runaway nephew who had sold his clothes. By this ruse he contrived to pass almost unquestioned through several groups both of citizens and of soldiers, and to lead the boy to the miserable garret in which he and his family lived.
Caumont hid himself for a while in the straw of the marker’s bed, and tried to get a little sleep. In the meantime the man had observed that he wore several rings of great value; and he asked for them in return for his hospitality as soon as the child awoke. Caumont unhesitatingly drew them one by one off his fingers with the exception of a certain diamond, which had been his mother’s gift; and in answer to a question by the marker’s wife, he told her why he wished to keep it. The woman angrily replied that he ought to grudge nothing to persons who had shown him so much kindness, and who could not afford to be out of pocket by their good actions; and the child knowing how much he was in their power, reluctantly yielded up the coveted reward. She then gave him a meal of very unpalatable food, and her husband offered to guide him to any place of safety he might select. The child at first chose the Louvre, where his sister, Madame de Larchant, was near
the person of the Queen; but the man positively refused to take him there on account of the great risk of his being recognised by some of the guards. “Take me to the arsenal then,” said young De Caumont, “to the house of Madame de Brisambourg, my aunt.” “Agreed,” replied the tennis-marker; “it is a long way, but we will go round by the ramparts, and perhaps we shall be so lucky as not to meet a single person on the road.”