The edict of January having granted to the Protestants a certain tolerance, Guise, who boasted that he would cut this edict in half with his sword, proved his word by the massacre of Vassy. The Protestants of Paris were terrified at this tragedy, but would not be discouraged. The very day the duke returned to Paris, his sword reeking with innocent blood, Bèze went to preach at the temple of Jerusalem, whither he was escorted by the Prince de Condé, a faithful Huguenot, and by a large company of mounted arquebusiers.
During the second civil war, in January, 1568, the citizens of Paris were, by an official proclamation, called upon to warn the Protestants of the capital to absent themselves from it, “until those who had taken arms against His Majesty should have laid them low.” In December, after the “lame” peace, as it was called, Parliament ordered the Protestants to shut themselves up in their houses “to avoid the murders which might follow.” It is asserted that ten thousand of them were assassinated during the six months which succeeded the peace, though this figure is doubtless exaggerated.
The extermination of the heretics had for a considerable time past been recommended to Catherine de Médicis by Philippe II., by the Duke of Alva, and by Pope Pius V. The queen, long irresolute, decided suddenly, just when the Guises had aggravated the situation by causing Coligny to be assassinated. Catherine, as we have seen in a previous chapter, obtained, at the last moment, the consent of the king; but it was Charles’s brother and successor, Henry III., who took the direction of the massacre and posted himself in the middle of the bridge of Notre Dame in order to have both banks beneath his eye. We know how the signal for the tragedy was given by the bell of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and how Coligny was the first to feel the Catholic steel. The assassins who now plunged into their ghastly work carried a white cross in their hat and a kerchief tied in a knot on their arm.
At the court of the Louvre the officer of the guard, with a list in his hand, called out the Huguenot gentlemen who were staying in the palace, and the king, from one of the windows, saw the throats of his guests cut, to the number of two hundred. It is an error, all the same, to suppose that the massacre scarcely touched any but the aristocratic classes; a large portion of[{40}] the Parisian population, merchants, workmen, belonged to the Reformation and perished.
THE NATIONAL BRIDGE.
Towards seven in the morning Charles IX., armed with a blunderbuss, fired upon some of the fugitives, whom he failed to hit because his fowling-piece did not carry far enough. This incident has been denied; but it has been gravely recorded by Brantôme, D’Aubigny, and Goulard. It was attested moreover to Voltaire by Marshal de Jessé. The Marshal had known the page, then almost a centenarian, who loaded and re-loaded the royal blunderbuss.
After the massacre the king went to the Parliament and declared that he assumed the whole responsibility for what had happened. The audience of senators loudly applauded the murderer, and the chief president overwhelmed him with the vilest eulogies. On the 27th August the chapter of Notre Dame formed a special procession to thank the Almighty for the “extirpation of the heretics now happily commenced”; and at the same juncture Panigarole, bishop of Asti, preaching before the queen-mother, Charles IX., and Henry, King of Poland, praised the king for having “in one morning purged France of heresy.” Nor did the municipality of Paris omit to have medals struck “in memory of Saint Bartholomew’s Day.”
More than one professor of the reformed faith now turned renegade. Condé abjured at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Henry of Navarre and his sister at the Louvre. But the infant church was fondly nursed by such devotees as Bérenger and Portal, who endowed it with a sum sufficient to maintain its pastors in their functions and to educate candidates for the future ministry.