Heaven smiled on the generous hospitality of the little republic. The plague, which had been raging in Geneva, disappeared simultaneously with the arrival of the fugitives from France.[1217] Still the burden which their hosts had assumed was by no means light. They were not rich, and the rigorous winter that followed would have reduced them to great straits even without this additional drain upon their resources. Besides, they had incurred the dangerous enmity of the King of France. While professing deep gratitude to the Genevese for the advice they had given to the Protestants of Nismes to liberate the agents of the royal court, who had been sent to procure their destruction, but had been discovered and incarcerated, Charles the Ninth was in secret plotting the ruin of the city which furnished an asylum to so many of his persecuted subjects. At one time the danger was imminent. The Duke of Savoy was reported to have collected an army of eighteen thousand men near Chambéry and Annecy, while rumors of domestic treachery took so definite a form, that it was said that two hundred papal soldiers in the disguise of Protestant refugees were lurking in Geneva itself. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic cantons of Fribourg and Soleure, when on the point of joining Berne and Zurich in sending assistance, undertook to stipulate for the reinstatement of the mass within the walls of Geneva; and the Genevese, who, whatever other faults they might possess, were no cowards, declined an alliance upon such conditions.[1218] But the threatened contest of arms never came. By one of those strange turns of affairs, which, from their frequent recurrence in the history of Geneva, an impartial beholder can scarcely interpret otherwise than as interpositions of providence in behalf of a city that was destined for ages to be a safe refuge for the oppressed confessors of a purer faith, the storm was dissipated as rapidly as it had gathered. The bodily ailments of Charles the Ninth were, humanly speaking, the salvation of Geneva.[1219]
In other parts of Switzerland the King of France made great efforts to counteract the injurious influence upon his interests which the intelligence of the massacre could but exert. Almost immediately after the events of the last week of August, the royal ambassador, Monsieur de la Fontaine, and the treasurer whom the French monarch was accustomed to keep in Switzerland, were instructed to write out an account for the benefit of his Majesty's "best and perfect friends," "the magnificent seigniors," wherein among the numerous falsehoods with which they attempted to feed the unsophistical mountaineers, was at least a single truth: "This young and magnanimous prince, since his accession to the throne, has, so to speak, reaped only thorns in place of a sceptre."[1220]
Impression at Baden.
A little later M. de Bellièvre, his special envoy at the diet of Baden, was profuse in assurances to the effect that the deed was not premeditated, but had been rendered necessary by the machinations of the admiral—"a wretched man, or rather, not a man, but a furious and irreconcilable beast who had lost all fear of God and man." He particularly defended the king from all responsibility for the excesses that had been committed, insisting that it was the people that "had taken the bit in its teeth," while Charles, Anjou, and Alençon, did their best to check its mad impetuosity, and Catharine felt "unspeakable regret."[1221] But the envoy had little reason to congratulate himself upon his success. "Sire," he wrote with some disgust to his master, "it is all but impossible to get it out of the heads of the Protestants, that your Majesty's intention is to join the rest of the Catholic princes, in order by force to put (the decrees of) the Council of Trent into execution in their countries." They would not be satisfied entirely by Bellièvre's plausible explanations. "Simple and rude people are violently excited by such things, and are very difficult to be reassured."[1222]
Medals and vindications.
Charles the Ninth stood convicted in the eyes of the world of a great crime. No elaborate vindications, by their sophistry, or by barefaced misstatements of facts, could clear him, in the judgment of impartial men of either creed, from the guilt of such a butchery of his subjects as scarcely another monarch on record had ever perpetrated. Medals were early struck in honor of the event, upon which "valor and piety"—the king's motto—were represented as gloriously exhibited in the destruction of rebels and heretics.[1223] But the wise regarded it as "a cruelty worse than Scythian," and deplored the realm where "neither piety nor justice restrained the malice and sword of the raging populace."[1224] The Protestants of all countries—and they were his natural allies against Spanish ambition for world-empire—had forever lost confidence in the honor of Charles of Valois.
Multis minatur, qui uni facit, injuriam.
"If that king be author and doer of this act," wrote the Earl of Leicester, expressing the common judgment of the civilized world, "shame and confusion light upon him; be he never so strong in the sight of men, the Lord hath not His power for naught.... If he continue in confirming the fact, and allowing the persons that did it, then must he be a prince detested of all honest men, what religion soever they have; for as his fact was ugly, so was it inhumane. For whom should a man trust, if not his prince's word; and these men he hath put to slaughter, not only had his word, but his writing, and not public, but private, with open proclamations and all other manner of declarations that could be devised for the safety, which now being violated and broken, who can believe and trust him?"[1225]
Disastrous effects of the massacre on Charles himself.
Upon the king himself the results of the fearful atrocities which he had been induced by his mother and brother to sanction, were equally lasting and disastrous. The change was startling even to those who were its chief cause: from a gentle boy he had become transformed into a morose and cruel man. "The king is grown now so bloody-minded," writes one who enjoyed good opportunities of observing him, "as they that advised him thereto do repent the same, and do fear that the old saying will prove true," "Malum consilium consultori pessimum."[1226] The story of the frenzy of Charles who, on one occasion, seemed to be resolved to take the lives of Navarre and Condé, unless they should instantly recant, and was only prevented by the entreaties of his young wife, may be exaggerated.[1227] But certain it is that the unhappy king was the victim of haunting memories of the past, which, while continually robbing him of peace of mind, sometimes drove him to the borders of madness. Agrippa d'Aubigné tells us, on the often repeated testimony of Henry of Navarre, that one night, a week after the massacre, Charles leaped up in affright from his bed, and summoned his gentlemen of the bedchamber, as well as his brother-in-law, to listen to a confused sound of cries of distress and lamentations, similar to that which he had heard on the eventful night of the butchery. So convinced was he that his ears had not deceived him, that he gave orders that the new attack which he fancied to be made upon the partisans of Montmorency should at once be repressed by his guards. It was not until the soldiers returned with the assurance that everything was quiet throughout the city, that he consented to retire to his rest again. For an entire week the delusive cries seemed to return at the self-same hour.[1228] These fancies—the creations of his fevered brain—may soon have left him, not to return until the general closing in at the death-bed. But there were marks of the violence of the passions of which he was the victim in his altered mien and deportment. Even before the event that has fixed upon him an infamous notoriety, he acted at times like a madman in the indulgence of his whims and coarse tastes. Sir Thomas Smith, five months before the fatal St. Bartholomew's Day, wrote of "his inordinate hunting, so early in the morning and so late at night, without sparing frost, snow or rain, and in so desperate doings as makes her (his mother) and them that love him to be often in great fear."[1229] But now the picture, as faithfully drawn by the friendly hand of the Venetian ambassador, early in the year 1574, is still more pitiful. His countenance had become sad and forbidding. When obliged to give audience to the representatives of foreign powers, as well as in his ordinary interviews, he avoided the glance of those who addressed him. He bent his head toward the ground and shut his eyes. At short intervals he would open them with a start, and in a moment, as though the effort caused him pain, he would close them again with no less suddenness. "It is feared," adds the writer, "that the spirit of vengeance has taken possession of him; formerly he was only severe, now his friends dread lest he will become cruel." He must at all hazards find hard work to do. He was on horseback for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours, and pursued the same deer for two or three days, stopping only to take nourishment, or snatch a little rest at night. His hands were scarred and callous. When in the palace, his passion for violent exercise drove him to the forge, where for three or four hours he would work without intermission, with a ponderous hammer fashioning a cuirass or some other piece of armor, and exhibiting more pride in being able to tire out his gentle competitors, than in more royal accomplishments.[1230] We have no means of tracing accurately the influence of the massacre upon others. The Abbé Brantôme, however, early pointed out the remarkable fact that of those who took a principal part in the work of murder and rapine many soon after met with violent deaths, either at the siege of La Rochelle or in the ensuing wars, and that the riches they had so iniquitously accumulated profited them little.[1231]