“You must admit, monseigneur,” said the Prince de Conde to the papal nuncio, “that if these French gentlemen know how to conspire, they also know how to die.”
“What hatreds, brother!” whispered the Duchesse de Guise to the Cardinal de Lorraine, “you are drawing down upon the heads of our children!”
“The sight makes me sick,” said the young king, turning pale at the flow of blood.
“Pooh! only rebels!” replied Catherine de’ Medici.
The chants went on; the axe still fell. The sublime spectacle of men singing as they died, and, above all, the impression produced upon the crowd by the progressive diminution of the chanting voices, superseded the fear inspired by the Guises.
“Mercy!” cried the people with one voice, when they heard the solitary chant of the last and most important of the great lords, who was saved to be the final victim. He alone remained at the foot of the steps by which the others had mounted the scaffold, and he chanted:—
“Thou, O God, be merciful unto us,
And bless us,
And cause thy face to shine upon us.
Amen!”
“Come, Duc de Nemours,” said the Prince de Conde, weary of the part he was playing; “you who have the credit of the skirmish, and who helped to make these men prisoners, do you not feel under an obligation to ask mercy for this one? It is Castelnau, who, they say, received your word of honor that he should be courteously treated if he surrendered.”
“Do you think I waited till he was here before trying to save him?” said the Duc de Nemours, stung by the stern reproach.
The clerk called slowly—no doubt he was intentionally slow:—