The conspiracy had been kept a profound secret from Marguerite, lest she should betray it to her husband. In the mean time, aided by the gloom of a starless night, preparations were making in every street of Paris for the enormous perpetration. Soldiers were assembling at their appointed rendezvouses. Guards were stationed to cut off flight. Fanatic men, armed with sabres and muskets which gleamed in the lamplight, began to emerge through the darkness, and to gather in motley assemblage. Many houses were illuminated, that, by the blaze from the windows, the bullet might be thrown with precision, and the dagger might strike an unerring blow.
Catharine and her son Charles were now in one of the apartments of the Louvre, waiting for the clock to strike the hour of two, when the signal was to be given. Catharine, inexorable in crime, was very apprehensive that her son might relent. Petulant and self-willed, he was liable to paroxysms of stubbornness, when he spurned his mother’s counsels.
Weak as well as depraved, the wretched king was feverishly excited. He paced the room nervously, peering out at thewindow, looking at his watch, wishing yet dreading to have the appointed hour arrive. His mother, witnessing these indications of a faltering spirit, urged him to order the alarm-bell immediately to be struck, which was to be the signal for the massacre to commence. Charles hesitated, and a cold sweat oozed from his brow.
“Are you a coward?” tauntingly inquired the fiend-like mother.
This is a charge which no coward can stand. It almost always nerves the poltroon to action. The young king nervously exclaimed, “Well, then, let it begin!” There were in the room at the time only Catharine, Charles, and his brother, the Duke of Anjou. It was two hours after midnight. There was a moment of dreadful suspense and of perfect silence. All three stood at the window, in the Palace of the Louvre, looking out into the rayless night.
Suddenly through the still air the ponderous tones of the alarm-bell fell upon the ear, and rolled the knell of death over the city. The vibration awakened the demon in ten thousand hearts. It was the morning of the sabbath, Aug. 24, 1572,—the anniversary of the festival of St. Bartholomew.
The first stroke of the bell had not ceased to vibrate upon the ear when the uproar of the carnage commenced. The sound, which seemed to rouse Catharine to frenzy, almost froze the blood of the young monarch. Trembling in every nerve, he shouted for the massacre to be stopped.
It was too late: the train was fired. Beacon-fires and alarm-bells sent the signal with the rapidity of light and of sound through entire France. The awful roar of human passion, the crackling of musketry, the shrieks of the wounded and of the dying, blended in appalling tumult throughout the whole metropolis. Old men, terrified maidens, helpless infants, venerable matrons, were alike smitten down mercilessly to the fanatic cry of “Vive Dieu et le Roi!”—“Live God and the King!”
The Admiral Coligni, who had been shot and desperately wounded the day before, faint and dying, was lying upon hisbed, surrounded by a few faithful friends, as the demoniac clamor rolled in upon their ears. The Duke of Guise, a fanatic Papist, with three hundred followers, hastened to the lodgings of the admiral, stabbed the sentinels, and burst through the gates. A wounded servant rushed to the chamber of the admiral, exclaiming,—
“The house is forced; and there are no means of resisting!”