“Let not one single Protestant be spared,” the king proclaimed, “to reproach me hereafter with this deed.”
Charles, with his mother and the high-born profligate ladies who disgraced the court, emerged in the morning light in splendid array into the reeking streets. Many of the women contemplated with merriment the dead bodies piled up before the Louvre. One of the ladies, however, appalled by the spectacle, wished to retire, alleging that the bodies already emitted an offensive odor. Charles brutally replied,—
“The smell of a dead enemy is always pleasant!”
The massacre was continued in the city and throughout the kingdom for a week. On Thursday, after four days spent in hunting out the fugitives from all their hiding-places, the Catholic clergy paraded the streets of Paris in a triumphal procession, and with jubilant prayers and hymns gave thanks to God for their victory. The Catholic pulpits resounded with exultant harangues. A medal was struck off in honor of the event, with the inscription, “La Piété a réveille la Justice,”—“Religion has awakened Justice.”
In some of the distant provinces in France, the Protestants were in the majority; and the Catholics did not venture to attack them. In some others they were so few that they were not feared, and were therefore spared. In the sparsely-settled rural districts, the Catholic peasants, kind-hearted and virtuous, refused to imbrue their hands in the blood of their neighbors. In these ways, several thousand Protestants escaped.
But in nearly all the cities and populous towns the slaughter was indiscriminate and universal. The number who perished in the awful massacre of St. Bartholomew is estimated at from eighty to a hundred thousand.
But there were some noble Catholics, who, refusing to surrender conscience to this iniquitous order of the king, laid down their own lives in adhering to the principle, that theywould “obey God rather than man” when God’s law and man’s law came into antagonism.
The governor of Auvergne, an heroic and a noble man, replied in the following terms to the king’s secret missive commanding the massacre:—
“Sire, I have received an order, under your Majesty’s seal, to put all the Protestants of this province to death; and, if (which God forbid!) the order be genuine, I still respect your Majesty too much to obey you.”
The infamous decree of the king was sent to the Viscount Orthez, commandant at Bayonne. The following was his intrepid reply:—