The awful carnage which followed is known in history as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, because it occurred upon the anniversary of a festival in honor of St. Bartholomew, which had long been celebrated.
As the solemn dirge from the steeple rang out upon the air, the king stood at the window of the palace trembling in every limb, but the demoniacal Catherine was aroused to a frenzy of delight. The first victim was the wounded Coligni. The Duke of Guise with three hundred soldiers hastened to the lodgings of the admiral, and the gates were forced and the assassins entered the sick man’s chamber. Helpless, and abandoned by his frightened servants, he was brutally butchered, and his bleeding body was thrown out of the window at the command of the Duke of Guise, who desired to look upon his dead enemy. Giving the mangled corpse a kick in the face, the duke exclaimed: “Courage, comrades, we have happily begun. Let us now go for others. The king commands it.”
Sixteen years from that time the Duke of Guise was himself assassinated, and received a kick in the face from Henry III., the brother of Charles IX., in whose service he was performing these diabolical deeds.
The streets everywhere resounded with the cries of “Kill! kill!”
At the commencement of the carnage, the queen of Navarre was awakened by a cry at her door: “Navarre! Navarre!” Supposing it was her husband, she ordered her attendants to open the door, whereupon a bleeding Huguenot rushed to her bedside and clasped the queen’s arm, begging for his life. He was followed by Catholic soldiers; but at the entreaty of the princess his life was spared. Words are weak to describe the horrors of that direful night. Gory bodies were suspended from the windows; the dead were piled in heaps in the streets; the pavements were slippery with the streaming blood; human heads were kicked as footballs along the boulevards, by the bestial fiends who had become frenzied with the sight of blood. And in the midst of this awful scene of terror, priests paraded in their sacerdotal robes, bearing aloft the crucifixes, and shouting their blasphemous hymns of rejoicing, and inciting the demoniacal murderers to fresh deeds of hellish hate. Catholic nobles and generals rode through the streets with gorgeous retinues, and called upon the people to wreak their vengeance upon the helpless Protestants. For a whole week the massacre continued, and it is estimated that one hundred thousand Protestants perished throughout the kingdom.
When the morning was well advanced, Catherine, Charles, and a profligate band of lords and ladies walked through the reeking streets, and gazed with calmness and satisfaction upon the heaps of dead piled up before the Louvre; and they even indulged in ribald jest and merriment.
The Catholic pulpits resounded with exultant harangues after this hellish work was ended, and in honor of the event a medallion was struck off, with the inscription, “La Piété a reveillé la Justice.”
From every part of Protestant Europe arose a cry of horror. Queen Elizabeth shrouded her court in mourning, and refused to give audience to the French ambassador, who exclaimed in mortification and chagrin, “I am ashamed to acknowledge myself a Frenchman.”
But Philip of Spain, the “Demon of the South,” wrote to the infamous Catherine de’ Medici:—
“These tidings are the greatest and the most glorious I could have received.”