COURAGE AND CURIOSITY OF THE FAIR SEX. MASSACRE IN 1572.
ON the 24th of August, St. Bartholemew's day, 1572, the massacre of the Hugonots or or Calvinists, began by the murder of Admiral Coligni the signal was to have been given at midnight; but Catherine of Medicis, mother to the then King Charles IX. (who was only two and twenty years of age) hastened the signal more than an hour, and endeavoured to encourage her son, by quoting a passage from a sermon: "What pity do we not shew in being cruel? what cruelty would it not be to have pity?"
In Mr. Wraxall's account of this massacre, in his Memoirs of the Kings of France of the Race of Valois, compiled from all the French historians, he says, Soubise, covered with wounds, after a long and gallant defence, was finally put to death under the queen-mother's windows. The ladies of the court, from a savage and horrible curiosity, went to view his naked body, disfigured and bloody.
"An Italian first cut off Coligni's head, which was presented to Catherine of Medicis. The populace then exhausted all their brutal and unrestrained fury on the trunk. They cut off the hands, after which it was left on a dunghill; in the afternoon they took it up again, dragged it three days in the dirt, then on the banks of the Seine, and lastly carried it to Montfaucon (an eminence between the Fauxbourg St. Martin and the Temple, on which they erected a gallows.) It was here hung by the feet with an iron chain, and a fire lighted under it, with which it was half roasted. In this situation the King and several of the courtiers went to survey it. These remains were at length taken down privately in the night, and interred at Chantilly."
"During seven days the massacre did not cease, though its extreme fury spent itself in the two first."
"Every enormity, every profanation, every atrocious crime, which zeal, revenge, and cruel policy are capable of influencing mankind to commit, stain the dreadful registers of this unhappy period. More than five thousand persons of all ranks perished by various species of deaths. The Seine was loaded with carcases floating on it, and Charles fed his eyes from the windows of the Louvre, with this unnatural and abominable spectacle of horror. A butcher who entered the palace during the heat of the massacre, boasted to his sovereign, baring his bloody arm, that he himself had dispatched an hundred and fifty."
"Catherine of Medicis, the presiding demon, who scattered destruction in so many shapes, was not melted into pity at the view of such complicated and extensive misery; she gazed with savage satisfaction on the head of Coligni which was brought her."
Sully only slightly mentions this massacre of which he was notwithstanding an eye-witness, because he was but twelve years of age.
Mezeray gives the most circumstantial account of it; he says, "The streets were paved with dead or dying bodies, the portes-cochêres, (great gates of the hotels) were stopped up with them, there were heaps of them in the public squares, the street-kennels overflowed with blood, which ran gushing into the river. Six hundred houses were pillaged at different times, and four thousand persons were massacred with all the inhumanity and all the tumult than can be imagined."