Coligny once again was warned by his friends to beware of the court, but he refused to distrust the king. Many and conflicting are the reports of what followed. We shall not be accused of any Protestant bias if we base our story mainly on that of the two learned Benedictines[111] who are responsible for five solid tomes of the Histoire de la Ville de Paris. On the morrow of the attempt on Coligny’s life, the queen-mother invited Charles and his brother of Anjou to walk, after dinner, in the garden of her new palace in the Tuileries: they were joined by the chief Catholic leaders, and a grand council was held. The queen dwelt on the perilous situation of the monarchy and the Catholic cause, and urged that now was the time to act: Coligny lay wounded; Navarre and Condé were in their power at the Louvre; for ten Huguenots in Paris the Catholics could oppose a thousand armed men; rid France of the Huguenot chiefs and a formidable evil were averted. Her course was approved, but the leaders shrank from including the two princes of Navarre and Condé: they were to be given their choice—recantation or death. By order of the king 12,000 arquebusiers were placed along the river and the streets, and arms were carried into the Louvre. The admiral’s friends, alarmed at the sinister preparations, protested to Charles but were reassured and told to take Cosseins and fifty arquebusiers to guard his house. The provost of Paris was then summoned by the Duke of Guise and ordered to arm and organise the citizens and proceed to the Hôtel de Ville at midnight. The king, Guise said, would not lose so fair an opportunity of exterminating the Huguenots. The Catholic citizens were to tie a piece of white linen on their left arm and place a white cross in their caps that they might be recognised by their friends. At midnight the windows of their houses were to be illuminated by torches, and at the first sound of the great bell at the Palais de Justice the bloody work was to begin. Midnight drew near. Catherine was not sure of the king, and repaired to his chamber with Anjou and her councillors to fix his wavering purpose; she heaped bitter reproaches upon him, worked on his fears with stories of a vast Huguenot conspiracy and hinted that cowardice prevented him from seizing the fairest opportunity that God had ever offered, to free himself from his enemies. She repeated an Italian prelate’s vicious epigram: “Che pietà lor ser crudel, che crudeltà, lor ser pietosa,”[112] and concluded by threatening to leave the court with the Duke of Anjou rather than witness the destruction of the Catholic cause. Charles, who had listened sullenly, was stung by the taunt of cowardice and broke into a delirium of passion; he called for the death of every Huguenot in France, that none might be left to reproach him afterwards.
Catherine gave him no time for farther vacillation. The great bell of St. Germain l’Auxerrois was rung, and at two in the morning of Sunday, St. Bartholomew’s Day, 24th August 1572, the Duke of Guise and his followers issued forth to do their Sabbath morning’s work. Cosseins saw his leader coming and knew what was expected of him. Coligny’s door was forced, his servants were poignarded, and Besme, a German in the service of Guise, followed by others, burst into the admiral’s room. The old man stood erect in his robe de chambre, facing his murderers. “Art thou the admiral?” demanded Besme. “I am he,” answered Coligny with unfaltering voice and, gazing steadily at the naked sword pointed at his breast, added, “Young man, thou shouldst show more respect to my white hairs; yet canst thou shorten but little my brief life.” For answer he was pierced by Besme’s sword and stabbed to death by his companions. Guise stood waiting in the street below and the body was flung down to him from the window. He wiped the blood from the old man’s face, looked at it, and said, “It is he!” Spurning the body with his foot he cried, “Courage, soldiers! we have begun well; now for the others, the king commands it. “Meanwhile the bell of the Palais de Justice, answering that of St. Germain, was booming forth its awful summons, and the citizens hastened to perform their part. Some passing the body of Coligny cut off the head and took it to the king and queen, others mutilated the trunk, which, after being dragged about the streets for three days, was hanged by the feet on the gibbet at Montfaucon, where Charles and Catherine are said to have come to gaze on it.
All the Huguenot nobles dwelling near the admiral were pitilessly murdered, and a similar carnage took place at the Louvre. Marguerite, the young bride of Navarre, in her Memoirs, tells of the horrors of that morning, how, when half-asleep, a wounded Huguenot nobleman rushed into her chamber, pursued by four archers, and flung himself on her bed imploring protection. A captain of the guard entered, from whom she gained his life. She entreated the captain to lead her to her sister’s room, and as she fled thither, more dead than alive, another fugitive was hewn down by a hallebardier only three paces from her; she fell fainting in the captain’s arms. Meanwhile Charles, the queen-mother, and Henry of Anjou, after the violent scene in the king’s chamber, had lain down for two hours’ rest and then went to a window which overlooked the basse-cour of the Louvre, to see the “beginning of the executions.” If we may believe Henry’s story, they had not been there long before the sound of a pistol shot filled them with dread and remorse, and a messenger was sent to bid Guise to spare the admiral and to stay the whole undertaking; but the nobleman who had been sent returned saying that Guise had told him it was too late: the admiral was dead, and the executions had begun all over the city. A dozen Protestant nobles of the suites of Condé and Navarre, who had taken refuge in the Louvre, were seized; one was even dragged from a sick-bed: all were taken to the courtyard and hewn in pieces by the Swiss guards under the eyes of Charles, who cried: “Let none escape.” Meantime the Catholic leaders had been scouring the streets on horseback, shouting to the people that a Huguenot conspiracy to murder the king had been discovered, and that it was the king’s wish that all the Huguenots should be destroyed.
A list of the Huguenots in Paris had been prepared and all their houses marked. None was spared. Old and young, women and children, were pitilessly butchered. All that awful Sunday the orgy of slaughter and pillage went on; every gate of the city had been closed and the keys brought to the king. Night fell and the carnage was not stayed. Two days yet and two nights the city was a prey to the ministers of death, and some Catholics, denounced by personal enemies, were involved in the massacre. The resplendent August sun, the fair sky and serene atmosphere were held to be a divine augury, and a whitethorn in the cemetery of the Innocents blooming out of season was hailed as a miracle and a visible token from God that the Catholic religion was to blossom again by the destruction of the Huguenots. A famous professor at the university was flung out of a window by the scholars, his body insulted and dragged in the mud. The murders did not wholly cease until 17th September. Various were the estimates of the slain—20,000, 5,000, 2,000. A goldsmith named Cruce went about displaying his robust arm and boasting that he had accounted for 400 Huguenots. The streets, the front of the Louvre, the public places were blocked by dead bodies; tumbrils[113] were hired to throw them into the Seine, which literally for days ran red with blood.
The princes of Navarre and Condé saw the privacy of their chambers violated by a posse of archers on St. Bartholomew’s morning; they were forced to dress and were haled before the king, who, with a fierce look and glaring eyes, swore at them, reproached them for waging war upon him, and ordered them to change their religion. On their refusal he grew furious with rage, and by dint of threats wrung from them a promise to go to mass.
