FullReads

Quickly the silence of the night was broken by loud cries, shouts of vengeance, the tramp of many feet, the sharp reports of musketry. The work was begun. Every man not marked by a cross was to be slaughtered. The voice of murder broke fearfully upon the peacefulness of the recently quiet midnight hour.

The noise roused Coligny. He rose hastily and threw on his dressing-gown. The cries and shots told him what was going on. He had trusted the faithless Guises and the soulless De’ Medici, and this was what came of it.

“M. Merlin,” he said to a clergyman who was with him, “say me a prayer; I commit my soul to my Saviour.”

Some of his gentlemen entered the room.

“What is the meaning of this riot?” asked Ambrose Pare.

“My lord, it is God calling us,” said Cornaton.

“I have long been ready to die,” said the admiral; “but you, my friends, save yourselves, if it is still possible.”

They left him, and escaped, the most of them by the roof. Only one man stayed with him, Nicholas Muss, a German servant, “as little concerned,” says Cornaton, “as if there was nothing going on around him.”

The flight had been made barely in time. Hasty footsteps were heard below. The assassins were in the house. In a moment more the chamber door was flung open and two servants of the Duke of Guise entered.

“Art not thou the admiral?” asked one of them, Behme by name.

“Young man,” answered Coligny, “thou comest against a wounded and aged man. Thou’lt not shorten my life by much.”

Behme’s answer was to plunge a heavy boar-spear which he held into the body of the defenceless veteran. Withdrawing it, he struck him on the head with it. Coligny fell, saying,–

“If it were but a man! But it is a horse-boy.”

Others rushed into the room and thrust their weapons into the dying man.

“Behme,” cried the duke of Guise from the court-yard, “hast thou done?”

“It is all over, my lord,” answered the assassin.

The murderers flung the body from the window. It fell with a crash at the feet of Guise and his companions. They turned it over, wiped the blood from the face, and said,–

“Faith, it is he, sure enough!”

Some say that Guise kicked the bleeding corpse in the face.

Meanwhile, murder was everywhere. The savage lower orders of Paris, all, high and low, of the party of the Guises, were infected with the thirst for blood, and the streets of the city became a horrible whirlpool of slaughter, all who did not wear the saving cross being shot down without mercy or discrimination.

The anecdotes of that fatal night and the succeeding day are numerous, some of them pathetic, most of them ferocious, all tending to show how brutal man may become under the inspiration of religious prejudice and the example of slaughter,–the blood fury, as it has been fitly termed.

Teligny, the son-in-law of Coligny, took refuge on a roof. The guards of the Duke of Anjou fired at him as at a target. La Rochefoucauld, with whom the king had been in merry chat until eleven o’clock of the preceding evening, was aroused by a loud knocking upon his door. He opened it; six masked men rushed in, and instantly buried their poniards in his body. The new queen of Navarre had just gone to bed, under peremptory orders from her mother, Catherine de’ Medici. She was wakened from her first slumber by a man knocking and kicking at her door, with wild shouts of “Navarre! Navarre!” Her nurse ran to open the door, thinking that it was the king, her lady’s husband. A wounded and bleeding gentleman rushed in, blood flowing from both arms, four archers pursuing him into the queen’s bedchamber.

The fugitive flung himself on the queen’s couch, seizing her in his alarm. She leaped out of bed towards the wall, he following her, and still clasping her round the body. What it meant she knew not, but screamed in fright, her assailant screaming as loudly. Their cries had the effect of bringing into the room M. de Nancay, captain of the guards, who could not help laughing on seeing the plight of the queen. But in an instant more he turned in a rage upon the archers, cursed them for their daring, and harshly bade them begone. As for the fugitive, M. de Leran by name, he granted him his life at the queen’s prayer. She put him to bed, in her closet, and attended him until he was well of his wounds.