AT midnight the city authorities assembled in the Place de Grève. The Duke addressed them thus:—”It is the King’s good pleasure that we should take up arms to kill Coligni, and extirpate all the other Huguenots and rebels. The same is to be done in all the provinces. When the clock of the Palais de Justice sounds its bell at daybreak, let each good Roman Catholic bind a strip of white linen round his left arm, and put a white cross on his cap, and begin the work.”
They had not to wait long. It wanted yet an hour and a half of daybreak when the Queen-mother, impatient of the delay, or fearing some change in the purpose of the king, gave orders that the bell of the church of St. Germain de l’Auxerrois should be sounded as the signal to commence. Then she and Charles and Anjou passed into a small apartment above the gate of the Louvre, and, opening the window, looked out to see the tragedy begin. All was still and dark: a pistol shot was fired; the solitary report struck terror into their hearts. Seized with a spasm of remorse, they sent a gentleman to the Duke of Guise, bidding him to proceed no further. It was too late.
No sooner had the signal been given than Guise galloped to the dwelling of the Admiral. Cosseins, the captain of the King’s Guard, knocked at the outer gate, and demanded entrance. Suspecting nothing, the servant in charge opened, and fell under the stroke of Cossein’s dagger. His followers rushed in and filled the inner court of the hotel. The noise had awakened the Admiral, who lay upstairs with one or two faithful attendants in his room. Fearing some popular outbreak, but relying on the King’s Guard stationed there for the purpose of protecting him, Coligni rose, put on his dressing-gown, and asked Merlin, his favourite minister, to engage in prayer. A servant rushed into the room.
“My Lord,” he said, “it is God who calls you. The hall is carried, and we have no means of resistance left.” “I have long been prepared to die,” said the Admiral; “but save yourselves, all of you, if you can.” Behme, a German, and other retainers of the Guise, now broke into the apartment. “Are you the Admiral?” said Behme. “Yes,” was Coligni’s calm reply; “but, young man, you should have some respect to my grey hairs and my infirmities.”
With a savage oath, the German plunged his boar-spear into the Admiral’s breast. Rapid sword strokes from others followed. Covered with wounds, Coligni sank mangled among their feet. “Behme, have you done it?” shouted the Bastard of Angouleme, from the court below. “It is done, my Lord,” was the reply. “But Guise will not believe it unless he sees him with his own eyes. Throw him out of the window.”
The brutal command was instantly obeyed. The body was flung down upon the pavement. The two Lords alighted and bent over it; the face was besmeared with blood, and disfigured; they took their handkerchiefs and wiped the blood away. “‘Tis he,” they said, as each kicked the corpse. Then in haste they mounted, and dashed out through the gate, shouting in triumph as they galloped forth, “Courage, soldiers, courage! we have made a good beginning–now for the others.” At this moment, responding to the first signal sound, the bells of all the churches rung out their summons to that shameless slaughter. In a few hours, within a short space round the Louvre, 500 noblemen and gentlemen were sabred or shot. Rochefoucauld had parted from the King but an hour or two before, the last to leave the palace. He was awakened by men entering his chamber in masks. Fancying it some frolic of the Prince, he rose to meet them, and fell pierced by their rapiers at the door. The young Teligni was seen creeping along a house-top; but he was such a favourite that more than one, who as they pointed their pieces recognised him, held back their fingers from the trigger. At last the fatal shot was fired, and he fell dead upon the street.
But the archers’ work in the chambers and passages of the palace, daring and desperate as it was, was a restrained and orderly execution, as compared with that perpetrated throughout the city by sixty thousand men—princes, nobles, soldiers, citizens—with all kinds of murderous weapons in their hands, under no command, throwing off all restraint, all pity, every vestige of human feeling, turned for the time into incarnate demons; Guise, Tavannes, Nevers, and others, hounding them on with shoutings of “Down with the Huguenots! Kill, kill! blood-letting is as good in August as in May! Kill, kill! ’tis the command of the King!” And king never had command more thoroughly obeyed. Two thousand unsuspecting, helpless, half-naked men were slaughtered that morning, their bodies flung out at windows, dragged through the mire, pitched into the river, amid whistlings and howlings, and yells of delight, and oaths of a horrible blasphemy. At mid-day of that Sabbath, the king thought good to hold his hand, and sent an order to the authorities of the city to check the massacre. And his mother and he employed the leisure of that evening in writing despatches to foreign powers, attributing the massacre wholly to the Guises, going so far even to say that they had enough to do to protect themselves.
But Charles had raised a demon he could not lay. Next forenoon, in the cemetery of the Innocents, a miracle was announced; a hawthorn had flowered in the night—emblem of the Church flourishing once again. The fanatic city mob got more excited than ever. The bells all rang out again. The massacre began with greater barbarity than ever, and went on more or less throughout the week. The business now was to search out every Huguenot that was left, to let not even the youngest child escape. Infants packed in baskets, amid jeering laughter, were flung over the bridge into the Seine. Little boys not ten years old were seen dragging with cords in triumph along the streets a Huguenot infant, torn from its slaughtered mother’s breast.
Upon the streets there lay together, weltering in their blood, a father and his two sons, apparently all dead. Many as they passed stopped for a moment to gaze upon the group. “Tis all the better,” so they said, “it is nothing to kill the wolves, if you do not kill their little ones along with them.” The bodies lay all still. At last there came a solitary man who, as he stopped and looked, gently raised his hands to heaven, and said in pitiful indignation, “God will avenge that deed!” And then the youngest of the children raised its little head from out of its bath of blood, and said, “I am not dead. Take me to the arsenal, and M. de Biron will pay you well.” The child that had the singular self-possession to feign itself dead so long, and was thus preserved, was Caumont de la Force, the head of a distinguished family, who lived to do good service afterwards to the Huguenot cause in France.
As little respect was paid to character as to age. Pierre de la Place, a distinguished jurist and historian, had a message sent to him that he was wanted at the Louvre. Suspecting the object, he fled out of his own house, tried the house of three friends, was repulsed from each, returned to his own dwelling, gathered his family round him and engaged in prayer. The messenger came the second time, with an urgency that he could not resist. He bade adieu to his household, but had not gone far upon his way when he fell under the daggers of the assassins.
Peter Ramus—still a name of renown in the world of scholarship and philosophy, the highest name, in fact, that France had then to boast of—retired into his library, in the fifth storey of the house, and was kneeling there in prayer when they broke in upon his retirement. They stopped a moment. They heard him say, “O, my God, have mercy on me, and pardon those who know not what they do!” A sword was passed through his body, a shot fired at his head. He still breathed. His murderers seized him and flung him out of the window. Still he breathed, but no one would give him the coup de grace. They tied cords instead about his feet, and dragged him through the streets. At last, by the river side, they cut the head off, and flung the trunk into the stream.
Coligni’s body was exposed to still more barbarous treatment. His head was carried to Catherine, as the Baptist’s was to Herodias, and sent by her as a trophy to the Cardinal of Lorraine at Rome. The headless trunk, subjected to indescribable indignities, after having been dragged to and fro through the streets, was hung up by the feet half burnt, upon a gibbet at Montfaucon. Two days afterwards, the King and Catherine, and the court ladies, made a holiday excursion to the spot, shamelessly to gaze on and to jeer at the marred and mutilated remains of the greatest man that France in that age had produced.
With marvellous speed the news of the Parisian massacre spread over France, and so ripe and ready for it was the Roman Catholic population, that each city, as it got the tidings, had its own St. Bartholomew; they heard of it at Meaux on the Sabbath evening; that night the streets of Meaux were drenched in blood. They heard of it at Orleans on Tuesday the 26th; for a week onward from that date Roman Catholic Orleans gave itself up to the pillage and murder of its Huguenot inhabitants. They heard of it at Lyons on Thursday the 28th, and scenes of blood, rivalling those of Paris, were day by day enacted, the Rhone literally ran red with blood, that the inhabitants of Arles, and other towns below Lyons, for days abstained from drinking its waters. Orleans, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Angers, Saumur, Bourges, and other towns followed the lead. Premeditated as to the general design, but not preconcerted as to the time and execution, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was not the gusty act of a single night. It was the prolonged and widespread massacre of six weeks and more all over France, in the course of which 30,000 Huguenots were cut off.—Dr. Hanna’s “The War of the Huguenots.”