The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's.
THE August night of the 23d sunk down over Paris, and upon its narrow streets and gloomy lanes a strange stillness rested. The citizens awaited in silence the signal for the massacre of the Huguenots, and the perfect fulfillment of the constant injunctions from Rome. Every Catholic, every Parisian, knew that the popes had never ceased to inculcate a general destruction of the heretics. The king's body-guard had been stationed under arms in the city; the citizens were provided with weapons at the public cost; the houses of the Huguenots were marked to guide the murderers to their doors; the Catholic assassins were enjoined to wear a white cross to distinguish them from their victims. But while all was still without, in a retired chamber of the Louvre a scene of human passion and wickedness was exhibited, such as can scarcely be paralleled in history. A mother was urging her half-insane son to an unequaled deed of crime. Charles hesitated to give the final order. Soon after midnight Catherine had risen, perhaps from sleep, and gone to the king's chamber. She found Charles irresolute, and excited by a terrible mental struggle. He was probably insane. At one moment he cried out that he would call upon the Huguenots to protect his life; at another he overwhelmed with reproaches his brother Anjou, whom he hated and feared, and who had now entered the room. The other members of the guilty council—Guise, Nevers, and their associates—followed and gathered around the king. He still paced the room with rapid steps, incapable of decision. But Catherine, roused to a fierce rage, her voice filled with sinister meaning, told Charles that it was too late to recede, and that the order must be given. The king, still scarcely twenty-two years old, accustomed from infancy to tremble before his mother's glance, his mind enfeebled by dissipation and crime, conscious that if he disobeyed that menacing tone his own life was not safe, and that Catherine might remove him by her secret arts to place her favorite Anjou on his throne, in a sudden access of terror or of frenzy, gave the fatal command. From this moment all that was gentle in his nature died forever, and he became the chief promoter of the general massacre, the active instrument in the hands of unsparing Rome. Guise at once went swiftly from the room to begin the labor of death by the murder of Coligny. The clash of his horse's hoofs resounded in the still Sabbath morning as he led a party of soldiers to the admiral's quarters. Catherine, Charles, and the other conspirators, terrified at what they had done, kept closely together, and gathered at a window overlooking the tennis court. "We were smitten," says Anjou, "with terror and foreboding." Catherine, it is said, even sent to recall Guise; but he replied, "It is too late." Coligny had been stabbed in his bed-chamber, and his body thrown out of the window into the court below. Many587Huguenots perished with him. The death of the chief of the reformers roused the conspirators to new energy, and Catherine gave orders that the signal for the general massacre should be given before the appointed hour. The clock of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois sounded over silent Paris. Its ominous peal awoke an awful clamor, such as the earth had never witnessed before. A clang of bells responded from every tower and belfry; the adherents of the pope seized their arms, rushed to the houses of the Huguenots, and murdered every inmate, from the sleeping infant to the gray-haired grandsire and the helpless maid. The city had been suddenly illuminated, and from every Catholic house the blaze of torches lighted up the labor of death. Beneath their rays were seen women unsexed, and children endowed with an unnatural malice, torturing and treating with strange malignity the dying and the dead. It is impossible, indeed, to narrate the details of this awful event, over which Catholic kings and priests rejoiced, and for which the infallible pope at Rome gave public thanks to God. Within the palace of the Louvre itself, where a few days before every saloon had rung with festivity, and where mask and dance and throngs of gallant knights and maidens had greeted the nuptials of Henry and Marguerite, now echoed the groans of the dying Huguenots, and the shrieks of the terrified queen. In the evening Marguerite had been driven by her enraged mother from her presence and from the arms of her sister Claud, who would have detained her, and was forced to go, trembling, to the apartment of her husband, lest her absence might excite suspicion. She lay awake all night, filled with a sense of impending danger. She pretended that she knew nothing of the approaching event. Henry's rooms were filled with his companions in arms, who passed the night in uttering vain threats against the Guises, and planning projects of revenge. Toward morning they all went out in company with the king; and Marguerite, weary with watching, sunk into a brief slumber. She was aroused by a loud cry without of "Navarre! Navarre!" and a knocking at the door. It was thrown open; a man, wounded and bleeding, pursued by four soldiers, rushed into the room, and threw his arms around the queen. He clung to her, begging for life. She screamed in her terror. The captain of the guard came in and drove off the soldiers, and the wounded Huguenot was allowed to hide himself in her closet. Marguerite fled hastily across the halls of the Louvre to her sister's room, and, as she passed amidst the scene that had so lately rung with the masks and revels of her wedding night, she saw another Huguenot pierced by the spear of his pursuer, and heard the clamor of the general massacre. Faint and trembling, she went to her mother and the king, threw herself at their feet, and begged the lives of two of her husband's retainers. Meantime, when Henry of Navarre had left his room in the morning, he had been arrested, and carried to the king's chamber; but of the band of Huguenots who had attended him in the night only a few escaped. Each man, as he passed out into the court, between two lines of Swiss guards, was stabbed without mercy. Two hundred of the noblest and purest reformers of France lay piled in a huge heap before the windows of the Louvre; Charles IX., Catherine, and her infamous train of maids of honor, inspected and derided them as they lay dead. All through that fearful Sabbath day, the feast of St. Bartholomew, and for two succeeding days, the murders went on; the whole city was in arms; every hat or cap was marked with a white cross, and every Catholic was converted into an assassin. Charles, a raging lunatic, rode through the streets, laughing and jesting over the fallen. The streets were filled with corpses; the Seine was turned to blood; many Catholics grew rich by the plunder of the Huguenots; and it was believed that the king and his brother, Anjou, shared the spoils of opulent merchants and skillful goldsmiths. The papal nuncio, Salviati, overjoyed at the spectacle, wrote to the pope that nothing was to be seen in the streets but white crosses, producing fine effect; he did not see the heaps of dead, nor the scenes of inexpiable crime. Charles IX. shot at the flying Huguenots from his bedroom window. The rage of the murderers was chiefly turned against women and infants. One man threw two little children into the Seine from a basket; another infant was dragged through the streets by a crowd of Catholic children, with a cord tied around its neck; a babe smiled in the face of the man who had seized it, and played with his beard, but the monster stabbed the child, and, with an oath, threw it into the Seine. For three days the massacre continued with excessive atrocities. A month later, Huguenots were still being murdered in Paris. It is computed that several thousand persons perished in that city alone. In every part of the kingdom, by orders of the king, an effort was made to exterminate the Huguenots; and Lyons, Orleans, Bordeaux, and all the provincial towns ran with blood. Four thousand reformers are said to have been killed in Lyons. At Bordeaux, Auger, the most eloquent of the Jesuit preachers, employed all his powers in urging on the work of slaughter. "Who," he cried, "executed the divine judgments at Paris? The angel of the Lord. And who will execute them in Bordeaux? The angel of the Lord, however man may try to resist him!" The number of the slain throughout France has been variously estimated at from ten to one hundred thousand. History has no parallel to offer to this religious massacre, even in its most barbarous period. The Pope, Gregory XIII., received the news of the fate of the Huguenots with unbounded joy. The wish of his heart had been gratified, and Charles IX. was now his favorite son. Rome rang with rejoicing. The guns of the Castle of St. Angelo gave forth a joyous salute; the bells sounded from every tower; bonfires blazed throughout the night; and Gregory, attended by his cardinals and priests, led the magnificent procession to the church of St. Louis, where the cardinal of Lorraine, the brother of the duke of Guise, chanted a Te Deum. The cry of the dying host in France was gentle harmony to the court of Rome. A medal was struck to commemorate the glorious massacre; a picture, which still exists in the Vatican, was painted by Vasari, representing the chief events of St. Bartholomew. The pope, eager to show his gratitude to Charles for his dutiful conduct, sent him the Golden Rose; and from the pulpits of Rome eloquent preachers celebrated Charles, Catherine, and the Guises as the new founders of the papal church.—Historical Studies.