"OF WHOM THE WORLD WAS NOT WORTHY"
-204-
AUGUST
At the same time, Le Charron,
Provost of the merchants, and Mariel, his ancient friend, having
mustered a large number of desperadoes who have been previously assigned
respective quarters are now to be seen hastening to enter upon their
frightful morning's work; while the Duke of Guise determines to be the
one to complete the murder of Coligny, and thus hastens to his hotel.
The Duke's party bursts in the outer door; and the
Admiral is roused from his sleep by shots fired at his followers in the
courtyard below. Rising from his couch, but scarcely able to stand, he
flees to an upper chamber, only to be tracked by his assassins who stab
him to death as he stands leaning against the wall. His body is then
thrown out of the window into the courtyard below. The Duke who has been
waiting impatiently below hurries up to the body, and wiping the blood
from the Admiral’s face says, "I know him --it is he;" then spurning the
body with his foot calls out, “Courage, comrades, we have begun well,
now for the rest; the king commands it." They then rush into the street.
Firing can now be heard in every quarter throughout
Paris. The houses of the Huguenots, which have been marked, are broken
into, and men, women, and children are sabred or shot down. It is no use
trying to flee. The would-be fugitives are slaughtered in the streets.
Even the king has seized his arquebus and securely fires upon his
subjects from the windows of the Louvre.
The Massacre will continue three days. Corpses block
doorways; mutilated bodies lie in every lane; while thousands are cast
into the Seine River, now swollen by a flood.
Similar massacres immediately follow all over France.
Between fifteen and eighteen hundred persons will be killed at Lyons,
and those who dwell along the Rhone River below that city will be
horrified by the sight of the dead bodies floating down the river. Six
hundred will be killed at Rouen and many more at Dieppe and Havre.
Sully will estimate the entire number massacred at
seventy thousand, but other writers will estimate the victims at one
hundred thousand. Catherine will write to Philip II of the three days of
massacre at Paris, who, when he will read of it, will be said to laugh
for the first and only time in his life. Rome will be beside herself
with joy; the cannon will be fired at St. Angelo, while Gregory XIII and
his cardinals will walk in procession from sanctuary to sanctuary to
give thanks to God for the massacre.
When the French Ambassador, La Mothe Fenelon, first
appears at the English court following the massacre, Queen Elizabeth
will refuse to see him for several days. At length admitting him to an
audience, the lords and ladies receive him in profound silence. They
will be dressed in deep mourning. They do not deign to salute or even to
look at the ambassador. The Queen receives him with a severe and
mournful countenance. Stammering out his apology that he blushes to bear
the name of "Frenchman", he hastens from her presence.
Not all of Admiral Coligny's family is destroyed: a
surviving daughter will marry William, Prince of Orange, who, like his
father-in-law will be assassinated for his Protestant defense. William
will be murdered in 1585 by Balthazar Gerard and will expire in the arms
of his wife.
As for the wretched, young king of France, the terrible
crime to which he has been a party will bear upon his mind to the last.
The recollection of the scenes of the massacre constantly haunts him,
and he will become restless, haggard, and miserable. He will see his
murdered guests sitting by his bedside and at his table. "Ambrose," he
will say to his confidential physician, "I know not what has happened to
me these two or three days past, but I feel my mind and body at enmity
with each other as if I was seized with a fever. Sleeping or waking, the
murdered Huguenots seem ever present to my eyes, with ghastly faces,
weltering in blood. I wish the innocent and helpless had been spared."
He will die in tortures of mind impossible to be described --attended in
his last moments, strange to say, by Ambrose Pare, who is a Huguenot
physician, and by a Huguenot nurse. One of the worst horrors that will
haunt him will be that his own mother is causing his death by slow
poisoning, an art in which he knew that great woman to be fearfully
accomplished.
The Catholic Chateaubriand laments, "The execrable day
of Saint Bartholomew only made martyrs; it gave to philosophical ideas
an advantage over religious ideas which has never since been lost."
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"Your heart is beating a funeral march to the grave."
-Charles Spurgeon-