Such was the prince, fiery and flighty, inconsistent and artful, accessible to the most opposite sympathies as well as hatreds, of whom Catherine de’ Medici and Admiral Coligny were disputing the possession.

In the spring of 1572 Coligny might have considered himself the victor in this struggle; at his instance Charles IX. had written on the 27th of April to Count Louis of Nassau, leader of the Protestant insurrection in Hainault, “that he was determined, so far as opportunities and the arrangements of his affairs permitted him, to employ the powers which God had put into his hands for the deliverance of the Low Countries from the oppression under which they were groaning.” Fortified by this promise of the king’s, Coligny had raised a body of French Protestants, and had sent it under the command of La Noue to join the army of Louis of Nassau. The Reformers had at first had some successes; they had taken Valenciennes and Mons; but the Duke of Alba restored the fortunes of the King of Spain; he re-entered Valenciennes and he was besieging Mons. Coligny sent to the aid of that place a fresh body of French under the orders of Senlis, one of his comrades in faith and arms. Before setting out, Senlis saw Charles IX., received from him money together with encouragement, and, in the corps he led, some Catholics were mixed with the Protestants. But from the very court of France there came to the Duke of Alba warnings which put him in a position to surprise the French corps; and Senlis was beaten and made prisoner on the 10th of July. “I have in my hands,” the Duke of Alba sent word to his king, “a letter from the King of France which would strike you dumb if you were to see it; for the moment, it is expedient to say nothing about it.” “News of the defeat of Senlis,” says Tavannes, “comes flying to court, and changes hearts and counsels. Disdain, despite, is engendered in the admiral, who hurls this defeat upon the heads of those who have prevented the king from declaring himself; he raises a new levy of three thousand foot, and, not regarding who he is and where he is, he declares, in the presumption of his audacity, that he can no longer hold his partisans, and that it must be one of two wars, Spanish or civil. It is all thunder-storm at court; everyone remains on the watch at the highest pitch of resolution.” A grand council was assembled. Coligny did not care. He had already, at the king’s request, set forth in a long memorial all the reasons for his policy of a war with Spain; the king had appeared struck with them; but, “as he only sought,” says De Thou, “to gain time without its being perceived,” he handed the admiral’s memorial to the keeper of the seals, John de Morvilliers, requesting him to set forth also all the reasons for a pacific policy. Coligny, a man of resolution and of action, did not take any pleasure in thus prolonging the discussion; nevertheless he again brought forward and warmly advocated, at the grand council, the views he had so often expressed. They were almost unanimously rejected. Coligny did not consider himself bound to give them up. “I have promised,” said he, “on my own account, my assistance to the Prince of Orange; I hope the king will not take it ill if by means of my friends, and perhaps in person, I fulfil my promise.” This reservation excited great surprise. “Madam,” said Coligny to the queen-mother, “the king is to-day shunning a war which would promise him great advantages; God forbid that there should break out another which he cannot shun!” The council broke up in great agitation. “Let the queen beware,” said Tavannes, “of the king her son’s secret councils, designs, and sayings; if she do not look out, the Huguenots will have him. At any rate, before thinking of anything else, let her exert herself to regain the mother’s authority which the admiral has caused her to lose.”

The king was hunting at Brie. The queen-mother went and joined him; she shut herself up with him in a cabinet, and, bursting into tears, she said, “I should never have thought that, in return for having taken so much pains to bring you up and preserve to you the crown, you would have had heart to make me so miserable a recompense. You hide yourself from me, me who am your mother, in order to take counsel of your enemies. I know that you hold secret counsels with the admiral; you desire to plunge rashly into war with Spain, in order to give your kingdom, yourself, and the persons that are yours, over as a prey to them of the religion. If I am so miserable a creature, yet before I see that, give me leave to withdraw to the place of my birth; remove from you your brother, who may call himself unfortunate in having employed his own life to preserve yours; give him at least time to withdraw out of danger and from the presence of enemies made in doing you service; Huguenots who desire not war with Spain, but with France, and the subversion of all the Estates in order to set up themselves.”

Tavannes himself terms these expressions “an artful harangue;” but he says, “it moved, astounded, and dismayed the king, not so much on the score of the Huguenots as of his mother and brother, whose subtlety, ambition, and power in the state he knew; he marvelled to see his counsels thus revealed; he avowed them, asked pardon, promised obedience. Having sown this distrust, having shot this first bolt, the queen-mother, still in displeasure, withdrew to Monceaux. The trembling king followed her; he found her with his brother and Sieurs de Tavannes, de Retz, and the Secretary of State de Sauve, the last of whom threw himself upon his knees and received his Majesty’s pardon for having revealed his counsels to his mother. The infidelity, the bravado, the audacity, the menaces, and the enterprises of the Huguenots were magnified with so much of truth and art that from friends behold them converted into enemies of the king, who, nevertheless, wavering as ever, could not yet give up the desire he had conceived of winning glory and reputation by war with Spain.”

A fresh incident increased the agitation in the royal circle. In July, 1572, the throne of Poland had become vacant. A Polish embassy came to offer it to the Duke of Anjou. On his part and his mother’s, there was at first great eagerness to accept it; Catherine was charmed to see her favorite son becoming a king. “If we had required,” says a Polish historian, “that the French should build a bridge of solid gold over the Vistula, they would have agreed.” Hesitation soon took the place of eagerness; Henry demanded information, and took time to reply. He had shown similar hesitation at the time of the negotiations entered upon in London, in 1571, with a view of making him the husband of Elizabeth, Queen of England: Coligny, who was very anxious to have him away, pressed Charles IX. to insist upon a speedy solution. “If Monsieur,” said he, “who would not have England by marriage, will not have Poland either by election, let him declare once for all that he will not leave France.” The relations between the two brothers became day by day more uncomfortable: two years later, Henry, for a brief period King of Poland, himself told the story of them to his physician Miron. “When, by any chance,” he said, “the queen-mother and I, after the admiral’s departure, approached the king to speak to him of any matters, even those which concerned merely his pleasure, we found him marvellously quick-tempered and cross-grained, with rough looks and bearing, and his answers still more so. One day, a very short time before the St. Bartholomew, setting out expressly from my quarters to go and see the king, somebody told me on inquiry that he was in his cabinet, whence the admiral, who had been alone with him a very long while, had just that instant gone out. I entered at once, as I had been accustomed to do. But as soon as the king my brother perceived me, he, without saying anything to me, began walking about furiously and with long steps, often looking towards me askance and with a very evil eye, sometimes laying his hand upon his dagger, and in so excited a fashion that I expected nothing else but that he would come and take me by the collar to poniard me. I was very vexed that I had gone in, reflecting upon the peril I was in, but still more upon how to get out of it; which I did so dexterously, that, whilst he was walking with his back turned to me, I retreated quickly towards the door, which I opened, and, with a shorter obeisance than at my entry, I made my exit, which was scarcely perceived by him until I was outside. And straightway I went to look for the queen my mother; and, putting together all reports, notifications, and suspicions, the time, and past circumstances, in conjunction with this last meeting, we remained both of us easily persuaded, and as it were certain, that it was the admiral who had impressed the king with some bad and sinister opinion of us, and we resolved from that moment to rid ourselves of him.”

One idea immediately occurred to Catherine and her son. Two persons felt a passionate hatred towards Coligny; they were the widow of Duke Francis of Guise, Anne d’Este, become Duchess of Nemours by a second marriage, and her son Henry de Guise, a young man of twenty-two. They were both convinced that Coligny had egged on Poltrot to murder Duke Francis, and they had sworn to exact vengeance. Being informed of the queen-mother’s and the Duke of Anjou’s intention, they entered into it eagerly; the young Duke of Guise believed his mother quite capable of striking down the admiral in the very midst of one of the great assemblies at court; the fair ladies of the sixteenth century were adepts in handling dagger and pistol. In default of the Duchess of Nemours, her son was thought of for getting rid of Coligny. “It was at one time decided,” says the Duke de Bouillon in his Memoires, “that M. de Guise should kill the admiral during a tilt-at-the-ring which the king gave in the garden of the Louvre, and in which all Messieurs were to lead sides. I was on that of the duke, who was believed to have an understanding with the admiral. On this occasion, it was so managed that our dresses were not ready, and the late duke and his side did not tilt at all. The resolution against the admiral was changed prudently; inasmuch as it was very perilous, for the person of the king and of Messieurs, to have determined to kill him in that place, there being present more than four hundred gentlemen of the religion, who might have gone very far in case of an assault upon that lord, who was so much beloved by them.” Everything considered, it was thought more expedient to employ for the purpose an inferior agent; Catherine and the Duke of Anjou sent for a Gascon captain, a dependant of the house of Lorraine, whom they knew to be resolute and devoted. “We had him shown the means he should adopt,” says the Duke of Anjou, “in attacking him whom we had in our eye; but, having well scanned him, himself and his movements, and his speech and his looks, which had made us laugh and afforded us good pastime, we considered him too hare-brained and too much of a wind-bag to deal the blow well.” They then applied to an officer “of practice and experience in murder,” Charles de Louviers, Sieur de Maurevert, who was called the king’s slaughterman (le tueur du roi), because he had already rendered such a service, and they agreed with him as to all the circumstances of place, time, and procedure most likely to secure the success of the deed, whilst giving the murderer chances of escape.

In such situations there is scarcely any project the secret of which is so well kept that there does not get abroad some rumor to warn an observant mind; and when it is the fate of a religious or a popular hero that is in question, there is never any want of devoted friends or servants about him, ready to take alarm for him. When Coligny mounted his horse to go from Chatillon to Paris, a poor countrywoman on his estates threw herself before him, sobbing, “Ah! sir, ah! our good master, you are going to destruction; I shall never see you again if once you go to Paris; you will die there, you and all those who go with-you.” At Paris, on the approach of the St. Bartholomew, the admiral heard that some of his gentlemen were going away. “They treat you too well here,” said one of them, Langoiran, to him; “better to be saved with the fools than lost for the sake of being thought over-wise.” “The admiral was beset by letters which reminded him of the queen-mother’s crooked ways, and the detestable education of the king, trained to every sort of violence and horrible sin; his Bible is Macchiavelli; he has been prepared by the blood of beasts for the shedding of human blood; he has been persuaded that a prince is not bound to observe an edict extorted by his subjects.” To all these warnings Coligny replied at one time by affirming the king’s good faith, and at another by saying, “I would rather be dragged dead through the muck-heaps of Paris than go back to civil war.” This great soul had his seasons, not of doubt as to his faith or discouragement as to his cause, but of profound sorrow at the atrocious or shameful spectacles and the public or private woes which had to be gone through.

Charles IX. himself felt some disquietude as to the meeting of the Guises and Coligny at his court. The Guises had quitted it before the 18th of August, the day fixed for the marriage of King Henry of Navarre with Marguerite de Valois. When the marriage was over, they were to return, and they did. At the moment of their returning, the king said to Coligny, with demonstrations of the most sincere friendship, “You know, my dear father, the promise you made me not to insult any of the Guises as long as you remained at court. On their side, they have given me their word that they will have for you, and all the gentry of your following, the consideration you deserve. I rely entirely upon your word, but I have not so much confidence in theirs; I know that they are only looking for an opportunity of letting their vengeance burst forth; I know their bold and haughty character; as they have the people of Paris devoted to them, and as, on coming hither, under pretext of the rejoicings at my sister’s marriage, they have brought a numerous body of well-armed soldiers, I should be inconsolable if they were to take anything in hand against you; such an outrage would recoil upon me. That being so, if you think as I do, I believe the best thing for me is to order into the city the regiment of guards, with such and such captains (he mentioned none but those who were not objects of suspicion to Coligny); this re-enforcement,” added the king, “will secure public tranquillity, and, if the factious make any disturbance, there will be men to oppose to them.” The admiral assented to the king’s proposal. He added that he was ready to declare “that never had he been guilty or approving of the death of Duke Francis of Guise, and that he set down as a calumniator and a scoundrel whoever said, that he had authorized it.” Though frequently going to the palace, both he and the Guises, they had not spoken when they met. Charles had promised the Lorraine princes “not to force them to make friends with Coligny more than was agreeable to them.” He believed that he had taken every precaution necessary to maintain in his court, for some time at least, the peace he desired.

On Friday, the 22d of August, 1572, Coligny was returning on foot from the Louvre to the Rue des Fosses—St.-Germain-l’Auxerrois, where he lived; he was occupied in reading a letter which he had just received; a shot, fired from the window of a house in the cloister of St. Germain-l’Auxerrois, smashed two fingers of his right hand and lodged a ball in his left arm; he raised his eyes, pointed out with his injured hand the house whence the shot had come, and reached his quarters on foot. Two gentlemen who were in attendance upon him rushed to seize the murderer; it was too late; Maurevert had been lodging there and on the watch for three days at the house of a canon, an old tutor to the Duke of Guise; a horse from the duke’s stable was waiting for him at the back of the house; and, having done his job, he departed at a gallop. He was pursued for several leagues without being overtaken.

Coligny sent to apprise the king of what had just happened to him. “There,” said he, “was a fine proof of fidelity to the agreement between him and the Duke of Guise.” “I shall never have rest, then!” cried Charles, breaking the stick with which he was playing tennis with the Duke of Guise and Teligny, the admiral’s son-in-law; and he immediately returned to his room. The Duke of Guise took himself off without a word. Teligny speedily joined his father-in-law. Ambrose Pare had already attended to him, cutting off the two broken fingers; somebody expressed a fear that the balls might have been poisoned. “It will be as God pleases as to that,” said Coligny; and, turning towards the minister, Merlin, who had hurried to him, he added, “pray that He may grant me the gift of perseverance.” Towards midday, Marshals de Damville, De Cosse, and De Villars went to see him “out of pure friendship,” they told him, “and not to exhort him to endure his mishap with patience: we know that you will not lack patience.” “I do protest to you,” said Coligny, “that death affrights me not; it is of God that I hold my life; when He requires it back from me, I am quite ready to give it up. But I should very much like to see the king before I die; I have to speak to him of things which concern his person and the welfare of his state, and which I feel sure none of you would dare to tell him of.” “I will go and inform his Majesty, . . .” rejoined Damville; and he went out with Villars and Teligny, leaving Marshal de Cosse in the room. “Do you remember,” said Coligny to him, “the warnings I gave you a few hours ago? You will do well to take your precautions.”

About two P. M., the king, the queen-mother, and the Dukes of Anjou and Alencon, her two other sons, with many of their high officers, repaired to the admiral’s. “My dear father,” said the king, as he went in, “the hurt is yours; the grief and the outrage mine; but I will take such vengeance that it shall never be forgotten;” to which he added his usual imprecations. “Then the admiral, who lay in bed sorely wounded,” says the Duke of Anjou himself, in his account of this interview, “requested that he might speak privately to the king, which the king granted readily, making a sign to the queen my mother, and to me, to withdraw, which we did incontinently into the middle of the room, where we remained standing during this secret colloquy, which caused us great misgiving. We saw ourselves surrounded by more than two hundred gentlemen and captains of the admiral’s party, who were in the room and another adjoining, and, besides, in a ball below, the which, with sad faces and the gestures and bearing of malcontents, were whispering in one another’s ears, frequently passing and repasssing before and behind us, not with so much honor and respect as they ought to have done, and as if they had some suspicion that we had somewhat to do with the admiral’s hurt. We were seized with astonishment and fear at seeing ourselves shut in there, as my mother has since many times confessed to me, saying that she had never been in any place where there was so much cause for fright, and whence she had gone away with more relief and pleasure. This apprehension caused us to speedily break in upon the conversation the admiral was having with the king, under a polite excuse invented by the queen my mother, who, approaching the king, said out loud that she had no idea he would make the admiral talk so much, and that she saw quite well that his physicians and surgeons considered it bad for him, as it certainly was very dangerous, and enough to throw him into a fever, which was, above everything, to be guarded against. She begged the king to put off the rest of their conversation to another time, when the admiral was better. This vexed the king mightily, for he was very anxious to hear the remainder of what the admiral had to say to him. However, he being unable to gainsay so specious an argument, we got the king away. And incontinently the queen-mother (and I too) begged the king to let us know the secret conversation which the admiral had held with him, and in which he had been unwilling that we should be participators; which the king refused several times to do. But finding himself importuned and hard pressed by us, he told us abruptly and with displeasure, swearing by God’s death that what the admiral said was true, that kings realized themselves as such in France only in so far as they had the ‘power of doing harm or good to their subjects and servants, and that this power and management of affairs had slipped imperceptibly into the hands of the queen my mother and mine.’ ‘This superintendent domination, the admiral told me, might some day be very prejudicial to me and to all my kingdom, and that I should hold it in suspicion and beware of it; of which he was anxious to warn me, as one of my best and most faithful subjects, before he died. There, God’s death, as you wish to know, is what the admiral said to me.’ This, said as it was with passion and fury, went straight home to our hearts, which we concealed as best we might, both of us, however, defending ourselves in the matter. We continued this conversation all the way from the admiral’s quarters to the Louvre, where, having left the king in his room, we retired to that of the queen my mother, who was piqued and hurt to the utmost degree at this language used by the admiral to the king, as well as at the credence which the king seemed to accord to it, and was fearful lest it should bring about some change and alteration in our affairs and in the management of the state. Being unable to resolve upon any course at the moment, we retired, putting off the question till the morrow, when I went to see my mother, who was already up. I had a fine racket in my head, and so had she, and for the time there was no decision come to save to have the admiral despatched by some means or other. It being impossible any longer to employ stratagems and artifices, it would have to be done openly, and the king brought round to that way of thinking. We agreed that, in the afternoon, we would go and pay him a visit in his closet, whither we would get the Sieur de Nevers, Marshals de Tavannes and de Retz, and Chancellor de Birague to come, merely to have their opinion as to the means to be adopted for the execution, which we had already determined upon, my mother and I.”

On Saturday, the 23d of August, in the afternoon, the queen-mother, the Duke of Anjou, Marshals do Tavannes and de Retz, the Duke of Nevers, and the Chancellor de Birague met in the king’s closet, who was irresolute and still talking of exacting from the Guises heavy vengeance for the murderous attack upon Coligny. Catherine “represented to him that the party of the Huguenots had already seized this occasion for taking up arms against him; they had sent,” she said, “several despatches to Germany to procure a levy of ten thousand reiters, and to the cantons of the Swiss for another levy of ten thousand foot; the French captains, partisans of the Huguenots, had already, most of them, set out to raise levies within the kingdom time and place of meeting had already been assigned and determined. All the Catholics, on their side,” added Catherine, “disgusted with so long a war and harassed by so many kinds of calamities, have resolved to put a stop to them; they have decided amongst them to elect a captain-general, to form a league offensive and defensive against the Huguenots. The whole of France would thus be seen armed and divided into two great parties, between which the king would remain isolated, without any command and with about as much obedience. For so much ruin and calamity in anticipation and already within a finger’s reach, and for the slaughter of so many thousands of men, a preventive may be found in a single sword-thrust; all that is necessary is to kill the admiral, the head and front of all the civil wars; the designs and the enterprises of the Huguenots will die with him, and the Catholics, satisfied with the sacrifice of two or three men, will remain forever in obedience to the king. . . .” “At the beginning,” continues the Duke of Anjou, in his account, “the king would not by any means consent to have the admiral touched; feeling, however, some fear of the danger which we had so well depicted and represented, to him, he desired that, in a case of such importance, every one should at once state his opinion.” When each of those present had spoken, the king appeared still undecided. The queen-mother then resolved “to let him hear the truth in toto from Marshal de Retz, from whom she knew that he would take it better than from any other,” says his sister Marguerite de Valois in her Memoires, “as one who was more in his confidence and favor than any other. The which came to see him in the evening, about nine or ten, and told him that, as his faithful servant, he could not conceal from him the danger he was in if he were to abide by his resolution to do justice on M. de Guise, because it was necessary that he should know that the attack upon the admiral was not M. de Guise’s doing alone, but that my brother Henry, the King of Poland, afterwards King of France, and the queen my mother, had been concerned in it; which M. de Guise and his friends would not fail to reveal, and which would place his Majesty in a position of great danger and embarrassment.” Towards midnight, the queen-mother went down to the king, followed by her son Henry and four other councillors. They found the king more put out than ever. The conversation began again, and resolved itself into a regular attack upon the king. “The Guises,” he was told, “will denounce the king himself, together with his mother and brother; the Huguenots will believe that the king was in concert with the party, and they will take the whole royal family to task. War is inevitable. Better to win a battle in Paris, where we hold all the chiefs in our clutches, than put it to hazard in the field. After a struggle of an hour and a half, Charles, in a violent state of agitation, still hesitated; when the queen-mother, fearing lest, if there were further delay, all would be discovered, said to him, ‘Permit me and your brother, sir, to retire to some other part of the kingdom.’ Charles rose from his seat. ‘By God’s death,’ said he, ‘since you think proper to kill the admiral, I consent; but all the Huguenots in Paris as well, in order that there remain not one to reproach me afterwards. Give the orders at once.’” And he went back into his room.

In order to relieve and satisfy her own passions and those of her favorite son, which were fear and love of power, the queen-mother had succeeded in working her king-son into a fit of weakness and mad anger. Anxious to profit by it, “she gave orders on the instant for the signal, which was not to have been given until an hour before daybreak,” says De Thou, “and, instead of the bell at the Palace of Justice, the tocsin was sounded by the bell of St.-Germain-Auxerrois, which was nearer.”

Even before the king had given his formal consent, the projectors of the outrage had carefully prepared for its execution; they had apportioned out amongst themselves or to their agents the different quarters of the city. The Guises had reserved for themselves that in which they considered they had personal vengeance as well as religious enmity to satisfy, the neighborhood of St.-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and especially Rue de Bethisy and Rue des Fosses-St.-Germain. Awakened by the noise around his house, and, before long, by arquebuse-shots fired in his court-yard, Coligny understood what was going to happen; he jumped out of bed, put on his dressing-gown, and, as he stood leaning against the wall, he said to the clergyman, Merlin, who was sitting up with him, “M. Merlin, say me a prayer; I commit my soul to my Saviour.” One of his gentlemen, Cornaton, entered the room. “What is the meaning of this riot?” asked Ambrose Pare, who had also remained with the admiral.

“My lord,” said Cornaton to Coligny, “it is God calling us.” “I have long been ready to die,” said the admiral; “but you, my friends, save yourselves, if it is still possible.” All ran up stairs and escaped, the majority by the roof; a German servant, Nicholas Muss, alone remained with the admiral, “as little concerned,” says Cornaton, “as if there were nothing going on around him.” The door of his room was forced. Two men, servants of the Guises, entered first. One of them, Behme, attached to the Duke of Guise’s own person, came forward, saying, “Art thou not the admiral?” “Young man,” said Coligny, “thou comest against a wounded and an aged man. Thou’lt not shorten my life by much.” Behme plunged into his stomach a huge pointed boar-spear which he had in his hand, and then struck him on the head with it. Coligny fell, saying, “If it were but a man! But ‘tis a horse-boy.” Others came in and struck him in their turn. “Behme!” shouted the Duke of Guise from the court-yard, “hast done?” “‘Tis all over, my lord,” was the answer; and the murderers threw the body out of the window, where it stuck for an instant, either accidentally or voluntarily, and as if to defend a last remnant of life. Then it fell. The two great lords, who were waiting for it, turned over the corpse, wiped the blood off the face, and said, “Faith, ‘tis he, sure enough.”

Some have said that Guise gave him a kick in the face. A servant of the Duke of Nevers cut off the head, and took it to the queen-mother, the king, and the Duke of Anjou. It was embalmed with care, to be sent, it is said, to Rome. What is certain is that, a few days afterwards, Mandelot, governor of Lyons, wrote to the king, “I have received, sir, the letter your Majesty was pleased to write to me, whereby you tell me that you have been advertised that there is a man who has set out from over yonder with the head he took from the admiral after killing him, for to convey it to Rome, and to take care, when the said man arrives in this city, to have him arrested, and to take from him the said head. Whereupon I incontinently gave such strict orders, that, if he presents himself, the command which it pleases your Majesty to lay upon me will be acted upon. There hath not passed, for these last few days, by way of this city, any person going Romewards save a squire of the Duke of Guise’s, named Paule, the which had departed four hours previously on the same day on which I received the said letter from your Majesty.”

We do not find anywhere, in reference to this incident, any information going further than this reply of the governor of Lyons to Charles IX. However it may be, the remains of Coligny’s body, after having been hung and exposed for some days on the gibbet of Montfaucon, were removed by Duke Francis de Montmorency, the admiral’s relative and friend, who had them transferred to Chantilly and interred in the chapel of the castle. After having been subjected, in the course of three centuries, at one time to oblivion and at others to divers transferences, these sad relics of a great man, a great Christian, and a great patriot, have been resting, for the last two and twenty years, in the very castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing, his ancestors’ own domain having once more become the property of a relative of his family, the Duke of Luxembourg, to whom Count Anatole de Montesquiou transferred them, and who, in 1851, had them sealed up in a bit of wall in ruins, at the foot of an old tower, under the site of the bed-chamber of the Duchesses of Chatillon, where, in all probability, Coligny was born. The more tardy the homage, the greater.

The actual murderers of Coligny, the real projectors of the St. Bartholomew, Catherine de’ Medici and her son the Duke of Anjou, at the very moment when they had just ordered the massacre, were seized with affright at the first sound of their crime. The Duke of Anjou finishes his story with this page “After but two hours’ rest during the night, just as the day was beginning to break, the king, the queen my mother, and I went to the frontal of the Louvre, adjoining the tennis-court, into a room which looks upon the area of the stable-yard, to see the commencement of the work. We had not been there long when, as we were weighing the issues and the consequence of so great an enterprise, on which, sooth to say, we had up to that time scarcely bestowed a thought, we heard a pistol-shot fired. I could not say in what spot, or whether it knocked over anybody; but well know I that the sound wounded all three of us so deeply in spirit that it knocked over our senses and judgment, stricken with terror and apprehension at the great troubles which were then about to set in. To prevent them, we sent a gentleman at once and with all haste to M. de Guise, to tell him and command him expressly from us to retire into his quarters, and be very careful to take no steps against the admiral, this single command putting a stop to everything else, because it had been determined that in no spot in the city should any steps be taken until, as a preliminary, the admiral had been killed. But soon afterwards the gentleman returning told us that M. de Guise had answered him that the command came too late, that the admiral was dead, and the work was begun throughout the rest of the city. So we went back to our original determination, and let ourselves follow the thread and the course of the enterprise.”

The enterprise, in fact, followed its thread and natural course without its being in the power of anybody to arrest or direct it. It had been absolutely necessary to give information of it the evening before to the provost of tradesmen of Paris, Le Charron, president in the court of taxation (Board of Excise), and to the chief men of the city. According to Brantome, “they made great difficulties and imported conscience into the matter; but M. de Tavannes, in the king’s presence, rebuked them strongly, and threatened them that, if they did not make themselves busy, the king would have them hanged. The poor devils, unable to do aught else, thereupon answered, ‘Ha! is that the way you take it, sir, and you, monsieur? We swear to you that you shall hear news thereof, for we will ply our hands so well right and left that the memory shall abide forever of a right well kept St. Bartholomew.’” “Wherein they did not fail,” continues Brantome, “but they did not like it at first.” According to other reports, the first opposition of the provost of tradesmen, Le Charron, was not without effect; it was not till the next day that he let the orders he had received take their course; and it was necessary to apply to his predecessor in his office, the ex-provost Marcel, a creature of the queen-mother’s, to set in motion the turbulent and the fanatical amongst the populace, “which it never does to ‘blood,’ for it is afterwards more savage than is desirable.” Once let loose upon the St. Bartholomew, the Parisian populace was eager indeed, but not alone in its eagerness, for the work of massacre; the gentlemen of the court took part in it passionately, from a spirit of vengeance, from religious hatred, from the effect of smelling blood, from covetousness at the prospect of confiscations at hand. Teligny, the admiral’s son-in-law, had taken refuge on a roof; the Duke of Anjou’s guards make him a mark for their arquebuses. La Rochefoucauld, with whom the king had been laughing and joking up to eleven o’clock the evening before, heard a knocking at his door, in the king’s name; it is opened; enter six men in masks and poniard him. The new Queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, had gone to bed by express order of her mother Catherine. “Just as I was asleep,” says she, “behold a man knocking with feet and hands at the door and shouting, Navarre! Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was the king my husband, runs quickly to the door and opens it. It was a gentleman named M. de Leran, who had a sword-cut on the elbow, a gash from a halberd on the arm, and was still pursued by four archers, who all came after him into my bedroom. He, wishing to save himself, threw himself on to my bed; as for me, feeling this man who had hold of me, I threw myself out of bed towards the wall, and he after me, still holding me round the body. I did not know this man, and I could not tell whether he had come thither to offer me violence, or whether the archers were after him in particular, or after me. We both screamed, and each of us was as much frightened as the other. At last it pleased God that M. de Nanqay, captain of the guards, came in, who, finding me in this plight, though he felt compassion, could not help laughing; and, flying into a great rage with the archers for this indiscretion, he made them begone, and gave me the life of that poor man who had hold of me, whom I had put to bed and attended to in my closet, until he was well.”

We might multiply indefinitely these anecdotical scenes of the massacre, most of them brutally ferocious, others painfully pathetic, some generous and calculated to preserve the credit of humanity amidst one of its most direful aberrations. History must show no pity for the vices and crimes of men, whether princes or people; and it is her duty as well as her right to depict them so truthfully that men’s souls and imaginations may be sufficiently impressed by them to conceive disgust and horror at them; but it is not by dwelling upon them and by describing them minutely, as if she had to exhibit a gallery of monsters and madmen, that history can lead men’s minds to sound judgments and salutary impressions; it is necessary to have moral sense and good sense always in view, and set high above great social troubles, just as sailors, to struggle courageously against the tempest, need to see a luminous corner where the sky is visible, and a star which reveals to them the port. We take no pleasure, and we see no use, in setting forth in detail the works of evil; we should be inclined to fear that, by familiarity with such a spectacle, men would lose the perception of good, and cease to put hope in its legitimate and ultimate superiority. Nor will we pause either to discuss the secondary questions which meet us at the period of which we are telling the story; for example, the question whether Charles IX. fired with his own hand on his Protestant subjects whom he had delivered over to the evil passions of the aristocracy and of the populace, or whether the balcony from which he is said to have indulged in this ferocious pastime existed at that time, in the sixteenth century, at the palace of the Louvre, and overlooking the Seine. These questions are not without historic interest, and it is well for learned men to study them; but we consider them incapable of being resolved with certainty; and, even were they resolved, they would not give the key to the character of Charles IX. and to the portion which appertains to him in the deed of cruelty with which his name remains connected. The great historic fact of the St. Bartholomew is what we confine ourselves to; and we have attempted to depict it accurately as regards Charles IX.‘s hesitations and equally feverish resolutions, his intermixture of open-heartedness and double-dealing in his treatment of Coliguy, towards whom he felt himself drawn without quite understanding him, and his puerile weakness in presence of his mother, whom he feared far more than he trusted. When he had plunged into the orgies of the massacre, when, after having said, “Kill them all!” he had seen the slaughter of his companions in his royal amusements, Teligny and La Rochefoucauld, Charles IX. abandoned himself to a fit of mad passion. He was asked whether the two young Huguenot princes, Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, were to be killed also; Marshal de Retz had been in favor of it; Marshal de Tavannes had been opposed to it; and it was decided to spare them. On the very night of the St. Bartholomew, the king sent for them both. “I mean for the future,” said he, “to have but one religion in my kingdom; the mass or death; make your choice.” Henry of Navarre reminded the king of his promises, and asked for time to consider; Henry de Conde “answered that he would remain firm in the true religion though he should have to give up his life for it.” “Seditious madman, rebel, and son of a rebel,” said Charles, “if within three days you do not change your language, I will have you strangled.” At this first juncture, the king saved from the massacre none but his surgeon, Ambrose Pare, and his nurse, both Huguenots; on the very night after the murder of Coligny, he sent for Ambrose Pare into his chamber, and made him go into his wardrobe, says Brantome, “ordering him not to stir, and saying that it was not reasonable that one who was able to be of service to a whole little world should be thus massacred.” A few days afterwards, “Now,” said the king to Pare, “you really must be a Catholic.” “By God’s light,” answered Pars, “I think you must surely remember, sir, to have promised me, in order that I might never disobey you, never, on the other hand, to bid me do four things—find my way back into my mother’s womb, catch myself fighting in a battle, leave your service, or go to mass.” After a moment’s silence Charles rejoined, “Ambrose, I don’t know what has come over me for the last two or three days, but I feel my mind and my body greatly excited, in fact, just as if I had a fever; meseems every moment, just as much waking as sleeping, that those massacred corpses keep appearing to me with their faces all hideous and covered with blood. I wish the helpless and the innocent had not been included.” “And in consequence of the reply made to him,” adds Sully in his (Economies royales t. i. p. 244, in the Petitot collection), “he next day issued his orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering; the which were, nevertheless, very ill observed, the animosities and fury of the populace being too much inflamed to defer to them.”

The historians, Catholic or Protestant, contemporary or researchful, differ widely as to the number of the victims in this cruel massacre; according to De Thou, there were about two thousand persons killed in Paris the first day; D’Aubigne says three thousand; Brantome speaks of four thousand bodies that Charles IX. might have seen floating down the Seine; La Popeliniere reduces them to one thousand. There is to be found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river. The uncertainty is still greater when one comes to speak of the number of victims throughout the whole of France; De Thou estimates it at thirty thousand, Sully at seventy thousand, Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris in the seventeenth century, raises it to one hundred thousand; Papirius Masson and Davila reduce it to ten thousand, without clearly distinguishing between the massacre of Paris and those of the provinces; other historians fix upon forty thousand. Great uncertainty also prevails as to the execution of the orders issued from Paris to the governors at the provinces; the names of the Viscount d’Orte, governor of Bayonne, and of John le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, have become famous from their having refused to take part in the massacre; but the authenticity of the letter from the Viscount d’Orte to Charles IX. is disputed, though the fact of his resistance appears certain; and as for the bishop, John le Hennuyer, M. de Formeville seems to us to have demonstrated in his Histoire de l’ancien Eveche-comte de Lisieux (t. ii. pp. 299-314), “that there was no occasion to save the Protestants of Lisieux, in 1572, because they did not find themselves in any danger of being massacred, and that the merit of it cannot be attributed to anybody, to the bishop, Le Hennuyer, any more than to Captain Fumichon, governor of the town. It was only the general course of events and the discretion of the municipal officers of Lisieux that did it all.” One thing which is quite true, and which it is good to call to mind in the midst of so great a general criminality, is that, at many spots in France, it met with a refusal to be associated in it; President Jeannin at Dijon, the Count de Tende in Provence, Philibert de la Guiche at Macon, Tanneguy le Veneur de Carrouge at Rouen, the Count de Gordes in Dauphiny, and many other chiefs, military or civil, openly repudiated the example set by the murderers of Paris; and the municipal body of Nantes, a very Catholic town, took upon this subject, as has been proved from authentic documents by M. Vaurigaud, pastor of the Reformed Church at Nantes [in his Essai sur l’Histoire des Eglises reformees de Bretagne, t. i. pp. 190-194], a resolution which does honor to its patriotic firmness as well as to its Christian loyalty.

A great, good man, a great functionary, and a great scholar, in disgrace for six years past, the Chancellor Michael de l’Hospital, received about this time, in his retreat at Vignay, a visit from a great philosopher, Michael de Montaigne, “anxious,” said the visitor, “to come and testify to you the honor and reverence with which I regard your competence and the special qualities which are in you; for, as to the extraneous and the fortuitous, it is not to my taste to put them down in the account.” Montaigne chose a happy moment for disregarding all but the personal, and special qualities of the chancellor; shortly after his departure, L’Hospital was warned that some sinister-looking horsemen were coming, and that he would do well to take care of himself. “No matter, no matter,” he answered; “it will be as God pleases when my hour has come.” Next day he was told that those men were approaching his house, and he was asked whether he would not have the gates shut against them, and have them fired upon, in case they attempted to force an entrance. “No,” said he, “if the small gate will not do for them to enter by, let the big one be opened.” A few hours afterwards, L’Hospital was informed that the king and the queen-mother were sending other horsemen to protect him. “I didn’t know,” said the old man, “that I had deserved either death or pardon.” A rumor of his death flew abroad amongst his enemies, who rejoiced at it. “We are told,” wrote Cardinal Granvelle to his agent at Brussels (October 8, 1572), “that the king has had Chancellor de l’Hospital and his wife despatched, which would be a great blessing.” The agent, more enlightened than his chief, denied the fact, adding, “They are a fine bit of rubbish left, L’Hospital and his wife.” Charles IX. wrote to his old adviser to reassure him, “loving you as I do.” Some time after, however, he demanded of him his resignation of the title of chancellor, wishing to confer it upon La Birague, to reward him for his co-operation in the St. Bartholomew. L’Hospital gave in his resignation on the 1st of February, 1573, and died six weeks afterwards, on the 18th of March. “I am just at the end of my long journey, and shall have no more business but with God,” he wrote to the king and the queen-mother. “I implore Him to give you His grace, and to lead you with His hand in all your affairs, and in the government of this great and beautiful kingdom which He hath committed to your keeping, with all gentleness and clemency towards your good subjects, in imitation of Himself, who is good and, patient in bearing our burdens, and prompt to forgive you and pardon you everything.”

From the 24th to the 31st of August, 1572, the bearing and conduct of Charles IX. and the queen-mother produced nothing but a confused mass of orders and counter-orders, affirmations and denials, words and actions incoherent and contradictory, all caused by a habit of lying and the desire of escaping from the peril or embarrassment of the moment. On the very first day of the massacre, about midday, the provost of tradesmen and the sheriffs, who had not taken part in the “Paris matins,” came complaining to the king “of the pillage, sack, and murder which were being committed by many belonging to the suite of his Majesty, as well as to those of the princes, princesses, and lords of the court, by noblemen, archers, and soldiers of the guard, as well as by all sorts of gentry and people mixed with them and under their wing.” Charles ordered them “to get on horseback, take with them all the forces in the city, and keep their eyes open day and night to put a stop to the said murder, pillage, and sedition arising,” he said, “because of the rivalry between the houses of Guise and Chatillon, and because they of Guise had been threatened by the admiral’s friends, who suspected them of being at the bottom of the hurt inflicted upon him.” He, the same day, addressed to the governors of the provinces a letter in which he invested the disturbance with the same character, and gave the same explanation of it. The Guises complained violently at being thus disavowed by the king, who had the face to throw upon them alone the odium of the massacre which he had ordered. Next day, August 25, the king wrote to all his agents, at home and abroad, another letter, affirming that “what had happened at Paris had been done solely to prevent the execution of an accursed conspiracy which the admiral and his allies had concocted against him, his mother, and his brothers;” and, on the 26th of August, he went with his two brothers to hold in state a bed of justice, and make to the Parliament the same declaration against Coligny and his party. “He could not,” he said, “have parried so fearful a blow but by another very violent one; and he wished all the world to know that what had happened at Paris had been done not only with his consent, but by his express command.” Whereupon it was enjoined upon the court, says De Thou, “to cause investigations to be made as to the conspiracy of Coligny, and to decree what it should consider proper, conformably with the laws and with justice.” The next day but one, August 28, appeared a royal manifesto running, “The king willeth and intendeth that all noblemen and others whosoever of the religion styled Reformed be empowered to live and abide in all security and liberty, with their wives, children, and families, in their houses, as they have heretofore done and were empowered to do by benefit of the edicts of pacification. And nevertheless, for to obviate the troubles, scandals, suspicion, and distrust, which might arise by reason of the services and assemblies that might take place both in the houses of the said noblemen and elsewhere, as is permitted by the aforesaid edicts of pacification, his Majesty doth lay very express inhibitions and prohibitions upon all the said noblemen and others of the said religion against holding assemblies, on any account whatsoever, until that, by the said lord the king, after having provided for the tranquillity of his kingdom, it be otherwise ordained. And that, on pain of confiscation of body and goods in case of disobedience.”

These tardy and lying accusations officially brought against Coligny and his friends; these promises of liberty and security for the Protestants, renewed in the terms of the edicts of pacification, and, in point of fact, annulled at the very moment at which they were being renewed; the massacre continuing here and there in France, at one time with the secret connivance and at another notwithstanding the publicly-given word of the king and the queen-mother; all this policy, at one and the same time violent and timorous, incoherent and stubborn, produced amongst the Protestants two contrary effects: some grew frightened, others angry. At court, under the direct influence of the king and his surroundings, “submission to the powers that be” prevailed; many fled; others, without abjuring their religion, abjured their party. The two Reformer-princes, Henry of Navarre and Henry de Conde, attended mass on the 29th of September, and, on the 3d of October, wrote to the pope, deploring their errors and giving hopes of their conversion. Far away from Paris, in the mountains of the Pyrenees and of Languedoc, in the towns where the Reformers were numerous and confident, at Sancerre, at Montauban, at Nimes, at La Rochelle, the spirit of resistance carried the day. An assembly, meeting at Milhau, drew up a provisional ordinance for the government of the Reformed church, “until it please God, who has the hearts of kings in His keeping, to change that of King Charles IX. and restore the state of France to good order, or to raise up such neighboring prince as is manifestly marked out, by his virtue and by distinguishing signs, for to be the liberator of this poor afflicted people.” In November, 1572, the fourth religious war broke out. The siege of La Rochelle was its only important event. Charles IX. and his councillors exerted themselves in vain to avoid it. There was everything to disquiet them in this enterprise: so sudden a revival of the religious war after the grand blow they had just struck, the passionate energy manifested by the Protestants in asylum at La Rochelle, and the help they had been led to hope for from Queen Elizabeth, whom England would never have forgiven for indifference in this cause. Marshal de Biron, who was known to favor the Reformers, was appointed governor of La Rochelle; but he could not succeed in gaining admittance within the walls, even alone and for the purpose of parleying with the inhabitants. The king heard that one of the bravest Protestant chiefs, La Noue Ironarm, had retired to Mons with Prince Louis of Nassau. The Duke of Longueville, his old enemy, induced him to go to Paris. The king received him with great favor, gave up to him the property of Teligny, whose sister La Noue had married, and pressed him to go to La Rochelle and prevail upon the inhabitants to keep the peace. La Noue refused, saying that he was not at all fitted for this commission. The king promised that he would ask nothing of him which could wound his honor. La Noue at last consented, and repaired, about the end of November, 1572, to a village close by La Rochelle, whither it was arranged that deputies from the town would come and confer with him. And they came, in fact, but at their first meeting, “We are come,” they said, “to confer with M. de La Noue, but we do not see him here.” La Noue got angry. “I am astonished,” he said, “that you have so soon forgotten one who has received so many wounds and lost an arm fighting for you.” “Yes, there is a M. de La Noue, who was one of us, and who bravely defended our cause; but he never flattered us with vain hopes, he never invited us to conferences to betray us.” La Noue got more fiercely angry. “All I ask of you is, to report to the senate what I have to say to them.” They complied, and came back with permission for him to enter the town. The people looked at him, as he passed, with a mixture of distrust and interest. After hearing him, the senate rejected the pacific overtures made to them by La Noue. “We have no mind to treat specially and for ourselves alone; our cause is that of God and of all the churches of France; we will accept nothing but what shall seem proper to all our brethren. For yourself, we give you your choice between three propositions: remain in our town as a simple burgess, and we will give you quarters; if you like better to be our commandant, all the nobility and the people will gladly have you for their head, and will fight with confidence under your orders; if neither of these propositions suits you, you shall be welcome to go aboard one of our vessels and cross over to England, where you will find many of your friends.” La Noue did not hesitate; he became, under the authority of the mayor Jacques Henri, the military head of La Rochelle, whither Charles IX. had sent him to make peace. The king authorized him to accept this singular position. La Noue conducted himself so honorably in it, and everybody was so convinced of his good faith as well as bravery, that for three months he commanded inside La Rochelle, and superintended the preparations for defence, all the while trying to make the chances of peace prevail. At the end of February, 1573, he recognized the impossibility of his double commission, and he went away from La Rochelle, leaving the place in better condition than that in which he had found it, without either king or Rochellese considering that they had any right to complain of him.

Biron first and then the Duke of Anjou in person took the command of the siege. They brought up, it is said, forty thousand men and sixty pieces of artillery. The Rochellese, for defensive strength, had but twenty-two companies of refugees or inhabitants, making in all thirty-one hundred men. The siege lasted from the 26th of February to the 13th of June, 1573; six assaults were made on the place; in the last, the ladders had been set at night against the wall of what was called Gospel bastion; the Duke of Guise, at the head of the assailants, had escaladed the breach, but there he discovered a new ditch and a new rampart erected inside; and, confronted by these unforeseen obstacles, the men recoiled and fell back. La Rochelle was saved. Charles IX. was more and more desirous of peace; his brother, the Duke of Anjou, had just been elected King of Poland; Charles IX. was anxious for him to leave France and go to take possession of his new kingdom. Thanks to these complications, the peace of La Rochelle was signed on the 6th of July, 1573. Liberty of creed and worship was recognized in the three towns of La Rochelle, Montauban, and Nimes. They were not obliged to receive any royal garrison, on condition of giving hostages to be kept by the king for two years. Liberty of worship throughout the extent of their jurisdiction continued to be recognized in the case of lords high-justiciary. Everywhere else the Reformers had promises of not being persecuted for their creed, under the obligation of never holding an assembly of more than ten persons at a time. These were the most favorable conditions they had yet obtained.

Certainly this was not what Charles IX. had calculated upon when he consented to the massacre of the Protestants. “Provided,” he had said, “that not a single one is left to reproach me.” The massacre had been accomplished almost without any resistance but that offered by certain governors of provinces or towns, who had refused to take part in it. The chief leader of French Protestantism, Coligny, had been the first victim. Far more than that, the Parliament of Paris had accepted the royal lie which accused Coligny of conspiring for the downfall of the king and the royal house; a decree, on that very ground, sentenced to condemnation the memory, the family, and the property of Coligny, with all sorts of rigorous, we should rather say atrocious, circumstances. And after having succeeded so well against the Protestants, Charles IX. saw them recovering again, renewing the struggle with him, and wresting from him such concessions as he had never yet made to them. More than ever might he exclaim, “Then I shall never have rest!” The news that came to him from abroad was not more calculated to satisfy him.