In the very height of the massacre, the rumor of a miracle revived the flagging zeal of the Parisians. In the ancient cemetery of the Innocents there stood a small chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and in front of it a white-thorn bush which for four years had shown neither leaf nor flower. All of a sudden, on the morning of the massacre, it became covered with beautiful white blossoms, filling the air with their delicious perfume. It continued in bloom for a fortnight, and every body went to see it. The king and his court proceeded thither in long procession. Sick persons were healed by merely looking at it; and the superstitious crowd, which included nearly every one in Paris, believed that it was “a sign from heaven of God’s approval of the Catholic uprising and the admiral’s death.” All the city guilds and companies, all the ecclesiastical fraternities, marched out to the cemetery with much pomp and loud music, killing the Huguenots they found in their road. The nuncio Salviati, who had probably formed one of the royal procession, writes very incredulously to the Papal Secretary of State: “The people ran to see it with such eagerness, that should any of the priests who live in the convent dare say publicly that it had blossomed some days before the event, he would be stoned and flung into the river.”[656]

Not until the second day does there appear to have been any remorse or pity for the horrors inflicted upon the wretched Huguenots. Elizabeth of Austria, the young queen who hoped shortly to become a mother, interceded for Condé, and so great was her agitation and distress that her “features were quite disfigured by the tears she had shed night and day.” And the Duke of Alençon, a youth of by no means lovable character, “wept much,” we are told, “over the fate of those brave captains and soldiers.” For this tenderness he was so bitterly reproached by Charles and his mother, that he was forced to keep out of their sight. Alençon was partial to Coligny, and when there was found among the admiral’s papers a report in which he condemned the appanages, the grants usually given by the crown to the younger members of the royal family, Catherine exultingly showed it to him: “See what a fine friend he was to you.” “I know not how far he may have been my friend,” replied the duke, “but the advice he gave was very good.”[657]

If Mezeray is to be trusted, Charles broke down on the second day of the massacre. Since Saturday he had been in a state of extraordinary excitement, more like madness than sanity, and at last his mind gave way under the pressure. To his surgeon Ambrose Paré, who kept at his side all through these dreadful hours, he said:[658] “I do not know what ails me. For these two or three days past, both mind and body have been quite upset. I burn with fever: all around me grin pale blood-stained faces. Ah! Ambrose, if they had but spared the weak and innocent!” A change indeed had come over him; he became more restless than ever, his looks savage, his buffoonery coarser and more boisterous. “Nè mai poteva pigliar requie,” says Sigismond Cavalli. Like Macbeth, he had murdered sleep. “I saw the king on my return from Rochelle,” says Brantome, “and found him entirely changed. His features had lost all the gentleness (douceur) usually visible in them.”[659]

“About a week after the massacre,” says a contemporary, “a number of crows flew croaking round, and settled on the Louvre. The noise they made drew every body out to see them, and the superstitious women infected the king with their own timidity. That very night Charles had not been in bed two hours, when he jumped up and called for the King of Navarre, to listen to a horrible tumult in the air: shrieks, groans, yells, mingled with blasphemous oaths and threats, just as they were heard on the night of the massacre. The sound returned for seven successive nights, precisely at the same hour.”[660] Juvenal des Ursins tells the story rather differently. “On the 31st August I supped at the Louvre with Madame de Fiesque. As the day was very hot, we went down into the garden and sat in an arbor by the river. Suddenly the air was filled with a horrible noise of tumultuous voices and groans, mingled with cries of rage and madness. We could not move for terror; we turned pale and were unable to speak. The noise lasted for half an hour, and was heard by the king, who was so terrified that he could not sleep the rest of the night.” As for Catherine, knowing that strong emotions would spoil her digestion and impair her good looks, she kept up her spirits: “For my part,” she said, “there are only six of them on my conscience;”[661] which is a lie, for when she ordered the tocsin to be rung, she must have foreseen the horrors—perhaps not all the horrors—that would ensue.

Before the bodies of their first victims were cold, Catherine and her advisers became aware of the great political blunder they had committed. That it was a crime affected them little, if at all; but they had perpetrated an act of treachery which they would have to justify in the eyes not only of France, but of the civilized world. Thousands shrank with horror from the deed and its perpetrators; and many even of those who applauded the end, could not vindicate the means.[662] Catherine and her Italians—for Charles was now the merest puppet in their hands—hastily made up their minds to throw upon the Duke of Guise the blame of the attempt upon the admiral’s life, and the massacre as the result of a riot between the two parties, in which the Huguenots were the weakest. They also represented that the king himself was hardly safe in the Louvre. “I am here with my brother of Navarre and my cousin of Condé, ready to share the same fortune with them,” wrote Charles.[663] On the evening of the massacre a circular note was issued, ascribing all the mischief to “the private quarrel which had long existed between the houses of Lorraine and Chatillon,” and which the king had vainly tried to arrange. It went on to say that the Edict of Pacification must be observed as strictly as ever. On the next day, Charles wrote to Schomberg, “bitterly deploring what had happened;” while to La Mothe-Fénelon he said that he was exceedingly vexed (infiniment marry) at the assault upon the admiral, and promised to investigate the case and punish the offender. On the 24th he wrote that the Guises had begun the massacre, “because they had heard that Coligny’s friends would retaliate;” and that he had been compelled to employ guards to keep the Louvre safe; and on the 27th he wrote again to the same effect, but with a significant variation in the phraseology.[664]

But by this time the massacre had assumed such enormous proportions, that the Duke of Guise, who had returned from the pursuit of Montgomery, refused to bear the odium of it alone. Besides, the excuse was such an acknowledgment of weakness, that in the eyes of the orthodox it elevated the duke into the position of the true defender of the Church. The only way to remedy the blunder was for Charles boldly to assume the responsibility. Catherine dreaded Henry of Guise fully as much as she had hated the admiral. The new policy would indeed compel them to tell another lie; but lying carried no disgrace with it at the court of France. On the 25th the king hinted something about a conspiracy to the Spanish embassador;[665] on the 26th all timidity and hesitation had disappeared. Charles, accompanied by his mother and brothers, attended by a numerous crowd of ladies and gentlemen, moved in stately procession through the streets of Paris. The populace welcomed the king with shouts of joy, and some of the more villainous of the ruffians pushed their way through the Guards, and displaying their bloody weapons and ensanguined arms, boasted to him of the numbers they had killed. One Protestant gentleman was hunted out and murdered before his very eyes: “Would to God he were the last!” exclaimed Charles fiercely. He went to the cathedral Church of Notre Dame to return thanks to God, as was his duty (says Capilupi) for such a happy issue, that without shedding the blood of a single believer, the kingdom had been so graciously delivered from those pernicious and wicked people. From the church he proceeded to the Palace of Justice, where, before the foreign embassadors and parliament assembled in the Gilded Chamber, he declared that the massacre had taken place “by his express orders, not from any religious motive, or in contravention of his Edicts of Pacification, which he still intended to observe, but to prevent the carrying out of a detestable conspiracy, got up by the admiral and his followers against the person of the king, the queen-mother, her other sons, and the King of Navarre.”[666] The story deceived none but the most ignorant and fanatical. Salviati declared at once that it was “false in every respect,” and that a man of the least “experience in worldly matters would be ashamed to believe it.”[667] This is the “third lie” they were obliged to invent, says Tavannes.

The royal speech was afterward amplified, and published as a manifesto.[668] It accused the Huguenots of infringing the Edict in various ways, and murdering Catholics; of threatening war, if their importunities were not attended to; and of plotting against the king and his mother, declaring all the while that the king was plotting against them. “All these inventions were forged in the admiral’s shop.” He was trying to cause a rupture with Spain by giving succor to the rebels in the Low Countries, when a man, whom he had threatened to hang, shot him as he was leaving the palace. His majesty was deliberating how he could execute prompt and exemplary justice on the author of such a wicked deed, when the admiral resolved to avenge himself at one blow upon the king and the royal family, so that he might the easier make himself sole master of the kingdom. “If my arm is wounded,” he said, “my head is not;[669] if I must lose my arm, I shall have the heads of those who caused the loss. They thought to kill me, but I shall be beforehand with them.” When he was told that the king was sorry for his suffering: “It is all made up,” he replied; “I understand their tricks. I know how to catch them all.” On Saturday, after dinner, the admiral held a secret council of his friends, at which it was resolved to kill the king and all who were opposed to their designs.[670] His majesty was informed of this in the evening by “some trustworthy persons,” and even by some of the conspirators, who would not join in “so barbarous and enormous a crime.” The king thought he must apply a “prompt, sovereign, and vigorous remedy to so cruel a plot;” for in matters where the lives of princes are concerned, punishment and “execution must precede inquiry:” in plain English, hang first and try afterward. He therefore resolved, in council with his mother and others, “to anticipate the conspiracy by a prompt and sovereign execution,” and accordingly gave orders that on Sunday morning at day-break they should commence the punishment by killing the admiral and all his faction, which was done with such “felicity, diligence, and celerity,” that by seven o’clock the admiral, his chief officers, and others were put to death, very few escaping with their lives. Hence the king argued the goodness of God, who kept the Huguenots in ignorance of the design against them. The people of Paris, who are stanch Catholics, and very fond of their prince, remembering their past sufferings, and exasperated by the story of the plot, “fell upon the Huguenots, killed many, and sacked their houses,” in their praiseworthy desire to support and defend their prince. If a few robberies were committed, “we must excuse the fury of a people impelled by honest zeal—a fury hard to restrain when once aroused.” Such was the defense of the massacre put forward at the time.[671] To us, who know its weakness and the falsehood of its chief point, it seems contemptible enough; but to the fanatics of those days, it must have been an appeal thrilling every nerve in their bodies.

The obsequious parliament, by the mouth of their president De Thou, thanked the king for his gracious communication, and for the vigor he had shown in crushing the conspiracy not only against the throne but against the Church. He quoted with approbation the villainous maxim of Louis XI., “Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare” (He who knows not how to dissemble knows not how to reign): his whole speech being a cowardly defense and eulogy of the massacre.[672] That the chief magistrate of France should stoop so low, is one of the saddest incidents of the time; but the French have always been too prone to worship the fait accompli, to become the servile flatterers of success. There can be no hope for the political life of a nation, until it learns to apply the same rules of morality to public as to private affairs. At that moment Charles was nobler than De Thou.[673] There is something in great crimes which fascinates and attracts. The king had struck a desperate blow, which, had it failed, might have cost him his throne and perhaps his life. The first president of the Parliament of Paris ostentatiously defended and extolled in public a deed which he condemned in private. His son tells us that in his copy of Statius he marked the following lines, giving them a significance of which the poet never dreamed:

At the suggestion of Pibrac the king’s words were entered in the register of minutes; and then the same man, braver and more humane than his fellows, prayed that Charles would order the massacre to cease. The king seems immediately to have issued the necessary directions, that no one should from that hour presume to kill or plunder a fellow-citizen under pain of death. But another advocate of the same court, by name Morvilliers,[675] had the baseness to propose that Coligny should be tried and attainted for the plot he had contrived against the king. At the same time the castle of Chatillon was ordered to be razed to the ground, one tower alone remaining of that princely mansion.

Although nothing had been found in the admiral’s papers to justify the charge of conspiring against the throne, there were two prisoners in custody who, it was hoped, might be induced to save their lives by confessing the existence of a plot. They were Briquemaut and Cavaignes, with whose judicial execution the horrors of the massacre may be considered to have terminated. Colonel Briquemaut, who was upward of seventy years old (he had served in the Italian wars of Francis I.), had saved himself in the night of the 24th by stripping and hiding under a pile of dead bodies, from which horrible shelter he made his escape to the house of the English embassador, where he was discovered in the disguise of a groom.[676] Cavaignes, “chancellor of the cause,” had recently been appointed Master of Requests at the admiral’s petition. A few days before the massacre, Charles had begged him not to leave the court, as he required his advice to perpetuate the happy peace which he (Cavaignes) had helped to negotiate. A special commission was appointed to try the prisoners, but their innocence was so manifest that the judges ordered their discharge. This decision was appealed against, and after another trial they were found guilty and condemned to die. It was hoped they would confess. Tavannes asserts that they were promised life and liberty if they would only say what they were asked; but they refused; and Walsingham thus describes the closing scene of their life: “On October 22, the young queen was brought to bed of a daughter; and the same day, between five and six in the evening, Briquemaut and Cavaignes were hanged by torch-light, the king, the queen-mother, and the King of Navarre, with the king’s brothers and the Prince of Condé, being lookers-on. As Briquemaut was going up the ladder, the under-provost of the town said that the king had sent him to know whether he could say any thing touching the late conjuration, which, if he would confess, he should save his life. He answered, that the king had never a more faithful subject than he was; but this I know proceeded not of himself, but of evil councilors about him; and so lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, ‘Oh my God, upon whose tribunal seat I stand, and whose face I hope shortly to see, thou knowest well that I know nothing nor did not so much as ever think of any conjuration against the king nor against his estate; though contrariwise they have entirely put the same in my process; but I beseech my God that he will pardon the king and all those that have been the cause of this my unjust death, even as I desire pardon at thy hands for my sins and offenses committed against thy divine majesty.’ Being then drawn up another step on the ladder, he uttered only these words: ‘I have somewhat to utter unto the king, which I would be glad to communicate unto him, but see that I may not.’ And so shrunk up his shoulders to forbear to use any farther speech. As his constancy was much commended, so was his death much bewailed of many Catholics that were beholders of the same. Cavaignes used no speech, but showed himself void of all magnanimity, who before his death, in hope of life, made some show to relent in religion. Two things were generally much misliked at this execution: the one the presence of the king, as a thing unworthy of the head of justice to be at the execution of justice; the other that Briquemaut, being a gentleman, was hanged, a thing very rare in France, especially he being reputed by his enemies to be innocent.” Charles’s presence at the execution added a new horror to the pangs of death: “Nero tamen subtraxit oculos jussitque scelera, non spectavit: præcipua sub Domitiano miseriarum erat, videre et aspici.”[677]

Walsingham continues his narrative: “About an hour after the execution, the cruel and bloody people of this town, not content with their death, took [their bodies] down from the gallows, and drew them about the streets, thrusting them through with daggers and shooting of dags [pistols] at them, cutting off their ears, and omitting no other kind of villainous and barbarous cruelty.” There were others to be executed, but the queen-mother “with no small difficulty,” persuaded her son to respite them for awhile. “The king is now grown so bloody-minded,” concludes Walsingham, “that they who advised him thereto do repent the same, and do fear that the old saying will prove true—malum consilium consultori pessimum.”[678] After this we can well believe the story that Charles ordered torches to be held near the faces of his two victims, that he might the clearer see their dying agonies. When the cruel tragedy on the Grève was over, the royal spectators, including Henry of Navarre, retired to a magnificent supper provided for them at the Hotel-de-Ville, at the windows of which they had been sitting.[679]

About a month after the massacre, Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Condé both abjured. The instrument of their conversion to orthodoxy was Sureau du Rozier, at one time minister at Orleans, and the fanatic apologist of Poltrot’s crime; but yielding to temptation, and partly also to fear, he abjured Protestantism, and, like all new converts, was eager to show his zeal by converting his late brethren. The two princes listened to his arguments, and professed themselves convinced; but they only temporized with a king who was capable, in one of his mad bursts of passion, of ordering them to execution. At the beginning of October the princes wrote to the pope, expressing sorrow for their past errors and promising to be faithful sons of the Catholic Church in future. The pope graciously accepted their recantations, and returned them the necessary dispensations for their marriages.[680] Henry went farther than was necessary to show his new zeal, by abolishing the Reformed religion in his maternal states. “M. Grammont hath commission from the king,” writes Walsingham, “to suppress all preaching in Bearn, and to plant there the Catholic religion, which is a verification of the king’s [Charles] intention touching the observation of his edict irrevocable for the toleration of religion.”[681] But the Bearnese stoutly refused to act upon the order, on the ground that the king was a prisoner in Paris and under constraint.