Historical Tales Volume Vi Part 15

"Then, if you will not do this, permit me and your brother to retire to some other part of the kingdom."

This threat to leave him alone to grapple with the difficulties that surrounded him frightened the feeble king. He rose hastily from his seat.

"By G.o.d's death!" he cried, pa.s.sionately, "since you think proper to kill the admiral, I consent." With these words he left the room.

The beginning of the work of bloodshed had been fixed for an hour before daybreak. But the king had spoken in a moment of pa.s.sion and agitation.

An hour's reflection might change his mind. There was no time to be lost. The queen gave the signal at once, and out on the air of that dreadful night rang the terrible tocsin peal from the tower of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the alarm call for which the white-crossed murderers waited.

Quickly the silence of the night was broken by loud cries, shouts of vengeance, the tramp of many feet, the sharp reports of musketry. The work was begun. Every man not marked by a cross was to be slaughtered.

The voice of murder broke fearfully upon the peacefulness of the recently quiet midnight hour.

The noise roused Coligny. He rose hastily and threw on his dressing-gown. The cries and shots told him what was going on. He had trusted the faithless Guises and the soulless De' Medici, and this was what came of it.

"M. Merlin," he said to a clergyman who was with him, "say me a prayer; I commit my soul to my Saviour."

Some of his gentlemen entered the room.

"What is the meaning of this riot?" asked Ambrose Pare.

"My lord, it is G.o.d calling us," said Cornaton.

"I have long been ready to die," said the admiral; "but you, my friends, save yourselves, if it is still possible."

They left him, and escaped, the most of them by the roof. Only one man stayed with him, Nicholas Muss, a German servant, "as little concerned,"

says Cornaton, "as if there was nothing going on around him."

The flight had been made barely in time. Hasty footsteps were heard below. The a.s.sa.s.sins were in the house. In a moment more the chamber door was flung open and two servants of the Duke of Guise entered.

"Art not thou the admiral?" asked one of them, Behme by name.

"Young man," answered Coligny, "thou comest against a wounded and aged man. Thou'lt not shorten my life by much."

Behme's answer was to plunge a heavy boar-spear which he held into the body of the defenceless veteran. Withdrawing it, he struck him on the head with it. Coligny fell, saying,--

"If it were but a man! But it is a horse-boy."

Others rushed into the room and thrust their weapons into the dying man.

"Behme," cried the duke of Guise from the court-yard, "hast thou done?"

"It is all over, my lord," answered the a.s.sa.s.sin.

The murderers flung the body from the window. It fell with a crash at the feet of Guise and his companions. They turned it over, wiped the blood from the face, and said,--

"Faith, it is he, sure enough!"

Some say that Guise kicked the bleeding corpse in the face.

Meanwhile, murder was everywhere. The savage lower orders of Paris, all, high and low, of the party of the Guises, were infected with the thirst for blood, and the streets of the city became a horrible whirlpool of slaughter, all who did not wear the saving cross being shot down without mercy or discrimination.

The anecdotes of that fatal night and the succeeding day are numerous, some of them pathetic, most of them ferocious, all tending to show how brutal man may become under the inspiration of religious prejudice and the example of slaughter,--the blood fury, as it has been fitly termed.

Teligny, the son-in-law of Coligny, took refuge on a roof. The guards of the Duke of Anjou fired at him as at a target. La Rochefoucauld, with whom the king had been in merry chat until eleven o'clock of the preceding evening, was aroused by a loud knocking upon his door. He opened it; six masked men rushed in, and instantly buried their poniards in his body. The new queen of Navarre had just gone to bed, under peremptory orders from her mother, Catherine de' Medici. She was wakened from her first slumber by a man knocking and kicking at her door, with wild shouts of "Navarre! Navarre!" Her nurse ran to open the door, thinking that it was the king, her lady's husband. A wounded and bleeding gentleman rushed in, blood flowing from both arms, four archers pursuing him into the queen's bedchamber.

The fugitive flung himself on the queen's couch, seizing her in his alarm. She leaped out of bed towards the wall, he following her, and still clasping her round the body. What it meant she knew not, but screamed in fright, her a.s.sailant screaming as loudly. Their cries had the effect of bringing into the room M. de Nancay, captain of the guards, who could not help laughing on seeing the plight of the queen.

But in an instant more he turned in a rage upon the archers, cursed them for their daring, and harshly bade them begone. As for the fugitive, M.

de Leran by name, he granted him his life at the queen's prayer. She put him to bed, in her closet, and attended him until he was well of his wounds.

Such are a few of the anecdotes told of that night of terror. They might be extended indefinitely, but anecdotes of murder are not of the most attractive character, and may profitably be pa.s.sed over. The king saved some, including his nurse and Ambrose Pare his surgeon, both Huguenots.

Two others, destined in the future to play the highest parts in the kingdom, were saved by his orders. These were the two Huguenot princes, Henry of Navarre, and Henry de Conde. The king sent for them during the height of the ma.s.sacre, and bade them recant or die.

"I mean, for the future," he said, "to have but one religion in my kingdom; the ma.s.s or death; make your choice."

The king of Navarre asked for time to consider the subject, reminding Charles of his promised protection. Conde was defiant.

"I will remain firm in what I believe to be the true religion," he said, "though I have to give up my life for it."

"Seditious madman, rebel, and son of a rebel," cried the king, furiously, "if within three days you do not change your language, I will have you strangled."

In three days Charles himself changed his language. Remorse succeeded his insensate rage.

"Ambrose," he said to his surgeon, "I do not know what has come over me for the last two or three days, but I feel my mind and body greatly excited; in fact, just as if I had a fever. It seems to me every moment, whether I wake or sleep, that these murdered corpses appear to me with hideous and blood-covered faces. I wish the helpless and innocent had not been included."

On the next day he issued orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering. But he had raised a fury not easily to be allayed. The tocsin of death still rang; to it the great bell of the palace added at intervals its clanging peal; shouts, yells, the sharp reports of pistols and arquebuses, the shrieks of victims, filled the air; sixty thousand murderers thronged the streets, slaying all who wore not the white cross, breaking into and plundering houses, and slaughtering all within them. All through that dreadful Sunday the crimson carnival went on, death everywhere, wagons loaded with bleeding bodies traversing the streets, to cast their gory burdens into the Seine, a scene of frightful ma.s.sacre prevailing such as city streets have seldom witnessed. The king judged feebly if he deemed that with a word he could quell the storm his voice had raised. Many of the n.o.bles of the court, satisfied with the death of the Huguenot leaders, attempted to stay the work of death, but a report that a party of Huguenots had attempted to kill the king added to the popular fury, and the sanguinary work went on.

It is not known how many were slain during that outbreak of slaughter.

It was not confined to Paris, but spread through France. Thousands are said to have been killed in the city. In the kingdom the number slain has been variously estimated at from ten to one hundred thousand. Such was the frightful result of a lamentable event in which religious animosity was taken advantage of to intensify the political enmity of the warring parties of the realm.

It proved a useless infamy. Charles IX. died two years afterwards, after having suffered agonies of remorse. Despite the ma.s.sacre, the Huguenots were not all slain. Nor had the murder of Coligny robbed them of a leader. Henry of Navarre, who had narrowly escaped death on that fearful night, was in the coming years to lead the Protestants to many a victory, and in the end to become king of France, as Henry IV. By his coronation, Coligny was revenged; the Huguenots, instead of being exterminated by the hand of ma.s.sacre, had defeated their foes and raised their leader to the throne, and the Edict of Nantes, which was soon afterwards announced, gave liberty of conscience to France for many years thereafter.

_KING HENRY OF NAVARRE._

For the first time in its history France had a Protestant king. Henry III. had died by the knife of an a.s.sa.s.sin. Henry of Navarre was named by him as his successor. But the Catholic chiefs of France, in particular the leaders of the League which had been banded against Henry III., were bitterly opposed to the reign of a Huguenot in a realm that had always been governed by Catholic kings, and it was evident that only by the sword could the throne be secured.

The League held Paris and much of France. Henry's army was too weak to face them. He fell back on Dieppe, that he might be near the coast, and in position to receive reinforcements and supplies promised him by Queen Elizabeth. The Duke of Mayenne pursued him with an army of some thirty-five thousand men. Such was the situation at the date of the opening of our story.

Henry III. had been killed on the 1st of August, 1589. Henry IV. was proclaimed king on the 2d of August. On the 26th of the same month he reached Dieppe, where he was met by the governor, Aymar de Chastes, and the leading citizens, who brought him the keys of the place.

"I come to salute my lord and hand over to him the government of this city," said Aymar, who was a Catholic n.o.ble.

"Ventre-saint-gris!" cried Henry, with his favorite exclamation; "I know none more worthy of it than you are."

The citizens crowded round the king, profuse in their expressions of loyalty.

"No fuss, my lads," said Henry, who was the embodiment of plain common sense; "all I want is your affection, good bread, good wine, and good hospitable faces."