Peace was made; but it was the third in seven years, and very shortly

after each new treaty civil war had recommenced. No more was expected

from the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye than had been effected by those of

Amboise and Longjumeau, and on both sides men sighed for something more

stable and definitive. By what means to be obtained and with what

pledges of durability? A singular fact is apparent between 1570 and

1572; there is a season, as it were, of marriages and matrimonial

rejoicings. Charles IX. went to receive at the frontier of his kingdom

his affianced bride, Archduchess Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of the

emperor, Maximilian II., who was escorted by the Archbishop of Treves,

chancellor of the empire; the nuptials were celebrated at Mezieres, on

the 26th of November, 1570; the princes and great lords of the Protestant

party were invited; they did not think it advisable to withdraw

themselves from their asylum at La Rochelle; but Coligny wrote to the

queen-mother to excuse himself, whilst protesting his forgetfulness of

the past and his personal devotion. Four months afterwards, Coligny

himself married again; it was three years since he had lost his noble

wife, Charlotte de Laval, and he had not contemplated anything of the

kind, when, in the concluding weeks of 1570, he received from the castle

of St. Andre de Briord, in Le Bugey, a letter from a great lady, thirty

years of age, Jacqueline de Montbel, daughter of Count d’Entremont,

herself a widow, who wrote to him “that she would fain marry a saint and

a hero, and that he was that hero.” “I am but a tomb,” replied Coligny.

But Jacqueline persisted, in spite of the opposition shown by her

sovereign, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, who did not like his fair

subjects to marry foreigners; and in February, 1571, she furtively

quitted her castle, dropped down the Rhone in a boat as far as Lyons,

mounted on horseback, and, escorted by five devoted friends, arrived at

La Rochelle. All Coligny’s friends were urgent for him to accept this

passionate devotion proffered by a lady who would bring him territorial

possessions valuable to the Protestants, “for they were an open door to

Geneva.” Coligny accepted; and the marriage took place at La Rochelle on

the 24th of March, 1571. “Madame Jacqueline wore, on this occasion,”

says a contemporary chronicler, “a skirt in the Spanish fashion, of black

gold-tissue, with bands of embroidery in gold and silver twist, and,

above, a doublet of white silver-tissue embroidered in gold, with large

diamond-buttons.” She was, nevertheless, at that moment almost as poor as

the German arquebusiers who escorted her litter; for an edict issued by

the Duke of Savoy on the 31st of January, 1569, caused her the loss of

all her possessions in her own country. She was received in France with

the respect due to her; and when, five months after the marriage,

Charles; IX. summoned Coligny to Paris, “to serve him in his most

important affairs, as a worthy minister, whose virtues were sufficiently

known and tried,” he sent at the same time to Madame l’Amirale a

safe-conduct in which he called her my fair cousin. Was there any one

belonging to that august and illustrious household who had, at that time,

a presentiment of their impending and tragic destiny?

At the same period, the Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, obtained for

her young nephew, Henry de Bourbon, Prince of Conde, son of the hero of

Jarnac, and companion of Henry of Navarre, the hand of his cousin, Mary

of Cleves; and there was still going on in London, on behalf of one of

Charles IX.’s brothers,--at one time the Duke of Anjou and at another the

Duke of Alencon,--the negotiation which was a vain attempt to make Queen

Elizabeth espouse a French prince.

Coincidently with all these marriages or projects of marriage amongst

princes and great lords came the most important of all, that which was to

unite Henry of Navarre and Charles IX.’s sister, Marguerite de Valois.

There had already, thirteen or fourteen years previously, been some talk

about it, in the reign of King Henry II., when Henry of Navarre and

Margaret de Valois, each born in 1553, were both of them mere babies.

This union between the two branches of the royal house, one Catholic and

the other Protestant, ought to have been the most striking sign and the

surest pledge of peace between Catholicism and Protestantism. The

political expediency of such a step appeared the more evident and the

more urgent in proportion as the religious war had become more direful

and the desire for peace more general. Charles IX. embraced the idea

passionately. At the outset he encountered an obstacle. The young Duke

of Guise had already paid court to Marguerite, and had obtained such

marked favor with her that the ambassador of Spain wrote to the king,

“There is no public topic in France just now save the marriage of my Lady

Marguerite with the Duke of Guise.” People even talked of a tender

correspondence between the princess and the duke, which was carried on

through one of the queen’s ladies, the Countess of Mirandola, who was

devoted to the Guises and a favorite with Marguerite. “If it be so,”

said Charles IX., savagely, “we will kill him;” and he gave such

peremptory orders on this subject, that Henry de Guise, somewhat

disquieted, avoided for a while taking part in the royal hunts, and

thought it well that there should be resumed on his behalf a project of

marriage with Catherine of Cleves, widow of the Prince of Portien (Le

Porcien) and the wealthy heiress to some great domains, especially the

countship of Eu. So long as he had some hope of marrying Marguerite de

Valois, the Duke of Guise had repudiated, not without offensiveness, all

idea of union with Catherine of Cleves. “Anybody who can make me marry

the Princess of Portien,” said he, “could make me marry a negress.” He,

nevertheless, contracted this marriage, so greatly disdained, on the 4th

of October, 1570; and at this price recovered the good graces of Charles

IX. The queen-mother charged the Cardinal Louis de Lorraine, him whom

the people called Cardinal Bottles (from his conviviality), to publicly

give the lie to any rumor of a possible engagement between her daughter

Marguerite and Henry de Guise; and a grand council of the kings, after

three holdings, adopted in principle the marriage of Marguerite de Valois

with “the little Prince of Bearn.”

Charles IX. at once set his hand to the work to turn this resolution to

good account, being the only means, he said, of putting a stop at last to

this incessantly renewed civil war, which was the plague of his life as

well as of his kingdom. He first of all sent Marshal de Cosse to La

Rochelle, to sound Coligny as to his feelings upon this subject, and to

urge him to thus cut short public woes and the Reformers’ grievances.

“The king has always desired peace,” said the marshal; “he wishes it to

be lasting; he has proved only too well, to his own misery and that of

his people, that of all the evils which can afflict a state, the most

direful is civil war. But what means this withdrawal, since the signing

of peace at St. Germain, of the Queen of Navarre and her children, of the

Prince of Conde, and so many lords and distinguished nobles, still

separated from their houses and their families, and collected together in

a town like Rochelle, which has great advantages by land and sea for all

those who would fain begin the troubles again? Why have they not

returned home? During the hottest part of the war, they ardently desired

to see once more their houses, their wives, and their children; and now,

when peace leaves them free to do so, they prefer to remain in a land

which is in some sort foreign, and where, in addition to great expenses,

they are deprived of the conveniences they would find at home. The king

cannot make out such absurdity; or, rather, he is very apprehensive that

this long stay means the hatching of some evil design.” The Protestants

defended themselves warmly against this supposition; they alleged, in

explanation of their persistent disquietude, the very imperfect execution

of the conditions granted by the peace of St. Germain, and the insults,

the attacks which they had still to suffer in many parts of the kingdom,

and quite recently at Rouen and at Orange. The king attempted, without

any great success, to repress these disorders amongst the populace. The

Queen of Navarre, the two princes, Coligny, and many Protestant lords

remained still at La Rochelle, where was being held at this time a

general synod of the Reformed churches. Charles IX. sent thither Marshal

de Biron, with formal orders to negotiate the marriage of Marguerite de

Valois and the Prince of Navarre, and to induce that prince, his mother

the Queen of Navarre, and Coligny to repair to the court in order to

conclude the matter. The young prince was at that time in Warn. The

queen, his mother, answered, “That she would consult her spiritual

advisers, and, as soon as her conscience was at rest, there were no

conditions she would not accept with a view of giving satisfaction to the

king and the queen, of marking her obedience and respect towards them,

and of securing the tranquillity of the state, an object for which she

would willingly sacrifice her own life. . . . But,” she added, “I

would rather sink to the condition of the humblest damoisel in France

than sacrifice to the aggrandizement of my family my own soul and my

son’s.”

In September, 1571, Charles IX. and the queen-mother repaired to Blois;

and at their urgent request Coligny went thither to talk over the

projected marriage and the affairs of Europe. The king received him with

emotional satisfaction, calling him my father, and saying to him, “Now we

have you, and you shall not escape us when you wish to.” Jeanne

d’Albret, more distrustful, or, one ought rather to say, more

clear-sighted, refused to leave La Rochelle, and continued to negotiate

vaguely and from a distance. Catherine de’ Medici insisted. “Satisfy,”

she wrote to her, “the extreme desire we have to see you in this company;

you will be loved and honored therein as accords with reason and with

what you are.” Jeanne still waited. It was only in the following year,

at the end of January, that, having earnestly exhorted her son “to remain

Bearn-wards whilst she was at the court of France,” she set out for

Blois, where Charles IX. received her most affectionately, calling her my

good aunt, my dear aunt, and lavishing upon her promises as well as

endearments. Jeanne was a strict and a judicious person; and the manners

and proceedings of the court at Blois displeased her. On the 8th of

March, 1572, she wrote to her son, “I find it necessary to negotiate

quite contrariwise to what I had expected and what had been promised me;

I have no liberty to speak to the king or my Lady Marguerite, only to the

queen-mother, who treats me as if I were dirt. . . . Seeing, then,

that no advance is made, and that the desire is to make me hurry matters,

and not conduct them orderly, I have thrice spoken thereof to the queen,

who does nothing but make a fool of me, and tell everybody the opposite

of what I told her; in such sort that my friends find fault with me, and

I know not how to bring her to book, for when I say to her, ‘Madame, it

is reported that I said so-and-so to you,’ though it was she herself who

reported it, she denies it flatly, and laughs in my face, and uses me in

such wise that you might really say that my patience passes that of

Griselda. . . . Thenceforward I have a troop of Huguenots, who come

to converse with me, rather for the purpose of being spies upon me than

of assisting me. Then I have some of another humor, who hamper me no

less, and who are religious hermaphrodites. I defend myself as best I

may. . . I am sure that if you only knew the trouble I am in, you

would have pity upon me, for they give me empty speeches and raillery

instead of treating with me gravely, as the matter deserves; in such sort

that I am bursting, because I am so resolved not to lose my temper that

my patience is a miracle to see. . . . I found your letter very much

to my taste; I will show, it to my Lady Marguerite if I can. She is

beautiful, and discreet, and of good demeanor, but brought up in the most

accursed and most corrupt society that ever was. I would not, for

anything in the world, have you here to remain here. That is why I

desire to get you married, and you and your wife withdraw from this

corruption; for though I believed it to be very great, I find it still

more so. Here it is not the men who solicit the women; it is the women

who solicit the men. If you were here, you would never escape without a

great deal of God’s grace.”

[Illustration: Admiral Gaspard de Coligny----346]

Side by side with this motherly and Christianly scrupulous negotiation,

Coligny set on foot another, noble and dignified also, but even less in

harmony with the habits and bent of the government which it concerned.

The puritan warrior was at the same time an ardent patriot: he had at

heart the greatness of France as much as he had his personal creed; the

reverses of Francis I. and the preponderance of Spain in Europe oppressed

his spirit with a sense of national decadence, from which he wanted

France to lift herself up again. The moment appeared to him propitious;

let the king ally himself with Queen Elizabeth of England, the Prince of

Orange in the Low Countries, and the Protestant princes of Germany; here

was for France a certain guarantee of power in Europe, and at the same

time a natural opportunity for conquering Flanders, a possession so

necessary to her strength and her security. But high above this policy,

so thoroughly French, towered a question still more important than that

of even the security and the grandeur of France; that was the partition

of Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it was in a country

Catholic in respect of the great majority, and governed by a kingship

with which Catholicism was hereditary, that, in order to put a stop to

civil war between French Catholics and Protestants, Coligny pressed the

king to put himself at the head of an essentially Protestant coalition,

and make it triumphant in Europe. This was, in the sixteenth century, a

policy wholly chimerical, however patriotic its intention may have been;

and the French Protestant hero who recommended it to Charles IX. did not

know that Protestantism was on the eve of the greatest disaster it would

have to endure in France.

A fact of a personal character tended to mislead Coligny. By his renown,

by the loftiness of his views, by the earnest gravity of his character

and his language he had produced a great effect upon Charles IX., a young

king of warm imagination and impressible and sympathetic temperament,

but, at the same time, of weak judgment. He readily gave way, in

Coligny’s company, to outpourings which had all the appearance of perfect

and involuntary frankness. “Speaking one day to the admiral about the

course of conduct to be adopted as to the enterprise against Flanders,

and well knowing that the queen-mother lay under his suspicion, ‘My dear

father,’ said he, ‘there is one thing herein of which we must take good

heed; and that is, that the queen, my mother, who likes to poke her nose

everywhere, as you know, learn nothing of this enterprise, at any rate as

regards the main spring of it, for she would spoil all for us.’ ‘As you

please, sir; but I take her to be so good a mother, and so devoted to the

welfare of your kingdom, that when she knows of it she will do nothing to

spoil it.’ ‘You are mistaken, my dear father,’ said the king; ‘leave it

to me only; I see quite well that you do not know my mother; she is the

greatest meddler in all the world.’” Another time, when he was speaking

likewise to Teligny, Coligny’s son-in-law, about this enterprise against

Flanders, the king said, “Wouldst have me speak to thee freely, Teligny?

I distrust all these gentry; I am suspicious of Tavannes’ ambition;

Vieilleville loves nothing but good wine; Cosse is too covetous;

Montmorency cares only for his hunting and hawking; the Count de Retz is

a Spaniard; the other lords of my court and those of my council are mere

blockheads; my Secretaries of State, to hide nothing of what I think, are

not faithful to me; insomuch that, to tell the truth, I know not at what

end to begin.” This tone of freedom and confidence had inspired Coligny

with reciprocal confidence; he believed himself to have a decisive

influence over the king’s ideas and conduct; and when the Protestants

testified their distrust upon this subject, he reproached them vehemently

for it; he affirmed the king’s good intentions and sincerity; and he

considered himself in fact, said Catherine de’ Medici with temper,

“a second king of France.”

How much sincerity was there about these outpourings of Charles IX. in

his intercourse with Coligny, and how much reality in the admiral’s

influence over the king? We are touching upon that great historical

question which has been so much disputed: was the St. Bartholomew a

design, long ago determined upon and prepared for, of Charles IX. and his

government, or an almost sudden resolution, brought about by events and

the situation of the moment, to which Charles IX. was egged on, not

without difficulty, by his mother Catherine and his advisers?

We recall to mind here what was but lately said in this very chapter as

to the condition of minds and morals in the sixteenth century, and as to

the tragic consequences of it. Massacre, we add no qualifying term to

the word, was an idea, a habit, we might say almost a practice, familiar

to that age, and one which excited neither the surprise nor the horror

which are inseparable from it in our day. So little respect for human

life and for truth was shown in the relations between man and man! Not

that those natural sentiments, which do honor to the human race, were

completely extinguished in the hearts of men; they reappeared here and

there as a protest against the vices and the crimes of the period; but

they were too feeble and too rare to struggle effectually against the

sway of personal passions and interests, against atrocious hatreds and

hopes, against intellectual aberrations and moral corruption. To betray

and to kill were deeds so common that they caused scarcely any

astonishment, and that people were almost resigned to them beforehand.

We have cited fifteen or twenty cases of the massacres which in the reign

of Charles IX., from 1562 to 1572, grievously troubled and steeped in

blood such and such a part of France, without leaving any lasting traces

in history. Previously to the massacre called the St. Bartholomew, the

massacre of Vassy is almost the only one which received and kept its true

name. The massacre of Vassy was, undoubtedly, an accident, a deed not at

all forecast or prepared for. The St. Bartholomew massacre was an event

for a long time forecast and announced, promised to the Catholics and

thrown out as a threat to the Protestants, written beforehand, so to

speak, in the history of the religious wars of France, but, nevertheless,

at the moment at which it was accomplished, and in the mode of its

accomplishment, a deed unexpected so far as the majority of the victims

were concerned, and a cause of contest even amongst its originators.

Accordingly it was, from the very first, a subject of surprise and

horror, throughout Europe as well as in France; not only because of the

torrents of blood that were shed, but also because of the extraordinary

degree in which it was characterized by falsehood and ferocious hatred.

We will bring forward in support of this double assertion only such facts

and quotations as appear to us decisive.

In 1565, Charles IX. and Catherine de’ Medici had an interview at Bayonne

with the Duke of Alba, representative of Philip II., to consult as to the

means of delivering France from heretics. “They agreed at last,” says

the contemporary historian Adriani [continuer of Guicciardini; he had

drawn his information from the _Journal of Cosmo de’ Medici,_ Grand Duke

of Tuscany, who died in 1574], “in the opinion of the Catholic king, who

thought that this great blessing could not have accomplishment save by

the death of all the chiefs of the Huguenots, and by a new edition, as

the saying was, of the Sicilian Vespers. ‘Take the big fish,’ said the

Duke of Alba, ‘and let the small fry go; one salmon is worth more than a

thousand frogs.’ They decided that the deed should be done at Moulins in

Bourbonness, whither the king was to return. The execution of it was

afterwards deferred to the date of the St. Bartholomew, in 1572, at

Paris, because of certain suspicions which had been manifested by the

Huguenots, and because it was considered easier and more certain to get

them all together at Paris than at Moulins.”

Catherine de’ Medici charged Cardinal Santa Croce to assure Pope Pius V.

“that she and her son had nothing more at heart than to get the admiral

and all his confidants together some day and make a massacre (_un

macello_) of them; but the matter,” she said, “was so difficult that

there was no possibility of promising to do it at one time more than at

another.”

La Noue bears witness in his _Memoires_ to “the resolution taken at

Bayonne, with the Duke of Alba aiding, to exterminate the Huguenots of

France and the beggars (_gueux_) of Flanders; whereof warning had been

given by those about whom there was no doubt. All these things, and many

others as to which I am silent, mightily waked up those,” he adds, “who

had no desire to be caught napping. And I remember that the chiefs of

the religion held, within a short time, three meetings, as well at Valeri

as at Chatillon, to deliberate upon present occurrences, and to seek out

legitimate and honorable expedients for securing themselves against so

much alarm, without having recourse to extreme remedies.”

De Thou regards these facts as certain, and, after having added some

details, he sums them all up in the words, “This is what passed at

Bayonne in 1565.”

In 1571, after the third religious war and the peace of

St. Germain-en-Laye, Marshal de Tavaunes wrote to Charles IX., “Peace

has a chance of lasting, because neither of the two parties is willing

or able to renew open war; but, if one of the two sees quite a safe

opportunity for putting a complete end to what is at the root of the

question, this it will take; for to remain forever in the state now

existing is what nobody can or ought to hope for. And there is no such

near approximation to a complete victory as to take the persons. For to

surprise what they (the Reformers) hold, to put down their religion, and

to break off all at once the alliances which support them--this is

impossible. Thus there is no way but to take the chiefs all together

for to make an end of it.”

Next year, on the 24th of August, 1572, when the St. Bartholomew broke

out, Tavannes took care to himself explain what he meant in 1571 by those

words, to take the chiefs all together for to make an end of it. Being

invested with the command in Paris, “he went about the city all day,”

says Brantome, “and, seeing so much blood spilt, he said and shouted to

the people, ‘Bleed, bleed; the doctors say that bleeding is as good all

through this month of August as in May.’”

In the year which preceded the outbreak of the massacre, when the

marriage of Marguerite de Valois with the Prince of Navarre was agreed

upon, and Coligny was often present at court, sometimes at Blois and

sometimes at Paris, there arose between the king and the queen-mother a

difference which there had been up to that time nothing to foreshadow.

It was plain that the union between the two branches, Catholic and

Protestant, of the royal house and the patriotic policy of Coligny were

far more pleasing to Charles IX. than to his mother.

On the matrimonial question the king’s feeling was so strong that he

expressed it roughly. Jeanne d’Albret having said to him one day that

the pope would make them wait a long while for the dispensation requested

for the marriage, “No, no, my clear aunt,” said the king; “I honor you

more than I do the pope, and I love my sister more than I fear him. I am

not a Huguenot, but no more am I an ass. If the pope has too much of his

nonsense, I will myself take Margot by the hand and carry her off to be

married in open conventicle.” Toligny, for his part, was so pleased with

the measures that Charles IX. had taken in favor of the Low Countries in

their quarrels with Philip II., and so confident himself of his influence

over the king, that when Tavannes was complaining in his presence “that

the vanquished should make laws for the victors,” Coligny said to his

face, “Whoever is not for war with Spain is not a good Frenchman, and has

the red cross inside him.” The Catholics were getting alarmed and

irritated. The Guises and their partisans left the court. It was near

the time fixed for the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de

Valois; the new pope, Gregory XIII., who had at first shown more pliancy

than his predecessor Pius V., attached to the dispensation conditions to

which neither the intended husband nor King Charles IX. himself was

inclined to consent. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, who had gone

to Paris in preparation for the marriage, had died there on the 8th of

June, 1572; a death which had given rise to very likely ill-founded

accusations of poisoning. “A princess,” says D’Aubigne, “with nothing of

a woman but the sex, with a soul full of everything manly, a mind fit to

cope with affairs of moment, and a heart invincible in adversity.” It

was in deep mourning that her son, become King of Navarre, arrived at

court, attended by eight hundred gentlemen, all likewise in mourning.

“But,” says Marguerite de Valois herself, “the nuptials took place a few

days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my

quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning

for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown

and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand

blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the

people choking one another down below to see us pass.” The marriage was

celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front of

the principal entrance of Notre-Dame. When the Princess Marguerite was

asked if she consented, she appeared to hesitate a moment; but King

Charles IX. put his hand a little roughly on her head, and made her lower

it in token of assent. Accompanied by the king, the queen-mother, and

all the Catholics present, Marguerite went to hear mass in the choir;

Henry and his Protestant friends walked about the cloister and the nave;

Marshal de Damville pointed out to Coligny the flags, hanging from the

vaulted roof of Notre-Dame, which had been taken from the vanquished at

the battle of Moncontour. “I hope,” said the admiral, “that they will

soon have others better suited for lodgement in this place.” He was

already dreaming of victories over the Spaniards.

Meanwhile Charles IX. was beginning to hesitate. He was quite willing

to disconnect himself from the King of Spain, and even to incur his

displeasure, but not to be actively embroiled with him and make war upon

him; he could not conceal from himself that this policy, thoroughly

French though it was, was considered in France too Protestant for a

Catholic king. Coligny urged him vehemently. “If you want men,” he

said, “I have ten thousand at your service;” whereupon Tavannes said to

the king, “Sir, whoever of your subjects uses such words to you, you

ought to have his head struck off. How is it that he offers you that

which is your own? It is that he has won over and corrupted them, and

that he is a party-leader to your prejudice.” Tavannes, a rough and

faithful soldier, did not admit that there could be amongst men moral

ties of a higher kind than political ties. Charles IX., too weak in mind

and character to think and act with independence and consistency in the

great questions of the day, only sought how to elude them, and to leave

time, that inscrutable master, to settle them in his place. His

indecision brought him to a state of impotence, and he ended by inability

to do anything but dodge and lie, like his mother, and even with his

mother. Whilst he was getting his sister married to the King of Navarre

and concerting his policy with Coligny, he was adopting towards the three

principal personages who came to talk over those affairs with him three

different sorts of language; to Cardinal Alessandrino, whom Pope Pius V.

had sent to him to oppose the marriage, he said, “My lord cardinal, all

that you say to me is sound; I acknowledge it, and I thank the pope and

you for it; if I had any other means of taking vengeance on my enemies,

I would not make this marriage; but I have no other.” With Jeanne

d’Albret, he lauded himself for the marriage as the best policy he could

pursue. “I give my sister,” he said, “not to the Prince of Navarre, but

to all the Huguenots, to marry them as it were, and take from them all

doubt as to the unchangeable fixity of my edicts.” And to humor his

mother Catherine, he said to her, on the very evening of his interview

with Jeanne d’Albret, “What think you, madam? Do I not play my partlet

well?” “Yes, very well; but it is nothing if it is not continued.” And

Charles continued to play his part, even after the Bartholomew was over,

for he was fond of saying with a laugh, “My big sister Margot caught all

those Huguenot rebels in the bird-catching style. What has grieved me

most is being obliged to dissimulate so long.”

His contemporary Catholic biographer, Papirius Masson, who was

twenty-eight years old at the time of the St. Bartholomew, says of him,

“He is impatient in waiting, ferocious in his fits of anger, skilfully

masked when he wishes, and ready to break faith as soon as that appears

to his advantage.”

[Illustration: Charles IX. and Catherine de’ Medici----354]

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.”

[Illustration: Henry de Guise and the Corpse of Coligny----369]

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.”

[Illustration: The Queen of Navarre and the Huguenot----372]

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.

[Illustration: Chancellor Michael de l’Hospital----376]

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.

[Illustration: The St. Bartholomew----383]

The St. Bartholomew had struck Europe with surprise and horror; not only

amongst the princes and in the countries that were Protestant, in

England, Scotland, and Northern Europe, but in Catholic Germany itself,

there was a very strong feeling of reprobation; the Emperor Maximilian

II. and the Elector Palatine Frederic III., called the Pious, showed it

openly; when the Duke of Anjou, elected King of Poland, went through

Germany to go and take possession of his kingdom, he was received at

Heidelberg with premeditated coolness. When he arrived at the gate of

the castle, not a soul went to meet him; alone he ascended the steps, and

found in the hall a picture representing the massacre of St. Bartholomew;

the elector called his attention to the portraits of the principal

victims, amongst others that of Coligny, and at table he was waited upon

solely by French Protestant refugees. At Rome itself, in the midst of

official satisfaction and public demonstrations of it exhibited by the

pontifical court, the truth came out, and Pope Gregory XIII. was touched

by it when certain of my lords the cardinals who were beside him “asked

wherefore he wept and was sad at so goodly a despatch of those wretched

folk, enemies of God and of his Holiness: ‘I weep,’ said the pope, ‘at

the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of God, for to

inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he

will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long). I fear,

too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as

guilty.’” [_Brantome,_ t. iv. p. 306. He attributes this language to

Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew. Gregory

XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the massacre took place.] Only

the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless

persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered

Charles IX. the assistance of his army, if he had need of it, against

what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.

Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently

strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many

violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions. Catherine de

Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their

confidence and implicit obedience. “All the actions of the

queen-mother,” said the Venetian ambassador Sigismund Cavalli, who had

for a long while resided at her court, “have always been prompted and

regulated by one single passion, the passion of ruling.” Her son Charles

had yielded to it without an effort in his youth. “He was accustomed to

say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that

is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he

showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself

altogether in his mother’s hands. Now, he no longer thinks and acts in

the same way. I have been told that, since the late events, he requires

to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen,

before obeying her.” It was not with regard to his mother only that

Charles had changed. “His looks,” says Cavalli, “have become melancholy

and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the

speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all

at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with

no less suddenness. It is feared that the demon of vengeance has

possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is

becoming cruel. He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water.

To tire himself at any price, is his object. He remains on horseback for

twelve or fourteen consecutive hours; and so he goes hunting and coursing

through the woods the same animal, the stag, for two or three days, never

stopping but to eat, and never resting but for an instant during the

night.” He was passionately fond of all bodily exercises, the practice

of arms, and the game of tennis. “He had a forge set up for himself,”

says Brantome, “and I have seen him forging cannon, and horseshoes, and

other things as stoutly as the most robust farriers and forgemen.” He,

at the same time, showed a keen and intelligent interest in intellectual

works and pleasures. He often had a meeting, in the evening, of poets,

men of letters, and artists--Ronsard, Amadis Jamin, Jodelle, Daurat,

Baif; in 1570 he gave them letters patent for the establishment of an

Academy of poetry and music, the first literary society founded in France

by a king; but it disappeared amidst the civil wars. Charles IX.

himself sang in the choir, and he composed a few hunting-airs. Ronsard

was a favorite, almost a friend, with him; he used to take him with him

on his trips, and give him quarters in his palace, and there was many an

interchange of verse between them, in which Ronsard did not always have

the advantage. Charles gave a literary outlet to his passion for

hunting; he wrote a little treatise entitled La Chasse royale, which was

not published until 1625, and of which M. Henry Chevreul brought out, in

1857, a charming and very correct edition. Charles IX. dedicated it to

his lieutenant of the hunt, Mesnil, in terms of such modest and

affectionate simplicity that they deserve to be kept in remembrance.

“Mesnil,” said the king, “I should feel myself far too ungrateful, and

expect to be chidden for presumption, if, in this little treatise that I

am minded to make upon stag hunting, I did not, before any one begins to

read it, avow and confess that I learnt from you what little I know.

. . . I beg you, also, Mesnil, to be pleased to correct and erase what

there is wrong in the said treatise, the which, if peradventure it is so

done that there is nothing more required than to re-word and alter, the

credit will be firstly yours for having so well taught me, and then mine

for having so well remembered. Well, then, having been taught by so good

a master, I will be bold enough to essay it, begging you to accept it as

heartily as I present it and dedicate it to you.”

These details and this quotation are allowable in order to shed full

light upon the private and incoherent character of this king, who bears

the responsibility of one of the most tragic events in French history.

In the spring of 1574, at the age of twenty-three years and eleven

months, and after a reign of eleven years and six months, Charles IX.

was attacked by an inflammatory malady, which brought on violent

hemorrhage; he was revisited, in his troubled sleep, by the same bloody

visions about which, a few days after the St. Bartholomew, he had spoken

to Ambrose Pare. He no longer retained in his room anybody but two of

his servants and his nurse, “of whom he was very fond, although she was a

Huguenot,” says the contemporary chronicler Peter de l’Estoile. “When

she had lain down upon a chest, and was just beginning to doze, hearing

the king moaning, weeping, and sighing, she went full gently up to the

bed. ‘Ah, nurse, nurse,’ said the king, ‘what bloodshed and what

murders! Ah! what evil counsel have I followed! O, my God! forgive me

them and have mercy upon me, if it may please Thee! I know not what hath

come to me, so bewildered and agitated do they make me. What will be the

end of it all? What shall I do? I am lost; I see it well.’ Then said

the nurse to him, ‘Sir, the murders be on the heads of those who made you

do them! Of yourself, sir, you never could; and since you are not

consenting thereto, and are sorry therefor, believe that God will not put

them down to your account, and will hide them with the cloak of justice

of His Son, to whom alone you must have recourse. But for God’s sake,

let your Majesty cease weeping!’ And thereupon, having been to fetch him

a pocket-handkerchief, because his own was soaked with tears, after that

the king had taken it from her hand, he signed to her to go away and

leave him to his rest.”

On Sunday, May 30, 1574, Whitsunday, about three in the afternoon,

Charles IX. expired, after having signed an ordinance conferring the

regency upon his mother Catherine, “who accepted it,” was the expression

in the letters patent, “at the request of the Duke of Alencon, the King

of Navarre, and other princes and peers of France.” According to

D’Aubigne, Charles used often to say of his brother Henry, that, “when he

had a kingdom on his hands, the administration would find him out, and

that he would disappoint those who had hopes of him.” The last words he

said were, “that he was glad not to have left any young child to succeed

him, very well knowing that France needs a man, and that, with a child,

the king and the reign are unhappy.”