This indecision was a serious blot upon his character. Energetic
and decisive as he was in all his measures of government, his
religious convictions were ever feeble and wavering.

When the darkness of night passed away and the morning of the Sabbath
dawned upon Paris, a spectacle was witnessed such as the streets even
of that blood-renowned metropolis have seldom presented. The city
still resounded with that most awful of all tumults, the clamor of an
infuriated mob. The pavements were covered with gory corpses. Men,
women, and children were still flying in every direction, wounded and
bleeding, pursued by merciless assassins, riotous with demoniac
laughter and drunk with blood. The report of guns and pistols was
heard in all parts of the city, sometimes in continuous volleys, as if
platoons of soldiers were firing upon their victims, while the
scattered shots, incessantly repeated in every section of the extended
metropolis, proved the universality of the massacre. Drunken wretches,
besmeared with blood, were swaggering along the streets, with ribald
jests and demoniac howlings, hunting for the Protestants. Bodies, torn
and gory, were hanging from the windows, and dissevered heads were
spurned like footballs along the pavements. Priests were seen in their
sacerdotal robes, with elevated crucifixes, and with fanatical
exclamations encouraging the murderers not to grow weary in their holy
work of exterminating God's enemies. The most distinguished nobles and
generals of the court and the camp of Charles, mounted on horseback
with gorgeous retinue, rode through the streets, encouraging by voice
and arm the indiscriminate massacre.

"Let not," the king proclaimed, "one single Protestant be spared to
reproach me hereafter with this deed."

For a whole week the massacre continued, and it was computed that from
eighty to a hundred thousand Protestants were slain throughout the
kingdom.

Charles himself, with Catharine and the highborn but profligate ladies
who disgraced her court, emerged with the morning light, in splendid
array, into the reeking streets. The ladies contemplated with
merriment and ribald jests the dead bodies of the Protestants piled up
before the Louvre. Some of the retinue, appalled by the horrid
spectacle, wished to retire, alleging that the bodies already emitted
a putrid odor. Charles inhumanly replied, "The smell of a dead enemy
is always pleasant."

On Thursday, after four days spent in huntin