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