the midst of trouble. While the Royalists were exulting at
the fancied annihilation of their foe, they suddenly learned that
Coligni was approaching the capital, at the head of the largest army
that the Huguenots had yet sent into the field. Again the device of a
treacherous pacification was attempted, and again it prevailed.
Coligni was warned of the personal danger that he incurred by trusting
the faith of a Medici and a Guise; but he replied that he would rather
lay down his life, than see France continue the victim of the woes of
civil war.

The treaty of St. Germains was signed on August 8, 1570, and on August
24, 1572, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew attested with what worse
than Punic faith the crowned conspirators of the French Court had
planned it. In the interval, the most detestable and elaborate
hypocrisy was employed to lull the suspicions of the Huguenot chiefs,
and to bring them defenceless into the power of their enemies. At
last, in the summer of 1572, they were collected in Paris, under the
pretence of being the honored guests of the French king, at the
nuptials of his sister with Henry of Navarre. An attempt was made on
the life of Coligni by an assassin, in which the Admiral was severely
wounded. The king and his courtiers affected the utmost indignation at
this crime, and the warmest sympathy with the suffering veteran. But
in the early dawn of the day appointed for the most unchristian
carnage that ever defiled the earth, a party of murderers, headed by
the young Duke of Guise himself, broke open the doors of the house
where Coligni lay, and Besme, one of the duke's domestics, entered
with a drawn sword, into the room where the Admiral was sitting in an
arm-chair.

"Young man," said he, undisturbed, "you ought to respect my gray
hairs; but do as you please, you can only shorten my life a few days."

Besme thrust him through in many places, and then threw his body,
still breathing, out of the window into the court, where it fell at
the feet of the Duke of Guise. The minions of the Louvre flocked
around in hideous glee, to insult the lifeless form of him, before
whom they had so long quailed and trembled. They gibbeted their own
infamy in vainly seeking to dishonor the illustrious dead. His memory
is at once the glory and the shame of France: and the very land of the
St. Bartholomew is, to some extent, hallowed by having been the
birthplace of Coligni, and the scene of his heroic career.

I do n