ruelty, and cruelty mildness; then she threatened to
leave the court with her other son, the Duc d'Anjou, so as not to
witness the ruin of her house, so as to no longer have before her eyes
such cowardice and imbecility. She had well calculated the effect of
this last taunt upon a violent spirit. Charles, until then motionless
and sombre, suddenly exclaimed, that, if it were found advisable to kill
the admiral, he wished that all the Huguenots in France might be killed,
'so that not one should be left to reproach him.'" It was agreed to
exempt from the massacre the King of Navarre, the new brother-in-law of
Charles, and the young Prince de Conde, but on the condition that both
of them returned to the Catholic religion.

All the necessary measures had been taken by the Guises and by the
municipality of the city; the signal was to be given from the Palais de
Justice, by the first stroke of the tocsin after midnight, on the
morning of Sunday, the 24th of August, the day of Saint-Barthelemy, and
the Catholics were to be designated by white handkerchiefs on their arms
and white crosses in their hats. But the killing began under the walls
of the Louvre before the appointed hour, and Catherine sent hastily to
the neighboring church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois with orders to give
the signal. The Duc de Guise had reserved for himself the honor of
superintending the murder of Coligny, then helpless from his wounds, and
he immediately hastened to the Hotel de Ponthieu, where the admiral was
lodged, burst in the doors, had the old man murdered and flung out of
the window and his head struck off.

There are various authorities, among them D'Aubigne, for the story that
the king fired with a long arquebus from one of the windows of the
Louvre upon the fleeing Huguenots. "He took great pleasure," says
Brantome, "in seeing from his windows more than four thousand corpses,
killed or drowned, floating down the river." The same chronicler relates
that when, on the 27th, in company with his mother and a number of
seigneurs, he visited the gibbet of Montfaucon to inspect the corpse of
the admiral, there hanging in chains, he did not, like all the others,
stop his nose, but said: "I do not as you all do, for the smell of an
enemy is always pleasant." He had, perhaps, borrowed the phrase from
Aulus Vitellius, visiting the battle-field of Bedriac.

"Women who were enceinte were ripped open, that the little Huguenots
might be snatched from th