Pavannes' house,
where we had hitherto been, stood at some distance from the centre of
the blood-storm which was enwrapping unhappy Paris that morning. It
was several hundred paces from the Rue de Bethisy where the Admiral
lived, and what with this comparative remoteness and the excitement of
our own little drama, we had not attended much to the fury of the
bells, the shots and cries and uproar which proclaimed the state of the
city. We had not pictured the scenes which were happening so near.
Now in the streets the truth broke upon us, and drove the blood from
our cheeks. A hundred yards, the turning of a corner, sufficed. We
who but yesterday left the country, who only a week before were boys,
careless as other boys, not recking of death at all, were plunged now
into the midst of horrors I cannot describe. And the awful contrast
between the sky above and the things about us! Even now the lark was
singing not far from us; the sunshine was striking the topmost storeys
of the houses; the fleecy clouds were passing overhead, the freshness
of a summer morning was--

Ah! where was it? Not here in the narrow lanes surely, that echoed and
re-echoed with shrieks and curses and frantic prayers: in which bands
of furious men rushed up and down, and where archers of the guard and
the more cruel rabble were breaking in doors and windows, and hurrying
with bloody weapons from house to house, seeking, pursuing, and at last
killing in some horrid corner, some place of darkness--killing with
blow on blow dealt on writhing bodies! Not here, surely, where each
minute a child, a woman died silently, a man snarling like a
wolf--happy if he had snatched his weapon and got his back to the wall:
where foul corpses dammed the very blood that ran down the kennel, and
children--little children--played with them!

I was at Cahors in 1580 in the great street fight; and there women were
killed, I was with Chatillon nine years later, when he rode through the
Faubourgs of Paris, with this very day and his father Coligny in his
mind, and gave no quarter. I was at Courtas and Ivry, and more than
once have seen prisoners led out to be piked in batches--ay, and by
hundreds! But war is war, and these were its victims, dying for the
most part under God's heaven with arms in their hands: not men and
women fresh roused from their sleep. I felt on those occasions no such
horror, I have never felt such burning pity and indignation as on the
morni