admiral; "but you, my friends,
save yourselves, if it is still possible."

They left him, and escaped, the most of them by the roof. Only one man
stayed with him, Nicholas Muss, a German servant, "as little concerned,"
says Cornaton, "as if there was nothing going on around him."

The flight had been made barely in time. Hasty footsteps were heard
below. The assassins were in the house. In a moment more the chamber
door was flung open and two servants of the Duke of Guise entered.

"Art not thou the admiral?" asked one of them, Behme by name.

"Young man," answered Coligny, "thou comest against a wounded and aged
man. Thou'lt not shorten my life by much."

Behme's answer was to plunge a heavy boar-spear which he held into the
body of the defenceless veteran. Withdrawing it, he struck him on the
head with it. Coligny fell, saying,--

"If it were but a man! But it is a horse-boy."

Others rushed into the room and thrust their weapons into the dying man.

"Behme," cried the duke of Guise from the court-yard, "hast thou done?"

"It is all over, my lord," answered the assassin.

The murderers flung the body from the window. It fell with a crash at
the feet of Guise and his companions. They turned it over, wiped the
blood from the face, and said,--

"Faith, it is he, sure enough!"

Some say that Guise kicked the bleeding corpse in the face.

Meanwhile, murder was everywhere. The savage lower orders of Paris, all,
high and low, of the party of the Guises, were infected with the thirst
for blood, and the streets of the city became a horrible whirlpool of
slaughter, all who did not wear the saving cross being shot down without
mercy or discrimination.

The anecdotes of that fatal night and the succeeding day are numerous,
some of them pathetic, most of them ferocious, all tending to show how
brutal man may become under the inspiration of religious prejudice and
the example of slaughter,--the blood fury, as it has been fitly termed.

Teligny, the son-in-law of Coligny, took refuge on a roof. The guards of
the Duke of Anjou fired at him as at a target. La Rochefoucauld, with
whom the king had been in merry chat until eleven o'clock of the
preceding evening, was aroused by a loud knocking upon his door. He
opened it; six masked men rushed in, and instantly buried their poniards
in his body. The new queen of Navarre had just gone to bed, under
peremptory orders from her mother, Catherine de' Medici. She was wakened