ppear to me with
hideous and blood-covered faces. I wish the helpless and innocent had
not been included."

On the next day he issued orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any
slaying or plundering. But he had raised a fury not easily to be
allayed. The tocsin of death still rang; to it the great bell of the
palace added at intervals its clanging peal; shouts, yells, the sharp
reports of pistols and arquebuses, the shrieks of victims, filled the
air; sixty thousand murderers thronged the streets, slaying all who wore
not the white cross, breaking into and plundering houses, and
slaughtering all within them. All through that dreadful Sunday the
crimson carnival went on, death everywhere, wagons loaded with bleeding
bodies traversing the streets, to cast their gory burdens into the
Seine, a scene of frightful massacre prevailing such as city streets
have seldom witnessed. The king judged feebly if he deemed that with a
word he could quell the storm his voice had raised. Many of the nobles
of the court, satisfied with the death of the Huguenot leaders,
attempted to stay the work of death, but a report that a party of
Huguenots had attempted to kill the king added to the popular fury, and
the sanguinary work went on.

It is not known how many were slain during that outbreak of slaughter.
It was not confined to Paris, but spread through France. Thousands are
said to have been killed in the city. In the kingdom the number slain
has been variously estimated at from ten to one hundred thousand. Such
was the frightful result of a lamentable event in which religious
animosity was taken advantage of to intensify the political enmity of
the warring parties of the realm.

It proved a useless infamy. Charles IX. died two years afterwards, after
having suffered agonies of remorse. Despite the massacre, the Huguenots
were not all slain. Nor had the murder of Coligny robbed them of a
leader. Henry of Navarre, who had narrowly escaped death on that fearful
night, was in the coming years to lead the Protestants to many a
victory, and in the end to become king of France, as Henry IV. By his
coronation, Coligny was revenged; the Huguenots, instead of being
exterminated by the hand of massacre, had defeated their foes and raised
their leader to the throne, and the Edict of Nantes, which was soon
afterwards announced, gave liberty of conscience to France for many
years thereafter.

_KING HENRY OF NAVARRE._

For the first time