eous stand for justice and
right. In the massacre of the Saint Bartholomew, for example, it was a
zealous coadjutor. The officers of the municipalite had prepared for
this great measure, the _prevot_ of the merchants, summoned to the
Louvre, received from Charles IX orders to close all the gates of the
city and to have in readiness the captains, lieutenants, and bourgeois
in whom he had confidence. He promised "to put so many hands at the
mischief that it should be remembered." Rewards were given officially to
the archers who had aided in the massacre, to the ferrymen who had
prevented the Huguenots from crossing the river, to the grave-diggers of
Saint-Cloud, of Auteuil, and of Chaillot for having interred in a week
eleven hundred corpses. A municipal medal was struck in _memoire du jour
de Saint Barthelemy_. The president of the Parlement, Christophe de
Thou, pronounced an eulogy on the prudence of the king which had saved
the nation from the misfortune of seeing the crown fall on the head of
the Prince of Conde, and, perhaps, on that of Admiral Coligny himself,
who had been ambitious enough to dream of seating himself on the throne
of France after having driven from it the king and ruined the royal
family. The Parlement, after deliberation, declared the admiral guilty
of the crime of lese-majeste, ordered that his body, or at least his
effigy, should be dragged on a hurdle, attached to a gallows on the
Place de Greve and then to the gibbet of Montfaucon, that his memory
should be declared infamous and that his chateau of Chatillon-sur-Loing
should be razed. The headless body of the admiral was at that moment
swinging on the gibbet of Montfaucon.

In the religious wars that followed, the city paid dearly for this
wholesale murder. The population, during the siege by the King of
Navarre, was reduced to the last extremity of famine, even to
cannibalism, and when that monarch had retired from before the walls,
the horrors of anarchy and civil war succeeded. The Parlement, terrified
by the execution of the first president, Brisson, refused to sit, and,
when summoned to do so, replied to the agents of the _Seize_, the chiefs
of the sixteen quarters of Paris who had formed a council to aid the
work of the _Sainte Ligue_ of the Catholics, that they would return to
their functions only to hang those who had participated in the official
murder of the president. The Duc de Mayenne, summoned to the rescue of
public order, carrie