he whole city was filled with troops. But
the Place Maubert was left unguarded, and a rabble rout--all night
long--was collecting in that distant spot. Four companies of
burgher-guards went over to the League at three o'clock in the morning.
The rest stood firm in the cemetery of the Innocents, awaiting the orders
of the King. At day-break on the 11th the town was still quiet. There was
an awful pause of expectation. The shops remained closed all the morning,
the royal troops were drawn up in battle-array, upon the Greve and around
the Hotel de Ville, but they stood motionless as statues, until the
populace began taunting them with cowardice, and then laughing them to
scorn. For their sovereign lord and master still sat paralyzed in his
palace.

The mob had been surging through all the streets and lanes, until, as by
a single impulse, chains were stretched across the streets, and
barricades thrown up in all the principal thoroughfares. About noon the
Duke of Guise, who had been sitting quietly in his hotel, with a very few
armed followers, came out into the street of the Hotel Montmorency, and
walked calmly up and down, arm-in-aim with the Archbishop of Lyons,
between a double hedge-row of spectators and admirers, three or four
ranks thick. He was dressed in a white slashed doublet and hose, and wore
a very large hat. Shouts of triumph resounded from a thousand brazen
throats, as he moved calmly about, receiving, at every instant, expresses
from the great gathering in the Place Maubert.

"Enough, too much, my good friends," he said, taking off the great
hat--("I don't know whether he was laughing in it," observed one who was
looking on that day)--"Enough of 'Long live Guise!' Cry 'Long live the
King!'"

There was no response, as might be expected, and the people shouted more
hoarsely than ever for Madam League and the Balafre. The Duke's face was
full of gaiety; there was not a shadow of anxiety upon it in that
perilous and eventful moment. He saw that the day was his own.

For now, the people, ripe, ready; mustered, armed, barricaded; awaited
but a signal to assault the King's mercenaries, before rushing to the
palace: On every house-top missiles were provided to hurl upon their
heads. There seemed no escape for Henry or his Germans from impending
doom, when Guise, thoroughly triumphant, vouchsafed them their lives.

"You must give me these soldiers as a present, my friends," said he to
the populace.

And so the