ip, for his shop was entirely stripped."

Mezeray writes that seven hundred or eight hundred people had taken
refuge in the prisons, hoping they would be safe "under the wings of
Justice"; but the officers selected for this work had brought them into
the fitly named "Valley of Misery," and there beat them to death with
clubs and threw their bodies into the river. The Venetian ambassador
corroborates this story, adding that they were murdered in batches of
ten. Where all were cruel, some few persons distinguished themselves by
especial ferocity. A gold-beater, named Crozier, one of those
prison-murderers, bared his sinewy arm and boasted of having killed four
thousand persons with his own hands. Another man--for the sake of human
nature we would fain wish him to be the same--affirmed that unaided he
had "despatched" eighty Huguenots in one day. He would eat his food with
hands dripping with gore, declaring "that it was an honor to him,
because it was the blood of heretics." On Tuesday a butcher, Crozier's
comrade, boasted to the King that he had killed one hundred fifty the
night before. Coconnas, one of the _mignons_ of Anjou, prided himself
on having ransomed from the populace as many as thirty Huguenots, for
the pleasure of making them abjure, and then killing them with his own
hand, after he had "secured them for hell."

About seven o'clock the King was at one of the windows of his palace,
enjoying the air of that beautiful August morning, when he was startled
by shouts of "Kill, kill!" They were raised by a body of guards, who
were firing with much more noise than execution at a number of Huguenots
who had crossed the river--"to seek the King's protection," says one
account; "to help the King against the Guises," says another. Charles,
who had just been telling his mother that "the weather seemed to rejoice
at the slaughter of the Huguenots," felt all his savage instincts kindle
at the sight. He had hunted wild beasts; now he would hunt men, and,
calling for an arquebuse, he fired at the fugitives, who were
fortunately out of range. Some modern writers deny this fact, on the
ground that the balcony from which Charles is said to have fired was not
built until after 1572. Were this true, it would only show that
tradition had misplaced the locality. Brantome expressly says the King
fired on the Huguenots--not from a balcony, but--"from his bedroom
window." Marshal Tesse heard the story, according to Voltaire, from the