onditions granted them, but that the agents disobeyed. He
hoped that the Peace of St. Germain had the same legitimate motive
and excuse, and advised that a list of proscription should be drawn
up. In short, the idea had been long entertained, and had been more
than once near execution. At last, the murder of Coligny was provoked
by the imminent war with Spain, and the general slaughter followed.
The clergy applauded, but it did not proceed from them. Excepting
Sorbin at Orleans and the Jesuit Auger in the south, few of them were
actual accomplices before the fact. After the energetic approval
given by the court of Rome, it was not quite easy for a priest to
express dissent.

One dauntless ecclesiastic warned the Pope to prohibit demonstrations
which revealed the secret of the priesthood. The man who thus
disturbed the unanimity of exultant cardinals was Montalto, afterwards
Sixtus V, and he deserves to be recorded, because he outweighs many
names. He thought so ill of his predecessor, Gregory XIII, that he
was tempted to revoke the best act of his pontificate, the reformation
of the Calendar; and he was quite perspicacious enough to understand
that the massacre was the height of folly as well as the worst of
crimes.

We have no reliable statistics of the slain. The fugitives who
escaped to England spoke of one hundred thousand. At Rome they put
the figure for Paris alone at sixty thousand. For the capital a basis
of calculation is supplied by the number of bodies found in the river.
The result would be something over two thousand. In the provinces
there are reports from about forty towns. The Protestant martyrology
assigns two thousand to Orleans alone. But Toussaint, one of the
ministers, who was there, and had the good fortune to escape, knew
only of seven hundred, and that is still the belief in the town
itself. It was said that two hundred perished at Toulouse. But the
president, Durand, who lost some of his own friends, and whose Memoirs
were not written for the public, speaks of thirty-six. In five towns
the victims amounted to between one hundred and seven hundred. In all
the rest they were fewer. Taking the more authentic figures, and in
cases where we cannot decide between statements that conflict,
preferring the lower figure, because of the tendency to exaggerate
where there is passion or excitement, we arrive at rather more than
five thousand for the whole of France. The editor of Queen