." Consequently, in order to
protect himself and the royal family, Charles directs the prevot to seize
the keys of all the gates of the city, and to keep them carefully closed,
in order to prevent any one from entering or leaving Paris. He also
commands him to remove all the boats moored along the Seine, so as to
prevent any one from crossing the river; and to put under arms all
captains, lieutenants, ensigns, and burgesses capable of doing military
duty.[977] The orders were faithfully and promptly obeyed. Long before
morning dawned they had been transmitted successively to the lower
municipal officers, quarteniers, dizainiers, etc.; the wherry-men had been
stopped, and the troops and burgesses of Paris having armed themselves as
best they could, were assembled ready for action in front of the Hotel de
Ville, on that famous Place de Greve, so often drenched in martyr's
blood.[978]

[Sidenote: The first shot and the bell of St. Germain l'Auxerrois.]

To the guilty plotters that was a sleepless night. Unable to rest quietly,
at a little before dawn, Catharine with her two elder sons found her way
to the portal of the Louvre, adjoining the tennis court. There, in a
chamber overlooking the "bassecour," they sat down to await the beginning
of their treacherous enterprise. If we may believe Henry of Anjou, none of
them as yet realized its full horrors; but as they quietly watched in that
hour of stillness for the first signs of the coming outbreak, the report
of a pistol-shot reached their ears. Instantly it wrought a marvellous
revulsion in their feelings. Whether the shot wounded or killed any one,
they knew not; but it brought up vividly to their imaginations the results
of the terrible deluge of blood whose flood-gates they had raised. Hastily
they send a servant to the Duke of Guise, and countermand the instructions
of the evening, and bid him do no injury to the admiral. It is too late!
The messenger soon returns with the tidings that Coligny is already dead,
that the work is about to begin in all the rest of the city. This news
produces a fresh change. With one of those fluctuations which are so easy
for souls that have no firm or established principles, but shift according
to the deceptive, ever-varying tide of apparent interest, the mother and
her sons return heartily to their former purpose. The die is cast, the
deed is half done; let it be fully and boldly consummated. No room now for
pity or regret.[979]

It wa