ault,
suffered outrages that were worse than death. Matron and maiden alike
welcomed as merciful the blow that liberated them from an existence now
rendered insupportable. Women approaching maternity were selected for more
excruciating torments, and savage delight was exhibited in destroying the
unborn fruit of the womb. Nor was any rank respected. Madame d'Yverny, the
niece of Cardinal Briconnet, was recognized, as she fled, by the costly
underclothing that appeared from beneath the shabby habit of a nun which
she had assumed; and, after suffering every indignity, upon her refusal to
go to mass, was thrown from a bridge into the Seine and drowned.[1019]
Occasionally the women rivalled the cruelty of the men. A poor carpenter,
of advanced age, with whom the author of the "Tocsain contre les
massacreurs" was personally acquainted, had been taken by night and cast
into the river. He swam, however, to a bridge, and succeeded in climbing
up by its timbers, and so fled naked to the house of a relative near the
"Cousture Sainte Catherine," where his wife had taken refuge. But,
instead of welcoming him, his wife drove him away, and he was soon
recaptured and killed.[1020] It is related that the daughter of one Jean
de Coulogne, a mercer of the "Palais," betrayed her own mother to death,
and subsequently married one of the murderers.[1021] The very innocence of
childhood furnished no sufficient protection--so literally did the pious
Catholics of Paris interpret the oft-repeated exhortations of their holy
father to exterminate not only the roots of heresy, but the very fibres of
the roots.[1022] Two infants, whose parents had just been murdered, were
carried in a hod and cast into the Seine. A little girl was plunged naked
in the blood of her father and mother, with horrible oaths and threats
that, if she should become a Huguenot, the like fate would befall her. And
a crowd of boys, between nine and ten years of age, was seen dragging
through the streets the body of a babe yet in its swaddling-clothes, which
they had fastened to a rope by means of a belt tied about its neck.[1023]

[Sidenote: Shamelessness of the court ladies.]

[Sidenote: Anjou encourages the assassins.]

The bodies of the more inconspicuous victims lay for hours in whatever
spot they happened to be killed; but the court required ocular
demonstration that the leaders of the Huguenots who had been most
prominent in the late wars were really dead. Accordingly th