nd carriage-ways, they were heaped in the courtyards.
When the utmost that impotent passion could do to these lifeless remains
was accomplished, the Seine became the receptacle. Besides those Huguenots
whom their murderers dragged to the bridges or wharves to despatch by
drowning, both by day and by night wagons laden with the corpses of men
and women, and even of young children, were driven down to the river and
emptied of their human freight. But the current of the crooked Seine
refused to carry away from the capital all these evidences of guilt. The
shores of its first curve, from Paris to the bridge of St. Cloud, were
covered with putrefying remains, which the municipality were compelled to
inter, through fear of their generating a pestilence. And so we read, in
the registers of the Hotel-de-Ville, of a payment of fifteen livres
tournois, on the ninth of September, for the burial of the dead bodies
found near the Convent of Chaillot, and of a second payment of twenty
livres on the twenty-third, for the burial of eleven hundred more, near
Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud.[1044]

[Sidenote: Not a popular movement.]

[Sidenote: Plunder of the rich.]

The massacre was not in its origin a popular outbreak. It sprang from the
ambition and vindictive passions of the queen mother, and others, whom the
ministers of a corrupt religion had long accustomed to the idea that the
extermination of heretics is not a sin, but the highest type of piety. The
people were called in only as assistants. Probably the first intention was
only to hold the municipal forces in readiness to overcome any resistance
which the Protestants might offer. But the massacre succeeded beyond the
most sanguine expectations of the conspirators. Very few of the victims
defended themselves or their property; scarcely one Roman Catholic was
slain. And now the populace, having had a taste of blood, could no longer
be restrained. Whether the plunder of the Protestants entered into the
original calculations of Catharine and her advisers, may perhaps be
doubted. But there is no question as to the turn which the affair soon
took in the minds of those engaged in it. Pillage was not always
countenanced by church and state: as a violation of the second table of
the Law, it was, under ordinary circumstances, atoned for by penance and
ecclesiastical censures; as a breach of the royal edicts, it was likely to
be punished with hanging or still more painful modes of execu