ecial executions.[1086] We shall not find it
very difficult to account for the rapidity with which the massacre spread
to the provincial towns--of which the secretary of the Spanish ambassador,
in his hurried journey from Paris to Madrid, was an eye-witness[1087]--if
we bear in mind the previous ripeness of the lowest classes of the Roman
Catholic population for the perpetration of any possible acts of insult
and injury toward their Protestant fellow-citizens. The time had come for
the seed sown broadcast by monk and priest in Lenten and Advent discourses
to bear its legitimate harvest in the pitiless murder of heretics.

[Sidenote: The massacre at Meaux.]

Meaux was naturally one of the first of smaller cities to catch the
contagion from the capital. Not only was it the nearest city that
contained any considerable body of Huguenots, but, if we may credit the
report current among them, Catharine, in virtue of her rank as Countess of
Meaux, had placed it first upon the roll. It is not impossible that the
circumstance that this was the cradle of Protestantism in France may have
secured it this distinction. About the middle of Sunday afternoon a
courier reached Meaux, and at once made his way to the residence of the
procureur-du-roi, one Cosset. The nature of the message he bore may be
inferred from the fact that secret orders were at once given to those
persons upon whom Cosset thought that he could rely, to be in readiness
about nightfall. So completely had every outlet from Paris been sealed,
that it had proved almost impossible for a Protestant to find the means of
escaping to carry the tidings abroad. Consequently the adherents of the
reformed faith were yet in ignorance of the impending catastrophe. At the
time appointed, Cosset and his followers seized the gates of Meaux. It was
the hour when the peaceable and unsuspecting people were at supper. The
Protestants could now easily be found, and few escaped arrest, either that
evening or on the succeeding day. Happily, however, a large number of
Huguenots resided in a quarter of Meaux known as the "Grand Marche," and
separated from the main part of the town by the river Marne. The
inhabitants of the Grand Marche received timely warning of their danger;
and the men fled by night for temporary refuge to the neighboring
villages. It was scarcely dawn on Monday morning when the work of plunder
begun. By eight o'clock little was left of the goods of the Huguenots on
this sid