ip. "Where is your God?" "Where are your prayers and your psalms?"
"Where is the God they invoke so much? Let Him save, if He can." Such were
the expressions with which the blows of the assassin were interlarded. At
times he thought to aggravate his victim's sufferings by singing snatches
of favorite psalms from the Huguenot psalm-book. It might be the
forty-third, so appropriate to the condition of oppressed innocence, in
its quaint old French garb:

Revenge-moi, pren la querelle
De moi, Seigneur, de ta merci,
Contre la gent fausse et cruelle:
De l'homme rempli de cautelle,
Et en sa malice endurci,
Delivre moi aussi.

Or it might be the fifty-first--the words never more sincerely accepted,
even when chanted to all the perfection of choral music, in the Sistine
Chapel or in St. Peter's, than when, in the ears of constant sufferers for
their Christian faith, ribald voices contemptuously sang or drawled the
familiar lines:

Misericorde au povre vicieux,
Dieu tout-puissant, selon ta grand' clemence.[1094]

"These execrable outrages," adds the chronicler who gives us this
interesting information, "did not in the least unnerve the Protestants,
who died with great constancy; and, if some were shaken (as were some, but
in very small numbers), this in no wise lessened the patience and
endurance of the rest."[1095] The number of the killed was great. The
murderers themselves boasted of the slaughter of more than twelve hundred
men and of one hundred and fifty women, besides a large number of children
of nine years old and under. And there was a dreary uniformity in the
method of their death. They were shot with pistols, then stripped, and
dragged to the river, or thrown into the city moat.[1096] But it is, after
all, not the numbers of nameless victims whose honorable deaths leave no
distinct impression upon the mind, but the individual instances of
Christian heroism, teaching lessons of imitable human virtues, that speak
most directly to the sympathies of the reader of an age so long posterior.
The records of French Protestantism are full of these, and one or two of
the most striking that occurred in Orleans deserve mention. M. de
Coudray--whom the Roman Catholics had in vain endeavored on previous
occasions to shake--seeing his house beset and no prospect of deliverance,
himself opened the door of his dwelling to the murderers, telling them,
with wonderful assurance of faith: "You do but h