ment which the Huguenots are to receive in the other
cities is sufficiently evident, as well as the means by which some assured
rest may be expected in our poor Catholic Church."[1148] But the municipal
and judicial officers of Nantes, instead of following the bloody path thus
marked out for them by the governor of their province, "held a meeting in
the town hall, and swore to maintain their previous oath not to violate
the Edict of Pacification published in favor of the Calvinists, and
forbade the inhabitants from indulging in any excess against them."[1149]

[Sidenote: Uncertain number of the victims.]

Such are the general outlines and a few details of a massacre the full
horrors of which it is outside of the province and beyond the ability of
history to relate. Nor is it even possible to set down figures that may be
relied upon as expressing the true number of those who were unjustly put
to death. The difficulty experienced by a well informed contemporary, has
not been removed; notwithstanding the careful investigations of those who
earnestly desired "that posterity might not-be deprived of what it needed
to know, in order that it might become wiser at the expense of
others."[1150] We shall be safe in supposing that the number of Huguenot
victims throughout France was somewhere between twenty thousand, as
conjectured by De Thou and La Popeliniere, and thirty thousand, as stated
by Jean de Serres and the Memoires de l'estat de France, rather than in
adopting the extreme views of Sully and Perefixe, the latter of whom
swells the count of the slain to one hundred thousand men, women, and
children.[1151] It can scarcely have been much less than the lower number
I have suggested.

[Sidenote: News of the massacre received at Rome.]

[Sidenote: Public thanksgivings.]

While the massacre begun on St. Bartholomew's Day was spreading with the
speed of some foul contagion to the most distant parts of France, the
tidings had been carried beyond its boundaries, and excited a thrill of
delight, or a cry of execration, according to the character and sympathies
of those to whom they came. Nowhere was the surprise greater, nor the joy
more intense, than at Rome. Pope Gregory, like his predecessor, had been
very sceptical respecting the pious intentions of the French court.
Nuncios and legates brought them, it is true, a great profusion of
brilliant assurances, on the part of Catharine and Charles, of devotion to
the Roman Church