safety in the
citadel. Ten captains at the head of as many bands of
soldiers, ruled the city, and were foremost in the work of
murder and rapine that now ensued. But there were other bands
engaged in the same occupation, not to speak of single persons
acting strictly on their own account. Moreover, four hundred
ruffians came in from the country, intent upon making up for
losses which they pretended to have sustained during the late
civil wars. They showed no mercy to the Huguenots that fell
into their hands. Of the Protestants scarcely one made
resistance, so hopeless was their situation. Pierre Pillier, a
bell founder, had indeed barred his door with iron, but,
finding that his assailants were on the point of forcing the
entrance, he first threw his money from a window, and then,
seizing his opportunity when the miscreants were scrambling
for their prize, deluged them with molten lead, after which he
set fire to his house, and perished, with his wife and
children, in the flames.

There is, happily, no need of repeating here the shocking
details of the butchery told by the student. As a German, and
not generally known to be a Protestant, he managed to escape
the fate of his Huguenot friends, but he witnessed, and was
forced to appear to applaud, the most revolting exhibitions
both of cruelty and of selfishness. His favorite professor,
the venerable Francois Taillebois, after having been twice
plundered by bands of marauders, was treacherously conducted
by the second band to the Loire, despatched with the dagger,
and thrown into the river. "The last lecture, which he gave on
Monday at nine o'clock," says his pupil, "was on the _Lex
Cornelia_ [de sicariis] of which he made the demonstration by
the sacrifice of his own life." It is pitiful to read that
even professors in the university were not ashamed to enrich
their libraries by the plunder of the law-books of their
colleagues, or of their scholars. The writer traced his own
copies of Alciat, of Mynsinger and "Speculator," to the
shelves of Laurent Godefroid, Professor of the Pandects, and
the entire library of his brother Bernhard to those of his
neighbor, Dr. Beaupied, Professor of Canon Law.

In the midst of the almost universal unchaining of the worst
passions of human or