whose name has remained attached to them
in history; the people themselves have very often been the prime movers
in them; they have very often preceded and urged on their masters in the
black deeds which have sullied their history; and on the masses as well
as on the leaders ought the just sentence of posterity to fall. The
moment we speak of the St. Bartholomew, it seems as if Charles IX.,
Catherine de' Medici, and the Guises issued from their grave to receive
that sentence; and God forbid that we should wish to deliver them from
it; but it hits the nameless populace of their day as well as themselves,
and the hands of the people, far more than the will of kings, began the
tale of massacres for religion's sake. This is no vague and general
assertion; and, to show it, we shall only have to enumerate, with their
dates, the principal facts of which history has preserved the memory,
whilst stigmatizing them, with good reason, as massacres or murders. The
greater number, as was to be expected, are deeds done by Catholics, for
they were by far the more numerous and more frequently victorious; but
Protestants also have sometimes deserved a place in this tragic category,
and when we meet with them, we will assuredly not blot them out.

We confine the enumeration to the reign of Charles IX., and in it we
place only such massacres and murders as were not the results of any
legal proceeding. We say nothing of judicial sentences and executions,
however outrageous and iniquitous they may have been.

The first fact which presents itself is a singular one. Admiral de
Coligny's eldest brother, Odet de Chatillon, was a Catholic, Bishop of
Beauvais, and a cardinal; in 1550, he had gone to Rome and had
co-operated in the election of Pope Julius III.; in 1554, he had
published some _Constitutions synodales_ (synodal regulations), to remedy
certain abuses which had crept into his diocese, and, in 1561, he
proposed to make in the celebration of the Lord's Supper some
modifications which smacked, it is said, of the innovations of Geneva.
The populace of Beauvais were so enraged at this that they rose up
against him, massacred a schoolmaster whom he tried to protect, and would
have massacred the bishop himself if troops sent from Paris had not come
to his assistance.

In the same year, 1561, the Protestants had a custom of meeting at Paris,
for their religious exercises, in a house called the Patriarch's house,
very near the church of