k place at
Vassy, a small town in Champagne, near which the Duke of Guise passed on
returning from Germany. Hearing, as he went, the sound of bells, he
asked what it meant. "It is the church of the Huguenots of Vassy," was
the answer. "Are there many of them?" asked the duke. He was told that
there were, and that they were increasing more and more. "Then," says
the chronicler, "he began to mutter and to put himself in a white heat,
gnawing his beard, as he was wont to do when he was enraged or had a mind
to take vengeance." Did he turn aside out of his way with his following,
to pass right through Vassy, or did he confine himself to sending some of
his people to bring him an account of what was happening there? When a
fact which was at the outset insignificant has become a great event, it
is hardly possible to arrive at any certain knowledge of the truth as to
the small details of its origin. Whatever may have been the case in the
first instance, a quarrel, and, before long, a struggle, began between
the preacher's congregation and the prince's following. Being informed
of the matter whilst he was at table, the Duke of Guise rose up, went to
the spot, found the combatants very warmly at work, and himself received
several blows from stones; and, when the fight was put a stop to,
forty-nine persons had been killed in it, nearly all on the Protestant
side; more than two hundred others, it is said, came out of it severely
wounded; and, whether victors or vanquished, all were equally irritated.
The Protestants complained vehemently; and Conde offered, in their name,
fifty thousand men to resent this attack, but his brother, the King of
Navarre, on the contrary, received with a very bad grace the pleading of
Theodore de Beze. "It is true that the church of God should endure
blows and not inflict them," said De Beze, "but remember, I pray you,
that it is an anvil which has used up a great many hammers."

The massacre of Vassy, the name which has remained affixed to it in
history, rapidly became contagious. From 1562 to 1572, in Languedoc, in
Provence, in Dauphiny, in Poitou, in Orleanness, in Normandy even and in
Picardy, at Toulouse, at Gaillac, at Frejus, at Troyes, at Sens, at
Orleans, at Amiens, at Rouen, and in many other towns, spontaneous and
disorderly outbreaks between religiously opposed portions of the populace
took place suddenly, were repeated, and spread, sometimes with the
connivance of the local autho