in a battle, leave your service, or go to mass." After a
moment's silence Charles rejoined, "Ambrose, I don't know what has come
over me for the last two or three days, but I feel my mind and my body
greatly excited, in fact, just as if I had a fever; meseems every moment,
just as much waking as sleeping, that those massacred corpses keep
appearing to me with their faces all hideous and covered with blood. I
wish the helpless and the innocent had not been included." "And in
consequence of the reply made to him," adds Sully in his (_Economies
royales_ t. i. p. 244, in the Petitot collection), "he next day issued
his orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering; the
which were, nevertheless, very ill observed, the animosities and fury of
the populace being too much inflamed to defer to them."

The historians, Catholic or Protestant, contemporary or researchful,
differ widely as to the number of the victims in this cruel massacre;
according to De Thou, there were about two thousand persons killed in
Paris the first day; D'Aubigne says three thousand; Brantome speaks of
four thousand bodies that Charles IX. might have seen floating down the
Seine; La Popeliniere reduces them to one thousand. There is to be
found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the
grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven
hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot,
Auteuil, and St. Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried
still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river. The
uncertainty is still greater when one comes to speak of the number of
victims throughout the whole of France; De Thou estimates it at thirty
thousand, Sully at seventy thousand, Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris in the
seventeenth century, raises it to one hundred thousand; Papirius Masson
and Davila reduce it to ten thousand, without clearly distinguishing
between the massacre of Paris and those of the provinces; other
historians fix upon forty thousand. Great uncertainty also prevails as
to the execution of the orders issued from Paris to the governors at the
provinces; the names of the Viscount d'Orte, governor of Bayonne, and of
John le Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux, have become famous from their having
refused to take part in the massacre; but the authenticity of the letter
from the Viscount d'Orte to Charles IX. is disputed, though the fact of
his re