'I weep,' said the pope, 'at
the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of God, for to
inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he
will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long). I fear,
too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as
guilty.'" [_Brantome,_ t. iv. p. 306. He attributes this language to
Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew. Gregory
XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the massacre took place.] Only
the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless
persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered
Charles IX. the assistance of his army, if he had need of it, against
what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.

Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently
strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many
violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions. Catherine de
Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their
confidence and implicit obedience. "All the actions of the
queen-mother," said the Venetian ambassador Sigismund Cavalli, who had
for a long while resided at her court, "have always been prompted and
regulated by one single passion, the passion of ruling." Her son Charles
had yielded to it without an effort in his youth. "He was accustomed to
say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that
is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he
showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself
altogether in his mother's hands. Now, he no longer thinks and acts in
the same way. I have been told that, since the late events, he requires
to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen,
before obeying her." It was not with regard to his mother only that
Charles had changed. "His looks," says Cavalli, "have become melancholy
and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the
speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all
at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with
no less suddenness. It is feared that the demon of vengeance has
possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is
becoming cruel. He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water.
To tire himself at any price, is his object. H