ud of smoke which hung over the
towers and roofs; and it seemed to me the canopy of hell itself. I
fancied that my head still rang with the cries and screams and curses,
the sounds of death. In very fact, I could hear the dull reports of
firearms near the Louvre, and the jangle of the bells. Country-folk
were congregated at the cross-roads, and in the villages, listening and
gazing; asking timid questions of the more good-natured among us, and
showing that the rumour of the dreadful work doing in the town had
somehow spread abroad. And this though I learned afterwards that the
keys of the city had been taken the night before to the king, and that,
except a party with the Duke of Guise, who had left at eight in pursuit
of Montgomery and some of the Protestants--lodgers, happily for
themselves, in the Faubourg St. Germain--no one had left the town
before ourselves.

While I am speaking of our departure from Paris, I may say what I have
to say of the dreadful excesses of those days, ay, and of the following
days; excesses of which France is now ashamed, and for which she
blushed even before the accession of his late Majesty. I am sometimes
asked, as one who witnessed them, what I think, and I answer that it
was not our country which was to blame. A something besides Queen
Catharine de' Medici had been brought from Italy forty years before, a
something invisible but very powerful; a spirit of cruelty and
treachery. In Italy it had done small harm. But grafted on French
daring and recklessness, and the rougher and more soldierly manners of
the north, this spirit of intrigue proved capable of very dreadful
things. For a time, until it wore itself out, it was the curse of
France. Two Dukes of Guise, Francis and Henry, a cardinal of Guise,
the Prince of Conde, Admiral Coligny, King Henry the Third all these
the foremost men of their day--died by assassination within little more
than a quarter of a century, to say nothing of the Prince of Orange,
and King Henry the Great.

Then mark--a most curious thing--the extreme youth of those who were in
this business. France, subject to the Queen-Mother, of course, was
ruled at the time by boys scarce out of their tutors' hands. They were
mere lads, hot-blooded, reckless nobles, ready for any wild brawl,
without forethought or prudence. Of the four Frenchmen who it is
thought took the leading parts, one, the king, was twenty-two;
Monsieur, his brother, was only twenty; the Du