ve. Those riders were grim, brutal
men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame,
clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of
horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror
tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied
imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris,
fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. As we now
know.

For it was noon--or a little more--of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth,
"a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure
to kill and plunder." From the bridges, and particularly from the stone
bridge of Notre Dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and
Tignonville crouched in his haymow--Huguenots less fortunate were being
cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine. On the river bank Spire
Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own
books. In their houses, Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor--than
whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater--were being butchered
like sheep; and in the Valley of Misery, now the Quai de la Megisserie,
seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being
beaten to death with bludgeons. Nay, at this hour--a little sooner or a
little later, what matters it?--M. de Tignonville's own cousin, Madame
d'Yverne, the darling of the Louvre the day before, perished in the hands
of the mob; and the sister of M. de Taverny, equally ill-fated, died in
the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets.

Madame Carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument. But
Mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded.

"If I am to be Monsieur's wife," she said with quivering nostrils, "shall
I fear his servants?"

And opening the door herself, for the others would not, she called. The
man who answered was a Norman; and short of stature, and wrinkled and low-
browed of feature, with a thatch of hair and a full beard, he seemed the
embodiment of the women's apprehensions. Moreover, his _patois_ of the
cider-land was little better than German to them; their southern, softer
tongue was sheer Italian to him. But he seemed not ill-disposed, or
Mademoiselle's air overawed him; and presently she made him understand,
and with a nod he descended to carry her message.

Then Mademoiselle's heart began to beat; and beat more quick