our thousand persons were massacred
with all the inhumanity and all the tumult than can be imagined."

"Among the slain was _Charles de Quelleue Pontivy_, likewise called
_Soubise_, because he had married _Catherine_, only daughter and heiress
of _Jean de Partenay_ Baron _de Soubise_: this Lady had entered an
action against him for impotence; His naked dead body being among others
dragged before the _Louvre_, there were ladies curious enough to examine
leisurely, if they could discover the cause or the marks of the defeat
of which he had been accused."

_Brantome_, in his memoirs of _Charles IX._ says, "As soon as it was day
the king looked out of the window, and seeing that many people were
running away in the _fauxbourg St. Germain_, he took a large hunting
_arquebuse_, and shot at them many times, but in vain, for the gun did
not carry so far."[30]

[Note 30: The king was shooting from the _Louvre_, and the
_Fauxbourg_ St. _Germain_ is on the other side of the river.]

"He took great pleasure in seeing floating in the river, under his
windows, more than four thousand dead bodies."

A French writer, _Mr. du Laure_, in a Description of Paris, just
published, says, "About thirty thousand persons were killed on that
night in Paris and in the country; few of the citizens but were either
assassins or assassinated. Ambition, the hatred of the great, of a
woman, the feebleness and cruelty of a king, the spirit of party, the
fanaticism of the people, animated those scenes of horror, which do not
depose so much against the French nation, at that time governed by
strangers, as against the passions of the great, and the ill-directed
zeal of the religion of an ignorant populace."

A few more modern instances of female fortitude are given in a note.[31]

[Note 31: On the 28th of March, 1757, _Damiens_, who stabbed _Lewis_
XV. was executed in the _Place de Greve_, four horses were to pull his
arms and legs from his body: they were fifty minutes pulling in vain,
and at last his joints were obliged to be cut: he supported these
torments patiently, and expired whilst the tendons of his shoulders were
cutting, though he was living after his legs and thighs had been torn
from his body; his right hand had previously been cut off. I was in
Paris in 1768, and then, and at various times since have been assured by
eye-witnesses, that almost all the windows of the square where the
execution was performed were hired by ladies, at from t