threat. In spite of this, a sergeant said: 'Hold
your d----d tongue, lieutenant; this isn't your affair, it's ours.'

"The troops killed for the mere sake of killing. A witness says: 'In
the courtyards of the houses, they shot even the horses and dogs.'

"In the house next Frascati's, at the corner of Rue Richelieu, the
soldiers were coolly going to shoot even the women and children, who
were already drawn up in a mass before a platoon for that purpose when
a colonel arrived. He stopped the massacre, boxed up these poor
trembling creatures in the Passages des Panoramas, where he locked them
in, and saved them. A celebrated writer, Monsieur Lireux, after having
escaped the first balls, was led about, during an hour, from one
guard-house to another, preparatory to being shot. It required a
miracle to save him. The celebrated artist, Sax, who happened to be in
the musical establishment of M. Brandus, was about to be shot, when a
general recognized him. Everywhere else the people were killed
indiscriminately.

"The first person killed in this butchery--history has in like manner
preserved the name of the first person killed at the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew--was one Theodore Debaecque, who lived in the house at the
corner of Rue du Sentier, where the carnage began.

VII

"When the slaughter came to an end,--that is to say when it was black
night, and it had begun in broad day,--the dead bodies were not
removed; they were so numerous that thirty-three of them were counted
before a single shop, that of M. Barbedienne. Every square of ground
left open in the asphalt at the foot of the trees on the boulevards was
a reservoir of blood. 'The dead bodies,' says a witness, 'were piled up
in heaps, one upon another, old men, children, blouses and paletots,
assembled pell-mell, in an indescribable mass of heads, arms, and
legs.'

"Another witness describes thus a group of three individuals: 'Two had
fallen on their backs; and the third, having tripped over their legs,
had fallen upon them.' The single corpses were rare and attracted more
notice than the others. One young man, well dressed, was seated against
a wall, with his legs apart, his arms half folded, one of Verdier's
canes in his hand, and seemed to be looking at what was going on around
him; he was dead. A little farther on, the bullets had nailed against a
shop a youth in velveteen trousers who had some proof-sheets in his
hand. The wind fluttered these bl