cried, "provided not one Huguenot be left alive in France to reproach me
with the deed."

That night the slaughter commenced. The long premeditated crime was
executed in a panic, but the work was thoroughly done. The King, who a
few days before had written with his own hand to Louis of Nassau,
expressing his firm determination to sustain the Protestant cause both in
France and the Netherlands, who had employed the counsels of Coligny in
the arrangement, of his plans, and who had sent French troops, under
Genlis and La None, to assist their Calvinist brethren in Flanders, now
gave the signal for the general massacre of the Protestants, and with his
own hands, from his own palace windows, shot his subjects with his
arquebuss as if they had been wild beasts.

Between Sunday and Tuesday, according to one of the most moderate
calculations, five thousand Parisians of all ranks were murdered. Within
the whole kingdom, the number of victims was variously estimated at from
twenty-five thousand to one hundred thousand. The heart of Protestant
Europe, for an instant, stood still with horror. The Queen of England put
on mourning weeds, and spurned the apologies of the French envoy with
contempt. At Rome, on the contrary, the news of the massacre created a
joy beyond description. The Pope, accompanied by his cardinals, went
solemnly to the church of Saint Mark to render thanks to God for the
grace thus singularly vouchsafed to the Holy See and to all Christendom;
and a Te Deum was performed in presence of the same august assemblage.

But nothing could exceed the satisfaction which the event occasioned in
the mind of Philip the Second. There was an end now of all assistance
from the French government to the Netherland Protestants. "The news of
the events upon Saint Bartholomew's day," wrote the French envoy at
Madrid, Saint Goard, to Charles IX., "arrived on the 7th September. The
King, on receiving the intelligence, showed, contrary to his natural
custom, so much gaiety, that he seemed more delighted than with all the
good fortune or happy incidents which had ever before occurred to him. He
called all his familiars about him in order to assure them that your
Majesty was his good brother, and that no one else deserved the title of
Most Christian. He sent his secretary Cayas to me with his felicitations
upon the event, and with the information that he was just going to Saint
Jerome to render thanks to God, and to offer his prayers