It was during the festivities which succeeded the marriage of the King of Navarre that Coligny was murdered, and the signal for the horrid slaughter of St. Bartholomew was given. At midnight, August 23, 1572, the great bell at the Hotel de Ville began to toll; torches were placed in the windows, chains were drawn across the streets, and armed bodies collected around the hotels. The doors of the houses were broken open, and neither age, condition, nor sex was spared, of such as were not distinguished by a white cross in the hat. The massacre at Paris was followed by one equally brutal in the provinces. Seventy thousand people were slain in cold blood. The King of Navarre and the Prince of Conde only escaped in consequence of their relationship with the king, and by renouncing the Protestant religion. Most of the European courts expressed their detestation of this foulest crime in the history of religious bigotry; but the pope went in grand procession to his cathedral, and ordered a _Te Deum_ to be sung in commemoration of an event which steeped his cause in infamy to the end of time. The Protestants, though nearly exterminated, again rallied, and the King of Navarre and his cousin the Prince of Conde escaped, renounced the religion which had been forced on them by fear of death, and prosecuted a bloody civil war, with the firm resolution of never abandoning it until religious liberty was guarantied. Meanwhile, Charles IX. died, as it was supposed, by poison. His last hours were wretched, and his remorse for the massacre of St. Bartholomew filled his soul with agony. He beheld spectres, and dreamed horrid dreams; his imagination constantly saw heaps of livid bodies, and his ears were assailed with imaginary groans. He became melancholy and ferocious, while his kingdom became the prey of factions and insurrections. But he was a timid and irresolute king, and was but the tool of his infamous mother, the grand patroness of assassins, against whom, on his death bed, he cautioned the king of Navarre. [Sidenote: Henry III.--Henry IV.]