"Every enormity, every profanation, every atrocious crime, which zeal, revenge, and cruel policy are capable of influencing mankind to commit, stain the dreadful registers of this unhappy period. More than five thousand persons of all ranks perished by various species of deaths. The _Seine_ was loaded with carcases floating on it, and _Charles_ fed his eyes from the windows of the _Louvre_, with this unnatural and abominable spectacle of horror. A butcher who entered the palace during the heat of the massacre, boasted to his sovereign, baring his bloody arm, that he himself had dispatched an hundred and fifty." "_Catherine of Medicis_, the presiding demon, who scattered destruction in so many shapes, was not melted into pity at the view of such complicated and extensive misery; she gazed with savage satisfaction on the head of _Coligni_ which was brought her." _Sully_ only slightly mentions this massacre of which he was notwithstanding an eye-witness, because he was but twelve years of age. _Mezeray_ gives the most circumstantial account of it; he says, "The streets were paved with dead or dying bodies, the _portes-cocheres_, (great gates of the hotels) were stopped up with them, there were heaps of them in the public squares, the street-kennels overflowed with blood, which ran gushing into the river. Six hundred houses were pillaged at different times, and four 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."