"Many of the wretched victims fled to the water-side, and some swam over the Seine to the suburbs of St. Germaine. The king saw them from his window, which looked upon the river, and fired upon them with a carbine that had been loaded for that purpose by one of his pages; while the queen-mother, undisturbed and serene in the midst of slaughter, looking down from a balcony, encouraged the murderers and laughed at the dying groans of the slaughtered. This barbarous queen was fired with a restless ambition, and she perpetually shifted her party in order to satiate it. "Some days after this horrid transaction, the French court endeavoured to palliate it by forms of law. They pretended to justify the massacre by a calumny, and accused the admiral of a conspiracy, which no one believed. The parliament was commanded to proceed against the memory of Coligni; and his dead body was hung in chains on Montfaucon gallows. The king himself went to view this shocking spectacle; when one of his courtiers advising him to retire, and complaining of the stench of the corpse, he replied, 'A dead enemy smells well.'--The massacres on St. Bartholomew's day are painted in the royal saloon of the Vatican at Rome, with the following inscription: _Pontifex_ Coligni _necem probat_, i. e. 'The pope approves of Coligni's death.' "The young king of Navarre was spared through policy, rather than from the pity of the queen-mother, she keeping him prisoner till the king's death, in order that he might be as a security and pledge for the submission of such protestants as might effect their escape. "This horrid butchery was not confined merely to the city of Paris. The like orders were issued from court to the governors of all the provinces in France; so that, in a week's time, about one hundred thousand protestants were cut to pieces in different parts of the kingdom! Two or three governors only refused to obey the king's orders. One of these, named Montmorrin, governor of Auvergne, wrote the king the following letter, which deserves to be transmitted to the latest posterity. "SIRE--I have received an order, under your majesty's seal, to put to death all the protestants in my province. I have too much respect for your majesty, not to believe the letter a forgery; but if (which God forbid) the order should be genuine, I have too much respect for your majesty to obey it." At Rome the horrid joy was so great, that they appointed a day of high festival, and a jubilee, with great indulgence to all who kept it and showed every expression of gladness they could devise! and the man who first carried the news received 1000 crowns of the cardinal of Lorrain for his ungodly message. The king also commanded the day to be kept with every demonstration of joy, concluding now that the whole race of Huguenots was extinct.