Thus did Henry IV. and the Prince de Condé escape death, unknown to, and contrary to the express orders of Catherine. Without, Paris is a charnel-house. The streets are choked up by murdered Huguenots. Carts and litters full of dead bodies, huddled together in a hideous medley, rumble along the rough causeways, to be shot into the Seine. The river runs red with blood; its current is dammed up with corpses. But the Court is merry. Catherine triumphs. Her ladies--_la petite bande de la Reine_--go forth and pick their way in the gory mud, to scrutinise the dead, piled in heaps against the walls and in the courts of the Louvre, to recognise friends or lovers. On the 6th September the news of the massacre reaches Rome by letters from the Nuncio. Gregory XIII. commands solemn masses and thanksgivings to God for the event. The cannon of St. Angelo booms over the papal city; _feux de joie_ are fired in the principal streets; a medal is struck; a jubilee is published; a legate is sent into France; a procession, in which the Pope, Cardinals, and Ministers to the See of Rome appear, visit the great Basilicas; the Cardinal de Lorraine, uncle to the Balafré, then at Rome, is present, and in the name of his master, Charles IX., congratulates his Holiness on the efficacy of his prayers these _seventeen years past_ for the destruction of heretics. Blood calls for blood![16] Charles IX., whose royal mandate authorised the massacre (which lasted seven days and seven nights), falls sick two years after at the Castle of Vincennes. “I know not what has befallen me,” he says to his surgeon, Ambrose Paré; “my mind and body both burn with fever. Asleep or awake, I see the mangled Huguenots pass before me. They drip with blood; they make hideous faces at me; they point to their open wounds and mock me. Holy Virgin! I wish, Paré, I had spared the old and the infirm and the infants at the breasts.” Aged twenty-four, Charles died, abhorring the mother whose counsels had led him to this execrable deed--abhorring her so intensely that he could not even bear her in his sight. In her place he called for the King of Navarre, and confided to him his last wishes. He died, poor misguided youth, piously thanking God that he left no children. The blood actually oozed from the pores of his skin. His cries and screams were horrible. Thus another King of France passed into the world of spirits, bringing Henry of Navarre one step nearer the throne. Charles, according to the prediction of Ruggiero, had died young, bathed in his own blood. And Catherine? Calm, undaunted, still handsome, she inaugurated a new reign--that of her third and best beloved son, Henri, Duc d’Anjou and King of Poland, popularly known by the style and title of Henry III., “_by the favour of his mother inert King of France_.” CHAPTER XXI. THE END OF CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI.