A list of the Huguenots in Paris had been prepared and all their houses marked. None was spared. Old and young, women and children, were pitilessly butchered. All that awful Sunday the orgy of slaughter and pillage went on; every gate of the city had been closed and the keys brought to the king. Night fell and the carnage was not stayed. Two days yet and two nights the city was a prey to the ministers of death, and some Catholics, denounced by personal enemies, were involved in the massacre. The resplendent August sun, the fair sky and serene atmosphere were held to be a divine augury, and a whitethorn in the cemetery of the Innocents blooming out of season was hailed as a miracle and a visible token from God that the Catholic religion was to blossom again by the destruction of the Huguenots. A famous professor at the university was flung out of a window by the scholars, his body insulted and dragged in the mud. The murders did not wholly cease until 17th September. Various were the estimates of the slain--20,000, 5,000, 2,000. A goldsmith named Cruce went about displaying his robust arm and boasting that he had accounted for 400 Huguenots. The streets, the front of the Louvre, the public places were blocked by dead bodies; tumbrils[113] were hired to throw them into the Seine, which literally for days ran red with blood. The princes of Navarre and Condé saw the privacy of their chambers violated by a posse of archers on St. Bartholomew's morning; they were forced to dress and were haled before the king, who, with a fierce look and glaring eyes, swore at them, reproached them for waging war upon him, and ordered them to change their religion. On their refusal he grew furious with rage, and by dint of threats wrung from them a promise to go to mass. [Illustration: THE LOUVRE--GALERIE D'APOLLON.] Charles is said to have stood at a window in the Petite Galerie of the Louvre and to have fired across the river with a long arquebus on some Huguenots who, being lodged on the southern side, had escaped massacre, and were riding up to learn what was passing. The statement is much canvassed by authorities. It is at least permissible to doubt the assertion, since the first floor[114] of the Petite Galerie, where the king is traditionally believed to have placed himself, was not in existence before the time of Henry IV. If the ground floor be meant, a further difficulty arises from the fact that the southern end was not furnished with a window in Charles IX.'s time.