“Well, then,” replied Charles, petulantly, “since you approve the murder of the admiral, I am content. But let all the Huguenots also fall, that there may not be one left to reproach me.” While the young king of Navarre was by the bedside of his wounded friend, the Admiral Coligni, recounting to him the assurances of faith and honor given by Catherine and Charles IX., these two were in secret council, debating whether this Henry, the newly-made husband of the daughter of one and the sister of the other, should be included in the dreadful doom appointed for the Protestants. It was at length decided that his life should be spared, but that he should be kept in a kind of imprisonment, and that he should be forced to abjure his Protestant faith. The young Duke of Guise was to take the lead of this terrible carnage. As he believed that Coligni was a party to the murder of his father, some years before, he determined that he should be the first victim of this awful night. He had issued secret orders for all the Catholics “to wear a white cross on the hat, and to bind a piece of white cloth around the arm,” that they might be thus distinguished in the darkness of the night. The alarm-bell in the tower of the Palace of Justice was to toll the dire signal for the indiscriminate massacre of the Protestants. The conspiracy extended throughout the provinces of France. Men, women, and children were to be cut down without mercy. “The storm was to burst at the same moment upon the unsuspecting victims in every city and village of the kingdom. Beacon-fires, with their lurid midnight glare, were to flash the tidings from mountain to mountain. The peal of alarm was to ring along from steeple to steeple, from city to hamlet, from valley to hillside, till the whole Catholic population should be aroused to obliterate every vestige of Protestantism from the land.” While Catherine and Charles were arranging every detail of this monstrous crime, they lavished the warmest and most flattering attention upon the Protestant generals and nobles, whom they had lured within their insidious power. The very day before that dreadful night Charles entertained many of the most illustrious of the doomed guests at a sumptuous feast in the Louvre, and detained them in the palace all night by the most courteous and pressing invitations to accept his hospitality.