Henry of Navarre had his suspicions aroused; but though he was well aware of the utter depravity of Catherine and Charles, he knew not where the blow would fall. The young bride of Henry had not been informed of this vile plot, and when about to retire to her apartments in the palace, her sister Claude, who knew of the coming danger, tried to detain her lest she might suffer harm. Catherine sternly rebuked her daughter, and bade her be silent. But Claude still held Margaret by the arm, and said to Catherine, “It is a shame to send her to be sacrificed, for if anything is discovered, they (meaning the Catholics) will be sure to avenge themselves upon her.” But the fiend-like Catherine, preferring that her own child should risk danger and perhaps death, rather than that her hellish work should be thwarted, replied:— “No harm will befall the queen of Navarre, and it is my pleasure that she retire to her own apartments, lest her absence should create suspicion.” Henry, Prince of Joinville, who now held the title of the Duke of Guise, was to be the chief leader of this infernal massacre. He had ordered the tocsin, the signal for the massacre, to be tolled at two o’clock in the morning. Meanwhile Catherine and Charles watched in one of the apartments of the Louvre for the fatal knell. Charles was wildly excited. And at last, his mother fearing that his determination to carry out this night’s hellish work was wavering, she urged him to send a servant at once to sound the alarm. Charles hesitated, and a cold sweat covered his forehead. For with all his depravity he had still remaining a slight spark of humanity; but the fiend incarnate, his shameful mother, tauntingly exclaimed: “Are you a coward?” Whereupon the tortured king cried, “Well, then begin.” And so upon the early morning air of a calm Sabbath, Aug. 24, 1572, the direful tocsin pealed forth its death-doom; and at this signal armed men rushed forth into the streets shouting, “_Vive Dieu et le roi!_” The awful carnage which followed is known in history as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, because it occurred upon the anniversary of a festival in honor of St. Bartholomew, which had long been celebrated. As the solemn dirge from the steeple rang out upon the air, the king stood at the window of the palace trembling in every limb, but the demoniacal Catherine was aroused to a frenzy of delight. The first victim was the wounded Coligni. The Duke of Guise with three hundred soldiers hastened to the lodgings of the admiral, and the gates were forced and the assassins entered the sick man’s chamber. Helpless, and abandoned by his frightened servants, he was brutally butchered, and his bleeding body was thrown out of the window at the command of the Duke of Guise, who desired to look upon his dead enemy. Giving the mangled corpse a kick in the face, the duke exclaimed: “Courage, comrades, we have happily begun. Let us now go for others. The king commands it.”