Imagining every one must be as fond of blood as himself, he used to conduct the young king and queen to the ramparts, or to the windows, to witness the executions,[124] pointing out the most illustrious of the victims and mocking at their agony. As they died almost all of them with firmness and serenity, he bade Francis II. “look at those insolent men, whom even death can not subdue. What would they not do with you, if they were your masters?” One afternoon, for these executions usually took place after dinner, for the amusement of the court, the Duchess of Guise was present, but she could not endure the ghastly spectacle. She nearly fainted away, and entering all pale and trembling into the queen-mother’s closet, she exclaimed: “Oh, madame, what horrors! I fear that a curse will come upon our house, and the innocent blood rest upon our heads!” The Duke of Longueville, who had been invited to Amboise, stayed away under pretext of illness, but sent one of his gentlemen to make his excuses. Guise was at table when the messenger arrived, and took advantage of the opportunity to strike terror into the duke and all who opposed the Lorraine faction. “Tell your master I am very well,” he said, “and report to him the viands in which I indulge.” At the word a tall, fine-looking man was brought in, a rope was immediately put round his neck, and he was hanged to a bar of the window before the eyes of the astonished gentleman.[125] Whatever may have been the temporary success procured by this ferocious victory, it disappointed the expectations of the Guises.[126] The moral world is so constituted that crime sooner or later works out its own punishment. “The butchers,” as the two Lorraine brothers were called, had converted their victims into martyrs, and all over France a feeling of resistance began to spring up that could not fail ere long to have a violent termination. Most of those who suffered at Amboise were of the Reformed religion; but there were others of the old faith who joined the conspiracy out of dislike to the duke and the cardinal, and who now began to think that no hope remained except in their swords. In the market-place of Amboise, where most of the victims had been put to death, Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigné was sworn, like young Hannibal, to avenge the cause of his party. The elder D’Aubigné was taking the boy to Paris, and passing through Amboise one fair-time, he saw the ghastly heads of the conspirators still grinning horribly on the walls and gates. Moved with indignation, he spurred his horse into the midst of the assembled crowd, exclaiming: “The murderers! they have beheaded France.” Being recognized as a Calvinist, he had to ride for his life, and when he was out of danger he touched his son’s right hand: “My boy,” he said, “do not spare your head to avenge the heads of those honorable gentlemen. If you do, your father’s curse be upon you.” Young Theodore never forgot this lesson, and his life was one long heroic, if