We did not meet him as it turned out; but before we had traversed
a quarter of the distance we had to go we found that fears based
on reason were not the only terrors we had to resist. Pavannes'
house, where we had hitherto been, stood at some distance from
the centre of the blood-storm which was enwrapping unhappy Paris
that morning. It was several hundred paces from the Rue de
Bethisy where the Admiral lived, and what with this comparative
remoteness and the excitement of our own little drama, we had not
attended much to the fury of the bells, the shots and cries and
uproar which proclaimed the state of the city. We had not
pictured the scenes which were happening so near. Now in the
streets the truth broke upon us, and drove the blood from our
cheeks. A hundred yards, the turning of a corner, sufficed. We
who but yesterday left the country, who only a week before were
boys, careless as other boys, not recking of death at all, were
plunged now into the midst of horrors I cannot describe. And the
awful contrast between the sky above and the things about us!
Even now the lark was singing not far from us; the sunshine was
striking the topmost storeys of the houses; the fleecy clouds
were passing overhead, the freshness of a summer morning was--
Ah! where was it? Not here in the narrow lanes surely, that
echoed and re-echoed with shrieks and curses and frantic prayers:
in which bands of furious men rushed up and down, and where
archers of the guard and the more cruel rabble were breaking in
doors and windows, and hurrying with bloody weapons from house to
house, seeking, pursuing, and at last killing in some horrid
corner, some place of darkness--killing with blow on blow dealt
on writhing bodies! Not here, surely, where each minute a child,
a woman died silently, a man snarling like a wolf--happy if he
had snatched his weapon and got his back to the wall: where foul
corpses dammed the very blood that ran down the kennel, and
children--little children--played with them!
I was at Cahors in 1580 in the great street fight; and there
women were killed, I was with Chatillon nine years later, when he
rode through the Faubourgs of Paris, with this very day and his
father Coligny in his mind, and gave no quarter.
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