‘You followed him here! Into the apartments of Her Majesty! It will be well for you if you make yourself scarce at once before Her Majesty has time to note your evil faces.’

‘Shall we take the heretic, sir? He is making a mess in the lady’s bedchamber.’

Margot said haughtily: ‘I will deal with him. You have heard what Monsieur de Nançay said. You will be wise to go at once.’

When they had gone, reluctant and almost sheepish, de Nançay’s lips began to twitch.

‘You will help me to get this man into my ruelle, Monsieur,’ said Margot coldly. ‘And while you do so perhaps you will tell me why you are amused at your low soldiers’ daring to insult me.’

‘Madame, Your Majesty’s pardon,’ said de Nançay, lifting the semi-conscious man in his arms, ‘but Your Majesty’s kindness is well known, and if I seemed to smile, it was because I was thinking that this man might have heard of it.’

‘Take him to my ruelle at once.’

‘Madame, he is a Huguenot.’

‘What of that?’

‘The King’s orders are that no Huguenot shall survive this night.’

She stared at him in horror. ‘My . . . husband? His . . . friends?’

‘Your husband will be safe, together with the Prince of Condé.’

Now she understood the meaning of the terrible noises in the streets below. She was nauseated. She hated bloodshed. They were all concerned in this—her mother, her brothers . . . her lover.

De Nancay spoke gently to her. ‘I will take this man away, Madame. He shall not defile, your chamber further with his blood.’

But Margot shook her head. ‘You will obey me, Monsieur, and take him to my ruelle.’

‘But, Madame, I beg of you to remember the King’s orders.’

‘I am not accustomed to having my orders disobeyed,’ she said. ‘Take him in there at once. And, Monsieur de Nancay, you will tell none that he is here. And you will obey me, or I will never forgive your insolence of this night.’

De Nançay very gallant and Margot was very charming. What, he asked himself, was, one Huguenot among thousands?

‘I promise you, Madame,’ he said, ‘that none shall know you keep him here.’

He laid the man on the black satin-covered couch, while Margot called to her women to bring her ointments and bandages; she had been a pupil of Paré’s was more skilled than most in the use of these things. Tenderly she bathed and bandaged the wounds, and, as She did so, determined that here was at least one Huguenot who should not die.


* * *

The Duc de la Rochefoucauld had been sleeping soundly, a smile on his fresh young face; but he had awakened suddenly, and was not sure what had awakened him. He had dreamed he was at a masque, the noisiest masque he had ever known, and the King was calling to him not to leave his side. He heard the voice distinctly: “Foucauld. ‘Foucauld, do not go tonight.’

What noise there must be in the streets tonight! It was as bad as it had been during the wedding celebrations. It would be well when all the visitors had gone back to their homes. But these were strange noises. Bells at this hour? Screams? Shouts? Cries?

He turned over and tried to stop up his ears.

But the noise would not be shut out. It came nearer. It seemed as though it were in his own house.

He was right. It was. The door was flung suddenly open. Someone was in his room; several people seemed to have called on him.

He was fully awake now that they had parted his bed-curtains.

He grinned. He thought he understood. This was why the King had advised him to stay in the palace. Here was the King with his merry followers prepared to play that game of beating his friends. In a moment he would hear the voice of the King. ‘Your turn tonight, ‘Foucauld. Do not blame me. I asked you to stay in the palace.’

‘Come on!’ he cried. ‘I am ready.’

A dark figure with a white cross in his hat had darted forward and de la Rochefoucauld felt the sharp pain of a dagger. Others closed in on him and he saw the gleam of their weapons.

‘Die . . . heretic!’ said one; and Rochefoucauld, the favourite of the King, lay back moaning, while his life-blood stained the bedclothes a vivid scarlet.


* * *

Now that the massacre was in full swing, Catherine’s fear had left her. It was apparent that the Huguenots had been taken completely by surprise and that there was no danger of serious retaliation. She was safe; her family was safe; and she would have the best possible news for Philip of Spain, to counterbalance that unpleasant pill, the Huguenot marriage of her daughter; and this marriage, the gloomy monarch would readily see, had been a necessity, a bait to catch his enemies in one big trap. She had kept her word; the promise she had made to Alva at Bayonne was fulfilled. Now she could rest, assured of her temporary safety in an unsafe world; for temporary safety was the best for which she could hope.

The head of Coligny had been brought to her, and she, surrounded by members of her Flying Squadron, had gloated over it.

‘How different the Admiral looks without his body!’ said one of those cynical young women.

‘But death has somewhat impaired his beauty!’ tempered another.

‘Ah, my big salmon!’ cried Catherine exultantly. ‘You were hard to catch, but now you will give us no further trouble.’

She was laughing, and her women noticed that the excitement made her look years younger. She was as energetic as ever, remembering those who must die tonight, mentally ticking them off as news of their deaths was brought to her. ‘Ah, another name to cross off my list!’ she would cry. ‘My red list!’

Trophies were brought to her. ‘A finger of Monsieur de Téligny, which was all the mob would let us have, Madame.’

‘A little part of Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld . . . for one of your ladies who did so admire him.’

There was ribald laughter and many a joke between the women, for some had known the victims very well indeed. There was great hilarity when the mutilated body of a certain Soubise was brought in, for this gentleman’s wife had sued him for a divorce on account of his impotency. The Escadron Volant amused its mistress with its clowning over his body.

Catherine, watching them, burst into loud laughter which was largely the laughter of relief.


* * *

Through the streets rode the Duke of Guise accompanied by Angoulême, Montpensier and Tavannes, urging the excited Catholics to fresh slaughter. They were determined that no Huguenot should survive.

‘It is the wish of the King!’ cried Guise. ‘It is the command of the King. Kill all heretics. Let not one of these vipers live another hour.’

Not that such exhortation was necessary. The bloodlust was rampant. How simple to wipe off old scores; for who would doubt that Monsieur So-and-So—a business rival—was a Huguenot in secret, or that the too-fascinating Mademoiselle Such-and-Such who had been receiving the attention of another’s husband, had been a convert to ‘The Religion’?

Ramus, the famous Greek scholar and teacher, was dragged from his bed and put to lingering death. ‘He is a heretic. He has been practising heresy in secret!’ was the cry of the jealous scholar who had long coveted the professorial chair of Ramus.

There was rape and brutality in plenty that night. It was so simple to commit the crime and kill afterwards, to leave no evidence of villainy. Bewildered Huguenots, running for shelter to the Admiral’s house or the Hôtel de Bourbon, were shot down or run through with swords. They lay where they fell, dead and dying heaped together.

Tavannes cried: let them bleed, my friends. The doctors say that bleeding is as beneficial in August as in May.’

Priests walked the streets, carrying swords in one hand, crucifixes in the other, making it a solemn duty to visit those quarters where there was a falling-off of bloodshed, a lack of enthusiasm to kill.

‘The Virgin and the saints watch you, my friends. Your victims are an offering to Our Lady who receives it with joy. Kill . . . and win eternal joy. Death to the heretic!’

The trunk of Coligny was being dragged through the streets, naked and mutilated. No obscenity was too vile, no insult too degraded to be played on the greatest man of his times. Finally, the remains of the Admiral were roasted over a slow fire, and the mob surrounding the spectacle, screaming and shouting at each other like the savages they had become, laughed at the sight of the distorted flesh, jocularly commented on its odour as it burned.

Men and women were murdered in their beds during that night of terror; heads and limbs severed from their bodies, fell from the windows. Nor were babies spared.

Lambon, the Catholic reader to the King, as great a bigot as lived in Paris at that time, on witnessing the horrible death of Ramus the scholar, was overcome by horror and died of the shock.

‘I cannot tell you what happened on that night,’ said an old Catholic in writing to another. ‘The very paper itself would weep, if I wrote upon it all I have seen.’

The poor King was lost in his madness. He could smell blood; he could see it flow. He stood at the windows of his apartments, shouting to the murderers, urging them to commit more horrible atrocities.

When he saw men and women trying to get into a boat which had been overlooked and was moored on the banks of the Seine, he himself fired at them and, missing, was in a raging frenzy lest they should escape; he called his guards and ordered them to shoot the people, and he laughed with glee when he saw the boat capsize and heard the cries of the victims as they sank in the bloodstained water.