reach Tavannes they must apply to his riders, for Carlat and the men-servants were confined above. Those riders were grim, brutal men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame, clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris, fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. As we now know.
For it was noon—or a little more—of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth, “a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder.” From the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of Notre Dame—while they lay safe in that locked room, and Tignonville crouched in his haymow—Huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine. On the river bank Spire Niquet, the bookman, was being burnt over a slow fire, fed with his own books. In their houses, Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor—than whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater—were being butchered like sheep; and in the Valley of Misery, now the Quai de la Megisserie, seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being beaten to death with bludgeons. Nay, at this hour—a little sooner or a little later, what matters it?—M. de Tignonville’s own cousin, Madame d’Yverne, the darling of the Louvre the day before, perished in the hands of the mob; and the sister of M. de Taverny, equally ill-fated, died in the same fashion, after being dragged through the streets.
Madame Carlat, then, went not a whit beyond the mark in her argument. But Mademoiselle had made up her mind, and was not to be dissuaded.
“If I am to be Monsieur’s wife,” she said with quivering nostrils, “shall I fear his servants?”
