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. I was at
Courtas and Ivry, and more than once have seen prisoners led out
to be piked in batches--ay, and by hundreds! But war is war, and
these were its victims, dying for the most part under God's
heaven with arms in their hands: not men and women fresh roused
from their sleep. I felt on those occasions no such horror, I
have never felt such burning pity and indignation as on the
morning I am describing, that long-past summer morning when I
first saw the sun shining on the streets of Paris. Croisette
clung to me, sick and white, shutting his eyes and ears, and