towers and roofs; and it seemed to me the canopy of hell itself.
I fancied that my head still rang with the cries and screams and
curses, the sounds of death. In very fact, I could hear the dull
reports of firearms near the Louvre, and the jangle of the bells.
Country-folk were congregated at the cross-roads, and in the
villages, listening and gazing; asking timid questions of the
more good-natured among us, and showing that the rumour of the
dreadful work doing in the town had somehow spread abroad. And
this though I learned afterwards that the keys of the city had
been taken the night before to the king, and that, except a party
with the Duke of Guise, who had left at eight in pursuit of
Montgomery and some of the Protestants--lodgers, happily for
themselves, in the Faubourg St. Germain--no one had left the town
before ourselves.

While I am speaking of our departure from Paris, I may say what I
have to say of the dreadful excesses of those days, ay, and of
the following days; excesses of which France is now ashamed, and
for which she blushed even before the accession of his late
Majesty. I am sometimes asked, as one who witnessed them, what I
think, and I answer that it was not our country which was to
blame. A something besides Queen Catharine de' Medici had been
brought from Italy forty years before, a something invisible but
very powerful; a spirit of cruelty and treachery. In Italy it
had done small harm. But grafted on French daring and
recklessness, and the rougher and more soldierly manners of the
north, this spirit of intrigue proved capable of very dreadful
things. For a time, until it wore itself out, it was the curse
of France. Two Dukes of Guise, Francis and Henry, a cardinal of
Guise, the Prince of Conde, Admiral Coligny, King Henry the Third