the officers in immediate charge it was intimated that "those of the
new religion" designed "to rise against the king's authority, to the
trouble of his subjects and the city of Paris. For the prevention of
which conspiracy the king enjoined the Provost to possess himself
[127] of the keys of the various city gates, and seize all boats
plying on the river, to the end that none might enter or depart."
And just before the lists close around the doomed, Gaston has bounded
away on his road homeward to the bed of the dying grandfather, after
embracing his wife, anxious, if she might, to share his journey, with
some forecast of coming evil among those dark people.

The white badges of Catholicism had been distributed, not to every
Catholic (a large number of Catholics perished), to some Huguenots
such as La Rochefoucauld, brave guerrier et joyeux compagnon, dear to
Charles, hesitating still with some last word of conscience in his
ear at the very gate of the Louvre, when a random pistol-shot, in the
still undisturbed August night, rousing sudden fear for himself,
precipitates the event, and as if in delirium he is driven forth on
the scent of human blood. He had always hunted like a madman. It
was thus "the matins of Paris" began, in which not religious zealots
only assisted, but the thieves, the wanton, the unemployed, the
reckless children, les enfants massacreurs like those seen dragging
an insulted dead body to the Seine, greed or malice or the desire for
swift settlement of some long-pending law-suit finding here an
opportunity. A religious pretext had brought into sudden evidence
all the latent ferocities of a corrupt though dainty civilisation,
and while the stairways of the Louvre, the streets, [128] the vile
trap-doors of Paris, run blood, far away at Deux-manoirs Gaston
watches as the light creeps over the silent cornfields, the last
sense of it in those aged eyes now ebbing softly away. The village