Protestantism in France From Death of Francis I to Edict of Nantes - James Aitken Wylie

slaughtered in their bed-rooms and closets, the
assassins bursting open all places of concealment,
and massacring all who opposed their entrance, and
throwing their mangled bodies into the street. The
darkness would have been a cover to some, but the
lights that blazed in the windows denied even this
poor chance of escape to the miserable victims.
The Huguenot as he fled through the street, with
agonized features, and lacking the protection of the
white scarf, was easily recognised, and dispatched
without mercy.
The Louvre was that night the scene of a great
butchery. Some 200 Protestant noblemen and
gentlemen from the provinces had been
accommodated with beds in the palace; and
although the guests of the king, they had no
exemption, but were doomed that night to die with
others. They were aroused after midnight, taken out
one by one, and made to pass between two rows of
halberdiers, who were stationed in the underground
galleries. They were hacked in pieces or poniarded
on their way, and their corpses being carried forth
were horrible to relate, piled in heaps at the gates
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