[Illustration:  Death of La Renaudie——­283]

The young king was, nevertheless, according to what appears, somewhat troubled at all this uproar and at the language of the conspirators.  “I don’t know how it is,” said he sometimes to the Guises, “but I hear it said that people are against you only.  I wish you could be away from here for a time, that we might see whether it is you or I that they are against.”  But the Guises set about removing this idea by telling the king that neither he nor his brothers would live one hour after their departure, and “that the house of Bourbon were only seeking how to exterminate the king’s house.”  The caresses of the young queen Mary Stuart were enlisted in support of these assertions of her uncles.  They made a cruel use of their easy victory “for a whole month,” according to contemporary chronicles, “there was nothing but hanging or drowning folks.  The Loire was covered with corpses strung, six, eight, ten, and fifteen, to long poles. . . .”  “What was strange to see,” says Regnier de la Planche, “and had never been wont under any form of government, they were led out to execution without having any sentence pronounced against them publicly, or having the cause of their death declared, or having their names mentioned.  They of the Guises reserved the chief of them, after dinner, to make sport for the ladies; the two sexes were ranged at the windows of the castle, as if it were a question of seeing some mummery played.  And what is worse, the king and his young brothers were present at these spectacles, as if the desire were to ‘blood’ them; the sufferers were pointed out to them by the Cardinal of Lorraine with all the signs of a man greatly rejoiced, and when the poor wretches died with more than usual firmness, he would say, ’See, sir, what brazenness and madness; the fear of death cannot abate their pride and felonry.  What would they do, then, if they had you in their clutches?’”

It was too much vengeance to take and too much punishment to inflict for a danger so short-lived and so strictly personal.  So hideous was the spectacle that the Duchess of Guise, Anne d’Este, daughter of Renee of France, Duchess of Ferrara, took her departure one day, saying, as she did so, to Catherine de’ Medici, “Ah! madame, what a whirlwind of hatred is gathering about the heads of my poor children!” There was, throughout a considerable portion of the country, a profound feeling of indignation against the Guises.  One of their victims, Villemongey, just as it came to his turn to die, plunged his hands into his comrades’ blood, saying, “Heavenly Father, this is the blood of Thy children:  Thou wilt avenge it!” John d’Aubigne, a nobleman of Saintonge, as he passed through Amboise one market-day with his son, a little boy eight years old, stopped before the heads fixed upon the posts, and said to the child, “My boy, spare not thy head, after mine, to avenge these brave chiefs; if thou spare thyself, thou shalt have my curse upon thee.”  The Chancellor Olivier himself, for a long while devoted to the Guises, but now seriously ill and disquieted about the future of his soul, said to himself, quite low, as he saw the Cardinal of Lorraine, from whom he had just received a visit, going out, “Ah! cardinal, you are getting us all damned!”