of the castle.  After having been subjected, in the course of three centuries, at one time to oblivion and at others to divers transferences, these sad relics of a great man, a great Christian, and a great patriot, have been resting, for the last two and twenty years, in the very castle of Chatillon-sur-Loing, his ancestors’ own domain having once more become the property of a relative of his family, the Duke of Luxembourg, to whom Count Anatole de Montesquiou transferred them, and who, in 1851, had them sealed up in a bit of wall in ruins, at the foot of an old tower, under the site of the bed-chamber of the Duchesses of Chatillon, where, in all probability, Coligny was born.  The more tardy the homage, the greater.

The actual murderers of Coligny, the real projectors of the St. Bartholomew, Catherine de’ Medici and her son the Duke of Anjou, at the very moment when they had just ordered the massacre, were seized with affright at the first sound of their crime.  The Duke of Anjou finishes his story with this page “After but two hours’ rest during the night, just as the day was beginning to break, the king, the queen my mother, and I went to the frontal of the Louvre, adjoining the tennis-court, into a room which looks upon the area of the stable-yard, to see the commencement of the work.  We had not been there long when, as we were weighing the issues and the consequence of so great an enterprise, on which, sooth to say, we had up to that time scarcely bestowed a thought, we heard a pistol-shot fired.  I could not say in what spot, or whether it knocked over anybody; but well know I that the sound wounded all three of us so deeply in spirit that it knocked over our senses and judgment, stricken with terror and apprehension at the great troubles which were then about to set in.  To prevent them, we sent a gentleman at once and with all haste to M. de Guise, to tell him and command him expressly from us to retire into his quarters, and be very careful to take no steps against the admiral, this single command putting a stop to everything else, because it had been determined that in no spot in the city should any steps be taken until, as a preliminary, the admiral had been killed.  But soon afterwards the gentleman returning told us that M. de Guise had answered him that the command came too late, that the admiral was dead, and the work was begun throughout the rest of the city.  So we went back to our original determination, and let ourselves follow the thread and the course of the enterprise.”

The enterprise, in fact, followed its thread and natural course without its being in the power of anybody to arrest or direct it.  It had been absolutely necessary to give information of it the evening before to the provost of tradesmen of Paris, Le Charron, president in the court of taxation (Board of Excise), and to the chief men of the city.  According to Brantome, “they made great difficulties and imported conscience into the matter; but M. de Tavannes,