de Tavannes had been opposed to it; and it was decided to spare them.  On the very night of the St. Bartholomew, the king sent for them both.  “I mean for the future,” said he, “to have but one religion in my kingdom; the mass or death; make your choice.”  Henry of Navarre reminded the king of his promises, and asked for time to consider; Henry de Conde “answered that he would remain firm in the true religion though he should have to give up his life for it.”  “Seditious madman, rebel, and son of a rebel,” said Charles, “if within three days you do not change your language, I will have you strangled.”  At this first juncture, the king saved from the massacre none but his surgeon, Ambrose Pare, and his nurse, both Huguenots; on the very night after the murder of Coligny, he sent for Ambrose Pare into his chamber, and made him go into his wardrobe, says Brantome, “ordering him not to stir, and saying that it was not reasonable that one who was able to be of service to a whole little world should be thus massacred.”  A few days afterwards, “Now,” said the king to Pare, “you really must be a Catholic.”  “By God’s light,” answered Pars, “I think you must surely remember, sir, to have promised me, in order that I might never disobey you, never, on the other hand, to bid me do four things—­find my way back into my mother’s womb, catch myself fighting in a battle, leave your service, or go to mass.”  After a moment’s silence Charles rejoined, “Ambrose, I don’t know what has come over me for the last two or three days, but I feel my mind and my body greatly excited, in fact, just as if I had a fever; meseems every moment, just as much waking as sleeping, that those massacred corpses keep appearing to me with their faces all hideous and covered with blood.  I wish the helpless and the innocent had not been included.”  “And in consequence of the reply made to him,” adds Sully in his (Economies royales t. i. p. 244, in the Petitot collection), “he next day issued his orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering; the which were, nevertheless, very ill observed, the animosities and fury of the populace being too much inflamed to defer to them.”

The historians, Catholic or Protestant, contemporary or researchful, differ widely as to the number of the victims in this cruel massacre; according to De Thou, there were about two thousand persons killed in Paris the first day; D’Aubigne says three thousand; Brantome speaks of four thousand bodies that Charles IX. might have seen floating down the Seine; La Popeliniere reduces them to one thousand.  There is to be found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot, Auteuil, and St. Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river.  The uncertainty is still greater when one comes to