the 9th and 10th of May, preparing for the morrow’s action without well knowing what it was to be, proposing various plans, collecting arms, and giving instructions to their agents amongst the populace.  An agitation of the same sort prevailed at the Louvre; the king, too, was deliberating with his advisers as to what he should do on the morrow:  Guise would undoubtedly present himself at his morning levee; should he at once rid himself of him by the poniards of the five and forty bravoes which the Duke of Epernon had enrolled in Gascony for his service?  Or would it be best to summon to Paris some troops, French and Swiss, to crush the Parisian rebels and the adventurers that had hurried up from all parts to their aid?  But on the 10th of May, Guise went to the Louvre with four hundred gentlemen well armed with breastplates and weapons under their cloaks.  The king did nothing; no more did Guise.  The two had a long conversation in the queen-mother’s garden; but it led to no result.  On the 11th of May, in the evening, the provost of tradesmen, Hector de Perreuse, assembled the town-council and those of the district-colonels on whom he had reliance to receive the king’s orders.  Orders came to muster the burgher companies of certain districts, and send them to occupy certain positions that had been determined upon.  They mustered slowly and incompletely, and some not at all; and scarcely had they arrived when several left the posts which had been assigned to them.  The king, being informed of this sluggishness, sent for the regiment of the French Guards, and for four thousand Swiss cantoned in the outskirts of Paris; and he himself mounted his horse, on the 12th of May, in the morning, to go and receive them at the gate of St. Honord.  These troops “filed along, without fife or drum, towards the cemetery of the Innocents.”  The populace regarded them as they passed with a feeling of angry curiosity and uneasy amazement.  When all the corps had arrived at the appointed spot, “they put themselves in motion towards different points, now making a great noise with their drums and fifes, which marvellously astonished the inhabitants of the quarter.”  Noise provokes noise.  “In continently,” says L’Estoile, “everybody seizes his arms, goes out on guard in the streets and cantons; in less than no time chains are stretched across and barricades made at the corners of the streets; the mechanic leaves his tools, the tradesman his business, the University their books, the attorneys their bags, the advocates their bands; the presidents and councillors themselves take halberds in hand; nothing is heard but shouts, murmurs, and the seditious speeches that heat and alarm a people.”  The tocsin sounded everywhere; barricades sprang up in the twinkling of an eye; they were made within thirty paces of the Louvre.  The royal troops were hemmed in where they stood, and deprived of the possibility of moving; the Swiss, being attacked, lost fifty men, and surrendered, holding up their chaplets