6.  Catherine’s Policy.—­Catherine made use of the suspension of arms to try to detach the Huguenot leaders, by entangling them in the pleasures of the court and lowering their sense of duty.  The court was studiously brilliant.  Catherine surrounded herself with a bevy of ladies, called the Queen-Mother’s Squadron, whose amusements were found for the whole day.  The ladies sat at their tapestry frames, while Italian poetry and romance was read or love-songs sung by the gentlemen; they had garden games and hunting-parties, with every opening for the ladies to act as sirens to any whom the queen wished to detach from the principles of honour and virtue, and bind to her service.  Balls, pageants, and theatricals followed in the evening, and there was hardly a prince or noble in France who was not carried away by these seductions into darker habits of profligacy.  Jeanne of Navarre dreaded them for her son Henry, whom she kept as long as possible under training in religion, learning, and hardy habits, in the mountains of Bearn; and when Catherine tried to draw him to court by proposing a marriage between him and her youngest daughter Margaret, Jeanne left him at home, and went herself to court.  Catherine tried in vain to bend her will or discover her secrets, and her death, early in 1572, while still at court, was attributed to the queen-mother.

7.  Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572).—­Jeanne’s son Henry was immediately summoned to conclude the marriage, and came attended by all the most distinguished Huguenots, though the more wary of them remained at home, and the Baron of Rosny said, “If that wedding takes place the favours will be crimson.”  The Duke of Guise seems to have resolved on taking this opportunity of revenging himself for his father’s murder, but the queen-mother was undecided until she found that her son Charles, who had been bidden to cajole and talk over the Huguenot chiefs, had been attracted by their honesty and uprightness, and was ready to throw himself into their hands, and escape from hers.  An abortive attempt on Guise’s part to murder the Admiral Coligny led to all the Huguenots going about armed, and making demonstrations which alarmed both the queen and the people of Paris.  Guise and the Duke of Anjou were, therefore, allowed to work their will, and to rouse the bloodthirstiness of the Paris mob.  At midnight of the 24th of August, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s night, the bell of the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois began to ring, and the slaughter was begun by men distinguished by a white sleeve.  The king sheltered his Huguenot surgeon and nurse in his room.  The young King of Navarre and Prince of Conde were threatened into conforming to the Church, but every other Huguenot who could be found was massacred, from Coligny, who was slain kneeling in his bedroom by the followers of Guise, down to the poorest and youngest, and the streets resounded with the cry, “Kill! kill!” In every city where royal troops and Guisard partisans