But before I pursue our fortunes farther let me explain.  The room we had guarded so jealously was empty!  The plan had been mine and I was proud of it.  For once Croisette had fallen into his rightful place.  My flight from the gate, the vain attempt to close the house, the barricade before the inner door—­these were all designed to draw the assailants to one spot.  Pavannes and his wife—­the latter hastily disguised as a boy—­had hidden behind the door of the hutch by the gates—­the porter’s hutch, and had slipped out and fled in the first confusion of the attack.

Even the servants, as we learned afterwards, who had hidden themselves in the lower parts of the house got away in the same manner, though some of them—­they were but few in all were stopped as Huguenots and killed before the day ended.  I had the more reason to hope that Pavannes and his wife would get clear off, inasmuch as I had given the Duke’s ring to him, thinking it might serve him in a strait, and believing that we should have little to fear ourselves once clear of his house; unless we should meet the Vidame indeed.

We did not meet him as it turned out; but before we had traversed a quarter of the distance we had to go we found that fears based on reason were not the only terrors we had to resist.  Pavannes’ house, where we had hitherto been, stood at some distance from the centre of the blood-storm which was enwrapping unhappy Paris that morning.  It was several hundred paces from the Rue de Bethisy where the Admiral lived, and what with this comparative remoteness and the excitement of our own little drama, we had not attended much to the fury of the bells, the shots and cries and uproar which proclaimed the state of the city.  We had not pictured the scenes which were happening so near.  Now in the streets the truth broke upon us, and drove the blood from our cheeks.  A hundred yards, the turning of a corner, sufficed.  We who but yesterday left the country, who only a week before were boys, careless as other boys, not recking of death at all, were plunged now into the midst of horrors I cannot describe.  And the awful contrast between the sky above and the things about us!  Even now the lark was singing not far from us; the sunshine was striking the topmost storeys of the houses; the fleecy clouds were passing overhead, the freshness of a summer morning was—­

Ah! where was it?  Not here in the narrow lanes surely, that echoed and re-echoed with shrieks and curses and frantic prayers:  in which bands of furious men rushed up and down, and where archers of the guard and the more cruel rabble were breaking in doors and windows, and hurrying with bloody weapons from house to house, seeking, pursuing, and at last killing in some horrid corner, some place of darkness—­killing with blow on blow dealt on writhing bodies!  Not here, surely, where each minute a child, a woman died silently, a man snarling like a wolf—­happy if he had snatched his weapon and got his back to the wall:  where foul corpses dammed the very blood that ran down the kennel, and children—­little children—­played with them!