The transition and relief were so wonderful that I shall never forget them.  I gazed on the wide landscape before me, lying quiet and peaceful in the sunlight, and could scarce believe in my happiness.  I drew the fresh air into my lungs, I threw up my sheathed sword and caught it again in a frenzy of delight, while the gloomy men about me smiled at my enthusiasm.  I felt the horse beneath me move once more like a thing of life.  No enchanter with his wand, not Merlin nor Virgil, could have made a greater change in my world, than had the captain of the gate with his simple key!  Or so it seemed to me in the first moments of freedom, and escape—­of removal from those loathsome streets.

I looked back at Paris—­at the cloud of smoke which hung over the towers and roofs; and it seemed to me the canopy of hell itself.  I fancied that my head still rang with the cries and screams and curses, the sounds of death.  In very fact, I could hear the dull reports of firearms near the Louvre, and the jangle of the bells.  Country-folk were congregated at the cross-roads, and in the villages, listening and gazing; asking timid questions of the more good-natured among us, and showing that the rumour of the dreadful work doing in the town had somehow spread abroad.  And this though I learned afterwards that the keys of the city had been taken the night before to the king, and that, except a party with the Duke of Guise, who had left at eight in pursuit of Montgomery and some of the Protestants—­lodgers, happily for themselves, in the Faubourg St. Germain—­no one had left the town before ourselves.

While I am speaking of our departure from Paris, I may say what I have to say of the dreadful excesses of those days, ay, and of the following days; excesses of which France is now ashamed, and for which she blushed even before the accession of his late Majesty.  I am sometimes asked, as one who witnessed them, what I think, and I answer that it was not our country which was to blame.  A something besides Queen Catharine de’ Medici had been brought from Italy forty years before, a something invisible but very powerful; a spirit of cruelty and treachery.  In Italy it had done small harm.  But grafted on French daring and recklessness, and the rougher and more soldierly manners of the north, this spirit of intrigue proved capable of very dreadful things.  For a time, until it wore itself out, it was the curse of France.  Two Dukes of Guise, Francis and Henry, a cardinal of Guise, the Prince of Conde, Admiral Coligny, King Henry the Third all these the foremost men of their day—­died by assassination within little more than a quarter of a century, to say nothing of the Prince of Orange, and King Henry the Great.