That night precautions were taken.  All the guards were doubled around the palace and through the streets.  The Hotel de Ville and the Place de la Greve were made secure, and the whole city was filled with troops.  But the Place Maubert was left unguarded, and a rabble rout—­all night long—­was collecting in that distant spot.  Four companies of burgher-guards went over to the League at three o’clock in the morning.  The rest stood firm in the cemetery of the Innocents, awaiting the orders of the King.  At day-break on the 11th the town was still quiet.  There was an awful pause of expectation.  The shops remained closed all the morning, the royal troops were drawn up in battle-array, upon the Greve and around the Hotel de Ville, but they stood motionless as statues, until the populace began taunting them with cowardice, and then laughing them to scorn.  For their sovereign lord and master still sat paralyzed in his palace.

The mob had been surging through all the streets and lanes, until, as by a single impulse, chains were stretched across the streets, and barricades thrown up in all the principal thoroughfares.  About noon the Duke of Guise, who had been sitting quietly in his hotel, with a very few armed followers, came out into the street of the Hotel Montmorency, and walked calmly up and down, arm-in-aim with the Archbishop of Lyons, between a double hedge-row of spectators and admirers, three or four ranks thick.  He was dressed in a white slashed doublet and hose, and wore a very large hat.  Shouts of triumph resounded from a thousand brazen throats, as he moved calmly about, receiving, at every instant, expresses from the great gathering in the Place Maubert.

“Enough, too much, my good friends,” he said, taking off the great hat—­("I don’t know whether he was laughing in it,” observed one who was looking on that day)—­“Enough of ‘Long live Guise!’ Cry ’Long live the King!’”

There was no response, as might be expected, and the people shouted more hoarsely than ever for Madam League and the Balafre.  The Duke’s face was full of gaiety; there was not a shadow of anxiety upon it in that perilous and eventful moment.  He saw that the day was his own.

For now, the people, ripe, ready; mustered, armed, barricaded; awaited but a signal to assault the King’s mercenaries, before rushing to the palace:  On every house-top missiles were provided to hurl upon their heads.  There seemed no escape for Henry or his Germans from impending doom, when Guise, thoroughly triumphant, vouchsafed them their lives.

“You must give me these soldiers as a present, my friends,” said he to the populace.

And so the armed Swiss, French, and German troopers and infantry, submitted to be led out of Paris, following with docility the aide-de-camp of Guise, Captain St. Paul, who walked quietly before them, with his sword in its scabbard, and directing their movements with a cane.  Sixty of them were slain by the mob, who could not, even at the command of their beloved chieftain, quite forego their expected banquet.  But this was all the blood shed on the memorable day of Barricades, when another Bartholomew massacre had been, expected.