Within the precincts of the Louvre, upon the night of the massacre, the shift of Marguerite of Valois was drenched in the blood of a wounded fugitive. In that passage of her memoirs transcribed by Champagnac, she relates how a gentleman sought sanctuary at her side whilst his pursuers forced their way into her bedchamber. She subsequently fled to her sister’s apartments. Another fugitive was struck down in the antechamber. The palace, which ought to have afforded safe harbor to these guests, had been transformed into the very theater of their peril.
The chronicle assigns the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre to August 1572, following the reconciliation of the French Protestants with Charles IX. It portrays this pacification as the staging of an ambush: advantageous covenants were tendered, Admiral de Coligny subscribed to them, and the court lavished festivities, guarantees, and solemn oaths upon the Protestant captains. Champagnac imputes the contrivance of the massacre directly to Catherine de' Medici and the King; this judgment, framed within an ardently partisan text, must be recognized as belonging strictly to the chronicler.
A few days prior to the slaughter, Coligny had been wounded by an arquebus shot as he departed the Louvre. The source records that he discerned in this outrage the mark of an open rupture with the Duke of Guise. Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Condé laid their grievances before the King. Charles IX made show of profound sorrow, ordered a rigorous inquest to apprehend the culprits, and bestowed upon the Admiral the title of father. The pledge of royal affection recorded by Champagnac is thus juxtaposed against the catastrophe that ensued immediately thereafter; the narrative invites the reader to perceive in this proximity a deliberate dissimulation, yet it furnishes no contemporaneous documents whereby the true designs of each protagonist might be judicially established.
Upon the eve of Saint Bartholomew, in the dead of night, a signal was given. The tocsin of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois rang out, answered presently by the great bell of the Palais de Justice. The houses of the Protestants were breached by main force. In recounting these opening violences, Champagnac dwells upon the lodging of Coligny in the Rue de Bétizi, where the aged Admiral sat unarmed in an armchair.
An armed band burst into his dwelling. Besme, a domestic retainer of the House of Guise, is designated as the man who struck him down. The chronicle relates that Coligny bade him respect his gray hairs, telling him he could rob him of but a few remaining days of life; these utterances come down to us through a later tradition transmitted by Champagnac. The account places the young Duke of Guise outside the house, awaiting the consummation of the deed. Coligny was cast down from a window, and his corpse abandoned to the fury of the mob. Champagnac further records that the head was severed from the body and dispatched to Catherine de' Medici; he cites Voltaire, who notes that the dispatch of the relic to Rome remains unverified.
The demise of the Admiral put no period to the onslaught. Men, children, and entire Protestant families were hunted through the thoroughfares. The narrative makes mention of ecclesiastics said to have exhorted the assassins, as well as Marshal de Tavannes riding through the city on horseback. These images and imputations belong strictly to the chronicle; yet they must not obscure the individuals whose names appear therein as definite victims.
At the Louvre, Protestant domestics belonging to the retinue of Navarre were set upon. Marguerite describes a wounded gentleman, named Téjan, who flung himself across her bed to elude the archers of the guard. She further relates that another man was run through in her antechamber. Her linen was soaked with blood when she was compelled to change her attire before gaining her sister’s chambers. In this deposition, a palace scene ceases to be a mere dynastic tableau: the violence breaches private thresholds and reaches those who sought only a sanctuary.
The chronicle likewise names the Count de La Rochefoucauld, a royal favorite who had spent that very evening in the King’s company. Charles IX is said to have sought to detain him and, meeting with his refusal, suffered him to depart; Champagnac affirms that he was butchered shortly thereafter. The Count de Téligny, Coligny’s son-in-law, was murdered as well; the philosopher Ramus was hurled from a window of the Collège de Presle. This enumeration does not reconstruct every separate slaying, yet it demonstrates how rank, profession, and intimacy with the sovereign offered no safeguard to those whom the chronicle designates as belonging to the proscribed minority.
Among the rare survivors, Champagnac recounts the deliverance of the young La Force, a boy of ten years. The soldiers seized him together with his father and his brother. Stained with the blood of his kin, the child feigned death. An overseer of a tennis court noticed that he was still breathing, concealed him beneath a cloak, and passed him off as his drunken nephew. The narrative adds that he demanded thirty crowns for this service—a detail preserved solely by the chronicle, unsupported by corroborating testimony. La Force was subsequently brought to a kinsman and made his escape disguised as a page, under the assumed name of Beaupin. This survivor, whom the chronicle follows beyond the night of blood, would later become a Marshal of France.
Other accounts of flight extend this slender register of escape from the carnage. Jean de Beaumanoir, Marquis de Lavardin, was sheltered by a Catholic widow, who subsequently conveyed him to her estates disguised as her chambermaid. Several individuals attempted to traverse the river. Champagnac attributes to the King himself the act of firing upon them from a palace window, citing Brantôme as an eyewitness to the scene. Here again, the accusation is grave and its provenance must remain conspicuous: we read only what a nineteenth-century chronicler claims to have found in the pages of an earlier memorialist.
Following the massacres, a symbolic judicial procedure was directed against the memory of Coligny. Charles IX formally accused him before the Parlement of Paris of having entered into a treasonous conspiracy; the magistrates rendered a decree against the deceased, ordering, according to Champagnac, that his corpse be dragged through the streets and hanged upon a gibbet, that his ancestral mansion be razed to the ground, and that his posterity be stripped of their civil rights. The chronicle adds that an annual procession was instituted to render thanks to Almighty God for the discovery of the plot. Champagnac contends, conversely, that the Admiral had entertained no such design: this denial belongs to the same retrospective pleading, and the text does not in itself provide the judicial grounds necessary to resolve the question of political intent.
The bloodshed was not confined to Paris. Champagnac states that instructions were dispatched to the provincial governors, dwelling in particular upon the massacres in Lyons and Toulouse. In Toulouse, by his reckoning, approximately three hundred Protestant captives were put to death within the Conciergerie at the beginning of October, after which their houses were pillaged. He notes, however, the names of several Catholic governors who, in diverse cities, refused to carry out the royal mandates. This roll, like the casualty figures, represents the testimony transmitted by the author; it nonetheless reveals that the response of local authorities was not uniform even within his own chronicle.
Champagnac concludes by advancing an immense number of victims for the capital, without providing in this chapter the particulars of his calculation. This tally must be received as an assertion of the text, and not as an established total founded upon verified documents. In his eyes, the massacre failed to eradicate the causes of the conflict: hostilities erupted anew, and those Protestants who had escaped the blow took up arms in self-defense. Thus the catastrophe, which the court had sought to conclude by sovereign violence, opened in the chronicle a fresh era of civil war.
The scene at the Louvre remains that of a sanctuary transformed into a thoroughfare for murderers; alongside it endure the names of Coligny, Téligny, Ramus, and those anonymous victims whom the source cannot rescue from oblivion. The author vehemently condemns dissimulation and fanaticism, yet his own invectives against a creed or a faction cannot supply the place of legal proof. The undeniable reality remains that in August 1572, subjects were hunted down in their homes after the Crown had proclaimed a public reconciliation. This fatal contradiction, between the royal assurances proffered and the signal sounded in the night, constitutes the true moral and judicial crux of the affair.