mediately to the south of the Petit Pont, with the intention of occupying that street, they were pushed back upon the bridge by the people, with a force which they found it in vain to try to resist. But the first outbreaking of actual hostilities was occasioned by one of the soldiers firing upon the people in the Rue Neuve Nôtre Dame. A volley of musketry and a shower of stones fell at once among the Swiss who occupied the Marché Neuf; and twenty or thirty, or, as some accounts say, as many as sixty of these troops fell dead upon the ground. Many more would have perished had not the Duke of Brissac interfered, and rescued the men from their enraged assailants, by admitting them under the cover of some shambles which adjoined the market-place. Meantime the guards stationed on the bridges were also attacked, and instantly put to flight. Thus the King's troops were everywhere dispersed, and only to be seen flying along the streets before their pursuers. The city remained completely in possession of the people.

In this state of affairs Henry had no other resource but to apply to the leader of the revolt, the Duke of Guise himself, and to request him to exert his influence with the people to stop the carnage. The Duke, deeming the end of all his hopes effectually attained by the completeness of the victory which had crowned the arms of his adherents, was not unwilling to prove how easily he could allay the tempest he had excited. Towards four o'clock in the afternoon, therefore, he came forth for the first time that day from his house-the same now called the Hotel de Soubise, in which the national records are kept,— and proceeded to shew himself in different parts of the city. Wherever he appeared he was received with shouts of Guise for ever! His orders that hostilities should cease were instantly obeyed. He then

desired Brissac to conduct the remains of the royal forces to the Louvre, making them march bareheaded, and with their arms reversed. For that night, at least, Guise was king in Paris. The captains of the city guard even came to ask him for the countersign, refusing to receive it from the Provost of the Merchants, who used to give it them in the name of the King. In a letter which he addressed the next morning to the governor of Orleans, we find him remarking, with all the delight of gratified ambition, that the Louvre being now invested by his adherents, he had no fear of being able to render a good account of that which it inclosed. But here he was doomed to be disappointed. By noon that day Henry contrived to make his escape from his palace. On the following day he reached Chartres, whither, in less than a week, a deputation came to him from his faithful subjects at Paris, imploring him to forget the outrages committed on the day of the Barricades, and to return to his now tranquillized and repentant capital. The result of all this was a feigned reconciliation between Henry and the Duke; but the former was not to be prevailed upon to return to Paris. Soon after this the King having received certain information that Guise was plotting his death, at last determined to rid himself of so turbulent a subject, and had him assassinated on the 23rd of December, in the Castle of Blois. Next day his brother, the Cardinal de Lorraine, underwent the same fate.

The destruction of the Duke of Guise did not restore Henry to the peaceful possession of his throne. On the contrary, the opposition of the people of Paris, fomented by the partisans of the murdered Duke, broke out again with more violence than ever. Regarded now as the bloodiest enemy of the national faith, and even openly denounced as such from

every pulpit in the city, Henry had only one way of recovering possession of his capital, by entering it, as he had sworn to do when casting his last look upon it in his precipitate flight, through a breach made by his cannon in the walls. With this view he resolved upon adopting the extraordinary step of forming an alliance with his great adversary, Henry of Navarre. The two princes met accordingly on the 30th of April, 1589, at Plessis-les-Tours, and, forgetting their past differences, agreed for the future to unite their forces and their interests. Towards the end of July they set out together at the head of their troops to attack Paris. But while the two kings were still at St. Cloud, on the 1st of August a Dominican monk, James Clement, an emissary of the Leaguers, having contrived to obtain access to Henry of France, stabbed him in the abdomen, and he died of the wound on the following day. Thus perished another of the chief criminals of the St. Bartholomew, finding the same bloody death which he had himself only a few months before inflicted on his fellow actor in that terrible tragedy. In the short interval also between the assassinations of the Duke of Guise and the King, namely on the 5th of January, had descended to the grave the original projector and prime mover of the massacre, the notorious Catherine de Medicis.

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CHAPTER XIV.

SIEGES OF PARIS,-CONCLUDED.

ON the 31st of October Henry of Navarre, bearing the title of Henry IV. of France, appeared with his army immediately under the walls of Paris, Occupying the villages of Gentilly, Mont-Rouge, Vaugirard, and the others in the same vicinity. He resolved, in the first place, to make an attempt to gain possession of the Faubourgs on that side of the city. An assault was therefore made upon that of St. Germain. Sully, who was one of the leaders on this occasion, tells us that in a street near the Foire, or Market-place, of St. Germain, having inclosed a crowd of the inhabitants between two troops, they slew four hundred of them in a space of less than two hundred paces in extent. These unhappy victims made no attempt to defend themselves; and Sully says that he at last became weary of merely striking them to the ground, and called out that he would kill no more of them. Did the people, then, thus lavishly massacred, refuse to surrender? or were the orders that no quarter should be given? The affair has the appearance of being one of the most barbarous butcheries that ever disgraced the annals of war. Sully, however, does not seem to view it in that light, but goes on to inform us, that after discontinuing the slaughter the soldiers began the work of pillage, and that he and a few of his men having merely entered six or seven houses and come out again, the booty they obtained was so considerable that by good hap there fell to his share some

two or three thousand crowns*. Dulaure conjectures that the scene of this destructive attack was probably either the Rue de Tournon, or the Rue de Condé, now called the Rue Neuve t. The assailants afterwards advanced to the Port Nesle (which stood near the spot now occupied by the east wing of the Palais des Beaux Arts), and some of them even passed through the gate, which they found open. But a party of troops here appearing forced them to retire

Two days after this the royal army left Paris to undertake the siege of Etampes. Henry did not again present himself before the walls of his rebellious capital till the beginning of May in the following year. His intention was now to blockade the place instead of endeavouring to take it by assault; and that he might be able to environ it the more completely, he resolved, as his first operation, to attempt to make himself master of all the faubourgs. On the night of the 8th of the above month, therefore, which was very dark, his army having been divided into ten parts, commenced, exactly at twelve o'clock, a simultaneous attack upon the ten faubourgs by which Paris was then surrounded ‡, and, after a hot fire of two hours, carried every point. "Could a picture of this night be drawn," says Sully, "in which the noise of the cries and the reports of the arquebuses should be faithfully represented, as well as the sparks

*Sully, Economies Royales, Part I., cap. xxix. + Histoire de Paris, v. 91.

Sully's enumeration of the Parisian faubourgs, on this occasion, includes all those dependencies of the capital now usually so designated, with the exception of those of the Temple, of Poisonière, and of Le Roule, and with the addition of those of St. Michel and St. Victor, to the south of the river, now included within the city. The boundary of the city at this time, it will be recollected, was still the wall begun by Stephen Marcel in the reign of John, and rebuilt in that of Charles VI.; for an account of which see chap. i. pp. 16, 17.