Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 6.djvu/21

Rh nation took a share in it or sympathized with it, and armed in a body to attack the Huguenots, who were held to be strangers and enemies. St. Bartholomew was, in short, a national uprising, like that of the Spaniards in 1809; and the citizens of Paris, when they cut the throats of the heretics, had a firm belief that they were obeying the voice of heaven.

It is no part of the business of a teller of tales like myself to give in this volume a précis of the historical incidents of 1572, but as I have mentioned St. Bartholomew I cannot refrain from setting forth certain thoughts that have occurred to me as I read this bloody page of our history. Have the causes which brought about the massacre been well understood? Was it long premeditated, or was it not rather the result of a sudden resolve, even of a chance? No historian supplies me with satisfactory answers to any of these questions. They all admit as evidence mere street rumours and alleged conversations, of very small weight in deciding a historical question of such importance. Some of them represent Charles IX. as a prodigy of dissimulation; others as a man of hasty, violent, and fantastic temper. If, long before the 24th of August, he broke out into threats against the Protestants, it is proof that he had long been