Pascal's Wager Read Online Free PDF Page A

people found themselves hungry.
    On a hot summer night, when riot was buzzing in the taverns and the hotels, someone took a shot at Admiral de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenot military. He was wounded and nearly killed, but not quite. The Huguenots demanded justice and appealed to the king. When justice did not arrive at once, they threatened to riot. But the king, Charles IX, and his court, which included Catherine de Médicis and Henri, the duc d’Anjou, struck first. The king had been uncertain initially, fearing, quite justly, the general slaughter that might follow, but the others pressured him until he agreed. They met in secret on August 23 and decided to assassinate Coligny. Charles waffled even then, but after some discussion he finally surrendered, saying, “Well, then, kill them all, so that no one will be around to reproach me after.”
    Early that morning, a Sunday morning, the duc de Guise led several troops of Swiss mercenaries and a few French regulars to the admiral’s home. It was the king’s will and God’s will that they should take their vengeance on the traitors and rebels who had fallen into their power, he told his men. Since the soldiers were not in uniform, they identified themselves with a white armband on their left arms and a white cross stuck intheir hats. They had all agreed that once the admiral was killed, the signal for the massacre would be given: a quick toll of the palace bell.
    At gaining entry into the admiral’s house, the soldiers rushed in, slaughtering the servants as they passed. They came upon the admiral in his room. Still believing he had the king’s favor, he had refused to leave the city and had been awakened in the belief that what he was hearing in the street was another quick uprising among the people, something that the king’s soldiers would quickly put down. Fully awake, he had left his bed and was praying when the soldiers rushed into his room, dragged him from his prayers, and stabbed him over and over. The duc de Guise, who was waiting below in the courtyard, called to the men in the house to find out if the deed had been done. “It is done,” one of the captains called down, and threw the body out the window. Several of the men, including the chevalier d’Angoulême, backed away in disgust at the butchery, but the duke laughed at them, repeatedly kicked Coligny’s dead body in the face and in the groin, and said to the chevalier that he and the men should cheer up. Since the king had commanded it, they should do the deed thoroughly.
    The duke then ordered that they give the signal, that their fellow in the palace should ring the bell. All around them, voices cried out in the night, “Alarm! To arms!” The soldiers then dragged the admiral’s body to a nearby stable and tossed it inside, where they decapitated and then eviscerated it, spitting on the parts and kicking the head around the stable like a football. Later, a mob of children came upon the body and tried to throw it into the Seine, but others stopped them and instead hung the headless admiral from the gibbet of Montfaucon.
    Faster than light, news of the murder spread throughout the city. The local militia rose up, followed by the populace, who, in imitation of the soldiers, stuck white crosses in their hats to identify themselves as Catholic, and turned on the Protestants. Neighbor slaughtered neighbor, and all the bile of religious hatred poured out onto the streets to mix with blood. The killing continued for three days. It spread like plague from the city out to the surrounding towns and villages, out to the provinces, to the wineries, to the little dairy farms, to the fields of lavender. Many peoplebelieved that they had been ordered by the king to kill all the Protestants, and they set out to do just that. By the end of the third day, over seventy thousand people had been slaughtered.
     
    Though the Huguenot wars had ended with the Edict of Nantes, the religious wars carried on.