folk, enemies of God and of his Holiness:  ‘I weep,’ said the pope, ’at the means the king used, exceeding unlawful and forbidden of God, for to inflict such punishment; I fear that one will fall upon him, and that he will not have a very long bout of it (will not live very long).  I fear, too, that amongst so many dead folk there died as many innocent as guilty.’” [Brantome, t. iv. p. 306.  He attributes this language to Pope Pius V., who died four months before the St. Bartholomew.  Gregory XIII., elected May 15, 1572, was pope when the massacre took place.] Only the King of Spain, Philip II., a fanatical despot, and pitiless persecutor, showed complete satisfaction at the event; and he offered Charles IX. the assistance of his army, if he had need of it, against what there was remaining of heretics in his kingdom.

Charles IX. had not mind or character sufficiently sound or sufficiently strong to support, without great perturbation, the effect of so many violent, repeated, and often contradictory impressions.  Catherine de Medici had brought up her three sons solely with a view of having their confidence and implicit obedience.  “All the actions of the queen-mother,” said the Venetian ambassador Sigismund Cavalli, who had for a long while resided at her court, “have always been prompted and regulated by one single passion, the passion of ruling.”  Her son Charles had yielded to it without an effort in his youth.  “He was accustomed to say that, until he was five and twenty, he meant to play the fool; that is to say, to think of nothing but of enjoying his heyday; accordingly he showed aversion for speaking and treating of business, putting himself altogether in his mother’s hands.  Now, he no longer thinks and acts in the same way.  I have been told that, since the late events, he requires to have the same thing said more than three times over by the queen, before obeying her.”  It was not with regard to his mother only that Charles had changed.  “His looks,” says Cavalli, “have become melancholy and sombre; in his conversations and audiences he does not look the speaker in the face; he droops his head, closes his eyes, opens them all at once, and, as if he found the movement painful, closes them again with no less suddenness.  It is feared that the demon of vengeance has possessed him; he used to be merely severe; it is feared that he is becoming cruel.  He is temperate in his diet; drinks nothing but water.  To tire himself at any price, is his object.  He remains on horseback for twelve or fourteen consecutive hours; and so he goes hunting and coursing through the woods the same animal, the stag, for two or three days, never stopping but to eat, and never resting but for an instant during the night.”  He was passionately fond of all bodily exercises, the practice of arms, and the game of tennis.  “He had a forge set up for himself,” says Brantome, “and I have seen him forging cannon, and horseshoes, and other things as stoutly as the most robust farriers