The kitchen of the Lecamus family was beneath the back-shop and looked out upon the river.  It had a glass door opening upon a sort of iron balcony, from which the cook drew up water in a bucket, and where the household washing was done.  The back-shop was made the dining-room, office, and salon of the merchant.  In this important room (in all such houses richly panelled and adorned with some special work of art, and also a carved chest) the life of the merchant was passed; there the joyous suppers after the work of the day was over, there the secret conferences on the political interests of the burghers and of royalty took place.  The formidable corporations of Paris were at that time able to arm a hundred thousand men.  Therefore the opinions of the merchants were backed by their servants, their clerks, their apprentices, their workmen.  The burghers had a chief in the “provost of the merchants” who commanded them, and in the Hotel de Ville, a palace where they possessed the right to assemble.  In the famous “burghers’ parlor” their solemn deliberations took place.  Had it not been for the continual sacrifices which by that time made war intolerable to the corporations, who were weary of their losses and of the famine, Henri IV., that factionist who became king, might never perhaps have entered Paris.

Every one can now picture to himself the appearance of this corner of old Paris, where the bridge and quai still are, where the trees of the quai aux Fleurs now stand, but where no trace remains of the period of which we write except the tall and famous tower of the Palais de Justice, from which the signal was given for the Saint Bartholomew.  Strange circumstance! one of the houses standing at the foot of that tower then surrounded by wooden shops, that, namely, of Lecamus, was about to witness the birth of facts which were destined to prepare for that night of massacre, which was, unhappily, more favorable than fatal to Calvinism.

At the moment when our history begins, the audacity of the new religious doctrines was putting all Paris in a ferment.  A Scotchman named Stuart had just assassinated President Minard, the member of the Parliament to whom public opinion attributed the largest share in the execution of Councillor Anne du Bourg; who was burned on the place de Greve after the king’s tailor—­to whom Henri II. and Diane de Poitiers had caused the torture of the “question” to be applied in their very presence.  Paris was so closely watched that the archers compelled all passers along the street to pray before the shrines of the Madonna so as to discover heretics by their unwillingness or even refusal to do an act contrary to their beliefs.

The two archers who were stationed at the corner of the Lecamus house had departed, and Cristophe, son of the furrier, vehemently suspected of deserting Catholicism, was able to leave the shop without fear of being made to adore the Virgin.  By seven in the evening, in April, 1560, darkness was already falling, and the apprentices, seeing no signs of customers on either side of the arcade, were beginning to take in the merchandise exposed as samples beneath the pillars, in order to close the shop.  Christophe Lecamus, an ardent young man about twenty-two years old, was standing on the sill of the shop-door, apparently watching the apprentices.