THOUGH the throne of France has never been filled by a female, the Government of that country has perhaps been as frequently, and as thoroughly, for a time, what writers on the constitutions of States call a Gynocracy, as that of any other kingdom in Europe. Queens, queen mothers, and royal mistresses, have repeatedly
proved too strong for the Salic Law; and without actually wearing on their brow " the round and top of sovereignty," have exercised, sometimes almost openly, its fullest prerogatives. At the period of which we are now about to speak-the year 1572 - the actual ruler of France was the celebrated Catherine de Medicis, the widow of Henry II., and the mother of the reigning king, Charles IX.

The spirit of ambition has rarely possessed any bosom more completely than it did that of this remarkable woman. Unrestrained either by religion or humanity--despising alike the law of God and the opinion of man-she was well fitted to move forward in the pursuit of her purposes with the reckless and unshrinking audacity which their nature demanded, and to brook neither obstacle nor competition in her path. If she had one weak point of character, and was even more than the generality of her contemporaries the slave of the popular superstitions of her age, her deference to the imaginary intimations of the stars was in no degree calculated to withhold her from any really wicked course, although it might sometimes make her fly from dangers of its own creation. Indeed, in thus scaring her with merely visionary terrors, it was likely only to plunge her deeper into crime than she might otherwise have fallen. Of crimes of a certain character there is no other of the passions which is so fruitful a master as Fear.

Catherine, too, if not endowed in any surpassing degree with general talent, was an Italian not more in blood and lineage than in the subtlety and wiliness which have been supposed, in modern times, to characterize her countrymen; and young as she was, only fourteen, when she left her native land, she seems to have brought away with her from her earliest instructors no small share of that art of intrigue and skill in political stratagem, for which the minor courts of Italy had long been famous.

Charles himself inherited much of the ability of his mother; but this bad woman, with the view to secure the more completely her own domination, had taken pains to surround her son, from the moment he became king (which he did when only a child of ten years of age, by the death of his elder brother, Francis II.) with every seduction most suited to corrupt and enfeeble his mind, and to pervert the bounty of nature. She did not altogether succeed in this design; for, despite of his disadvantages of training, Charles, when he reached manhood, displayed decidedly superior talents, even of a literary kind as may be seen from some of his compositions, both in prose and verse, which are still extant. But the influences to which he was exposed seem to have nearly stifled whatever had been originally good in his moral nature, and to have operated with all the intended effect, in giving preternatural expansion and growth to the seeds it contained of vice and weakness. This victim of a mother's heartlessness and selfish ambition manifested, as he advanced in years, a character and disposition which fitted him to be partly that mother's instrument, and partly her coadjutor.

Catherine's resoluteness and stern inflexibility of purpose had degenerated in Charles into mere obstinacy and waywardness; and when she proceeded to her end with a cool, single-eyed, invincible determination, he was only headstrong, precipitate, and driven forward by the caprice of the moment, to be immediately driven back as far, perhaps, by an opposite gust of temper or inclination. But, on the other hand, making allowance for his youth and comparative inexperience-for he was as yet only twenty-two-his capacity for perfidy and dissimulation was scarcely inferior to her own ; and his indifference to the sufferings of others, in the pursuit of his own gratifications, equally hardened. Without any of his mother's nerve, or as some may call it, strength of character, in treachery, in cruelty, in selfishness, in all that constituted the mere baseness of her nature, he was the worthy son of such a parent.

Such were the hands that held the royal authority. Meanwhile, the country was kept in a state of distraction, breaking out occasionally into open warfare, by the enmity of the two great religious parties into which the people were divided. At the head of the adherents of the ancient faith were the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, who were nearly connected with the royal family by the marriage of their niece, Mary of Scotland, with the late King, Francis II. The chiefs of highest rank among the Huguenots, or Protestants, were the two young princes of the blood, Henry, King of Navarre, and the Prince of Condé.

The main stay of the party, however, and the individual who principally directed it, both by his councils and his popular influence, was the able, brave, and virtuous Coligny, or, as he was generally called in his own day, the Admiral of Chatillon. Of the mass of the population the immense majority were Papists, but still the Protestants formed also a very numerous and powerful body; and, although the recent battles of Jarnac and Montcontour, in both which they had been beaten by the King's brother, the Duke of Anjou, had for the present somewhat broken their strength, the energy natural to a new and aggressive party was not likely to allow them to remain long depressed under the effects of their disasters. The peace concluded in August, 1570,* had put a stop, for the moment, to the active hostilities of the two parties, rather than united them, or composed their difficulties.

* Called La paix boiteuse-the lame peace.

Affairs were in this state when the Queen-mother resolved to strike a bold and decisive blow for the consolidation of her authority. She had hitherto succeeded, by management, in preserving her position at the head of affairs, but the supremacy she was enabled to maintain was far from the full and unfettered dictatorship to which her ambition aspired. Mistress of the State as she was, she had yet been obliged to share too much of her power with those under whose protection, as it were, she held it, and who, by merely withdrawing their aid and support, could, at any moment they chose, leave her in the hands of another faction just as little disposed to allow her the exercise of an unparticipated sovereignty.

Tired of this imperfect and precarious sway, Catherine appears to have resolved upon the adoption of a new policy. Instead of longer employing the two hostile parties to balance each other, she now determined to avail herself of the assistance of the one to effect, once for all, the extermination and destruction of the other. In carrying this de and daring scheme into execution, she was influenced, moreover, by her religious opinions. Bigoted adherent of the Papacy, she was taught to believe that she would be doing God service by the destruction of the new faith. Intolerance and the spirit of persecution aided her political schemes, and she resolved to immolate the enemies of her faith to her ferocious and devouring ambition.

The occasion which Catherine determined to seize upon for 'the perpetration of her diabolical design, was one singularly calculated to deepen the revolting character of the tragedy about to be enacted. To crown and consummate, as it was pretended, the reconcilement of the two religions, the Court had proposed that a marriage should take place between Charles' sister, Margaret, and Henry of Navarre. There is too much reason to conclude that Catherine and her son had, from the first, suggested this union with no other object than that of drowning the day of its celebration in the blood of their unsuspecting subjects.

EVERY expedient was now resorted to in order to make the Protestants forget their ancient jealousy of the Court, and to lull them into reliance and security. The King himself undertook the management of Coligny; and the royal hypocrite plied his chosen task with a depth of art so much beyond his years, that he soon had the Admiral as completely within his toils as he could desire. Having invited him to court, Charles received him with a degree of distinction which had scarcely ever before been accorded to a subject; and not only restored him immediately to all his ancient dignities, but took him into his intimacy, consulted him on all affairs of State, seemed on every occasion to be more swayed by his advice than by that of any of his other counsellors, and in short, impressed him with a conviction that he had not a more attached friend than his young sovereign.

Coligny thus deceived, it was not wonderful that the great majority of the party who looked upon him as their head, should allow themselves to be caught in the same snare. The professions of the Court seem to have been almost universally relied upon as sincere ; and when invitations to the royal marriage were sent to all the most distinguished Huguenot lords and gentlemen throughout France, few thought of declining to repair to Paris from any apprehension that their lives would be in danger on an occasion which, to them especially, was one of so much triumph and promise, and which was to be graced and sanctioned by the presence, in the quality of the King's confidant and advisor, of their most experienced and most venerated chief. Some, however, still retained their doubts and fears, and deemed it most prudent to remain at their homes.

One circumstance which alarmed the more suspicious, was the sudden death of Henry's mother, the Queen of Navarre, which occurred on the 9th of June, at the house of Guillart, Bishop of Chartres, in which she had taken up her abode on coming to Paris a few weeks before to assist in the preparations for her son's nuptials.

This lady was a person of distinguished ability and strength of character; and although the excitement in which men's minds were at that time, from the expectation of coming events, may have caused her death to pass over with less observation, it was afterwards very generally believed that she had been taken off by poison, perhaps from a fear on the part of the Court that her penetration, and the opportunities she enjoyed of mixing intimately with the royal circle, might enable her to detect or conjecture the meditated treachery.

As the day on which the marriage was to take place approached, the Huguenot gentlemen, and even numbers of the humbler orders who belonged to that party, flocked to Paris from all quarters; and by the middle of August the capital had collected within its walls nearly all the persons of consequence in France attached to the new faith.

On the evening of Sunday the seventeenth, the espousals of the royal pair were celebrated in the Louvre with becoming festivities ; and on the following morning the marriage ceremony was performed on an elevated platform erected before the great Cathedral of Notre-Dame, in the presence of a splendid company, composed both of Papists and Protestants. After the performance of the ceremony, the bride and those of the company who were of the Romish faith, advanced to the high altar to hear mass; while Henry, Admiral Coligny, and the rest of the Protestants, retired into the choir.

On leaving the church the party returned to the archbishop's palace, and there dined. In the evening, a supper and a masked ball again collected the revellers in the grand hall of the Louvre, although most of the Protestants were restrained, by the severity of their religious notions, from attending this conclusion of the day's festivities. Coligny himself was absent under the pretest of a slight indisposition.

The next day, the nineteenth, was devoted to repose by the King and his exhausted guests; but on the evening of Wednesday, the twentieth, the hilarities of the Court were renewed by a very extraordinary entertainment given in the Hotel de Bourbon. On this occasion, a theatrical show or mask was exhibited to the company, which actually pictured out, with daring distinctness, the horrible tragedy that was so soon to follow. The chronicles of the time* describe this exhibition minutely, and from their descriptions it would seem to have been easy to conjecture what were the thoughts of the King, and his secret counsellors, in the midst of all these scenes of, festive abandonment. It is true that such a rehearsal of the intended massacre was unnecessary for the execution of the design, and might even seem fraught with some risk of preventing its success; but the projectors of great crimes have often shown this wild propensity to sport with the chances of detection, by venturing to the very brink of a disclosure of their plans.

* Memoires de l'Etat de la France, sons Charles IX.

Even before this dark and shadowy hint of the designs of the Court, various circumstances had troubled the confidence of the Protestants. So little care had their enemies taken to conceal their hostile intentions, that rumors of some terrible blow about to be struck were general among the populace, and had, in several instances, met the ears of the devoted Huguenots. Obscure, but earnest, intimations of impending danger had even been communicated to particular individuals by their Romish friends.

The uneasiness and apprehension thus created were increased to the greatest degree of alarm, when at last a body of twelve hundred soldiers made their appearance in the city, and were seen, after being marched through the streets, to take up their stations under arms, in the vicinity of the palace, the arsenal, and other strongholds. Several Protestant lords and gentlemen, on witnessing the entry of these troops, secretly withdrew themselves from the city; and even Coligny himself was induced, on the morning of the twentieth, to seek the royal presence, and to request an explanation from his Majesty of a circumstance which had so greatly excited the fears of his friends.

The Admiral was received by his sovereign with so much kindness, and such warm assurances of protection, that long before the close of their interview, whatever suspicions he had at first been inclined to entertain were completely dissipated. So far did Charles carry his dissimulation, that he declared he had ordered the troops into the city for the express purpose of placing them as guards, in the excited state of the public feeling, around the houses of the Huguenots, to protect them from designs which he Suspected to be entertained against them by their old enemies, the Guises.

To enable him the more securely to attain this object, he suggested that all the principal persons of the reformed religion should be immediately collected from the different parts of the town, and lodged together in the neighborhood of the palace. Coligny, completely reassured by all this show of friendship, returned to his house, where he was soon after sought by many of his followers, anxious to consult with him on the circumstances in which they were placed.

Retiring to his apartment, he left his son-in-law, Teligny,* to receive his visitors; and with such encouraging animation did this ardent young man describe to them the conversation which the Admiral had just had with his Majesty, that most of them left the house convinced of the groundlessness of their fears, and having their doubts of their sovereign's honor converted into gratitude for his provident watchfulness over their safety.

*Charles, Lord of Teligny in Rovergne, had, a few months before this, espoused Louisa de Coligny, the daughter of the Admiral. This lady afterwards married William of Nassau, Prince of orange, the founder of the Republic of Holland.

The strange allegorical pastime with which the guests of the palace had amused themselves on the evening of the 20th, again awakened the misgivings of some, and on the following day Coligny repaired to the Queen-mother, to inform her of the dissatisfaction which these extraordinary revels had occasioned. Catherine affected to laugh at his alarm. "Mon dieu! Admiral," she exclaimed, "give yourself no further uneasiness about these festivities of ours,- leave us to make merry in our own way, and in the course of four days, on the faith of a Queen, I promise you that you and those of your religion shall have such proofs of my regard as shall satisfy your utmost desires,"

She kept her word!

THE seeming frankness of the assurances of Queen Catherine appears again to have allayed all suspicion; and notwithstanding the successive warnings, as we may almost call them, which they had received of the destruction preparing for them, the devoted victims remained in tranquility under the descending stroke of their oppressors.

But the conspirators were now about to proceed to a more daring act than anything they had yet ventured upon. It was resolved to assassinate the admiral. In the obscurity which hangs over much of the interior mechanism of these dark transactions, we are left almost to mere conjecture regard to the motives which may have prompted the contrivers of the plot to preface their work of general slaughter, by this attack on the life of an individual. Perhaps they had become afraid, from the repeated occasions on which Coligny had evinced some suspicion of the intentions of the Court, that he had his eye upon them too watchfully, and might yet defeat their plans unless he were instantly got rid of.

Or they may have calculated that such an incident as the murder of their chief in open day was the most likely of all things to strike the whole body of the Protestants with consternation, and, by the terror and confusion into which it threw them, to prepare them the more certainly for falling a prey, when their destroyers should be let loose upon them. It may have even been expected that this act of treachery would perchance precipitate them, in the first fury of their indignation, into some course of violence or aggression, such as might afford a seeming justification for the meditated massacre. At all events, if, as it seems likely, the assassination of Coligny was the project of the heads, or most determined partners of the conspiracy, a stroke well-contrived, by its tendency to bring matters to extremities, to fix their less resolute confederates, and nerve them to enter with decision upon that line of action to which they might not otherwise have been easily brought to make up their minds.

There were appearances of vacillation- whether arising from fear, or some more creditable feeling- on the part of Charles himself, before his mother and her more intimate coadjutors had found means to fix his resolution, by persuading him that matters had now come to such a pass that, if he should delay attacking the Huguenots, they would assuredly rise and destroy him, and that the question was simply whether they should perish, or himself and a vast multitude of his other subjects.

But to return to our story. Towards eleven o'clock on the morning of the 22d, which was Friday, the Admiral, after having spent some time in the Louvre with the king's brother, the Duke of Anjou, who had sent for him- was returning on foot to his hotel to dinner, when he met the King coming out of a chapel which stood opposite to the palace. They walked together to the tennis court of the palace, where, finding the Duke of Guise and Teligny, Charles and the former engaged in a game against the latter and another gentleman. After having stood by for a short time, Coligny took his leave, followed by about a dozen lords and gentlemen of his party, and proceeded on his way home.

He had not advanced more than a hundred paces, when as he was moving leisurely along, engaged in reading a paper which some one had presented to him, he was suddenly struck by two balls from an arquebuse, one of which carried away the forefinger of his right hand, while the other wounded him more severely in his left arm. He immediately dropped the paper he held, and fell into the arms of his friends who were near him. The shot had come from the right, and looking up in that direction, the Admiral pointed out at once to those who were with him, the window from which it had been fired.

*His name was Maurevel, or Maurevert, a creature of the Duke of Guise, in whose service this is said not to have been his first exploit of a similar character.

Meanwhile Coligny had been carried home by his friends and placed in bed. The news of the attack that had been made upon his life spread rapidly over the city, and the Protestants flocked in crowds to his house. Among others the celebrated surgeon, Ambrose Pere, was quickly in attendance, and proceeded to dress the wounds of the old man, and to extract the ball, while a numerous circle of his friends stood around, watching the process with intense solicitude.

But we must omit all further description of this scene, and return for a moment to the tennis-court, where the King was at play. That part of the street where the Admiral was when he was fired at, was so near the palace, that the report of the arquebuse, ringing through the tennis-court, startled his majesty and those who were with him, and the next minute some one running into the palace from the street, informed them what had happened. There is no good reason to suppose that Charles had been intrusted by his mother with her plan of assassinating the Admiral. She seems rather, as we have already observed, to have determined upon 'the perpetration of the crime principally for the purpose of steadying the wavering resolution of son, by producing a state of circumstances, which he should imagine it impossible for him to draw back in his design.

When Charles, therefore, was now told of the daring outrage which had been committed almost within the precincts of his palace, his instant emotion was that of furious indignation. Throwing down his racket, he rushed into the palace, declaring that he would be avenged on the bold ruffian who had thus broken the laws and insulted his authority. He had not been long in his apartment when the King of Navarre and the Prince of Condo sought his presence, having just come from the house of their wounded friend. To their vehement suit for justice on the authors of the assassination he replied, with the most terrific oaths, that the Admiral's blood should be amply atoned for. His mother, and the Duke of Anjou, who were also present, deemed it prudent in the meantime, to counterfeit the same indignation, and to join in the King's assurances, that nothing would be left undone to detect the perpetrators of so heinous an atrocity.

Soon after this Teligny presented himself, bringing a request to Charles from his father-in-law, that be would deign to pay him a visit at his hotel, as he had some matters to communicate to him which he was unwilling to confide to any other ear. With this petition the King promised to comply, and about two o'clock Charles set out to make his promised visit, accompanied by his mother, his brothers, and a retinue composed of several of the most distinguished members of the Court, among whom were the Marshal de Tavannes, the Count de Retz, and the Duke de Nevers, all principal confidants of Catherine, and confederated with her in her scheme for the massacre of the Protestants.

When they reached the house, they were ushered into the apartment where Coligny was, surrounded by many of his friends, among whom were the King of Navarre, the Prince of Condé, and other individuals of rank. Charles and his mother having taken their seats by his bed-side, the wounded man entered into conversation with them. In a long discourse which he addressed to the King, he began by taking God to witness, that in all his actions he had never had any other object in view except the good of his country, and his sovereign's true honor, declaring that he was ready to render an account of his conduct to his Maker, if it should be His will now to take him to Himself.

Passing from that topic, he proceeded to urge upon his Majesty the duty of doing something to check the growing ascendency of Spain, or at least of so ordering matters that the Duke of Alba should no longer be immediately informed, by means of his salaried spies, of whatever took place in the council of the King of France. But the subject to which he besought the King's attention with the greatest earnestness, was the necessity, if he wished to preserve the tranquility of the kingdom, of his giving orders that the different edicts which had been published for the protection of the adherents of the reformed faith, and especially the articles of the recent peace, should be more strictly maintained.

Charles replied in somewhat guarded terms. He expressed his conviction of the Admiral's loyalty and patriotism, and added that it had ever been his wish to observe religiously his compact with his Protestant subjects, and that such was still his determination. He then professed to feel anxious that Coligny, in his weak state, should not agitate himself by any further exertion; and, adverting to his wound, declared, with an oath, that he would punish the crime that had been committed in such a manner that the memory of his revenge should never be forgotten.

The conversation continued for a short time longer, when it was proposed by the Count de Retz that Coligny should be removed to the palace, where the Queen of Navarre would willingly give up her apartment to his use. This, however, was opposed by Mazille, the physician in attendance, who stated that a removal would be attended with danger to his patient. The royal party remained to see the wounds dressed, when Charles, taking up one of the bandages that was steeped in blood, looked at it with every appearance of reverential concern, and then handed it to his mother. The ball which had been extracted from the Admiral's arm, was also examined by both. They then took their departure, and hurried back to the Louvre.

On arriving at the palace, Charles, Catherine, the Duke of Anjou, and their chief advisers, remained for some time in secret consultation ; after which the King was busily engaged in giving orders and making up despatches, with which couriers were sent off to the provinces in rapid succession.