I wish the helpless and the innocent had not been included." "And in consequence of the reply made to him," adds Sully in his (_Economies royales_ t.i.

p.

244, in the Petitot collection), "he next day issued his orders, prohibiting, on pain of death, any slaying or plundering; the which were, nevertheless, very ill observed, the animosities and fury of the populace being too much inflamed to defer to them." The historians, Catholic or Protestant, contemporary or researchful, differ widely as to the number of the victims in this cruel massacre; according to De Thou, there were about two thousand persons killed in Paris the first day; D'Aubigne says three thousand; Brantome speaks of four thousand bodies that Charles IX.

might have seen floating down the Seine; La Popeliniere reduces them to one thousand.

There is to be found, in the account-books of the city of Paris, a payment to the grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents for having interred eleven hundred dead bodies stranded at the turns of the Seine near Chaillot, Auteuil, and St.Cloud; it is probable that many corpses were carried still farther, and the corpses were not all thrown into the river.