The Black Town

For darkly, no man knew how, the news had come to Angers. It had been
known, more or less, for three days. Men had read it in other men's
eyes. The tongue of a scold, the sneer of an injured woman had spread
it, the birds of the air had carried it. From garret window to garret
window across the narrow lanes of the old town it had been whispered at
dead of night; at convent grilles, and in the timber-yards beside the
river. Ten thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, it was
rumoured, had perished in Paris. In Orleans, all. In Tours this man's
sister; at Saumur that man's son. Through France the word had gone forth
that the Huguenots must die; and in the busy town the same roof-tree
sheltered fear and hate, rage and cupidity. On one side of the party-
wall murder lurked fierce-eyed; on the other, the victim lay watching the
latch, and shaking at a step. Strong men tasted the bitterness of death,
and women clasping their babes to their breasts smiled sickly into
children's eyes.

The signal only was lacking. It would come, said some, from Saumur,
where Montsoreau, the Duke of Anjou's Lieutenant-Governor and a Papist,
had his quarters. From Paris, said others, directly from the King. It
might come at any hour now, in the day or in the night; the magistrates,
it was whispered, were in continuous session, awaiting its coming. No
wonder that from lofty gable windows, and from dormers set high above the
tiles, haggard faces looked northward and eastward, and ears sharpened by
fear imagined above the noises of the city the ring of the iron shoes
that carried doom.