Ay, what was it? A score of voices called for silence; a breathless hush
fell on the crowd. A moment the fiercest listened, with parted lips and
starting eyes. Then, "It was the bell!" cried one, "let us out!" "It
was not!" cried another. "It was a pistol shot!" "Anyhow let us out!"
the crowd roared in chorus; "let us out!" And they pressed in a furious
mass towards the door, as if they would force it, signal or no signal.
But the pikemen stood fast, and the throng, checked in their first rush,
turned on one another, and broke into wrangling and disputing; boasting,
and calling Heaven and the saints to witness how thoroughly, how
pitilessly, how remorselessly they would purge Paris of this leprosy when
the signal did sound. Until again above the babel a man cried "Silence!"
and again they listened. And this time, dulled by walls and distance,
but unmistakable by the ears of fear or hate, the heavy note of a bell
came to them on the hot night air. It was the boom, sullen and menacing,
of the death signal.
The doorkeepers lowered their pikes, and with a wild rush, as of wolves
swarming on their prey, the band stormed the door, and thrust and
struggled and battled a way down the narrow staircase, and along the
narrow passage. "A bas les Huguenots! Mort aux Huguenots!" they
shouted; and shrieking, sweating, spurning with vile hands, viler faces,
they poured pell-mell into the street, and added their clamour to the
boom of the tocsin that, as by magic and in a moment, turned the streets
of Paris into a hell of blood and cruelty. For as it was here, so it was
in a dozen other quarters.
Quickly as they streamed out--and to have issued more quickly would have
been impossible--fiercely as they pushed and fought and clove their way,
Tignonville was of the foremost. And for a moment, seeing the street
clear before him and almost empty, the Huguenot thought that he might do
something. He might outstrip the stream of rapine, he might carry the
alarm; at worst he might reach his betrothed before harm befell her. But
when he had sped fifty yards, his heart sank. True, none passed him; but
under the spell of the alarm-bell the stones themselves seemed to turn to
men. Houses, courts, alleys, the very churches vomited men. In a
twinkling the street was alive with men, roared with them as with a
rushing tide, gleamed with their lights and weapons, thundered with the
volume of their thousand voices. He was no longer ahead, men were
running before him, behind him, on his right hand and on his left. In
every side-street, every passage, men were running; and not men only, but
women, children, furious creatures without age or sex. And all the time
the bell tolled overhead, tolled faster and faster, and louder and
louder; and shots and screams, and the clash of arms, and the fall of
strong doors began to swell the maelstrom of sound.