Coligny was one of the first victims of Saint-Barthélemy: German Besme entered his room with a band of stickers: "is this well you it admiral ? "-" It is me, answered Coligny without disturbing itself, do what you will want; for a long time I am ready to die "Besme plunged to him his sword in the chest in blasphémant." Besme, shouted the duke of Own way, which had remained in the street, Besme, is this finished ? "-" It is fact "answered the assassin. - "it by the window Throws that I see it" Besme obeys, and Own way had the infamy to insult its died enemy, and to strike it of a kick to the face.

Charles IX, after having resisted the excitations of his mother a long time, had finished by him yielding: "By God death, he with rage says, since you find good that the admiral is killed, I want, me, that one kills also all the huguenots of France, so that there does not remain about it one which can reproach it to me" Catherine did not neglect anything so that this desire was fully satisfied.

Catherine de Médicis passed all the evening of Saturday 23 and one part of the night to prepare the crime with Henri de Guise and her other accomplices: the roles were distributed, one made close the doors of Paris, and connect all the boats of the Seine, then the stickers went by small troops to the stations that one assigned to them, so that at two hours of the morning, with the signal given by the bell of Saint-Germain the Resident of Auxerre, the massacre started everywhere at the same time: the Protestants, surprised for the majority in their bed, could not even defend themselves; the assassins were not satisfied to massacre Coligny and the other chiefs of the protesting party: noble, magistrates, middle-class man, craftsmen, all those which one could take perished, killed with blow of gun or blow of sword, struck, strangled, drowned, broken, the torturers saved neither the women, nor the children: "Bleed, bleed, shouted by laughing one of the principal executors, the bleeding is as good in August as in May" the rabble, put in joy, trailed the corpses of street in street, the paving stones were red and blood ran in the brooks.

A few hundreds of Protestants who lived in theSaint-Germain suburb, apart from the walls, assembled with the noise of the arquebusades, and thinking that it was a riot of the Own ways against the king, it moved towards Tileries to defend it, but when they arrived on the quay, they were accomodated by shots, and the king took itself an arquebus to draw on them: they turned back in all haste, and the duke of Own way, which had sprung with their continuation, could not manage to join them (August 24, 1572).

The massacres of Paris repeated in province, in Lyon, in Bordeaux, in Rouen, in Meaux, in Troyes, in Bourges, with Charity, Tours, in Orleans, in Saumur, in Angers, etc.

The Loire, the Garonne and the Rhone rolled, like the Seine, of the hundreds of corpses.

One can estimate that Saint-Barthélemy made approximately 20 000 victims, including at least 2000 in Paris and 500 in Rouen.

The king remained some time plunged in the intoxication of his crime, but when it returned to the reason, it had shame of itself, it lost the rest, and its nights were disturbed by terrible nightmares: he heard cries, he saw heaps of corpses, and as he felt death to approach, he trembled of terror, rejected his crime on his mother, and beseeched by sanglotant the mercy of God.

Its end was so miserable that the Protestants themselves testified some pity to it.

It died on May 30, 1574: it was not yet twenty-four years old.