Was her mistress mad?
Did she wish to court her fate?
To reach Tavannes they must apply to his riders, for Carlat and the men-servants were confined above.

Those riders were grim, brutal men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account.

And Madame, clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror tenfold.

And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris, fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour.

As we now know.
For it was noon--or a little more--of Sunday, August the twenty-fourth, "a holiday, and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder." From the bridges, and particularly from the stone bridge of Notre Dame--while they lay safe in that locked room, and Tignonville crouched in his haymow--Huguenots less fortunate were being cast, bound hand and foot, into the Seine.