And this though I learned afterwards that the keys of the city had been taken the night before to the king, and that, except a party with the Duke of Guise, who had left at eight in pursuit of Montgomery and some of the Protestants--lodgers, happily for themselves, in the Faubourg St.Germain--no one had left the town before ourselves.
While I am speaking of our departure from Paris, I may say what I have to say of the dreadful excesses of those days, ay, and of the following days; excesses of which France is now ashamed, and for which she blushed even before the accession of his late Majesty.

I am sometimes asked, as one who witnessed them, what I think, and I answer that it was not our country which was to blame.

A something besides Queen Catharine de' Medici had been brought from Italy forty years before, a something invisible but very powerful; a spirit of cruelty and treachery.

In Italy it had done small harm.

But grafted on French daring and recklessness, and the rougher and more soldierly manners of the north, this spirit of intrigue proved capable of very dreadful things.