"
Mezeray writes that seven hundred or eight hundred people had taken
refuge in the prisons, hoping they would be safe "under the wings of
Justice"; but the officers selected for this work had brought them into
the fitly named "Valley of Misery," and there beat them to death with
clubs and threw their bodies into the river. The Venetian ambassador
corroborates this story, adding that they were murdered in batches of
ten. Where all were cruel, some few persons distinguished themselves by
especial ferocity. A gold-beater, named Crozier, one of those
prison-murderers, bared his sinewy arm and boasted of having killed four
thousand persons with his own hands. Another man--for the sake of human
nature we would fain wish him to be the same--affirmed that unaided he
had "despatched" eighty Huguenots in one day. He would eat his food with
hands dripping with gore, declaring "that it was an honor to him,
because it was the blood of heretics." On Tuesday a butcher, Crozier's
comrade, boasted to the King that he had killed one hundred fifty the
night before. Coconnas, one of the _mignons_ of Anjou, prided himself
on having ransomed from the populace as many as thirty Huguenots, for
the pleasure of making them abjure, and then killing them with his own
hand, after he had "secured them for hell.
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