"
"I know not how far he may have been my friend," replied the Duke, "but
the advice he gave me was very good."
If Mezeray is to be trusted, Charles broke down on the second day of the
massacre. Since Saturday he had been in a state of extraordinary
excitement, more like madness than sanity, and at last his mind gave way
under the pressure. To his surgeon, Ambrose Pare, who kept at his side
all through these dreadful hours, he said: "I do not know what ails me.
For these two or three days past, both mind and body have been quite
upset. I burn with fever; all around me grin pale blood-stained faces.
Ah! Ambrose, if they had but spared the weak and innocent." A change,
indeed, had come over him; be became more restless than ever, his looks
savage, his buffoonery coarser and more boisterous. "_Ne mai poteva
pigliar requie_" says Sigismond Cavalli. Like Macbeth, he had murdered
sleep. "I saw the King on my return from Rochelle," says Brantome, "and
found him entirely changed. His features had lost all the gentleness
[_douceur_] usually visible in them."
"About a week after the massacre," says a contemporary, "a number of
crows flew croaking round and settled on the Louvre. The noise they made
drew everybody out to see them, and the superstitious women infected the
King with their own timidity.
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