The Emerald Swan

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The tocsin rang at midnight. The streets, hushed and empty, now filled with men, gathering quietly at first, as if for a moment awed by the enterprise that drew them from their houses, white crosses in their hats, harquebuses, swords, knives in their hands.

They moved through the narrow lanes and cobbled streets surrounding the grim dark citadel of the Louvre. A week before, the citadel had blazed with light, music pouring from the narrow barred windows, and crowds of drunken revelers had thronged the streets of the city celebrating the marriage of the French King Charles's sister Marguerite to the Huguenot King Henry of Navarre. A marriage that was intended to unite the Catholic and protestant factions in France.

But on this Saint Bartholomew's night, the marriage served as the bait to entrap and destroy the Huguenots who had arrived in their thousands in Paris to support their young king.

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