History of the Rise of the Huguenots

Me faudra-il ainsi périr?

Pope and cardinals are summoned in vain. No one comes, no one will bring reliquary or consecrated wafer. The Mass must finally resign all hope and die:

Hélas chantant, brayant, virant,
Tant que le crime romp et blesse
Puis que voy tost l'ame expirant,
Dites au moins adieu la Messe.
A tous faisant mainte promesse
Ore ai-je tout mon bien quitté
Veu qu'a la mort tens et abaisse
Ite Missa est; donc Ite,
Ite Missa est.

The "chants de guerre" furnish a running commentary upon the military events of the last forty years of the sixteenth century, which is not devoid of interest or importance. The hopeful spirit characterizing the earlier ballads is not lost even in the latest; but the brilliant anticipations of a speedy triumph of the truth, found before the outbreak of the first civil war, or immediately thereafter, are lacking in other productions, dating from the close of the reign of Henry the Third. In a spirited song, presumably belonging to 1562, the poet, adopting the nickname of Huguenots given to the Protestants by their opponents, retaliates by applying an equally unwelcome term to the Roman Catholics, and forecasting the speedy overthrow of the papacy:

Vous appellez Huguenots
Ceux qui Jesus veullent suivre,
Et n'adorent vos marmots
De boys, de pierre et de cuyvre.
Hau, Hau, Papegots,
Faictes place aux Huguenots.

Nostre Dieu renversera
Vous et vostre loy romaine,
Et du tout se mocquera
De vostre entreprise vaine.
Hau, Hau, Papegots,
Faictes place aux Huguenots.

Vostre Antechrist tombera
Hors de sa superbe place
Et Christ partout règnera
Et sa loy pleine de grâce.
Hau, Hau, Papegots,
Faictes place aux Huguenots.

The current expectation of the Protestants is attested in a long narrative ballad by Antoine Du Plain on the siege of Lyons (1563), in which Charles the Ninth figures as another Josiah destined to abolish the idolatrous mass:

Ce Roy va chasser l'Idole
Plain de dole
Cognoissant un tel forfait:
Selon la vertu Royale,
Et loyale,
Comme Iosias a fait.

It is noticeable that the words "va chasser l'Idole" are an anagram of the royal title Charles de Valois– an anagram which gave the Huguenots no little comfort. The same play upon words appears with a slight variation in a "Huictain au Peuple de Paris, sur l'anagrammatisme du nom du tres-Chrestien Roy de France, Charles de Valois IX. de ce nom" (Recueil des Choses Mémorables, 1565, p. 367), of which the last line is,

"O Gentil Roy qui chassa leur idole."

But after the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day the hopes of the Huguenots were blighted. If the king is not referred to by name, his mother figures as the guilty cause of all the misfortune of France. She is a second Helen born for the ruin of her adopted country, according to Étienne de Maisonfleur.

Hélène femme estrangère
Fut la seule mesnagère
Qui ruina Ilion,
Et la reine Catherine
Est de France la ruine
Par l'Oracle de Léon.

"Léon" is Catharine's uncle, Pope Leo the Tenth, who was said to have predicted the total destruction of whatever house she should be married into. See also the famous libel "Discours merveilleux de la vie de Catherine de Medicis" (Ed. of Cologne, Pierre du Marteau, 1693), p. 609.

The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day naturally contributes a considerable fund of laments, etc., to the Huguenot popular poetry of the century. A poem apparently belonging to a more remote date, discovered by Dr. Roullin, and perhaps the only Breton song of the kind that has come down to us, is as simple and unaffected a narrative as any of the modern Greek mœrologia (Vaurigaud, Essaie sur l'hist. des églises réf. de Bretagne, 1870, i. 6). It tells the story of a Huguenot girl betrayed to the executioner by her own mother. In spite of a few dialectic forms, the verses are easily understood.

Voulz-vous ouir l'histoire
D'une fille d'espit
Qui n'a pas voulu croire
Chose que l'on lui dit.

– Sa mère dit: "Ma fille,
A la messe allons donc!"
– "Y aller à la messe,
Ma mère, ce n'est qu'abus.

Apportez-moi mes livres
Avec mes beaux saluts.
J'aimerais mieux être brûlée
Et vantée au grand vent

Que d'aller à la messe
En faussant mon serment."
– Quand sa très-chère mère
Eut entendu c' mot là,

Au bourreau de la ville
Sa fille elle livra.
"Bourreau, voilà ma fille!
Fais à tes volontés;

Bourreau, fais de ma fille
Comme d'un meurtrier."
Quand elle fut sur l'échelle,
Trois rollons jà montée,

Elle voit sa mère
Qui chaudement pleurait.
"Ho! la cruelle mère
Qui pleure son enfant

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