“She will have to stay in your room with you, Simon. All the time. And no one must ever go in there. You will have to pretend to be sick.” He did not say so, but the message to his son was clear: “You have brought the girl in, and now you will have to suffer the consequences.”

As for the little girl herself, Pierre was kindly, but blunt. The first thing he did was to put a white band around her arm.

“If anyone ever asks,” he told her, “you must say that you are Catholic. If you say you are Protestant, they will kill you, like your mother and father. Do you understand?” It was a terrible thing to say, but he knew it was necessary. “They will probably kill all of us too,” he added.

Little Constance nodded solemnly. She understood.

“If anyone ever sees her,” Pierre continued, “we shall have to say she is a cousin who is visiting us. But people will be suspicious. So let us keep her out of sight until we can find out what to do.”

By gentle questioning during that very day, her story became clear enough.

Her parents had come from the great western port of La Rochelle, with a party of other merchants and craftsmen who had thought this a safe opportunity to see the capital. Dragged from the tavern where they were staying, her father had been killed at once, but her mother had managed to escape. As she ran down the street, hearing a horse’s hooves coming around the corner behind her, she’d whispered to the child to hide, and shoved her into the shadows of the alley as she passed. A moment later, she’d been cut down.

“Did other family come with you to Paris?” Suzanne asked her. The child shook her head.

“Have you family in La Rochelle?”

“My aunt and uncle.”

“God willing,” Pierre said to his wife afterward, “we can return her to La Rochelle when it’s safe to do so.”

They were both silent for a moment. Neither of them spoke the thought that was in their minds: unless the Protestants of La Rochelle had all been killed as well.

During the first days, the Renard family were very frightened. For the terrible massacre on the Feast of Saint Bartholomew lasted well past the day itself. Estimates varied, but thousands were slaughtered in Paris alone. Soon news came that the massacres were taking place in other towns and cities as well. What the royal family and the Guises had started in Paris, the mob continued all over France. Orléans, Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux, in one after another, Catholic mobs massacred Protestants in the thousands. As yet, it seemed, the great stronghold of La Rochelle had not been touched. But who knew what might come next?