noon
And Madame , clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress , suggested all manner of horrors , one on top of the other , until she increased her own terror tenfold . And yet , to do her justice , nothing that even her frenzied imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris , fruitful mother of horrors , were witnessing at that very hour . As we now know . For it was noon -- or a little more -- of Sunday , August the twenty-fourth , `` a holiday , and therefore the people could more conveniently find leisure to kill and plunder . '' From the bridges , and particularly from the stone bridge of Notre Dame -- while they lay safe in that locked room , and Tignonville crouched in his haymow -- Huguenots less fortunate were being cast , bound hand and foot , into the Seine . On the river bank Spire Niquet , the bookman , was being burnt over a slow fire , fed with his own books . In their houses , Ramus the scholar and Goujon the sculptor -- than whom Paris has neither seen nor deserved a greater -- were being butchered like sheep ; and in the Valley of Misery , now the Quai de la Megisserie , seven hundred persons who had sought refuge in the prisons were being beaten to death with bludgeons .