A similar expectation excited the Huguenots, at Caen.
They dug up the coffin: the hollow stone rung to the strokes of their
daggers: the vibration proved that it was not filled by the corpse; and
nothing more was wanted to seal its destruction.
De Bourgueville, who went to the spot and exerted his eloquence to check
this last act of violence, witnessed the opening of the coffin. It
contained the bones of the king, wrapped up in red taffety, and still in
tolerable preservation; but nothing else. He collected them, with care,
and consigned them to one of the monks of the abbeys who kept them in
his chamber, till the Admiral de Chatillon entered Caen at the head of
his mercenaries, on which occasion the whole abbey was plundered, and
the monks put to flight, and the bones lost. "Sad doings, these," says
De Bourgueville, "_et bien peu reformez!_"--He adds, that one of the
thigh-bones was preserved by the Viscount of Falaise, who was there with
him, and begged it from the rioters, and that this bone was longer by
four fingers' breadth than that of a tall man. The bone thus preserved,
was re-interred, after the cessation of the troubles: it is the same
that is alluded to in the inscription, which also informs us that a
monument was raised over it in 1642, but was removed in 1742, it being
then considered as an incumbrance in the choir.
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