Paris in the 16th century on September 5, 1557, thirty were from noble families. In 1561-62, the number of Protestants in Paris was estimated at between ten and fifteen thousand; in France as a whole, three million, or fifteen percent of the population. The Massacre of Saint-Bartholomew's Day on August 23–24, 1572 killed between two and three thousand Protestants; it was followed by a large-scale emigration of Protestants out of the city, primarily to Sedan, Montbeliard and Geneva. In 1598, with the Edict of Nantes, the Protestant were again able to open a church a Grigny, on the banks of the Seine outside the city.
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre on St. Bartholomew's Day" (1852), which depicts a Catholic woman attempting to convince her Huguenot lover to wear the white scarf badge of the Catholics and protect himself. The man, true to his beliefs, gently refuses her. Millais was inspired to create the painting after seeing Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots". Mark Twain described the massacre in "From the Manuscript of 'A Tramp Abroad' (1879): The French and the Comanches," an essay about "partly civilized races." He wrote in part, "St. Bartholomew's was unquestionably the finest thing of the kind ever devised and accomplished in the world. All the best people took