Scene of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre (24 August 1572)

In February 1836 Paris crowded into the Opéra for Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, a grand opera that ends on the night of Saint Bartholomew, 24 August 1572, when Catholic mobs killed Protestants by the thousands. That same year Fragonard signed this canvas, commissioned in 1833. The massacre broke out six days after the wedding of the king's sister, Marguerite de Valois, to the Protestant Henri of Navarre.

The Louvre places the scene in the apartment of the queen of Navarre. Marguerite herself wrote in her memoirs that a wounded Protestant gentleman, Monsieur de Léran, burst in with archers at his heels and threw himself onto her bed, clinging to her until the captain of the guards spared his life. The picture has sometimes been described as her shielding her husband, though Henri was not in her rooms that night. On the bed, Marguerite in a white cap covers a man in red hose while a soldier raises his sword over them.