The accepted tale of the part played by the famous window of the Louvre in the drama of Saint Bartholomew's night is as follows: As the signal tolled from the belfry of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois it was answered by another peal from the great bell of the Palais de Justice, where, within a small apartment over the watergate of the Louvre, the queen and her two sons were huddled together not knowing what might happen next. The multitude streamed by on the quay before the palace, and, finally, amid all the horror of Coligny's murder, and the throwing of his body from a window of the Louvre to the street below, Charles IX stood at his window regarding the fleeing Huguenots as so much small game, shooting away at them with an arquebuse as they went by, and with an unholy glee, even boasting that he had killed a score of heretics in a quarter of an hour.
Historians of those exciting times were perhaps none too faithful chroniclers and Charles's "excellent shots" in his "royal hunt," and hideous oaths and threats such as: "We'll have them all, even the women and children," are not details as well authenticated as we would like to have them. Like Rizzio's blood stains they lack conviction.
The ambitious white-plumed Henri de Navarre, when he became Henri IV of France, set about to connect the tentacle which stretched southward from the Old Louvre with the Tuileries (a continuation of the project of Catherine de Médici), and, by the end of the sixteenth century, had built a long façade under the advice of the brothers Ducerceau. This work was added to on the courtyard side under the Second Empire, when a reconstruction, more likely a strengthening of underpinning and walls because of their proximity to the swift-flowing waters of the Seine, of the work of Henri IV was undertaken.
Joining the Tuileries and this work of Ducerceau was the celebrated Pavilion de Flore, a work of the Henri IV period rather than that of Catherine de Médici.
From the Pavilion de Flore to the Pavilion de Lesdiguières ran this long gallery of the Ducerceau and numerous interstices and unfinished vaults and arches leading towards the Old Louvre were, at this epoch, completed by Metezeau and Dupaira. The chief apartment of this structure became known as the _Galerie Henri IV_, and was completed in 1608.