Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion is advised.

For just a moment, when Margot of Valois woke in the darkness to the sound of pounding

on her door, she thought that it might be her new husband.

They had been married just four days earlier.

The ceremony was on a platform built outside of Notre Dame Cathedral, because her new husband

was a Protestant heretic, a Huguenot, and he couldn't come inside for a mouse.

They had barely looked at each other through the entire ceremony, and they hadn't looked

at each other afterwards.

When he had gone off to begin the feastings and pantomimes and festivities of their wedding

week, surrounded by his Huguenot friends, and she, Margot, had gone to sit in their

palaces at the Louvre with her sister.

The marriage hadn't been consummated yet.

Her new husband, Henry of Navarre, probably assumed from her stony face at the ceremony

that she wouldn't be willing in welcoming him to her bed.

But he should have known that Margot was a girl who did her duty.

That was the only reason why she was there in the first place, marrying a Protestant heretic

at all.

And so, four days after their wedding, when the festivities still raged on, when Margot

awoke to a knock at her door, she assumed for a moment that it was her husband.

But the knocking became more frantic, and then there was the crying.

Not the crying of a woman or child, but the full-throated weeping of a grown man like a wounded

...