for what reason he had slain the provost of tradesmen
and in what offence he had detected him, and pointed out quietly and
discreetly how that on this very night the city of Paris must have been
overrun and destroyed if God of His grace had not applied a remedy. When
the people who were present heard these news they were much astounded at
the peril in which they had been, and the greater part thanked God with
folded hands for the grace He had done them." The corpse of Stephen
Marcel was stripped and exposed quite naked to the public gaze, in front
of St. Catherine du Val des Beoliers, on the very spot where, by his
orders, the corpses of the two marshals, Robert de Clermont and John de
Conflans, had been exposed five months before. He was afterwards cast
into the river in the presence of a great concourse. "Then were
sentenced to death by the council of prud'hommes of Paris, and executed
by divers forms of deadly torture, several who had been of the sect of
the provost," the regent having declared that he would not re-enter Paris
until these traitors had ceased to live.

Thus perished, after scarcely three years' political life, and by the
hands of his former friends, a man of rare capacity and energy, who at
the outset had formed none but patriotic designs, and had, no doubt,
promised himself a better fate. When, in December, 1355, at the summons
of a deplorably incapable and feeble king, Marcel, a simple burgher of
Paris and quite a new man, entered the assembly of the states-general of
France, itself quite a new power, he was justly struck with the vices and
abuses of the kingly government, with the evils and the dangers being
entailed thereby upon France, and with the necessity for applying some
remedy. But, notwithstanding this perfectly honest and sound conviction,
he fell into a capital error; he tried to abolish, for a time at least,
the government he desired to reform, and to substitute for the kingship
and its agents the people and their elect. For more than three centuries
the kingship had been the form of power which had naturally assumed shape
and development in France, whilst seconding the natural labor attending
the formation and development of the French nation; but this labor had as
yet advanced but a little way, and the nascent nation was not in a
condition to take up position at the head of its government. Stephen
Marcel attempted by means of the states-general of the fourteenth century
to brin