“Étienne, Étienne,” cried Maillard, “what are you doing here at this hour?”
“What business is it of yours, Jehan! I am here to act for the city whose government has been entrusted to me.”
“That is not so,” cried Jehan with an oath. “You are not here at this hour for any good end; and I call your attention,” he said to the men with him, “to the keys of the gate that he is carrying for the purpose of betraying the city.”
“Jehan, you lie!”
“Traitor, ’tis you who lie!”
A sharp fight arose between the two bands and Maillard himself killed Marcel. He explained his course the next day to the people, “and the greater part thanked God with folded hands for the grace He had done them.”
When Charles the regent rode into Paris on the second day of August he passed a churchyard where the naked bodies of Marcel and two of his companions were exposed on the same spot where the provost had exposed the bodies of the two marshals.
It is not possible to tell now—perhaps it was not possible to tell in his own day—how much of Marcel’s activity was due to a sincere desire to improve the economic and political condition of the burghers of Paris, and how much was the result of his own ambition. Perhaps he was ahead of his time; certainly he was mistaken in his methods. Whatever the judgment upon him it is undeniable that he was a man of extraordinary force and a “spellbinder” whose personality has won him admiration through the centuries. Beside the Hôtel de Ville his statue stands to-day, a stern figure looking south across the river, and mounted on a horse which has been proclaimed as the finest bronze steed in the world.
Upon his return to Paris Charles showed a forbearance unusual in those times of swift reprisals. There were confiscations of the property of some of Marcel’s friends and even the beheading of two of them on the Grève, but that was before the regent’s entrance into the city, and he tactfully steadied popular feeling and gave no rein to the spirit of revenge which he might have been expected to feel. He even entered into an agreement of peace with that weathercock, Charles of Navarre, and Paris and its neighborhood drew a sigh of relief.
The dauphin seized the opportunity offered by this time of quiet to make the Louvre more habitable. The ancient tower was left undisturbed except that a gallery sprang from it to the northern wall which Charles built to complete the rectangle which Philip Augustus had begun.