The whole country was in a state of uproar, ready to change every existing arrangement in the hope that what succeeded it would be better. The populace of Paris rose against the Armagnacs and the treachery of a Burgundian sympathizer admitted the friends of John the Fearless. The guardian of the Porte de Buci (in the left bank wall just south of the Tour de Nesle) was an iron merchant whose place of business was on the Petit Pont, the western bridge connecting the Cité with the left bank. This man’s son stole his father’s keys and opened the gate to the Burgundians. They swarmed into the city and at once began a massacre so horrible that the streets were strewn with dead bodies which the children pulled about in play. The Provost of Paris seized the dauphin, afterwards Charles VII, then a lad of fifteen, and carried him in his arms to the Bastille where he might be in safety. The insurgents broke in to the Hôtel Saint Paul, took out the mad king and led him about the city on a horse on the pretense that he was giving his approval to the change of rule. As a matter of fact he was a mere puppet in their hands.
As if these disturbances were not enough, Paris, toward the end of this same year (1418), underwent a severe attack of the plague during which the mortality was so great that the dead were buried in ditches, six hundred in each trench. Between September 8 and December 8, according to the city grave-diggers, a hundred thousand people were buried and of these all but about a dozen in every four or five hundred were children. It is small wonder that the Danse Macabre, picturing all men as followed through life by skeletons giving warning of death, was painted in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, even though the number stated by the grave-diggers would seem to have been increased by the proverbial libation-pouring habits of the profession. Probably fifty thousand is nearer the truth.
Queen Isabeau was ever on the side which she thought most profitable to herself. Just now she was in league with John the Fearless who had caused her to be named regent. With him she had reëntered Paris; she concurred in his getting rid of the Cabochiens by sending them out of the city to attack the Armagnacs outside, and shutting the gates behind them; but it is suspected that she was not ignorant of the plot to murder the duke which was carried out the next year.
John the Fearless was succeeded by his son, Philip the Good, and he became the queen’s adviser. The battle of Agincourt had given Henry
THE OLDEST KNOWN MAP OF PARIS, PROBABLY 15TH CENTURY.
The top of the page is east.
V of England the right to dictate the terms of the Treaty of Troyes. By it Queen Isabeau practically gave away the crown which belonged to her son Charles, bestowed her daughter, Catherine, in marriage on Henry, and yielded the regency of France to Henry during the lifetime of the mad king. Burgundians and English escorted Henry V into Paris at the end of December, 1420. He made the Louvre his residence and put English officers in charge of the Bastille and the other fortifications. The Parisians at first received the newcomers with delight, for so worn was the city with quarreling and fighting that the advent of a new element was looked upon with hope. It was not long, however, before Henry’s sternness and the arrogance of his followers made them disliked, and the new element was found to be an element of discord. Between the regent and the Church there were continual dissensions, for the bishops refused to confirm Henry’s appointments of prelates sympathetic with England.