of every street.

[Illustration: LA GROSSE HORLOGE AND THE TOWN BELFRY]

In a tumultuous and cheering crowd, the citizens poured towards the
centre of their civic life, in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge; Robert
Deschamps, the Mayor, was put to instant flight for daring to give
halting counsels, and his private prisons were broken open. "No King
can make the people," cried the mob, "but we are going to make a
King," and forthwith they seized on poor honest Jehan le Gras, a
quiet, seemly draper; they robed him in a cloak that had just served
its turn in the last Mystery Play, and they bore him in raucous
triumph to the open square before St. Ouen. "I forthwith abolish the
taxes!" stuttered the royal phantom in high dismay, while his subjects
cheered vociferously, and every market-place roared approbation. "I
deliver up the tax-gatherers to justice!" and in a trice every
tax-gatherer, and Jew, and usurer, and fiscal agent was haled towards
the bridge and there beheaded, till the Seine ran red beneath. "I
deliver up your cruel Mayors to justice!" went on the quavering
monarch, and forthwith five miserable men who had once been mayors of
Rouen, fled from the Rue du Grand Pont, from the Rue Damiette, and
from the Rue aux Gantiers, and took shelter in the nearest cemeteries,
while their burning houses lighted up the town. "I deliver up the
proud monks of St. Ouen to justice!" continued poor Jehan le Gras,
seeing that the mob had already begun to batter in the monastery
gates,[34] and in a moment more the archives and the ancient charters
of the privileges of St. Ouen were in tatters on the ground, or
burning among the desecrated walls they had protected for so many
centuries. In his death-agony the trembling abbot signed the
renunciation of his powers, while the crowd screamed at him till he
was borne back to die.

[Footnote 34: It had always been a bitter grievance that St. Ouen held
a monopoly of the public mills for their bakers, and the grotesque
procession of the "oison bride," in which two monks carried a goose by
a rope every year to the Town Mill in the Rue Coquerel, had not
sufficed to win their pardon from the lower classes.]

And now the mob was parted here and there by a procession of strong
men who bore something with great pride and mystery, and held it,
enveloped from all harm, above their heads. A whisper went round that
grew at last into a shout of welcome and drowned all other sounds.
"The Charter of the N