ed thither, for the
7th of November following, the deputies from seventy towns, a sufficient
number to give their meeting a specious resemblance to the
states-general. One circumstance ought to have caused him some
glimmering of suspicion. At the same time that the dauphin was sending
to the deputies his letters of convocation, Marcel himself also sent to
them, as if he possessed the right, either in his own name or in that of
the thirty-six delegate-commissioners, of calling them together. But a
still more serious matter came to open the dauphin's eyes to the danger
he had fallen into. During the night between the 8th and 9th of
November, 1357, immediately after the re-opening of the states, Charles
the Bad, King of Navarre, was carried off by a surprise from the castle
of Arleux in Cambresis, where he had been confined; and his liberators
removed him first of all to Amiens and then to Paris itself, where the
popular party gave him a triumphant reception. Marcel and his sheriffs
had decided upon and prepared, at a private council, this dramatic
incident, so contrary to the promises they had but lately made to the
dauphin. Charles the Bad used his deliverance like a skilful workman;
the very day after his arrival in Paris he mounted a platform set against
the walls of St. Germain's abbey, and there, in the presence of more than
ten thousand persons, burgesses and populace, he delivered a long speech,
"seasoned with much venom," says a chronicler of the time. After having
denounced the wrongs which he had been made to endure, he said, for
eighteen months past, he declared that the would live and die in defence
of the kingdom of France, giving it to be understood that "if he were
minded to claim the crown, he would soon show by the laws of right and
wrong that he was nearer to it than the King of England was." He was
insinuating, eloquent, and an adept in the art of making truth subserve
the cause of falsehood. The people were moved by his speech. The
dauphin was obliged not only to put up with the release and the triumph
of his most dangerous enemy, but to make an outward show of
reconciliation with him, and to undertake not only to give him back the
castles confiscated after his arrest, but "to act towards him as a good
brother towards his brother." These were the exact words made use of in
the dauphin's name, "and without having asked his pleasure about it," by
Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, who himself also h