o, not
content with assassinating political prisoners and stealing their
property in Paris, roamed all over the Departments of the Seine and the
Seine-et-Oise, torturing farmers to make them give up their money, and
maddening the countryside with outrages not to be described.

Jean and Mathieu de Longueval, Pierre Piat,[7] and other 'notable
persons' of Chauny, bound themselves together by an oath, in 1432, to
'take the fortress of the city and demolish it.' They chose an occasion
when the bailli, Collard de Mailly, and his brother, Ferry de Mailly,
with some of their men, went riding out of the fortress 'to take their
pleasure in the town.'

[7] That 'Pierre Piat' was a man of character as well as of
substance appears from the fact that he was charged with seeing that
his wife, the cousin of a rich and charitable lady of Chauny, Marie
Martine de Feure, who died in 1400, should each year receive, under
the will of this good dame, 'a large piece of linen cloth whereof to
make shrouds for the poor who might die in the hospital of the
Hotel-Dieu at Chauny.' Obviously there was much better stuff for the
making of a true republic among these good burghers of Chauny in the
fifteenth century than was to be

found among the shouting mobs of the Palais-Royal in the eighteenth.

With a few courageous 'companion adventurers,' previously posted in
hiding near the castle, these determined burghers suddenly sallied
'forth from the place where they were watching the castle gates, and, no
one paying any heed to them, entered the castle courtyard, drew up the
bridge after them, and took possession.'

'News of this going after the two brothers, they were sore displeased,
but they could do nothing,' says the chronicler; 'for the citizens who
were in the plot straightway fell to sounding the tocsin, and gathering
about the castle in great numbers, with arms and with sticks, were soon
admitted into it.'

The castle being thus secured, 'sundry notables of the city went to meet
the two knights, and assured them that no harm should come to them or
theirs, for that what had been done was done only for the peace and
prosperity of the city.' Quite different this from the cowardly murder
of the Governor of the Bastille, struck down after his surrender by some
of Maillard's confederates, while that scoundrel himself still had his
hand upon the unfortunate De Launay's collar.

The 'Messires de Mailly' made