Loire.  He engaged, further, to solemnly renounce all pretensions to the crown of France so soon as King John had renounced all rights of suzerainty over Aquitaine.  King John’s ransom was fixed at three millions of golden crowns, payable in six years, and John Galeas Visconti, Duke of Milan, paid the first instalment of it (six hundred thousand florins) as the price of his marriage with Isabel of France, daughter of King John.  Hard as these conditions were, the peace was joyfully welcomed in Paris, and throughout Northern France; the bells of the country churches, as well as of Notre-Dame in Paris, songs and dances amongst the people, and liberty of locomotion and of residence secured to the English in all places, “so that none should disquiet them or insult them,” bore witness to the general satisfaction.  But some of the provinces ceded to the King of England had great difficulty in resigning themselves to it.  “In Poitou, and in all the district of Saintonge,” says Froissart, “great was the displeasure of barons, knights, and good towns when they had to be English.  The town of La Rochelle was especially unwilling to agree thereto; it is wonderful what sweet and piteous words they wrote, again and again, to the King of France, begging him, for God’s sake, to be pleased not to separate them from his own domains, or place them in foreign hands, and saying that they would rather be clipped every year of half their revenue than pass into the hands of the English.  And when they saw that neither excuses, nor remonstrances, nor prayers were of any avail, they obeyed , but the men of most mark in the town said, ’We will recognize the English with the lips, but the heart shall beat to it never.’” Thus began to grow in substance and spirit, in the midst of war and out of disaster itself [per damna, per caedes ab ipso Duxit opes animumque ferro], that national patriotism which had hitherto been such a stranger to feudal France, and which was so necessary for her progress towards unity—­the sole condition for her of strength, security, and grandeur, in the state characteristic of the European world since the settlement of the Franks in Gaul.

Having concluded the treaty of Bretigny, the King of England returned on the 18th of May, 1360, to London; and, on the 8th of July following, King John, having been set at liberty, was brought over by the Prince of Wales to Calais, where Edward III. came to meet him.  The two kings treated one another there with great courtesy.  “The King of England,” says Froissart, “gave the King of France at Calais Castle a magnificent supper, at which his own children, and the Duke of Lancaster, and the greatest barons of England, waited at table, bareheaded.”  Meanwhile the Prince-Regent of France was arriving at Amiens, and there receiving from his brother-in-law, Galdas Visconti, Duke of Milan, the sum necessary to pay the first instalment of his royal father’s ransom.  Payment having been made, the two kings