and they were at once torn to pieces amidst ferocious rejoicings.  All the prisons were ransacked and emptied; the prisoners who attempted resistance were smoked out; they were hurled down from the windows upon pikes held up to catch them.  The massacre lasted from four o’clock in the morning to eleven.  The common report was, that fifteen hundred persons had perished in it; the account rendered to parliament made the number eight hundred.  The servants of the Duke of Burgundy mentioned to him no more than four hundred.

It was not before the 14th of July that he, with Queen Isabel, came back to the city; and he came with a sincere design, if not of punishing the cut-throats, at least of putting a stop to all massacre and pillage; but there is nothing more difficult than to suppress the consequences of a mischief of which you dare not attack the cause.  One Bertrand, head of one of the companies of butchers, had been elected captain of St. Denis because he had saved the abbey from the rapacity of a noble Burgundian chieftain, Hector de Saveuse.  The lord, to avenge himself, had the butcher assassinated.  The burgesses went to the duke to demand that the assassin should be punished; and the duke, who durst neither assent nor refuse, could only partially cloak his weakness by imputing the crime to some disorderly youngsters whom he enabled to get away.  On the 20th of August an angry mob collected in front of the Chatelet, shouting out that nobody would bring the Armagnacs to justice, and that they were every day being set at liberty on payment of money.  The great and little Chatelet were stormed, and the prisoners massacred.  The mob would have liked to serve the Bastille the same; but the duke told the rioters that he would give the prisoners up to them if they would engage to conduct them to the Chatelet without doing them any harm, and, to win them over, he grasped the hand of their head man, who was no other than Capeluche, the city executioner.  Scarcely had they arrived at the court-yard of the little Chatelet when the prisoners were massacred there without any regard for the promise made to the duke.  He sent for the most distinguished burgesses, and consulted them as to what could be done to check such excesses; but they confined themselves to joining him in deploring them.  He sent for the savages once more, and said to them, “You would do far better to go and lay siege to Montlhery, to drive off the king’s enemies, who have come ravaging everything up to the St. Jacques gate, and preventing the harvest from being got in.”  “Readily,” they answered, “only give us leaders.”  He gave them leaders, who led six thousand of them to Montlhery.  As soon as they were gone Duke John had Capeluche and two of his chief accomplices brought to trial, and Capeluche was beheaded in the market-place by his own apprentice.  But the gentry sent to the siege of Montlhery did not take the place; they accused their leaders of having betrayed them, and returned to be