the Black Prince, whose forces were weak, began to retreat; but the French King outmarched and intercepted him near Poitiers.  He had the English completely in his power, and with a little patience could have starved them into submission; instead, he deemed it his chivalric duty to avenge Crecy in arms, and the great battle of Poitiers was the result (19th September, 1356).  The carnage and utter ruin of the French feudal army was quite incredible; the dead seemed more than the whole army of the Black Prince; the prisoners were too many to be held.  The French army, bereft of leaders, melted away, and the Black Prince rode triumphantly back to Bordeaux with the captive King John and his brave little son in his train.  A two years’ truce ensued; King John was carried over to London, where he found a fellow in misfortune in David of Scotland, who had been for eleven years a captive in English hands.  The utter degradation of the nobles, and the misery of the country, gave to the cities of France an opportunity which one great man, Etienne Marcel, provost of the traders at Paris, was not slow to grasp.  He fortified the capital and armed the citizens; the civic clergy made common cause with him; and when the Dauphin Charles convoked the three Estates at Paris, it was soon seen that the nobles had become completely discredited and powerless.  It was a moment in which a new life might have begun for France; in vain did the noble order clamour for war and taxes,—­they to do the war, with what skill and success all men now knew, and the others to pay the taxes.  Clergy, however, and burghers resisted.  The Estates parted, leaving what power there was still in France in the hands of Etienne Marcel.  He strove in vain to reconcile Charles the Dauphin with Charles of Navarre, who stood forward as a champion of the towns.  Very reluctantly did Marcel entrust his fortunes to such hands.  With help of Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, he called the Estates again together, and endeavoured to lay down sound principles of government, which Charles the Dauphin was compelled to accept.  Paris, however, stood alone, and even there all were not agreed.  Marcel and Bishop Lecocq, seeing the critical state of things, obtained the release of Charles of Navarre, then a prisoner.  The result was that ere long the Dauphin-regent was at open war with Navarre and with Paris.  The outbreak of the miserable peasantry, the Jacquerie, who fought partly for revenge against the nobles, partly to help Paris, darkened the time; they were repressed with savage bloodshed, and in 1358 the Dauphin’s party in Paris assassinated the only great man France had seen for long.  With Etienne Marcel’s death all hope of a constitutional life died out from France; the Dauphin entered Paris and set his foot on the conquered liberties of his country.  Paris had stood almost alone; civic strength is wanting in France; the towns but feebly supported Marcel; they compelled the movement to lose its popular and