Among the chief characteristics that distinguish the history of France from that of any other Christian or civilised nation are the furious, credulous, ferocious mobs, whose atrocious deeds continually appear in her annals, and who seem to belong to no particular century; for whether we see them murdering nobles and gentlemen with their wives and children in the fourteenth century, Huguenots in the sixteenth, waggon loads of women, young girls, and little children in the eighteenth--or priests and unarmed hostages in the nineteenth, whether they are called Jacques, or Leaguers, or Septembriseurs, or Communists--they evidently do not excite either abhorrence or shame in the minds of the great mass of their countrymen who have just raised a statue in Paris in honour of one of the most bloodthirsty of the wretches who acted as their leader in the perpetration of those cowardly and brutal crimes against which the rest of civilised humanity revolts.
One of these mobs, not a whit more cruel and savage than those which yelled and howled and danced through the streets of Paris in our own and our fathers’ and grandfathers’ days, was now pressing round the hôtel of the Duc d’Aquitaine at Saint Paul. They had certainly much reason for their anger and complaints, but whether their cause is a bad or a good one the means by which they carry it out are always atrocious. On this occasion they put forward a Carmelite monk called Eustace, who gave a harangue on the calamities, bad government, and generally disastrous state of things. The Duke of Burgundy came down, said the King was only just recovered and could not bear this agitation, and advised them to go away. But they clamoured for the Duc d’Aquitaine, who, terrified by the tumult and urged by the Duke of Burgundy, appeared at a window and promised all they asked.
One of their leaders, named Jean de Troyes, then imposed silence, and in a speech received with enthusiastic applause by the people and with scarcely concealed indignation by the nobles, declared that they would do no harm to the Duc d’Aquitaine, but demanded that his evil counsellors should be given up to them; and on his chancellor imprudently asking to whom they referred handed up a list of fifty names, including not only the principal gentlemen of his household, but Ludwig of Bavaria, the Queen’s brother, Edouard, Duc de Bar, cousin of the King, and several of the Queen’s ladies. The princes could not pacify them, the Queen wept and raved, the King remonstrated in vain; the Duc d’Aquitaine, turning with a furious look to the Duke of Burgundy, exclaimed, “Father-in-law, this outrage is your doing, for the leaders of it are the people of your house. Know surely that the day will come when you shall repent of it, for things will not always go on according to your pleasure.”