rich province; there were five or six talliages a year; one was no sooner
over than another began; they had levied quite three millions of gold
from Villeneuve-d'Avignon to Toulouse." Charles listened with feeling,
and promised to have justice done, and his father's old councillors, who
were in his train, were far from dissuading him. The Duke of Burgundy,
seeing him start with them in his train, had testified his spite and
disquietude to the Duke of Berry, saying, "Aha! there goes the king on a
visit to Languedoc, to hold an inquiry about those who have governed it.
For all his council be takes with him only La Riviere, Le Mercier,
Montaigu, and Le Begue de Vilaine. What say you to that, my brother?"
"The king, our nephew, is young," answered the Duke of Berry: "if he
trusts the new councillors he is taking, he will be deceived, and it will
end ill, as you will see. As for the present, we must support him. The
time will come when we will make those councillors, and the king himself,
rue it. Let them do as they please, by God: we will return to our own
dominions. We are none the less the two greatest in the kingdom, and so
long as we are united, none can do aught against us."

The future is a blank, as well to the anxieties as to the hopes of men.
The king's uncles were on the point of getting back the power which they
believed to be lost to them. On the 13th of June, 1392, the constable,
Oliver de Clisson, was waylaid as he was returning home after a banquet
given by the king at the hostel of St. Paul. The assassin was Peter de
Craon, cousin of John IV., Duke of Brittany. He believed De Clisson to
be dead, and left him bathed in blood at a baker's door in the street
called Culture-Sainte-Catherine. The king was just going to bed, when
one of his people came and said to him, "Ah! sir, a great misfortune has
happened in Paris." "What, and to whom?" said the king. "To your
constable, sir, who has just been slain." "Slain!" cried Charles; "and
by whom?" "Nobody knows; but it was close by here, in St. Catherine