We have no space in which to follow here the varying fortunes of the two parties. For long years, in town and country, they fought it out; the children of the villages with fists, feet, stones, and sticks; their elders in the towns, with sword, dagger, and club. In the autumn of 1418 the Burgundians effected an entry into Paris, and the excited mob commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of their opponents. Two presidents of parliament, magistrates, bishops, even, fell. Sixteen hundred persons perished in a day. They were slain in the prisons, they were slain in the street. "Did you see your enemy passing on the other side of the way, you had but to cry "À l'Armagnac" and he was dead." A woman, about to become a mother, was ripped open; within her dead body, as she lay in the street, the child could be seen to move. "Vois donc," said the canaille, "this little dog still stirs." But none durst take the child. No Burgundian priest would baptise a little Armagnac. Why should he save an enemy's brat from damnation? "The children played with the corpses in the streets. The body of the Constable and others lay for three days in the palace, a butt for the jests of the passers by. Some of them remembered to take a strip of skin from his back, so that he, too, might wear in death, the white emblem of the living Armagnacs." At last the stench forced them to throw all the debris into the tomberaux; thence, without priest or prayer, into an open ditch in the pig-market.[163] These closing years of the reign of the mad king,[164] from 1418 and on to 1425, were the darkest in all the history of France. War, famine, pestilence, three grim spectres, stalked over the land. Every evening a starving crowd surged round the bake-houses of Paris. In all the town were heard the piteous lamentations of little children crying: "Je meurs de faim!" Upon a dung-heap, thirty boys and girls died of hunger and cold. The dog-knacker was followed by the poor, who, as he slew, devoured all, "chair et trippes."[165] Nor were things better without the town. The fields, deserted by their normal labourers, were re-peopled with wolves, that, scouring the country in great packs, grew fat upon the corpses they scratched up. The people lived only in the woods and the fortresses; the towns teemed with men at arms; all culture was abandoned, except around the ramparts, within sight of the sentry upon his tower. When the enemy appeared upon the horizon, the sound of the tocsin moved man and beast, by a common instinct, to seek shelter within the walls.[166] Hunger made brigands of all. France was receiving at the hand of God full measure for all her sins. The dead man's pall, that Jean sans Peur had been bearing through twelve wretched years of misery and blood, were soon to cover his own mangled body. Murder, as of old, was to breed murder. He who had taken the sword, was to perish by it.