‘Jacques Bonhomme,’ the French noble would say mockingly of the peasant, ‘has a broad back ... he will pull out his purse fast enough if he is beaten.’ The day came, however, when Jacques Bonhomme, grown reckless in his misery, pulled out his knife instead, and, in the words of Froissart, became like a ‘mad dog’. He had neither leaders nor any hope of reform, nothing but a seething desire for revenge; and in the ‘Jacquerie’, as the peasant rebellion of this date was called, he inflicted on the nobles and their families all the horrors that he himself, standing by helpless, had seen perpetrated on his own belongings. Castles were burned, their furniture and treasures looted and destroyed, their owners were roasted at slow fires, their wives and daughters violated, their children tortured and massacred. This is one of the most hideous scenes in French history, the darker because France in her blindness learned no lesson from it. The nobles, who soon gained the upper hand against these wild undisciplined hordes, exacted a vengeance in proportion to the crimes committed, and fixed the yoke of serfdom more surely than ever on the shoulders of Jacques Bonhomme. This was the only way, in their conception, to deal with such a mad dog; but Jacques Bonhomme was in reality an outraged human being of flesh and blood like those who loathed and despised him; and during centuries of tyranny his anger grew in force and bitterness until in the Revolution of 1789 it burst forth with a violence against both guilty and innocent that no power in France was strong enough to stem. [Sidenote: Étienne Marcel] The outrages of the Jacquerie unfortunately discredited real efforts at reform that had been initiated in Paris by the leader of the middle classes, the Provost of Merchants, Étienne Marcel. This Marcel had demanded that the States-General should be called regularly twice a year, that the Dauphin Charles,[28] eldest son of King John, who was acting as regent during his father’s imprisonment, should send away his favourites, and that instead of these fraudulent ministers a standing council of elected representatives should be set up to advise the crown. To these and many other reforms the Dauphin pretended to yield under the pressure of public opinion; but he soon broke all his promises and began to rule again as he chose. Marcel, roused to indignation, summoned his citizen levies, and, breaking into the Prince’s palace, ordered his men-at-arms to seize two of the most hated ministers and drag them to the royal presence. ‘Do that quickly for which you were brought,’ he said to the soldiers; whereupon they slew the favourites as they crouched at Charles’s feet, their fingers clinging to his robe.