A person, called John de Bourges, clerk and servant to master John Berard, king's counsellor in the parliament, who had been confined a prisoner, together with Gratian Meriodeau and Francis Meriodeau his brother, for having quitted Paris, and gone into Brittany to the duke of Berry, conspiring against the person of the king, was, on the 27th day of July, taken out of the bastile of St Anthony, with his fellow-prisoner, Francis Meriodeau,--and, by sentence of the provost of the marshals, they were drowned in the Seine by the hangman of Paris, in front of the tower of Billy, near to the said bastile. And on the following Monday, the 31st of July, the said Gratian, who had been king's notary in the Châtelet, was likewise taken out of the bastile and drowned at the same place, and in the same manner as the two others had been. In like manner was drowned a poor man, a mason's labourer, whom the wife of master Odo de Bucy[75] had sent from Paris with letters to her husband, an advocate in the court of the Châtelet, and then at Estampes. Odo de Bucy was attached to the brother of the count de St Pol, and with him at Estampes, with the other rebellious lords. The labourer brought back answers to the letters, and was paid, for each day he had been out, two sols parisis. For this, however, he was imprisoned, and condemned to be drowned at the same place where the others had suffered. On the morrow, the wife of Odo was banished Paris: she went to St Antoine des Champs, where she resided until peace was made between the king and the princes of France. The princes now advanced to St Maur des Fosses, Conflans, and before Paris, after having staid some days at Estampes, as has been related in the chronicles of Monstrelet. On the 3d of August, the king, having a singular desire to afford some comfort to the inhabitants of his good town of Paris, lowered the duties on all wines sold by retail within that town, from a fourth to an eighth; and ordained that all privileged persons should fully and freely exercise their privileges as they had done during the reign of his late father, the good Charles VII. whose soul may God pardon! He also ordered that every tax paid in the town, but those on provision, included in the six revenue-farms, which had been disposed of in the gross, should be abolished, namely, the duties on wood-yards, on the sales of cattle, on cloth sold by wholesale, on sea-fish, and others; which was proclaimed that same day they were taken off, by sound of trumpets, in all the squares of the town, in the presence of sir Denis Hesselin, the receiver of the taxes within the said town. On this being made public, the populace shouted for joy, sang carols in the streets, and at night made large bonfires.