To meet the needs of the war, and to provide himself with a still greater force for the coming campaign, John resorted to all sorts of financial expedients. He ordered his treasurers to adjourn all payments out of the public funds, be they for what purpose they might; he made treaties for subsidies with several provinces, Auvergne, Normandy, Maine, and Anjou, and lastly convened the states-general at Paris.[c] THE STATES-GENERAL OF 1355 A.D. The estates of the north, or of the Languedoïl, convoked on the 30th of November, showed no tractable temper. It was necessary to promise them the abolition of that direct robbery called the right of seizure, and of the indirect one which was practised through the coinage. The king declared that the new impost should extend to all persons, and that it should be paid by himself, the queen, and the princes. These fair words did not reassure the estates. They put no trust in the royal word, or in the royal tax-gatherers. They required that the money should be received by themselves, through collectors chosen by them; that accounts should be laid before them, and that they should meet again on the 1st of March, and again, after the lapse of a year, on St. Andrew’s day. [Sidenote: [1355-1356 A.D.]] To vote and receive taxes is to reign. No one in those days was aware of the full import of this bold demand of the estates, probably not even Étienne Marcel, the famous provost of the merchants, whom we see at the head of the deputies of the towns. The assembly purchased this royalty by the enormous concession of 6,000,000 livres parisis for the pay of thirty thousand men-at-arms. This money was to be raised by two imposts, on salt and on sales--bad imposts, no doubt, and bearing heavily on the poor; but what other could be devised in so pressing an emergency, when the whole south was at the enemy’s mercy?