Doubtless there are blots in Marcel’s life. His siding with the Jacques is to be reproached against him as well as his friendship with the king of Navarre, “the third aspirant in the midst of the rival ambitions of France and England.” But it was a question of putting down an absolute, unlimited power. If the aim is the entire remodelling of the organisation of society, when the end in view is the high ambition of snatching the direction of public affairs from the hands of an entire class, history shows that such objects have never been reached without bloodshed. When, four centuries later, the substitution of a representative government for a monarchy founded upon divine right caused so many heads to fall and entailed so much agony, is it to be wondered at that the revolution undertaken by Marcel should follow the same course and suffer the same fate? After all, if the bold provost shed the blood of his adversaries, he was playing a losing game, and staking his own life against the dominion of the nobility. Which is the more illustrious victim, the marshal or himself? Which executioner should be blamed? Marcel failed apparently, because the time was not yet ripe; he had, by a great bound into the future, put himself ahead of his epoch. But he threw an external lustre over the provosts of Paris, and as an eminent historian said, when he demanded that statues should be raised in memory of Marcel, “he is the greatest personage of the fourteenth century.”[k] PEACE NEGOTIATIONS; EDWARD IN FRANCE (1359 A.D.) The dauphin had returned to Paris, but the state of the kingdom seemed desperate. People, however, spoke of peace. Weary of the sumptuous hospitality he had received at Windsor, John had treated with the king of England. He had abandoned to him the shores of the Channel, that is to say Calais, Montreuil, Boulogne, Ponthieu, and Normandy; the whole of Aquitaine, which included Gascony, Bordelais, Agénois, Quercy, Périgord, the Limousin, Poitou, Saintonge, and Aunis; also Touraine and Anjou; and besides this four million gold crowns for the king’s personal ransom. It was the greatest and best part of France, including the entrances to all the rivers. When the treaty was brought to Paris the dauphin refused to execute it, and to strengthen himself for the contest with his father called, at Paris on the 19th of May, 1359, the semblance of an assembly of the three orders, which rejected the shameful terms and added that King John must stay in England until it pleased God to show him the way out.