A sharp contest of a few months was terminated by another hollow truce, under the name of a peace. By this time the Burgundian prince appears to have been converted into a deadly enemy of des Essarts. Three causes are assigned for this change. The provost is said to have in private charged him with appropriating a large sum of the public money to his own use; to have entered into correspondence with the Orleanist leaders, and warned them that the duke designed to assassinate them; and likewise to have formed, with the concurrence of the dauphin, a plan for rescuing that prince and the king from the state of tutelage in which they were kept by the Burgundian ruler. It is highly probable that, disgusted by the duke having abandoned him in the treaty of the Bicêtre, he had really gone over to the Orleanist faction. Any one of these causes was sufficient to make his former patron resolve upon his ruin. There was also another circumstance which wore a threatening aspect for des Essarts. The States-General were now sitting at Paris, and in that assembly clamours began to be heard against financial depredators, amongst whom the multitude, so lately his adulators, did not hesitate to class him. To elude the storm, which he saw approaching from more than one quarter, he resigned his office of finance minister, in which he had succeeded Montaigu; but he did not forget to secure an adequate compensation for the sacrifice which he made. He then retired to his government of Cherbourg. The Burgundian was at this period in apparent amity with the dauphin; nor had he, as yet, openly manifested his animosity against the provost. The dauphin, was, however, at heart hostile to him, and impatient of his yoke. It was, no doubt, with a view to having a firm hold of Paris, that he resolved to become master of the Bastile; but to the duke the reason which he assigned was, the mutinous disposition of the people, which it was necessary to have the means of repressing. Imagining that the provost was still trusted by the duke, he proposed to confide to him the task of seizing upon the Bastile. The clear-sighted Burgundian at once saw through the scheme, but he gave a willing consent to its execution; for it would enable him to accomplish two objects, the getting of des Essarts into his hands, and the gaining a complete triumph over the dauphin himself. Des Essarts was consequently summoned from Cherbourg; he accepted the commission; and he managed so well, that he secured the Bastile, without the least opposition.