These enormities—prefigurations of those which, nearly four centuries later, were to be committed in the same city—were succeeded by riotous rejoicings for the arrival of the queen and the duke, and by “one of the finest religious processions that ever was seen.” But the wrath of Heaven did not slumber long. “The joy of Paris,” says an old annalist, “was speedily changed into mourning, for three months had not passed away after this carnage, when so cruel a pestilence fell upon the city, that it destroyed more than eighty thousand persons in three months. History records, that this Perinet and his companions, after having squandered all that they had gained by plunder, died miserably, not long enjoying the fruits of their robberies; and that the greater part of the nobles and gentlemen, who had acted with the murderers, were carried off by the pestilence, except l’Isle Adam, who was reserved to be chastised by king Henry of England, though it was on another account, as we shall relate in the proper place. And was it not God who took vengeance for these cruelties?” In a little more than a year from this time, John the Fearless, himself an assassin, fell by an assassin’s hand, at the conference of Montereau. His life had been productive of great evils to France; his death brought on it still greater. The murder of John gave birth to that coalition between his successor Philip the Good, Henry the fifth of England, and queen Isabella, which, for more than a quarter of a century, deluged the kingdom with blood, and nearly wrested the sceptre from the ancient line of monarchs. In 1420, Paris was delivered into the hands of the English, and for sixteen years they retained possession of it; the Louvre, the Bastile, and Vincennes, were their principal posts in the capital and its immediate vicinity. The only prisoner whom, during their domination, the English are recorded to have confined in the Bastile, was the very man but for whose activity and daring the capital would, perhaps, never have been in their power. It was l’Isle Adam. This warrior, who was born about 1384, of an ancient and noble family, was taken by the English, at Honfleur, in 1415. After he recovered his liberty, he joined the party of John the Fearless, and was made governor of Pontoise. We have seen by what means he gained Paris for the Burgundian prince. That he was deeply implicated in the massacres appears to be a melancholy truth; and all his talents and valour are insufficient to cleanse his reputation from that damnable spot. For his services he was rewarded, by the duke of Burgundy, with the rank of marshal.