Struck by the eagerness of the Parisians to witness the funeral, which seemed to be a matter of public mourning, Caillet followed the crowd, whose confluence from several other streets soon became considerable. Accident threw him near a student of the University of Paris. The young man, about twenty years of age, was named Rufin the Tankard-smasher, a nickname that was borne out by the jovial and convivial mien of the strapping youngster. He had on his head a crazy felt hat that age had rendered yellow, and he wore a black coat no less patched up than his hose. He looked as threadbare as ever did a Paris student. Held back by his rustic timidity, Caillet did not venture to open a conversation with Rufin the Tankard-smasher, notwithstanding several remarks dropped by the crowd around him and by the student himself increased the rustic's curiosity in the young man. "Poor Perrin Macé!" said a Parisian, "To have his hand cut off and then be hanged without trial! And all because it so pleased the Regent and his courtiers!" "That's the way the court respects the famous ordinance of our Marcel!" "Oh, this nobility!... It is the pest and ruination of the country!... It and its clergy!" "The nobles!" cried Rufin the Tankard-smasher; "they are merely caparisoned and plumed parade horses; good to prance and not to carry or draw. The moment they are called to do work, they rear and kick!" "And yet, master student," ventured a large sized man with a furred cap, "the noble knighthood deserves our respect." "The knighthood!" cried Rufin, laughing contemptuously, "the knighthood is good only to figure in tourneys, attracted by the lure of profit. The horse and arms of the vanquished belong to the vanquisher. By Jupiter! Those doughty chaps seek to throw down their adversaries just as we students seek to knock down the nine-pins at a bowling game on the college grounds. But so soon as their skins are in danger in battle, where there is no profit to be fetched other than blows, that same nobility shamefully takes to flight, as happened at the battle of Poitiers, where it gave the signal for run-who-run-can to an army of forty thousand men pitted against only eight thousand English archers! By the bowels of the Pope! Your nobles are not men, they are hares!" "Come, now, master student," laughingly put in another townsman; "let us not be too hard upon the nobility; did it not rid us of King John by leaving him a prisoner in the hands of the English?" "Yes!" exclaimed another, "but we shall have to pay the royal ransom, and in the meantime must submit to the government of the Regent, a stripling of twenty years, who orders people to be hanged when they demand the moneys owing to them by the royal treasury, and object when we strike them, as did Perrin Macé." "With the aid of heaven, our friend Marcel will soon put a stop to that sort of thing." "Marcel is the providence of Paris."