The body met less than three weeks after Charles’s arrival in Paris. More than eight hundred members from all northern France gathered in the Great Hall of the palace. Half of this throng was representative of the _bourgeoisie_, and their superiority in numbers over the nobility--depleted by its losses at Poitiers--and the clergy--naturally a lesser body, though almost every prelate of high rank was present--gave the middle class a courage they never before had assumed. Activity against the regent was manifested promptly. The size of the Assembly being unwieldy a body of eighty was chosen from the full membership to confer and report to the whole meeting. Charles sent officers to represent his interests and to furnish information. On the second day the representatives refused to take counsel unless the officers were withdrawn. Why they wanted to be unchecked was quite evident when, a few days later, the States-General requested the dauphin to meet with them in the monastery of the Cordeliers on the left bank and hear the recommendations which had been approved by the full house. They demanded that twenty-two men of king John’s closest friends and councillors should be arrested, lose their offices and have their property confiscated, and, if trial proved them guilty of “grafting” and of giving bad advice to the king, they were to be further punished. A traveling commission was to be appointed to keep a check on all the officials of France, and a body of twenty-eight men--four prelates, twelve nobles and twelve burghers--was to have “power to do and to order everything in the kingdom just like the king himself.” This proposition practically relegated the regent to private life. A proposal to release from prison Charles’s brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, was not only an attack on John’s management, but a threat against the dauphin’s peace, for the king of Navarre had come honestly by his nickname and was capable of fomenting endless trouble. In return for conceding their demands the States promised the regent a force of thirty thousand men, their support to be provided by taxes of doubtful collectibility. Charles found himself in a position of extreme difficulty. The people of Paris were clamorously in favor of the Assembly’s proposals. Everybody was ready to hit the man who seemed to have no friends. Charles sparred for time, announcing at a meeting held in the Louvre that all the matters under discussion must hold over until he had attended to some business with the German emperor and the pope which called him to Metz. Although Paris was hostile to him Charles had friends elsewhere. He received information that the south of France was heartily royalist, and also that some of the deputies from northern towns to the Paris Assembly had been rebuked by their constituents when they returned home, for their attitude to the regent.