Charles had obtained the money to pay part of his father’s ransom from his new brother-in-law, the duke of Milan who had just married his sister Isabelle. It was to secure the payment of the remainder that John’s younger sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent to England as hostages. John reëntered Paris in December, 1360, four years after the disastrous battle that had cost him his liberty but had had the result of giving his son training which went far to make him one of the greatest kings that France ever has known. Paris was glad to welcome her monarch whose charm they loved and whose weakness they forgot. The remaining four years of John’s rule was hardly wiser than the early part. He jaunted about the country, everywhere instituting festivals and tournaments. It was now that he gave the duchy of Burgundy to prince Philip as a reward for his pluck at Poitiers. Then came the breaking of his parole by the duke of Anjou and John’s return to England and death. The stage was clear for the reëntrance of a man who was to treat his task of rulership as one worthy of serious approach. CHAPTER IX PARIS OF CHARLES V King John’s body was sent over to France from London. As the cortège escorting the coffin drew near to Paris Charles and his brothers went out on foot to meet it, going beyond Saint Denis and then convoying it to the abbey where it was duly buried. The metropolitan of Paris, the archbishop of Sens, sang mass, and after the service the princes with their following of lords and prelates returned to the city. On Trinity Sunday, not long after, these same lords and prelates were witnesses of the coronation at Rheims of Charles and his wife. The ceremonies and festivities lasted five days, after which Charles returned to Paris to take up the burden of government of a disordered and disheartened country. John’s lavishness could not make the people blind to their losses by the plague and three years after Charles’s accession a new attack swept across France striking chiefly the large cities where ignorance of sanitation produced conditions in which truly only the “fittest”--the toughest--could survive. A writer of the time says, “None could count the number of the dead in Paris, young or old, rich or poor; when death entered a house the little children died first, then the menials, then the parents.” It is only wonderful that such epidemics did not make their visitations oftener, when, for instance, the bodies of Marcel and his companions in treachery were cast into the river at the Port Saint Paul, which is above the city, and the city continued to use the river water for drinking purposes.