The thirty-six commissioners made a show of submission; and their most faithful ecclesiastical ally, Robert Lecocq, Bishop of Laon, returned to his diocese.

The dauphin left Paris and went a trip into some of the provinces, halting at the principal towns, such as Rouen and Chartres, and everywhere, with intelligent but timid discretion, making his presence and his will felt, not very successfully, however, as regarded the re-establishment of some kind of order on his route in the name of the kingship.
[Illustration: Stephen Marcel----342] Marcel and his partisans took advantage of his absence to shore up their tottering supremacy.

They felt how important it was for them to have a fresh meeting of the estates, whose presence alone could restore strength to their commissioners; but the dauphin only could legally summon them.
They, therefore, eagerly pressed him to return in person to Paris, giving him a promise that, if he agreed to convoke there the deputies from twenty or thirty towns, they would supply him with the money of which he was in need, and would say no more about the dismissal of royal officers, or about setting at liberty the king of Navarre.

The dauphin, being still young and trustful, though he was already discreet and reserved, fell into the snare.

He returned to Paris, and summoned thither, for the 7th of November following, the deputies from seventy towns, a sufficient number to give their meeting a specious resemblance to the states-general.