On the 15th they met in the great hall of the arch-bishop's palace.

Around the king's throne sat two hundred and fifty deputies, whom the successive arrivals of absentees raised to two hundred and eighty-four.

"France in all its entirety," says M.Picot, "found itself, for the first time, represented; Flanders alone sent no deputies until the end of the session; but Provence, Roussillon, Burgundy, and Dauphiny were eager to join their commissioners to the delegates from the provinces united from the oldest times to the crown." [_Histoire des Etats Generaux_ from 1355 to 1614, by George Picot, t.i.p.

360.] We have the journal of these states-general drawn up with precision and detail by one of the chief actors, John Masselin, canon of and deputy for Rouen, "an eminent speaker," says a contemporary Norman chronicle, "who delivered on behalf of the common weal, in the presence of kings and princes, speeches full of elegance." We may agree that, compared with the pompous pedantry of most speakers of his day, the oratorical style of John Masselin is not without a certain elegance, but that is not his great and his original distinction; what marks him out and gives him so high a place in the history of the fifteenth century, is the judicious and firm political spirit displayed in his conduct as deputy and in his narrative as historian.

[The Journal, written by the author in Latin, was translated into French and published, original and translation, by M.A.Bernier, in 1835, in the _Collection des Documents inedits relatifs d l'Histoire de France._] And it is not John Masselin only, but the very assembly itself in which he sat, that appears to us, at the end of five centuries, seriously moved by a desire for a free government, and not far from comprehending and following out the essential conditions of it.