They were rarely paid and there were no perquisites.

In vain they had inscribed their registers with the formula: _Non deliberetur donec solvantur species_; no payments were forthcoming from the suitors.[721] The Attorney General, Messire Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, who owned rich lands and houses in Ile-de-France, Brie, and Champagne, was filled with pity at the sight of that good and honourable lady his wife, his eleven children, and his three sons-in-law going barefoot and poorly clad through the streets of the town.[722] As for the doctors and professors who had followed the King's fortunes, in vain were they wells of knowledge and springs of clerkly learning, since, for lack of a University to teach in, they reaped no advantage from their eloquence and their erudition.

The town of Poitiers, having become the first city in the realm, had a Parlement but no University, like a lady highly born but one-eyed withal, for the Parlement and the University are the two eyes of a great city.

Thus in their doleful leisure they were consumed with a desire, if it were God's will, to restore the King's fortunes as well as their own.

Meanwhile, shivering with cold and emaciated with hunger, they groaned and lamented.