“I always said he was a woman,” added Montigny with a not to speak of those who aren’t.” He made a shocking sneer. “Sit up, can’t you?” he went on, giving another shake gesture in the air with his raised right hand, and put out his to the murdered body. “Tread out that fire, Nick!” tongue and threw his head on one side, so as to counterfeit But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking the appearance of one who has been hanged. Then he pock-Villon’s purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the eted his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with his stool where he had been making a ballade not three min-feet as if to restore the circulation.
utes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the of the booty, which the monk silently promised as he passed money, and retired to the other end of the apartment.
the little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.
out the dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.
No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon
“You fellows had better be moving,” he said, as he wiped shook himself, jumped to his feet, and began helping to the blade on his victim’s doublet.
scatter and extinguish the embers. Meanwhile Montigny
“I think we had,” returned Villon with a gulp. “Damn his opened the door and cautiously peered into the street. The fat head!” he broke out. “It sticks in my throat like phlegm.
coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in sight.
What right has a man to have red hair when he is dead?” Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon And he fell all of a heap again upon the stool, and fairly was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighbourhood 201
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of the dead Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright windy phase of hurry to get rid of him before he should discover the loss the night’s existence, for one; and for another, the look of of his money, he was the first by general consent to issue the dead man with his bald head and garland of red curls.
forth into the street.
Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by heaven. Only a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeting mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and by a com-shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only mon optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which still: a company of white hoods, a field full of little Alps, was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.
below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an and a couple of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wher-lanterns swung as though carried by men walking. It was a ever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cem-patrol. And though it was merely crossing his line of march, etery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as speedily as he his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime could. He was not in the humour to be challenged, and he and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped the snow. Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it was street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.
half-ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of and so he made three steps of it and jumped into the shel-202
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ter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the glim-by a cold draught in a great man’s doorway, before she had mer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with time to spend her couple of whites -it seemed a cruel way outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he sprang more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle. Then before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a woman, and and vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter light was blown out and the lantern broken.
point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed to fall upon the garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt the name of whites. It was little enough; but it was always again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst something; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration.
pathos that she should have died before she had spent her To spendthrifts money is so living and actual – it is such a money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, one limit to their fortune – that of time; and a spendthrift and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they of man’s life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, 203
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from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has had probably struck sideways and sunk deeply in. With a put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-single white in his pocket, all his projects for a rousing morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse.
ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps towards the house him; and though the wind had now fallen, a binding frost beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, was setting in stronger with every hour, and be felt be-which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that numbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the upon the snow: nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.
it in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occu-no answer. He knocked again and again, taking heart with pant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, every stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; within. A barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful and emitted a gush of yellow light.
light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived
“Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.
from within.
He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about
“It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.
upon the snow for the money he had thrown away in his
“Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he childish passion. But he could only find one white; the other cursed him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him 204
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at such an hour, and bade him be off to hell, where he What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the came from.
frosty streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his
“My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my imagination, and gave him a hearty fright; what had hap-feet are dead and full of twinges; my nose aches with the pened to her in the early night might very well happen to sharp air; the cold lies at my heart. I may be dead before him before morning. And he so young! and with such im-morning. Only this once, father, and before God I will never mense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him!
ask again!”
He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if
“You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic it had been some one else’s, and made a little imaginative coolly. “Young men require a lesson now and then.” He vignette of the scene in the morning when they should find shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the interior of his body.
the house.
He passed all his chances under review, turning the white Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his between his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was hands and feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.
on bad terms with some old friends who would once have
“Wormy old fox!” he cried. “If I had my hand under your taken pity on him in such a plight. He had lampooned them twist, I would send you flying headlong into the bottom-in verses, he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now, less pit.”
when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was down long passages. He passed his hand over his mouth worth trying at least, and he would go and see.
with an oath. And then the humour of the situation struck On the way, two little accidents happened to him which him, and he laughed and looked lightly up to heaven, where coloured his musings in a very different manner. For, first, the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.
he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked in it for 205
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some hundred yards, although it lay out of his direction.
her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his desti-And this spirited him up; at least he had confused his trail; nation – his last hope for the night.
for he was still possessed with the idea of people tracking The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and yet him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring him next after a few taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door morning before he was awake. The other matter affected opening, and a cautious voice asking who was there. The him very differently. He passed a street corner, where, not poet named himself in a loud whisper, and waited, not with-so long before, a woman and her child had been devoured out come trepidation, the result. Nor had he to wait long.
by wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops when wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been again; and a lone man in these deserted streets would run unprepared for something of the sort, and had put himself the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but stopped and looked upon the place with an unpleasant infor all that, he was deplorably drenched below the waist.
terest – it was a centre where several lanes intersected each His hose began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold other; and he looked down them all one after another, and and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some gallop-was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing tentatively.
ing black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He between him and the river. He remembered his mother tell-stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had ing him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was been so rudely used, and reflected with his finger to his yet a child. His mother! If he only knew where she lived, nose. He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and he might make sure at least of shelter. He determined he that was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away, would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he would go and see which looked as if it might be easily broken into, and thither 206
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he betook himself promptly, entertaining himself on the a rope’s end in bell-towers? What’s the use of day, if people way with the idea of a room still hot, with a table still loaded sit up all night? The gripes to them!” He grinned as he saw with the remains of supper, where he might pass the rest of where his logic was leading him. “Every man to his busi-the black hours, and whence he should issue, on the mor-ness, after all,” added he, “and if they’re awake, by the row, with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for this once, and on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as he cheat the devil.”
was calling the roll of his favourite dainties, roast fish preHe went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured sented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amuse-hand. On both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly ment and horror.
and with some dread of attracting notice; but now when he
“I shall never finish that ballade,” he thought to himself; had just discarded the thought of a burglarious entry, knock-and then, with another shudder at the recollection, “Oh, ing at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent pro-damn his fat head!” he repeated fervently, and spat upon ceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house the snow.
with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though it were quite The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as empty; but these had scarcely died away before a mea-Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the handi-sured tread drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, est point of attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye and one wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or from behind a curtained window.
fear of guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a
“The devil!” he thought. “People awake! Some student man, muscular and spare, but a little bent, confronted Villon.
or some saint, confound the crew! Can’t they get drunk The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the and lie in bed snoring like their neighbours? What’s the nose blunt at the bottom, but refining upward to where it good of curfew, and poor devils of bell-ringers jumping at joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth 207
Robert Louis Stevenson
and eyes surrounded with delicate markings, and the whole only some gold plate on a sideboard; some folios; and a face based upon a thick white beard, boldly and squarely stand of armour between the windows. Some smart tapes-trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flickering hand-try hung upon the walls, representing the crucifixion of lamp, it looked perhaps nobler than it had a right to do; but our Lord in one piece, and in another a scene of shepherds it was a fine face, honourable rather than intelligent, strong, and shepherdesses by a running stream. Over the chimney simple, and righteous.
was a shield of arms.
“You knock late, sir,” said the old man in resonant, cour-
“Will you seat yourself,” said the old man, “and forgive teous tones.
me if I leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of you are to eat I must forage for you myself.” apology; at a crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the in him, and the man of genius hid his head with confusion.
chair on which he had just seated himself, and began ex-
“You are cold,” repeated the old man, “and hungry? Well, amining the room, with the stealth and passion of a cat. He step in.” And he ordered him into the house with a noble weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened all the folios, enough gesture.
and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the stuff
“Some great seigneur,” thought Villon, as his host, set-with which the seats were lined. He raised the window ting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, curtains, and saw that the windows were set with rich shot the bolts once more into their places.
stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, of martial
“You will pardon me if I go in front,” he said, when this import. Then he stood in the middle of the room, drew a was done; and he preceded the poet upstairs into a large long breath, and retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked apartment, warmed with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great round and round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress lamp hanging from the roof. It was very bare of furniture: every feature of the apartment on his memory.
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“Seven pieces of plate,” he said. “If there had been ten, I Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he would have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, left the house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.
so help me all the saints!”
“It was none of my shedding,” he stammered.
And just then, hearing the old man’s tread returning along
“I had not supposed so,” returned his host quietly.
the corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly
“A brawl?”
toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan.
“Well, something of that sort,” Villon admitted with a His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug quaver.
of wine in the other. He set down the plate upon the table,
“Perhaps a fellow murdered?”
motioning Villon to draw in his chair, and going to the
“Oh no, not murdered,” said the poet, more and more sideboard, brought back two goblets, which he filled.
confused. “It was all fair play – murdered by accident. I
“I drink to your better fortune,” he said, gravely touch-had no hand in it, God strike me dead!” he added fervently.
ing Villon’s cup with his own.
“One rogue the fewer, I dare say,” observed the master
“To our better acquaintance,” said the poet, growing bold.
of the house.
A mere man of the people would have been awed by the
“You may dare to say that,” agreed Villon, infinitely re-courtesy of the old seigneur, but Villon was hardened in lieved. “As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusa-that matter; he had made mirth for great lords before now, lem. He turned up his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty and found them as black rascals as himself. And so he de-thing to look at. I dare say you’ve seen dead men in your voted himself to the viands with a ravenous gusto, while time, my lord?” he added, glancing at the armour.
the old man, leaning backward, watched him with steady,
“Many,” said the old man. “I have followed the wars, as curious eyes.
you imagine.”
“You have blood on your shoulder, my man,” he said.
Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just 209
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taken up again.
university. I know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can
“Were any of them bald?” he asked.
make chansons, ballades, lais, virelais, and roundels, and I
“Oh yes, and with hair as white as mine.” am very fond of wine. I was born in a garret, and I shall not
“I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said improbably die upon the gallows. I may add, my lord, that Villon. “His was red.” And he had a return of his shudder-from this night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequi-ing and tendency to laughter, which he drowned with a ous servant to command.”
great draught of wine. “I’m a little put out when I think of
“No servant of mine,” said the knight; “my guest for this it,” he went on. “I knew him – damn him! And then the evening, and no more.”
cold gives a man fancies – or the fancies give a man cold, I
“A very grateful guest,” said Villon politely; and he drank don’t know which.”
in dumb show to his entertainer.
“Have you any money?” asked the old man.
“You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his fore-
“I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing. “I got it head, “very shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; out of a dead jade’s stocking in a porch. She was as dead and yet you take a small piece of money off a dead woman as Caesar, poor wench, and as cold as a church, with bits in the street. Is it not a kind of theft?” of ribbon sticking in her hair. This is a hard world in winter
“It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord.” for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me.”
“The wars are the field of honour,” returned the old man
“I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, proudly. “There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights seigneur de Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what in the name of his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their may you be?”
lordships the holy saints and angels.” Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. “I am called
“Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I Francis Villon,” he said, “a poor Master of Arts of this not play my life also, and against heavier odds?” 210
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“For gain, but not for honour.”
mutton chops, without so much as disturbing people’s sleep;
“Gain?” repeated Villon with a shrug. “Gain! The poor the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none the less whole-fellow wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a somely on what remains. You come up blowing gloriously campaign. Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and beat the much about? If they are not gain to those who take them, farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am they are loss enough to the others. The men-at-arms drink only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them hanging’s too good for me – with all my heart; but just you wine and wood. I have seen a good many ploughmen swing-ask the farmer which of us he prefers, just find out which ing on trees about the country, ay, I have seen thirty on one of us he lies awake to curse on cold nights.” elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when I asked
“Look at us two,” said his lordship. “I am old, strong, some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it and honoured. If I were turned from my house to-morrow, was because they could not scrape together enough crowns hundreds would be proud to shelter me. Poor people would to satisfy the men-at-arms.”
go out and pass the night in the streets with their children,
“These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born if I merely hinted that I wished to be alone. And I find you must endure with constancy. It is true that some captains up, wandering homeless, and picking farthings off dead drive over hard; there are spirits in every rank not easily women by the wayside! I fear no man and nothing; I have moved by pity; and indeed many follow arms who are no seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word. I wait better than brigands.”
God’s summons contentedly in my own house, or, if it please
“You see,” said the poet, “you cannot separate the sol-the king to call me out again, upon the field of battle. You dier from the brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated look for the gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or brigand with circumspect manners? I steal a couple of honour. Is there no difference between these two?” 211
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“As far as to the moon,” Villon acquiesced. “But if I had warm; and he was in nowise frightened for his host, having been born lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor gauged him as justly as was possible between two such scholar Francis, would the difference have been any the different characters. The night was far spent, and in a very less? Should not I have been warming my knees at this comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of charcoal pan, and would not you have been groping for a safe departure on the morrow.
farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the soldier,
“Tell me one thing,” said the old man, pausing in his walk.
and you the thief?”
“Are you really a thief?”
“A thief!” cried the old man. “I a thief! If you under-
“I claim the sacred rights of hospitality,” returned the stood your words, you would repent them.” poet. “My lord, I am.”
Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable
“You are very young,” the knight continued.
impudence. “If your lordship had done me the honour to
“I should never have been so old,” replied Villon, show-follow my argument!” he said.
ing his fingers, “if I had not helped myself with these ten
“I do you too much honour in submitting to your pres-talents. They have been my nursing mothers and my nurs-ence,” said the knight. “Learn to curb your tongue when ing fathers.”
you speak with old and honourable men, or some one hastier
“You may still repent and change.”
than I may reprove you in a sharper fashion.” And he rose
“I repent daily,” said the poet. “There are few people more and paced the lower end of the apartment, struggling with given to repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let anger and antipathy. Villon surreptitiously refilled his cup, somebody change my circumstances. A man must continue and settled himself more comfortably in the chair, crossing to eat, if it were only that he may continue to repent.” his knees and leaning his head upon one hand and the el-
“The change must begin in the heart,” returned the old bow against the back of the chair. He was now replete and man solemnly.
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“My dear lord,” answered Villon, “do you really fancy sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so that I steal for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he of work or of danger. My teeth chatter when I see a gal-somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better lows. But I must eat, I must drink, I must mix in society of way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to drive some sort. What the devil! Man is not a solitary animal –
him forth again into the street.
cui Deus faeminam tradit. Make me king’s pantler – make
“There is something more than I can understand in this,” me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the Patatrac; and he said at length. “Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you leave me devil has led you very far astray; but the devil is only a very the poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why, of weak spirit before God’s truth, and all his subtleties vanish course, I remain the same.”
at a word of true honour, like darkness at morning. Listen