No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself,
jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the
embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into
the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in
sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon
was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighborhood of the dead
Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him
before he should discover the loss of his money, he was the first by
general consent to issue forth into the street.
[Footnote 64: From "A Lodging for the Night: A Story of Francis
Villon," in the volume entitled "New Arabian Nights," published in
1882.]
The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a
few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It
was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost
more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was
absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little
Alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it
were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail
behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still
tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he
must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the
crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came
back to him with a new significance. He snapt his fingers as if to
pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stept
boldly forward in snow.
Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at
Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night's existence, for
one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and
garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept
quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by
mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder
with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the
white streets, except when the wind swooped around a corner and threw
up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering
dust.
Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of
lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as tho
carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And tho it was merely
crossing his line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot
as speedily as he could. He was not in the humor to be challenged, and
he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just
on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a
large porch before the door; it was half-ruinous, he remembered, and
had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped
into the shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the
glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with
outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an
indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose.
His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared
dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It
was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon
this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A
little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her
cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were
quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found
two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little
enough; but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a
deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent
her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he
looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to
the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V of
England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and
this poor jade cut off by a cold draft in a great man's doorway,
before she had time to spend her couple of whites--it seemed a cruel
way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a little
while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in
the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul,
and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all
his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopt beating; a
feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow
seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then
he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon
him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts
money is so living and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and
their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune--that of
time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome
until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer
the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to
nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the
halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so
dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and curst; he threw
the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he
stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor
corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house
beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which
was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost
purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow:
nothing was to be seen. He had not dropt it in the streets. Had it
fallen in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but
the idea of the grizzly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as
he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been
unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a
changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived
his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.