PERHAPS one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the
sudden bull’s-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of
François Villon. {192} His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of
biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will
recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which he
bequeaths his spectacles—with a humorous reservation of the case—to the
hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-Score. Thus equipped,
let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in the
cemetery of the Innocents! For his own part the poet can see no
distinction. Much have the dead people made of their advantages. What
does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and nourished portly
bodies upon cakes and cream! Here they all lie, to be trodden in the
mud; the large estate and the small, sounding virtue and adroit or
powerful vice, in very much the same condition; and a bishop not to be
distinguished from a lamp-lighter with even the strongest spectacles.
Such was Villon’s cynical philosophy. Four hundred years after his
death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; and though he
left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is
only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been
finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among the
good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a fine
figure of the imperishability of men’s acts, that the stealth of the
private inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and dusty
past. We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied. In the
extreme of dissolution, when not so much as a man’s name is remembered,
when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps the very grave
and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have been forgotten,
desecrated, and buried under populous towns,—even in this extreme let an
antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the name will be
recalled, the old infamy will pop out into daylight like a toad out of a
fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what was once a man
will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little while ago and
Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived for the sake of
his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection
of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this projection of a man’s
existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up
again and set forth for the consideration of posterity by a few dips in
an antiquary’s inkpot! This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to
justify those (and they are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the
immediate present.