a hanging job for every man jack of us that’s here--not to speak of
those who aren’t.” He made a shocking gesture in the air with his
raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one
side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged.
Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with
his feet as if to restore the circulation.
39. Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money,
and retired to the other end of the apartment.
40. Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out a
dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.
41. “You fellows had better be moving,” he said, as he wiped the blade
on his victim’s doublet.
42. “I think we had,” returned Villon, with a great gulp. “Damn his fat
head!” he broke out. “It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right
has a man to have red hair when he is dead?” And he fell all of a heap
again upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.
43. Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming
in.
44. “Cry baby,” said the monk.
45. “I always said he was a woman,” added Montigny, with a sneer. “Sit
up, can’t you?” he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body.
“Tread out that fire, Nick!”
46. But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon’s purse,
as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been
making a ballad not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly
demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently promised as
he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an
artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.
47. 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.
48. 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 snapped his fingers as if
to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped
boldly forward in the snow.
49. 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 round a corner and threw up the
snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.
50. 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 though
carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though 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 sprung 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 pitiful 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.
51. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered
France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught 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.
52. While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped 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 spend-thrifts
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 cursed; 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 dropped 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 grisly 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.
53. He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the
snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he
could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and
sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects
for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And
it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive
discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the
porch. His perspiration had dried upon him, and although the wind had
now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour,
and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as
was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the house of his
adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.
54. He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer.
He knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last
steps were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in
the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.
55. “Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain, from within.
56. “It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.
57. “Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he cursed
him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and
bade him be off to hell, where he came from.
58. “My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my feet are dead
and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies
at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and
before God, I will never ask again!”
59. “You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic coolly.
“Young men require a lesson now and then.” He shut the wicket and
retired deliberately into the interior of the house.
60. Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and
feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.
61. “Wormy old fox!” he cried. “If I had my hand under your twist, I
would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit.”
62. A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long
passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the
humor of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up
to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.
63. What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty
streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and
gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night
might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! and with
such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt
quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some
one else’s, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the
morning when they should find his body.
64. He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between
his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some
old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He
had lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet
now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least
one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at
least, and he would go and see.
65. On the way two little accidents happened to him which colored his
musings in a very different manner. For, first he fell in with the
track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards, although
it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he
had confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of
people tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring him
next morning before he was awake. The other matter affected him quite
differently. He passed a street corner, where, not so long before, a
woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. This was just the
kind of weather, he reflected, when wolves might take it into their
heads to enter Paris again; and a lone man in these deserted streets
would run the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He stopped
and looked upon the place with an unpleasant interest--it was a center
where several lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them
all, one after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should
detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of
howling between him and the river. He remembered his mother telling
him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His
mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at least
of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he
would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his
destination--his last hope for the night.
66. The house was quite dark, like its neighbors; and yet after a few
taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious
voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper,
and waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor had he
to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops
splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been unprepared for
something of the sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the
nature of the porch admitted; but for all that, he was deplorably
drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze almost at once.
Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he
was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing tentatively. But the
gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred
yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and reflected
with his nose. He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that
was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if
it might be easily broken into, and thither he betook himself promptly,
entertaining himself on the way with the idea of a room still hot, with
a table still loaded with the remains of supper, where he might pass
the rest of the black hours and whence he should issue, on the morrow,
with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered on what viands
and what wines he should prefer; and as he was calling the roll of his
favorite dainties, roast fish presented itself to his mind with an odd
mixture of amusement and horror.
67. “I shall never finish that ballad,” he thought to himself; and
then, with another shudder at the recollection, “Oh, damn his fat
head!” he repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.
68. The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon
made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of
attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a
curtained window.
69. “The devil!” he thought. “People awake! Some student or some
saint, confound the crew! Can’t they get drunk and lie in bed snoring
like their neighbors! What’s the good of curfew, and poor devils of
bellringers jumping at a rope’s end in bell-towers? What’s the use of
day, if people sit up all night! The gripes to them!” He grinned as he
saw where his logic was leading him. “Every man to his business, after
all,” added he, “and if they’re awake, by the Lord, I may come by a
supper honestly for once, and cheat the devil.”
70. He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand. On
both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly and with some dread
of attracting notice; but now, when he had just discarded the thought
of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and
innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house
with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though the house were empty;
but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near,
a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as
though no guile or fear of guile were known to those within. A tall
figure of a man, muscular and spare, but a little bent, confronted
Villon. The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose
blunt at the bottom, but refining upward to where it joined a pair of
strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with delicate
markings, and the whole face based upon a thick white beard, boldly
and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flickering
hand-lamp, it looked, perhaps, nobler than it had a right to do; but it
was a fine face, honorable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and
righteous.
71. “You knock late, sir,” said the old man, in resonant, courteous
tones.
72. Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a
crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man of
genius hid his head with confusion.
73. “You are cold,” repeated the old man, “and hungry? Well, step in.”
And he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.
74. “Some great seigneur,” thought Villon, as his host, setting down
the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once more
into their places.
75. “You will pardon me if I go in front,” he said, when this was
done; and he preceded the poet up-stairs into a large apartment,
warmed with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from
the roof. It was very bare of furniture; only some gold plate on a
sideboard; some folios; and a stand of armor between the windows.
Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, representing the crucifixion
of our Lord in one piece, and in another a scene of shepherds and
shepherdesses by a running stream. Over the chimney was a shield of
arms.
76. “Will you seat yourself,” said the old man, “and forgive me if I
leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat I
must forage for you myself.”
77. No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on
which he had just seated himself, and began examining the room, with
the stealth and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his
hand, opened all the folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield,
and the stuff with which the seats were lined. He raised the window
curtains, and saw that the windows were set with rich stained glass
in figures, so far as he could see, of martial import. Then he stood
in the middle of the room, drew a long breath, and, retaining it with
puffed cheeks, looked round and round him, turning on his heels, as if
to impress every feature of the apartment on his memory.
78. “Seven pieces of plate,” he said. “If there had been ten, I would
have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me all the
saints!”
79. And just then, hearing the old man’s tread returning along the
corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting his wet
legs before the charcoal pan.
80. His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine
in the other. He sat down the plate upon the table, motioning Villon
to draw in his chair, and, going to the sideboard, brought back two
goblets, which he filled.
81. “I drink your better fortune,” he said, gravely touching Villon’s
cup with his own.
82. “To our better acquaintance,” said the poet, growing bold. A mere
man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old
seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth for
great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as himself. And
so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous gusto, while the
old man, leaning backward, watched him with steady, curious eyes.
83. “You have blood on your shoulder, my man,” he said.
84. Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the
house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.
85. “It was none of my shedding,” he stammered.
86. “I had not supposed so,” returned his host, quietly. “A brawl?”
87. “Well, something of that sort,” Villon admitted with a quaver.
88. “Perhaps a fellow murdered?”
89. “Oh, no, not murdered,” said the poet, more and more confused.
“It was all fair play--murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God
strike me dead!” he added, fervently.
90. “One rogue the fewer, I dare say,” observed the master of the house.
91. “You may dare to say that,” agreed Villon, infinitely relieved.
“As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned up
his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say
you’ve seen dead men in your time, my lord?” he added, glancing at the
armor.
92. “Many,” said the old man. “I have followed the wars, as you
imagine.”
93. Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up
again.
94. “Were any of them bald?” he asked.
95. “Oh, yes, and with hair as white as mine.”
96. “I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said Villon.
“His was red.” And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to
laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine. “I’m a little
put out when I think of it,” he went on. “I knew him--damn him! And
then the cold gives a man fancies--or the fancies give a man cold, I
don’t know which.”
97. “Have you any money?” asked the old man.
98. “I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing. “I got it out of a
dead jade’s stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Cæsar, poor wench,
and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair. This
is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like
me.”
99. “I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de
Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?”
100. Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. “I am called Francis
Villon,” he said, “a poor master of arts in this university. I know
some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons, ballads, lais,
virelais, and roundels and I am very fond of wine. I was born in a
garret and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows. I may add, my
lord, that from this night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequious
servant to command.”
101. “No servant of mine,” said the knight; “my guest for this evening,
and no more.”
102. “A very grateful guest,” said Villon, politely, and he drank in
dumb show to his entertainer.
103. “You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his forehead, “very
shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small
piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a kind of
theft?”
104. “It is a kind of theft much practiced in the wars, my lord.”
105. “The wars are the field of honor,” returned the old man, proudly.
“There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of his
lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy saints
and angels.”
106. “Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I not
play my life also, and against heavier odds?”
107. “For gain, but not for honor.”
108. “Gain?” repeated Villon, with a shrug. “Gain! The poor fellow
wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign. Why,
what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If they are not
gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to the others. The
men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to
buy them wine and wood. I have seen a good many plowmen swinging on
trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very
poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how all these came to
be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together
enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms.”
109. “These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must
endure with constancy. It is true that some captains drive overhard;
there are spirits in every rank not easily moved by pity; and indeed
many follow arms who are no better than brigands.”
110. “You see,” said the poet, “you cannot separate the soldier
from the brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with
circumspect manners? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without so much
as disturbing people’s sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none
the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up blowing gloriously
on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully
into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I
am a rogue and a dog, and hanging’s too good for me--with all my heart;
but just ask the farmer which of us he prefers, just find out which of
us he lies awake to curse on cold nights.”