"WE SPEAK TO MEN"
It fell this time upon fresh ears, the ears of an old woman who was
patiently pushing her way through the crowd in her effort to reach
her humble lodging. She had succeeded in making her way to the open
space as the last words of the herald's offer were being spoken, and
suddenly her dulled brain caught the full significance of Montjoye's
speech. Looking wildly around her, she saw where Villon stood, an
armoured figure held captive, and without attempting to realize the
meaning of what she beheld, she dropped her stick and tottered
forward to the dais, where she fell on her knees with clasped,
entreating hands.
"Sire, sire, I will die for him!"
Villon's heart leaped to his throat when he saw her.
"Mammy, mammy, go away!" he cried, and he made a vain attempt to
move towards his mother, a movement instantly restrained by the
crossed weapons of his captors. At the same moment Katherine de
Vaucelles came out of the church door in obedience to the summons of
a royal page, who had found her at her prayers, and who told her
that the king desired her presence. She paused at the head of the
steps in amazed survey of the crowded place and a scene that at
first she could not understand.
"Who is this woman?" Louis asked, looking down at the poor old dame,
who knelt before him and besought him. Olivier answered in his ear:
"The fellow's mother, sire."
A very little tenderness came into Louis' eyes, a very little
tenderness trembled on his lips.
"Woman, we cannot hear you," he said. "By God's law you have given
him life once and by my law you may not give him life again."
"Sire, I beseech you," Mother Villon entreated; but the king's pity
was not to be purchased so.
"Take her away and use her gently," he said.
Noel le Jolys stooped to obey the king's command, but the old woman,
rising to her feet, repulsed him fiercely.
"No! no!" she said. "I will not leave my son," and she flung her old
body passionately upon the prisoner's neck and clasped with her lean
arms his mailed shoulders.
Louis bade Montjoye proclaim for the last time, and once again the
trumpets thundered and once again the cold, calm voice of Montjoye
propounded the grim terms of the king's clemency.
The silence that followed was swiftly broken by; the sweet, clear
voice of a girl.
"I will," said Katherine de Vaucelles from her stand on the church
steps, and on the instant all eyes were turned to the spot where the
maiden stood with face as white as pear-blossom and her hands
tightly clenched by her sides. She moved slowly down the steps in
the dead silence and paused before the king's throne.
"I will die for him, sire," she said quietly.
From Villon's lips there came a mighty cry of "Katherine!" and a
fain spot of colour rose on the king's cheeks.
"Mistress, we speak to men," he said.
Tristan pressed his great hands together.
"By St. Denis, our women seem to make the best men," he grunted.
Katherine stood, tall and proud, facing the king. Mother Villon,
stirred by this heavenly interference, left her son to fall at the
feet of the angel lady and kiss the hem of her garment.
Katherine spoke bravely:
"Sire, I love this man and would be proud to die for him. It may
chime with your pleasure to slay him; it cannot chime with your
honour to deny me. Your word is given and a king must keep his
word."
The king made an impatient gesture.
"We speak to men."
Villon caught at his words.
"I speak to a woman," he cried, and gazirig passionately at his
love, he called to her: "Katherine, my Katherine, death is a little
thing. For love is deathless and you give me a better thing than
life."
With unmoved voice, with unchanged face, Katherine persisted:
"Sire, I claim your promise."
Louis again denied her.
"We speak to men. Tristan, do your office."
At this moment the situation suddenly changed. Villon unexpectedly
wrenched himself free from the control of the two soldiers beside
him, whose hold had relaxed in their wonder at what was passing, and
sprang towards Katherine. His act instantly inspired the hearts and
hands of his sympathisers, and in a second he was caught up and
encircled by a crowd of armed and determined men, who drove back the
Scottish archers. Villon snatched a drawn sword from the hand of
René de Montigny and held it high in the air while he shouted:
"No, by God's rood, the candle of my grace has not yet burnt to the
socket! People of Paris, shall I not speak to my lover before I die?"
The place was a raving bedlam of noise and menace. The Scottish
archers did not dare to make any attempt to recapture their escaped
prisoner, but kept their line in front of the royal dais, while
Villon stood by the side of Katherine with drawn sword, an archangel
of insurrection, ready at any moment to fling the forces behind him
upon his adversaries. Yet the king remained as unmoved as if he had
been witnessing a puppet show. In his thin, even voice, he
commanded:
"Speak to her while the candle burns, not a second longer."
With one accord, Villon's adherents drew back and Villon was left
with Katherine alone in the open space.
Katherine whispered to him:
"François, will you not take life at my hands?"
Villon answered her tenderly:
"Dear child, if that crowned Judas there had taken you at your word,
do you think I would have outlived you by the space of a second?"
She looked fixedly into his eyes.
"You are resolved?"
He smiled back at her.
"I am as stubborn as a mule and no pleadings will move me."
She looked over her shoulder with a shudder.
"Dearest, the candle flickers in the wind. There is a dagger in your
girdle. Slay me and yourself."
"You mean it?" he gasped, and she answered firmly:
"By God's Mother and God's Son."
A sudden, wonderful thought flashed through Villon's mind. He had
won love, he could not hope to win life, but at least he might so
manage as to die a soldier's death and not a knave's. He whispered
to her eagerly:
"Then we will spoil old Louis' pleasure yet. Lore, will you marry me
here at the foot of the gallows?"
She answered him:
"With all my heart."
Instantly he turned and left her and strode towards the throne.
"King, I crave your patience, but your sentence must tarry and turn,
for I claim to marry this lady."
Louis smiled derisively.
"It is too late. Sing your neck-rhyme and have done, for your noose
is too large for a wedding ring."
Villon gave him back smile for smile.
"Sire," he said, "I am a Master of Arts of the University of Paris
and as such have the right in extremis to any sacrament of the
church. I have lived a confirmed bachelor, but now I have a mind to
change my state. Find me a priest, King Louis."
Olivier stooped to the king.
"He speaks the truth, sire. He can claim this right"
Louis leaned forward interested.
"What do you hope to gain by this?"
Villon answered calmly:
"The right to die like a soldier by the sword, not like a rogue by
the rope."
A murmur of approval stirred the silent crowd, but it died away as
Katherine suddenly advanced and stood, a white figure like a fair
lily, between the king and Villon.
"Nay, you gain more than this. I am the Lady Katherine de Vaucelles,
kinswoman of the royal house, mistress of a hundred lands, Grand
Seneschale of Gascony, Warden of the Marches of Poitou. In my own
domains I exercise the High Justice and the Low. This man is of
humble birth, and when I marry him he becomes my vassal. Over my
vassals I hold the law of life and death."
Villon dropped on his knees beside his lady.
Louis clapped his thin hands together as a man might applaud a play.
"You are a bold minion and you have a quick wit. But if you marry
this gaol bird you decline to his condition. Your high titles fall
from you, your great estates are forfeit to the crown and you and he
must go out into exile together; the beggar woman with the beggar
man."
Katherine turned to Villon where he knelt beside her.
"'Tis a little price to pay for my lover."
Villon looking up into her eyes, questioned her:
"Do you think I'm worth it, Kate? 'Tis a big price to pay for this
poor anatomy."
She repeated her words.
"'Tis a little price to pay for my lover. Do you doubt me?"
Unheeded a man-at-arms pushed his way through the crowd to the
king's dais and whispered some words in the ear of Noel le Jolys,
who in turn whispered in the ear of Olivier and Olivier hearing,
grew paler than before. Villon caught Katherine by the hand.
"No, Kate, no! The world is wide, our hearts are light. For a star
has fallen to me from heaven and it fills the earth with glory."
His words fell on the king's ears like the voice of an oracle.
Standing in his place with staring eyes and trembling fingers, he
repeated falteringly the mystic words.
"A star has fallen from heaven. My dream, my dream!"
Olivier plucked at his mantle, whispering with twitching lips:
"My liege, this story spreads like the plague in the city and every
alley vomits mutiny."
Louis pushed him aside.
"Rub your pale cheeks," he said; "for all is well. Destiny has
spoken."
Then leaning over and stretching his thin hand towards the crowd, he
cried:
"People of Paris, that man shall have his life; this woman her
lover. I have tried a man's heart and found it pure gold; a woman's
soul and found it all angel. True man and true woman, to each
other's arms!"
And Katherine and Villon obeyed the king.
EPILOGUE
At about this point in his narrative, Dom Gregory, as those happy
few who are familiar with his manuscript in the Abbey of Bonne
Aventure are aware, diverges from the full current of his story to
indulge in some philosophical reflections upon the character of
Louis XI.
What, Dom Gregory asks in cautious interrogation, were the real
intentions of the monarch with regard to François Villon and the
Lady Katherine de Vaucelles? His enemies no doubt assert that he
played with their destinies for a purely malignant purpose and was
only prevented from carrying his evil intentions into effect by the
storm of popular indignation that threatened him. Others, again, who
pretend to a more intimate acquaintance with the shifty character of
the king, insist that he did indeed purpose to send Master Villon to
the gallows, or at least and worse, into a beggar's exile, but that
lie was stayed by Master Villon's happy use of the phrase concerning
a star fallen from heaven, which words, harping upon the
superstitious wits of his majesty, made him believe that the dream
which had puzzled him was interpreted and fulfilled. In this regard
Dom Gregory records with a sly gravity how many suggest that Master
François used those words of set purpose with the very intention of
playing upon the strained strings of the king's mind. But there be
those, too, Dom Gregory adds, and we gather from his manner that he
is inclined to include himself in their number, there be those
partisans of the king who maintain that the king's cruelty was from
the start a mere mask for clemency, that he only intended a little
malicious sport with the too outspoken lover and the too disdainful
lass, and that it had never been in the scope of his thoughts
seriously to punish either the broker of ballads or the valiant maid
of Vaucelles.
Starting from this point, Dom Gregory indulges in a great many
reflections upon kings and kingship and the consequences of kingly
acts, all of which seemed perhaps more momentous at the time when
they were written and in the sleepy Abbey where they lie enshrined,
than in busier and more bustling times. One could have wished that
Dom Gregory had let such philosophies go by the board and had given
us instead some greater knowledge of what happened to François
Villon and Katherine de Vaucelles after they fell upon each other's
necks in that open place in Paris, with the mob huzzahing, the king
staring and Tristan's strange satellites busily dismantling the
useless gibbet. But here Dom Gregory is little less than dumb.
Losses in the manuscript account for much of his silence; perhaps
his ecclesiastical indifference to the wedded state may account for
more. If we can gather vaguely from other sources that the poet and
his mistress settled down on a small and quiet estate in Poitou,
lived a peaceful country life for many years and died a peaceful
country death at the end, it is the most we can hope to gain with
surety. We are glad to believe in their happiness, for he was a true
lover and she was a fair woman.
End of Project Gutenberg's If I Were King, by Justin Huntly McCarthy