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
Francois Villon[6]. 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 lamplighter 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.