Villon was still absent on the Angers expedition when the Prior of Paray
sent such a bombshell among his accomplices; and the dates of his return
and arrest remain undiscoverable. M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for
the autumn of 1457, which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and
the first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils. We may
suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter; we may suppose him
competed for between lay and clerical Courts; and we may suppose him
alternately pert and impudent, humble and fawning, in his defence. But
at the end of all supposing, we come upon some nuggets of fact. For
first, he was put to the question by water. He who had tossed off so
many cups of White Baigneux or red Beaune, now drank water through linen
folds, until his bowels were flooded and his heart stood still. After so
much raising of the elbow, so much outcry of fictitious thirst, here at
last was enough drinking for a lifetime. Truly, of our pleasant vices,
the gods make whips to scourge us. And secondly he was condemned to be
hanged. A man may have been expecting a catastrophe for years, and yet
find himself unprepared when it arrives. Certainly, Villon found, in
this legitimate issue of his career, a very staggering and grave
consideration. Every beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin.
If everything is lost, and even honour, life still remains; nay, and it
becomes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan's parable, as dear as all the rest.
"Do you fancy," he asks, in a lively ballad, "that I had not enough
philosophy under my hood to cry out: 'I appeal'? If I had made any bones
about the matter I should have been planted upright in the fields, by
the St. Denis Road"--Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis. An appeal
to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de Cayeux, did not
necessarily lead to an acquittal or a commutation; and while the matter
was pending, our poet had ample opportunity to reflect on his position.
Hanging is a sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
adds a horrible corollary for the imagination. With the aspect of
Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the neighbourhood appears
to have been sacred to junketing and nocturnal picnics of wild young men
and women, he had probably studied it under all varieties of hour and
weather. And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new and
startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of epitaph for
himself and his companions, which remains unique in the annals of
mankind. It is, in the highest sense, a piece of his biography:--
"La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;
Puis ca, puis la, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez a couldre.
Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre."
Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that was
spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul. There is
an intensity of consideration in the piece that shows it to be the
transcript of familiar thoughts. It is the quintessence of many a
doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in
the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his
eyes.
And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one of
banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must carry his woes
without delay. Travellers between Lyons and Marseilles may remember a
station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets
seaward between vine-clad hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be
a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what with the
hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was little to
be pitied on the conditions of his exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad
ballad, written in a breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the
Parliament; the _envoi_, like the proverbial postscript of a lady's
letter, containing the pith of his performance in a request for three
days' delay to settle his affairs and bid his friends farewell. He was
probably not followed out of Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular
preacher, another exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes;[13]
but I daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a bottle with him
before they turned. For banished people, in those days, seem to have set
out on their own responsibility, in their own guard, and at their own
expense. It was no joke to make one's way from Paris to Roussillon
alone and penniless in the fifteenth century. Villon says he left a rag
of his tails on every bush. Indeed, he must have had many a weary tramp,
many a slender meal, and many a to-do with blustering captains of the
Ordonnance. But with one of his light fingers, we may fancy that he took
as good as he gave; for every rag of his tail he would manage to
indemnify himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or
ringing money; and his route would be traceable across France and
Burgundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over petty thefts, like
the track of a single human locust. A strange figure he must have cut in
the eyes of the good country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet,
with a smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street arab,
posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the green fields and
vineyards. For himself, he had no taste for rural loveliness; green
fields and vineyards would be mighty indifferent to Master Francis; but
he would often have his tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic
dupes, and often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.
How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the _protege_ of the
Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part,
under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be
referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, are matters
that still remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas!
he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-sur-Loire, in the prisons
of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been lowered in a
basket into a noisome pit, where he lay all summer, gnawing hard crusts
and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being
excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a
caricature of his own misery. His eyes were "bandaged with thick
walls." It might blow hurricanes overhead; the lightning might leap in
high heaven; but no word of all this reached him in his noisome pit.
"_Il n'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon._" Above all, he was
levered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his heart
flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault d'Aussigny, walking
the streets in God's sunlight, and blessing people with extended
fingers. So much we find sharply lined in his own poems. Why he was cast
again into prison--how he had again managed to shave the gallows--this
we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever
likely to learn. But on October 2nd, 1461, or some day immediately
preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into
Meun. Now it was a part of the formality on such occasions for the new
King to liberate certain prisoners; and so the basket was let down into
Villon's pit, and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most
joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but once more
a free man, into the blessed sun and wind. Now or never is the time for
verses! Such a happy revolution would turn the head of a
stocking-weaver, and set him jingling rhymes. And so--after a voyage to
Paris, where he finds Montigny and De Cayeux clattering their bones upon
the gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets, "with
their thumbs under their girdles,"--down sits Master Francis to write
his "Large Testament," and perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious
ignominy.