graves were decently covered; tall, white housetops stood around in
grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, benightcapped like
their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighborhood but a
little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and
tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock
was hard on ten when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern,
beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the
cemetery of St. John.
Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall,
which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring
district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream
of warm vapor from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted
on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But
within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet,
and some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the
night alive and passing round the bottle.
A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from
the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy
monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the
comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the
firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in
a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery,
bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was covered with a
network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now
pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him
on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange
excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled,
grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly
frame.
On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a
scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the
_Ballade of Roast Fish_, and Tabary spluttering admiration at his
shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with
hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty
years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes,
evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled
together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly
countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted
like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in
violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent,
admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips:
he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of
burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese
and human donkeys.
At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game
of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and
training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly
in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin,
poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery
that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been
gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald
head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant
stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.
"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin.
Montigny nodded grimly.
"_Some may prefer to dine in state_" wrote Villon, "_On bread and
cheese on silver plate_. Or--or--help me out, Guido!"
Tabary giggled.
"_Or parsley on a silver dish_" scribbled the poet.
The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and
sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral
grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night
went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something
between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent
of the poet's, much detested by the Picardy monk.
"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are
all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my
gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew, what a gust! Down
went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged
medlar-tree!--I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on the St.
Denis Road?" he asked.
Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his
Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by
the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for
Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard
anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon
fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an
attack of coughing.
"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish.'"
"Doubles or quits," said Montigny doggedly.
"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.
"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.
"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that big
hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you
expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared
to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself
another Elias--and they'll send the coach for you?"
"_Hominibus impossibile_" replied the monk, as he filled his glass.
Tabary was in ecstasies.
Villon filliped his nose again.
"Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.
"It was very good," objected Tabary.
Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish,'" he said. "What
have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it at the
great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus--the
devil with the humpback and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of the
devil," he added, in a whisper, "look at Montigny!"
All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be
enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril
nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his
back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed
hard under the gruesome burden.
"He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Tabary, with round
eyes.
The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to
the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and
not any excess of moral sensibility.
"Come now," said Villon--"about this ballade. How does it run so far?"
And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.
They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal
movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin
was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny
leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow
took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to
move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut,
his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over
one shoulder with the eyes open, and Thevenin Pensete's spirit had
returned to Him who made it.
Everyone sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos.
The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly
fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a
singular and ugly leer.
"My God!" said Tabary, and he began to pray in Latin.
Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and
clucked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then
he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued
laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to pieces.
Montigny recovered his composure first.
"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked; and he picked the dead
man's pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money into four
equal portions on the table. "There's for you," he said.
The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy
glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself
and topple sideways off the chair.
"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. "It's 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.
Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and
retired to the other end of the apartment.
Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the dagger,
which was followed by a jet of blood.
"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he wiped the blade on
his victim's doublet.
"I think we had," returned Villon with a 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.
Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.
"Cry baby," said the monk.
"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." 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 ballade 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
inside 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 sprang 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 pitiable 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. 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.
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 with perspiration. To spendthrifts 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 the door and window, and revived his terror for the
authorities and Paris gibbet.
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 though 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.
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.
"Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain from within.
"It's only me," whimpered Villon.
"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.
"My hands are blue to the wrists," 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."
"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.
Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and
feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.
"Wormy old fox," he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I would
send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."
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.
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.
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.
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 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 very
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 unpleasant interest--it was a centre
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.
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 finger to 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.
"I shall never finish that ballade," 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.
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.
"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
bell-ringers 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 this once, and cheat the devil."
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 it were quite 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.
"You knock late, sir," said the old man in resonant, courteous tones.
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.