THE THE OUBLIETTE1 (BEING ANOTHER OF FRANÇOIS VILLON'S NIGHTS) BY GEORGE BRONSON-HOWARD Author of "Shadows, "The Romaunt of the Rose," etc. I PICTURES BY ARTHUR E. BECHER HE night of the Consecration of the Candles, the night of the Purification of Our Lady, the second night of the second month of 1462. Candles by the dozen, the score, the gross, the hundredweight, in gold and silver, brass and copper, stone and pewter. In the ville, tiny perfumed tapers, like the fingers of the lovely ladies who lighted them; in the abbeys, tapers chaste and virginal, like the cold fingers of the nuns; in the churches of the city, cathedral candles chilly and severe, higher toward heaven in that vaulty, drafty air; in the houses of the poor, yellow, squatty dips of tallow, smoky, smelly-more apt to be cursed than consecrated, impossible of purification. To the stranger in the street all were alike, with their sparkling tips and golden gleaming, and the carillon of St. Landry, the choruses of St. Merri, all the brazen voices of all the little saints, and the loud and lofty clangor of Our Lady in her own church of Notre Dame, rang out joyous greeting to them all. Through the streets wound long processions of acolytes, priests at their heads, choir-boys at their heels; of fasting vestals with virtuous abbesses, gowns and faces as white as their flickering tapers; of gold-laced captains leading their troops; merchants, their apprentices; aldermen, their gilds-all bowed of head and bare of foot, swords gone from scabbards, tucks from girdles, clubs from belts, the army that wielded them an army of lights. and sharp-pointed, revealing a later procession, a company of soldiers patrolling a prisoner. As it lighted up the Street of the Lantern, dark save for a candle in the confessional of the church of the Madeleine and a patch of luminous shadow from the Fir Apple opposite, the tavern door had opened suddenly, with a reveler rolling out singing a ribald song. Master François Villon, observing him, was filled with envy and a gentle melancholy. He, too, might have been drunk and disorderly had he gone to the Pomme de Pin that night instead of remaining at work in his attic. And now he was the prisoner of the procession, soldiers on all sides of him. Ahead strode the officer, his black velvet set off by buttons of gilt, his baldric broidered, his girdle chased. Boots of Cordovan leather wrinkled smartly about his calves; resting upon the embossed hilt of his two-edged sword was a gantlet of white doeskin worked with threads of gold. From the splendor of this person's attire, the poet, who was also a philosopher, salvaged some scant consolation. "At least they did not send a common fellow for me. Even a sergeant of the watch is dirt to this popinjay. Which would indicate that even in this wretched city there is some one who appreciates poetry." This was said to no one in particular. The poet had exhausted himself in efforts to unriddle the reason for his arrest, the place or person that awaited him. But they paid him the compliment of good listeners, leaving him the conversation, and devoting themselves to their marching. Now they had crossed the Little Bridge, had passed the Point of the Changers, were on the right bank, where in the distance the Fort l'Evêque lighted up the river. Nearer the Grand Châtelet 1 Published in collaboration with the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. But one by one every light had winked and gone out, every bell had ceased to boom; and the moon, peeping timidly through wreaths of white smoke and finding its million rivals departed, rose high above red roofs and black gables, sheer darkened it as it darkened the hearts of its prisoners. Of this gloomy pile, as of the university on the bank far beyond, the poet was an alumnus. "I perceive you are taking me home again," he said, pointing, although his heart was heavy within him. But the procession passed on to gloomy La Grève, where it must detour to avoid the gallows set in the center of the square. As the moon capped the garrets and gables of the town hall, one of the narrow, winding streets became a skein of silver, and an obelisk within the walls of the Cemetery of the Innocents a ghostly guardian. The poet's gaze, leaving this, encountered the pillory of the Halles. "A cheerful journey," he commented sourly. "Is this your delightful answer regarding what awaits me? We have had a prison, a pillory, a gallows, a cemetery. And now, bon Dieu! there is mine ancient enemy, the wheel of the Croix du Trahor. I am to be prisoned, pilloried, broken on the wheel, then hanged and buried. Is that all? Conceal nothing from me." He faltered. They had come to the caldron of the hog-market. Here coiners were boiled alive; and though his brain evolved more bitter badinage, adding to the forecast of his fate an experience with this grisly calorimeter, he could only lick his lips and eye it silently. On they went through the deserted streets of the dark city. Towers and turrets and the overhanging housetops dripped melted snow; the unpaved streets were mud to the tops of their ankles. A cold wind blew up from the river, hanging sign-boards creaked dismally, and at the arched entrance of an alley dangled a long man. This foolish fellow had amateurishly imitated Cousin Henriot, having executed. sentence upon himself for the crime of poverty. His eyes were turned upward to the stone saints of a clock-tower, larger editions of those famous leaden statues that encircled the cap of the king. "If they can do no better for him in heaven than they did on earth, they had better take up a business they know more about," said Villon, cocking his eye at the dead man's smock, his patched and gaping hosen, his frozen toes thrust through the rags that bound his feet. And then he coughed suddenly, harshly, and loudly. The Rue St. Martin stretched before them, a wilderness of windows barred and doors bolted. At midnight it was best not only to be within, but to offer no temptation to those without. More than once, as they passed on, the poet's keen eyes distinguished a dark shape that dived deep beneath some semicircular doorway or pointed arch, to crouch close in friendly darkness, as well he knew, and also that teeth chattered, and fingers clenched on club or tuck. Once on a patch of snow within a spear-head railing the poet saw the shadow of a halberd enlarged to the size of a headsman's ax. As they passed the adjoining wall, a lanthorn's orange light fell full upon a fallen man, face downward in a trickling black blot, the owner of the halberd stirring him with its pole, the lantern-bearer with his toe, while others of the night-bird catchers giggled or grinned. Above this brotherhood of man rose the Sisters of God, stately towers of an abbey, with gables like a clump of dark-pointed pines. A light that ever and anon leaped above a line of quavering shadows in the distance, taken with the gaudy sash wound about the waist of the fallen man, told the story. This street led to that Egyptian evil, that open, unbandaged sore upon the city that festered the night, that unholy sanctuary of truands and cutthroats, the Court of Miracles. It seemed as if fate were combining with his captives to impress upon Villon the little value set upon human life in his Majesty's city of Paris. "Bah! rat-catchers!" he flung behind him. From the Street of St. Martin across the Rue Tintarget, up that of St. Denis into the broader Rue St. Antoine they passed. If two of these saintly streets were the veins of the ville carrying off dirt and scum through such as La Grève and its gibbet, Antoine's was the major artery. Here were ghostly gardens pale in the darkling moon, under trees that waved over housetops like ancient physicians with hands on pulses bidding patients sleep. Here were walls and walls and walls; pointed Gothic arches; porters' lodges over gates; abbeys, great hôtels, palaces. In the middle of this city of spires, slim and white and fire-tipped, a Candlemas candle magnified a thousandfold, the Astrologers' Column revealed its far-reaching gardens, its lighted window-slits, behind which poisons were studied and the secrets of the stars, the beacon of this night-bound shore. Beyond it, in the mighty palace of St. Pol, princes held revelry. Opposite, on the right of the great Antoine artery, rose the palace of the Angoulême prince and the turrets of the Tournelles, a palace brought straight from fairy-land by some jinnee of the lamp, all dark below, but above a grove of gargoyles, a flock of weathercocks, a land of lanterns. On, on, and on they passed, the moon mocking their speed above forests of shining spires and gleaming gables, their journey's end one that would neither shine nor gleam; one that the sunniest day left as dark as the brow of the Black Man himself, the ugly pile of a Bastille. And then to a shrilling upon the officer's silver whistle, down clanked drawbridge and clanged portcullis, and up passed the procession under the ugly snouts of fire-drakes and other fiery ordnance fowl, up and into the donjon-keep. Flambeaux in cages of iron showed walls sticky with moisture, their sickly green a verdure that knew no health of sun, no light of day. Beneath one of these flaming links, where a bored officer in a Scotch bonnet of the royal body-guard kicked his heels against the wet walls, his presence proving that the king was within the fortress, the procession changed leaders. Then up again, with a jingle of keys to follow and a jailer in black jerkin and trunk-hose striped with purple to thread the way through chilly passages, to cling ahead to spiral stairways that wound around the king's inclosure. This striped spider paused before a doorway cut into the stones of a low, arched gallery. The door opened inward to the tune of squeaking bolts and shrieking hinges. Villon, to whom none addressed a word even now, bowed his head and bent his back, stumbled down three steps into the dark inclosure, slipped, and fell upon his face. The key turned again, the bolt was shot back and Master Francis, the poet, was honored with a sleeping chamber under the same roof that sheltered Master Louis, the king. II HIS nerves were none of the strongest, and by design, aided by accident, the jour ney had unmanned him. La Grève, with its ghastly gibbet, the grisly caldron of the hog-market, the wheel of the Trahors cross, the cemetery, the suicide, the slain truand of the Filles-Dieu, were all familiar horrors enough, taken singly, to one of his town and time, especially to him who had written himself in eternal fear of that ill sun that tans when men are dead. But he had never realized their menace so vividly until as a prisoner those silent men led him he knew not whither nor for what. His life had been crowded with offenses against the law. He knew the inside of many prisons; once he had been sentenced to hanging by the neck till he was dead. But the silence, this sinister Bastille, where men were racked apart, buried alive, burned while living! A fit of shuddering took him. "You are cold. Come to the fire," said a voice from the darkness. The poet leaped as high as any deer done to death, then sank to the straw of the floor, face clutched 'twixt trembling palms. Bars and bolts are valor's mightiest foes, and at this sound from nowhere, this fearsome innuendo of a fire, there uprose, stark and terrible, the wraiths of the old wives' tales: red-hot pincers that tore living flesh, men who hung in chains over the roasting flames; all the terrors of secret dungeons where even Cæsar or Charlemagne would have been daunted and dismayed. Clenching teeth and fists, Villon forced back his fear and opened his eyes. No horror beset his gaze. It was only that, coming out of the flare of torches into the darkness, he had not seen at the farther extremity of the cell a basket of live coals swinging from an iron crane, its red glow revealing a pallet of straw, a log for pillow, a man wrapped in a long robe, with a face half hidden by its high-peaked hood. He was not a young man or a strong one. Villon took heart, and for the first time since officer and silent squad had entered his garret he remembered that it had been cold all day with a persistent north wind that made it difficult for poets to keep their wits from wandering and their ink from freezing. So he went forward to the fire, and as he toasted his toes, peered at his fellowprisoner, who had already paid him that compliment, one, be it said, that the poet deserved, for his eyes were bright and luminous, his forehead was broad and high. His features were comely and unusual enough to distinguish any countenance in that land of fire and sword, that age of doubt and despair-features seen oftener in the romance country, in Provence and along the Italian border, where the Renaissance was creeping from its cocoon, a brilliant butterfly from an ugly egg. "I am glad to have your company," said the older man. "It is lonely here. But I am accustomed to loneliness, so it does not matter very greatly. The body can only breathe and eat and sleep, and all those things may be done in a prison." "Myself, I am benefited by the change," yawned Villon, stretching himself lazily upon the straw. "It was very cold in my garret. There is a fire here. To afford fires, I must go to taverns, sometimes to worse places. Of late I have had a strong disinclination to practise the only paying trade I know. I have been writing my will, in rhyme and reason, fitting into it certain ballads I have composed at other times in the last few years. So my mind has been occupied to the detriment of my body; I have not lain soft or eaten my fill for months. But I had sworn to accomplish this work the last time I enjoyed his Majesty's hospitality. These are troublous times, and 't were ill to die with too much left unsaid. One does not rest quiet in one's grave." "His Majesty's hospitality?" echoed the other. "You have been here before?" Villon shook his head. "Nay, Sir Stranger; I rise in the world. I am recognized. Before I was but a vagabond who snatched a gold scent-box from a bishop's quean, having its need for food and drink. For which the bishop may the devil dust off for him the hottest spike in hell!-threw me into a dungeon where the high-water mark of the Loire could be measured upon my waist every noon, and all summer long fed me upon moldy crusts, and left me without drink save only that filthy river-water. hell-hound of a Thibault! oh, lecherous and treacherous D'Aussigny! may the foulest fiend with toe-nails the whitesthot kick you from one end of the bottomless pit to the other!" Oh, "Blasphemer!" said the other in loud tones, and as he sprang up, Villon saw that his hood was a high-pointed cowl, his mantle a monastic gown, his habit that of a Carthusian monk. His long, skinny hand, outstretched, menaced Villon. "Who but pestilential rogue or Hussite heretic could so bespeak a prince of the church?" he charged harshly. "Had I known so foul a fellow was to share my solitude, I would have protested. Blasphemer and thief! And unrepentant even in the shadow of death." It was Villon's turn to leap up and stretch out a threatening hand. "Sanguelac!" he roared. "Death?" Monk's and poet's eyes met above the glow and glare of the iron basket. "Death," repeated the monk, solemnly. "Some time since an officer came to me and asked that I prepare a man to die." "But for what?" demanded Villon, frantically. "What is the accusation against me?" Quickly there ran through his mind the thoughts of his offenses. Had Petit Jean confessed to the robbery at Malamort? Jean had been absent from the taverns these last few days. That had been Villon's only offense since leaving Meung jail; the golden service, sold, had served for food and fire these last two months. But stay! There was the matter of the slain knight on the St. Denis road, slain in self-defense, true, but of that the law took no count when commoner killed nobleman. But how came it? None had seen. All this in the brief instant before the monk answered him. "Of your crime I know nothing; but, an I understood rightly, your sacrilegious life is done by to-morrow's sunrise. The chaplain of this prison is with the king's confessor in the chapel; the Valois sleeps here to-night. So I am to shrive you, unhappy man. Turn your thoughts to holy things." As Villon listened, blind rage and terror filled him; but he sat very still, studying the burning coals, for there was a certain pride in him. This monkish fellow who scorned him should see how little a philosopher needed his platitudes, how well a poet, not a thief, could face the fear of death. And though all was black within him, the hold he kept upon himself forced the fear from his face. he spoke not, for his lips seemed frozen. Yet "You could scarcely go to a worse one," interrupted Villon, viciously. "You have scorned me as a thief. I am; but a thief in a land of thieves. Better be that, a free thief, than a servant of thieves. I am a scholar of the University of Paris, and because I did not choose to be priest or monk, violating my vows as does this Thibault D'Aussigny with his mistresses and his drunkenness, I must become the jackanapes, the jester, the merry-andrew of some great lord, a teller of lewd tales, a procureur to his pleasure. Then I should be honest and sleep soft and wellfed and warm. Some great lord! Examine his pretenses. Go into his villages, his mud-huts, see his villeins with their iron collars, observe the peasants who till God's soil and render him its fruits. And if they resent cold misery and hunger, they are jacquerie to be shot down by archers and harquebusiers. If by ill chance a rose grows in some such dung-heap, the first young springal in silk and velvet may carry her off from father or husband; and if they dare resist, they are rebels and food for corbies. Great God! mighty, merciful Lord!" He ground his teeth and spat. "A thief, you say. But that is because my shoulder has never been augustly honored by the accolade. Had I been belted knight, I might engage in any baron's quarrel. Then calling myself vavasor of one, plunge my hand into the pouch of any in his enemy's fief, carry off his liegemen's precious chattels, sell his serfs into other slavery, burn his house over his head. Or great lords' quarrels being scarce, I hie me to a caravan of merchantmen with offers to protect them from robbers; and they, knowing to refuse means I will gallop ahead and play the robber myself, pay me what I ask. Or if I am a needy seignior with domains through which such caravans must pass, I spy them from my topmost turret, mail me and my men, take horse and collect toll as lord of the highway. And if they are armed and will not, I attack and slay." He paused for want of breath, for he had spoken loud and violently, shaking clenched fist the while. "But I am only a scholar, and therefore a sacrilegious scoundrel. I have heard such talk before from many honest men. Honest! Ha! Especially in our sovereign city of Paris, where honest men abound. Louis of Valois calls himself king of it? It is his little joke. There are a hundred kings. The bishop is king of his diocese, the bailiff of his bailiwick, each of the hundred-odd seigniors is a king in his seigniory. Has not each different laws? But to violate any is to be rogue and rascal. And every little king prisons and tortures and hangs, collects highway-fees, and otherwise administers justice. Justice, quotha? The high and the low; and, so to do, must have archers and crossbowmen, swordsmen, axmen, men at arms, cutthroats for captains as well as for foes. And these swagger the streets along with provost's archers and king's guards and the sons of the seigniories, all booted and sworded, and brawl and wench and maim and kill. Let us be thankful for these honest men who defend our good city against such ragged rascals as myself." He had forgotten the fate that was soon to end all arguments-had forgotten everything except the monstrous injustice of a career that, outside ignominious servitude, had had little choice between starvation and larceny. He was again the orator of the Pomme de Pin, where he, too, was a king; where those who listened students, housebreakers, picklocks generally, the Coquillards of which he was captain-called themselves the children of Francis Villon, and hoisted him aloft on their shoulders when he burned them up with the fire of his discourse. "I was poor, and a priest would have me for his successor. He sent me to the university, where I starved and chilled over my studies until I saw other priests, greedy gormands, drunken swine, lewd debauchers. But I dared not forget my fear of God and take the solemn vows they broke so readily. Nor could I foully jest and play the ape to wallow in rich lords' kitchens, much as I love cakes and |