5 six, wearing long hair behind. The prior expressed, through Tabary, his anxiety to become their accomplice and altogether such as they were (de leur sorte et le leurs complices). Mighty polite they showed themselves, and made him. many fine speeches in return. But for all that, perhaps because they had longer heads than Tabary, perhaps because it is less easy to wheedle men in a body, they kept obstinately to generalities and gave him no information as to their exploits, past, present, or to come. I suppose Tabary groaned under this reserve; for but to plan a deliberate robbery on his uncle the monk. As soon as he had properly studied the ground, the others were to go over in force from Paris picklocks and all- and away with my uncle's strongbox! This throws a comical sidelight on his own accusation against his relatives, that they had forgotten natural duty' and disowned him because he was poor. A poor relation 10 is a distasteful circumstance at the best, but a poor relation who plans deliberate robberies against those of his blood, and trudges hundreds of weary leagues to put them into execution, is surely a little on 15 no sooner were he and the Prior out of the wrong side of toleration. The uncle at Angers may have been monstrously. undutiful; but the nephew from Paris. was upsides with him. 20 the church than he fairly emptied his heart to him, gave him full details of many hanging matters in the past, and explained the future intentions of the band. The scheme of the hour was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert de la Porte, and in this the Prior agreed to take a hand with simulated greed. Thus, in the course of two days, he had turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out. For a while longer the farce was carried on; the Prior was introduced to PetitJehan, whom he describes as a little, very smart man of thirty, with a black beard 30 and a short jacket; an appointment was made and broken in the de la Porte affair; Tabary had some breakfast at the Prior's charge and leaked out secrets under the influence of wine and friendship; and then all of a sudden, on the 17th of May, an alarm sprang up, the Prior picked up his skirts and walked quietly over to the Châtelet to make a deposition, and the whole band took to 40 their heels and vanished out of Paris and the sight of the police. 35 On the 23d April, that venerable and discreet person, Master Pierre Marchand, Curate and Prior of Paray-le-Monial, in the diocese of Chartres, arrived in Paris and put up at the sign of the Three Chandeliers, in the Rue de la Huchette. 25 Next day, or the day after, as he was breakfasting at the sign of the Armchair, he fell into talk with two customers, one of whom was a priest and the other our friend Tabary. The idiotic Tabary became mighty confidential as to his past life. Pierre Marchand, who was an acquaintance of Guillaume Coiffier's and had sympathized with him over his loss, pricked up his ears at the mention of picklocks, and led on the transcriber of improper romances from one thing to another, until they were fast friends. For picklocks the Prior of Paray professed a keen curiosity; but Tabary, upon some late alarm, had thrown all his into the Seine. Let that be no difficulty, however, for was there not little Thibault, who could make them of all shapes and sizes, and to whom Tabary, smelling an 45 accomplice, would be only too glad to introduce his new acquaintance? On the morrow, accordingly, they met; and Tabary, after having first wet his whistle. at the Prior's expense, led him to Notre 50 Dame and presented him to four or five young companions,' who were keeping sanctuary in the church. They were all clerks, recently escaped, like Tabary himself, from the episcopal prisons. 55 Among these we may notice Thibault, the operator, a little fellow of twenty more Vanish as they like, they all go with a clog about their feet. Sooner or later, here or there, they will be caught in the fact, and ignominiously sent home. From our vantage of four centuries afterward, it is odd and pitiful to watch the order in which the fugitives are captured and dragged in. Montigny was the first. In August of that same year, he was laid by the heels on many grievous counts; sacrilegious robberies, frauds, incorrigibility, and that bad business about Thevenin Pensete in the house by the Cemetery of St. John. He was reclaimed by the ecclesiastical authorities as a clerk; but the claim was rebutted on the score of incorrigibility, and ultimately fell to the ground; and he was condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. It was a very rude hour for Montigny, but hope was not yet over. He was a fellow of some birth; his father had been king's pantler; his sister, probably married to some one about the Court, was in the family way, and her health would be endangered if the exe-10 cution was proceeded with. So down comes Charles the Seventh with letters of mercy, commuting the penalty to a year in a dungeon on bread and water, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. 15 James in Galicia. Alas! the document was incomplete; it did not contain the full tale of Montigny's enormities; it did not recite that he had been denied benefit 25 of clergy, and it said nothing about 20 Thevenin Pensete. Montigny's hour was at hand. Benefit of clergy, honorable descent from king's pantler, sister in the family way, royal letters of commutation- all were of no avail. He had been in prison in Rouen, in Tours, in Bordeaux, and four times already in Paris; and out of all these he had come scathless; but now he must make a little excursion as far as Montfaucon with 30 Henry Cousin, executor of high justice. There let him swing among the carrion crows. About a year later, in July, 1458, the police laid hands on Tabary. Before the ecclesiastical commissary he was twice examined, and, on the latter occasion, put to the question ordinary and extraordinary. What a dismal change from pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph with expert operators and great wits! He is at the lees of life, poor rogue; and those fingers which once transcribed improper romances are now agonizingly stretched upon the rack. We have no sure knowledge, but we may have a shrewd guess of the conclusion. Tabary, the admirer, would go the same way as those whom he admired. 35 40 45 The last we hear of is Colin de Cayeux. 50 He was caught in autumn 1460, in the great Church of St. Leu d'Esserens, which makes so fine a figure in the pleasant Oise valley between Creil and Beaumont. He was reclaimed by no less than 55 two bishops; but the Procureur for the Provost held fast by incorrigible Colin. 1460 was an ill-starred year: for justice was making a clean sweep of 'poor and indigent persons, thieves, cheats, and lockpickers,' in the neighborhood of 5 Paris;1 and Colin de Cayeux, with many others, was condemned to death and hanged.2 VILLON AND THE GALLOWS 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 end of all supposing, we come upon some and fawning, in his defense. But at the 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 honor, 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 1 Chron. Scand. ut supra. 2 Here and there, principally in the order of events, this article differs from M. Longnon's own reading of his material. The ground on which he defers the execution of Montigny and De Cayeux beyond the date of their trials seems insufficient. There is a law of parsimony for the construction of historical documents; simplicity is the first duty of narration; and hanged they were. as 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 5 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. 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 And, after all, the Parliament changed the matter was pending, our poet had his sentence into one of banishment; and ample opportunity to reflect on his posi- to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet tion. Hanging is a sharp argument, and must carry his woes without delay. to swing with many others on the gibbet Travelers between Lyons and Marseilles adds a horrible corollary for the imagina- may remember a station on the line, some tion. With the aspect of Montfaucon he 15 way below Vienne, where the Rhone was well acquainted; indeed, the fleets seaward between vine-clad hills. neighborhood appears to have been sacred This was Villon's Siberia. It would be to junketing and nocturnal picnics of a little warm in summer, perhaps, and a wild young men and women, he had little cold in winter in that draughty probably studied it under all varieties of 20 valley between two great mountain fields; hour and weather. And now, as he lay but what with the hills, and the racing in prison waiting the mortal push, these river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was different aspects crowded back on his imlittle to be pitied on the conditions of his agination with a new and startling signifi- exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad balcance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of 25 lad, written in a breath, heartily thanked epitaph for himself and his companions, and fulsomely belauded the Parliament; which remains unique in the annals of the envoi, like the proverbial postscript mankind. It is, in the highest sense, a of a lady's letter, containing the pith of piece of his biography:his performance in a request for three 30 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 35 multitudes; but I dare say 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, La pluye nous a debuez et lavez, Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille ab- 40 in those days, seem to have set out on souldre. [The rain has soaked us and washed us, and the sun has dried us and tanned us; magpies and crows have pecked out our 45 eyes, and snatched away our beards and eye-brows. Never, never are we at rest! Now here, now there, as the wind shifts, it carries us along at its pleasure, ceaselessly, more pecked by birds than thimbles for 50 sewing. Do not join, then, our band, but pray God that he may be willing to absolve us.] Here is some genuine thieves' litera- 55 ture after so much that was spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a 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 1 Chron. Scand., p. 338. 5 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 10 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, 15 he might stop to contemplate the gibbet with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape. - - this we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever likely to learn. But on October 2d, 1461, or some day immediately preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into Méun. 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 rimes. 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. THE LARGE TESTAMENT' Of this capital achievement and, with the place to speak. The Large Testament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, in ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression; and he could draw at full How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the protégé of the Bour- 20 bons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part, under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in riming tournament to be referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, 25 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 30 it, of Villon's style in general, it is here Méun-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 35 terspersed among these many admirable 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 40 length the portrait of his own bedeviled 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 [Where he lies neither lightning nor whirlwind enters].' Above all, he was fevered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his heart 50 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 55 he was cast again into prison how he had again managed to shave the gallows 45 soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theater of his exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between the slapdash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer-except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me he bears a particular resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigor, a delight in local personalities, and an in 25 shame, and death; monks and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry; the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window; 5 people with patched eyes sprawl all night under the stall; chuckling Tabary transcribes an improper romance; barebosomed lasses and ruffling students swagger into the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward; the graveyard is ful! of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colir de Cayeux and Montigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be seen than sordid misery and worthless joys? Only where the poor old mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes tremulous supplication to the Mother of God. terest in many sides of life, that are often despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy, colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary. 10 Shall we not dare to say of a thief,' asks Montaigne, 'that he has a handsome leg'? It is a far more serious claim that we have to put forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contempo- 15 raries, his writing, so full of color, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers could have taken a leaf out of his book, history 20 would have been a pastime, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of Charles Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age and country, and initiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long ago, in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognized him as the first articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by priority of merit, but living dura- 30 tion of influence; not on a comparison with obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we shall install this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche in glory's temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in itself, a memorable fact that, before 1542, in the very dawn of printing, and while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran through seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and through Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and growing and growing inspiration. inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous per- 45 tinent way of looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a more specific feature in the literature of France. And only the other year, a work of some power appeared in 50 Paris, and appeared with infinite scandal, which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward form to the study of our riming thief. 35 The world to which he introduces us 55 is, as before said, blackguardly and bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not long before, Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in the whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet could perceive. His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth. He dwelt all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Méun. In the moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognizable out of holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden ships and sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning leaps and cleans the face of heaven; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men's spirits; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is mumbling crusts and picking vermin. Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another characteristic of his work: its unrivaled insincerity. I can give no better similitude of this quality than I have given already: that he comes up with a whine, and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his nose. His pathos is that of a professional mendicant who should happen to be a man of genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy the reader, and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of sympathy. But when the thing is studied the illusion fades away: in the transitions, above all, we can detect the evil, ironical temper of the man; and instead of a flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for the |