15 rebutted on the score of incorrigibility, crows. 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. 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 and fawning, in his defense. But at the 25 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 every About a year later, in July, 1458, the police laid hands on Tabary. Before the 35 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. 45 thing is lost, and even honor, life still 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. 40 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. 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. 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. 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. Travelers between Lyons and Marseilles may remember a station on the line, some 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 10 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 15 way below Vienne, where the Rhone was well acquainted; indeed, as neighborhood 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 20 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 25 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: the La pluye nous a debuez et lavez, 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 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; 1 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, Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille ab- 40 in those days, seem to have set out on souldre. 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. 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 a 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 - 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' 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 next find him, in summer 1461, alas! he Of this capital achievement and, with 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 45 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 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 terest in many sides of life, that are 30 35 45 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 full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin 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. 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 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. corners. 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 The world to which he introduces us 55 temper of the man; and instead of a is, as before said, blackguardly and bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, бо flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for the 5 mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to think of the Large Testament as of one long-drawn epical grimace, pulled by a merry-andrew, who has found a certain despicable eminence over human respect and human affections by perching himself astride upon the gallows. Between these two views, at best, all temperate judgments will be found to fall; and rather, as I imagine, 10 toward the last. There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in one case, even threatening sincerity. He 30 35 beseeching here in the street, but I would not go down a dark road with him for a large consideration. The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat sniveling conviction of the transitory. nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an after-world- these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease. An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and none of them will tickle an audience into good humor. Tousjours vieil synge est desplaisant. It is not the old jester who receives most recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome, who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air. Of this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious. As for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his reflections on their old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for me. Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune; but what Horace throws out with an ill-favored laugh, Villon dwells on with an almost maudlin whimper. The first of these was an undisguised 15 envy of those richer than himself. was forever drawing a parallel, already exemplified from his own words, between the happy life of the well-to-do and the miseries of the poor. Burns, too proud 20 and honest not to work, continued through all reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Béranger waited till he was himself beyond the reach of want, before writing the Old 25 Vagabond or Jacques. Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, 'was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty' in his ill days. Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox burrowing in their vitals. But Villon, who had not the courage to It is in death that he finds his truest be poor with honesty, now whiningly inspiration; in the swift and sorrowful implores our sympathy, now shows his change that overtakes beauty; in the teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly strange revolution by which great forsnarl. He envies bitterly, envies pas- tunes and renowns are diminished to a sionately. Poverty, he protests, drives handful of churchyard dust; and in the men to steal, as hunger makes the wolf utter passing away of what was once sally from the forest. The poor, he goes lovable and mighty. It is in this that on, will always have a carping word to the mixed texture of his thought enables say, or, if that outlet be denied, nourish him to reach such poignant and terrible rebellious thoughts. It is a calumny on effects, and to enhance pity with ridicule, the noble army of the poor. Thousands like a man cutting capers to a funeral in a small way of life, ay, and even in march. It is in this, also, that he rises the smallest, go through life with tenfold 45 out of himself into the higher spheres as much honor and dignity and peace of of art. So, in the ballade by which he mind, as the rich gluttons whose dainties is best known, he rings the changes on and state-beds awakened Villon's cov- names that once stood for beautiful and etous temper. And every morning's sun queenly women, and are now no more sees thousands who pass whistling to 50 than letters and a legend. Where are their toil. But Villon was the mauvais the snows of yester year?' runs the burpauvre defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its English expression, so admirably stereotyped by Dickens. He was the first wicked sans-culotte [tatterdemalion]. 55 He is the man of genius with the moleskin cap. He is mighty pathetic and 40 den. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and trumpeters, who also bore their part in |