astute 20 suspicion it was Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk) hurried them away. It was ten o'clock when they mounted the ladder; it was about midnight before Tabary 5 beheld them coming back. To him they gave ten crowns, and promised a share of a two-crown dinner on the morrow; whereat we may suppose his mouth watered. In course of time, he got wind of the real amount of their booty and understood how scurvily he had been used; but he seems to have borne no malice. How could he, against such superb operators as Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux; or a person like Villon, who could have made a new improper romance out of his own head, instead of merely copying an old one with mechanical right hand? The rest of the winter was not uneventful for the gang. First they made a demonstration against the Church of St. Mathurin after chalices, and were ignominiously__chased away by barking of Our Lord], he took part in a memorable supper at the Mule Tavern, in front of the church of St. Mathurin. Tabary, who seems to have been very much Villon's creature, had ordered the supper in the course of the afternoon. He was a man who had had troubles in his time and languished in the Bishop of Paris's prisons on a suspicion of picking locks; confiding, convivial, not very 10 who had copied out a whole improper romance with his own right hand. This supper-party was to be his first introduction to De Cayeux and Petit-Jehan, which was probably a matter of some 15 concern to the poor man's muddy wits; in the sequel, at least, he speaks of both with an undisguised respect, based on professional inferiority in the matter of picklocks. Dom Nicolas, a Picardy monk, was the fifth and last at table. When supper had been despatched and fairly washed down, we may suppose, with white Baigneux or red Beaune, which were favorite wines among the 25 dogs. Then Tabary fell out with Casin fellowship, Tabary was solemnly sworn over to secrecy on the night's performances; and the party left the Mule and proceeded to an unoccupied house belonging to Robert de Saint-Simon. This, over a low wall, they entered without difficulty. All but Tabary took off their upper garments; a ladder was found and applied to the high wall which separated Saint-Simon's house from the court 35 of the College of Navarre; the four fellows in their shirtsleeves (as we might say) clambered over in a twinkling; and Master Guy Tabary remained alone beside the overcoats. From the court the 40 burglars made their way into the vestry of the chapel, where they found a large chest, strengthened with iron bands and closed with four locks. One of these locks they picked, and then, by levering up the corner, forced the other three. Inside was a small coffer, of walnut wood, also barred with iron, but fastened with only three locks, which were all comfortably picked by way of the keyhole. 50 In the walnut coffer a joyous sight by our thieves' lantern were five hundred crowns of gold. There was some talk of opening the aumries, where, if they had only known, a booty eight or nine times greater lay ready to their hand; but one of the party (I have a humorous 30 Chollet, one of the fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat, who subsequently became a sergeant of the Châtelet and distinguished himself by misconduct, followed by imprisonment and public castigation, during the wars of Louis Eleventh. The quarrel was not conducted with a proper regard to the king's peace, and the pair publicly belabored each other until the police stepped in, and Master Tabary was cast once more into the prisons of the Bishop. While he still lay in durance, another job was cleverly executed by the band in broad daylight, at the Augustine Monastery. Brother Guillaume Coiffier was beguiled by an accomplice to St. Mathurin to say mass; and during his absence, his chamber was entered and five or six hundred 45 crowns in money and some silver-plate successfully abstracted. A melancholy man was Coiffier on his return! Eight crowns from this adventure were forwarded by little Thibault to the incarcerated Tabary; and with these he bribed the jailer and reappeared in Paris taverns. Some time before or shortly after this, Villon set out for Angers, as he had promised in the Small Testament. The 55 object of this excursion was not merely to avoid the presence of his cruel mistress or the strong arm of Noë le Joly, 5 six, wearing 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 his own accusation against his relatives, that they had forgotten natural duty' and disowned him because he was poor. A poor relation 10 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 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. 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 On the 23d April, that venerable and 20 band. The scheme of the hour was to discreet person, Master Pierre Marchand, rob another Augustine monk, Robert de Curate and Prior of Paray-le-Monial, in la Porte, and in this the Prior agreed to the diocese of Chartres, arrived in Paris take a hand with simulated greed. Thus, and put up at the sign of the Three in the course of two days, he had turned Chandeliers, in the Rue de la Huchette. 25 this wineskin of a Tabary inside out. Next day, or the day after, as he was For a while longer the farce was carried breakfasting at the sign of the Arm- on; the Prior was introduced to Petitchair, he fell into talk with two cus- Jehan, whom he describes as a little, very tomers, one of whom was a priest and smart man of thirty, with a black beard the other our friend Tabary. The idiotic 30 and a short jacket; an appointment was Tabary became mighty confidential as to made and broken in the de la Porte his past life. Pierre Marchand, who was affair; Tabary had some breakfast at the an acquaintance of Guillaume Coiffier's Prior's charge and leaked out more and had sympathized with him over his secrets under the influence of wine and loss, pricked up his ears at the mention 35 friendship; and then all of a sudden, on of picklocks, and led on the transcriber the 17th of May, an alarm sprang up, of improper romances from one thing to the Prior picked up his skirts and walked another, until they were fast friends. quietly over to the Châtelet to make a For picklocks the Prior of Paray pro- deposition, and the whole band took to fessed a keen curiosity; but Tabary, upon 40 their heels and vanished out of Paris and some late alarm, had thrown all his into the sight of the police. 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 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 45 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, 15 of clergy, and it said nothing about 20 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.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 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 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 35 40 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 upon the rack. 45 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. 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. 1 Chron. Scand. ut supra. 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 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 his sentence into one of banishment; and 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 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; 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. [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 - 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 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' to Of this capital achievement and, with 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 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 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 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 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, interspersed among these many admirable 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 length the portrait of his own bedeviled 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 |