dormant through a dateless winter. His kinship with the South might colour his own taste and shed a little lustre on his court at Blois : it could not redeem him from the dark conditions of his age nor change these sensibly through France. They had seemed at their darkest when, amid the last spasms of the war, François Villon was born in a Paris still held by the English, who that very year (1431) burned Joan, 'la bonne Lorraine,' at Rouen. But they grew darker still when the English had departed the land, for not till after the tide of conquest had turned was there revealed the full horror-the rot and stench of the wreckage it had submerged. The winter following on Charles VII.'s re-entry into Paris (1437) was one of pestilence and famine and unheard-of cold. Wolves prowled in the streets, attacking grown men.1 Charles D'Orléans took refuge from those evil days in the glow of an easy mind he shut himself in, as a man on winter evenings shuts himself into a little chamber lit with a cheerful blaze. It was not so with Villon. The grisly shadows of his childhood crept into his soul, and from his soul into his song; so that when most his verses glitter and ring with tears and laughter, there shall you look to meet a wolf at any turn. The record of his manhood opens with a sordid tragedy, and closes, so far as we know it, with a blackguardly revenge. Skipping the follies of 'le petit escolier,' we find him, a young man, sitting, on a June evening in 1455, after supper under the clock-tower of Saint Bénoit-le-bétourné. A priest, one Philippe Sermoise, wronged, it may be, in a 1 François Villon d'après des documens nouveaux.' Marcel Schwob. Revue des deux Mondes, 15 Juillet 1892. I am indebted to this article for the details of Villon's life, there published for the first time. shameless intrigue, drew near, and after an exchange of insults, pushed him down. It is a note of the time that every bystander slunk forthwith into the shadows, and the two were left alone in the twilight, Then the priest drew a dagger and stabbed Villon in the lip; but Villon, striking from under his cloak, knifed his antagonist in the groin, and, finally, being disarmed by a newcomer, picked up a heavy stone and pashed in the priest's brain-pan. Banished for this manslaughter, he took to the road, and he travelled the highways of France. They were infested, as ever in the Middle Age, yet more thickly then than ever, by a wandering populace of minstrels, beggars, sham clerks, goliards, broken men, campfollowers, and thieves. For the Hundred Years' War had come to an end with Charles VII.'s entry into Bordeaux in 1453, and this tide of scum was now swollen beyond any previous high-water mark by the disbanding of his army. Within its eddies there existed from that year until its extermination in 1461, the secret society (not unlike the Camorra) of the Coquillards,' or 'Companions of the Shell,' with a jargon of its own, with 'prentices, pastmasters, and a chief, ' le Roi de la Coquille': briefly, a complete hierarchy of blackguardism, with organised departments of brutality or craft, to which each newcomer was detailed according to his natural aptitude for crimes. It is beyond doubt, as M. Schwob has shown, that Villon was received into this association. He wrote six ballades in its slang; he consorted for years with two notorious 'companions,' Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux, in whose felonies he lent a hand, and whose deaths he mourned. In 1456 his banishment was remitted, and he returned to Paris with his new-found know 6 ledge of the world. Nor was he long in turning it to account. In the December of the same year you will find him, with Colin de Cayeux and another, scaling the high walls of the Collège de Navarre to pick the common chest of the dons and students in the Faculty of Theology, the while another rascal Guy de Tabarie by name, kept watch outside over the ladder and the cloaks. Villon, for his share of the plunder, pocketed a hundred gold crowns, and, as he tells us in the Petit Testament, about Christmas, in the dead season, when the wolves live on wind,' he shifted his quarters to Angers. With a wise prevision, as it turned out; for when, next year (1457), the chest was found empty, Tabarie first blabbed, and then, under torture, gave full information against his confederates. Villon derides him in the Grand Testament for his habit of telling the truth, and bequeaths a halter to one of his examiners, while to another, François de Ferrebourg, a sharper vengeance is reserved. But for the moment the poet could return no more to Paris. A Companion of the Shell dared hope for little mercy : three had been boiled alive at Dijon but two years before, and the society was ever getting thinned by the axe and the rope. Villon, indeed, was not to see Paris again until he was amnestied on the accession of Louis XI., in 1461, for yet another crime of the 'Coquillards,' perpetrated, we know not when, at Montpipeau: a crime which ended in the hanging of Colin de Cayeux, and in his own condemnation to perpetual imprisonment at Meung, in the donjon of the Bishop of Orléans. We get glimpses of him at the courts of Charles D'Orléans and of Jean II. de Bourbon, but soon he wanders out of sight again, by the ways of those that love darkness, and when we fish him up again he is in irons at Meung. There, on bread and water, he must have composed the bulk of the great poem which has made him immortal: a work of unfailing execution, of brilliant lines playing like forked lightning over unguessed chasms of awful truth. He writes of his shames in it as an old soldier of his scars: Necessité fait gens mesprendre. Et faim saillir les loups des bois.' The worship of the Virgin or the beastliness of the stews; the old age of the wit told to hold his tongue, or of the harlot heart-sick for lost loveliness; the fortune of those who fare sumptuously, and, again, of those who beg naked and see bread only through the windows they go by; the passing of renowned ladies and great emperors and saints: all these are as one to his art. The truth of them is there, set down with unfaltering precision, without a trace of effort. He sings the 'snows of yester-year' in words that haunt the ages, or lightly casts an acrostic of his name into an envoy aching with desolation : 'Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuict! Ie suis paillard, la paillarde me duit. Lequel vault mieux ? Chascun bien s'entresuit, Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt, En ce bourdeau, ou tenons nostre estat.' So he sings. It is easy as the wind in autumn, and as musical, and-whirling with dead leaves ! With this and the rest of the Grand Testament in his pocket he returned to Paris in 1461, and we hear of him but once again, playing a mean part in a squalid brawl. François Ferrebouc, the examiner, his old enemy, knocked up one night after supper by Villon and his friends, was stabbed by an unknown hand. The record of his manhood ends as it began, and he passes for ever into utter darkness. From some lampoons in his work and this last act of rascality or cowardice, it would seem that he could never forgive any person concerned in the criminal investigation of 1457: the calamity which made him an outcast. It was in that year, and in such dubious plight, that Villon drifted to the court of Charles D'Orléans at Blois. It was a strange meeting of two poets: the younger, of twenty-six, a known criminal, a gaol-bird to be; the elder, of sixty-six, aged before his time, enfeebled with long imprisonment in his country's cause, so fallen into decay that six years later he could no longer even sign his name. Of the manner of their meeting we know nothing directly; but, indirectly, we can gather enough from significant hints in their writings and from the shortness of one's stay. There is a dull official poem by Villon on the birth of Charles's daughter in December, 1457. It is copied in his hand into a manuscript containing poems in the writing of Charles himself and other rhyming friends. But the fourteen pages following Villon's contribution are blank. An explanation may be found in his refrain to a ballade, the first line of which, 'Je meurs de soef auprès de la fontaine,' was apparently given out by Charles as the text for a poetical tournament. We have the thing done and copied out by Charles and many of his guests; but Villon's work is very different from theirs. The antithesis to be maintained in every line lent itself perfectly to the theme of his own false position. The official line has reminded him of the reservation with which he was received, of the half-hearted hospitality. He dies of thirst beside the fountain; chatters with |