A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT - A STORY OF FRANCIS VILLON
by Robert Louis Stevenson
It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over
Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes
the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying
vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after
flake descended out of the black night air, silent,
circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up
under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all
came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an
alternative that afternoon at a tavern window: was
it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus?
or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor
Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat
touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude.
A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the
company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine
in honor of the jest and the grimaces with which it
was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard
that he had been just such another irreverent dog
when he was Villon's age.
The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing;
and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole
city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end
to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If there were
any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a
large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars,
on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the
snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers.
Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long
white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The
gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses,
drooping towards the point. The crockets were like
upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals
of the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about
the precincts of the church.
The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow.
All the graves were decently covered; tall white housetops stood
around in grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed,
benightcapped like their domiciles; there was no light in all
the neighborhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung
swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and
fro in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten
when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, beating
their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery
of St. John.
Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall,
which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring
district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a
stream of warm vapor from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow
melted on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the
door. But within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis
Villon the poet, and some of the thievish crew with whom he
consorted, were keeping the night alive and passing round the
bottle.
A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from
the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy
monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the
comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and
the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person,
and in a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had
the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was
covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary
circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the
fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half
fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his
bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half
with the shadow of his portly frame.
On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over
a scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to
call the "Ballade of Roast Fish," and Tabary spluttering admiration
at his shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and
lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his
four-and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made
folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The
wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent,
sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and
prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were
continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive
pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility
breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become
a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses,
by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and
human donkeys.
At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a
game of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good
birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe,
and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the
face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a
good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques,
and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile
illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of
red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent
chucklings as he swept in his gains.
"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin. Montigny nodded grimly.
"Some may prefer to dine in state," wrote Villon, "on bread and
cheese on silver plate. Or--or--help me out, Guido!"
Tabary giggled.
"Or parsley on a golden dish," scribbled the poet.
The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it,
and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made
sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper
as the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the
gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an
eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet's, much detested by
the Picardy monk.
"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They
are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may
dance, my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a
gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the
three-legged medlar-tree!--I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold
to-night on the St. Denis Road?" he asked.
Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his
Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood
hard by the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the
raw. As for Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he
had never heard anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides
and crowed. Villon fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned
his mirth into an attack of coughing.
"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish.'"
"Doubles or quits," said Montigny doggedly.
"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.
"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.
"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that
big hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how
do you expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can
be spared to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think
yourself another Elias--and they'll send the coach for you?"
"Hominibus impossible," replied the monk, as he
filled his glass.
Tabary was in ecstasies.
Villon filliped his nose again.
"Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.
"It was very good," objected Tabary.
Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish,'" he said.
"What have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it
at the great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary,
clericus--the devil with the humpback and red-hot fingernails.
Talking of the devil," he added in a whisper, "look at Montigny!"
All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be
enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril
nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his
back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he
breathed hard under the gruesome burden.
"He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Tabary, with round
eyes.
The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands
to the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas,
and not any excess of moral sensibility.
"Come now," said Villon--"about this ballade. How does it run so
far?" And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.
They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal
movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and
Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory,
when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to
the heart. The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry,
before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame;
his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; then
his head rolled backward over one shoulder with the eyes wide open;
and Thevenin Pensete's spirit had returned to Him who made it.
Everyone sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos.
The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly
fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a
singular and ugly leer.
"My God!" said Tabary; and he began to pray in Latin.
Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward
and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder.
Then he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and
continued laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to
pieces.
Montigny recovered his composure first.
"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked; and he picked the
dead man's pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money
into four equal portions on the table. "There's for you," he said.
The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy
glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself
and topple sideways off the chair.
"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. "It's a
hanging job for every man jack of us that's here--not to speak of
those who aren't." He made a shocking gesture in the air with his
raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on
one side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been
hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a
shuffle with his feet as if to restore the circulation.
Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money,
and retired to the other end of the apartment.
Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the
dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.
"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he wiped the blade
on his victim's doublet.
"I think we had," returned Villon with a gulp. "Damn his fat
head!" he broke out. "It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What
right has a man to have red hair when he is dead?" And he fell all
of a heap again upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with
his hands.
Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming
in.
"Crybaby," said the monk.
"I always said he was a woman," added Montigny with a sneer. "Sit
up, can't you?" he went on, giving another shake to the murdered
body. "Tread out that fire, Nick!"
But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon's purse,
as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been
making a ballade not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary
dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently
promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown.
In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical
existence.
No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook
himself, jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and
extinguish the embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and
cautiously peered into the street. The coast was clear; there was
no meddlesome patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip
out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to escape from
the neighborhood of the dead Thevenin, and the rest were in a
still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should discover
the loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to
issue forth into the street.
The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only
a few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeting rapidly across the
stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things
seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The
sleeping city was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a
field full of little Alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon
cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever
he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering
streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the
cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own
plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind
him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with
a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his
own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped boldly
forward in the snow.
Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows
at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night's existence,
for one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald
head and garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart,
and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from
unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked
back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was
the only moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind
swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was beginning
to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.
Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple
of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as
though carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it
was merely crossing his line of march, he judged it wiser to get
out of eyeshot as speedily as he could. He was not in the humor
to be challenged, and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous
mark upon the snow. Just on his left hand there stood a great
hotel, with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it
was half-ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and
so he made three steps of it and jumped into the shelter of the
porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy
streets, and he was groping forward with outspread hands, when he
stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable mixture
of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a
leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the
obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a
woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this
latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A
little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and
her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets
were quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter,
Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of
whites. It was little enough; but it was always something; and
the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should
have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a
dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his
hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his
head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V of England, dying
at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor
jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway, before
she had time to spend her couple of whites--it seemed a cruel
way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a
little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more
good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the
devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin.
He would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown
out and the lantern broken.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped
beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs,
and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified
for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and
then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with
perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual--it
is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is
only one limit to their fortune--that of time; and a spendthrift
with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent.
For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking
reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a
breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for
it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly
earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw
the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he
stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor
corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps towards the
house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the
patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but
that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and
left upon the snow; nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped it
in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked
dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant
unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their
efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary,
it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in
the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the
authorities and Paris gibbet.
He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the
snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion.
But he could only find one white; the other had probably struck
sideways and sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket,
all his projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished
utterly away. And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from
his grasp; positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he
stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon
him; and although the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was
setting in stronger with every hour, and be felt benumbed and sick
at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable
as was success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the
chaplain of St. Benoit.
He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no
answer. He knocked again and again, taking heart with every
stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from within. A
barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, and emitted a
gush of yellow light.
"Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain from within.
"It's only me," whimpered Villon.
"Oh, it's only you, is it?" returned the chaplain; and he cursed
him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour,
and bade him be off to hell, where he came from.
"My hands are blue to the wrist," pleaded Villon; "my feet are dead
and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold
lies at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once,
Father, and before God I will never ask again!"
"You should have come earlier," said the ecclesiastic coolly.
"Young men require a lesson now and then." He shut the wicket and
retired deliberately into the interior of the house.
Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and
feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.
"Wormy old fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I
would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."
A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long
passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And
then the humor of the situation struck him, and he laughed and
looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking
over his discomfiture.
What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty
streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination,
and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the
early night might very well happen to him before morning. And he
so young! and with such immense possibilities of disorderly
amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion
of his own fate, as if it had been some one else's, and made
a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when
they should find his body.
He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between
his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with
some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a
plight. He had lampooned them in verses, he had beaten and cheated
them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought
there was at least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance.
It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see.
On the way, two little accidents happened to him which colored his
musings in a very different manner. For, first, he fell in with
the track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards,
although it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at
least he had confused his trail; for he was still possessed with
the idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and
collaring him next morning before he was awake. The other matter
affected him very differently. He passed a street corner, where,
not so long before, a woman and her child had been devoured by
wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when
wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; and
a lone man in these deserted streets would run the chance of
something worse than a mere scare. He stopped and looked upon the
place with an unpleasant interest--it was a center where several
lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them all one after
another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some
galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling
between him and the river. He remembered his mother telling him
the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His
mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at
least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow;
nay, he would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he
arrived at his destination--his last hope for the night.
The house was quite dark, like its neighbors; and yet after a few
taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious
voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud
whisper, and waited, not without come trepidation, the result. Nor
had he to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful
of slops splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been
unprepared for something of the sort, and had put himself as much
in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but for all that,
he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose began to
freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in
the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and began
coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his
nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had
been so rudely used, and reflected with his finger to his nose.
He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that was to
take it. He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if
it might be easily broken into, and thither he betook himself
promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea of a room
still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of supper,
where he might pass the rest of the black hours, and whence he
should issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He
even considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer;
and as he was calling the roll of his favorite dainties, roast
fish presented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amusement
and horror.
"I shall never finish that ballade," he thought to himself; and
then, with another shudder at the recollection, "Oh, damn his fat
head!" he repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.
The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon
made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of
attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a
curtained window.
"The devil!" he thought. "People awake! Some student or some
saint, confound the crew! Can't they get drunk and lie in bed
snoring like their neighbors? What's the good of curfew, and
poor devils of bell-ringers jumping at a rope's end in bell-towers?
What's the use of day, if people sit up all night? The gripes
to them!" He grinned as he saw where his logic was leading him.
"Every man to his business, after all," added he, "and if they're
awake, by the Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for this
once, and cheat the devil."
He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand.
On both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly and with
some dread of attracting notice; but now when he had just
discarded the thought of a burglarious entry, knocking at a
door seemed a mighty simple and innocent proceeding. The
sound of his blows echoed through the house with thin,
phantasmal reverberations, as though it were quite empty;
but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread
drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing
was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile were
known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular and
spare, but a little bent, confronted Villon. The head was
massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose blunt at
the bottom, but refining upward to where it joined a pair of
strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded
with delicate markings, and the whole face based upon a
thick white beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as
it was by the light of a flickering hand-lamp, it looked
perhaps nobler than it had a right to do; but it was a fine
face, honorable, rather than intelligent, strong, simple,
and righteous.
"You knock late, sir," said the old man in resonant, courteous
tones.
Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a
crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man
of genius hid his head with confusion.
"You are cold," repeated the old man, "and hungry? Well, step in."
And he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.
"Some great seigneur," thought Villon, as his host, setting down
the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts
once more into their places.
"You will pardon me if I go in front," he said, when this was
done; and he preceded the poet upstairs into a large apartment,
warmed with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging
from the roof. It was very bare of furniture: only some gold
plate on a sideboard; some folios; and a stand of armour
between the windows. Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls,
representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and in
another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running
stream. Over the chimney was a shield of arms.
"Will you seat yourself," said the old man, "and forgive me if I
leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat
I must forage for you myself."
No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on
which he had just seated himself, and began examining the room,
with the stealth and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons
in his hand, opened all the folios, and investigated the arms
upon the shield, and the stuff with which the seats were lined.
He raised the window curtains, and saw that the windows were set
with rich stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, of
martial import. Then he stood in the middle of the room, drew
a long breath, and retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked round
and round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress every
feature of the apartment on his memory.
"Seven pieces of plate," he said. "If there had been ten, I would
have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me
all the saints!"
And just then, hearing the old man's tread returning along the
corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting
his wet legs before the charcoal pan.
His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine
in the other. He set down the plate upon the table, motioning
Villon to draw in his chair, and going to the sideboard, brought
back two goblets, which he filled.
"I drink to your better fortune," he said, gravely touching
Villon's cup with his own.
"To our better acquaintance," said the poet, growing bold. A mere
man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old
seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth
for great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as
himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous
gusto, while the old man, leaning backward, watched him with
steady, curious eyes.
"You have blood on your shoulder, my man," he said.
Montigny must have laid his wet hand upon him as he left
the house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.
"It was none of my shedding," he stammered.
"I had not supposed so," returned his host quietly.
"A brawl?"
"Well, something of that sort," Villon admitted with
a quaver.
"Perhaps a fellow murdered?"
"Oh no, not murdered," said the poet, more and more
confused. "It was all fair play--murdered by accident.
I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!" he added fervently.
"One rogue the fewer, I dare say," observed the master
of the house.
"You may dare to say that," agreed Villon, infinitely relieved.
"As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned
up his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I
dare say you've seen dead men in your time, my lord?" he added,
glancing at the armour.
"Many," said the old man. "I have followed the wars, as you
imagine."
Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just
taken up again.
"Were any of them bald?" he asked.
"Oh, yes, and with hair as white as mine."
"I don't think I should mind the white so much," said Villon. "His
was red." And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to
laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine. "I'm a
little put out when I think of it," he went on. "I knew him--damn
him! And then the cold gives a man fancies--or the fancies give a
man cold, I don't know which."
"Have you any money?" asked the old man.
"I have one white," returned the poet, laughing. "I got it out of
a dead jade's stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Caesar, poor
wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her
hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and
poor rogues like me."
"I," said the old man, "am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de
Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?"
Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. "I am called Francis
Villon," he said, "a poor Master of Arts of this university.
I know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons,
ballades, lais, virelais, and roundels, and I am very fond of
wine. I was born in a garret, and I shall not improbably die
upon the gallows. I may add, my lord, that from this night
forward I am your lordship's very obsequious servant to command."
"No servant of mine," said the knight; "my guest for this evening,
and no more."
"A very grateful guest," said Villon politely; and he drank in dumb
show to his entertainer.
"You are shrewd," began the old man, tapping his forehead, "very
shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a
small piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a
kind of theft?"
"It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord."
"The wars are the field of honor," returned the old man proudly.
"There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of
his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy
saints and angels."
"Put it," said Villon, "that I were really a thief, should I not
play my life also, and against heavier odds?"
"For gain, but not for honor."
"Gain?" repeated Villon with a shrug. "Gain! The poor fellow
wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign.
Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If
they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough
to the others. The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the
burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a
good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country; ay, I
have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made;
and when I asked someone how all these came to be hanged, I
was told it was because they could not scrape together enough
crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms."
"These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must
endure with constancy. It is true that some captains drive
overhard; there are spirits in every rank not easily moved by
pity; and, indeed, many follow arms who are no better than
brigands."
"You see," said the poet, "you cannot separate the soldier from
the brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with
circumspect manners? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without
so much as disturbing people's sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit,
but sups none the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up
blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and
beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I
am only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and hanging's
too good for me--with all my heart; but just you ask the farmer
which of us he prefers, just find out which of us he lies awake
to curse on cold nights."
"Look at us two," said his lordship. "I am old, strong, and
honored. If I were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would
be proud to shelter me. Poor people would go out and pass the
night in the streets with their children, if I merely hinted that
I wished to be alone. And I find you up, wandering homeless, and
picking farthings off dead women by the wayside! I fear no man and
nothing; I have seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word. I
wait God's summons contentedly in my own house, or, if it please
the king to call me out again, upon the field of battle. You look
for the gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or honor. Is
there no difference between these two?"
"As far as to the moon," Villon acquiesced. "But if I had been
born lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis,
would the difference have been any the less? Should not I have
been warming my knees at this charcoal pan, and would not you have
been groping for farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the
soldier, and you the thief?"
"A thief!" cried the old man. "I a thief! If you understood your
words, you would repent them."
Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable impudence.
"If your lordship had done me the honor to follow my argument!" he
said.
"I do you too much honor in submitting to your presence," said
the knight. "Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old
and honorable men, or someone hastier than I may reprove you
in a sharper fashion." And he rose and paced the lower end of
the apartment, struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon
surreptitiously refilled his cup, and settled himself more
comfortably in the chair, crossing his knees and leaning his
head upon one hand and the elbow against the back of the chair.
He was now replete and warm; and he was in nowise frightened
for his host, having gauged him as justly as was possible
between two such different characters. The night was far spent,
and in a very comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally
certain of a safe departure on the morrow.
"Tell me one thing," said the old man, pausing in his walk. "Are
you really a thief?"
"I claim the sacred right of hospitality," returned the poet. "My
lord, I am."
"You are very young," the knight continued.
"I should never have been so old," replied Villon, showing his
fingers, "if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They
have been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers."
"You may still repent and change."
"I repent daily," said the poet. "There are few people more given
to repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody
change my circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were
only that he may continue to repent."
"The change must begin in the heart," returned the old man
solemnly.
"My dear lord," answered Villon, "do you really fancy that I steal
for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or of
danger. My teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I
must drink, I must mix in society of some sort. What the devil!
Man is not a solitary animal--Cui Deus faeminam tradit. Make me
king's pantler--make me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the
Patatrac; and then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you
leave me the poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why,
of course, I remain the same."
"The grace of God is all-powerful."
"I should be a heretic to question it," said Francis. "It has made
you lord of Brisetout and bailly of the Patatrac; it has given me
nothing but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my
hands. May I help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By
God's grace, you have a very superior vintage."
The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind
his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about
the parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had
interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits
were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever
the cause, he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better
way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to drive him forth
again into the street.
"There is something more than I can understand in this," he said
at length. "Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has
led you very far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit
before God's truth, and all his subtleties vanish at a word of
true honor, like darkness at morning. Listen to me once more. I
learned long ago that a gentleman should live chivalrously and
lovingly to God, and the king, and his lady; and though I have seen
many strange things done, I have still striven to command my ways
upon that rule. It is not only written in all noble histories, but
in every man's heart, if he will take care to read. You speak of
food and wine, and I know very well that hunger is a difficult
trial to endure; but you do not speak of other wants; you say
nothing of honor, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy, of
love without reproach. It may be that I am not very wise--and yet
I think I am--but you seem to me like one who has lost his way and
made a great error in life. You are attending to the little wants,
and you have totally forgotten the great and only real ones, like
a man who should be doctoring a toothache on the Judgment Day. For
such things as honor and love and faith are not only nobler than
food and drink, but indeed I think we desire them more, and
suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to you as I think
you will most easily understand me. Are you not, while careful
to fill your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart,
which spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually
wretched?"
Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonising.
"You think I have no sense of honor!" he cried. "I'm poor enough,
God knows! It's hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you
blowing in your hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although
you speak so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps
you would change your tune. Anyway I'm a thief--make the most of
that--but I'm not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would
have you to know I've an honor of my own, as good as yours, though
I don't prate about it all day long, as if it was a God's miracle to
have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till
it's wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been in this
room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone in the house?
Look at your gold plate! You're strong, if you like, but you're
old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want but a jerk
of the elbow and here would have been you with the cold steel in
your bowels, and there would have been me, clinking in the streets,
with an armful of gold cups! Did you suppose I hadn't wit enough
to see that? And I scorned the action. There are your damned
goblets, as safe as in a church; there are you, with your heart
ticking as good as new; and here am I, ready to go out again as
poor as I came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth!
And you think I have no sense of honor--God strike me dead!"
The old man stretched out his right arm. "I will tell
you what you are," he said. "You are a rogue, my man,
an impudent and blachearted rogue and vagabond. I
have passed an hour with you. Oh! believe me, I feel
myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at
my table. But now I am sick at your presence; the day
has come, and the night-bird should be off to his roost.
Will you go before, or after?"
"Which you please," returned the poet, rising. "I believe
you to be strictly honorable." He thoughtfully emptied
his cup. "I wish I could add you were intelligent," he
went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles. "Age,
age! the brains stiff and rheumatic."
The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect;
Villon followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.
"God pity you," said the lord of Brisetout at the door.
"Good-by, Papa," returned Villon with a yawn. "Many
thanks for the cold mutton."
The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking
over the white roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning
ushered in the day. Villon stood and heartily stretched
himself in the middle of the road.
"A very dull old gentleman," he thought. "I wonder
what his goblets may be worth."
~~~~~~~ THE END ~~~~~~~
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