and counting as acquaintances the most disreputable people he could lay his hands on: fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat; sergeants of the criminal court,

he says himself, like dirty linen on the washing-board. It is characteristic that his malice had notably increased between the time when he wrote the Small Testament immediately on the back of the oc- 5 and archers of the watch; blackguards currence, and the time when he wrote the Large Testament five years after. On the latter occasion nothing is too bad for his damsel with the twisted nose,' as he calls her. She is spared neither hint nor accusation, and he tells his messenger to accost her with the vilest insults. Villon, it is thought, was out of Paris when these amenities escaped his pen; or perhaps the strong arm of Noë le Joly would have 15 been again in requisition. So ends the love story, if love story it may properly be called. Poets are not necessarily fortunate in love; but they usually fall among more romantic circumstances and 20 bear their disappointment with a better grace.

who slept at night under the butchers' stalls, and for whom the aforesaid archers peered about carefully with lanterns; Regnier de Montigny, Colin de Cayeux, and their crew, all bound on a favoring breeze toward the gallows; the disorderly abbess of Port Royal, who went about at fair time with soldiers and thieves, and conducted her abbey on the queerest principles; and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.1 Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost The neighborhood of Regnier de Mon- rank in this society. He could string off tigny and Colin de Cayeux was probably verses, which is always an agreeable talmore influential on his after life than the 25 ent; and he could make himself useful in contempt of Catherine. For a man who many other ways. The whole ragged is greedy of all pleasures, and provided army of Bohemia, and whosoever loved with little money and less dignity of char- good cheer without at all loving to work acter, we may prophesy a safe and speedy and pay for it, are addressed in contemvoyage downward. Humble ог even 30 porary verses as the Subjects of truckling virtue may walk unspotted in François Villon.' He was a good genius. this life. But only those who despise to all hungry and unscrupulous persons; the pleasures can afford to despise the and became the hero of a whole legendary opinion of the world. A man of a strong, cycle of tavern tricks and cheateries. heady temperament, like Villon, is very 35 At best, these were doubtful levities, differently tempted. His eyes lay hold on rather too thievish for a schoolboy, rather all provocations greedily, and his heart. too gamesome for a thief. But he would flames up at a look into imperious de- not linger long in this equivocal border sire; he is snared and broached to by land. He must soon have complied with anything and everything, from a pretty 40 his surroundings. He was one who face to a piece of pastry in a cook-shop would go where the cannikin clinked, not window; he will drink the rinsing of the caring who should pay; and from supping wine cup, stay the latest at the tavern in the wolves' den, there is but a step to party; tap at the lit windows, follow the hunting with the pack. And here, as I sound of singing, and beat the whole 45 am on the chapter of his degradation, I neighborhood for another reveler, as he shall say all I mean to say about its goes reluctantly homeward; and grudge darkest expression, and be done with it himself every hour of sleep as a black for good. Some charitable critics see no empty period in which he cannot follow more than a jeu d'esprit, a graceful and after pleasure. Such a person is lost 50 trifling exercise of the imagination, in if he have not dignity, or, failing that, the grimy ballad of Fat Peg (Grosse at least pride, which is its shadow and Margot). I am not able to follow these in many ways its substitute. Master gentlemen to this polite extreme. Out of Francis, I fancy, would follow his own all Villon's works that ballad stands eager instincts without much spiritual 55 forth in flaring reality, gross and ghastly, struggle. And we soon find him fallen as a thing written in a contraction of among thieves in sober, literal earnest,

1 Chronique Scandaleuse, ed. Panthéon, p. 237.

disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have gone far to prove itself. I can well understand the reluctance of worthy persons in this matter; for of course it is unpleasant to think of a man of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult

A place, for which the pained'st fiend
Of hell would not in reputation change.

So these three dallied in front of St. Benoit, taking their pleasure (pour soy esbatre). Suddenly there arrived upon the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or 5 Sermaise, also with sword and cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi. Sermaise, according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go upon, came up blustering and denying God; as 10 Villon rose to make room for him upon the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place; and finally drew his sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should imagine was a very clumsy stroke. 15 Up to this point, Villon professes to have been a model of courtesy, even of feebleness; and the brawl in his version, reads like the fable of the wolf and the lamb. But now the lamb was roused; he drew his sword, stabbed Sermaise in the groin, knocked him on the head with a big stone, and then, leaving him to his fate, went away to have his own lip doctored by a barber of the name of Fouquet. In one version, he says that Gilles, Isabeau, and Le Mardi ran away at the first high words, and that he and Sermaise had it out alone; in another, Le Mardi is represented as returning and wresting Villon's sword from him: the reader may please himself. Sermaise was picked up, lay all that night in the prison of Saint Benoit, where he was examined by an official of the Châtelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died on the following Saturday in the Hotel Dieu.

But beyond this natural unwillingness,
the whole difficulty of the case springs
from a highly virtuous ignorance of life. 20
Paris now is not so different from the
Paris of then; and the whole of the do-
ings of Bohemia are not written in the
sugar-candy pastorals of Murger. It is
really not at all surprising that a young 25
man of the fifteenth century, with a
knack of making verses, should accept
his bread upon disgraceful terms. The
race of those who do is not extinct; and
some of them to this day write the pretti- 30
est verses imaginable.
After this,

it were impossible for Master Francis to
fall lower to go and steal for himself
would be an admirable advance from
every point of view, divine or human.

35

This, as I have said, was in June. Not before January of the next year could Villon extract a pardon from the king; but while his hand was in, he got two. One is for François des Loges, alias (autrement dit) de Villon'; and the other runs in the name of François de Montcorbier. Nay, it appears there was a further complication; for in the narrative of the first of these documents, it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one Michel Mouton. M. Longnon has a theory that this un

And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first appearance before angry justice. On June 5, 1455, when he was about twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter 40 of three years, we behold him for the first time quite definitely. Angry justice Angry justice had as it were, photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon, rummaging among old deeds, has turned 45 up the negative and printed it off for our instruction. Villon had been supping – copiously we may believe and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoit, in company with a priest 50 happy accident with Sermaise was the

called Gilles and a woman of the name of Isabeau. It was nine o'clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and evidently a fine summer's night. Master Francis carried a mantle, like a prudent man, to keep him from the dews (serain), and had a sword below it dangling from his girdle.

the

cause of Villon's subsequent irregularities; and that up to that moment he had been the pink of good behavior. But matter has to my eyes a more dubious 55 air. A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another for Montcorbier? and these two the same person? and one or both

5

prised to meet with thieves in the shape of tonsured clerks, or even priests and monks.

To a knot of such learned pilferers our poet certainly belonged; and by turning over a few more of M. Longnon's negatives, we shall get a clear idea of their character and doings. Montigny and De Cayeux are names already known; Guy Tabary, Petit-Jehan, Dom Nicolas, little Thibault, who was both clerk and goldsmith, and who made picklocks and melted plate for himself and his companions with these the reader has still to

of them known by the alias of Villon, however honestly come by? and lastly, in the heat of the moment, a fourth name thrown out with an assured countenance? A ship is not to be trusted that sails under so many colors. This is not the simple bearing of innocence. No- the young master was already treading crooked paths; already, he would start and blench at a hand upon his shoulder, with the look 10 we know so well in the face of Hogarth's Idle Apprentice; already, in the blue. devils, he would see Henry Cousin, the executor of high justice, going in dolorous procession toward Montfaucon, and 15 become acquainted. Petit-Jehan and De hear the wind and the birds crying around Paris gibbet.

A GANG OF THIEVES

20

Cayeux were handy fellows and enjoyed a useful preeminence in honor of their doings with the picklock. 'Dictus des Cahyeus est fortis operator crochetorum [the said De Cayeux is an able manipulator of picklocks],' says Tabary's interrogation, sed dictus Petit-Jehan, ejus socius, est forcius operator [but the said PetitJehan, his companion, is a more able manipulator].' But the flower of the flock was little Thibault; it was reported that no lock could stand before him; he had a persuasive hand; let us salute capacity wherever we may find it. Perhaps the term gang is not quite properly applied to the persons whose fortunes we are now about to follow; rather they were independent malefactors, socially intimate, and occasionally joining together for 35 some serious operation, just as modern stock-jobbers form a syndicate for an important loan. Nor were they at all particular to any branch of misdoing. They did not scrupulously confine themselves to a single sort of theft, as I hear is common among modern thieves. They were ready for anything, from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. Montigny, for instance, had neglected neither of these extremes, and we find him accused of cheating at games of hazard on the one hand, and on the other of the murder of one Thevenin Pensete in a house by the Cemetery of St. John. If time had only spared us some particulars, might not this last have furnished us with the matter of a grisly winter's tale?

In spite of the prodigious number of people who managed to get hanged, the fifteenth century was by no means a bad time for criminals. A great confusion of parties and great dust of fighting favored the escape of private house- 25 breakers and quiet fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat. Prisons were leaky; and as we shall see, a man with a few crowns in his pocket and perhaps some acquaintance among the officials, 30 could easily slip out and become once more a free marauder. There was no want of a sanctuary where he might harbor until troubles blew by; and accomplices helped each other with more or less good faith. Clerks, above all, had remarkable facilities for a criminal way of life; for they were privileged, except in cases of notorious incorrigibility, to be plucked from the hands of rude secular 40 justice and tried by a tribunal of their own. In 1402, a couple of thieves, both clerks of the University, were condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. As they were taken to Montfaucon, they kept 45 crying high and clearly' for their benefit of clergy, but were none the less pitilessly hanged and gibbeted. Indignant Alma Mater interfered before the king; and the Provost was deprived of all royal offices, 50 and condemned to return the bodies and erect a great stone cross, on the road from Paris to the gibbet, graven with the effigies of these two holy martyrs.1 We shall hear more of the benefit of clergy; 55 for after this the reader will not be sur

1 Monstrelet: Panthéon Littéraire, p.

26.

At Christmas-time in 1456, readers of Villon will remember that he was engaged on the Small Testament. About the same period, circa festum nativitatis Domini [about the feast of the birth

astute

of Our Lord], he took part in a mem-
orable 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 pick-
ing locks; confiding, convivial, not very 10
who had copied out a whole im-
proper romance with his own right hand.
This supper-party was to be his first in-
troduction 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 20
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
fellowship, Tabary was solemnly sworn
over to secrecy on the night's perform-
ances; and the party left the Mule and
proceeded to an unoccupied house belong
ing 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 sepa-
rated Saint-Simon's house from the court 35
of the College of Navarre; the four fel-
lows in their shirtsleeves (as we might
say) clambered over in a twinkling; and
Master Guy Tabary remained alone be-
side 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 com-
fortably 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

5

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 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 dogs. Then Tabary fell out with Casin 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 object of this excursion was not merely to avoid the presence of his cruel mistress or the strong arm of Noë le Joly,

55

On the 23d April, that venerable and 20 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 this wineskin of a Tabary inside out.