struction only a certain refinement of their wits they became first parasites, then crooks, counterfeiters, and finally out-and-out highwaymen. Such was the lot of more than one of our poet's companions, and such, it must be confessed, was his own." Pardoners or bearers of more or less authentic indulgences, coggers of dice and gamesters, coiners, players of tric-trac, of bowls and gleek, professional makers of farces or moralities, singers, players of cymbals and flutes,such are the comrades of our Villon, and all these fellows have but a single aim— to make money by any means, and how does the money go, "what think you? To taverns and wenches, every bit?" This is the picture Villon himself paints in his "Ballade of Good Doctrine to those of Evil Life."

We regretfully pass over our biographer's masterly description of the university courses open to Villon, in order to dwell for a moment on the lifting of the Pet-au-diable or "Devil's Crake," a great prehistoric stone. In 1451 the students had taken it into their heads to steal this monolith, which long had stood before the mansion of Madame de Bruyères. Indignant at the theft of her glorious palladium, she appealed to the authorities, who fetched back the Pet-audiable and for greater safety set it inside the palace. But the scholars, with their hare-brained allies the basochiens, carried off the stone once more in triumph and this time fastened it down with plaster and iron bars. "They crowned it with flowers, which they renewed on Sundays, and every night they danced round it to the sound of flutes and tambourines. They had made a kind of fetish of this stone and compelled all passers by, and, above all, the king's officers, to go through a clownish ceremony of allegiance." There were worse scrapes still, for, one night, the students stole four painted signs, the Fleeing Sow from the markets, the Bear from Baudoyer Gate, and pretended to wed them with the Stag for a priest and the Popinjay as a wedding gift. This mad wedding procession went noisily through the streets, and if any startled townsman put his head out to see they yelled, "Kill! Kill!" They knocked off butchers' meat hooks, filched

some hens and kidnapped a young woman (though the University asserted later that she had gone of her own free will). Robert d'Estouteville, who figures in Hugo's Notre Dame, decided at last to intervene.

These brawls seem to have had their influence on François de Montcorbier and even, says our biographer, to have awakened his genius. About ten years later he bequeathes to Master Guillaume, what? His novel called Le Pet-au-Diable, copied or engrossed for him by Guy Tabarie.

I do bequeathe my library,

The "Devil's Crake" Romaunt, whilere
By Messire Guy de Tabarie,—
A right trustworthy man,-writ fair.
Beneath a bench it lies somewhere,
In quires. Though crudely it be writ,
The matter's so beyond compare
That it redeems the style of it.

This novel is lost, and great is the pity; for one may imagine how François would have handled so racy a theme.

These were the very years when our poet ought to have been working hard, but he spent his time loitering through his beloved streets. On hearing the bell of the Sorbonne, François sets out from his small room in St. Benedict's Cloister. He stops in at the Sign of the Mule; from there he goes through his pet haunts in the Latin Quarter, past the dreaded Châtelet, lingers a while to hear the fishwives, then goes on to spend some money (if he happen to have any) at the Fircone tavern kept by Robin Turgis in Jewry Street, or we may find him playing handball at the Trou Perrette and, oftener still, dallying with Fat Peg, not far from the cloister of Our Lady. But his favourite goal was the burial ground round the church of the Holy Innocents. This spot, which deeply influenced Villon's thoughts, his biographer describes with such skill that we must pause and look in. Here are mingled "with the promiscuousness habitual to the Middle Ages the most earnest appeals of religion and the most worldly preoccupations, the rumbling of life and the silence of death. The burial ground of the Innocents was surrounded by a high wall pierced by four gates. With their backs to this wall,

some lovely Gothic arcades formed roomy galleries, above which were lofts lighted by vaults with trilobate. foils." Here so many million Parisians had been buried that in time, to make room for newcomers, skeletons were dug up and heaped above and below, where they lay, bones in piles and skulls in pyramids. "In 1424 and 1425 there was painted on a wall of these galleries the celebrated Macabré dance, which represented Death as a dance to which all humans are invited whether they will or no." Pope and emperor, layman, clerk and hermit were here invited by Death to join in the great dance. "Death is figured by a skeleton, or often by a corpse almost a skeleton; the skull is quite bare, but from Death's sides hang shreds of flesh. He gambols and grins as he seizes his partner's hand, and the latter wears a look of terrified surprise and seems to resist. This vast fresco filled ten arcades divided into three double compartments, each occupied by one of the personages mentioned and by the figure of Death astonishingly varied in its hideousness. Below each personage and each Death figure was an eight-line stanza ending in a proverb, uttering the imperiously sarcastic invitation of Death and the vain supplication or the powerless regrets of the mortal." François de Montcorbier must many a time have gazed in irony at these ghastly scenes. Like Hamlet, he wonders who they may have been. Bishops or lampmakers, Death has fetched them all. God have their spirits!

As for their bodies, they are clay:
Once they were ladies, lords and knights,
That on soft beds of satin lay
And fed on dainties every day.
Their bones are mouldered into dust,
They reck not now of laugh or play:
Christ will assoilzie them, I trust.

"The Middle Ages knew no respect for the dead." Burial grounds in the crowded cities had to serve for meetings, for festivals and balls. To the Innocents the people came for a walk or a tryst, or to shop in the booths. Here, says our biog rapher, François de Montcorbier could not have failed to find distraction from his woeful reveries.

We must leave unmentioned many of

François's wanderings, his adventure with the Abbess Huguette du Hamel, his relation with Robert d'Estouteville and a motley throng of aldermen, money lenders, rakes and worse, the gracious gallants that sang or spoke so well, or the light-o'-loves who made him sin. Of these poor souls Villon has left portraits in which their brief, gaudy joys ending in haggard old age are so portrayed that the mirth is also tragedy.

Though Villon and his friends were often wickedly busy before 1455 it was then that his evil genius got him into a brawl not mentioned in his poems. On the evening of June 5, 1455, Villon was seated on a stone bench in the rue Saint Jacques. With him was a woman named Isabeau and a priest named Gilles. "They were chatting when, toward nine o'clock, there came along another priest, one Philippe de Sermoise, who probably had claims to Isabeau. He began to threaten the scholar. Isabeau and Gilles, seeing the fury of Sermoise, took to flight, as well as a friend who was with Sermoise. Sermoise, whipping out his dagger, struck Villon in the face and slit his lip." Villon likewise plied his dagger so well that he cut his adversary in the groin. At this moment the friend of Sermoise returned and disarmed Villon, who fled into the cloister and there, wheeling on his two pursuers, laid out the priest with a paving block. After this Villon went to have his wound dressed by a barber, to whom he cautiously gave the name of his victim, but himself he called Michel Mouton. He then fled from Paris. The stench of this scandal seems to have blown over by 1456, for in January of that year Villon was back in Paris, pardoned. Only a little later our sorry hero joined Colin des Cayeux and Regnier de Montigny in robbing the Collège de Navarre, an adventure vividly described in Stevenson's essay.* Villon was soon afterwards at Angers, whither he had thought of going before the robbery (A Dieu! je m'en vois a Angers); for

*Stevenson's essay followed the appearance of Longnon's excellent edition (1892). It may be true, as Gaston Paris remarks, that Stevenson paints Villon "too black," but his study is, nevertheless, well-proportioned and profound, nor do later discoveries essentially belie Ste venson's presentation.

through his uncle, a monk, he had learnt of a hoard zealously guarded by another friar. If Villon could hit on a way, he hoped to show his companions in Faris how they might get their hands on this money. The plot, however, fell through.

What may now have befallen our vagabond is hard to say. In 1457 he seems to have turned up at Blois, where the poet Charles of Orleans was holding court. It appears, also, that he was once more sentenced to banishment and thrust into prison by the Duke of Orleans, to whom he had appealed in vain. Knowing that if he returned to Paris he might soon be swaying on the gibbet of Montfaucon, Villon now took up his stick once more and set out for Roussillon. The word travel had not lost its earlier meaning then, and to our lonely tramp (who had no feeling for the loveliness of nature) those were weary miles. As he trudged along, gnawed by regrets for his lost Bohemia, hungry, and plotting felony, bushes and briars tore his coat into rags, but, as Stevenson says, "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 Burgundy by housewives and innkeepers lamenting over petty thefts, like the track of a single human locust." Now it was that he fell in with the Coquillards or Knights of the Shell, a band of crooks, lock-picks, horse thieves, and bullies, whose cant he put afterwards into verse. To him this company was not new, for its members were scattered over most of France. Villon was, no doubt, an active member of the Shell.*

In 1461, as we have seen, Villon was in the dark pit at Meun, from which he was lifted by the mercy of the King. Free again, he longed to see his old haunts in Paris, to be with his mother, his "more than father," Maitre Guillaume, his "dear Rose" and his boon companions. He hoped, also, to become a "man of worth." But he could not go without apprehension, for old scores were not settled, a new accusation might arise. After a short visit to Paris, during which he *Coquille may mean something quite different from Shell.

must have been in constant fear, Villon hid away somewhere and wrote the Greater Testament, into which he put his whole life. In this haphazard poem we find the man, swayed to and fro by gusts of emotion; now desperately sick at heart over his misdeeds, now ready for some new villainy, grateful (at least in words) to those who have helped him, fawning to the great, cravenly befouling whoever has done him real or fancied harm; now whining at fate and envying the rich, now cringing at the thought of death, or cracking in the next breath some lewd jest. In a moment of patriotic anger he devises dreadful punishments for the slanderers of France, but he vents unmanly spite on Katherine de Vaucelles, for whom he had once been beaten like linen in a tub. He repents, but never so deeply as to keep him from falling quickly into another sin. loved his mother dearly, but one may be sure that he loved brothels more; for, good or bad, the greater love always wins when there is no mastering will to keep a man loyal to an ideal.

He

Villon returned to his old abode in Saint-Benoit cloister toward the end of 1462, and before long he was once more headed toward the gallows. Early in September he was gaoled in the Châtelet on the charge of theft, but the charge could not be proven and he was about to go free when the Faculty of Theology stepped in. Thanks to King Louis's grant of mercy Villon could not be held for crime, but civil action was possible, and our poet now found himself in a desperate plight: he must restore the 120 golden crowns filched from that strongbox in the Collège de Navarre. Luckily François still had moneyed friends ready to pay within the three years allowed him. Being sure of payment, the head beadle concluded to let François go. Scarcely out of the Châtelet he got into another scrape, likely to be his last.

"One fine evening in this same November, 1462, a certain Robin d'Ogis, profession unknown, who dwelt in the rue des Parcheminiers," got a visit from his friend, Master François, fresh from gaol. The poet had come for a supper. After the meal, in which others joined, François asked his friends to finish the evening

with him at the cloister. As the party were on their way thither, about eight o'clock, they happened to pass by the lighted writing booth of Master Ferrebouc, a scribe of the ecclesiastical court of the Bishop of Paris. One of the gang, Roger Pichart, who, as our biographer says, must have borne the scribe a grudge, began to chaff the clerks working within and to spit through the open window. Then ensued the inevitable brawl. Robin d'Ogis stabbed Ferrebouc, then fled. But he was caught and after a year in the conciergerie of the Palace he went free only on a grant of mercy obtained through the father-in-law of Louis XI., the Duke of Savoy. Pichart was hanged in 1464. Villon, probably at the instance of Maître Ferrebouc, was again behind the bars. The provost of Paris, no longer Robert d'Estouteville, was in no humour for mercy and caused Villon to be put to the ordeal by water, whereafter he was sentenced to be "hanged and strangled." As Villon saw death so close upon him, overshadowing him in a phantom shape that was soon to be real, fear inspired his imagination and he made his ballad of the gibbet. He fancies himself and five companions swaying in the wind, and he and they beseech the living not to jest.

sentence but, "seeing his evil life," banished Villon for ten years "from the town, provostship and viscounty of Paris." As is shown by the envoi of the ballade of appeal, Villon was granted time to supply himself and say good-bye:

Prince, of thy grace deny me not three days To bid my friends adieu and go my ways: Without them I've not money, clothes nor food.

Such are the main facts of the life of François de Montcorbier, called also François de Loges, or Villon, or "Michel Mouton." He disappeared, and the rest is legend. Most of the evil he did, and his own record of the good he would have liked to do, we know. Instead of working honourably for his living, he chose to sponge or steal. His good intentions melted away under temptation as snow melts off under a breath of the sun. Genius he was, but no man was ever more contemptible. His biographer has generously said in Villon's favour everything that can be said. His strongest plea is that Villon lived in an evil time. Villon lived in a sterile century. His contemporaries had not themselves the gift of song. In ancient poetry they sought everything except artistic inspiration, and when they tried to imitate their own earlier singers they were like deaf men listening to a musician's notes and only seeing his fingering of the strings. All narrative poetry of every kind, save a few properly historical poems, was unknown in Villon's time. The old epic songs, the Arthurian romances and tales of adventure or the fableaux, those short, mirthful stories of some social episode, were almost wholly forgotten. Lyric poetry was half stifled by moralising and allegory. The poems of Charles of Orleans, which Villon had certainly read when he was at Blois, were too remote in spirit to have deeply influenced him. It was, rather, from Alain Chartier that Villon borrowed ideas as to form. As for substance, there lay open to him a considerable mass of little moral poems dealing with the vicissitudes of fortune and the ineluctability of death, and Villon knew Philippe de Vitry, else he would not have scoffed at the rustic life

of Franc Gontier and his wife Hélène in the ballade whose burden runs, "There is no treasure but to have one's ease."

They eat coarse bread of barley, sooth to say, And drink but water from the heaven's shed:

Not all the birds that singen all the way

From here to Babylon could me persuade To spend one day so harboured and so fed. For God's sake let Franc Gontier none deny To play with Helen 'neath the open sky, Why should it irk me, if they love the leas?

But vaunt who will the joys of husbandry,

There is no treasure but to have one's ease.

From his own words we know that François was familiar with the farces,* moralities, and mysteries then in vogue. In the mysteries he found a medley of earnestness and buffoonery, of horse laughter and honest tears. We know, also, that he had derived certain rebellious, learned, cynical, and gallant notions from the Roman de la Rose. From Jean de Meun he got ideas as to the influence of the stars, as to free will, fortune, and the inequality of riches. Even his idea of his legacies is not new, but he en

*The Farce of Maistre Pierre Pathelin, once ascribed to Villon, was certainly not performed before 1468.

hanced the old scheme with the most original drollery. Nothing was commoner in the Middle Ages than to speculate on the fate of those whom Time had garnered in. In the "Ballade of Bygone Ladies," Villon has treated his theme with ineffable charm.

Villon is the first modern poet, because his interests lie almost wholly in the scenes of his own life; because he eschews allegory, because he lays before us his own soul, his very looks, his passions, griefs, joys, humours, sins, and ideals. Instead of the conventional platonic adoration of some vague, worshipful lady, he tells of real loves, base though they be, for real women that he knew. Villon is always picturesque. His verses are an emotional, graphic chronicle of what happened in the poet's own heart and of what he witnessed from day to day. Lucilius, Tibullus, Propertius, and Horace in antiquity, Dante in his time, put their own lives into their works, filled them with a thrill of emotion identical with our own, but most mediæval poetry is marred by something factitious and conventional. In vain we try to get close to the man. He is hidden in the very haze through which he himself got only a poor glimpse of the world. Villon is the first modern man to put himself, soul and body, into poesy. Richard Holbrook.