In Yeddo, with this nondescript political status, and cut off
from any means of livelihood, he was joyfully supported by
those who sympathised with his design.  One was Sakuma-
Shozan, hereditary retainer of one of the Shogun's
councillors, and from him he got more than money or than
money's worth.  A steady, respectable man, with an eye to the
world's opinion, Sakuma was one of those who, if they cannot
do great deeds in their own person, have yet an ardour of
admiration for those who can, that recommends them to the
gratitude of history.  They aid and abet greatness more,
perhaps, than we imagine.  One thinks of them in connection
with Nicodemus, who visited our Lord by night.  And Sakuma
was in a position to help Yoshida more practically than by
simple countenance; for he could read Dutch, and was eager to
communicate what he knew.

While the young Ronyin thus lay studying in Yeddo, news came
of a Russian ship at Nangasaki.  No time was to be lost.
Sakuma contributed "a long copy of encouraging verses and off
set Yoshida on foot for Nangasaki.  His way lay through his
own province of Choshu; but, as the highroad to the south lay
apart from the capital, he was able to avoid arrest.  He
supported himself, like a TROUVERE, by his proficiency in
verse.  He carried his works along with him, to serve as an
introduction.  When he reached a town he would inquire for
the house of any one celebrated for swordsmanship, or poetry,
or some of the other acknowledged forms of culture; and
there, on giving a taste of his skill, he would be received
and entertained, and leave behind him, when he went away, a
compliment in verse.  Thus he travelled through the Middle
Ages on his voyage of discovery into the nineteenth century.
When he reached Nangasaki he was once more too late.  The
Russians were gone.  But he made a profit on his journey in
spite of fate, and stayed awhile to pick up scraps of
knowledge from the Dutch interpreters - a low class of men,
but one that had opportunities; and then, still full of
purpose, returned to Yeddo on foot, as he had come.

It was not only his youth and courage that supported him
under these successive disappointments, but the continual
affluence of new disciples.  The man had the tenacity of a
Bruce or a Columbus, with a pliability that was all his own.
He did not fight for what the world would call success; but
for "the wages of going on."  Check him off in a dozen
directions, he would find another outlet and break forth.  He
missed one vessel after another, and the main work still
halted; but so long as he had a single Japanese to enlighten
and prepare for the better future, he could still feel that
he was working for Japan.  Now, he had scarce returned from
Nangasaki, when he was sought out by a new inquirer, the most
promising of all.  This was a common soldier, of the Hemming
class, a dyer by birth, who had heard vaguely (1) of
Yoshida's movements, and had become filled with wonder as to
their design.  This was a far different inquirer from Sakuma-
Shozan, or the councillors of the Daimio of Choshu.  This was
no two-sworded gentleman, but the common stuff of the
country, born in low traditions and unimproved by books; and
yet that influence, that radiant persuasion that never failed
Yoshida in any circumstance of his short life, enchanted,
enthralled, and converted the common soldier, as it had done
already with the elegant and learned.  The man instantly
burned up into a true enthusiasm; his mind had been only
waiting for a teacher; he grasped in a moment the profit of
these new ideas; he, too, would go to foreign, outlandish
parts, and bring back the knowledge that was to strengthen
and renew Japan; and in the meantime, that he might be the
better prepared, Yoshida set himself to teach, and he to
learn, the Chinese literature.  It is an episode most
honourable to Yoshida, and yet more honourable still to the
soldier, and to the capacity and virtue of the common people
of Japan.

(1) Yoshida, when on his way to Nangasaki, met the soldier
and talked with him by the roadside; they then parted, but
the soldier was so much struck by the words he heard, that on
Yoshida's return he sought him out and declared his intention
of devoting his life to the good cause.  I venture, in the
absence of the writer, to insert this correction, having been
present when the story was told by Mr. Masaki. - F. J.  And
I, there being none to settle the difference, must reproduce
both versions. - R. L. S.

And now, at length, Commodore Perry returned to Simoda.
Friends crowded round Yoshida with help, counsels, and
encouragement.  One presented him with a great sword, three
feet long and very heavy, which, in the exultation of the
hour, he swore to carry throughout all his wanderings, and to
bring back - a far-travelled weapon - to Japan.  A long
letter was prepared in Chinese for the American officers; it
was revised and corrected by Sakuma, and signed by Yoshida,
under the name of Urinaki-Manji, and by the soldier under
that of Ichigi-Koda.  Yoshida had supplied himself with a
profusion of materials for writing; his dress was literally
stuffed with paper which was to come back again enriched with
his observations, and make a great and happy kingdom of
Japan.  Thus equipped, this pair of emigrants set forward on
foot from Yeddo, and reached Simoda about nightfall.  At no
period within history can travel have presented to any
European creature the same face of awe and terror as to these
courageous Japanese.  The descent of Ulysses into hell is a
parallel more near the case than the boldest expedition in
the Polar circles.  For their act was unprecedented; it was
criminal; and it was to take them beyond the pale of humanity
into a land of devils.  It is not to be wondered at if they
were thrilled by the thought of their unusual situation; and
perhaps the soldier gave utterance to the sentiment of both
when he sang, "in Chinese singing" (so that we see he had
already profited by his lessons), these two appropriate
verses:


"We do not know where we are to sleep to-night,
In a thousand miles of desert where we can see no human
smoke."


In a little temple, hard by the sea-shore, they lay down to
repose; sleep overtook them as they lay; and when they awoke,
"the east was already white" for their last morning in Japan.
They seized a fisherman's boat and rowed out - Perry lying
far to sea because of the two tides.  Their very manner of
boarding was significant of determination; for they had no
sooner caught hold upon the ship than they kicked away their
boat to make return impossible.  And now you would have
thought that all was over.  But the Commodore was already in
treaty with the Shogun's Government; it was one of the
stipulations that no Japanese was to be aided in escaping
from Japan; and Yoshida and his followers were handed over as
prisoners to the authorities at Simoda.  That night he who
had been to explore the secrets of the barbarian slept, if he
might sleep at all, in a cell too short for lying down at
full length, and too low for standing upright.  There are
some disappointments too great for commentary.

Sakuma, implicated by his handwriting, was sent into his own
province in confinement, from which he was soon released.
Yoshida and the soldier suffered a long and miserable period
of captivity, and the latter, indeed, died, while yet in
prison, of a skin disease.  But such a spirit as that of
Yoshida-Torajiro is not easily made or kept a captive; and
that which cannot be broken by misfortune you shall seek in
vain to confine in a bastille.  He was indefatigably active,
writing reports to Government and treatises for
dissemination.  These latter were contraband; and yet he
found no difficulty in their distribution, for he always had
the jailor on his side.  It was in vain that they kept
changing him from one prison to another; Government by that
plan only hastened the spread of new ideas; for Yoshida had
only to arrive to make a convert.  Thus, though he himself
has laid by the heels, he confirmed and extended his party in
the State.

At last, after many lesser transferences, he was given over
from the prisons of the Shogun to those of his own superior,
the Daimio of Choshu.  I conceive it possible that he may
then have served out his time for the attempt to leave Japan,
and was now resigned to the provincial Government on a lesser
count, as a Ronyin or feudal rebel.  But, however that may
be, the change was of great importance to Yoshida; for by the
influence of his admirers in the Daimio's council, he was
allowed the privilege, underhand, of dwelling in his own
house.  And there, as well to keep up communication with his
fellow-reformers as to pursue his work of education, he
received boys to teach.  It must not be supposed that he was
free; he was too marked a man for that; he was probably
assigned to some small circle, and lived, as we should say,
under police surveillance; but to him, who had done so much
from under lock and key, this would seem a large and
profitable liberty.

It was at this period that Mr. Masaki was brought into
personal contact with Yoshida; and hence, through the eyes of
a boy of thirteen, we get one good look at the character and
habits of the hero.  He was ugly and laughably disfigured
with the smallpox; and while nature had been so niggardly
with him from the first, his personal habits were even
sluttish.  His clothes were wretched; when he ate or washed
he wiped his hands upon his sleeves; and as his hair was not
tied more than once in the two months, it was often
disgusting to behold.  With such a picture, it is easy to
believe that he never married.  A good teacher, gentle in
act, although violent and abusive in speech, his lessons were
apt to go over the heads of his scholars and to leave them
gaping, or more often laughing.  Such was his passion for
study that he even grudged himself natural repose; and when
he grew drowsy over his books he would, if it was summer, put
mosquitoes up his sleeve; and, if it was winter, take off his
shoes and run barefoot on the snow.  His handwriting was
exceptionally villainous; poet though he was, he had no taste
for what was elegant; and in a country where to write
beautifully was not the mark of a scrivener but an admired
accomplishment for gentlemen, he suffered his letters to be
jolted out of him by the press of matter and the heat of his
convictions.  He would not tolerate even the appearance of a
bribe; for bribery lay at the root of much that was evil in
Japan, as well as in countries nearer home; and once when a
merchant brought him his son to educate, and added, as was
customary, (1) a little private sweetener, Yoshida dashed the
money in the giver's face, and launched into such an outbreak
of indignation as made the matter public in the school.  He
was still, when Masaki knew him, much weakened by his
hardships in prison; and the presentation sword, three feet
long, was too heavy for him to wear without distress; yet he
would always gird it on when he went to dig in his garden.
That is a touch which qualifies the man.  A weaker nature
would have shrunk from the sight of what only commemorated a
failure.  But he was of Thoreau's mind, that if you can "make
your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from
success."  He could look back without confusion to his
enthusiastic promise.  If events had been contrary, and he
found himself unable to carry out that purpose - well, there
was but the more reason to be brave and constant in another;
if he could not carry the sword into barbarian lands, it
should at least be witness to a life spent entirely for
Japan.

(1) I understood that the merchant was endeavouring
surreptitiously to obtain for his son instruction to which he
was not entitled. - F. J.

This is the sight we have of him as he appeared to
schoolboys, but not related in the schoolboy spirit.  A man
so careless of the graces must be out of court with boys and
women.  And, indeed, as we have all been more or less to
school, it will astonish no one that Yoshida was regarded by
his scholars as a laughing-stock.  The schoolboy has a keen
sense of humour.  Heroes he learns to understand and to
admire in books; but he is not forward to recognise the
heroic under the traits of any contemporary man, and least of
all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher.  But as the
years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida continued in vain
to look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began
more and more to understand the drift of his instructions,
they learned to look back upon their comic school-master as
upon the noblest of mankind.

The last act of this brief and full existence was already
near at hand.  Some of his work was done; for already there
had been Dutch teachers admitted into Nangasaki, and the
country at large was keen for the new learning.  But though
the renaissance had begun, it was impeded and dangerously
threatened by the power of the Shogun.  His minister - the
same who was afterwards assassinated in the snow in the very
midst of his bodyguard - not only held back pupils from going
to the Dutchmen, but by spies and detectives, by imprisonment
and death, kept thinning out of Japan the most intelligent
and active spirits.  It is the old story of a power upon its
last legs - learning to the bastille, and courage to the
block; when there are none left but sheep and donkeys, the
State will have been saved.  But a man must not think to cope
with a Revolution; nor a minister, however fortified with
guards, to hold in check a country that had given birth to
such men as Yoshida and his soldier-follower.  The violence
of the ministerial Tarquin only served to direct attention to
the illegality of his master's rule; and people began to turn
their allegiance from Yeddo and the Shogun to the long-
forgotten Mikado in his seclusion at Kioto.  At this
juncture, whether in consequence or not, the relations
between these two rulers became strained; and the Shogun's
minister set forth for Kioto to put another affront upon the
rightful sovereign.  The circumstance was well fitted to
precipitate events.  It was a piece of religion to defend the
Mikado; it was a plain piece of political righteousness to
oppose a tyrannical and bloody usurpation.  To Yoshida the
moment for action seemed to have arrived.  He was himself
still confined in Choshu.  Nothing was free but his
intelligence; but with that he sharpened a sword for the
Shogun's minister.  A party of his followers were to waylay
the tyrant at a village on the Yeddo and Kioto road, present
him with a petition, and put him to the sword.  But Yoshida
and his friends were closely observed; and the too great
expedition of two of the conspirators, a boy of eighteen and
his brother, wakened the suspicion of the authorities, and
led to a full discovery of the plot and the arrest of all who
were concerned.

In Yeddo, to which he was taken, Yoshida was thrown again
into a strict confinement.  But he was not left destitute of
sympathy in this last hour of trial.  In the next cell lay
one Kusakabe, a reformer from the southern highlands of
Satzuma.  They were in prison for different plots indeed, but
for the same intention; they shared the same beliefs and the
same aspirations for Japan; many and long were the
conversations they held through the prison wall, and dear was
the sympathy that soon united them.  It fell first to the lot
of Kusakabe to pass before the judges; and when sentence had
been pronounced he was led towards the place of death below
Yoshida's window.  To turn the head would have been to
implicate his fellow-prisoner; but he threw him a look from
his eye, and bade him farewell in a loud voice, with these
two Chinese verses:-


"It is better to be a crystal and be broken,
Than to remain perfect like a tile upon the housetop."


So Kusakabe, from the highlands of Satzuma, passed out of the
theatre of this world.  His death was like an antique
worthy's.

A little after, and Yoshida too must appear before the Court.
His last scene was of a piece with his career, and fitly
crowned it.  He seized on the opportunity of a public
audience, confessed and gloried in his design, and, reading
his auditors a lesson in the history of their country, told
at length the illegality of the Shogun's power and the crimes
by which its exercise was sullied.  So, having said his say
for once, he was led forth and executed, thirty-one years
old.

A military engineer, a bold traveller (at least in wish), a
poet, a patriot, a schoolmaster, a friend to learning, a
martyr to reform, - there are not many men, dying at seventy,
who have served their country in such various characters.  He
was not only wise and provident in thought, but surely one of
the fieriest of heroes in execution.  It is hard to say which
is most remarkable - his capacity for command, which subdued
his very jailors; his hot, unflagging zeal; or his stubborn
superiority to defeat.  He failed in each particular
enterprise that he attempted; and yet we have only to look at
his country to see how complete has been his general success.
His friends and pupils made the majority of leaders in that
final Revolution, now some twelve years old; and many of them
are, or were until the other day, high placed among the
rulers of Japan.  And when we see all round us these brisk
intelligent students, with their strange foreign air, we
should never forget how Yoshida marched afoot from Choshu to
Yeddo, and from Yeddo to Nangasaki, and from Nangasaki back
again to Yeddo; how he boarded the American ship, his dress
stuffed with writing material; nor how he languished in
prison, and finally gave his death, as he had formerly given
all his life and strength and leisure, to gain for his native
land that very benefit which she now enjoys so largely.  It
is better to be Yoshida and perish, than to be only Sakuma
and yet save the hide.  Kusakabe, of Satzuma, has said the
word: it is better to be a crystal and be broken.

I must add a word; for I hope the reader will not fail to
perceive that this is as much the story of a heroic people as
that of a heroic man.  It is not enough to remember Yoshida;
we must not forget the common soldier, nor Kusakabe, nor the
boy of eighteen, Nomura, of Choshu, whose eagerness betrayed
the plot.  It is exhilarating to have lived in the same days
with these great-hearted gentlemen.  Only a few miles from
us, to speak by the proportion of the universe, while I was
droning over my lessons, Yoshida was goading himself to be
wakeful with the stings of the mosquito; and while you were
grudging a penny income tax, Kusakabe was stepping to death
with a noble sentence on his lips.



CHAPTER VI - FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER



PERHAPS one of the most curious revolutions in literary
history is the sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on
the obscure existence of Francois Villon. (1)   His book is
not remarkable merely as a chapter of biography exhumed after
four centuries.  To readers of the poet it will recall, with
a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which he
bequeaths his spectacles - with a humorous reservation of the
case - to the hospital for blind paupers known as the
Fifteen-Score.  Thus equipped, let the blind paupers go and
separate the good from the bad in the cemetery of the
Innocents!  For his own part the poet can see no distinction.
Much have the dead people made of their advantages.  What
does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and
nourished portly bodies upon cakes and cream!  Here they all
lie, to be trodden in the mud; the large estate and the
small, sounding virtue and adroit or powerful vice, in very
much the same condition; and a bishop not to be distinguished
from a lamp-lighter with even the strongest spectacles.

(1) ETUDE BIOGRAPHIQUE SUR FRANCOIS VILLON.  Paris: H. Menu.

Such was Villon's cynical philosophy.  Four hundred years
after his death, when surely all danger might be considered
at an end, a pair of critical spectacles have been applied to
his own remains; and though he left behind him a sufficiently
ragged reputation from the first, it is only after these four
hundred years that his delinquencies have been finally
tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among
the good or wicked.  It is a staggering thought, and one that
affords a fine figure of the imperishability of men's acts,
that the stealth of the private inquiry office can be carried
so far back into the dead and dusty past.  We are not so soon
quit of our concerns as Villon fancied.  In the extreme of
dissolution, when not so much as a man's name is remembered,
when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps the
very grave and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest
have been forgotten, desecrated, and buried under populous
towns, - even in this extreme let an antiquary fall across a
sheet of manuscript, and the name will be recalled, the old
infamy will pop out into daylight like a toad out of a
fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what was
once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants.  A
little while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten;
then he was revived for the sake of his verses; and now he is
being revived with a vengeance in the detection of his
misdemeanours.  How unsubstantial is this projection of a
man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and
then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration
of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot!  This
precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those
(and they are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the
immediate present.


A WILD YOUTH.


Francois de Montcorbier, ALIAS Francois des Loges, ALIAS
Francois Villon, ALIAS Michel Mouton,  Master of Arts in the
University of Paris, was born in that city in the summer of
1431.  It was a memorable year for France on other and higher
considerations.  A great-hearted girl and a poor-hearted boy
made, the one her last, the other his first appearance on the
public stage of that unhappy country.  On the 30th of May the
ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the
2d of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally
enough into disaffected and depopulating Paris.  Sword and
fire still ravaged the open country.  On a single April
Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides children, made their
escape out of the starving capital.  The hangman, as is not
uninteresting to note in connection with Master Francis, was
kept hard at work in 1431; on the last of April and on the
4th of May alone, sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets.
(1)  A more confused or troublous time it would have been
difficult to select for a start in life.  Not even a man's
nationality was certain; for the people of Paris there was no
such thing as a Frenchman.  The English were the English
indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with
Joan of Arc at their head, they had beaten back from under
their ramparts not two years before.  Such public sentiment
as they had centred about their dear Duke of Burgundy, and
the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to keep out of
their neighbourhood. . . .  At least, and whether he liked it
or not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled
as a subject of the English crown.

(1) BOUGEOIS DE PARIS, ed.  Pantheon, pp. 688, 689.

We hear nothing of Villon's father except that he was poor
and of mean extraction.  His mother was given piously, which
does not imply very much in an old Frenchwoman, and quite
uneducated.  He had an uncle, a monk in an abbey at Angers,
who must have prospered beyond the family average, and was
reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns.  Of this
uncle and his money-box the reader will hear once more.  In
1448 Francis became a student of the University of Paris; in
1450 he took the degree of Bachelor, and in 1452 that of
Master of Arts.  His BOURSE, or the sum paid weekly for his
board, was of the amount of two sous.  Now two sous was about
the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of 1417;
it was the price of half-a-pound in the worse times of 1419;
and in 1444, just four years before Villon joined the
University, it seems to have been taken as the average wage
for a day's manual labour. (1)  In short, it cannot have been
a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set lad in breakfast
and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon's share of the
cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never
weary of referring, must have been slender from the first.

(1) BOURGEOIS, pp. 627, 636, and 725.

The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were,
to our way of thinking, somewhat incomplete.  Worldly and
monkish elements were presented in a curious confusion, which
the youth might disentangle for himself.  If he had an
opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much hair-drawn
divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in
the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other.  The
lecture room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the
same roof with establishments of a very different and
peculiarly unedifying order.  The students had extraordinary
privileges, which by all accounts they abused
extraordinarily.  And while some condemned themselves to an
almost sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the
schools, swaggered in the street "with their thumbs in their
girdle," passed the night in riot, and behaved themselves as
the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo in the romance of
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS.  Villon tells us himself that he was
among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal.  The
burlesque erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no
more than the merest smattering of knowledge; whereas his
acquaintance with blackguard haunts and industries could only
have been acquired by early and consistent impiety and
idleness.  He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
who have been to modern universities will make their own
reflections on the value of the test.  As for his three
pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau -
if they were really his pupils in any serious sense - what
can we say but God help them!  And sure enough, by his own
description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant
as was to be looked for from the views and manners of their
rare preceptor.

At some time or other, before or during his university
career, the poet was adopted by Master Guillaume de Villon,
chaplain of Saint Benoit-le-Betourne near the Sorbonne.  From
him he borrowed the surname by which he is known to
posterity.  It was most likely from his house, called the
PORTE ROUGE, and situated in a garden in the cloister of St.
Benoit, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne
ring out the Angelus while he was finishing his SMALL
TESTAMENT at Christmastide in 1546.  Towards this benefactor
he usually gets credit for a respectable display of
gratitude.  But with his trap and pitfall style of writing,
it is easy to make too sure.  His sentiments are about as
much to be relied on as those of a professional beggar; and
in this, as in so many other matters, he comes towards us
whining and piping the eye, and goes off again with a whoop
and his finger to his nose.  Thus, he calls Guillaume de
Villon his "more than father," thanks him with a great show
of sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, and
bequeaths him his portion of renown.  But the portion of
renown which belonged to a young thief, distinguished (if, at
the period when he wrote this legacy, he was distinguished at
all) for having written some more or less obscene and
scurrilous ballads, must have been little fitted to gratify
the self-respect or increase the reputation of a benevolent
ecclesiastic.  The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy
of the poet's library, with specification of one work which
was plainly neither decent nor devout.  We are thus left on
the horns of a dilemma.  If the chaplain was a godly,
philanthropic personage, who had tried to graft good
principles and good behaviour on this wild slip of an adopted
son, these jesting legacies would obviously cut him to the
heart.  The position of an adopted son towards his adoptive
father is one full of delicacy; where a man lends his name he
looks for great consideration.  And this legacy of Villon's
portion of renown may be taken as the mere fling of an
unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in
his own shame the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy
benefactor's feelings.  The gratitude of Master Francis
figures, on this reading, as a frightful MINUS quantity.  If,
on the other hand, those jests were given and taken in good
humour, the whole relation between the pair degenerates into
the unedifying complicity of a debauched old chaplain and a
witty and dissolute young scholar.  At this rate the house
with the red door may have rung with the most mundane
minstrelsy; and it may have been below its roof that Villon,
through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he tells us, the
leisures of a rich ecclesiastic.

It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he
should have inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoit.  Three of
the most remarkable among his early acquaintances are
Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he entertained a short-
lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly resentment;
Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth; and
Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking
locks.  Now we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it
is at least curious to find that two of the canons of Saint
Benoit answered respectively to the names of Pierre de Vaucel
and Etienne de Montigny, and that there was a householder
called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street - the Rue des Poirees -
in the immediate neighbourhood of the cloister.  M. Longnon
is almost ready to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre;
Regnier as the nephew of Etienne, and Colin as the son of
Nicolas.  Without going so far, it must be owned that the
approximation of names is significant.  As we go on to see
the part played by each of these persons in the sordid
melodrama of the poet's life, we shall come to regard it as
even more notable.  Is it not Clough who has remarked that,
after all, everything lies in juxtaposition?  Many a man's
destiny has been settled by nothing apparently more grave
than a pretty face on the opposite side of the street and a
couple of bad companions round the corner.

Catherine de Vausselles (or de Vaucel - the change is within
the limits of Villon's licence) had plainly delighted in the
poet's conversation; near neighbours or not, they were much
together and Villon made no secret of his court, and suffered
himself to believe that his feeling was repaid in kind.  This
may have been an error from the first, or he may have
estranged her by subsequent misconduct or temerity.  One can
easily imagine Villon an impatient wooer.  One thing, at
least, is sure: that the affair terminated in a manner
bitterly humiliating to Master Francis.  In presence of his
lady-love, perhaps under her window and certainly with her
connivance, he was unmercifully thrashed by one Noe le Joly -
beaten, as 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 occurrence, 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
Noe le Joly would have 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 bear their
disappointment with a better grace.

The neighbourhood of Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux
was probably more influential on his after life than the
contempt of Catherine.  For a man who is greedy of all
pleasures, and provided with little money and less dignity of
character, we may prophesy a safe and speedy voyage downward.
Humble or even truckling virtue may walk unspotted in this
life.  But only those who despise the pleasures can afford to
despise the opinion of the world.  A man of a strong, heady
temperament, like Villon, is very differently tempted.  His
eyes lay hold on all provocations greedily, and his heart
flames up at a look into imperious desire; he is snared and
broached-to by anything and everything, from a pretty face to
a piece of pastry in a cookshop window; he will drink the
rinsing of the wine cup, stay the latest at the tavern party;
tap at the lit windows, follow the sound of singing, and beat
the whole neighbourhood for another reveller, as he goes
reluctantly homeward; and grudge himself every hour of sleep
as a black empty period in which he cannot follow after
pleasure.  Such a person is lost if he have not dignity, or,
failing that, at least pride, which is its shadow and in many
ways its substitute.  Master Francis, I fancy, would follow
his own eager instincts without much spiritual struggle.  And
we soon find him fallen among thieves in sober, literal
earnest, 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, and archers of
the watch; blackguards 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 favouring breeze
towards 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 rank in this society.  He could string off verses,
which is always an agreeable talent; and he could make
himself useful in many other ways.  The whole ragged army of
Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving
to work and pay for it, are addressed in contemporary verses
as the "Subjects of Francois Villon."  He was a good genius
to all hungry and unscrupulous persons; and became the hero
of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks and cheateries.
At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too thievish
for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief.  But he
would not linger long in this equivocal border land.  He must
soon have complied with his surroundings.  He was one who
would go where the cannikin clinked, not caring who should
pay; and from supping in the wolves' den, there is but a step
to hunting with the pack.  And here, as I am on the chapter
of his degradation, I shall say all I mean to say about its
darkest expression, and be done with it for good.  Some
charitable critics see no more than a JEU D'ESPRIT, a
graceful and trifling exercise of the imagination, in the
grimy ballad of Fat Peg (GROSSE MARGOT).  I am not able to
follow these gentlemen to this polite extreme.  Out of all
Villon's works that ballad stands forth in flaring reality,
gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction of
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."


But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty
of the case springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life.
Paris now is not so different from the Paris of then; and the
whole of the doings of Bohemia are not written in the sugar-
candy pastorals of Murger.  It is really not at all
surprising that a young 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 prettiest 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.

(1) CHRONIQUE SCANDALEUSE, ed.  Pantheon, p. 237.

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 of three years, we behold him for the first
time quite definitely.  Angry justice had, as it were,
photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon,
rummaging among old deeds, has turned 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
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.
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 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
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.  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 Chatelet and expressly pardoned Villon,
and died on the following Saturday in the Hotel Dieu.

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 "Francois des
Loges, alias (AUTREMENT DIT) de Villon;" and the other runs
in the name of Francois 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 unhappy accident
with Sermaise was the cause of Villon's subsequent
irregularities; and that up to that moment he had been the
pink of good behaviour.  But the matter has to my eyes a more
dubious air.  A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another
for Montcorbier? and these two the same person? and one or
both 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 colours.  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 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 towards
Montfaucon, and hear the wind and the birds crying around
Paris gibbet.


A GANG OF THIEVES.


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 favoured the escape of private housebreakers 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,
could easily slip out and become once more a free marauder.
There was no want of a sanctuary where he might harbour 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 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 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, 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; for after this the reader will not be surprised to
meet with thieves in the shape of tonsured clerks, or even
priests and monks.

(1) Monstrelet: PANTHEON LITTERAIRE, p. 26.

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 become acquainted.  Petit-Jehan and De Cayeux
were handy fellows and enjoyed a useful pre-eminence in
honour of their doings with the picklock.  "DICTUS DES
CAHYEUS EST FORTIS OPERATOR CROCHETORUM," says Tabary's
interrogation, "SED DICTUS PETIT-JEHAN, EJUS SOCIUS, EST
FORCIUS OPERATOR."  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 some
serious operation just as modern stockjobbers 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?

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, 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
astute - 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 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 favourite wines among the 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 of the College of Navarre; the four fellows in
their shirt-sleeves (as we might say) clambered over in a
twinkling; and Master Guy Tabary remained alone beside the
overcoats.  From the court the 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.  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 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 Chatelet 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 belaboured 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 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 jailor 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 Noe le
Joly, 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 own accusation against his relatives, that
they had "forgotten natural duty" and disowned him because he
was poor.  A poor relation 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 the
wrong side of toleration.  The uncle at Angers may have been
monstrously undutiful; but the nephew from Paris was upsides
with him.

On the 23d April, that venerable and 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.  Next
day, or the day after, as he was breakfasting at the sign of
the Armchair, he fell into talk with two customers, one of
whom was a priest and the other our friend Tabary.  The
idiotic Tabary became mighty confidential as to his past
life.  Pierre Marchand, who was an acquaintance of Guillaume
Coiffier's and had sympathised with him over his loss,
pricked up his ears at the mention of picklocks, and led on
the transcriber of improper romances from one thing to
another, until they were fast friends.  For picklocks the
Prior of Paray professed a keen curiosity; but Tabary, upon
some late alarm, had thrown all his into 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 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.
Among these we may notice Thibault, the operator, a little
fellow of twenty-six, wearing long hair behind.  The Prior
expressed, through Tabary, his anxiety to become their
accomplice and altogether such as they were (DE LEUR SORTS ET
DE LEURS COMPLICES).  Mighty polite they showed themselves,
and made him many fine speeches in return.  But for all that,
perhaps because they had longer heads than Tabary, perhaps
because it is 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 no sooner were he and the
Prior out of 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 band.  The
scheme of the hour was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert
de la Porte, and in this the Prior agreed to take a hand with
simulated greed.  Thus, in the course of two days, he had
turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out.  For a while
longer the farce was carried on; the Prior was introduced to
Petit-Jehan, whom he describes as a little, very smart man of
thirty, with a black beard and a short jacket; an appointment
was made and broken in the de la Porte affair; Tabary had
some breakfast at the Prior's charge and leaked out more
secrets under the influence of wine and friendship; and then
all of a sudden, on the 17th of May, an alarm sprang up, the
Prior picked up his skirts and walked quietly over to the
Chatelet to make a deposition, and the whole band took to
their heels and vanished out of Paris and the sight of the
police.