"Monsieur," and the little man slipped from the table-edge to his feet and bowed, his eyes twinkling with an intense enjoyment, "I can vouch for him as you can for Stephen La Mothe: I have the honour to present to you Francois Villon, Master of Arts of Paris and of all the crafts of this wicked world."
CHAPTER IX
FRANCOIS VILLON, POET AND GALLOWS-CHEAT
La Mothe stared up at him incredulously. "You Francois Villon?" he began; "Francois Villon the—the——"
The gallows-cheat, the human pitch whose very touch is defilement was what was in his mind, but with those clear luminous eyes looking down unashamed into his own he could not put the brutal thought into the naked brutality of words. But Villon read something of his meaning in his eyes and rounded off the sentence for him.
"The King's Jackal!" he said, not without a sour resentment.
"Nécessité faict gens mesprendre:
Et fain sallir le loup des boys!
You don't believe it? But you have been dandled on the knees of respectability all your little life: what do you know of necessity or hunger? I know both, and I tell you necessity and hunger are two gods before whom all who meet them bow down. Better a live jackal than a dead poet. Besides, is he not the greatest of kings? Bishop Thibault had me in gaol for a mere slip of the fingers and talked of a judicial noose—the third I've looked through—but the King fetched me out—God save the King!"
"God save the King!" echoed La Mothe, for want of something better to say. His mind was still confused by this sudden upheaval of his ideals. All that was best in Villon's poetry had stirred his enthusiasm, while all the much which was worst had left his sane wholesomeness untainted. To the half-dreamer, half-downright, practical lad in Poitou, Villon, with his jovial, bitter humour and even flow of human verse, had been something of an idol, and when our idols crash into ruin the thunder of the catastrophe bewilders judgment. But there was more than bewilderment, there was an inevitable disgust. The frankness of this disgust Villon discovered.
"Besides, again, my very young friend," he went on, "what are you in Amboise at all for, you and your lute? Is Villon the only King's Jackal here in the Chien Noir? Do we not hunt in a couple, and have you as good an excuse for your hunting as poor Francois Villon, who looked through a halter, and found the eternity beyond unpoetical to a man of imagination? What brought you to Amboise, I say?"