Stories By English Authors: France (Selected by Scribners) | Page 2

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 sputtering 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 flavour 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 Nicholas 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.
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