ed Dom Nicholas, the Picardy monk,
with his skirts tucked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable
warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only
escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between
his outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the
continual drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested veins,
purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his
back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had
half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his
bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the 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 spluttering 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 excessive 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 flavor 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."

The first thing to note about this fine descriptive fragment is that the
persons are definitely placed in the room. The monk before the fire is
the focal point; the