ously. "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.

"Necessite 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?"

"The King's orders: the peace of France," began La Mothe, but though
the words were fine swelling words in the mouth they somehow failed to
fill the stomach of his sense. Nor did Villon let him finish.

"And I say the same. What is more, I say them openly, and do not drown
the words with the twanging of a lute. Not that I blame you--not I,

'Tou