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 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 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.

"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 silver 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 mon