a thief. But he would
not linger long in this equivocal border-land. He must soon have
complied with his surroundings. He was one who would go where the
cannikin clinked, not caring who should pay; and from supping in the
wolves' den, there is but a step to hunting with the pack. And here, as
I am on the chapter of his degradation, I shall say all I mean to say
about its darkest expression, and be done with it for good. Some
charitable critics see no more than a _jeu d'esprit_, a graceful and
trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg
(_Grosse Margot_). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this
polite extreme. Out of all Villon's works that ballad stands forth in
flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction
of disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that
we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real
persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if
the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have
gone far to prove itself. I can well understand the reluctance of worthy
persons in this matter; for of course it is unpleasant to think of a man
of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult--

"A place, for which the pained'st fiend
Of hell would not in reputation change."

But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty of the case
springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life. Paris now is not so
different from the Paris of then; and the whole of the doings of
Bohemia are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Muerger. It is
really not at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century,
with a knack of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful
terms. The race of those who do so is not extinct; and some of them to
this day write the prettiest verses imaginable.... After this, it were
impossible for Master Francis to fall lower: to go and steal for himself
would be an admirable advance from every point of view, divine or human.

And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first
appearance before angry justice. On June 5, 1455, when he was about
twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter of three years, we
behold him for the first time quite definitely. Angry justice had, as it
were, photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon,
rummaging among old deeds, has turned