up the negative and printed it off
for our instruction. Villon had been supping--copiously we may
believe--and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoit,
in company with a priest called Gilles and a woman of the name of
Isabeau. It was nine o'clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and
evidently a fine summer's night. Master Francis carried a mantle, like a
prudent man, to keep him from the dews (_serain_), and had a sword below
it dangling from his girdle. So these three dallied in front of St.
Benoit, taking their pleasure (_pour soy esbatre_). Suddenly there
arrived upon the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Sermaise, also
with sword and cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi.
Sermaise, according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go
upon, came up blustering and denying God; as Villon rose to make room
for him upon the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place; and
finally drew his sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should
imagine was a very clumsy stroke. Up to this point, Villon professes to
have been a model of courtesy, even of feebleness: and the brawl, in his
version, reads like the fable of the wolf and the lamb. But now the
lamb was roused; he drew his sword, stabbed Sermaise in the groin,
knocked him on the head with a big stone, and then, leaving him to his
fate, went away to have his own lip doctored by a barber of the name of
Fouquet. In one version he says that Gilles, Isabeau, and Le Mardi ran
away at the first high words, and that he and Sermaise had it out alone;
in another, Le Mardi is represented as returning and wresting Villon's
sword from him: the reader may please himself. Sermaise was picked up,
lay all that night in the prison of Saint Benoit, where he was examined
by an official of the Chatelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died
on the following Saturday in the Hotel Dieu.

This, as I have said, was in June. Not before January of the next year
could Villon extract a pardon from the King; but while his hand was in,
he got two. One is for "Francois des Loges, alias (_autrement dit_) de
Villon"; and the other runs in the name of Francois de Montcorbier. Nay,
it appears there was a further complication; for in the narrative of the
first of these documents it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon
Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one Michel Mouton. M. Longnon has a
theory that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was the cause of
Vi