to cry out: 'I appeal'? If I had made any bones
about the matter I should have been planted upright in the fields, by
the St. Denis Road"--Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis. An appeal
to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de Cayeux, did not
necessarily lead to an acquittal or a commutation; and while the matter
was pending, our poet had ample opportunity to reflect on his position.
Hanging is a sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
adds a horrible corollary for the imagination. With the aspect of
Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the neighbourhood appears
to have been sacred to junketing and nocturnal picnics of wild young men
and women, he had probably studied it under all varieties of hour and
weather. And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new and
startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of epitaph for
himself and his companions, which remains unique in the annals of
mankind. It is, in the highest sense, a piece of his biography:--

"La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.
Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis;
Puis ca, puis la, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez a couldre.
Ne soyez donc de nostre confrairie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre."

Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that was
spurious; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul. There is
an intensity of consideration in the piece that shows it to be the
transcript of familiar thoughts. It is the quintessence of many a
doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in
the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his
eyes.

And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one of
banishment; and to Roussillon, in Dauphiny, our poet must carry his woes
without delay. Travellers between Lyons and Marseilles may remember a
station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets
seaward between vine-clad hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be
a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in that
draughty valley between two great mountain fields; but what with the
hills, and the racing river, and th