next find him, in summer 1461, alas!
he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-sur-Loire, in the prisons
of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been lowered in a
basket into a noisome pit, where he lay all summer, gnawing hard crusts
and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being
excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a
caricature of his own misery. His eyes were "bandaged with thick
walls." It might blow hurricanes overhead; the lightning might leap in
high heaven; but no word of all this reached him in his noisome pit.
"_Il n'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon._" Above all, he was
levered with envy and anger at the freedom of others; and his heart
flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault d'Aussigny, walking
the streets in God's sunlight, and blessing people with extended
fingers. So much we find sharply lined in his own poems. Why he was cast
again into prison--how he had again managed to shave the gallows--this
we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever
likely to learn. But on October 2nd, 1461, or some day immediately
preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into
Meun. Now it was a part of the formality on such occasions for the new
King to liberate certain prisoners; and so the basket was let down into
Villon's pit, and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most
joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but once more
a free man, into the blessed sun and wind. Now or never is the time for
verses! Such a happy revolution would turn the head of a
stocking-weaver, and set him jingling rhymes. And so--after a voyage to
Paris, where he finds Montigny and De Cayeux clattering their bones upon
the gibbet, and his three pupils roystering in Paris streets, "with
their thumbs under their girdles,"--down sits Master Francis to write
his "Large Testament," and perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious
ignominy.

THE "LARGE TESTAMENT"

Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style in general,
it is here the place to speak. The "Large Testament" is a hurly-burly of
cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to
friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these, many admirable
ballades both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought
that occurred to him would need t