her hawthorn. The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and
the courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as
in a literary carnival. If an indecorous adventure befell our friend
Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the
funniest of rondels, all the rhymes being the names of the cases of
nouns or the moods of verbs; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in
similar fashion, seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating
episodes. If Fredet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to
upbraid him; and it was in a rondel that Fredet would excuse himself.
Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the
same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic jargon. Some of
the poetasters were heavy enough; others were not wanting in address;
and the duchess herself was among those who most excelled. On one
occasion eleven competitors made a ballade on the idea,

"I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge"
(Je meurs de soif empres de la fontaine).

These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests the attention
rather from the name of the author than from any special merit in
itself. It purports to be the work of Francois Villon; and so far as a
foreigner can judge (which is indeed a small way), it may very well be
his. Nay, and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the
great _tabula rasa_, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the
biography of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon
a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons,
found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell
nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would
not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as
would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of
kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of
the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy
with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter
from Villon's dungeon at Meun; yet each in his own degree had been tried
in prison. Each in his own way also loved the good things of this life
and the service of the Muses. But the same gulf that separated Burns
from his Edinburgh patrons would separate the singer of Bohemia from the
rhyming duke. And it is hard to imagine that Villon's training amongst
th