For himself, he had no taste for rural loveliness; green
fields and vineyards would be mighty indifferent to Master Francis; but
he would often have his tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic
dupes, and often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape. How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the _protégé_ of the
Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part,
under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be
referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, are matters
that still remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas! he is once more in durance: this time at Méun-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
Méun. 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 to be dismissed without expression; and
he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul,
and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his
exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between
the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's "Don Juan" and the racy humorous
gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of
Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter
writer--except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be
paralleled from no other language known to me--he bears a particular
resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a
brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local
personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often
despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also,
in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and
obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great
masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary. "Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that he has a
handsome leg?" It is a far more serious claim that we have to put
forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his
writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in
an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers
could have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a
pastime, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of
Charles Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age
and country, and initiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long
ago, in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the
first articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by
priority of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison
with obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we
shall instal this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche
in glory's temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in
itself, a memorable fact that before 1542, in the very dawn of printing,
and while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran
through seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and
through Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and
growing inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way
of looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a
more specific feature in the literature of France. And only the other
year, a work of some power appeared in Paris, and appeared with infinite
scandal, which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward
form to the study of our rhyming thief. The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and
bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks
and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry;
the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window; people with
patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling
students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward;
the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux
and Montigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be
seen than sordid misery and worthless joys? Only where the poor old
mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.