Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 36

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Jfrantffb l^HIcrii, Stubent, |joxt, nnb pousebrcalur.
Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the
sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon, only last winter, on the
obscure existence of Francois Villon.* His book is not remarkable
merely as a chapter of biography exhumed after four centuries. To
readers of the poet it will recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic
passage in which he bequeaths his spectacles — with a humorous reserva-
tion of the case — to the hosjjital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-
Score. Thus equip23ed, let the blind paupers go and separate the good
from the bad in the cemeteiy of the Innocents ! For his own part the
poet can see no distinction. Much have the dead people made of their
advantages. What does it matter now that they have lain in state beds
and nourished portly bodies upon cakes and cream 1 Here they all lie,
to be trodden in the mud; the large estate and the small, sounding virtue
and adroit or poAverful vice, in very much the same condition ; and a
bLshop not to be distinguished from a lamplighter with even the strongest
spectacles.
Such was Villon's cpiical philosophy. Four hundred years after his
death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains ; and though he
left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is only
after these foiu- hmidred years that his delinquencies have been finally
tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among the good
or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a fine figure
of the imperishability of men's acts, that the stealth of the private inquiry
office can Ije carried so ftir back into the dead and dusty past. "We are
not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied. In the extreme of
dissolution, when not so much as a man's name is remembered, when his
dust is scattered to the four -vsTiids, and perhaps the very grave and the
very graveyard where he was laid to rest have been forgotten, desecrated,
and buried imder populous towns, — even'in this extreme let an antiquary
fall across a sheet of manusci'ipt, and the name will be recalled, the old
infamy will pop out into daylight like a toad out of a fissure in the rock,
and the shadow of the shade of wliat^was once a man "ndll be heartily
pilloried by his descendants. A little wliile ago and Villon was almost
totally forgotten ; then he was revived for the sake of his vex'ses ; and
now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection of his mis-
* Etude Biographiq^ue sur Frmifois Villon. Paris : H. Menu.