Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this
projection of a man's existence, which can he in
abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again
and set forth for the consideration of posterity by
a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot ! This pre-
carious tenure of fame goes a long way to justify
those (and they are not few) who prefer cakes and
cream in the immediate present.
A WILD YOUTH
Fran9ois de Montcorbier, alias Fran9ois des Loges,
alias Fran9ois Villon, alias Michel Mouton, Master
of Arts in the University of Paris, was born in that
city in the summer of 1431. It was a memorable
year for France on other and higher considerations.
A great-hearted girl and a poor-hearted boy made,
the one her last, the other his first appearance on the
pubhc stage of that unhappy country. On the 30th
of May the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into
the Seine, and on the 2nd of December our Henry
Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into
disaffected and depopulating Paris. Sword and fire
still ravaged the open country. On a single April
Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides children,
made their escape out of the starving capital. The
hangman, as is not uninteresting to note in connec-
tion with Master Francis, was kept hard at work in
1431 ; on the last of April and on the 4th of May
alone, sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets.^
^ Bourgeois de Paris, ed. Pantheon, pp. 688, 689.
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