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

222 FRANgOIS VILLON,
according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go upon, came up
blustering and denying God ; as Villon rose to make room for him upon
the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place ; and finally drew his
sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should imagine was a very
clumsy stroke. Up to this point, Villon professes to have been a model
of courtesy, even of feebleness ; and the brawl, in his version, reads like
the fable of the wolf and the lamb. But now the lamb was roused ; he
drew his sword, stabbed Sermaise in the groin, knocked him on the head
with a big stone, and then, lea"\T.ng him to his fate, went away to have
his own lip doctored by a barber of the name of Fouquet. In one version,
he says that Gilles, Isabeau, and Le Moxdi ran away at the first high
words, and that he and Sermaise had it out alone ; in another, Le Mardi
is represented as returning and wresting ^'illon's sword from him : the
reader may please himself. Sermaise was picked up, lay all that night
in the prison of Saint Benoit, where he was examined by an ofiicial of
the Chatelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died on the following
Saturday in the Hotel Dieu. He was plainly not a man of execution
like Noe le Joly ; and on the whole, a poor, crapulous being, mused with
drink.
This, as I have said, was in June. Not before January of the next
year, could Villon extract a pardon from the king ; but while his hand
was in, he got two. One is for " Franijois des Logos, alias {autrement
dit) de Villon ; " and the other runs in the name of Fran9ois de Mon-
corbier. Nay, it appears there was a further complication ; for in the
narrative of the first of these documents, it is mentioned that he passed
himself ofi" upon Fouquet, the barber- surgeon, as one Michel Mouton.
M. Longnon has a theory, that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was
the cause of Villon's subsequent iri-egularities ; and that up to that
moment he had been the pink of good behaviour. But the matter
has to my eyes a more dubious air. A pardon necessary for Des Loges
and another for Montcorbier? and these two the same person? and
one or both of them known by the alias of Villon, however honestly
come by 1 and lastly, in the heat of the moment, a fourth name thrown
out with an assured countenance ] A ship is not to be trusted that sails
under so many coloiu's. This is not the simple bearing of innocence.
No — the young master was already treading crooked paths ; already, he
would start and blench at a hand upon his shoulder, with the look we
know so well in the face of Hogarth's Idle Apprentice ; already, in the
blue devils, he would see Henry Cousin, the executor of high justice,
going in dolorous procession towards Montfaucon, and hear the wind and
the birds crvins around Paris gibbet.
A Gang of Thieves.
In spite of the prodigious quantity of people who managed to get
hanged, the fifteenth century was by no means a bad time for ciiminals.