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

FRAN(;:OIS VILLON
adroit or powerful vice, in very much the same con-
dition ; and a bishop not to be distinguished from
a lamphghter with even the strongest spectacles.
Such was Villon's cynical philosophy. Four hun-
dred years after his death, when surely all danger
might be considered at an end, a pair of critical
spectacles have been apphed to his own remains;
and though he left behind him a sufficiently ragged
reputation from the first, it is only after these four
hundred years that his dehnquencies 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 be carried so far
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 winds, and perhaps the very grave and the
very graveyard where he was laid to rest have been
forgotten, desecrated, and buried under populous
towns, — even in this extreme let an antiquary fall
across a sheet of manuscript, and the name will be
recalled, the old infamy will pop out into dayhght
like a toad out of a fissure in the rock, and the
shadow of the shade of what was once a man will be
heartily pilloried by his descendants. A httle while
ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then
he was revived for the sake of his verses ; and now
he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection
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