Page:The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.djvu/46

At the transitional period between the days of chivalry and the dawn of the Renaissance, Bohemia continues to stroll along all the highways of the kingdom, and already to some extent about the streets of Paris. There is Master Pierre Gringoire, friend of the vagrants and foe to fasting. Lean and famished as a man whose very existence is one long Lent, he lounges about the town, his nose in the air like a pointer’s, sniffing the odor from kitchen and cook shop. His eyes glittering with covetous gluttony cause the hams hung outside the pork-butcher’s to shrink by merely looking at them, whilst he jingles in imagination—alas! and not in his pockets—the ten crowns promised him by the échevins in payment of the pious and devout farce he has composed for the theatre in the hall of the Palais de Justice. Beside the doleful and melancholy figure of the lover Esmeralda, the chronicles of Bohemia can evoke a companion of less ascetic humor and more cheerful face—Master Francois Villon, the lover of “la belle qui fut haultmire.” Poet and vagabond, par excellence, is this latter, and one whose poetry, full of imagination, is no doubt on account of those presentiments which the ancients attributed to their vates, continually marked by a singular foreboding of the gallows, on which the said Villon one day nearly swung in a hempen collar for having looked too closely at the color of the king’s crowns. This same Villon, who more than once outran the watch started in his pursuit, this noisy guest at the dens of the Rue Pierre Lescot, this spunger at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poesy, has strung together elegies the heartbreaking sentiment and truthful accents of which move the most pitiless and make them forget the ruffian, the vagabond and the debauchee, before this muse drowned in her own tears.

Besides, amongst all those whose but little known work