nd derision. One of Villon's bequests to the old man, it will
be remembered, was the _Rommant du Pet au Diable_, which Stevenson
refers to again and again as an "improper romance." Mr. Stacpoole has
done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that
the _Rommant_ was nothing of the sort, but was a little epic--possibly
witty enough--on a notorious conflict between the students and civilians
of Paris. One may accept the vindication of Villon's goodness of heart,
however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole's tendency
to justify his hero. When, for instance, in the account of Villon's only
known act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest,
Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that he
must have been acting on the defensive, because, "since the earliest
times, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack--chiefly the
attack of wolves and dogs"--one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile.
I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuse
Villon of deliberate murder. But it is the absence of evidence that
acquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as well
as a dagger. Nor does it seem to, me quite fair to blame, as Mr.
Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de
Vaucelles for Villon's moral downfall. Katherine de Vaucelles--what a
poem her very name is!-may, for all one knows, have had the best of
reasons for sending her bully to beat the poet "like dirty linen on the
washing-board." We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter a
mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole:--

Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of
those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a
man's character, even though the bending had been ever so little,
she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was
moving, and which took place in the following December.

All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in her
absence Villon and a member of companion gallows-birds occupied the dark
of one winter's night in robbing the chapel of the College de Navarre.
This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote his _Petit
Testament_, and skipped from Paris.

We know little of his wanderings in the next five years, nor do we know
whether the greater part of them was spent in crimes or in re