putable
idleness. Mr. Stacpoole writes a chapter on his visit to Charles of
Orleans, but there are few facts for a biographer to go upon during this
period. Nothing with a date happened to Villon till the summer of 1461,
when Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans, for some cause or other,
real or imaginary, had him cast into a pit so deep that he "could not
even see the lightning of a thunderstorm," and kept him there for three
months with "neither stool to sit nor bed to lie on, and nothing to eat
but bits of bread flung down to him by his gaolers." Here, during his
three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that
bitterness of life which makes his _Grand Testament_ a "De Profundis"
without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr.
Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells
began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier
follies. He is henceforth the companion of lost souls. He is the most
melancholy of cynics in the kingdom of death. He has ever before him the
vision of men hanging on gibbets. He has all the hatreds of a man
tortured and haunted and old.

Not that he ever entirely resigns his carnality. His only complaint
against the flesh is that it perishes like the snows of last year. But
to recognize even this is to have begun to have a just view of life. He
knows that in the tavern is to be found no continuing city. He becomes
the servant of truth and beauty as he writes the most revealing and
tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's
literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of
"la belle Heaulmiere" grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned
to hideousness--her once fair limbs become "speckled like sausages"?
"La Grosse Margot" alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and
her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links her
name with Villon's:--

Ordure amons, ordure nous affuyt;
Nous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuyt,
En ce bordeau, ou tenons nostre estat.

But there is more than the truth of ugliness in these amazing ballads of
which the _Grand Testament_ is full. Villon was by nature a worshipper
of beauty. The lament over the defeat of his dream of fair lords and
ladies by the reality of a withered and dissatisfying world runs like a
torment through his verse. No one has ever celebrated the inevitable
passing of loveliness in lovelier