he most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that
rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of
chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and
training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in
the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor
soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that
afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining
from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone
rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook
with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

"_Some may prefer to dine in state_," wrote Villon, "_On bread and
cheese on silver plate_. Or--or--help me out, Guido!"

Tabary giggled.

"_Or parsley on a golden dish_," scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and
sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral
grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night
went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something
between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of
the poet's, much detested by the Picardy monk.

"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all
dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my
gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went
somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged
medlar-tree!--I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on the St.
Denis Road?" he asked.

Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his
Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by
the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for
Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard
anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon
fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an attack
of coughing.

"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish.'"

"Doubles or quits?" said Montigny doggedly.

"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.

"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.

"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that big
hogshead, you