istinguished (if, at the period when he
wrote this legacy, he was distinguished at all) for having written some
more or less obscene and scurrilous ballads, must have been little
fitted to gratify the self-respect or increase the reputation of a
benevolent ecclesiastic. The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy
of the poet's library, with specification of one work which was plainly
neither decent nor devout. We are thus left on the horns of a dilemma.
If the chaplain was a godly, philanthropic personage, who had tried to
graft good principles and good behaviour on this wild slip of an adopted
son, these jesting legacies would obviously cut him to the heart. The
position of an adopted son towards his adoptive father is one full of
delicacy; where a man lends his name he looks for great consideration.
And this legacy of Villon's portion of renown may be taken as the mere
fling of an unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in
his own shame the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy
benefactor's feelings. The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this
reading, as a frightful _minus_ quantity. If, on the other hand, those
jests were given and taken in good humour, the whole relation between
the pair degenerates into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old
chaplain and a witty and dissolute young scholar. At this rate the house
with the red door may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it
may have been below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster,
studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic.

It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he should have
inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoit. Three of the most remarkable
among his early acquaintances are Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he
entertained a short-lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly
resentment; Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth; and
Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking locks. Now
we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it is at least curious to
find that two of the canons of Saint Benoit answered respectively to the
names of Pierre de Vaucel and Etienne de Montigny, and that there was a
householder called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street--the Rue des
Poirees--in the immediate neighbourhood of the cloister. M. Longnon is
almost ready to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre; Regnier as
the nephew of Etienne, and Colin as