Stories By English Authors: France (Selected by Scribners) | Page 4

fortune. Would it were still
snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him
on the glittering streets; wherever he went, he was still tethered to the
house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went, he must weave,
with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and
would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to
him with new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his
own spirits, and, choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in
the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at
Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night's existence, for one;
and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and
garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept
quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by
mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder
with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the
white streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw
up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering
dust.
Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of
lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though
carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely
crossing his line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as
speedily as he could. He was not in the humour to be challenged, and
he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow.
Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a
large porch before the door; it was half ruinous, he remembered, and
had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into
the shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of
the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with outspread hands,
when he stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable
mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a
leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle.
Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a woman, and she dead.
He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point. She was
freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little ragged finery fluttered in
the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had been heavily rouged that
same afternoon. Her pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking,
underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by
the name of whites. It was little enough, but it was always something;
and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should
have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark
and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the
dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the
riddle of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after

he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in
a great man's doorway before she had time to spend her couple of
whites--it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would
have taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been
one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before
the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin. He
would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the
lantern broken.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a
feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow
seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he
felt again with one feverish movement; then his loss burst upon him,
and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is
so living and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and their
pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune--that of time; and a
spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they
are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most
shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a