Thus equipped, let the blind paupers go and
separate the good from the bad in the cemetery of the
Innocents! For his own part the poet can see no distinction.
Much have the dead people made of their advantages. What
does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and
nourished portly bodies upon cakes and cream! Here they all
lie, to be trodden in the mud; the large estate and the
small, sounding virtue and adroit or powerful vice, in very
much the same condition; and a bishop not to be distinguished
from a lamp-lighter with even the strongest spectacles.
(1) ETUDE BIOGRAPHIQUE SUR FRANCOIS VILLON. Paris: H. Menu.
Such was Villon's cynical philosophy. Four hundred years
after his death, when surely all danger might be considered
at an end, a pair of critical spectacles have been applied to
his own remains; and though he left behind him a sufficiently
ragged reputation from the first, it is only after these four
hundred years that his delinquencies have been finally
tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among
the good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that
affords a fine figure of the imperishability of men's acts,
that the stealth of the private inquiry office can be carried
so far back into the dead and dusty past. We are not so soon
quit of our concerns as Villon fancied.
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