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 the son of
Nicolas. Without going so far, it must be owned that the
approximation of names is significant. As we go on to see
the part played by each of these persons in the sordid
melodrama of the poet's life, we shall come to regard it as
even more notable.
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