And secondly he was condemned
to be hanged. A man may have been expecting a catastrophe
for years, and yet find himself unprepared when it arrives.
Certainly, Villon found, in this legitimate issue of his
career, a very staggering and grave consideration. Every
beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin. If
everything is lost, and even honour, life still remains; nay,
and it becomes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan's parable, as
dear as all the rest. "Do you fancy," he asks, in a lively
ballad, "that I had not enough philosophy under my hood to
cry out: 'I appeal'? If I had made any bones about the
matter, I should have been planted upright in the fields, the
St, Denis Road" - Montfaucon being on the way to St. Denis.
An appeal to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de
Cayeux, did not necessarily lead to an acquittal or a
commutation; and while the matter was pending, our poet had
ample opportunity to reflect on his position. Hanging is a
sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet
adds a horrible corollary for the imagination. With the
aspect of Montfaucon he was well acquainted; indeed, as the
neighbourhood appears to have been sacred to junketing and
nocturnal picnics of wild young men and women, he had
probably studied it under all varieties of hour and weather.
And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these
different aspects crowded back on his imagination with a new
and startling significance; and he wrote a ballad, by way of
epitaph for himself and his companions, which remains unique
in the annals of mankind.
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