A
strange figure he must have cut in the eyes of the good
country people: this ragged, blackguard city poet, with a
smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street
arab, posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the
green fields and vineyards. For himself, he had no taste for
rural loveliness; green fields and vineyards would be mighty
indifferent to Master Francis; but he would often have his
tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic dupes, and
often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet
with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape.
(1) CHRON. SCAND., p. 338.
How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he became the
protege of the Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when
it was that he took part, under the auspices of Charles of
Orleans, in a rhyming tournament to be referred to once again
in the pages of the present volume, are matters that still
remain in darkness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent
rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer
1461, alas! he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-
sur-Loire, in the prisons of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of
Orleans. He had been lowered in a basket into a noisome pit,
where he lay, all summer, gnawing hard crusts and railing
upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a
rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for
being excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the
man for being a caricature of his own misery.
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