Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up again.

“Were any of them bald?” he asked.

“Oh yes, and with hair as white as mine.”

“I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said Villon.  “His was red.”  And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine.  “I’m a little put out when I think of it,” he went on.  “I knew him—­damn him!  And then the cold gives a man fancies—­or the fancies give a man cold, I don’t know which.”

“Have you any money?” asked the old man.

“I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing.  “I got it out of a dead jade’s stocking in a porch.  She was as dead as Caesar, poor wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair.  This is a hard winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me.”

“I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de Brisetout, bailie du Patatrac.  Who and what may you be?”

Villon rose and made a suitable reverence.  “I am called Francis Villon,” he said, “a poor Master of Arts of this university.  I know some Latin, and a deal of vice.  I can make Chansons, ballades, lais, virelais, and roundels, and I am very fond of wine.  I was born in a garret, and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows.  I may add, my lord, that from this night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequious servant to command.”

“No servant of mine,” said the knight.  “My guest for this evening, and no more.”

“A very grateful guest,” said Villon, politely, and he drank in dumb show to his entertainer.

“You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his forehead, “very shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small piece of money off a dead woman in the street.  Is it not a kind of theft?”

“It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord.”

“The wars are the field of honour,” returned the old man, proudly.  “There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy saints and angels.”

“Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I not play my life also, and against heavier odds?”

“For gain, but not for honour.”

“Gain?” repeated Villon, with a shrug.  “Gain!  The poor fellow wants supper, and takes it.  So does the soldier in a campaign.  Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about?  If they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to the others.  The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood.  I have seen a good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms.”