A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the arched chimney.  Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth.  His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his outspread feet.  His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker’s; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side.  His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull-neck.  So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the “Ballade of Roast Fish,” and Tabary sputtering admiration at his shoulder.  The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks.  He carried his four and twenty years with feverish animation.  Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth.  The wolf and pig struggled together in his face.  It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance.  His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime.  As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips; he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk’s other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance.  About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face.  Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather; he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny.  A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

“Doubles or quits?” said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

“Some may prefer to dine in state,” wrote Villon, “on bread and cheese on silver plate.  Or, or—­help me out, Guido!”

Tabary giggled.

“Or parsley on a golden dish,” scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney.  The cold was growing sharper as the night went on.  Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something between a whistle and a groan.  It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet’s, much detested by the Picardy monk.