The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven.  Only a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars.  It was bitter cold; and, by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight.  The sleeping city was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the twinkling stars.  Villon cursed his fortune.  Would it were still snowing!  Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went, he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went, he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows.  The leer of the dead man came back to him with new significance.  He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and, choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went:  the aspect of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night’s existence, for one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland of red curls.  Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot.  Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of lanterns.  The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though carried by men walking.  It was a patrol.  And though it was merely crossing his line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as speedily as he could.  He was not in the humour to be challenged, and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow.  Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it was half ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the porch.  It was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose.  His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle.  Then he gave a little laugh of relief.  It was only a woman, and she dead.  He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point.  She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick.  A little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon.  Her pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of whites.  It was