little enough, but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money.  That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man’s life.  Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man’s doorway before she had time to spend her couple of whites—­it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world.  Two whites would have taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin.  He would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse.  Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp.  He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration.  To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—­it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures!  There is only one limit to their fortune—­that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent.  For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath.  And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly departed!  Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse.  Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside the cemetery.  He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse.  It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be seen.  He had not dropped it in the streets.  Had it fallen in the house?  He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him.  And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.