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 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;