had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it and jumped
inside 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 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