blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment;
then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst
upon him, and he was covered 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 the door and window, and revived his terror for the
authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the
snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he
could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and
sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects
for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And