and so through the rest of the splendid catalogue with its sad,
unanswerable refrain--

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

Even more persistently, the vision rises before him of the physical
terrors of death--the hideousness of its approaches, the loathsomeness
of its corruptions; in vain he smiles, in vain he weeps; the grim
imagination will not leave him. In the midst of his wildest debauches,
he suddenly remembers the horrible features of decaying age; he repents;
but there, close before him, he sees the fatal gibbet, and his own body
swinging among the crows.

With Villon the medieval literature of France comes at once to a climax
and a termination. His potent and melancholy voice vibrates with the
accumulated passion and striving and pain of those far-off generations,
and sinks mysteriously into silence with the birth of a new and happier
world.




CHAPTER II

THE RENAISSANCE


There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later
Middle Ages. The poems of Villon produce the impression of some bleak,