Chapter 22

The Rue Saint Jacques had toothsome sauce for its breakfast. The quarter smacked stiff lips over the news, as it pictured François de Montcorbier dangling from Montfaucon. “Horrible!” said the Rue Saint Jacques, and drew a moral of suitably pious flavor.

Guillemette Moreau had told Catherine of the affair before the day was aired. The girl’s hurt vanity broke tether.

“Sermaise!” said she. “Bah, what do I care for Sermaise! He killed him in fair fight. But within an hour, Guillemette⁠—within a half-hour after leaving me, he is junketing on church-porches with that trollop. They were not there for holy-water. Midnight, look you! And he swore to me⁠—chaff, chaff! His honor is chaff, Guillemette, and his heart a bran-bag. Oh, swine, filthy swine! Eh, well, let the swine stick to his sty. Send Noël d’Arnaye to me.”

The Sieur d’Arnaye came, his head tied in a napkin.

“Foh!” said she; “another swine fresh from the gutter? No, this is a bottle, a tun, a walking wine-barrel! Noël, I despise you. I will marry you if you like.”

He fell to mumbling her hand. An hour later Catherine told Jehan de Vaucelles she intended to marry Noël the Handsome when he should come back from Geneppe with the exiled Dauphin. The old man, having wisdom, lifted his brows, and returned to his reading in Le Pet au Diable.

The patrol had transported Sermaise to the prison of Saint Benoit, where he lay all night. That day he was carried to the hospital of the Hôtel Dieu. He died the following Saturday.

Death exalted the man to some nobility. Before one of the apparitors of the Châtelet he exonerated Montcorbier, under oath, and asked that no steps be taken against him. “I forgive him my death,” said Sermaise, manly enough at the last, “by reason of certain causes moving him thereunto.” Presently he demanded the peach-colored silk glove they would find in the pocket of his gown. It was Catherine’s glove. The priest kissed it, and then began to laugh. Shortly afterward he died, still gnawing at the glove.

François and René had vanished. “Good riddance,” said the Rue Saint Jacques. But Montcorbier was summoned to answer before the court of the Châtelet for the death of Philippe Sermaise, and in default of his appearance, was subsequently condemned to banishment from the kingdom.

The two young men were at Saint Pourçain-en-Bourbonnais, where René had kinsmen. Under the name of des Loges, François had there secured a place as tutor, but when he heard that Sermaise in the article of death had cleared him of all blame, François set about procuring a pardon.2 It was January before he succeeded in obtaining it.

Meanwhile he had learned a deal of René’s way of living. “You are a thief,” François observed to Montigny the day the pardon came, “but you have played a kindly part by me. I think you are Dysmas, René, not Gestas. Heh, I throw no stones. You have stolen, but I have killed. Let us go to Paris, lad, and start afresh.”

Montigny grinned. “I shall certainly go to Paris,” he said. “Friends wait for me there⁠—Guy Tabary, Petit Jehan and Colin de Cayeux. We are planning to visit Guillaume Coiffier, a fat priest with some six hundred crowns in the cupboard. You will make one of the party, François.”

“René, René,” said the other, “my heart bleeds for you.”

Again Montigny grinned. “You think a great deal about blood nowadays,” he commented. “People will be mistaking you for such a poet as was crowned Nero, who, likewise, gave his time to ballad-making and to murdering fathers of the Church. Eh, dear Ahenabarbus, let us first see what the Rue Saint Jacques has to say about your recent gambols. After that, I think you will make one of our party.”