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 towards 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 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.
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