1. "Bon Bec de Paris"
There went about the Rue Saint Jacques a notable shaking of heads on the day that Catherine de Vaucelles was betrothed to François de Montcorbier.
"Holy Virgin!" said the Rue Saint Jacques; "the girl is a fool. Why has she not taken Noël d'Arnaye,--Noël the Handsome? I grant you Noël is an ass, but, then, look you, he is of the nobility. He has the Dauphin's favor. Noël will be a great man when our exiled Dauphin comes back from Geneppe to be King of France. Then, too, she might have had Philippe Sermaise. Sermaise is a priest, of course, and one may not marry a priest, but Sermaise has money, and Sermaise is mad for love of her. She might have done worse. But François!
Ho, death of my life, what is François? Perhaps--he, he!--perhaps Ysabeau de Montigny might inform us, you say? Doubtless Ysabeau knows more of him than she would care to confess, but I measure the lad by other standards. François is inoffensive enough, I dare assert, but what does Catherine see in him? He is a scholar?--well, the College of Navarre has furnished food for the gallows before this. A poet?--rhyming will not fill the pot. Rhymes are a thin diet for two lusty young folk like these. And who knows if Guillaume de Villon, his foster-father, has one sou to rub against another? He is canon at Saint Benôit-le-Bétourné yonder, but canons are not Midases. The girl will have a hard life of it, neighbor, a hard life, I tell you, if--but, yes!--if Ysabeau de Montigny does not knife her some day. Oh, beyond doubt, Catherine has played the fool."
Thus far the Rue Saint Jacques.
This was on the day of the Fête-Dieu. It was on this day that Noël d'Arnaye blasphemed for a matter of a half-hour and then went to the Crowned Ox, where he drank himself into a contented insensibility; that Ysabeau de Montigny, having wept a little, sent for Gilles Raguyer, a priest and aforetime a rival of François de Montcorbier for her favors; and that Philippe Sermaise grinned and said nothing. But afterward Sermaise gnawed at his under lip like a madman as he went about seeking for François de Montcorbier.
2. "Deux estions, et n'avions qu'ung Cueur"
It verged upon nine in the evening--a late hour in those days--when François climbed the wall of Jehan de Vaucelles' garden.