This is the best ending for any set of verses one may choose out of Villon. It follows and completes the epitaph which in his will he orders to be written in charcoal--or scratched--above his tomb: the sad, sardonic octave of "the little scholar and poor." It is a kind of added dirge to be read by those who pass and to be hummed or chaunted over him dead. But it is a rondeau. See how sharp it is with the salt and vinegar of his pressed courageous smile--and how he cannot run away from his religion or from his power over sudden and vivid beauty. "Sire--et clarte perpetuelle"--which last are the best two words that ever stood in the vulgar for _lux perpetua_. It is no wonder that as time went on, more and more people learnt these things by heart. _RONDEAU._ _Repos eternel, donne a cil, Sire, et clarte perpetuelle, Qui vaillant plat ni escuelle N'eut oncques, n'ung brain de percil. Il fut rez, chief, barbe et sourcil, Comme un navet qu'on ret ou pelle. Repos eternel donne a cil. Rigueur le transmit en exil Et luy frappa au cul la pelle, Non obstant qu'il dit "J'en appelle!" Qui n'est pas terme trop subtil. Repos eternel donne a cil._ CLEMENT MAROT. If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground, yet both are forerunners only. With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediaeval Louvre, and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the Loire--being all this, the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life was worked.