So had Villon become a very great poet whose art was a fine blending of mirth and of pathos and of faith, and so might he hope to win to high honors in Antan, where, if anywhere, poets were properly rewarded. And the squalor and degradation of his terrestrial living were, now, but so many picturesque ingredients in the superb poem of his life, now that Villon too was—just as his Roman confrère had pointed out,—to be regarded as a character in a book. The difference was that Villon had become a never-dying myth of vagabondage with its heart in the right place, and a parable which revealed how much of good always survives in the most vile and abandoned of criminals and even in persons unsuccessful in business life. The legend of Villon thus proved exactly the contrary to that which was proved by the legend of Nero: as the one demonstrated the real nature of man to aspire only to lust and cruelty the moment that inhibitions were removed, so did the other legend show the real fundamental nature of every man to be incurably good and lovable under all possible surface stains. And the legend of Villon, Villon repeated, had in it tenderness,—that indispensable flavor of tenderness and of a sentimentality as wholesomely nourishing as molasses, without which no work of art can ever really be of the first class so far as goes its popular appeal. “For my life, gentlemen, was truly a superb parable. And it has been properly appreciated, it has ever been paid the fine compliment of being plagiarised by Holy Writ. Why, what the devil! if the parable of the Prodigal Son be good art in the New Testament, is it the less good art for being acted out with the vigor and the brio I brought to that task? For I too wasted all my substance, with some feminine assistance, and went down among the swine and the husks, without ever forgetting that by and by I was to be comforted with never-failing love and veal cutlets. In brief, although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars.” Then Gerald remarked, to this one of his discarded personalities: “You move me, Messire François. You sound upon my heart-strings a resounding chord, through your employment of a figure of speech which is always effective. I do not know why, but any imaginable bit of verse conveying a statement manifestly untrue can be made edifying and sublime through ending it with the word ‘stars’. We poets have convinced everybody, including ourselves, that there is some occult virtue in the act of looking at the stars. So, when you said just now, ‘Although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars’, I was moved very mightily. I seemed to hear the yearning cry of all human aspirations, foiled but superb. Yet if you had asserted your eyes to have been habitually, or at least every clear night, upon the planets—or, for that matter, upon the comets or the asteroids,—I would not have been moved in the least.”