AÎTRE JEAN BICHE stood, with a very black and evil expression of countenance, looking over the parapet of Notre Dame Bridge. He was in that mood when violence of some sort seems the only redress for an outraged self-esteem. It was just a question with him whether he should kill himself or another—deprive the insensate world of an inspired poet, or of an uninspired patron of poetasters. So he put it, there being no such merciless critic of his fellow-minors as an unappreciated rhymester.
And yet he might have solaced himself with the reflection that the approval of an insensate world would be the reverse from reassuring to a conscious genius. But there is no reasoning with an insulted poet.
It must be understood that Maître Jean, sensualist, decadent, and, at this last, by right maturation of a diseased egoism, a homicidal maniac, was quite earnest in his sense of injury, and quite deadly in his resolve to come to some kind of terms with Fate upon it. Notoriety was really the thing he craved—he called it appreciation. Tuneful from the first, his compositions, when only a poor sizar at the 'Collège des trois langues,' had instinctively assumed a metrical cast, and had merely awaited the authority of a Mastership of the Arts to expand into the full-blown song. And he had gained his degree, and thereafter had indulged his bent, seeking a living and a living fame in one; but with singular ill-success. Though he sang high and low, no one would employ him above a trumpery figure; and here, at thirty years of age, he was sunk into a mere tavern-strummer, begging his bread, like Homer, from door to door. Odes, hymns, eclogues, rondels, pasquinades—they all came within his scope—or so he thought—and he must exchange the best of them for a mug of wine and a bed in the midden. It was an unexampled infamy; but it had to be endured. And then one day there had appeared, unexpectedly, a potential patron, and his embittered soul had been exalted at a bound to unstable heights.
It was just a stranger in a tavern, a magnificent , who had clapped him on the shoulder over some neatly-turned epigram, and had sworn by his beard that Father Ronsard must and should hear of him; that the King himself must hear; that at a turn of the wheel he should find himself enrolled among that select company of Court songsters which wove a maze of melody about the branching corridors of the Louvre.
Jean Biche had listened petrified. Ronsard! the incomparable Ronsard, whom for years he had hated and envied and depreciated with all a poor man's spite of the successful! In a moment he found this great rival just and noble; in a moment he saw himself recognised, applauded—nay, lifted to pre-eminence. If, he reflected, in a glow of condescension, the Court emoluments were something less than princely, they would compare at least favourably with his present takings. Charles IX was credited with keeping his poets, like horses, on moderate oats, lest they should become over-blown and unfit for service. What of that, to one who had often drummed an accompaniment to his own couplets on his own empty stomach? He inflated his starved chest, he flushed and simpered; when the stranger insisted upon seeing such specimens of his art as he had about him, he protested, with an affectation of lowliness that was already vanity spurred and mounted. The two parted, after an appointment made at The Mewing Cat, the nobleman vowing, in a heat of tearful sentiment, that he would consider it the deed of his life to set those broken shoes of Maître Jean on the first rung of the ladder of fame. And after that, being, in truth, gloriously drunk, he had gone away and forgotten all about it.
Jean Biche—living meanwhile in the clouds, and feeding almost exclusively on wind—kept the appointment with punctuality, and found no impulsive patron awaiting him at The Mewing Cat, which was just a jolly tavern in the Rue de la Juiverie on the City Island. Nor did any 'come to arrive,' and in the end he had to sing for his supper. Thereafter he haunted The Mewing Cat, and always in vain; but, still living on the glamour of that meeting, and finding for himself a hundred reasons why its renewal was unavoidably postponed, he presently, in his new glorified self-confidence, began to conceive the possibility of touting for favour at the fountain-head on his own account. Why should he not submit his goods, so highly recommended, to the Sieur Ronsard himself, and so dispose of the encumbrance of a "middle-man"?