In this regard
Dom Gregory records with a sly gravity how many suggest that Master
Fran?ois used those words of set purpose with the very intention of
playing upon the strained strings of the king's mind. But there be
those, too, Dom Gregory adds, and we gather from his manner that he
is inclined to include himself in their number, there be those
partisans of the king who maintain that the king's cruelty was from
the start a mere mask for clemency, that he only intended a little
malicious sport with the too outspoken lover and the too disdainful
lass, and that it had never been in the scope of his thoughts
seriously to punish either the broker of ballads or the valiant maid
of Vaucelles.
Starting from this point, Dom Gregory indulges in a great many
reflections upon kings and kingship and the consequences of kingly
acts, all of which seemed perhaps more momentous at the time when
they were written and in the sleepy Abbey where they lie enshrined,
than in busier and more bustling times. One could have wished that
Dom Gregory had let such philosophies go by the board and had given
us instead some greater knowledge of what happened to Fran?ois
Villon and Katherine de Vaucelles after they fell upon each other's
necks in that open place in Paris, with the mob huzzahing, the king
staring and Tristan's strange satellites busily dismantling the
useless gibbet.
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