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Sometimes he sent home to one person a coat, with the legs of a pair of trousers attached to it for sleeves, and despatched to another the arms of the aforesaid coat tacked together as a pair of trousers. Sometimes the coat was made to button behind instead of before, and he frequently placed the pockets in the lower part of the skirts, as if he had been in league with cut-purses.
There was no sending a troop of horse into the Chase, and the husbandmen of the country-side were too good Friends of ours to play the Judas. We were not Highway Robbers. Not one of our band had ever taken to or been taken from the Road. Rascals of the Cartouche and Macheath kidney we Disdained. We were neither Foot-pads nor Cut-purses, nay, nor Smugglers nor Rick-burners.
And all these people seemed to be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters, watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by slippery-looking fellows in black the whole with such an air of ease and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals.
In the midst of this band of cut-purses I saw the so-called wife of the pretended Chevalier de Sabi, a pretty woman from Saxony, who, speaking Italian indifferently well, was paying her addresses to the Countess Piccolomini.
A fiddler has the hardest lot of all mankind, because his life depends upon a bit of wood and a piece of cord, for all the world like a malefactor's. Cut-purses are the most liberal of all men, for they not only empty their own purses, but those of other people. If you put a miller, a tailor, a bailiff and an attorney in a bag, the first thing to come out will be a thief.
"There will be a hundred to-morrow." "I reckon so. I even say more there will be two hundred." "Then your hundred and twenty men will not be enough." "Pardon me. In every crowd composed of a hundred thousand spectators, there are ten thousand bandits or cut-purses only they dare not take the initiative." "Well?"
"I have long since forgotten reticence and will discourse of my empty purse, my empty belly, and my empty heart to any man. Gather around me, cullions and cut-purses, and listen to the strange adventure of Master François Villon, clerk of Paris."
"I am thankful I found you," he said, "or in your fainting state you might have suffered injury from some of the thieves and cut-purses who infest this City. What has happened to you?" I told him that I had fled from the burnings at Smithfield. "I do not wonder at that," he answered; "it was a fearful sight." "And the poor lady with whom I saw you on her way thither, has she escaped?" I asked.
And now, my Lord of Mayence, will you listen carefully to my suggestion?" "Prince Roland," replied his Lordship, almost with geniality, "I have never heard so graphic a narrator in my life. Proceed, I beg of you." "When our band of cut-purses set out from Frankfort, they supposed the gold was to be shared equally among us. Mutiny taught me to use the arts of diplomacy, which I despise.
He has got his sermon so nicely by heart. Pray go on, Sir! "for the gallows and the wheel?" FATHER Dom. And thou, their precious captain! commander-in-chief of cut-purses! king of sharpers!
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