Thus the word itself merges the past with the present (just as historical fiction is a merger of different periods in time), while its meaning in each case is associated with natural laws or forces that are beyond man’s control.

The snow, too, is beyond control, with its ceaseless and unpredictable falling, its complete sovereignty over the lives of the people. Francis Villon, who is educated, can speculate amusingly and just a bit blasphemously on its origins: “Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus,” or “the holy angels moulting” (this page). But the illiterate poor, in contrast, have a sense of awe before natural phenomena, which is captured in a wonderful sentence: “To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from.” (this page) They are of course looking up to the heavens, and implicitly looking up to God. But Villon is too sophisticated for such absolute and unquestioning faith. He is a “Master of Arts,” and his ability to mix classical and religious allusions identifies him as an intellectual who does not take wonders for signs, or at least not for signs of God. Of course Villon’s sly humor borders on the blasphemous, and he does not pursue the joke. It is fine for an educated man to play with words and ideas, but it is also dangerous, and not something to treat cavalierly. But in even proposing the question, as Villon does, with a slight anticlerical edge, Stevenson opens up the prospect of religious questioning. Although the story is not one of specifically religious questioning, it is one of moral or ethical questioning, and one that addresses the “riddle of man’s life” (this page).

The phrase appears when Villon, searching for shelter in the middle of the night, stumbles upon the corpse of a woman who has frozen to death. He goes through her pockets, which are empty, and then discovers two small coins hidden in her stocking. Villon’s search is clearly a violation of the woman’s person, although the issue is problematic since it touches on a view of death that recurs in many of Stevenson’s stories. Simply put, if the spirit is gone, how can one violate the flesh? In “The Physician and the Saratoga Trunk” Dr. Noel insists to the young American whom he cajoles into accompanying a dead body back to London that it is only a “boxful of dead flesh,” and nothing to be concerned about. Once death occurs, all that remains is animal protein. Villon states this theme when he remarks upon the woman’s bad luck at not being able to spend her coins: “It would have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin” (this page).

Stevenson’s picture of Villon searching the prostitute’s garter and stocking functions on two levels: on the first, it draws on the historic Villon’s well-known fondness for women of all classes, not excluding prostitutes. That the fictional Villon would automatically lift the dead woman’s dress to search her stockings suggests that this is hardly a new experience for him. Stevenson builds his portrait from what his contemporaries commonly believed about Villon, deriving their knowledge from their reading of the poetry as well as from a recent French biography, which Stevenson had used as the source for his essay on the poet in Familiar Studies. One of Stevenson’s methods for constructing character, which he followed in his greatest fictions, is introduced here for the first time. The fictional Villon is built up from the historical Villon, a libertine whose poetry is dense with images of sexuality and love, however complex and problematic its ultimate view. Stevenson never directly suggests here that sexuality is a subject. He uses two vivid and implicative words in a simple subordinate phrase (“but in her stocking, underneath the garter”), and the reader must interpret all else, must recognize that the only way the fictional Villon could have uncovered the coins would have been through the intimate knowledge of women’s bodies that was presumably possessed by the real Villon. The small scene is instructive for what it tells us about Stevenson’s artistic principles: never disclose more to the reader than is absolutely essential, which is in fact a dramatic method adapted to fiction; and, in historical fiction, always base a complete understanding of character on a contextual knowledge of the historical personage.

The act of searching the dead woman’s body to uncover the coins is distinctly psychosexual, and akin to the psychosexuality illustrated in Silas Scuddamore’s peering through the peephole for a view of Madame Zephyrine. From a thematic point of view the sexuality has a furtive and secretive aspect to it; from the point of view of presentation, however, it is so unobtrusively managed that its meaning might easily escape the reader. The story could serve as a model for the kind of objective narration that Kipling became famous for and that Hemingway identified with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Stephen Crane. That aside, Stevenson’s association of sexuality and death, merely hinted at in this brief vignette, is further developed in Jekyll and Hyde and achieves a kind of climacteric in the death scene in “The Beach of Falesá.”

Of course death is such an overwhelming subject in Stevenson’s fiction that there is hardly a story that does not contain a death within the narrative. The issue is one Stevenson places at the center of human existence: we cannot understand life until we recognize and acknowledge the fact of death, that it may come when life appears most indestructible, and that it happens to the “poor jade” in the middle of the night as quickly and unexpectedly as it does to that fine figure of a soldier, Colonel Geraldine’s brother. The issue of death is so central in Stevenson that it has often been mistakenly attributed to the genre, viewed as simply part of the machinery of “adventure” or “romance” fiction. Yet it is a mistake to see in Stevenson’s treatment nothing more than an early version of Hollywood’s action-adventure films where the audience becomes immunized against the realities of death. Quite the contrary: in Stevenson the depiction is so vivid, so graphic, that a Chicago Tribune reviewer of New Arabian Nights considered the stories so repugnant as to warrant comparison with Emile Zola.

But let us return to one of the central points of this discussion: the idea that life is capricious, and that chance rules in place of fate, or individual will, and overrides the physical and mental endowments of being and personality. When Villon looks at the dead woman, and the coins in his hand, he shakes his head “over the riddle of man’s life.