Francois Villon

The poet known to the world as Francois Villon was born in Paris in 1431, the year Joan of Arc was burned at Rouen and English soldiers still held much of northern France ^[1]. His original surname was probably Montcorbier or des Loges; both forms appear in university and legal documents connected with him. His father died while he was a child, and his mother, a poor and pious woman he later remembered tenderly in verse, could not raise him alone ^[2].

The boy was taken in by Guillaume de Villon, a chaplain of the church of Saint-Benoit-le-Betourne near the University of Paris. Guillaume housed him, paid for his schooling, and gave him the name he would make famous. Villon later called his guardian 'more than a father' in Le Testament, one of the few unguarded expressions of gratitude in his work ^[3].

Paris in those decades was a hard place to grow up. The city had endured English occupation until 1436, and famine, wolves at the gates, and outbreaks of plague marked the years of Villon's childhood. Anyone asking who was Francois Villon has to begin with this setting: a capital full of clerics, students, beggars, and thieves, all of whom would eventually populate his poems ^[1].

Villon entered the University of Paris and progressed through the standard course in arts. He received his baccalaureate in 1449 and became a master of arts in the summer of 1452 ^[2]. The degree made him a clerk, a legal status that placed him under church jurisdiction and would later help him escape the worst consequences of his crimes. Student life at the time was rowdy, and the faculty repeatedly clashed with royal authorities over pranks and street disorders in which Villon's circle took part ^[4].

On 5 June 1455, the feast of Corpus Christi, a quarrel broke out between Villon and a priest named Philippe Sermoise. Knives were drawn, Villon was cut on the lip, and Sermoise received a wound and a blow from a stone that killed him. Villon fled Paris, but the dying priest reportedly forgave his attacker, and in January 1456 Villon obtained letters of royal pardon on grounds of self defense. The pardon documents, which survive, record both of his names and are among the key sources for his life ^[2].

He returned to Paris, but not to respectability. Around Christmas 1456 he joined a small band that broke into the College de Navarre and stole five hundred gold ecus from a strongbox belonging to the faculty of theology ^[3]. The theft went undiscovered for months, until an accomplice named Guy Tabarie talked too freely and, under interrogation in 1457, named Villon among the burglars. By then the poet had already left the city ^[4].

Just before fleeing Paris after the Navarre burglary, Villon composed Le Lais, sometimes called the Petit Testament, a poem of around 320 lines in eight line stanzas. In it he pretends to distribute mock bequests to friends and enemies: his empty purse, his sign board, his reputation. The piece is dated by its own opening to the end of 1456 and reads as a farewell to the city he could no longer safely inhabit ^[3].

What followed were roughly five years of wandering through the Loire valley and beyond, a period documented only in fragments. He appears to have spent time at Blois at the court of Charles d'Orleans, the prince and poet who held verse competitions among his guests. A ballade by Villon built on the set line 'I die of thirst beside the fountain' survives in the duke's personal manuscript, evidence that the vagabond and the prince briefly shared a page ^[5]. Scholars have also connected some of his ballades written in thieves' jargon with the Coquillards, an organized criminal band active in Burgundy whose slang matches the vocabulary of those poems ^[4].

The wandering ended badly. In the summer of 1461 Villon was imprisoned at Meung-sur-Loire on the orders of Thibault d'Aussigny, bishop of Orleans, for reasons that are not recorded. He later wrote that he was kept in a pit and fed on hard bread and water. When the new king, Louis XI, passed through Meung in October 1461, prisoners were released in celebration of the royal entry, and Villon walked free ^[2]. His hatred of the bishop opens Le Testament and never softens.

Free but broken in health at thirty, Villon wrote his masterpiece in late 1461 and early 1462. Le Testament runs to just over two thousand lines, mixing eight line stanzas with inserted ballades and rondeaux. Like Le Lais it uses the frame of a mock will, but the joke now carries real weight: the poet contemplates poverty, wasted youth, dead friends, and his own approaching end with a candor that had no precedent in French verse ^[3].

Among the poems embedded in Le Testament are the pieces on which any account of Francois Villon achievements must rest. The 'Ballade des dames du temps jadis', with its refrain asking where the snows of yesteryear have gone, made the passing of beauty into a permanent question. The ballade he wrote in his mother's voice as a prayer to the Virgin gives the illiterate old woman her own theology of painted paradise and painted hell. The 'Belle Heaulmiere' passage puts the lament for lost youth into the mouth of an aged former beauty, itemizing the ruin of her body without pity or euphemism ^[5].

Critics have long noted what set him apart from the courtly poets of his century. He wrote about himself, named real streets, taverns, jailers, and companions, and treated the fixed forms of ballade and rondeau as vessels for personal testimony rather than ornament ^[1]. Later, awaiting execution, he produced the 'Ballade des pendus', spoken by hanged men whose rain washed, sun blackened bodies beg the living for prayers. Many readers consider it the single most powerful lyric of the French Middle Ages ^[5].

Paris drew him back in 1462, and trouble followed at once. He was held in the Chatelet prison that autumn, and the old Navarre burglary resurfaced; he was released only after promising to repay his share of the stolen gold ^[2]. Weeks later he was arrested again after a street brawl in which a papal notary named Ferrebouc was wounded. Villon may have been only a bystander, but his record condemned him. The provost's court sentenced him to be hanged ^[4].

He appealed to the Parlement of Paris, and on 5 January 1463 the court set aside the death sentence, citing his bad life, and instead banished him from Paris for ten years ^[2]. Villon responded with two short poems, one thanking the court and asking for three days to gather money and say his goodbyes, the other a jaunty question to his jailer about the appeal. After that, nothing. No document, no poem, no burial record mentions him again ^[1].

He was thirty one when the record stops. Given his ruined health, described in his own verse, most biographers assume he died not long after leaving the city, which is why reference works commonly close his dates at 1463 ^[3]. Rabelais, writing decades later, passed along colorful tales of Villon's old age in Poitou and England, but scholars treat these as legend rather than evidence ^[4].

Villon's afterlife began quickly. Pierre Levet printed the first edition of his poems in Paris in 1489, only a generation after his disappearance, and some twenty further editions followed within fifty years ^[3]. In 1533 the poet Clement Marot, at the request of King Francis I, prepared a corrected edition and called Villon the best Parisian poet there was, while admitting that many of the private jokes in the bequests were already unintelligible ^[5].

The nineteenth century remade him into the archetype of the outlaw artist. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's English rendering of the ballade of dead ladies fixed 'where are the snows of yester-year' in English usage, and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote both an essay and a short story about him ^[1]. In the twentieth century, translators and admirers included Ezra Pound, who composed an opera on his verse, and Bertolt Brecht, who adapted several Villon ballades for The Threepenny Opera. Galway Kinnell's English versions kept the poems current for American readers ^[6].

Modern scholarship, from Auguste Longnon's archival discoveries in the 1870s to the biographies by Jean Favier and studies by David A. Fein, has separated the documented man from the romantic myth ^[4]. The basic Francois Villon facts remain stark: one pardon for homicide, one burglary, one death sentence commuted, two testaments in verse, and then silence. Few bodies of work so small, roughly three thousand lines in all, have held readers for more than five centuries.