Villon, FRANÇOIS, was born in or near Paris in 1431. From himself we learn that in gratitude he adopted the name of his 'more than father,' Maître Guillaume Villon; his own, as M. Longnon has established, was François de Montecorbié. Of his life we may say with M. Jannet that, 'though we know little more than he tells us himself, we know only too much.' We know nothing of it before 1455 or after 1461, and the dismal story of the interval derives what coherence it has from the researches of M. Vitu and M. Longnon. In 1455 he was a needy master of arts of, apparently, blameless life; but having the ill-luck to kill a priest in a street squabble, he took to flight, lay for some months in hiding, and was sentenced to banishment. The sentence was eventually rescinded on proof that he had been savagely attacked and forced to defend his life; but the affair no doubt influenced his career. Distress may have driven him into partnership with scoundrels, or he may have found that justifiable clericide had disposed of his prospects with the Sorbonne. He was also in trouble with a love-affair, and in his Petit Testament he talks of going to Angers to escape from a hopeless passion. This was in 1456, and in the next year it came out, through the confession of a friend of his, Guy de Tabarie, that he was one of a gang of burglars who, among other feats, had broken into the Collège de Navarre and stolen 500 crowns, and that he was then at Angers planning another operation of the same sort. Brought under the notice of the police, he was in course of time caught, put to the question, and with five others sentenced to be hanged. It was on this occasion that he wrote the grim ballade-epitaph on himself and his comrades swinging in the wind and feasting the crows on the gibbet, and the no less famous quatrain misquoted by Rabelais. He appealed, however, and by some friend's interest the sentence was commuted to banishment from the kingdom. He found an asylum under the Duc de Bourbon at Roussillon in Dauphiné; but early in 1461 he was back again at his old game, and passed the whole summer in a cell, or rather pit, in the prison of the Bishop of Orleans at Meung-sur-Loire. What his crime was is uncertain; tradition says sacrilege, but M. Longnon suspects it was a burglary at Montpierre. This time he owed his life to Louis XI., who passed through Meung, October 2d, and ordered a gaol-delivery in honour of his accession. Here Villon passes from our sight. Rabelais has a story of his 'vieux jours,' but before the century was out he had evidently become one of those legendary characters to whom stray stories are affiliated, as is shown by the Repêches franches, and by the other story told by Rabelais, which is at least two centuries older than Villon. That he survived his release many years is most unlikely. He speaks of himself as a dying man, and it is clear from his own words that he was a wreck, shattered by debauchery, prison-life, and torture, and from one passage it would seem far gone in consumption. Nor is it likely that the writer of the Grand Testament would have left no trace of his existence.
Villon's works consist of the Petit Testament, written at Christmas in 1456, the Grand Testament, begun, and perhaps finished, soon after his release in October 1461, and some forty or fifty short pieces, chiefly ballades, many of which are im- bedded in the Grand Testament. Of the Jargon ballades some, the second for instance, are clearly his, but his claim to the whole is doubtful. Readers of Villon generally pass through three stages of feeling with regard to him. The first introduction is usually through selected specimens, like 'The Ladies of bygone Days,' his mother's 'Prayer to our Lady,' the 'Epistle to his Friends,' and fascination is the inevitable consequence. Unrestricted acquaintance is almost sure to lead to disgust with his revolting realism and the atmosphere of rascality one is forced to breathe in his company. This is the feeling which finds eloquent expression in Mr R. L. Stevenson's striking essay, but, as he himself admits in his preface, it is one that may be modified afterwards. Not that anybody will make a serious attempt to clear Villon: poor François is beyond the help of paradox or whitewash; but there is still room for pity. The undercurrent of profound sadness that runs through all his seeming recklessness does not make itself fully felt at the first or second reading, nor yet the pathos that lies in the glimpses he gives of a sense of his own degradation. The repulsion is perhaps as strong as ever—'but yet the pity of it!' Some there are, indeed, who are not repelled but rather attracted by the infamy of Villon's life; for there is an eccentric school of thought that, in its blind hatred of all that it dubs as the conventional and the respectable, is ready to accept even crime as a mark of genius. Others, again, maintain that Villon the poet was born of Villon the burglar and blackguard, though it is not clear upon what grounds they rest their assertion that if he had not been a gaol-bird he would have been songless. This much, however, may be said for him, that at the worst he was a better and an honest man than the vapouring scoundrels, apt pupils of Victor Hugo's philosophy, who pose as victims of a corrupt social system and make society responsible for their own vicious propensities. Villon was no poseur. He had the manliness to acknowledge that the miserable bed he lay upon was of his own making.
The first dated edition of Villon's poems is of Paris, 1489; but the earliest is possibly an undated one. By 1542 twenty-seven editions had been printed. That of 1533 was edited by Clement Marot. His poetry did not suit the taste of the 17th century, but in the 18th there was a reaction. The best modern editions are those of Paul Lacroix, 'Bibliophile Jacob' (1854-66-77), Pierre Jannet (1867-73-77-81-84), Louis Moland (1879), Auguste Longnon (1892). A very faithful English translation by Mr John Payne was printed by the Villon Society in 1878, and an expurgated edition of the same published 1881. See also A. C. S. Vitu, Notice sur François Villon d'après des Documents nouveaux (1873); A. Longnon, Étude biographique sur François Villon (1877); W. Bijvanck, Specimen d'un Essai sur les Œuvres de François Villon (1882); A. Vitu, Le Jargon du XVe Siècle (1884).