François Villon, pseudonym of François de Montcorbier or François des Loges, was a French poet of the late Middle Ages.
Background
François Villon was born in 1431, in Paris, France, into a poor family. His mother was pious but illiterate; his father died when François was very young, and he was brought up by the canon Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné.
Education
Villon was taught Latin language and grammar by Guillaume de Villon. Villon, under his new father’s guidance, joined the Faculty of Arts of the University, perhaps at about twelve years of age. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Paris in 1449 and a master's degree in 1452.
Career
On June 5, 1455, a violent quarrel broke out in the cloisters of Saint-Benoît among himself, some drinking companions, and a priest, Philippe Sermoise, whom Villon killed with a sword thrust. He was banished from the city but, in January 1456, won a royal pardon. Just before Christmas of the same year, however, he was implicated in a theft from the Collège de Navarre and was again obliged to leave Paris.
At about this time he composed the poem his editors have called Le Petit Testament, which he himself entitled Le Lais (The Legacy). It takes the form of a list of "bequests," ironically conceived, made to friends and acquaintances before leaving them and the city. To his barber he leaves the clippings from his hair; to three well-known local usurers, some small change; to the clerk of criminal justice, his sword (which was in pawn).
After leaving Paris, he probably went for a while to Angers. He certainly went to Blois and stayed on the estates of Charles, duc d’Orléans, who was himself a poet. Here, further excesses brought him another prison sentence, this time remitted because of a general amnesty declared at the birth of Charles’s daughter, Marie d’Orléans, on December 19, 1457. Villon entered his ballade "Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine" ("I die of thirst beside the fountain") in a poetry contest organized by the prince, who is said to have had some of Villon’s poems (including the "letter" dedicated to the young child, "Épître à Marie d’Orléans") transcribed into a manuscript of his own work.
At some later time, Villon is known to have been in Bourges and in the Bourbonnais, where he possibly stayed at Moulins. But throughout the summer of 1461 he was once more in prison. He was not released until October 2, when the prisons were emptied because King Louis XI was passing through.
Free once more, Villon wrote his longest work, Le Testament (or Le Grand Testament, as it has since been known). It contains 2,023 octosyllabic lines in 185 huitains (eight-line stanzas). These huitains are interspersed with a number of fixed-form poems, chiefly ballades and chansons, some of which he had composed earlier.
In Le Testament Villon reviews his life and expresses his horror of sickness, prison, old age, and his fear of death. It is from this work especially that his poignant regret for his wasted youth and squandered talent is known. He re-creates the taverns and brothels of the Paris underworld, recalling many of his old friends in drunkenness and dissipation, to whom he had made various "bequests" in Le Lais. But Villon’s tone is here much more scathing than in his earlier work, and he writes with greater ironic detachment.
Shortly after his release from the prison at Meung-sur-Loire he was arrested, in 1462, for robbery and detained at the Châtelet in Paris. He was freed on November 7 but was in prison the following year for his part in a brawl in the rue de la Parcheminerie. This time he was condemned to be pendu et etranglé ("hanged and strangled"). While under the sentence of death he wrote his superb "Ballade des pendus," or "L’Épitaphe Villon", in which he imagines himself hanging on the scaffold, his body rotting, and he makes a plea to God against the "justice" of men. At this time, too, he wrote his famous wry quatrain "Je suis Françoys, dont il me poise" ("I am François, they have caught me"). He also made an appeal to the Parlement, however, and on January 5, 1463, his sentence was commuted to banishment from Paris for 10 years. He was never heard from again.
Views
Quotations:
"We were two and had but one heart."
"My days are gone a-wandering."
"Good talkers are only found in Paris."
"But where are the snows of yesteryear?"
"I know everything except myself."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"There has been no greater artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself."
Arthur Symons Figures of Several Centuries (London: Constable, 1916) p. 40.