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Updated: May 26, 2025
We hear nothing of Villon's father except that he was poor and of mean extraction. His mother was given piously, which does not imply very much in an old Frenchwoman, and quite uneducated. He had an uncle, a monk in an abbey at Angers, who must have prospered beyond the family average, and was reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns.
Great as would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter from Villon's dungeon at Méun; yet each in his own degree had been tried in prison.
But in London we have such sights every night as never were matched in the most turbulent Italian cities at times when the hot Southern blood was up; our great English capital can match Venice, Rome, Palermo, Turin, or Milan in the matter of stabbing; and, for mere wanton cruelty and thievishness, I imagine that Hackney Road or Gray's Inn Road may equal any thoroughfare of François Villon's Paris.
Amazed to be thus summoned in their own names by so great a personage as the Grand Constable of France, the thieves crept forward timidly and, in obedience to Villon's commanding gestures, gathered about him as he turned to them, pressing his face near to their faces, and cried: "Look at me closer closer. Don't you know François Villon in spite of this new spirit shining in his eyes?"
The speech, however, jingled very familiarly on Villon's ear, for the man was talking in the amazing jargon which the worshipful company of cockleshells had devised for the better furtherance of their thievish purposes, and it appealed to Villon as intimately as a song that is learned in childhood. The first pilgrim questioned the other, "What do you carry in your scrip?"
Villon's voice swelled proudly as he answered: "I want the Duke of Burgundy to believe that the king's favourite is a zany, and the king's court an orgy, where the king's honour melts like a pearl in a pot of vinegar. But our swords are tempered in wine and sharpened to dance music, and to-night we ride." The girl sighed. "I would that I were a man that I might ride with you."
"Sit up, can't you?" he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body. "Tread out that fire, Nick!" But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon's purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been making a ballade not three minutes before.
Like the hunger and sores of a fox or a wolf, his hunger and his sores are forgotten, never noticed. About all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking, overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word.
Whereat the two pilgrims saluted and parted and went their several ways and were swallowed up in the motley masquerade. Villon's curiosity was piqued to the quick. "How in heaven's name," he asked himself, "does it come to pass that people speaking the thieves' lingo of the Court of Miracles find themselves at a feast in the rose garden of King Louis?"
I felt as though I must have lived before, as though I must have known this woman. "And Villon's lines came to my mind like a sob: Tell me where, and in what place Is Flora, the beautiful Roman, Hipparchia and Thais Who was her cousin-german? Echo answers in the breeze O'er river and lake that blows, Their beauty was above all praise, But where are last year's snows?
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