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Updated: June 26, 2025
But a king is the father of his people, and his ears can never be shut against the cries of his children. You all love this man? Hear, then, my judgment! This man's life is forfeit. Which of you will redeem it? If there be one among you ready to take Master François Villon's place on yonder gibbet, let that one speak now."
It is he who forms the central figure on the stage of French poetry between the final collapse of the medieval tradition and the ceasing of Villon's song earlier, and later the full burst of the renaissance in the work of the Pléiade.
A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and the grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was Villon's age. The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive.
Gaston Cheverny sang these songs of Villon's very agreeably, accompanying himself on the viol, and so whiled away some of our heaviest hours. These diversions, together with our rat-killings, were the sum of our amusements, for I do not reckon the balls at the palace as amusements.
Open at random: here are two lines in 'A Toccata of Galuppi's, not deficient in melody by any means: "Dear dead women with such hair, too: what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old." This is not Villon's 'Ballad of Dead Ladies, nor even Tennyson's 'Dream of Fair Women'; but a master can still say a good deal in two lines.
Sermaise, according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go upon, came up blustering and denying God; as Villon rose to make room for him upon the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place; and finally drew his sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should imagine was a very clumsy stroke.
Villon's lifted hand gave the signal for a halt and he leaped lightly off his horse and advanced towards the king, a glorious figure to the eyes of the crowd in his shining armour with a scarlet coif upon his helmet. If for a moment his glance rested on the gaunt skeleton of the gallows there came no change in the proud composure of his face.
"Why, then, when the housewife moon kindles her pale fire on the hearth of heaven to-morrow, I shall be quiet enough. But either way you have given me a royal week, and I have made the most of it, lived a thousand lives, eaten my cake to the last sweet crumb and have known the meaning of kingship." Louis laughed. "You speak as if you had reigned for a century." Villon's sententious mood deepened.
He regretted the spitefulness that had led him to write in another name than hers because she had refused to support him. He had been a viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France, without the lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill of Villon's life. Gilfoyle's soul went down into a hell of regret and wriggled in the flames of self-condemnation.
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 Meun; yet each in his own degree had been tried in prison.
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