François de Montcorbier, _alias_ François des Loges, _alias_ François
Villon, _alias_ Michel Mouton, Master of Arts in the University of Paris,
was born in that city in the summer of 1431. It was a memorable year for
France on other and higher considerations. A great-hearted girl and a
poor-hearted boy made, the one her last, the other his first appearance
on the public stage of that unhappy country. On the 30th of May the
ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the 2d of
December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into
disaffected and depopulating Paris. Sword and fire still ravaged the
open country. On a single April Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides
children, made their escape out of the starving capital. The hangman, as
is not uninteresting to note in connection with Master Francis, was kept
hard at work in 1431; on the last of April and on the 4th of May alone,
sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets. {195} A more confused or
troublous time it would have been difficult to select for a start in
life. Not even a man’s nationality was certain; for the people of Paris
there was no such thing as a Frenchman. The English were the English
indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with Joan of Arc at
their head, they had beaten back from under their ramparts not two years
before. Such public sentiment as they had centred about their dear Duke
of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to keep
out of their neighbourhood. . . . At least, and whether he liked it or
not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of
the English crown.
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. Of this uncle
and his money-box the reader will hear once more. In 1448 Francis became
a student of the University of Paris; in 1450 he took the degree of
Bachelor, and in 1452 that of Master of Arts. His _bourse_, or the sum
paid weekly for his board, was of the amount of two sous. Now two sous
was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of 1417;
it was the price of half-a-pound in the worse times of 1419; and in 1444,
just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems to have
been taken as the average wage for a day’s manual labour. {196} In
short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set
lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days; and Villon’s share of
the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary
of referring, must have been slender from the first.
The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way
of thinking, somewhat incomplete. Worldly and monkish elements were
presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disentangle for
himself. If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much
hair-drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in the
way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The lecture room of
a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof with establishments
of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order. The students had
extraordinary privileges, which by all accounts they abused
extraordinarily. And while some condemned themselves to an almost
sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered
in the street “with their thumbs in their girdle,” passed the night in
riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo in
the romance of _Notre Dame de Paris_. Villon tells us himself that he
was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal. The burlesque
erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no more than the merest
smattering of knowledge; whereas his acquaintance with blackguard haunts
and industries could only have been acquired by early and consistent
impiety and idleness. He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
who have been to modern universities will make their own reflections on
the value of the test. As for his three pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard
Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau—if they were really his pupils in any serious
sense—what can we say but God help them! And sure enough, by his own
description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as was to be
looked for from the views and manners of their rare preceptor.
At some time or other, before or during his university career, the poet
was adopted by Master Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint
Benoît-le-Bétourné near the Sorbonne. From him he borrowed the surname
by which he is known to posterity. It was most likely from his house,
called the _Porte Rouge_, and situated in a garden in the cloister of St.
Benoît, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne ring out the
Angelus while he was finishing his _Small Testament_ at Christmastide in
1456. Towards this benefactor he usually gets credit for a respectable
display of gratitude. But with his trap and pitfall style of writing, it
is easy to make too sure. His sentiments are about as much to be relied
on as those of a professional beggar; and in this, as in so many other
matters, he comes towards us whining and piping the eye, and goes off
again with a whoop and his finger to his nose. Thus, he calls Guillaume
de Villon his “more than father,” thanks him with a great show of
sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, and bequeaths him
his portion of renown. But the portion of renown which belonged to a
young thief, distinguished (if, at the period when he wrote this legacy,
he was distinguished at all) for having written some more or less obscene
and scurrilous ballads, must have been little fitted to gratify the
self-respect or increase the reputation of a benevolent ecclesiastic.
The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy of the poet’s library,
with specification of one work which was plainly neither decent nor
devout. We are thus left on the horns of a dilemma. If the chaplain was
a godly, philanthropic personage, who had tried to graft good principles
and good behaviour on this wild slip of an adopted son, these jesting
legacies would obviously cut him to the heart. The position of an
adopted son towards his adoptive father is one full of delicacy; where a
man lends his name he looks for great consideration. And this legacy of
Villon’s portion of renown may be taken as the mere fling of an
unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in his own shame
the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy benefactor’s feelings.
The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this reading, as a frightful
_minus_ quantity. If, on the other hand, those jests were given and
taken in good humour, the whole relation between the pair degenerates
into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old chaplain and a witty
and dissolute young scholar. At this rate the house with the red door
may have rung with the most mundane minstrelsy; and it may have been
below its roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he
tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic.
It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet’s life that he should have
inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoît. Three of the most remarkable
among his early acquaintances are Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he
entertained a short-lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly
resentment; Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth; and
Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking locks. Now
we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it is at least curious to
find that two of the canons of Saint Benoît answered respectively to the
names of Pierre de Vaucel and Etienne de Montigny, and that there was a
householder called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street—the Rue des Poirées—in
the immediate neighbourhood of the cloister. M. Longnon is almost ready
to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre; Regnier as the nephew of
Etienne, and Colin as the son of Nicolas. Without going so far, it must
be owned that the approximation of names is significant. As we go on to
see the part played by each of these persons in the sordid melodrama of
the poet’s life, we shall come to regard it as even more notable. Is it
not Clough who has remarked that, after all, everything lies in
juxtaposition? Many a man’s destiny has been settled by nothing
apparently more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the
street and a couple of bad companions round the corner.
Catherine de Vausselles (or de Vaucel—the change is within the limits of
Villon’s licence) had plainly delighted in the poet’s conversation; near
neighbours or not, they were much together and Villon made no secret of
his court, and suffered himself to believe that his feeling was repaid in
kind. This may have been an error from the first, or he may have
estranged her by subsequent misconduct or temerity. One can easily
imagine Villon an impatient wooer. One thing, at least, is sure: that
the affair terminated in a manner bitterly humiliating to Master Francis.
In presence of his lady-love, perhaps under her window and certainly with
her connivance, he was unmercifully thrashed by one Noë le Joly—beaten,
as he says himself, like dirty linen on the washing-board. It is
characteristic that his malice had notably increased between the time
when he wrote the _Small Testament_ immediately on the back of the
occurrence, and the time when he wrote the _Large Testament_ five years
after. On the latter occasion nothing is too bad for his “damsel with
the twisted nose,” as he calls her. She is spared neither hint nor
accusation, and he tells his messenger to accost her with the vilest
insults. Villon, it is thought, was out of Paris when these amenities
escaped his pen; or perhaps the strong arm of Noë le Joly would have been
again in requisition. So ends the love story, if love story it may
properly be called. Poets are not necessarily fortunate in love; but
they usually fall among more romantic circumstances and bear their
disappointment with a better grace.
The neighbourhood of Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux was probably
more influential on his after life than the contempt of Catherine. For a
man who is greedy of all pleasures, and provided with little money and
less dignity of character, we may prophesy a safe and speedy voyage
downward. Humble or even truckling virtue may walk unspotted in this
life. But only those who despise the pleasures can afford to despise the
opinion of the world. A man of a strong, heady temperament, like Villon,
is very differently tempted. His eyes lay hold on all provocations
greedily, and his heart flames up at a look into imperious desire; he is
snared and broached-to by anything and everything, from a pretty face to
a piece of pastry in a cookshop window; he will drink the rinsing of the
wine cup, stay the latest at the tavern party; tap at the lit windows,
follow the sound of singing, and beat the whole neighbourhood for another
reveller, as he goes reluctantly homeward; and grudge himself every hour
of sleep as a black empty period in which he cannot follow after
pleasure. Such a person is lost if he have not dignity, or, failing
that, at least pride, which is its shadow and in many ways its
substitute. Master Francis, I fancy, would follow his own eager
instincts without much spiritual struggle. And we soon find him fallen
among thieves in sober, literal earnest, and counting as acquaintances
the most disreputable people he could lay his hands on: fellows who stole
ducks in Paris Moat; sergeants of the criminal court, and archers of the
watch; blackguards who slept at night under the butchers’ stalls, and for
whom the aforesaid archers peered about carefully with lanterns; Regnier
de Montigny, Colin de Cayeux, and their crew, all bound on a favouring
breeze towards the gallows; the disorderly abbess of Port Royal, who went
about at fair time with soldiers and thieves, and conducted her abbey on
the queerest principles, and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris
receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene
of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury
her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet. {204}
Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He
could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he
could make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of
Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving to work and
pay for it, are addressed in contemporary verses as the “Subjects of
François Villon.” He was a good genius to all hungry and unscrupulous
persons; and became the hero of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks
and cheateries. At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too
thievish for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief. But he would
not linger long in this equivocal border land. He must soon have
complied with his surroundings. He was one who would go where the
cannikin clinked, not caring who should pay; and from supping in the
wolves’ den, there is but a step to hunting with the pack. And here, as
I am on the chapter of his degradation, I shall say all I mean to say
about its darkest expression, and be done with it for good. Some
charitable critics see no more than a _jeu d’esprit_, a graceful and
trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg
(_Grosse Margot_). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this
polite extreme. Out of all Villon’s works that ballad stands forth in
flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction
of disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that
we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real
persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if
the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have
gone far to prove itself. I can well understand the reluctance of worthy
persons in this matter; for of course it is unpleasant to think of a man
of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult—
“A place, for which the pained’st fiend
Of hell would not in reputation change.”
But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty of the case
springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life. Paris now is not so
different from the Paris of then; and the whole of the doings of Bohemia
are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Murger. It is really not
at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century, with a knack
of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful terms. The
race of those who do is not extinct; and some of them to this day write
the prettiest verses imaginable. . . . After this, it were impossible
for Master Francis to fall lower: to go and steal for himself would be an
admirable advance from every point of view, divine or human.
And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first
appearance before angry justice. On June 5, 1455, when he was about
twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter of three years, we
behold him for the first time quite definitely. Angry justice had, as it
were, photographed him in the act of his homicide; and M. Longnon,
rummaging among old deeds, has turned up the negative and printed it off
for our instruction. Villon had been supping—copiously we may
believe—and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoît, in
company with a priest called Gilles and a woman of the name of Isabeau.
It was nine o’clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and evidently a
fine summer’s night. Master Francis carried a mantle, like a prudent
man, to keep him from the dews (_serain_), and had a sword below it
dangling from his girdle. So these three dallied in front of St. Benoît,
taking their pleasure (_pour soy esbatre_). Suddenly there arrived upon
the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Sermaise, also with sword and
cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi. 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.
Up to this point, Villon professes to have been a model of courtesy, even
of feebleness: and the brawl, in his version, reads like the fable of the
wolf and the lamb. But now the lamb was roused; he drew his sword,
stabbed Sermaise in the groin, knocked him on the head with a big stone,
and then, leaving him to his fate, went away to have his own lip doctored
by a barber of the name of Fouquet. In one version, he says that Gilles,
Isabeau, and Le Mardi ran away at the first high words, and that he and
Sermaise had it out alone; in another, Le Mardi is represented as
returning and wresting Villon’s sword from him: the reader may please
himself. Sermaise was picked up, lay all that night in the prison of
Saint Benoît, where he was examined by an official of the Châtelet and
expressly pardoned Villon, and died on the following Saturday in the
Hôtel Dieu.
This, as I have said, was in June. Not before January of the next year
could Villon extract a pardon from the king; but while his hand was in,
he got two. One is for “François des Loges, alias (_autrement dit_) de
Villon;” and the other runs in the name of François de Montcorbier. Nay,
it appears there was a further complication; for in the narrative of the
first of these documents, it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon
Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one Michel Mouton. M. Longnon has a
theory that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was the cause of Villon’s
subsequent irregularities; and that up to that moment he had been the
pink of good behaviour. But the matter has to my eyes a more dubious
air. A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another for Montcorbier? and
these two the same person? and one or both of them known by the _alias
of_ Villon, however honestly come by? and lastly, in the heat of the
moment, a fourth name thrown out with an assured countenance? A ship is
not to be trusted that sails under so many colours. This is not the
simple bearing of innocence. No—the young master was already treading
crooked paths; already, he would start and blench at a hand upon his
shoulder, with the look we know so well in the face of Hogarth’s Idle
Apprentice; already, in the blue devils, he would see Henry Cousin, the
executor of high justice, going in dolorous procession towards
Montfaucon, and hear the wind and the birds crying around Paris gibbet.