Francois de Montcorbier, _alias_ Francois des Loges, _alias_ Francois
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 2nd
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.[7] 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 about
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.[8] 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
Benoit-le-Betourne, 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. Benoit, 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 Benoit. 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 Benoit 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
Poirees--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 Noe
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
Noe 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.[9] 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
Francois 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 Muerger. 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 so 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. Benoit,
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.
Benoit, 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 Benoit, where he was examined
by an official of the Chatelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died
on the following Saturday in the Hotel 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 "Francois des Loges, alias (_autrement dit_) de
Villon"; and the other runs in the name of Francois 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.