Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/254

Rh 232 V I L V I L central prison, and accommodates about 1200 prisoners. On the left bank of the Lot, 2 miles south of Villeneuve, are the 13th- century walls of Pujols. VILLTERS, GEORGE. See BUCKINGHAM, DUKE OF. VILLON, FRANCIS (1431-1461?), whose real surname is a matter of much dispute, so that he is also called Corbueil, Corbier, De Montcorbier, and Des Loges, though in litera ture Villon is the sole term used, was born in 1431, and, as it seems, certainly at Paris. The mixture of the real and the ironical in the singular poems called Testaments, which form his chief, if not his only certain, work, make it very unsafe to speak positively as to such details of his life as depend upon them. Yet the Testaments, with some extant documents, are the only trustworthy information that we have, the legends and anecdotes which are told respecting him being for the most part of the most dubious, if not the most certainly apocryphal, character. It appears that he was born of poor folk, that his father died in his youth, but that his mother was alive when her son was thirty years old. The very name Villon was stated, and that by no mean authority, the president Claude Fauchet, to be merely a common and not a proper noun, signifying &quot; cheat &quot; or &quot; rascal &quot; ; but this seems to be a mistake. It is, however, certain that Villon was a person of loose life, and that he continued, long after there was any excuse for it in his years, the reckless way of living common among the wilder youth of the university of Paris. He appears to have derived his surname from a friend and benefactor named Guillaume de Villon, an ecclesiastic and a person of some property and position. The poet, either by his assistance or in some other way, became a student, and took the degree of bachelor in 1450 and that of master in 1452. Between this year and 1455 nothing positive is known of him, except that nothing was known against him. On 4th June 1455 the first important incident of his life that is known occurred. Being in the company of a priest named Giles and a girl named Isabeau, he met a certain Breton, a master of arts, who was also in the company of a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Sermoise or Sermaise. A scuffle ensued ; daggers were drawn ; and Sermaise, who is accused of having attacked Villon and drawn the first blood, not only received a dagger thrust in return, but a blow from a stone which struck him down. Sermaise died of his wounds. Villon fled, and was sentenced to banish ment, a sentence which was remitted in January 1456, the formal pardon being extant strangely enough in two different documents, in one of which the culprit is de scribed as &quot;Francois des Loges, autrement dit Villon,&quot; in the other as &quot; Francois de Montcorbier.&quot; That he is also said to have described himself to the barber-surgeon who dressed his own wounds as Michael Piton is less surprising, and hardly needs an addition to the list of his aliases. It should, however, be said that the documents relative to this affair confirm the date of his birth, by representing him as twenty-six years old or thereabouts. A year later he was again in trouble. In his first broil &quot;la femme Isabeau &quot; is only generally named, and it is impossible to say whether she had anything to do with the quarrel. In the second, Catherine de Vaucelles, of whom we hear not a little in the poems, is the declared cause of a scuffle in which Villon was so severely beaten that to escape ridicule he fled to Angers, where he had an uncle who was a monk. It was before leaving Paris that he composed what is now known as the Petit Testament, of which we shall speak presently, with the rest of his poems, and which, it should be said, shows little or no such mark of profound bitter ness and regret for wasted life as its in every sense greater successor the Grand Testament. Indeed Villon s serious troubles Avere only beginning, for hitherto he had been rather injured than guilty. He left Paris for Angers in the very early spring of 1456-57, and shortly afterwards (in March) the chapel of the College of Navarre was broken open and five hundred gold crowns stolen. The inquiries set on foot discovered a gang of student robbers, one of whom, Guy Tabarie, turned king s evidence and accused Villon, who was then absent, of being the ringleader, and of having gone to Angers, partly at least, to arrange for similar burglaries there. Other crimes were confessed by the accomplice, and Villon was arrested, put to the torture, and condemned to be hanged, a penalty which was actu ally inflicted later on two of his gang, and which he com memorated by anticipation in one of the most famous and remarkable of his poems, the sombre &quot;Ballade des Pendus.&quot; He escaped Montfaucon, however, by appealing from the bishop s court, where as a clerk he had been tried, to the parlement of Paris, by which body his sentence was com muted to banishment that is, of course, banishment from the capital. Where he went and what he did for the next four years we do not know. It is certain that at one time, and probable that at more times than one, he was in corre spondence with Charles d Orleans, and it is likely that he resided, at any rate for some period, at that prince s court at Blois. He had also something to do with another prince of the blood, Jean of Bourbon, and traces are found of him in Poitou, in Dauphine, ifec. But at his next certain appear ance he is again in trouble. He tells us that he had spent the summer of 1461 in the bishop s prison (bishops were fatal to Villon) of Meting. His crime is not known ; but his enemy, or at least judge, was Thibault d Aussigny, who held the see of Orleans. Villon owed his release to a general jail delivery at the accession of Louis XL, and became a free man again on 2d October. It was now that he wrote the Grand Testament, and this, the work which has immortalized him, is the last certain fact which is known of his life. If one could judge from a vague kind of internal evidence, it woxild seem likely that it is really a testament, and that the poet died soon after wards. Although he was only thirty at the date of this composition (which is unmistakable, because given in the book itself), there seems to be no kind of aspiration towards a new life, nor even any hankering after the old. Nothing appears to be left him but regret ; his very spirit has been worn out by excesses or sufferings or both. But, however this may be, he disappears from history. Rabelais indeed tells two stories about him which have almost necessarily been dated later. One is a countryside anecdote of a trick supposed to have been played by the poet in his old age at Saint Maixent in Poitou, whither he had retired. The other, a coarse but pointed jest at the expense of England, is told as having been addressed by Villon to King Edward V. during an exile in that country. Now, even if King Edward V. were not evidently out of the question, a pass age of the story refers to the well-known scholar and man of science, Thomas Linacre, as court physician to the king, and makes Villon mention him, whereas Linacre was only a young scholar, not merely at the time of Edward V. s supposed murder, but at the extreme date (1489) which can be assigned to Villon s life. For in this year the first edition of the poet s work appeared, obviously not published by himself, and with no sign in it of his having lived later than the date (1461) of the Grand Testament. It would be easy to dismiss these Rabelaisian mentions of Villon as mere humorous inventions, if it were not that the author of Pantagruel was born quite soon enough to have actually seen Villon if he had lived to anything that could be called old age, that he almost certainly must have known men who had known Villon, and that the poet undoubtedly spent much time in Rabelais s own country on the banks of the lower Loire. The obscurity, the unhappiness, and the evil repute of Villon s