Four hundred years after his
death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; and though he
left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is
only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been
finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among
the good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a
fine figure of the imperishability of men's acts, that the stealth of
the private inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and
dusty past. We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied. In the extreme of dissolution, when not so much as a man's name is
remembered, when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps
the very grave and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have
been forgotten, desecrated, and buried under populous towns,--even in
this extreme let an antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the
name will be recalled, the old infamy will pop out into daylight like a
toad out of a fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what
was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little
while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived
for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance
in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this
projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries
and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of
posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure
of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they are not few) who
prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present. A WILD YOUTH

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 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
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.