VILLON, FRANÇOIS. – Name adopted by François de Montcorbier, called des Loges, born in Paris around 1430 and graduated from that University as maître ès arte in 1452, after that of his protector, the chaplain Giovanni di V.; in modern times he has been regarded and recognized as the greatest lyric poet of the French Middle Ages.
The little that is known from documents about the life of V. concerns almost exclusively the accounts he had to render to justice for his none too honorable activities as a wayward student, thief, and brawler. On the evening of Corpus Christi, 5 June 1455, he mortally wounded with a dagger a priest with whom he had come to blows near the Sorbonne. He fled, and the following year succeeded in obtaining an amnesty from the King; a new brief stay in Paris, toward the end of 1456, enabled him to take part in the theft of 500 écus from the Collège de Navarre, discovered two years later. Wandering through central France, he was imprisoned for other offenses at Orléans and Meung, from which he emerged in the summer of 1461; then once again in Paris, for the theft from the Collège de Navarre and for a brawl involving injuries, which ultimately earned him, at the end of 1462, a capital sentence, commuted on appeal to ten years’ banishment from the city.
Testimony to these stormy vicissitudes remains in the not numerous poems that can securely be attributed to him (for a long time they were printed together with his works, although the comic-satirical compositions of the end of the century or the early years of the following one, such as the Franc Archier de Bagnolot, the Dialogue de Mallepaye et de Baillevent, and the Repues franches, certainly do not belong to him). They are ballads and other short lyrics in the forms and according to the taste of the period; most of them are included in the little poem of the Testament, where, as in the shorter Lais, V., in a series of bequests, vividly recalls his own escapades and misfortunes and pours out his most serious and sincere feelings: affection for his mother, remorse and regret for a past badly spent, suffering, and invocations to God.