François Villon

His face had grown harder and thinner.

Who was he that raised such a din? François Villon, as I am a sinner, at home in the Poor Devil's Inn.

What brought back this mad rogue from Hades, when seldom a ghost comes at call? He said he was tired of dead ladies, of Lais and Thais and all.

So, being of that sort whose star is a guide that leads surely to sin, he returned to pick purses in Paris, and brought up at the Poor Devil's Inn.

Often, adding a morsel of meat to one stew ran the risk of going to the gallows.

Between the year 1,100 and 1,400, obtaining one's pittance was a daily concern for peasants, for beggars, and even traveling entertainers like the great medieval French poet, Francois Villon.

We can imagine him here in a village, neighboring Orléans, on an evening in 1460, earning his crust by chanting to his public.

Meat on a spit, a gore de broth, grilled pike, but for the poor like me who get a nothing, for the grace of God, grant us our pittanceying.

These are a copy each of The New England Primer and Grimm's Household Stories.

At the age of twenty-three, having been graduated from college and having read the poems of Villon, the Confessions of Rousseau, and Boswell's Life of Johnson, I was convinced that I had comprehended the sum of human wisdom and knew all there was worth knowing.

If at the present time, for I am seventy-two, I knew as much as I thought I knew at twenty-three, I should undoubtedly be a prodigy of learning and wisdom.

I started out to be a philosopher.

While thus serving as a visible means of support to this horde of parasites, I fell in with the man who has since then been my intimate friend.

Judge Methuen was a visitor in Paris, and we became boon companions.

It was he who rescued me from the parasites and revived the flames of honorable ambition, which had well-nigh been extinguished by the wretched influence of Villon and Rousseau.

The judge was a year my senior, and a wealthy father provided him with the means for gratifying his wholesome and refined tastes.

I don't often make public confessions, but, uh, when we chat with our stars after the play tonight, I'll reveal one secret from my past.

Now here's Act Three of The Vagabond King, starring Dennis Morgan as François Villon, Catherine Grayson as Lady Catherine, and J. Carrol Naish as Louis XI.

[dramatic music] François Villon's one day of glory is more than half spent.

All afternoon, he was strangely absent from the palace, returning only an hour ago with his friend, Tavari.

The ball, ordered, is at midnight, but he and Tavari remain in the garden, planning the attack on the snarling armies of Burgundy beyond the city walls.

I have gone 20,000 leagues under the seas and as many leagues above them.

I have been the fire of Captain Kidd and Walter Raleigh and John Paul Jones and Francois Villon.

That fire that burns in the heart of youth, that makes men dream and dare and conquer.

I am the spirit of romantic adventure.

Chapter 9.

Villon, the Genius of the Tavern.

It is to Stevenson's credit that he was rather sorry that he had ever written his essay on Villon.

He explains that this was due to the fact that he regarded Villon as a bad fellow, but one likes to think that his conscience was also a little troubled because, through lack of sympathy, he had failed to paint a just portrait of a man of genius.

Villon was a bad fellow enough in all conscience.

He was not so bad, however, as Stevenson made him out.

He was no doubt a thief.

It is rather the confession of a man who had wandered over the crooked hills of delicious pleasure and had arrived in rags and filth in the famous city of hell.