A Poet and Thief.

Bruce Herald, Volume IX, Issue 807, 30 May 1876, Page 7

A Poet and Thief.

It may surprise some of our readers to know that the greatest French poet of the 15th ceutury was a swindler and thief by profession, nud only narrowly escaped the gibbet— that rough teacher of mankind, upon which ho wrote some of his best poems. Francois Villon, whom Louis XL saved from the gallows, was the favorite author of the gay and brave Fraueie I. This extraordinary genius was born three years after the accession of our Henry VI., in the very year of the burning of Joan of Arc, a heroine whom Villon "eulogised in bis poems once or twice. His father was poor, his mother pious, and he had a good uncle who, as he say 8 in a beautiful poem, was " sweeter to him than a. mother." Villon's mother J was a poor, ignorant, good woman, whom I he describes going to the parish church j and rejoicing in Jf.he frescoed angels play, ing on harps and lute?, and trembling at tbfi black devils being rolled into flames and torture. That Villon was a poor, idle student at the University of Paris is certain, as in one of his most pathetic laments for the follies and excesses of his mjsspent youth he regrets his lost oppor tunities of learning. How he first attempted to make bis bread, whether by copying MSS. or writing verses, or whether ariqjiing, gambling, and de bauehery drew him early into the ranks of the Bhop'iifterH and swindlers of the day, ia not known, but certain it is that by degrees, from stealing meat and fowls aud defrauding wine shops, he .passed on to more dangerous revels and frauds, robbing merchants on the highway, stealing horses, or working in a gang as a sort of gay and poetical burgler. He seems to have fled from Angers and Paris, and in 1457 (the height of the York and Lancaster wars) we find him and half-a-dozen other marked men snapped by the archers and thrown into the Chstelet for torture and instant death. In the stony depths of this home of deafcb the poet appealed to the French Parliament in a ballad of wonderfully bitter force, and which still exists. The King himself, or, ass some say, Charles, the poet Duke of Orleans, who spent half his life writing verses in the Tower of London, at last procured his release, and •Villon was banished from Paris ; and yet in 14GL we came upon the incorrigible, pensive, laughing rogue snug in prison again at Meuny-au-Loire, at the instance of the injured Bishop of Orleans, Some sacramental cup that glittered too much, we suppose, or some pis with a jewel in it such as Bardolph stole, or some impudent love affair with a nun, or some cask of wine ingeniously evoked from episcopal cellars. How be escaped dangling from the noose this time is not recorded, but, according to Babelais, who revelled in Villon's works', aud, indeed, imitated his license. Villon fled to England, and was sheltered as a friend by our jovial and ' not over moral King Edward IV., who gloried in bU wild quips, subtle repartees, and wonderful verses. In Ida old age, Villon is said to have retired to a village in Poitou, where some rich seigneur fostered the shameless old poet. How he behaved under such tutelage is not known, but be died during the reign of Edward IV. in the obscure poverty that might be presumed from such a mercurial life.— 1 'The Glebe,'