The criminal history of Villon’s life can all too easily obscure the scholar, trained in the rigorous intellectual disciplines of the medieval schools. While it is true that his poetry makes a direct unsentimental appeal to our emotions, it is also true that it displays a remarkable control of rhyme and reveals a disciplined composition that suggests a deep concern with form, and not just random inspiration. For example, the ballade “Fausse beauté, qui tant me couste chier” (“False beauty, for which I pay so dear a price”), addressed to his friend, a prostitute, not only supports a double rhyme pattern but is also an acrostic, with the first letter of each line of the first two stanzas spelling out the names Françoys and Marthe. Even the arrangement of stanzas in the poem seems to follow a determined order, difficult to determine, but certainly not the result of happy accident. An even higher estimate of Villon’s technical ability would probably be reached if more were known about the manner and rules of composition of the time.

A romantic notion of Villon’s life as some sort of medieval vie de bohème—a conception reinforced by the 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who saw him as the “accursed poet”—has been challenged by modern critical studies. David Kuhn has examined the way most texts were made to yield literal, allegorical, moral, and spiritual meanings, following a type of biblical exegesis prevalent in that theocentric age. He has discovered in Le Testament a numerical pattern according to which Villon distributed the stanzas. If his analysis is correct, then it would seem Le Testament is a poem of cosmic significance, to be interpreted on many levels. Kuhn believes, for example, that the stanza numbered 33—the number of years Jesus Christ lived—refers directly to Jesus, which, if true, could hardly be regarded as the random inspiration of a “lost child.” The critic Pierre Guiraud sees the poems as codes that, when broken, reveal the satire of a Burgundian cleric against a corps of judges and attorneys in Paris.

That Villon was a man of culture familiar with the traditional forms of poetry and possessing an acute sense of the past is evident from the poems themselves. There is the ballade composed in Old French, parodying the language of the 13th century; Le Testament, which stands directly in the tradition of Jehan Bodel’s Congés (“Leave-takings”), poetry that poets such as Adam de la Halle and Bodel before him had composed when setting out on a journey; best of all, perhaps, there is his “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone Times,” included in Le Testament), with its famous, incantatory refrain “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”).

However farfetched some of these insights into Villon may appear to be, it is not surprising that the poet—given the historical context of learning—should inform his own work with depth of thought, meaning, and significance. But an “intellectual” approach to Villon’s work should not distract from its burning sincerity nor contradict the accepted belief that fidelity to genuine, often painful, personal experience was the source of the harsh inspiration whereby he illuminated his largely traditional subject matter—the cortège of shattered illusions, the regrets for a lost past, the bitterness of love betrayed, and, above all, the hideous fear of death so often found in literature and art at that time of pestilence and plague, massacre and war.

The little knowledge of Villon’s life that has come down to the present is chiefly the result of the patient research of the 19th-century French scholar Auguste Longnon, who brought to light a number of historical documents—most of them judicial records—relating to the poet. But after Villon’s banishment by the Parlement in 1463 all trace of him vanishes. Still, it is a wonder that any of his poetry should have survived, and there exist about 3,000 lines, the greater part published as early as 1489 by the Parisian bookseller Pierre Levet, whose edition served as the basis for some 20 more in the next century. Apart from the works mentioned, there are also 12 single ballades and rondeaux (basically 13-line poems with a sophisticated double rhyme pattern), another 4 of doubtful authenticity, and 7 ballades in jargon and jobelin—the slang of the day. Two stories about the poet were later recounted by François Rabelais: one told of his being in England, the other of his seeking refuge at the monastery of Saint-Maixent in Poitou. Neither is credible, nor is it known when or where Villon died.