Avril | Page 9

attitude and manner, to an
inexhaustibility of special words, to a brilliancy of impression unique
even among his own people.
He was poor; he was amative; he was unsatisfied. This vigour,
therefore, led in his actions to a mere wildness; clothed in this wildness
the rare fragments of his life have descended to us. He professed to
teach, but he haunted taverns, and loved the roaring of songs. He lived
at random from his twentieth year in one den or another along the
waterside. Affection brought him now to his mother, now to his old

guardian priest, but not for long; he returned to adventure--such as it
was. He killed a man, was arrested, condemned, pardoned, exiled; he
wandered and again found Paris, and again--it seems--stumbled down
his old lane of violence and dishonour.
Associated also with this wildness is a curious imperfection in our
knowledge of him. His very name is not his own--or any other man's.
His father, if it were his father, took his name from Mont-Corbier--half
noble. Villon is but a little village over beyond the upper Yonne, near
the division, within a day of the water-parting where the land falls
southward to Burgundy and the sun in what they call "The Slope of
Gold." From this village a priest, William, had come to Paris in 1423.
They gave him a canonry in that little church called "St. Bennets
Askew," which stood in the midst of the University, near Sorbonne,
where the Rue des Écoles crosses the Rue St. Jacques to-day. Hither, to
his house in the cloister, he brought the boy, a waif whom he had found
much at the time when Willoughby capitulated and the French
recaptured the city. He had him taught, he designed him for the
University, he sheltered him in his vagaries, he gave him asylum. The
young man took his name and called him "more than father." His
anxious life led on to 1468, long after the poet had disappeared.
For it is in 1461, in his thirtieth year, that Villon last writes down a
verse. It is in 1463 that his signature is last discovered. Then not by
death or, if by death, then by some death unrecorded, he leaves history
abruptly--a most astonishing exit!... You may pursue fantastic legends,
you will not find the man himself again. Some say a final quarrel got
him hanged at last--it is improbable: no record or even tradition of it
remains. Rabelais thought him a wanderer in England. Poitou preserves
a story of his later passage through her fields, of how still he drank and
sang with boon companions, and of how, again, he killed a man....
Maybe, he only ceased to write; took to teaching soberly in the
University, and lived in a decent inheritance to see new splendours
growing upon Europe. It may very well be, for it is in such characters
to desire in early manhood decency, honour, and repose. But for us the
man ends with his last line. His body that was so very real, his personal
voice, his jargon--tangible and audible things--spread outward suddenly

a vast shadow upon nothingness. It was the end, also, of a world. The
first Presses were creaking, Constantinople had fallen, Greek was in
Italy, Leonardo lived, the stepping stones of the Azores were held--in
that new light he disappears.

Of his greatness nothing can be said; it is like the greatness of all the
chief poets, a thing too individual to seize in words. It is superior and
exterior to the man. Genius of that astounding kind has all the qualities
of an extraneous thing. A man is not answerable for it. It is nothing to
his salvation; it is little even to his general character. It has been known
to come and go, to be put off and on like a garment, to be lent by
Heaven and taken away, a capricious gift.
But of the manner of that genius it may be noted that, as his vigour
prepared the flood of new verse, so in another matter his genius made
him an origin. Through him first, the great town--and especially
Paris--appeared and became permanent in letters.
Her local spirit and her special quality had shone fitfully here and there
for a thousand years--you may find it in Julian, in Abbo, in Joinville.
But now, in the fifteenth century, it had been not only a town but a
great town for more than a century--a town, that is, in which men live
entirely, almost ignorant of the fields, observing only other men, and
forgetting the sky. The keen edge of such a life, its bitterness, the
mockery and challenge whereby its evils are borne, its extended
knowledge, the intensity of its spirit--all these are reflected in Villon,
and first reflected in