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Villon is known for his confessions about his own poverty, his irony and his regrets. The Ballad against the Enemies of France shows another side of the poet: a man who steps outside himself to curse, line after line, anyone who would harm the kingdom. Three stanzas, an envoi, a refrain that falls like a blade, and a parade of

He killed a priest, burgled a college, came within a rope’s length of the gallows, then vanished without trace at thirty-one. François Villon is also the greatest French poet of the Middle Ages, the one who brought into the language the ache of passing time and the voice of a man alone before his own death. We know this life