SOURCE: “Francois Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker,” in Virginibus Puerisque and Familiar Studies of Men and Books, J.M. Dent and Sons, 1929, pp. 229-251.

In this essay, originally published in 1874, Stevenson celebrates Villon's writing style while condemning both his life and his choice of subjects.

Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of François Villon.¹ His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which he bequeaths his spectacles—with a humorous reservation of the case—to the hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-Score. Thus equipped, let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in the cemetery of the Innocents! For his...