SOURCE: "François Villon," in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. VIII, No. XLIII, September, 1880, pp. 481-500.

Below, Payne discusses Villon's ability to portray common people and events of 15th-century Paris in a clear and realistic manner, making him "the first great poet of the people."

There are few names in the history of literature over which the shadow has so long and so persistently lain as over that of the father of French poetry. Up to no more distant period than the early part of the year 1877, it was not even known what was his real name, nor were the admirers of his genius in possession of any other facts relative to his personal history than could be gleaned, by a painful process of inference and deduction, from those works of the poet that have been handed down to posterity. The materials that exist for the biography of Shakespeare...