mon plus que pere
    Maistre Guillaume de Villon,
    Qui m’a este plus doux que mere;

and who gave him the name that he has made immortal.  That he was not altogether unresponsive to these good influences is shown by his references to them in his Grand Testament, though Stevenson was inclined to read into the lines on Guillaume the most infernal kind of mockery and derision.  One of Villon’s bequests to the old man, it will be remembered, was the Rommant du Pet au Diable, which Stevenson refers to again and again as an “improper romance.”  Mr. Stacpoole has done a service to English readers interested in Villon by showing that the Rommant was nothing of the sort, but was a little epic—­possibly witty enough—­on a notorious conflict between the students and civilians of Paris.  One may accept the vindication of Villon’s goodness of heart, however, without falling in at all points with Mr. Stacpoole’s tendency to justify his hero.  When, for instance, in the account of Villon’s only known act of homicide, the fact that after he had stabbed the priest, Sermoise, he crushed in his head with a stone, is used to prove that he must have been acting on the defensive, because, “since the earliest times, the stone is the weapon used by man to repel attack—­chiefly the attack of wolves and dogs”—­one cannot quite repress a sceptical smile.  I admit that, in the absence of evidence, we have no right to accuse Villon of deliberate murder.  But it is the absence of evidence that acquits him, not the fact that he killed his victim with a stone as well as a dagger.  Nor does it seem to, me quite fair to blame, as Mr. Stacpoole does by implication, the cold and beautiful Katherine de Vaucelles for Villon’s moral downfall.  Katherine de Vaucelles—­what a poem her very name is!-may, for all one knows, have had the best of reasons for sending her bully to beat the poet “like dirty linen on the washing-board.”  We do not know, and it is better to leave the matter a mystery than to sentimentalize like Mr. Stacpoole:—­

Had he come across just now one of those creative women, one of those women who by the alchemy that lives alone in love can bend a man’s character, even though the bending had been ever so little, she might have saved him from the catastrophe towards which he was moving, and which took place in the following December.

All we know is that the lady of miracles did not arrive, and that in her absence Villon and a member of companion gallows-birds occupied the dark of one winter’s night in robbing the chapel of the College de Navarre.  This was in 1456, and not long afterwards Villon wrote his Petit Testament, and skipped from Paris.