François Villon and Louis XI

This illustration comes from the work Louis XI by Job and Georges Montorgueil, published in Paris by Combet in 1905, depicting the poet François Villon in the presence of King Louis XI of France. At Louis XI's accession in 1461, the king granted clemency to several prisoners, among them Villon, who had been convicted of brawling and misdeeds, in an inaugural gesture of grace typical of his reign. François Villon, author of the celebrated Ballade des pendus and a towering figure of fifteenth-century French poetry, would vanish from all documentary record after his banishment from Paris in 1463. The scene captures the singular place Villon holds in the literary imagination of the late Middle Ages, at the intersection of social hardship, royal mercy, and poetic genius.