Villon's two Testaments are made up of eight-line stanzas of eight-syllabled verses, varied in the case of the Grand Testament by the insertion of ballades and rondeaux. The sense of the vanity of human life pervades the whole of Villon's poetry. It is the very keynote of his most famous and beautiful piece, the Ballade des dames du temps jadis, with its refrain, "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?", of the ballade of La Grosse Margot, with its burden of hopeless entanglement in shameless vice; and of the equally famous Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere, in which a woman, once young and beautiful, now old and withered, laments her lost charms. So it is almost throughout his poems, including the grim Ballade des pendus, and hardly excluding the very beautiful Ballade que Villon feist a la requeste de sa mere, pour prier Nostre-Dame, with its sincere and humble piety. In Villon's verse mediaeval Paris lives. Villon himself was beloved by the Paris of his day. His bright keen intellect, the exquisite polish of his verses and his realism, make him one of the great forces in French poetry. His influence on the moderns has been very great.
His certainly genuine poems consist of the two Testaments with their codicil (the latter containing the Ballade des pendus, or more properly Epitaplie en forme de ballade, and some other pieces of a similarly grim humour), a few miscellaneous poems, chiefly bal lades, and an extraordinary collection (called Le Jargon ou jobelin) of poems in argot, the greater part of which is now totally unin telligible, if, which may perhaps be doubted, it ever was otherwise. Several poems usually printed with Villon's works are certainly, or almost certainly, not his. The chief are Les Repues Franches, a curious series of verse stories of cheating tavern-keepers, etc., having some resemblance to those told of George Peele, but of a broader and coarser humour. These, though in many cases "com mon form" of the broader tale-kind, are not much later than his time, and evidence to reputation if not to fact.
The first dated edition of Villon is of 1489. Before 1542 there were very numerous editions, the most famous being that (1533) of Clement Marot, one of whose most honourable distinctions is the care he took of his poetical predecessors. The Pleiade move ment and the classicizing of the grand siecle put Villon rather out of favour, and he was not again reprinted till early in the 18th century, when he attracted the attention of students of old French like Le Duchat, Bernard de la Monnoye and Prosper Marchand.
The first critical edition in the modern sense—that is to say, an edition founded on mss. (of which there are in Villon's case several, chiefly at Paris and Stockholm)—was that of the Abbe J. H. R. Prompsault in 1832. The next was that of the "Bibliophile Jacob" (P. Lacroix) in the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne (Paris, 1854). The standard editions are Oeuvres completes de Francois Villon, by M. Auguste Longnon (1892), a revision of this text by Lucien Foulet, Francois Villon: Oeuvres (1923) ; and L. Thuasne, Francois Villon; Oeuvres: edition critique (1923) , based on the Stockholm ms. of 147o, the ms. Fr. 20041 of the Bibliotheque Nationale, and Levet's text of 1489. M. Marcel Schwob discovered new documents relating to the poet, but died before he could complete his work, which was post humously published in 1905. The researches of Schwob were com pleted by P. Champion in his Francois Villon, sa vie et son temps (1913). See also A. Longnon, Etude biographiqu,e sur Francois Vilion (1877) ; Gaston Paris, Francois Villon (19o1) ; D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Francois Villon, A Documented Survey (1928), with preface by H. Belloc, which contains renderings of the individual poems by Rossetti, Swinburne and Henley, and a full survey of the documents.