François Villon

François Villon (born around 1431, last recorded after 1463) is the best known French poet of the Late Middle Ages. His life was marked by criminal behavior and repeated encounters with the law, and he wrote about some of these experiences in his poems. In the summer of 1461 he was held in the bishop's prison at Meung-sur-Loire, and in his long poem Le Testament, dated that year, he bitterly denounces Bishop Thibault d'Aussigny of Orléans. He was probably freed in the general amnesty that followed the accession of King Louis XI. His Ballade des dames du temps jadis, with its refrain Mais où sont les neiges d'antan, became one of the most quoted lines of translated poetry in English through Dante Gabriel Rossetti's version, and later translators include Richard Wilbur. Brecht and Weill drew on his poems for The Threepenny Opera in 1928.