Sur les tumbeaux de mes ancestres,
Les ames desquelz dieu embrasse!
On n'y voit couronnes ne ceptres.
(Poor I am, and from my youth,
Born of a poor and humble stock.
My father never had much wealth
Nor yet his grandfather, Orace.
Poverty tracks us, every one.
Upon the tombs of my ancestors,
The souls of whom may God embrace!
Sceptres and crowns aren't to be seen.)
Villon apparently knew little about his father, but in Le Testament he refers to his mother as still living. He spent his early years as a student at the University of Paris in the home of Guillaume de Villon, a respected lawyer, whom he calls in Le Testament his “plus que pere . . . / Qui esté m'a plus doulx que mere” (more than father . . . / Who's been to me kinder than a mother), and he later adopted Guillaume's surname, at least for his poetry.
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