Le Prologue Dans Le Père Goriot

prayer to the Virgin. Villon’s poetry has roots in the thirteenth-century dit and his themes (nostalgia, regret, death) were commonplaces of the well-established ‘testament’ genre. But the emotion is genuine (for his mother, for his uncle, his ‘plus que père’) and has a wider range: Villon moves from the courtly to the sotte chanson, from the ‘Belle dame sans merci’ to Grosse Margot, from the language of piety to thieves’ cant. He was remembered, as he predicted, as a clown. But his real legacy was to