Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Frederic Leighton and Gustave Courbet. François Villon — poet, thief, and the best swordsman in the taverns — boasts in his cups about what he would do if he were king, and Louis XI, who is listening from the next table, gives him a week to make it good. McCarthy sat in Parliament for Irish Home Rule, then left politics for the theater; this 1901 romance became a play, an opera by Rudolf Friml, and four films. Fifty-four plates of castle and fortress painting, from Chillon to the Morro, by Courbet and Tissier, carry the tale's medieval strongholds into the age of print.