“From this you can perceive the fatality there was in this family from its beginning to its end, to the disadvantage of the Carlovingians. And moreover, how ignorant the Italian poet Dante was, when in his book entitled Purgatory he says that our Hugh Capet was the son of a butcher. Which word, once written erroneously and carelessly by him, has so crept into the heads of some simpletons, that many who never investigated the antiquities of our France have fallen into this same heresy. François de Villon, more studious of taverns and alehouses than of good books, says in some part of his works,

“Si feusse les hoirs de Capet

Qui fut extrait de boucherie.”

“Si feusse les hoirs de Capet Qui fut extrait de boucherie.”