What happens
On Christmas Day, Francois Villon, a poet and thief in fifteenth-century Paris, is jailed while Burgundian armies besiege the city. King Louis the Eleventh grows curious about Lady Catherine de Vausel, a woman at his court who has been moved by a poem a stranger wrote about her. Villon is brought to the palace and sent to a tavern-filled Paris with a fellow named Tabari, where the thief quickly gains a following among the city's outcasts. This Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of The Vagabond King stars Dennis Morgan as Villon, Catherine Grayson as Lady Catherine and J. Carrol Naish as the king. Its first broadcast was on December 25, 1944. Villon's brief meeting with the lady and the king's reaction to it set the story's tangle of love, politics and mistaken identity in motion.
Paris in the fifteenth century, during a Burgundian siege, moving between the city's taverns, the royal palace and the streets.
Characters: Francois Villon, Lady Catherine de Vausel, King Louis the Eleventh, Tristan, Tabari, Fonkwa, Grand Marshal Montcobier
Listen for: The street scene at the tavern where Villon's drinking song provokes a brawl, and the palace audience in which the king offers Villon a day as ruler.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.