Villon's "Épitaphe Villon" (the "Ballade des pendus") uses the epitaph convention to speak from beyond the grave, asking passers-by not to condemn the hanged bodies of the criminals but to pray for them, transforming the commemorative genre into a plea for human compassion; Marot's witty epitaphs demonstrate how the genre accommodated wordplay and humor alongside grief, his epitaph for a lion punning on the word's dual meaning and delivering a comic chute that makes death itself seem momentarily absurd; A Roman influence pervades French Renaissance epitaphs, which imitate the concise lapidary style of classical inscriptions: "Ci-gît qui vécut pour la gloire, / Et mourut ignoré du sort" packs a complete life judgment into two rhymed lines; A student writing an épitaphe should practice the art of extreme condensation: an entire human life, its essential quality, its loss, and the emotion of mourning must be compressed into four to eight lines of concentrated verse; Du Bellay's Latin and French epitaphs for humanist scholars show how the genre served the Renaissance Republic of Letters as a vehicle for commemorating intellectual achievement and asserting the permanence of learned fame against the transience of biological life; Modern epitaphs range from the gravely simple to the wryly humorous, and a student reading famous examples from Villon through Hardy and beyond will discover that the best epitaphs always contain an element of surprise, a perspective on death that the reader had not expected.