First Sentence

"Precisely one-half a millenium ago - and I mean what I say when I say it's precise - on the twenty-third day of the next-to-last month of the year fourteen hundred fourscore-and-sixteen (a tip of my hat to the Gauls' counting scheme), in the humble French town of Cahors en Quercy, some sixty-odd miles to the north of Toulouse, was born a bright boy christened Clement Marot, the son of an auto-taught poet named Jean and a lady whose life's but a question mark: our focus thus shifts from his folks to their lad."