(1431–1463). Of all the lyricists of late-medieval France, Villon is the most celebrated among both scholars and general readers. Students of premodern literature inside and outside the francophone world have encountered him in his original Middle French; and thousands of people who have little or no French have read versions of his poems in the major European languages.
It was not always thus. The circle of contemporaries who knew of Villon’s literary abilities was a modest one. He tells us in his Testament that an earlier work, the Lais, is already in circulation and being referred to by a title not of his choosing. On the other hand, the number of early sources preserving his poems is small; and his readers were in general not found among the rich and powerful. Although some such personages come in for mention in his verses, it is usually in the context of appeals for money, or of distant, uneasy, or downright irreverent allusion; Villon was not a success with well-off patrons of literature. The fame he sought eluded him. He seemingly hoped for a career as a court poet and exerted himself to catch the eye of such highly placed connoisseurs as Charles d’Orléans; but for unknown reasons, he did not achieve more than a small gift of money here and there. Greater success in his lifetime, however, might well have spelled later obscurity; his poésies de circonstance, composed, we must assume, to curry favor, competent though they are, are by and large forgettable. Rather than spend much of his career in turning out pleasing official verse, he was driven by circumstance, and perhaps also by a jarring personality, to live by expedients, know misery, reflect on it, and write amateur poetry of a unique stamp.
The body of Villon’s works is of moderate dimensions: some 3,300 lines. It comprises independent pieces in fixed form (ballades and rondeaux) and two unified compositions, the Lais and the Testament. The Lais, dated 1456, is a series of burlesque legacies occasioned by being, as Villon asserts, crossed in love, and consequently deciding to quit Paris, perhaps never to return. The Testament (1461) takes up again the legacy pattern but refines it into the articles of a last will and testament, complete with legal clauses and phraseology, the fiction now being that the author is near death and bethinking himself of soul and body as well as of worldly goods. This, Villon’s major work, written in octaves (eight-line strophes of octosyllabic verse), contains fixed-form pieces as well, some of which may antedate or even postdate 1461. The whole amounts to a personal literary anthology as well as the poet’s artistic testament and monument. The rest of his œuvre is made up of a fulsome Louange of Princess Marie d’Orléans, with attached double ballade and much Latin adornment; a Ballade franco-latine, even more latinate; a number of difficult poems in the jargon of the medieval French underworld; and some ballades made up of the rhetorical devices dear to the schoolroom and fashionable court. Jumbled in with them are some pieces so intensely felt, so personal, so perfectly marrying form and content, that they belong by right to the greatest world literature. Among these are the Épître a ses amis, Villon’s De profundis; the yes-and-no meditation on fate and individual responsibility best called Débat de Villon et de son cœur, and the Ballade des pendus, with its unbearable yet inescapable vision of legally executed bodies (including the poet’s?) and its reiterated solicitation of prayer for their souls. Villon’s last poems appear to fit into the interval between his last imprisonment and appeal, the commutation of his death sentence to a ten-year exile, and his departure in 1463 to an unknown end.
Villon was born into a poor family (Testament, ll. 273–75) in 1431, the year marked by the death of Jeanne d’Arc, celebrated in the Testament (ll. 351–52) as…Jehanne la bonne Lorraine/Qu’Engloys brulerent a Rouen (“Joan, the brave girl from Lorraine/Burned by the English at Rouen”). The Hundred Years’ War was dragging on; disease, food-shortages, and protracted spells of cold, wet weather afflicted everyone, the poor especially. It was out of harsh necessity, no doubt, that the future poet’s mother entrusted her child to a presumed relative, Guillaume de Villon, the kindly chaplain of the Parisian church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné not far from the Sorbonne, who would be the boy’s plus que père (Testament, l. 849).
Young François, originally called de Montcorbier or des Loges, took the surname of his adoptive father, and much else besides: security, relative comfort, clerical status, and the opportunity for the best formal education then available. In 1449, he obtained the baccalaureate degree and three years later the License and the degree of Maître ès Arts. This and his connections ought to have smoothed Villon’s path into the learned professions; but these were overpopulated in the mid-15th century. To enter the secular or regular clergy was apparently not for him a viable choice; nor, in the absence of an independent income or a patron, was it possible for him to become a professional writer. He turned to living by his wits, in the company of other unemployed clercs and even more lowly individuals; and this led him into repeated brushes with the law, mainly for theft but once for manslaughter. As an écolier, he was entitled to the church’s protection from the full rigor of secular justice; but it looks as if he lost the benefit of clergy, as well as many months of freedom, when he was condemned to prison at Meung-sur-Loire in 1461 by the bishop of Orléans.
It was his long police record, rather than one final and spectacular crime, that drove the exasperated secular authorities in late 1462 to pass a capital sentence; the Parlement, on appeal, commuted this to a ten-year banishment from Paris and its environs. Sadly, it is owing to his activities as part-time criminal that much of the information about Villon has come to us, for the abundant records have been preserved in the Paris archives. They supplement the hints, half-truths, special pleading, and down-right lies that bestrew the poet’s own writings.
Such a biographical excursus is particularly indicated in Villon’s case, for much of his work is highly personal without always being informative or even candid. His feelings take precedence over the exact cause for them, his hatred for his enemies overshadows the ways whereby the latter have earned his resentment, and the possibility that the poet himself might somehow have provoked or deserved rough handling is pushed far into the background. Yet the interweaving of concrete if unreliable allusions to persons and events on the one hand, of passionate response on the other, makes of Villon an autobiographical lyricist to an unusual degree.
His themes, though, are universal ones, colored by his cultural milieu and his own subjectivity. Adversity, suffering, insecurity, the hunger for love, the transitoriness of youth and of all good things, the approach of death, the faith that sees beyond it—these are the timbers of which his work is built. Through the 2,000 lines of the Testament, he turns these notions over and over, in a composition structured by association of ideas and shifting moods rather than logical or formal progression. This begins as early as the first stanzas, which move with great rapidity from the testator’s age and mental condition to his state of health and thence to his recent hardships and the person responsible for them; and with the name of Bishop Thibaut d’Aussigny, the memory of the preceding summer’s incarceration, and probable degradation from clerical status, comes flooding back, making him sacrifice syntax to sarcasm: yes, he will pray for his enemy—with a cursing psalm. For good measure, he adds a prayer for Louis, le bon roy de France. On he goes, intermingling complaint, piety, and half-admissions of unsatisfactory behavior. Yet a sinner in his situation is pardonable: Neccessité fait gens mesprendre/Et fain saillir le loup du boys (“It’s need drives folks to go astray,/And hunger, the wolf to leave the woods”; ll. 167–68). He has abundant grounds for lamentation. His youth has flown; he is prematurely old, poor, rejected by his kin, disappointed in love, regretting his old friends (where are they now?), knowing that death will come for him as it has for the lovely ladies and great potentates of the past. These are themes to which he returns, obsessively but not uninterruptedly; for a great number of bequests remain to be formulated and the whole apparatus of the fictitious testament to be worked in.
There is a good deal of humor in all this, of a rough, pun-filled, scabrous character; and the poet takes advantage of the safety afforded by the last-will-and-testament schema to take verbal revenge on the individuals and classes who have earned his disapproval; after all, the document, according to the poetic fiction, will not be read until after his decease. We are led once again to the theme that underlies the Testament as a whole. It sometimes is expressed with gentle gravity, as in the Ballade des dames du temps jadis; in grimmer moments, the poet’s thought turns to scenes commonly beheld in Paris: the piled-up and anonymous bones in the Cemetery of the Innocents, the cadav-ers of executed criminals dangling from the Montfaucon gibbet, the last agony awaiting each man and woman. In the Europe of the 15th century, the body’s death was but a stage in the soul’s journey; prayers and allusions to Heaven and Hell throng the octaves and fixed-form pieces. In the intervals of anxiety about death and what is in store for himself and all humankind, Villon repeatedly turns to common experience, particularly its darker side. Happiness is rare and fleeting; sorrow, fear, physical discomfort, and decrepitude—these are the lot of the human race. Why had Villon, why had so many men and women known suffering? Why does a just God permit malevolent Fortune to afflict the innocent? The poet’s own stance, at least as early as the independent Épître a ses amis (presumably composed during the 1461 incarceration at Meung-sur-Loire) is that of a blameless victim, and he cries out with the words of the archetypical righteous sufferer, Job (11. 1–2): Ayez pictié, ayez pictié de moy/A tout le moins, s’i vous plaist, mes amis! (“Have pity, do have pity upon me,/You at least, if you please, who are my friends”). This explicit kinship with Job is affirmed repeatedly through the Testament; it has become the poet’s characteristic way of making sense of what has befallen him, of understanding, as well, the human condition.
Villon’s themes are by no means original, nor is his use of archetypes in working them out. As an educated man, he was steeped in the Latin classics and in the Bible, those storehouses of human experience and its literary expression; to allude to traditional topoi, stories, and personages was second nature for him, as it was for other writers of the day. His preoccupation with death and decay, his frequent melancholy, his startling coarseness, his mingling of jest and seriousness, are also features common in late-medieval writing, and in the visual arts as well. What sets him apart is the immediacy of his communication with the reader. His verse revivifies the notion of lyric: not poems to be sung, but poems expressive of feeling. Unlike the conventional and impersonal je of much contemporary writing, Villon’s je most frequently is his unique and unruly self, temporarily brought to order by the discipline of his octaves and his fixed-form pieces. Much 15th-century poetry treats of love, again in courtly and stereotyped ways, for the stylized worship of the lady was still very much alive. Villon writes of love, too, but mostly from his own limited experience: it is a snare and a delusion, at best a fleeting joy. By and large, women are sensual and venal (but not to be condemned, for it is nature femeninne [Testament, l. 611] that moves them), and in any case their attractiveness soon withers. Indeed, woman’s charms, such a staple among mainstream masculine writers of the period, do not feature much here except in the context of bitter reminiscence and of regret for the transitoriness of all things desirable. It would in fact not be easy to find another major poet so indifferent to beauty; but then visual description of any sort does not stand out in Villon’s verses. He inclines to naming persons and places, to evoking action and speech and gesture, rather than to painting word pictures. Even his self-description is limited to a few qualifiers: sec et noir; plus maigre que chimere (“skinny and dark”; “thinner than a wraith”). What he does give us is his reactions to his experience, and a sketch of late-medieval France as he knew it. This is a world of people living by their wits and not hampered by scruples: entertainers, prostitutes, counterfeiters, tavern keepers and tavern haunters, jailers and moat cleaners, peddlers, beggars, dissolute monks—Villon’s poetry opens the door upon a teeming world, lacking in grace or nobility but intensely alive. Most vital of all are the poet’s own self and experience, given expression that transcends his own time and milieu so as to be at once personal and universal.
Villon’s works have been preserved in a number of manuscripts and fragments, and in a printed edition of 1489. These early sources vary in completeness, from the Lais, the Testament, and numerous independent pieces, down to two or three ballades; they differ also in degree of reliability. The manuscript copies, the incunabulum, and also the many 16th-century printings of his works attest to a moderate readership over the course of about a century. Villon then, like most medieval writers, underwent an eclipse, with one edition at the end of the 1600s and three in the 1700s. The years from 1832 onward have seen an increasing flow of editions, translations, historical notes, and interpretive essays; and the stream shows no sign of drying up. Villon continues to be subject to much critical scrutiny, some of it closer to creative writing than to explication of the texts, but much of it responsible and serious. We can now read Villon’s often difficult and allusive verses with a fair approximation to his own meaning.
