[Brereton is an English educator who has written extensively on French literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Here, in a revised version of an essay originally published in 1956, he praises Villon's poetic technique of combining the traditional ballade form with the modern tendency to write about highly personal subject matter.]

Villon was the last of the great French poets of the Middle Ages and one of the few who can now be read without a considerable background knowledge of medieval culture. He loses, of course, something in the process. One may fail to recognize the traditional nature of the themes he is treating, one may miss catching in his comments on life and death echoes going back two hundred years before his lifetime and so not appreciate the interesting twists he gives them. One may, in particular, remain unaware of his masterly use of verse-forms which had been developing during more than three centuries, since the time of the Provençal troubadours. But though he belonged to his age and reflected its cynicism, its innocent obscenity, its piety, its learning (on a lowish level), and some of its literary conventions, he is more than a merely representative poet. He is both universal and personal enough to carry beyond his age—or, if one prefers it, to carry his age to ours.

If, as modern scholarship tends to show, he is not quite the remarkable special case he was once considered to be, he is none the less the only poet to have expressed the spirit of his time with what seems to be a completely personal voice. This, which distinguishes him from all his major contemporaries, is the quality which has ensured his survival and it matters very little whether he was experiencing for the first time the states of mind he communicates. The point is that he communicates them effectively and, to the extent that he does so, makes them his own. Behind the work there is undoubtedly a man. While it would be a mistake to try to visualize the man too clearly apart from the work, yet something is known of his life from external sources. Scanty though these are, they fit the rest of the picture.

He was born in Paris in 1431, the year when Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen. His mother, according to his poems, was poor and illiterate. From his father, of whom no mention remains, he presumably took one of his two original names of Montcorbier and Des Loges. In later life he discarded them to adopt the name of a priest who befriended and educated him, Guillaume de Villon. Studying at Paris University, François Villon took the degrees of Bachelor, Licencié, and finally Master of Arts. Even after this, he continues to regard himself as a student, though of an unacademic kind. His first recorded conflict with the law occurred at the age of twenty-four, when he killed a priest called Philippe Chermoye in a brawl and fled from Paris. He returned with a pardon six months later, took part in a successful robbery at the Collège de Navarre and again left the capital, this time for five years. Just before going, he composed his first considerable poem, Les Lais (Christmas 1456).

During his wandering in the provinces he visited Orleans, Blois, and probably roved much further afield. He found a temporary patron in Charles, Duke of Orleans—himself a fine poet in the old courtly tradition—who included some of Villon's verses in his own album of poems. He had relations with a gang of malefactors known as les compagnons de la Coquille and he continued to fall foul of the law. One of his own compositions suggests that he lay at one time in the Duke of Orleans's prisons under sentence of death but was saved by an amnesty granted to celebrate the birth of the Duke's daughter. He spent the summer of 1461 in prison at Meung-sur-Loire. This time his captor was the Bishop of Orleans. He was released in the autumn of that year to return once more to Paris and write his principal poem, Le Testament.

There is no record of the crimes for which Villon suffered these punishments. He may even—though it seems unlikely—have been innocent. But, innocent or guilty, he was by now a marked man in the eyes of the authorities. In November 1462 he was arrested on suspicion of a new robbery. He was about to be released for lack of evidence when his share in the six-year-old affair of the Collège de Navarre was recalled. He was obliged to sign a promise to repay 120 gold crowns before they let him go. When, a few weeks later, he was concerned in a street brawl outside the office of a papal official, his evil reputation nearly destroyed him. He was sentenced to be hanged and it was no doubt while waiting to be executed that he composed the famous "Epitaphe Villon" or "Ballade des pendus." Meanwhile, he had chanced the desperate throw of an appeal. To his joy, it was granted. He was set free, but under penalty of ten years' banishment from the city and viscounty of Paris. This judgment, rendered on 5 January 1463, is the last authentic mention of François Villon.

Two picturesque ancedotes of his later life were recounted by Rabelais writing some ninety years after. One describes him in banishment in England, chatting with Rabelaisian familiarity to Edward IV. The other depicts him living in his boisterous old age at Saint-Maixantd-de-Poitou. The interest of the anecdotes, which are certainly inventions, is that already by Rabelais's time Villon had become a legendary figure, famed for his ingenious pranks and his coarse wit. The legend has continued to grow, fed by the abundant material, rich in contrasting pathos and squalor, provided by Villon's own writings. As would be expected, few precise statements of fact can be obtained from such a source. What does emerge is the revelation of a character, drawn with great frankness.

The self-portrayed Villon was a man of some education who drifted into a life of crime and vagabondage through his incurable love of independence. In spite of his obscure parentage, he was not inevitably marked out as a social outcast, for with his benefactor Guillaume Villon and his studies behind him he should have found at least a humble security in some ecclesiastical charge—had he wanted it. On the other hand, he was not a heroic rebel. He became a criminal less from design than from lethargy. He needed money to keep himself alive and to spend on 'taverns and women', and crime appeared the easiest way of obtaining it. Even here, he was not very successful, as his various imprisonments show.

Imprisonment soured him, but brought no repentance. His occasional flashes of regret were for his carefree youth and for the material comforts which had eluded him through his own folly, not for any moral standard from which he had fallen short. He could indulge in self-pity and at the same time cock verbal snooks at the rich and prosperous. Here in fact is the only kind of pride discernible in him; he had kept himself free from the taint of conformism. This was his essential freedom, worth preserving at the cost of many grovellings to the powerful, of many months of captivity in dungeons.

So far we have the makings of a picaresque poet—as handby, because of his peculiar position, with his stabs of satire as he is with his knife—irreverent, racy, slangy, no more respectful of words than of persons so long as they serve his purpose—a highly flavoured 'character,' but, on the long view, a minor poet. What raises him to a higher level is his partly traditional preoccupation with two themes which, fundamentally, are one: the shortness of youth, the horror of old age and death. These haunt him, less as poetic commonplaces than as almost tangible realities, to be handled as concretely as Hamlet did Yorick's skull. Over all is his religious seriousness, colouring much that he wrote and giving to some of his verses a solemn tone, though to others—judged by modern standards—a grotesque one. On the whole, however, it would be mistaken to include religion among the motive-forces of Villon's art. He was soaked in the beliefs of his century and he echoed them as unquestioningly as a modern poet might echo, woven into his thought, the main tenets of Freudian psychology.

Villon has left some three thousand lines of verse which fall into three main divisions: Les Lais, Le Testament, and a small number of miscellaneous pieces. He used two different but related verse-forms which he handled with such ease and mastery that they seem to belong to him as his personal language. The first is an eight-line stanza on three rhymes. The lines are octosyllabic and are used for what might be called the narrative part of Les Lais and Le Testament. These are the two opening stanzas of Les Lais:

L'an quatre cens cinquante six,
Je, Françoys Villon, escollier,
Considerant, de sens rassis,
Le frain aux dens, franc au collier,
Qu'on doit ses oeuvres conseillier,
Comme Vegece le raconte,
Sage Rommain, grant conseillier,
Ou autrement on se mesconte—

En ce temps que j'ay dit devant,
Sur le Noel, morte saison,
Que les loups se vivent de vent
Et qu'on se tient en sa maison,
Pour le frimas, pres du tison,
Me vint ung vouloir de brisier
La tres amoureuse prison
Qui soulait mon cuer debrisier.

Villon's second verse-form is the ballade, a more stylized version of the first, with a similar rhyme-pattern. It had been a favourite with medieval French poets ever since it was established in the fourteenth century by Guillaume de Machaut and it was used in English by Machaut's contemporary, Chaucer. Villon writes it in several variations. At its simplest, it consists of three eight-line stanzas and a four-line envoi, as in the well-known "Ballade des dames du temps jadis," with its refrain 'Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?'—or in the "Ballade des menus propos," which ends thus:

Je congnais cheval et mulet,
Je congnais leur charge et leur somme,
Je congnais Bietris et Belet,
Je congnais get qui nombre et somme,
Je congnais vision et somme,
Je congnais la faulte des Boesmes,
Je congnais le povoir de Romme,
Je congnais tout, fors que moy mesmes.

Prince, je congnais tout en somme,
Je congnais coulourez et blesmes,
Je congnais Mort qui tout consomme,
Je congnais tout, fors que moy mesmes.

The same rhymes recur throughout and the last line of each stanza and of the envoi is always the same, making up the refrain. The envoi often begins with the word Prince, originally addressed to the presiding judge at the medieval literary festivals known as puys. More elaborate kinds of ballade could be built by increasing the number of stanzas, or the number of lines within the stanza.

In Villon's hands the ballade acquires much greater flexibility than its stereotyped form suggests. He uses it for his most impressive pieces—the peaks which suddenly rise above the chirpy running verse of Le Testament—but also for poems where dignity would be as incongruous as a horse in the House of Commons. With this limited and traditional technical equipment he wrote almost the whole known body of his poetry.

Les Lais, as he says in the opening stanzas, already quoted, was written at Christmas 1456. He had just taken part in the robbery at the Collège de Navarre and was apparently contemplating a similar coup in the provinces, at Angers. Naturally he does not refer to this, but says that an unhappy love-affair is driving him from Paris. Knowing that he may be gone for some time and that life is uncertain, he makes a number of comic bequests to his friends and enemies. This explains the title of the poem, which is the same as the modern French legs, or legacy. It is sometimes called, less correctly, Le Petit Testament. The poem, a relatively short one of some three hundred lines, is a not entirely truthful balance-sheet of Villon's state of mind at the time and a half-mocking, half-serious farewell to his Parisian acquaintances. To his benefactor Guillaume Villon he leaves his reputation, to the woman who has treated him so harshly he leaves his heart, 'pâle, piteux, mort et transi', to his barber he leaves his hairclippings and to his cobbler his old shoes. Many of his other jokes are topical and local and do not travel well to the reader of today. A few remain surprisingly fresh.

Villon at this point was clearly pleased with himself and life in general. In spite of his protestation that the torments of love have left him 'as dry and black as a sweep's brush', he is still perky, full of an impudent, street-boy wit. He has enjoyed making his mock legacies and is looking forward with some pleasure to the new adventures which await him outside the capital.

Le Testament is a two-thousand-line poem of a more impressive and bitter nature. Five years older than when he wrote Les Lais, Villon has just been released, a broken man, from the prison of the Bishop of Orleans. He may have felt that it was literally time to make his will. In any case, while still following very loosely the plan of Les Lais, he seems intent on bequeathing in his new poem all the fruits of his painfully-acquired experience. Moreover, by encrusting in Le Testament poems which he had written earlier, he seeks to give them a more permanent setting and so preserve them. Villon's 'last will and testament' thus has a triple sense. It contains a few mock bequests which ostensibly justify its name; it is his latest word on life; and it represents the body of poetry which he wishes to leave to future generations. The show-pieces in it are certain of the ballades, but, although these can be taken out and appreciated in isolation, most of them gain when read in their ingeniously woven context.

Thus the famous "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" is part of a sequence of reflections on the brevity of youth and the inevitable coming of Death the Leveller. Villon leads up to it by a terrifyingly realistic description of the physical changes which death brings—an obsession of the medieval mind which occurs again in the late Renaissance, then virtually disappears until Baudelaire. He follows it with the deservedly less-known "Ballade des seigneurs du temps jadis," of which little but the refrain is worth remembering ('Mais où est le preux Charlemagne?'), and then, his pen having become stuck in this groove, with a ballade of similar import in pastiched 'Old French'. After this, he works back into the realistic vein of which he was a master and rhymes the regrets of la belle Heaulmière for her lost youth. Once beautiful, she is now a hideous old crone, and Villon omits no detail of her decay. And the moral, as she gives it to the younger women who still possess the beauty she has lost, is: Love while you are able, spare no man, take all the profit you can get.

Prenez a destre et a senestre;
N'espargnez homme, je vous prie:
Car vielles n'ont ne cours ne estre,
Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie.

It should be obvious that there was not a particle of romanticism in Villon's nature. But since many English readers will first have met him in translations of the great ballades, they must be warned that some of these translations deform the original by glamourizing it. There is no glamour in Villon. Sex, illness, hunger, cold, poverty, vice, are all described by him in the same flat and precise detail. His only escape from the concrete reality is, not into romanticism, but into humour, which sometimes resembles the cynical, snivelling laugh of the down-and-out. Any translation which makes him express fine sentiments is completely foreign to the original, and represents nothing but its form. There is, however, emotion in Villon, achieved in the hardest way of all: not by rhetoric which is a flourish from above, but by properly rooted pathos, rising from the lowest and grimiest feelings of humanity. His sense of the fundamental brotherhood of mankind, cutting right across distinctions of rank and wealth, is Villon's most positive quality. It saves him from total cynicism and every now and then exalts him above his material and enables him to write some tremendous poem such as the "Epitaphe Villon," in which he imagines himself to be dangling from the gallows among other hanged criminals:

With this poem, we are outside Le Testament. It is one of a score of pieces written on various occasions which do not fit into the framework of the longer poem. To show how these pieces came to be composed, it is interesting to recall that the "Epitaphe," written when he expected to be hanged, was followed by a ballade of ecstatic gratitude to the judges who reprieved him (ending, typically, with a further request for three days' grace before the sentence of banishment should take effect); and then by a cheerful little ballade addressed to his gaoler, who had evidently taken a gloomy view of Villon's chances. 'What do you think now of my appeal?' he asks him. 'Was I wise or mad to try to save my skin?' And with that perky question François Villon disappears from the scene.

Because of his archaic though direct language and his remote period, Villon might appear to be isolated from [other French poets]. His work, as it reads today, has a strongly individualized flavour and nothing quite like it could be expected to occur again. He himself and his immediate material world were the centre of his poetry. His best writing seems to spring straight from experience, for his book-learning was undisgested and always remained a surface feature. The main trend of the fifteenth century was still that of courtly poetry, renewed by Alain Chartier (who died at about the time when Villon was born) and continued by Charles d'Orléans and by the 'rhetorical' poets who flourished at the court of Burgundy. When these write of their personal experience, they do so in a discreet and generalized way, subordinating the individual note to an art ruled by elaborate and sometimes exquisite conventions. Moreover, up to Charles d'Orléans, they are often writing for music, in the old troubadour tradition. Villon's verse, on the contrary, was not intended to be sung. Artistic considerations, in the narrower sense, do not influence him. He writes for the broad or knowing laugh, for the gasp of surprise or emotion, rather than for the more subtle reactions of the educated connoisseur. This leads him to put down everything, however trivial, however unflattering to himself, and to put it down raw. The only concealment which he attempted was of facts which might involve him with the law—a practical rather than an aesthetic consideration.

It has already been observed that Villon was no Romantic. If he is sometimes represented as one in popular works, the ultimate blame lies with Sir Walter Scott who was a Romantic and whose reconstructions of the Middle Ages have much to answer for. The real Romantic poet, as he appeared in the nineteenth century, is always an arranged figure even in his most intimate self-revelations. He cannot help being conscious of the contrast between himself and his environment. Villon seems to have lacked this selfconsciousness. He accepts the environment as inevitable and, within it, remains unstudiedly himself. When he whines, it is not in revolt or in any exhibitionist spirit. It is a spontaneous abject whine forced out of him by misery. He is thus an example of that very rare writer, the subjective realist. His lyricism springs straight from his sensations. He seems unaware of more sophisticated conventions. Ultimately the difference between a poet of the fifteenth century and one of the nineteenth century lies in a changed attitude of society towards the writer. The good writer of any period always does what is expected of him. The great writer, like Villon manages to exceed expectations.

But if Villon has no equivalent in French literature, it is possible to find him certain affinities, particularly in Baudelaire and Verlaine. He is an early example—to use a much abused word—of the Bohemian poet. He is also—in France the two things have usually gone together—the first good Parisian poet, the first man to find all his material in the streets, the taverns, the personalities and transient happenings of that city. Others after him were inspired by the Paris of their time, but none absorbed its life more thoroughly than he did.

The intense local flavour of much of his work makes it at once more lively and less accessible to the modern reader. It is here, rather than in any fundamental difference between the medieval and the modern mentality, that the chief obstacle to appreciation may lie. But anyone who has the time and opportunity to study Villon's language and environment will be well rewarded. To read Le Testament in full is a lasting experience, and one which it is a pity to abandon to the specialist. Meanwhile the great ballades, which are admittedly the cream, can be enjoyed with the help of a few footnotes.