[In this essay, Sargent-Baur examines possible influences for Villon's rhetorical style of addressing potential benefactors, especially those Greek and Roman models Villon would have studied in school. The author considers Villon's Testament as well as several of his Poèmes variés.]

“Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?” asks le povre Villon, clearly soliciting the answer No. This appeal to readers, developed in each strophe of the “Epitre a ses amis”¹ and driven home four times by the refrain, is perhaps Villon's most concentrated composition in the persuasive mode; yet it differs only in degree from much of his other verse. Indeed, when he was not addressing requests to specific individuals or to a group more or less limited, although defined, he aimed at a more numerous, amorphous, and distant audience: those readers who somewhere, somehow, sometime might hear him understandingly and judge him kindly.

Insofar as he employed the resources of rhetoric both to promote action along desirable lines and to induce a favorable state of mind toward himself, Villon was the inheritor and conscious, skilled practitioner of a long tradition of the studied use of oral and written language to achieve a wished-for result. I propose to explore here some of the ways in which Villon breathed new life into conventional secular rhetoric, reminding us of the ancient roots of that art while turning it to ends at once highly personal and broadly human.

The use of language to move and to persuade, as practised by medieval writers, derived from the public speaking of the antique world. We should perhaps remind ourselves of the original raison d'être of verbal eloquence in classical times, for the conditions producing it stamped the art with a character that persisted long after its function changed, through the Middle Ages and beyond them. As developed by the Greeks and cultivated in their early centuries by the Romans, it was the study of free-born men, a preparation for active participation in civic life. Initially the art of the orator, it was employed sometimes in eulogy but oftener in political debate and in forensic pleading; its whole aim was to sway opinion and, most commonly, to move men to action in affairs of state, and to influence judges in legal cases. It was above all meant to persuade. Consequently its thrust was not primarily an aesthetic one; if a speech in its invention and arrangement, its periods and cadences, its topoi and vocabulary and phrases and epigrams, turned out to please the ear and taste of its audience (and was even accounted worthy of being preserved in writing), that was all to the good or at least was not bad, provided that it produced a state of mind favorable to the speaker and his cause. Nor did laudatory, deliberative, or judicial oratory aim at a cool and objective presentation of data; such speech differed from a scholarly exposé, and the facts (if they were facts) were prudently selected and cunningly arranged for maximum effect on the crowd or the Senate or the judges of a case.²

When the Republic was superseded by the Empire, oral Latin rhetoric became more and more a matter of written composition. From deliberative and judicial oratory as a practical activity, it evolved into a cultural ornament and moved from the Forum and the law courts into the school room, to become the academic and decorative art of school eloquence. It was this, in the manuals of the acknowledged authorities and in admired and imitated specimens of their written works, that was transmitted to the European Middle Ages.³ Yet traces of its original character remain, in all sorts of literary production both in Latin and the vernaculars. Medieval writers who were school-trained were educated in the arts of persuasion, and they turned them to their own ends, whether they were preachers, letter-writers, or lyric poets.⁴

As a schoolboy and then as a university man Villon received an education that was primarily verbal and bookish; this kind of intellectual training was prolonged during the three years when he was preparing his License and his Master's Degree in the Arts faculty at Paris. Like his fellows he had immersed himself in the study and imitation of the acknowledged classical masters and models, particularly Cicero and the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, whose prescriptive manuals figured in the curriculum along with those of their twelfth- and thirteenth-century successors. Also among the “set books” of school and university were works embodying and vivifying the theory of classical verbal composition: the prose and poetry of the Latin auctores, whom all educated medieval people were taught from childhood to venerate. Villon of course read these authors and read the “moderns” as well, and was familiar with the application by the latter of ancient compositional techniques to vernacular writing; he draws repeatedly on Jean de Meun and Alain Chartier (whom he names), and evokes more vaguely a host of contemporary and earlier courtly lyricists schooled in the Arts de seconde rhétorique (i.e. manuals on vernacular poetical composition). It was inevitable that someone of his intellectual formation would draw on accumulated poetical traditions if he turned his hand to poetry at all. Furthermore, potential patrons were also familiar with this kind of verbal system, expected to find it in new compositions, and were likely to reward its able practitioners.

Villon had his own reasons for targeting particular individuals and attempting to induce them to do something. One is saddened to observe that the something here is pretty concrete and existential, and that his oeuvre includes pieces in the unheroic sub-genre poésies de l'estomac. All his poems in the persuasive (more exactly, begging) vein belong to the miscellaneous corpus known as Poèmes variés (or Poésies diverses), the ordering of which generates differences of opinion among editors, for its chronology depends largely on internal evidence not abundantly supplied.⁵ Of these sixteen poems five make a more-or-less direct appeal for a benefaction of some sort. In the longest of them, known as the “Louange à Marie d'Orléans,” we encounter predominantly an exercise in epideictic composition: effusive praise of a personage interesting to the writer mainly because of the benefits she (or rather, in this case, the parents of this very small child) is able to bestow. Villon does not scruple to quote as epigraph a well-known line from Virgil's Eclogues⁶ forecasting the birth of a child who will restore the Golden Age, a line generally taken by medieval Christian thinkers as referring to the birth of Christ but which is here applied to the recent birth of an heir to his patron: flattery could scarcely be trowelled on more lavishly. The unstated objective is captatio benevolentiae; and we move through the assertions of the preternatural maturity and noble bearing of this child,⁷ the reiteration of the Virgilian line, the poet's expressions of entire devotion and submission, the evocation of archetypes biblical and classical, the wishes to her for a long and happy life, to arrive at last at the not-disinterested conclusion:

Entiere dame et assouvie,
J'espoir de vous servir ainçoys,
Certes, se Dieu plaist, que devie
Vostre povre escolier Françoys.

(I, 129-32)

The nature of this sooner-or-later service is not specified, and the poet coyly refrains from suggesting that the thought of compensation has even crossed his mind; yet these lines and in fact the entirety of this composition point in that direction.

Some such highly discreet hint at being at least in a receptive mood appears in another poem composed during Villon's undated stay at Blois; it is on a theme set by Charles d'Orléans (P. V. [Poèmes variés] II) and begins “Je meurs de soif auprés de la fontaine.” Here, after a series of one-line contradictory statements, comes the penultimate verse: “Que sais je plus? Quoy? Les gaiges ravoir.” The line stands out from the others; it has a different syntactic structure, and the thought informing it is different as well. I take gaiges to mean objects left in pawn (as do Rychner and Henry⁸); if this understanding is correct, then the line signifies “What do I know best? Retrieving what I've gaged”—with the rueful hint that the writer is in fact not very good at getting his possessions back, and the sub-jacent invitation to the “Prince” to guess the reason. Villon's poverty could have been no secret for the Duke of Orleans or anyone else; and his desire to please, and hope of reward, must have been all too patent. Another ballade, seemingly addressed to this same patron or hoped-for patron,⁹ is unabashedly a begging poem from first to last. On the surface, what is solicited is a loan:

Le mien seigneur et prince redoubté,
Fleuron de lis, roialle geniture,
François Villon, que Travail a dompté
A coups orbes, a force de batture,
Vous supplie par ceste humble escripture
Que luy faciez quelque gracïeux prest …

(P. V. IV, 1-6)

to be repaid if and when—as if great lords ever lent money to commoners! The wheedler proceeds to pull all the strings he can think of: you will surely be reimbursed, I've borrowed from no prince but you, your last loan went to buy food, I'll give back that sum when I repay this one, I'll scavenge acorns and chestnuts and present you with the proceeds, I'd sell my health if only I could, the crosses that appear to me are of wood or stone, whereas I hope for a “real” one (i.e., one stamped on coins)—all this on a playful note calculated to put the addressee into a good humor. But in the envoy the tone deepens:

Prince du lis, qui a tout bien complest,
Que pansés vous comment il me deplaist
Quant je ne puis venir a mon entente.
Bien m'entendez; aydés moy, s'il vous plaist;
Vous n'y perdrés seullement que l'attente.

(31-35)

The Poèmes variés comprise three more persuasive pieces, encouragements to action other than the bestowing of financial aid. Of P. V. XII, XI, and XVI, I conjecture the first (“Aiez pictié”) to spring from the imprisonment at Meung-sur-Loire, the second (“Freres humains”) to be inspired by the observation of public executions (and perhaps the anticipation of his own), and the third (“Tous mes cinq sens”) unquestionably to follow the successful appeal from the death sentence in early January 1463. P. V. XII draws on the archetype and situation of Job,¹⁰ and quotes Job's words, to galvanize his friends not to a monetary gift but to action: to intercede with the king and/or his ministers, to secure “graces et royaulx seaulx,” perhaps to visit him with hot soup or even attempt a rescue “en quelque corbillon.”¹¹ As in P. V. IV, the poet attempts to capture the benevolentia of his readers by striking a note half-serious, half-jocular; the prisoner's kinship with Job the innocent sufferer, the particulars of his own wretched state in darkness, hunger, and confinement, his total inability to do anything by and for himself, all mix with references to his friends' none-too-respectable ways of life, their freedom, the noise and music and bustling activity of their world, which had been his also. Even swine rush to each other's aid when one of them cries in distress; and to shore up this final and unanswerable point comes for the fourth and final time the refrain “Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?”

Also in this trio of poems urging to action is one now best known as the “Ballade des pendus.”¹² Here, no benefit to the living poet is for once envisaged, for his thought turns around dead bodies and perhaps redeemable souls. Even the conventional attachment of the ballade to the imprisonment and death sentence of 1462 is anything but solid;¹³ nor can one be sure that the “speakers” of the poem, the nous, include the poet:

Freres humains qui aprés nous vivez,
N'ayez les cueurs contre nous endurcis,
Car se pitié de nous povres avez,
Dieu en avra plus tost de vous mercis …

(P. V. XI, 1-4)

The collective voice is that of the cinq, six who are anonymous skeletons.¹⁴ Whether or not Villon imagines himself among the group, his speech joined with the others', the raison d'être of the ballade is persuasion: moving the spectators of this appalling scene to do the one thing that out of human solidarity they are able and ought to do: they can intercede with God on their behalf. The entire ballade constitutes a plea for prayer; the living are to act as advocates for the dead. The exhortation is aimed at those who have not (so far) got into trouble with the law, but otherwise are not very different from nous; we all make mistakes, and need what help we can get:

                                                  … vous sçavez
Que tous hommes n'ont pas le sens rassis.
Excusez nous, puisque sommes transis,
Envers le filz de la Vierge Marie …

(13-16)

While the speakers of this dramatic monologue appeal to Prince Jesus in the first two lines of the envoy, in all the rest of the poem “they” apostrophize the still-living members of the human family. Nothing temporal can now be of the slightest use, for eternity has overtaken the speakers. There is nothing for it but prayer; and the refrain “Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre” in four-fold repetition drives home the message that one supplication is not enough, no more than is the intercession of one person. The whole human brotherhood must be induced to attempt to soften God's judgement.

Villon's last poem in order of composition, as far as one can tell, is the ballade entitled in MS F “La Louange que feist Villon a la court quant fu dit que il ne mourroit point et puis requist trois jours de relache” (P. V. XVI). This title reflects the proportion of flattery and begging comprised in the poem. Of all of Villon's compositions in the persuasive vein it is the most clearly structured in thought and the least subtle in appeal. In three stanzas he exhorts all his five senses to come to his tongue's aid and then enlists heart, teeth, liver, lungs, spleen, and entire body into the chorus, while in the envoy, now reassembled into je, he directly addresses the Court (whose benevolence has so effusively been sought) with a request for three days' grace before his exile must begin. One would like to know whether this poem, which must have been composed in haste (just after the capital sentence was commuted on 5 January 1463), achieved its object, whether this application in thirty-five lines of an age-old tradition of deliberative rhetoric had the intended effect. The members of the Parlement de Paris, trained in rhetoric themselves, would have needed hearts incapable of being broken or pierced,¹⁵ to be insensible to a plea at once so artful and so sincere.

In the Testament we find another sort of eloquence at work. When composing his magnum opus Villon had other preoccupations than making ad-hoc appeals, and the audience he addresses is a wide one: the ideal reader and the world at large (as well as his drinking companions). Here are his expanded views, his own experiences and reflections, his deeds and misdeeds, his ambivalences, the scourge of his sweating self.¹⁶ Furthermore, he presents a picture of that self justified; the Testament is, among other things, his apologia pro vita sua. In telling his story he is at once client and advocate, accused and defense attorney; those addressed are judges, charged with hearing the arguments and rendering a verdict. The outcome will depend not so much on the factual evidence as on the presentation, on how the accused himself will be exhibited, on the degree of skill with which the defense will be conducted. Here it is very much in the interest of the homo reus and the juris prudens (who in this case are one and the same), standing at the bar of posterity, to guide posterity's judgement in a favorable direction. We recall that the whole matter is not being submitted either to a real tribunal or even to the verdict of his contemporaries and fellow-countrymen; the poet's bid for sympathy and indulgence is cast in the framework of a last will and testament, which perforce will be seen by no one until the testator is dead and no longer subject to any human sentence-passing. Here again he addresses his “Freres humains qui aprés nous vivez.” Here too his self-assigned task is to secure the goodwill of those he addresses; and to this end he employs techniques recommended in the Rhetorica ad Herennium and in Cicero's De oratore and De inventione. He does so not only in the initial part of the Testament but with much consistency throughout the 2000-odd lines of the work, thereby going far beyond the scope of the classical prescriptive manuals, which concentrated on the exordium. There, chiefly, did the practitioner of forensic oratory exert his best powers to gain the sympathy of his audience. Cicero, Quintilian, and others had much to say about ways of disposing a judge to give a favorable verdict: judicem benevolum parare, primarily by stressing the client's virtues and good intentions, secondarily by denigrating his accusers.¹⁷ Insofar as the Testament is largely (but with numerous digressions) an appeal for post-mortem exoneration, it is true to the spirit of classical law-court eloquence with its aim of moving and persuading.¹⁸

The passionate indignation of the first stanza is affecting in a way that a cooler and more rational opening could not achieve. The first three lines strike the testamentary note:

En l'an de mon trentïesme aage,
Que toutes mes hontes j'euz beues,
Ne du tout fol, ne du tout saige …

(1-3)

He has not been brought to complete folie or entire sagesse, although either might well have been the outcome of his sufferings, all of which are ascribed to a certain persecutor, a bishop who had acted as sentencing judge. For unspecified reasons the poet had been accused, condemned, and severely punished. Now at liberty, he makes it his first order of business to appeal to another tribunal, that of mankind at large. The modern reader's mind may turn to considerations of false arrest, abuse of power, cruel and unusual punishment, the confusion of ecclesiastical and secular authority. A man of the fifteenth century did not perhaps think in just such terms; but this particular man makes it plain that his rights had been violated and that neither mercy nor even justice had been extended to him. As a clericus Villon belonged to the Church, subject to her relatively mild discipline and entitled to her protection. Yet, far from being protected, the clerc-poète had been injured by someone well up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy who had exceeded his jurisdiction:

S'esvesque il est, signant les rues,
Qu'il soit le mien je le regny;
Mon seigneur n'est ne mon esvesque …

(7-9)¹⁹

This is the adversarius, Thibault d'Aucigny, named as early as the sixth line. Throughout the first half-dozen octaves of the Testament Villon develops the contrast of accused and accuser, victim and persecutor, small man and great; and the alleged brutality of this Churchman is underscored by juxtaposition to the next character introduced, the King of France, a layman and the poet's benefactor and liberator. The king gets three thankful stanzas (VIII, IX, XI) that seem almost to hint at a conscious royal intervention. The poet's persona is speedily established: he is weak, sick, soon to die, conventionally pious, capable of gratitude to God and to one person who had assisted him; if he is angry with someone he has ample reason. Thus in the opening part of this long poem there is a vigorous resort to the ab nostra [persona] and ab adversariorum [persona] arguments, here intermingled. The fictitious will gives us a literary and highly selective autobiography, which leads us back to the (fictitious) pretext for the will: the writer has not only been subjected to a gross miscarriage of justice but has thereby been brought to death's door. He is beyond help; he barely has the strength to dictate his final bequests and make his peace with God and man.

In the light of this narrative framework we can more accurately evaluate the anacoluthon of the initial stanzas.²⁰ The poem appears to escape from the poet's control as soon as it starts; it is an arresting opening move, and Villon had already experimented with something similar in the first octave of the Lais, but there retrieved the syntax in the following stanza. Here the false start is never corrected. The first nine stanzas have no main verb among them; they are linked in the loosest manner by beginning conjunctions (et, sy, combien) and by one relative pronoun (auquel). By the time we reach the end of this series the poet's rage seems to be abating, and X offers a self-contained and straightforward sentence with adverbial phrase (containing parenthetical remarks), pronoun subject, compound verb, and direct object. This sets in relief the violence and formlessness of the first seventy-two lines; their very incoherence testifies to the writer's overwrought state and eloquently underscores the posture he strikes: that of a man who has been abominably treated by a powerful adversary who kept him in ville puissance (55) and made him suffer maintes peines (4), to the point where his health is ruined and he can do nothing but make his testament and die. (He returns to this conceit in LXXIX: “Je sens mon cueur qui s'affoiblist / Et plus je ne puis papïer,” 785-6). His only recourse is to insert into the testament a reiterated assertion of why he is making it, how he has been driven to making it; he justifies himself at the bar of history and posterity.

The recent clash of homo reus and adversarius, to the former's detriment, has occasioned the composition of the Testament; it is consequently everywhere by implication present, even in the fairly extended sections in which it is not clearly evoked. All the elements in this work, even the fixed-form pieces that make of it a sort of poetical anthology (and some of which may originally have been conceived as independent poems), contribute to a versified will drawn up in anticipation of death and containing the poet's definitive views on his own situation, inter alia. This is how (we are to believe) a particular dying man saw his own life and acts. In this supreme hour he must be telling the truth.²¹ If he paints the bishop et compaignie as animated by motives both vile and inexplicable, and their treatment of himself as not only cruel but gratuitously so, we are intended to take this as veracious. Hence the play of opposites. The more he blackens his enemies the more innocent he makes himself appear; the more he develops his autoportrait as no arch-criminal or egregious sinner but by and large an average man, l'homme moyen sensuel, the more he insinuates himself into the good graces of his potential reader. Mon semblable, mon frère is the tone consistently struck, with a few exceptions.²² He concedes that his conduct has scarcely been austere, that when occasion offered he has lived it up and more than most:

Je plains le temps de ma jeunesse
Ouquel j'ay plus qu'autre gallé
Jusqu'a l'entree de viellesse …

(169-71)

True, he has spent something on food and drink and women, but not enough to cause problems for his friends (184-89); he has entangled himself with at least one venal woman (910-18); he has wasted the precious educational and professional opportunities that came his way:

Bien sçay, se j'eusse estudïé
Ou temps de ma jeunesse folle
Et a bonnes meurs dedïé
J'eusse maison et couche molle.
Mais quoy? je fuyoie l'escolle …

(201-5)

His self-acknowledgement of culpability is brief and couched in the most conventional terms:

Je suis pecheur, je le sçay bien;
Pourtant ne veult pas Dieu ma mort,
Mais convertisse et vive en bien,
Et tout autre que pechié mort.

(105-8)

One notes the slide from je to tout autre, deflecting any tendency on the reader's part to look at Villon's as a singular, and singularly bad, case. All men are sinners, and all men know it; so much the more reason not to think ill of this one. Besides, this one can and does adduce many an extenuating circumstance. His sins were those of youth, and therefore excusable; this is shored up with a reference to the Roman de la Rose,²³ quoted as observing

C'on doit jeune cueur en jeunesse,
Quant on le voit viel en viellesse,
Excuser …

(116-19)

Further excuse is to be sought in the words of the Saige (=Ecclesiastes), words that had actually encouraged him in his pleasure-seeking: “Esjoïs toy, mon filz, / A ton adolessence” (211-12). On top of the usual faults of youth there is the factor of poverty, an affliction weighing on enough of Villon's contemporaries so that here too he could count on a comprehending and indulgent response. (This note is struck not only in the Testament but also at the end of the Lais, where the details of the frozen ink and his own thinness are eloquent. We see it as well in some of the Poèmes variés, of which I is signed “Vostre povre escolier Françoys,” and IV is a forthright begging poem.²⁴) The association of ideas leads repeatedly back to poverty, most explicitly in XXXV:

Povre je suis de ma jeunesse,
De povre et de peticte extrasse;
Mon pere n'eust oncq grant richesse,
Ne son ayeul, nommé Orrace;
Povreté tous nous suit et trace …

(273-7)

As if confirmation were needed, it is supplied at the end of the work by a different voice, an independent witness, who asserts that when le povre Villon died it was in utter destitution: “Quant mourut, n'avoit q'un haillon” (2013). Poverty is a common affliction, though the poet suffered from it to an uncommon degree; it is also brought in here as an excuse for behavior that from time to time left something to be desired. This thought subtends the exemplum of Alexander and the pirate Diomedes, figuring early in the Testament and prolonged over five stanzas (XVII-XXI). Villon unambiguously assimilates himself to Diomedes in situation; but lacking “un autre piteux Alixandre” (162), he cannot rise to virtue. Diomedes/Villon pleads:

“Excusez moy aucunement
Et saichiez qu'en grant povreté,
Ce mot se dit communement,
Ne gist pas grande loyaulté.”

(149-52)

Here, as in other classical and medieval versions of the anecdote, Alexander finds the argument compelling; and Villon, moving on and out of the dramatic monologue, comments in his own poetical voice on the tale: if he had encountered a judge (cadés, 135) as humane as this one, a judge who also became his benefactor and turned his bad fortune to good (155-6), he would have been most severe towards himself had he subsequently gone astray: “… estre ars et mis en cendre / Jugié me feusse de ma voys” (165-66). To drive home the point errare humanum est and its universal application, even to the poet's future readers and judges, he turns to conventional wisdom and rounds out the passage with two proverbs: as everyone must acknowledge, “Neccessité fait gens mesprendre / Et fain saillir le loup du boys” (167-8).²⁵

As for the causes of his own necessity, aside from one (uncharacteristic) reference to his own fecklessness cited above (201-5) his maux are usually blamed on his fortune (145), sometimes personified (1786; also P. V. XII, 5). In P. V. X, known as the “Ballade de Fortune,” the poet points the accusatory finger away from himself and toward a malevolent power beyond his control or understanding; here Fortune reminds poet and readers that she has destroyed many great men, far greater than he, as witness the impressive catalogue of biblical and classical figures presented: “‘Et n'es, ce sais, envers eulx ung soullon’” (10). Even some of his contemporaries and betters have a miserable time of it, slaving away in gypsum-kilns and stone-quarries, however virtuous they may be. Bad things can happen to anyone: “‘S'a honte viz, te dois tu doncques plaindre? / Tu n'es pas seul, si ne te dois complaindre’” (6-7).

Returning to the Testament, we find there a fairly consistent mental posture regarding responsibility and culpability. The poet has led a hard life; if there were a few moments of carelessness and gaiety in his student days and later, some carousing and wenching heedless of the consequences, they are by now far behind him; the present is composed of unrelieved insecurity, poverty, hunger and thirst, sexual frustration, bullying by the police, ill health, premature aging, bereavement of adoptive father and old friends, and the presentiment of death and decay. His only comfort is prayer, his only recourse that to Nostre Dame:

Autre chastel n'ay ne forteresse
Ou me retraye corps ne ame
Quant sur moy court malle destresse.

(869-71)

All this, of course, is to be read retrospectively; where the verbs in the text refer to the present of the narration, we readers are to shift them into the past: these are the words of a man now deceased. One of the fictions of the Testament is the urgent need for the writer to have his say and make all necessary arrangements, because time is running out. The theme returns with heavy stress toward the conclusion, occupied as it is with burial-place, epitaph, executors, bell-ringers, pall-bearers (for this is a literary, if often burlesque, will); and the testator only just manages to finish his dictation:

Trop plus me font mal c'oncques maiz
Barbe, cheveux, penil, sourcys.
Mal me presse, temps desormaiz
Que crye a toutes gens mercys.

(1964-7)

This last line introduces the final ballade of the Testament proper,²⁶ and furnishes its refrain. Here Villon recalls onto his stage not all but much of his cast, now designated generically: religious orders, well-off idlers, lovers, servants, prostitutes and their clients, entertainers of all sorts—a fair cross-section of the parts of society he knew best. To them all, as to a tribunal or a jury assembled to reach and pronounce a definitive judgement upon his case, he cries for pardon. The appeal is wide: not only to the more-or-less disreputable segments of the population but to the bien-pensants, the devout Filles-Dieu, the worldly mendicant orders and the cloistered Chartreux and Celestines, none of whom had earlier received good language from him. This ballade in fact reminds us of many groups previously depicted in the poem as a whole; other classes (rulers, merchants, peasants) mentioned elsewhere but not here, are implicitly embraced in “Je crye a toutes gens mercys.” Explicitly excluded is another set of people: the poet's adversaries and tormentors, the “traitres chiens matins” (1984). The memory of them brings on one final spasm of scatological language and one last breakdown in the sequence of ideas. Wrath seems to run its course in the third stanza, of which the last two lines are conciliatory; but it flares up again in the envoy. Rather than an address to a conventional Prince, comes a return to what was on the poet's mind in the preceding stanza; thought takes precedence over both syntax and the usual ballade form:

C'on leur froisse les quinze costes
De groz mailletz, fors et massiz,
De plombees et telz peloctes! …
Je crye a toutes gens mercys.

(1992-5)

The leur, which ought to have its antecedent in the toutes gens of the preceding verse, in fact belongs to the traitres chiens matins of 1984. Here as in the first octaves of the Testament we encounter the figure of an implied author so indignant at the cruel treatment deliberately inflicted upon him that his fixed form breaks down along with his syntax, and he becomes illogical and incoherent. If he asks pardon of everyone, this must include the persecutors to whom he has just given nearly the whole third stanza; but at the beginning of that stanza he has pointedly excepted them. This ending of the Testament underscores the speaker's distress even more than did the beginning, since it is cast in the severe ballade form and yet has the fluidity and apparent carelessness of conversational speech. These are the last words of a dying man, crying out to humankind for indulgence toward himself and simultaneously calling for its indignation toward his adversaries.

As for these last, the poet is also consistent. Whatever peccadilloes he may have committed, they weigh light in the scale compared with the heavy afflictions he has endured, mostly caused by human agents (although Fortune too has opposed him). The hostility of his adversaries is detailed but never explained. Thibaut d'Aucigny is alleged at the outset, as we have seen, to have caused him much suffering, kept him on prison rations, been dur and cruel rather than misericors (22, 25); Villon returns to him later, claiming that he has ruined his health and robbed him of his youth (729-36), kept him underground and in fetters (and tortured him?) (737-41). With him are now associated certain confederates: a lieutenant, an official, and one “petit maistre Robert” (750), all clumped together in the poet's sarcastic love. In the final ballade of the Testament proper they again appear, not here named, and reduced to the bestial level; yet it is clear that it is those responsible for his incarceration at Meung that he has in mind: the

                              traitres chiens matins
Qui m'ont fait ronger dures crostes,
Macher mains soirs et mains matins,
Que ores je ne crains troys croctes.

(1984-7)

He no longer fears them because he is dying; yet since it is they who are responsible for his state he can appropriately bring them back into his text at the end, with a plea to his readers to do what he himself would do if only he could: attack them physically, breaking in their ribs.

The bishop and his crew feature as the poet's principal adversaries but not the only ones. Women too have afflicted him, and particularly Katherine de Vauselles (661). He leads up to her in a long sequence of huitains on the lustful nature and the venality of women; clearly those he associates with, “ces fillectes / Qu'en parolles toute jour tien” (590-1), if once they were femmes honnestes, are honest no longer, are indeed promiscuous, sexually insatiable, greedy, and merciless to their men. The point receives a more formal shape in the double ballade having the refrain “Bien eureux est qui rien n'y a” (632 etc.), with its catalogue of illustrious male victims of love serving as prelude to the poet's personal anecdote. Just what happened to him is characteristically left vague; but the scene is sufficiently squalid none the less and is laid to Katherine's charge. The ballade ends on a rather general note tending to exculpate young men who chase after young women: young men are like that. Yet Villon still has not finished with this female enemy; the one-sided quarrel is prolonged for another half-dozen octaves. She was faithless, she was false, she led him on to tell her all his heart, “Mais ce n'estoit qu'en m'abusant” (688). He had tried his hardest to please her, had served her “De si bon cueur et loyaulment” (674). All he got, though, for his loyal service was “maulx et griefz” (675). One might think that this long ad-feminam attack would suffice; but Villon returns to the subject, if not to the same woman, in a later sequence of four stanzas and a ballade. (The ballade carries FRANCOYS in acrostic in the first strophe and MARTHE in the second, suggesting a shift in the poet's interest from one person to another.) In the recollection of these experiences the speaker's attitude is the same: bitter disappointment, frustration, trust betrayed, an impotent desire for revenge; to these is joined in the second passage a strong implication of gold-digging. He leaves “Marthe” no bequest: what he has, she does not want; what she wants, he does not have. To this “chiere rose”

Ne luy laisse ne cueur ne foye;
Elle aymeroit mieulx aultre chose,
Combien qu'elle ait assés monnoye.
Quoy? une grant bourse de soye,
Plaine d'escuz, parfonde et large.

(911-15)

She has exacted a price, one difficult for the poet to pay and costing him his happiness, self-respect, and trust in his fellows:

Faulse beaulté, qui tant me couste chier,
Rude en effect, ypocrite doulceur,
Amour dure plus que fer a macher,
Yeulx sans pitié, ne veult Droit de Rigeur,
Sans empirer, ung povre secourir?

(942-4, 948-9)

Here and in the following strophes accumulated reproaches lead to a rhetorical question. The appeal goes beyond her (she would presumably be deaf to it) to droit, the universal sense of justice; “tout franc cueur” (968) must grant this. If she does not, this is an additional ground of complaint; and although in the second stanza he half-heartedly mentions the possibility of pictié he also resolves in effect to take the law into his own hands (“Mouray sans coup ferir?” 955); and he proceeds to relieve his feelings by depicting to the faulse beaulté what old age will do to her and how he would laugh if then he could. In the envoy he turns finally from her toward a Prince amoureux, brought in as a sort of superior judge (at least in amorous matters) with a superior sense of justice and with an ability to recognize that “tout franc cueur doit, par Nostre Seigneur, / Sans empirer, ung povre secourir” (968-9).

This is Villon's consistent posture before his contemporaries and his future readers. Of what he might have done to merit such treatment from women, of any shortcomings or offenses on his side, no mention is made. Their hard-heartedness seems inexplicable, because the poet has opted not to furnish any explanation. We see his beloved(s) as former beloved(s), and through the eyes of a man who has done with her/them but still smarts from the experience. Yet he has the last word, accusing them unreservedly and at the same time drawing sympathy to himself. The intensity of his bitterness and the very substantial amplification of the topos inevitably sway all but the toughest-minded reader toward the side of a man presented as blameless and yet ill-used and whose case is being argued by an articulate defender. But the victim of women's wiles is also a man suffering from heavier afflictions: an egregious abuse of power, arbitrarily inflicted (since the je of the poem acknowledges no wrongdoing). The greater guilt belongs to the Bishop of Orleans rather than to her/them; she/they made the poet unhappy, but Thibault and his minions nearly killed him. It is owing to them that (he claims) he is dying now, not long after his release from their clutches. Two of the three rondeaux in the Testament protest against the law's rigors. The “Bergeronnecte” (1784-95) dwells on the “dure prison / Ou j'ay laissié presque la vie;” and the “Verset” (1892-1903), using the third person because the poet is now to be thought of as deceased, states flatly “Rigueur le transmist en exil,” along with which imprisonment went physical punishment and head-shaving (= loss of tonsure?). That the “Verset” is also part of his self-designed epitaph underlines the poet/testator's moribund state.²⁷ Those who have brought him to it are utterly wicked, unmarked by any saving qualities, animated by the conscious intention to injure him and destroy him, and possessed of the power to do so. These, of course, are attributes of the Devil, as medieval readers of this text must have recognized.

Thus does Villon plead for Villon, alternately attacking his adversaries and stressing his own innocence: a barrister's proceeding. The links between this poetry and classical forensic eloquence are reinforced by the highly oral character of much of it: questions, exclamations, self-corrections, direct appeals to the reader, imaginary dialogues, dramatic monologues. The tone as well puts one in mind of public speaking and pleading; it is excited, partisan, emotional rather than cerebral, appealing to the pity and indignation of which the average judge or juror or spectator may be thought capable. It is calculated to convince the audience that the speaker is telling the truth; that this may not be the whole truth, and that the account presented may be selective and subjective, is nowhere hinted at. By such devices does Villon in some of his oeuvre seek to persuade certain persons to take action, in other parts endeavor to make all his hearers and readers into judges of his life and acts and to render a favorable verdict—or at least to temper justice with a massive admixture of mercy.

Notes

1. This is XII of the Poemès Variés (henceforth P. V.). All quotations and English translations of Villon come from François Villon: Complete Poems Edited with English Translation and Commentary by Barbara N. Sargent-Baur (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

2. For overviews of classical rhetoric, see Henri I. Marrou, History of Education in Antiquity, tr. George Lamb (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956), II, x, and III, vi; and Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard P. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), ch. 4. On medieval theory and practice, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1974).

3. On the transition from school exercises (imaginary speeches in improbable situations) to imaginative written literature, see Marrou, 383-87.

4. As Richard McKeon puts it, “the art of poetry came to be considered, after the twelfth century, not a branch of grammar but alternately a kind of persuasion.” See “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed. Ronald S. Crane (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953), 291.

5. I follow the order of these poems as given in my edition; it is also the order in Le Lais Villon et les Poèmes variés, ed. Jean Rychner et Albert Henry (Geneva: Droz, 1977).

6. “Jam nova progenies celo demittitur alto;” Virgil, Eclogae, IV, 7.

7. These details, if not pure hyperbole, seem to evoke not the birth of the princess in December 1457 but her joyeuse entrée into Orleans in July 1460. The poem may even have been composed in two stages.

8. Rychner and Henry, Lais, II, 68.

9. The identification of the seigneur et prince with the Duke of Bourbon appears only in MS R and the incunable I, both rather late and not very reliable. The arguments favoring Charles d'Orleans as Villon's patron are summed up by Rychner and Henry, Lais, II, 80-81. On the precarious position of writers needing patrons in the late Middle Ages, see Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le prince: L'évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), and Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1980).

10. See my Brothers of Dragons: Job dolens and François Villon (New York: Garland, 1990), 70-82.

11. I discuss this in “‘Et me montez en quelque corbillon’ (François Villon, Poèmes variés, XII, v. 33),” Romania 110 (1989), 265-69.

12. The title supplied by Clément Marot seems specific, but was presumably invented by him: “L'epitaphe en forme de ballade que feit Villon pour luy et pour ses compaignons, s'attendant estre pendu avec eulx.” It is called “Epitaphe” in sources MS F and incunable I.

13. Rychner and Henry term this dating “sans aucune preuve” (Lais, II, 107).

14. It is not necessarily true, as Rychner and Henry have it (Lais, II, 107), that “Villon s'imagine partageant le sort des pendus de Montfaucon (ou d'ailleurs) …”

15. “Cueur, fendez vous ou persez d'une broche,” says Villon to his own, 1. 11.

16. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day.”

17. Cicero designates these sorts of appeals as ab nostra [persona] and ab adversariorum [persona] (to which he adds ab iudicum persona and a causa); see Marcus Tullius Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, tr. Harry M. Hubbel (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1949), I, 15, 16; and also [Pseudo-Cicero] Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and tr. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1954), I, 4.

18. The digressions come mainly as fixed-form insertions and as comic bequests.

19. For the implications of this statement, see André Burger, “La Dure Prison de Meung,” in Studi in onore de Italo Siciliano (Florence: Olschki, 1966), I, 149-54.

20. See Le Testament Villon, ed. Jean Rychner et Albert Henry (Geneva: Droz, 1974), II, 15.

21. See my “Truth-claims as captatio benevolentiae in Villon's Testament,” in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1994), 505-14.

22. The most striking exception is the piece generally known as the “Ballade pour Robert d'Estouteville,” T. 1378-1405.

23. The reference is erroneous; Villon had in mind another work of Jean de Meun, his Testament.

24. The adjective povre is ambiguous; in such lines as T. 657 and P. V. XII, 10, 20, 30, 36, the meaning is closer to “pitiable.”

25. The proverb figures in Joseph Morawski, Proverbes français antérieurs au XVe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1925), #1000; and in James Woodrow Hassell, Middle French Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982), #F1 and #N10.

26. That is, the last segment of the text in which he designates the testator/poet.

27. Between the octave of introduction, blaming the poet's decease on Amours, and the rondeau referring to judicial severities, there is an apparent contradiction that extra-literary information might resolve if we possessed it.