SOURCE: “Final Preparations (Verses 1844-1995),” “Three Readings of the Final Ballad (Verses 1996-2023),” and “Conclusion” in A Reading of Villon's Testament, Summa Publications, 1984, pp. 69-83.

[In this excerpt, Fein turns to the conclusion of Villon's Testament, suggesting that behind its sarcasm and apparent celebration of dissipation the poem reveals an enthusiasm for life and offers a serious meditation on both humanity and eternity.]

FINAL PREPARATIONS (VERSES 1844–1995)

Now that all the bequests have been made, Villon turns his attention to the last few remaining formalities: provisions for the execution of the will, the choice of a burial site, the composition of an epitaph, the appointment of pallbearers, and other necessary details. Jehan Calais, a notary of the Châtelet charged with verifying wills and a man whom Villon admits he has never met, is named to interpret the will and adjudicate any disputes that may arise. Villon gives the notary practically unlimited power to construe and even modify the document:

De le gloser et commenter,
De le diffinir et descripre,
Diminuer ou augmenter,
De le canceller et prescripre.

(1852-1855)

(To gloss and annotate it
To define and clarify it
To shorten and lengthen it
To void it and scratch it out).

Playfully handling terms borrowed from the semantic fields of scholastic and legal terminology, Villon loosens and reinvigorates a normally rigid and lifeless form of language. At the same time he makes us aware of the vulnerability of the written word. Just as the will must be interpreted after the testator's death in order to be properly carried out, the literary text must be continually interpreted and reinterpreted in order to remain valid. We should take Villon's instructions to his notary as a warning, for it is we who have now become the real executors of Villon's will, glossing, annotating, and defining his text. Although this act of interpretation is incumbent upon each new generation of “executors,” we must remember, as Villon subtly reminds us, that this process entails a risk of distortion or even misrepresentation.

Parodying a common testamentary provision concerning the disposition of a bequest in the event of an heir's death, Villon envisions a different eventuality:

Et s'aucun, dont n'ay congnoissance,
Estoit allé de mort a vie

(1860-1861)

(And if unknown to me an heir
Has passed from death into life).

The words “de mort a vie” appear in medieval French literature as a verbal formula traditionally applied to Christ.¹ This religiously weighted phrase announces a series of Christ images that occur, concealed by comic effects, in the concluding ballad of the Testament. In broadest terms, the movement of Villon's poem has been one of life toward death. Now the phrase “de mort a vie” suggests an extension of the same movement beyond death to an enduring life.

To the stipulation that his sepulchre be located in the convent of Saint Avoye (patron saint of the dévoyés, the black sheep, whom she was believed capable of leading back to a righteous life), he adds a further request:

Et, affin que chascun me voie,
Non pas en char, mais en painture,
Que l'on tire mon estature
D'ancre, s'il ne coustait trop chier.

(1870-1873)

(And so everyone may see me
Not in the flesh but in painting
Have my full-length portrait done
In ink if there's money for that).

If we take the estature d'ancre to be the verbal self-portrait contained in the Testament, then it becomes clear that Villon has already fulfilled his own request. This reading is reinforced by the fact that in the other two occurrences of ancre to be found in Villon's poetry the word is specifically connected to the act of writing a will.² Since we cannot see him en char, we can only see a picture of him en painture. To rearrange the famous phrase from the Gospel of John, the flesh becomes word.

Having named his resting place, Villon now proceeds to specify the details of his epitaph:

Soit escript en lettre assez grosse,
Et qui n'auroit point d'escriptoire,
De charbon ou de pierre noire.

(1878-1880)

(Inscribed in rather large letters
Lacking something to write with
Use charcoal or a lump of coal).

Although the primary meaning of grosse in this context is apparently “large,” the word can also signify “common” or “vulgar.”³ The inscription that Villon envisions scribbled in charcoal over his grave take the form of a kind of graffiti, and the epitaph does in fact contain the kind of obscene term (cul) that one would expect to find in such a crude inscription. Again we see an act of debasement, this time self-imposed. Making a mockery of his epitaph, Villon is faithfully following his practice of desecrating that which his society regards with reverence. But the graffiti on the grave may also represent a deeper revolt. If the tomb symbolizes death, the epitaph symbolizes man's submission to death, his acceptance of the inevitable. Villon's inscription, scrawled in large black letters, insults the sanctity of the grave, and evokes laughter in the face of death. As with the final gulp of wine at the end of the poem, it may be taken as a gesture of defiance.

In the epitaph Villon cites his full name for the first and only time in the Testament. Death has reduced the omnipotent benefactor of the legacy section to a humble cleric by the name of François Villon:

Ung povre petit escollier,
Qui fut nommé Françoys Villon.

(1886-1887)

(A poor obscure scholar
Who was known as François Villon).

Referring to himself in the third person, and looking momentarily beyond his death, Villon begins to prepare his departure, and announces the eulogy to be delivered by an anonymous voice at the end of the poem. The words petit escollier, translated above as “obscure scholar,” literally mean a “small schoolboy.” The Testament moves simultaneously in a forward direction toward the poet's death, and backward through his past, the future and past merging in the epitaph that looks backward and forward at once.

The image painted by the epitaph, the inscription that will supposedly fix his memory for all posterity, is that of a man completely stripped—stripped of love, possessions (all of which he claims to have given away), stripped even of the hair on his face and head. But the pathos of the image is undercut by an ironic bit of courtly language:

Qu'amours occist de son raillon

(1885)

(One love's arrow struck down),

and a reminder that the poet's tomb is to be housed in the sollier (1884), “upper room,” of a convent. Villon clearly intends to leave a mock epitaph on a mock tomb. The prayer quoted in the inscription, containing the word cul as well as a traditional liturgical phrase, is also a mockery. At another level, however, Villon is conceiving his death, his grave, the memory he will leave behind, is requesting that a requiem prayer be recited for his soul, is confronting the most difficult and anxiety-filled questions facing every intelligent human being, all beneath the mask of humor. The association of death and humor, moreover, is completely normal. Jokes about death are as old as jokes about sex, and both, as it is well known, betray an understandable uneasiness and insecurity. If Villon is to introduce his own encounter with death into the Testament, and still keep the distance he has attempted to maintain between the poem and the personal experience it reflects, then he has no choice but to approach the subject through the means of humor, even to the extent of self-deprecation.

The final preparations for death fail to depress the resilient spirit of the dying testator. Instead they provide him with a last opportunity for a little satirical sport as he appoints the bell ringers and his executors. An obscene pun is tossed at a former schoolmate, Thomas Tricot, now a priest. Just as the flippant tone of the legacy section seems about to reassert itself, Villon cuts short the string of jokes with a reference to physical suffering:

Trop plus mal me font qu'onques mais
Barbe, cheveulx, penil, sourcis.
Mal me presse, temps desormais
Que crie a toutes gens mercis.

(1964-1967)

(Worse than ever they're killing me
My beard, hair, crotch, and eyebrows
Pain closes in, it's high time now
To cry everyone's pardon).

With this reminder of the agony of dying the poem revolves back to the grim reality confronted in Villon's painfully graphic description of the agonisant (313-328). The attempt to elude the ultimate threat of death has failed, and the vague awareness of mortality perceptible in the opening verse of the Testament returns with greater definition and intensity as the final moments of the poem and of the dying protagonist coincide.

In an act of confession the writer of the will, pressed by death and with little time remaining, focuses his last thoughts on those he has wronged, enumerating various groups of people in the ballad with the refrain, “Je crye a toutes gens mercis” (1968-1995). Yet when we observe the procession to whom Villon's plea is addressed, we find very few of those he has maligned in the poem. Members of several religious orders are included, but nowhere does Villon refer to the magistrates, the municipal officials, the wealthy bourgeois, and the others who have borne the brunt of his abuse. Instead we see mainly people of the street, especially those who occupy a marginal social position: prostitutes, thieves, brawlers, itinerant entertainers, jesters, actors. These are the people Villon knows best, the ones who form his true social milieu, and it is to them that he now turns before departing. The poem which began in the privacy of personal memories, and which has retained a highly introspective orientation now moves into the street to embrace a colorful array of human figures, practically all of whom are, like Villon, alienated to some degree from their society. The sense of intense isolation evident throughout the Testament briefly yields to a sense of communion and solidarity. At the same time, the introspective nature of the poem does not totally disappear. In reaching out to the monk, the thief, the jester, the actor, the rejected lover, Villon is also reaching out to and gathering together the various constituent elements of his total personality.

The apparent humility and good will of Villon's “confession” is undermined by the ballad's ending in which the poet curses those who kept him jailed in the prison at Meung-sur-Loire. Villon cannot ask forgiveness for his harsh verbal treatment of his jailers. On the contrary, he assails them with some of the most vehement language of the Testament:

Qu'on leur froisse les quinze costes
De gros mailletz, fors et massis,
De plombees et telz pelotes.

(1992-1994)

(Let their fifteen ribs be mauled
With big hammers heavy and strong
And lead weights and that kind of balls).

The memory of his recent experience in prison which opened the poem is obviously still quite fresh in Villon's mind. While previous allusions to Thibault d'Aussigny and Meung-sur-Loire remain couched in sarcastic terms, Villon makes his final assault in uncharacteristically blunt, unequivocally violent language. Having fully vented his anger and purged himself of resentment, he returns to his plea for pardon. The cursing of the jailers, coming at the end of a petition for forgiveness, underscores the fallibility of the petitioner. In the awesome moment at which he should be making peace with the world before departing, he cannot find within his heart the will to forgive his enemies. Still, the final verse of the ballad, and of the will proper, suggests an attitude of reconciliation, humility, and penance.

Taken literally and within the context of the whole poem, the phrase “Je crye a toutes gens mercis” incorporates a larger meaning. “Je crye” represents the entire verbal act of the Testament, the crying out, the urgent demand for attention. Those to whom Villon cries out, “toutes gens,” are not only those he knows personally, but all those who read his poem, all those who hear his cry. And the plea he makes to us is that we, his readers, grant him “mercis,” compassion and understanding, miséricorde. Read in this manner, the refrain restates a verse of Villon's famous “Ballade des pendus:”

N'ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis

(2)

(Don't let your hearts harden against us).

It is significant that the last utterance of the dying voice dictating the will is a word charged with religious implications, and whose meanings touch the very core of Christianity. As “mercy,” “pity,” or “compassion” mercis encompasses the essential qualities characterizing Christian behavior. As “forgiveness” or “grace” it embodies the hope for salvation. The man who has given so much of himself—his poetry, his emotion, his intellect—who, according to his epitaph, has given all he has, ends his testament in a gesture of supplication, finally asking, even pleading, to receive.

THREE READINGS OF THE FINAL BALLAD (VERSES 1996-2023)

The Testament closes with an epilogue in the form of a eulogy delivered by a disembodied voice. Like the epitaph of which it is an extension, the final ballad succinctly summarizes the life of the deceased, stressing the hardships and humiliations he was forced to endure. Because of its function as a conclusion to the Testament, and the privileged status it acquires by affording Villon an ultimate opportunity to comment on the preceding text, the closing ballad merits scrupulous attention. The epilogue offers us, in fact, a number of clues to help decipher the meaning of this mysterious work. According to which clues we collect, we may read the ballad and the long poem it concludes in at least three different ways. Moreover, these readings are not mutually exclusive, but rather superimposed, each interpreting the poem at a different level.

THE VICTIM

Adding an obscene twist to a stock rhetorical device lifted from courtly tradition, the speaker of the eulogy describes Villon's death as an act of martyrdom:

Car en amours mourut martir
Ce jura il sur son couillon.

(2001-2002)

(For he died a martyr to love
This he swore on his testicle).

The physical loss implied by the singular, son couillon, reinforces and concretizes the victimization which the preceding verse renders in more abstract imagery. Villon, who has worn so many masks throughout his poem, has chosen for his exit the mask of the martyred lover that he first tried on five years earlier in the Lais.⁴ The final ballad culminates a series of images portraying the povre Villon as a pathetic victim. The martyr, as we learn, lived in a state of perpetual exile, leaving pitiful traces of his presence wherever he went:

Tant que, d'icy a Roussillon,
Brosse n'y a ne brossillon
Qui n'eust, ce dit il sans mentir,
Ung lambeau de son cotillon.

(2007-2010)

From here to Roussillon
There isn't a shrub or a bush
That didn't get, he truly speaks,
A shred from his back).

Not only has the povre Villon parted with all his possessions, but he has even left behind his cotillon, the tunic worn as an undergarment, parcelled out in shreds and leaving its owner in a virtual state of nakedness. Now the anonymous voice describes the martyr's end, depicting in vivid terms the moment of his death:

Qui plus, en mourant, mallement
L'espoignoit d'Amours l'esguillon;
Plus agu que le ranguillon
D'ung baudrier luy faisoit sentir.

(2014-2017)

(What's worse, as he died, sorely
The spur of love pricked into him
Sharper than the buckle-tongue
Of a baldric he could feel it).

Again the abstract is conceptualized in graphic terms. The adverb mallement can also be read as mâle-ment, “in male fashion.”⁵ The epitaph states that the poet was killed by a raillon, a word sometimes loosely translated as “arrow,” but actually designating the bolt of a crossbow, a short, square-headed missile. The image of a buckle-tongue strongly connotes phallic penetration (as Kinnell's felicitous translation of verse 2015 implies), and combined with the phallic nature of the raillon and the reading of mâle-ment suggests a novel form of martyrdom which elicits our astonishment:

C'est de quoy nous esmerveillon

(2018)

(And that is what we marvel at).

The theme of victimization culminates in a brutal sexual assault.⁶

For Villon to take his proper place among the other martyrs of love, he must first die a martyr's death. But what are we to make out of this final mockery? Summoned by the bells, we have dutifully arrived at the poet's funeral dressed in the appropriate garb for commemorating a martyr's death (1998-2000). As we listen to the eulogy, we reverently await the re-enactment of the “martyr's” final moments. And now, as the anticipated moment arrives, we suddenly realize that we are watching a farce. It is not only the hapless hero of the poem who is being mocked, but we ourselves, as we stand solemnly and properly in our vermilion, watching this unexpected and totally undignified scene.

The last gesture of the moribund martyr is one of despair:

Sachiez qu'il fist au departir:
Ung traict but de vin morillon.

(2021-2022)

(Hear what he did as he left
He took a long swig of dead-black wine).

In the face of a long series of personal misfortunes, the drinking of the wine represents an act of desperation, an attempt to escape the pain and shame which have just been inflicted. It is the exaggerated gesture of a puppet manipulated into grotesque positions by the smiling puppeteer. The note of tragedy, for which we have been so carefully prepared, never rings. Instead, the last sound echoing from the world of the Testament, after all the raucous noises have subsided, is one of haunting laughter.

THE VICTOR

If the final ballad may be read as a fitting slapstick finale to a long tragicomic farce, it may be taken with equal validity as the heroic conclusion to a tensely dramatic struggle. Throughout the Testament we have followed the conflict between the two primal forces of life and death. At one extreme the poem moves through the painful motions of the danse macabre, lamenting the brevity and fragility of human existence, evoking scenes of cemeteries, boneyards, tombs, deathbeds. At the other extreme, the poem moves to the rhythm of life, brimming with humor, gaiety, and vitality. Fluctuating constantly between the force of life and the force of death, the Testament finally succeeds in fusing the two. For although the closing ballad depicts a scene of death and invokes the dead, it also exudes laughter and life.

The epilogue of the Testament can hardly be said to bear no relation whatsoever to Villon's life as we know it. The references to destitution, banishment, and physical abuse all correspond in some degree to biographical fact. Beneath the obvious travesty of the final ballad lies a core of truth without which the poem would drift meaninglessly detached from the rest of the work. The heroism of the closing moments of the Testament consists in the poet's will to rise above his suffering through an act of self-mockery. Death will break Villon just as we have seen it break his effigy, but the esprit of the poem, reflecting the spirit of the man, will not be destroyed.

In speaking of himself in the third person, Villon separates himself into the observer and the observed, the je and the il, one deceased and one who continues to live. In so doing, he has in a sense managed to outlive himself, conquering death. At the same time, the voice of the eulogy, speaking for the now voiceless martyr, comes to us in effect from the other side of the grave. Even before he has died, Villon is already addressing us from the realm of the dead.

THE OTHER VICTIM

Still another reading of the ballad points to a different hero, and consequently a different ending. Whether a mask deliberately assumed by the poet, or a figure unconsciously summoned, an image of the crucified Christ may be seen, without unduly straining the imagination, in the final verses of the Testament.⁷ Moreover, the connection between the poet and Christ is one for which the reader of the poem should not be totally unprepared. First, there is the matter of Villon's age—thirty years at the writing of the Testament. More important is Villon's relationship with Society. Constantly coming into conflict with civil and ecclesiastical authority, he too was something of an outcast, moving in a milieu considered dangerous by the social establishment. Also, Villon's self-portrayal is that of a sacrificial victim, a martyr, a man who has received far harsher treatment than he deserves, yet who claims he is prepared to give up his life if his death would benefit the bien publicque, the “common good” (121). Finally, the phrase, “Car en amours mourut martir” (2001) applies equally well to both martyrs, one of whom died for a higher form of love than did the other.

To see in the shredding of the martyr's tunic, left behind on every bush “d'icy a Roussillon” (2007), a parallel to the division of Christ's clothing among the Roman soldiers hardly requires an extraordinary leap of imagination. Whether carried out by human or natural agents, the distribution of clothing is accomplished in an equally random manner, leaving the victim to face his death in a state of virtual nakedness. But not completely naked:

Il est ainsi et tellement,
Quant mourut n'avoit qu'ung haillon.

(2012-2013)

(It was like this, so that
By the time he died he had only a rag).

This poor excuse for a garment, according to popular belief and almost every late medieval painting of the scene, was Christ's only clothing on the cross.

One martyr is wounded by an arrow immediately prior to his death; the other is pierced by a lance immediately after his death. The last recorded act of the povre Villon and the last recorded act of Christ (according to the Gospel of John) are identical: the drinking of wine. The wine offered to the victims of crucifixion was a cheap soldier's drink; Villon, wishing to make his exit with a little class, treats himself to a vin supérieur. It is the act, however, and not the quality of the wine that should claim our attention. While the stripping of the garments, the haillon, the arrow wound may be individually construed as vague or fortuitous parallels to the Crucifixion, the consumption of wine as the final act preceding death cannot be so easily discounted, especially when taken in conjunction with the other evidence.

Clearly the type of wine, morillon, is not a random selection. First, appearing in the penultimate verse of the Testament, the word allows Villon to partially sign his work (illon). The word may also be taken, given the poet's frequent use of ellipsis, as a slight abbreviation of mort Villon. It is in usage as well as in name a sort of “death wine,” a wine to be consumed at the moment of death. But also, perhaps, a wine to be consumed in memory of a death. The drinking of the wine, therefore, along with its other connotations, takes on a eucharistic function.

The word morillon in Villon's time was commonly associated with the color black, being used to designate either a black grape, a black duck, or a cloth of the same color.⁸ The last color image of the Testament is one which is rich in symbolic significance and fittingly emblematic of the poem's duality. On one hand, black connotes despair, melancholy, death, and is, of course, the color of mourning. On the other hand, it symbolizes sleep, eternity, the womb, and also the fertility of the earth.⁹ In the context of the Testament the image of blackness marks both an ending and a beginning.

The figure of Christ that emerges in the final ballad of Villon's poem suggests one answer, and perhaps, in the context of medieval thought, the only valid answer to the quest whose progress may be traced through the Testament. In the course of his will, Villon has methodically devalued various ideals to which men dedicate their lives. Material security and the acquisition of financial wealth (Jacques Cuer in his riche tumbeau) lose all meaning inside the darkness of the tomb. The Belle Heaulmière's epicurean attitude toward life can hardly provide more than temporary relief from the crushing burden of mortality. Love, while it may work for Robert and Ambroise, causes more pain than happiness in the eyes of Villon. Human justice is a sham. Kindness and goodness are no match for cruelty and malice. Having revealed the fallibility and illusory nature of all these values, Villon is left with the only value that has resisted the derisive force of his poem. For all his anger, bitterness, and apparent scorn of social respectability, Villon never comes close to profaning the truly sacred. And it is only the truly sacred, in the end, which survives. The evocation of the Crucifixion may indicate, or at least suggest, that the persona of the Testament is moving toward a state of grace. By identifying the martyr of his poem with Christ on the cross, Villon elevates the suffering of the former, endowing it with new meaning.

The journey through the private space of the Testament ends then with a scene that at one level represses past pain, injustice, and anguish by means of a comic device, while at another level redeeming these memories by placing them within a Christian context. The closing ballad which may appear at first reading to represent the nonsensical climax of a nightmarish passage through the darkest recesses of the human spirit, also contains a promise of restored meaning, a faint resurgence of hope, a tentative illumination, the prelude to another stage of the journey.

CONCLUSION

Why did Villon choose the form of a will for his most ambitious and important poetic effort? Having already experimented with the form five years earlier when he wrote the Lais, he was obviously well acquainted with its potential as a vehicle for irony and humor. The satirical testament, of course, was not invented by Villon who was only one of a long line of writers to try his hand at this literary convention.¹⁰ His Testament, however, extends far beyond the traditional confines of the genre. To grasp the essence of Villon's poem, one must turn not to the literary tradition from which it evolved, but to the nature of fifteenth-century wills.

We tend today to think of a legal will as a rather dry document filled with legalistic language and technical detail. The medieval will, by contrast, had a much broader function, ordering the testator's spiritual as well as his material affairs, specifying the place of burial, requesting requiem masses, and containing a variety of religious formulas acknowledging the mortal limits of humanity, the necessity of penance, and summarizing the Christian creed. As Jean Englemann points out in his study of fifteenth-century French wills, these texts represent more than mere secular concerns:

Les invocations pieuses si universelles et si développées qu'ils contiennent nour permettent de conclure, sans pouvoir être taxé d'exagération, qu'au point de vue purement formaliste, le testament du xv^e siècle est un acte riligieux.¹¹

The fifteenth-century will, addressing all important aspects of a man's life, embracing both spiritual and worldly concerns, amounts to a kind of self-definition in the face of death. Approaching his certain end, the testator deliberately and coherently identifies that which he cherishes most in his life. In this sense the will represents a statement of values. This clarification of priorities inevitably results in a sharp distinction between spiritual life and secular life. The fifteenth-century will typically treats the religious matters at the outset before proceeding to mundane concerns, leaving no doubt as to where the priorities lie.

The Testament, in spite of its many digressions, is loosely framed within the form of a will, and in spite of its obvious burlesque elements, possesses, as this study has attempted to demonstrate, a definite religious aspect in its multi-faceted character. Like other great products of the late medieval period, The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Celestina, for example, the Testament shows evidence of a didactic intention. By undercutting all temporal values in an act of wholesale destruction, the poem leaves only the spiritual values standing intact. Now that its creator is actually dead, the Testament acquires validity as a real will, and we may truthfully count ourselves among the heirs. Villon has left us not only his poetry and wit, but also his own understanding, at once deeply personal and deeply medieval, of the meaning of human existence.

A will looks simultaneously to the past and to the future, as does the Testament. From the opening verse of the work, the theme of time asserts its importance. In the course of the Testament Villon repeatedly attempts to situate his poem in time, working with two broad frames of reference. First, he locates the poem within what might be termed “personal time,” setting it against an autobiographical background: his age, the recent experience of imprisonment, the distance that separates the present moment from his early youth. The second frame might be labeled “historical time”: the year 1461, references to well-known people and events, past and present, that place the poem in a more objective temporal perspective. While the early section of the Testament looks primarily toward the past, the poem's conclusion, especially in the epitaph and eulogy, is oriented more toward the future. There are also moments in the poem that altogether transcend the concept of time. The “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” the “Ballade pour prier Nostre Dame,” and the “Ballade pour Robert d'Estouteville” all lift themselves above the destructive flow of time, pointing to the eternal.

A last will and testament can hardly be described as an inherently humorous document. Yet Villon's poem cannot adequately be described without reference to its humor. Mockery becomes a potent weapon when wielded by Villon, and he uses it expertly and pitilessly against those he despises. More important, he knows how to mock himself, his poverty, his humiliations, his suffering. If the writing of the will with all that this act implies—the survey of a life, the meditation on death, and the anticipation of that which lies beyond death—if all this is no more than a sham in Villon's poem, then the Testament's humor is shallow and facile. If, however, the will and all the difficult issues it raises can be taken seriously at some level, then Villon's humor acquires a different meaning. Faced with the inevitable certainty of his mortality, the poet laughs at the illusory nature of temporal existence. Like almost every other aspect of the Testament, this laugh is deeply equivocal. It is the cynical cackle of a dying old man, and the unrestrained mirth of a child radiating life. It both ridicules us and encourages us, derides our weaknesses while offering us a source of strength. Villon is both laughing at us and with us.

Notes

1. Thuasne III, 518.

2. Prens ancre tost, plume, papier;
   Ce que nomme escry vistement.

   (Testament, 789-790)

   (Hurry, get ink, pen, paper
   Write down quickly what I dictate).

   Je cuidé finir mon propos;
   Mais mon ancre trouvé gelé.

   (Lais, 307-308)

   (I tried to finish my task
   But my ink was frozen).

3. See, for example, Villon's use of gros in verse 286.

4. See verse 47 of the Lais.

5. It is Kuhn who originally suggested the reading of mâle-ment for mallement. He attaches the adverb to mourant instead of espoignoit and sees an act of sexual prowess in the death of the povre Villon (p. 333).

6. I first proposed this interpretation in “The Povre Villon and Other Martyred Lovers of the Testament” (in Neophilologus, 64, 356).

7. The religious symbolism to which I refer has only recently come to light. Jean-Charles Payen was the first to draw attention to this aspect of the closing ballad (“Le coup de l'étrier: Villon martyr et Goliard ou comment se faire oublier quand on est immortel?” in Etudes Françaises 16, 21-34). In a paper written before the publication of Payen's article and published slightly later, I examined the same evidence and drew similar conclusions (“The Conclusion of the Testament: An Image in the Shroud?” in Fifteenth-Century Studies, 5, 61-66).

8. The fact that the word is consistently associated with the color black may be explained by its etymology. Morillon derives from the Old French morel, an adjective primarily applied to horses (moreau in modern French), and indicating a dark brown or black color, derived in turn from the vulgar Latin maurellus, a corruption of Maurus, originally designating a dark-skinned inhabitant of Africa. Given its history of linguistic associations with blackness, the word morillon appearing at the end of Villon's poem clearly conveys, among other things, an image of color. While the play on mort-illon has been pointed out by various critics (e.g. Kuhn 334, Thuasne III 548, Rychner II 275), the connotation of color, and the symbolic values attached to this connotation remain unexplored.

9. See, for example, the Dictionnaire des symboles (Paris: Laffont, 1969).

10. See Winthrop Rice, The European Ancestry of Villon's Satirical Testaments (New York, 1941).

11. Les testaments coutumiers au xv^e siècle (Paris: Macon, 1903), p. 80.