SOURCE: “‘Contamination’ and the Central Metaphors,” in The Crossroad of Intentions: A Study of Symbolic Expression in the Poetry of François Villon, Mouton, 1974, pp. 29-63.

[In this excerpt, Vitz examines patterns of erotic and gustatory metaphors to establish the major contrasts in Villon's work. For Vitz, “contamination” describes the way in which metaphor seems to work by proximity in Villon's poetry, as symbolic connotations seem to seep from one line to the next.]

I propose, as an initial approach or avenue into Villon's Testament and accessorily his other works, a study of certain aspects of his use of symbolic expression: a study of certain words and groups of words which seem central to this problem.

The erotic symbolism in the Testament is a particularly useful place to begin this study, for the simple reason that it is both frequent and problematic. Occasionally the reader comes upon passages of blatant and open sexual meaning. Far more frequently, however, he is confronted with passages whose erotic overtones and implied double meanings are very subtle. The subtlety of this symbolism poses serious problems for the reader who wishes to read accurately and fully, without reading anything into the text.

In trying to understand why one so often has the vague impression that there is a hidden sexual meaning—even when it is not totally justified in the passage in question—I realized that this phenomenon is related to the accumulation of sexual nuances over the course of the work. A symbolic equivalence, once established between two words or objects, extends in its general effect to other words with more or less the same meaning, or to words pertaining to the same domain of reality. Such groups of words will be referred to as ‘families’ or ‘semantic fields’. In some cases these other words take on themselves a clear and direct erotic meaning, which will be termed a ‘denotation’ or ‘denotative meaning’. Often, however, they receive only a sexual ‘contamination’, or ‘connotation’, by analogy with the original metaphor. The word ‘contaminate’ seems rather unsatisfactory because of its moralistic, pathological, and nuclear connotation. Unfortunately no other word seems to suggest as adequately as ‘contamination’ the importance of proximity in the building up of symbolic nuances and the tenuousness with which words and notions ‘taint’ each other in Villon's poetry. This process of contamination is basically a metonymic one—determined largely by contiguity, and characterized by great contingency.

To take an isolated strophe as an example: in huitain XCIX we read:

Item, donne a mon advocat,
Maistre, Guillaume Charruau,
Quoy qu'il marchande ou ait estat,
Mon branc; je me tais du fourreau.
Il aura avec un rëau
En change, affin que sa bource enfle …

(T. [Testament] 1022-1027)

Branc in fifteenth-century French had a dual suggestiveness. There is a long tradition of phallic swords in medieval French literature.¹ The sound branc in French also meant ‘dung’, when spelled bren. Branc by itself, out of context, possesses these double meanings only potentially. In this case, our uncertainty as to the realization of this potential and as to the actual presence of a second meaning (or meanings) is dispelled by the word “fourreau”. In a striking example of the suggestive power of praeterition² Villon associates the “branc” with an ‘unmentionable’ sheath.³ We now know that the “branc” itself, symbolically contaminated by its sheath, hides some deeper and ‘shocking’ significance. We still do not know whether this other sense is phallic or excremental, for the sheath can be either vaginal or anal.⁴ In short, the suggestiveness is now clearly present, but remains unfocused. In the next two lines we find a coin, a “rëau”, given so that Charruau's “bource”, ‘purse’, will “swell”. Such objects would have no symbolic relevance to branc as ‘dung’ and fourreau as ‘anus’. They, quite definitely, are significant if branc is ‘sword’ and fourreau ‘vagina’. They complete the sexual sense of this huitain, by suggesting that not only does Charruau need a new phallic sword but even a handful of ‘coins’ to swell his sexual purse. The coins and purse have thus fully clarified the meaning of branc and fourreau. Their own exact semantic content, however, is not completely clear: bource would seem to mean scrotum (as it still can today), but are the rëaux specifically testicles or simply sexual potency in general?

At any rate, in this particular case, the strophe suffices unto itself to establish the presence and nature of its underlying symbolism. Here, the sexual meaning would seem the more important one: Villon draws attention to it and stresses it by his praeterition, while refusing to develop it openly. Moreover, it is the only reading in which the strophe would seem to make any sense.

In the following strophe, huitain C, Villon leaves to his lawyer Fournier “En ma bource quatre havees”.⁵ This statement, which otherwise could have been a perfectly simple, if humorous, one (Villon having just represented himself as poverty stricken), is contaminated by the meaning of bource in the preceding strophe: it takes on an undeniably erotic connotation. Even the “cent solz”⁶ that Villon leaves to Michault Cul d'Oue and Charlot Taranne in huitain CXXXV make us suspicious, as they belong to the same family as rëaux. We cannot affirm that they are a completely nonsexual gift, especially since they are accompanied by “house de basanne”, ‘sheep-leather stockings’, which in the fifteenth century could mean ‘(intercourse with) an old, dried-up woman’.⁷

The symbolic meaning of the branc of strophe XCIX will make itself felt every time we meet a sword, by whatever name. Sometimes, this meaning will be a clearly denotative one. In the Ballade de la Grosse Margot, Villon says:

Se j'ayme et sers la belle de bon hait,
M'en devez vous tenir ne vil ne sot?
Elle a en soy des biens a fin souhait.
Pour son amour sains bouclier et passot …

(T. 1591-1594)

In these first four lines of the ballade Villon presents himself as a courtly lover, ‘serving’ his lady. It would be quite appropriate for him to don a sword in her honor, to fight for the love of her. If it is a little odd that it should be a dagger, and not a sword, that he wields, it will soon become abundantly clear that Margot is no courtly lady but a prostitute, and that Villon is her pimp. The only kind of sword which figures in their wooing in the poem is an erotic one.

In other cases, the meaning that ‘sword’ takes on will be more vague, more open to question—more ‘connotation’ than ‘denotation’. Villon tells us:

Item, ne vueil plus que Cholet
Dolle, tranche, douve ne boise,
Relie broc ne tonnelet,
Mais tout ses houstilz changier voise
A une espee lyonnoise,
Et retiengne le hutinet;
Combien qu'il n'ayme bruyt ne noise,
Si luy plaist il ung tantinet.

(T. 1102-1109)

No more shaving wood, sawing, making staves, joining nails and barrels for Cholet. All these tools he shall exchange for a ‘sword’. But let him keep his barrelmaker's mallet. The presence of ‘sword’, with its high sexually symbolic potential, is troubling in a passage like this one. Such details as Villon's suggestion that he keep his ‘mallet’—which could signify some sort of sexual power—only heighten the sexual connotation, but cannot resolve it into clear denotation. Two strophes later the symbolic ambiguity of this huitain will be even more radically heightened, but still not resolved. In stanza CXI, Villon says:

Item, a l'Orfevre de Bois,
Donne cent clouz, queues et testes,
De gingembre sarrazinois,
Non pas pour acouppler ses boetes,
Mais pour conjoindre culz et coetes,
Et couldre jambons et andoulles,
Tant que le lait en monte aux tetes
Et le sang en devalle aux coulles.

(T. 1118-1125)

One motif in particular here seems to me relevant in considering huitain CIX. No sword appears, but here the notion of ‘joining’ becomes clearly, denotatively, sexual: “conjoindre culz et coetes”, “couldre jambons et andoulles”. The fact that ‘to join’ here means ‘to join sexually’ does not necessarily mean that it meant the same thing in any denotative sense two strophes earlier. It nonetheless throws a still more strongly sexual cast over that already troubling huitain.

As is apparent from the above example, the diffusion of erotic connotations—the contamination—in Villon's work is not a purely linear phenomenon. We do not just notice as we read along that words take on more and more nuances. The contamination works backwards as well as forward. It throws into question, retroactively, words and passages which we have already read, seeing at the time (or fully justified in seeing) only their surface content. A few more examples of this phenomenon may further clarify the point. In huitain XC Villon gave a gift to his amye Marthe:

Item, m'amour, ma chiere Rose,
Ne luy laisse ne cuer ne foye;
Elle ameroit mieulx autre chose,
Combien qu'elle ait assez monnoye.
Quoy? une grant bource de soye,
Plaine d'escuz, parfonde et large;
Mais pendu soit il, que je soye,
Qui luy laira escu ne targe.

(T. 910-917)

In this huitain Villon is in a quandary as to the most suitable gift for Marthe. He is trying to decide what she would most appreciate. In one sense, Villon is telling us here that he will give her neither his love nor his faith (his promise of faithfulness). She would rather have something else: a big silken purse full of coins. By going back to the literal meaning of cuer and by his pun on foye, Villon is also saying: I leave her neither my heart nor my liver. That “something else” she would rather he give her is now, by implication, some other organ. And that other organ is a grant bource de soye. We may well suspect that the purse in question is a testicular one. It is only nine strophes later, however, when the sexual meanings of “sword”, “sheath” and “purse”⁸ are fully clarified that we can verify retroactively our hypothesis: that the silken purse full of coins—at least at one level of interpretation—meant symbolically and elliptically, the sexual love of a rich and potent man; of a man whose sexual purse is full, and who is dressed in silk. In this case, the sexual meaning of the strophe, which would appear to be fully denotative, is not the only or even the more important meaning. Both the literal sense and the figurative, sexual, sense are valid. Both are informative about Marthe's character, each completing the other. What emerges from this dual meaning is the portrait of an uncourtly, ‘unidealistic’ woman who is interested in the concrete, in what can be of immediate use to her: money and carnal love rather than vows of eternal fidelity. Villon's ultimate reaction to Marthe—his expression of his feelings about her—contains a double meaning. In the last two lines of the strophe Villon declares on the one hand, “May he be hanged—or may I be—who gives her escu or targe”. Just as in the case of rëau, the coin that fills the sexual purse is itself contaminated. Villon here disapproves of any sexual expenditure on Marthe. Whether this is from resentment or for reasons of morality is unclear. On the other hand, Villon here would also seem to be exploiting a possible erotic meaning of pendu: let only a sexually competent, “well hung” man undertake to give Marthe seminal “money”.

In the above example the second, sexual, meaning which appeared retroactively fulfilled and developed the original, literal sense. In the following case the opposite is true. Villon quotes a supposed maligner of prostitutes:

“S'ilz n'ayment fors que pour l'argent,
On ne les ayme que pour l'eure;
Rondement ayment toute gent,
Et rient-lors que bource pleure …

(T. 577-580)

Literally, this critic of prostitutes is warning Villon against their greed and against their fundamental indifference to men. But we come to understand later on that symbolically and unintentionally he was saying (being made to say, by Villon) something quite different: such women want only to be loved and are only happy when a man's “purse” overflows in tears—“weeps”.

This tendency for certain words and real objects to exercise a contaminating influence—to irradiate symbolic meaning—throughout the entire work suggests that the notion of ‘symbolic centers’ may be a helpful one. In the examples studied thus far, the male sexual organs would seem to act as such a center. They have a powerful symbolic effect on their immediate context.⁹ This effect, or contamination, often results from an analogy to reality. Bource became sexualized by analogy to its proximity to branc and its real functions: “swelling”, “weeping”, and so forth.¹⁰ They also radiate contaminations out onto other passages, often by semantic analogy: passot¹¹ became erotic as if by analogy to branc.

A still more powerful symbolizing center is female sexuality, the semantic field of the sadinet,¹² which transforms into erotic metaphor an enormous sector of reality. The female and the male centers tend to affect overlapping sectors of reality and have a mutual influence on each other. On occasion, as we shall see, they function symbolically as a unit exercising a very powerful sexualizing influence.

The primary metaphors for the female sex organs in Villon's work are rose, fourreau, trou, cage; food also has a strongly sexual tendency, centered around the union of male and female. Each of these metaphorical names contaminates more or less completely and more or less precisely, depending on the case, the family of words and domain of reality to which it belongs.

To consider the image of man and woman and their sexual organs as food, we might start by turning once again to Villon's gift for the goldsmith:

Item, a l'Orfevre de Bois,
Donne cent clouz, queus et testes,
De gingembre sarrazinois,
Non pas pour acouppler ses boetes,
Mais pour conjoindre culz et coetes,
Et couldre jambons et andoulles,
Tant que le lait en monte aux tetes
Et le sang en devalle aux coulles.

(T. 1118-1125)

The first four lines of this stanza are perfectly anodyne—except that saracenic ginger was an aphrodisiac. Suddenly in the fifth line Villon explains most unambiguously the purpose of this gift: to join arses and tails. In the next line he gives a synonym: to sew together hams and sausages. And the last two lines make it still more abundantly clear that the union in question is a sexual one. As we shall see, the equation here between food and sex organ will have a troubling effect on other passages in the poem. First, however, one curious thing about the sexual imagery in this stanza should be noted. The combination of culz and coetes jambons and andoulles, is unmistakably erotic. The male half of these two pairs is clearly phallic: coetes (queues) and andoulles; but in the evocation of the female half we perceive a certain distancy of expression: first “ass” and, still more so, “ham” describe only a general area of the body, not an organ. (Incidentally, the absence of any clearly female organ in this union might be taken to suggest the possibility that the couple is a homosexual one. However, later in the poem, the feminity of one partner is postulated “tant que le lait en monte aux têtes”.)

In the next two strophes, Villon leaves his legacy to Jehan Riou:

Au cappitaine Jehan Riou,
Tant pour luy que pour ses archiers,
Je donne six hures de lou,
Qui n'est pas vïande a porchiers,
Prinses a gros mastins de bouchiers,
Et cuites en vin de buffet.
Pour mengier de ces morceaulx chiers,
On en feroit bien ung malfait.
C'est vïande ung peu plus pesante
Que duvet n'est, plume, ne liege.
Elle est bonne a porter en tente,
Ou pour user en quelque siege.
S'ilz estoient prins a un piege,
Que ces mastins ne sceussent courre,
J'ordonne, moy qui suis son miege,
Que des pealx, sur l'iver, se fourre.

(T. 1126-1141)

Having just read about sexual jambons and andoulles, we cannot but be suspicious of “wolf meat”. Although the literal meaning remains perfectly acceptable, there is also here an underlying, denotative, sexual meaning. These “six head of wolf meat”, that is, low-grade meat, may refer to a particularly unappetizing group of feminine morsels, snatched from their butcher-lovers (“Prinses a gros mastins de bouchiers”), ‘stewed’ on “vin de buffet”. These “morceaulx chiers” are good for use only when no one else is available—during a battle or a siege. It is only safe to “se fourrer” with their skins when the butcher-curs, their lovers, are caught in a trap somewhere and incapable of attack.

Let us note that in this passage as in the one which preceded it food is identified with sexual femininity, but not specifically with any female sexual organ.

If in the two examples just discussed, food has taken on a clear, denotative, sexual meaning, such is by no means always the case. At the end of the Ballade de la Grosse Margot, Villon concludes: “Ventre, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit”.¹³ In the context of this strongly sexual poem, Villon's “bread” is most suggestively phallic. That one of the names in medieval slang for one's ‘woman’ was boulangère¹⁴ intensifies this connotation.

Another example from the Margot is significant. In the first strophe we read:

Quant viennent gens, je cours et happe ung pot,
Au vin m'en fuis, sans demener grant bruit;
Je leur tens eaue, frommage, pain et fruit.
“S'ilz paient bien, je leur dis: “Bene stat;
Retournez cy, quant vous serez en ruit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat!”

(T. 1591-1600)

Here the food imagery as it appears in the brothel is naturally associated with fleshly pleasures in general, but no more. We are perhaps sensitized to the sexually contaminative effect that food has in Villon's poetry, but we are certainly not justified in reading ‘sex’ instead of ‘food’. Two stanzas later Margot is in bed with Villon and he tells us:

Tous deux ivres, dormons comme ung sabot.
Et au resveil, quant le ventre luy bruit,
Montre sur moy, que ne gaste son fruit.

(T. 1615-1617)

The ‘fruit’ in the first stanza was only vaguely suggestive. This second one, however, clearly denotes sexual pleasure. This ‘fruit’, and the ‘baked bread’ of the envoi, retroactively heighten the suggestive intensity of the first strophe's “eaue, frommage, pain et fruit”.

In concluding on this aspect of food symbolism, we should note that its sexually contaminative effect in the work is unsystematic. Moreover, we will see later that food and nourishment have other symbolic meanings in the Testament as well as their erotic implications.

‘Rose’ is a still more striking example of the contaminative power of a symbolic center in Villon's poetry. Here one feels a real symbolic extension of the metaphor¹⁵ reaching out to encompass an ever greater sector of the world and of experience. First, “rose” assimilates into sexual imagery the more general word “flower”, as well as, by analogy to the aging of the sexual rose, the verbs designating the decline of the blossom: Villon warns Marthe, his “chiere rose”,

Ung temps viendra qui fera dessechier,
Iaunir, flestrir vostre espanye fleur.

(T. 958-959)

Fleur in a passage like this one refers both to Marthe's sexual “flower” and in a larger sense to her beauty and youth and sexual attraction in general.

The place where the flower grows is clearly, denotative, subsumed: the “Old Hëaulmiere” looks down on her physical corruption and asks where are

Ces larges rains, ce sadinet
Assis sur grosses fermes cuisses,
Dedans son petit jardinet?

(T. 506-508)

With this notion of the jardinet in which the sexual flower grows go the various verbs that imply the cultivation of that field: in the Lais, Villon complained of being mistreated by his lady and concluded: “Planter me fault autres complans.”¹⁶ In the Testament, Villon speaking for Robert d'Estouteville says:

Si ne pers pas la graine que je sume
En vostre champ, quand le fruit me ressemble.
Dieu m'ordonne que le fouÿsse et fume …

(T. 1398-1400)

Here we see that with this notion of fecundity and fecundation goes the “fruit” as ‘child’. But with “fruit” we are back to food imagery …

The case of fourreau is equally rich. “Sheath”, as we have seen, contaminates the sword and the dagger (and/or it is contaminated by them). Battle is erotic battle: the Hëaulmiere evokes her past jousting.

… hanches charnues,
Eslevees, propres, faictisses
A tenir amoureuses lisses;

(T. 503-505)

Casual swipes are sexual, too: Villon complains that he had never had a chance to love Marthe: “Et qu'esse cy? Mourray sans coup ferir?”¹⁷ Finally even the opposite of war, peace is endowed with a clearly erotic meaning: after a battle with Margot in the brothel, Villon tells us: “Puis paix se fait …”¹⁸—meaning then we were reconciled, then we made love.

This tendency for military vocabulary to appear in Villon's work with sexual connotations is fully manifest in the very name the “Hëaulmiere”.¹⁹ This name, the feminine form of the term ‘helmet-maker’, would mean literally the helmet-maker's wife or woman. Symbolically, however, her name expresses her sexual way of life as prostitute.

We then find a woman called la Machecoue:

Item, quant est de Merebeuf
Et de Nicolas de Louviers,
Vache ne leur donne ne beuf,
Car vachiers ne sont ne bouviers,
Mais gens a porter espreviers,
Ne cuidez pas que je me joue,
Et pour prendre perdris, plouviers,
Sans faillir, sur la Machecoue.

(T. 1046-1053)

Machecoue, or machicoulis is part of the fortification of a medieval fortress: it is a hole or opening in a parapet through which heavy objects or boiling water could be dropped on the heads of attackers. Just as in the preceding case, the Hëaulmiere's profession contaminated her military name, so in this case the military name makes us wonder if the Machecoue is not also a prostitute.

Two of the most interesting metaphors are trou and cage, which are obviously related, and whose symbolic resonance and far-reaching impact will be studied together. First of all, insofar as trou means, literally, hole or aperture of some kind in a wall, we have just experienced its erotic potential in the person of Machecoue—that military aperture! Its precise sexual denotation is also manifest in Villon's evocation of an obscene song:

S'elle eust le chant “Marionette”,
Fait pour Marion la Peautarde,
Ou d'“Ouvrez vostre huys, Guillemette”,
Elle allast bien a la moustarde.

(T. 1780-1783)

Aller a la moustarde referred to the popular and obscene songs sung by bands of children on their way to buy mustard, and also meant in slang ‘to make love’.²⁰

Villon complains about the treatment his lady has forced upon him:

Ainsi m'ont Amours abusé
Et pourmené de l'uys au pesle.

(T. 705-706)

That is, thus has Love abused me, lured me out and locked the door behind me. And that ‘locked door’ is hers—both literal and sexual.

The Hëaulmiere warns her girls:

“Et vous, la gente Saulciciere
Qui de dancier estre adestre,
Guillemete la Tapiciere,
Ne mesprenez vers vostre maistre:
Tost vous fauldra clorre fenestre;
Quant deviendrez vielle, flestrie,
Plus ne servirez qu'ung viel prestre
Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie.

(T. 541-548)

Here again, the “window” that they will have to close is that literal window that opened from their rooms onto the street and through which they solicited. It is also the sexual uys that they will have to close in their old age.

Even when the “hole” in question is not denotatively or even connotatively a sexual one, it retains a strong suggestive power: Villon witnesses a couple of lovers through a chink in the plaster.

Sur mol duvet assis, ung gras chanoine,
Lez un brasier, en chambre bien natee,
A son costé gisant dame Sidoine,
Blanche, tendre, polie et attintee,
Boire ypocras, a jour et a nuytee,
Rire, jouer, mignonner et baisier,
Et nu a nu pour mieulx des corps s'aisier
Les vy tous deux, par ung trou de mortaise …

(T. 1473-1480)

In other words, holes, chinks, windows tend to appear in passages involving the sexual act, in one or another of its aspects.

This is equally true of the word trou in another of its acceptations: as bar or tavern. The taverns in Villon's poetry are very frequently presented with erotic suggestiveness: the Trou Perrete for instance, where the woman's name identifies her as owner and willing hostess of both a literal and a metaphorical trou. Villon renders still more explicit the atmosphere which reigns in the world of the tavern by the string attached to the gift:

S'il sceust jouer a ung tripot,
Il eust de moy le Trou Perrete.

(T. 1958-1959)

Jouer a un tripot meant ‘to play tennis’ in fifteenth-century French, and ‘to make love’ in slang.²¹

Bordeau is the final and logical extension of trou as a place, combined with its privileged association with the sexual act. This is the one word that unites the double postulation “Tout aux tavernes et aux filles”.²²

As for “cage”, it appears with a denotative erotic sense which fully exploits its fifteenth-century slang potential:²³

Item, je donne a frere Baude,
Demourant en l'ostel des Carmes,
Portant chiere hardie et baude,
Une sallade et deux guysarmes,
Que Detusca et ses gens d'armes
Ne luy riblent sa caige vert,
Viel est: s'il ne se rent aux armes,
C'est bien le deable de Vauvert.

(T. 1190-1197)

The “green cage” which old Brother Baude is in danger of losing is quite clearly his young mistress. And note that the gift which Villon gives Baude to enable him to hold her is a helmet and two double-edged battle-axes …

“Cage” also pulls the notion of ‘trap’, ‘nets’, into the sexual sphere:

Se celle que jadis servoie …
Se dit m'eust, au commencement,
Sa voulenté (mais nennil, las!)
J'eusse mis paine aucunement
De moy retraire de ses las

(T. 673-680)

When cage and trou are related in their common meaning, ‘dungeon’, small imprisoning hole, we find that they touch by their symbolizing force another very important world in their semantic field: the prison.

En ce temps que j'ay dit devant …
Me vint ung vouloir de brisier
La tres amoureuses prison
Qui souloit mon cuer debrisier.

(L. [Le Lais] 9-16)

Two points must be stressed here: by virtue of the explicitly or implicitly sexual meanings which garden, tavern, prison have all taken on, they throw a vague, a slight but nonetheless certain erotic tinge onto all the words of their common family—that of the enclosed space, the container. They add a nuance to the semantic content of all the numerous ostels, logis, jardins that Villon leaves to people or to which he alludes.²⁴ To give but one example, in huitain CXXXVI:

Item, au seigneur de Grigny,
Auquel jadis laissay Vicestre,
Je donne la tour de Billy
Pourveu, s'uys y a ne fenestre
Qui soit ne debout ne en estre,
Qu'il mette tres bien tout a point.
Face argent a destre et senestre:
Il m'en fault et il n'en a point.

(T. 1346-1353)

The presence of these motifs (window, door, money), whose meaning has been so contaminated in various contexts by sexual symbolism, contaminates this building, too. It adds an imprecise but unmistakable nuance of meaning to the strophe. And it is this very nuance which renders traditional textual analysis so difficult in Villon's poetry.

Second, if there is a general tinge of eroticism imparted to the work as a whole by this symbolic process, it would most certainly be abusive to assert that every time we meet in the text one of the words which I have discussed it is explicitly or even implicitly sexual. Even when it is not, however, in any sense used sexually, it nonetheless takes its meaning in part by relation to this general pattern.

The contamination, or symbolic attraction, in Villon's poetry is not just at the service of erotic symbolism; the point of all this is not to reduce the meaning of Villon's work to its sexual repercussions. Rather, this symbolism itself is part of a larger context: it is but one aspect of the whole experience of loving and being loved, holding and being held, containing and being contained.

If sex is the center of a powerful symbolizing force, it is but one extension of a still richer symbolic structure, one which embraces nearly all of reality as Villon represents it. The core, or center of this symbolizing field is the word or idea fosse. We have seen how fosse, as trou or cage can be a sexual metaphor. But it is also the word to describe the place where one lies dead: in ordering the arrangement of his sepulchre, Villon orders “Item, vueil qu'autour de ma fosse …”²⁵ And it describes the place where one is imprisoned: “En fosse gis, non pas soubz houx ne may”.²⁶ The very fact that one central image—the fosse—is used to express radically different human situations, implies that Villon posits a symbolic similarity among them—that in some sense he perceives or feels them to be alike. To use the same word for woman and sex as for death and prison is to imply, among other things, that even death or prison can have some positive meaning. And Villon does present them as places of security, repose: “REPOS ETERNEL DONNE A CIL, SIRE”.²⁷ But to use one word for them all might also suggest that sex and love can be confining, or deadening, or even fatal, as well as pleasurable.

These implications are rendered quite explicit in the text by Villon's use of mixed metaphor. He uses death vocabulary to describe prison:²⁸ originally by applying the word for grave-hole to dungeon: “En fosse gis …” To be freed from prison is to be delivered from death:

Escript l'ay l'an soixante et ung
Que le bon roy me delivera
De la dure prison de Mehun,
Et que vie me recouvra …

(T. 81-84)

Villon uses prison vocabulary to describe love: the “tres amoureuse prison”²⁹ and the “las”³⁰ of passion.

The “sword”, weapon of death, is also the instrument of love. Villon seems to pass over in general the courtly and metaphysical notion of the death of each lover to and in the other, but he obviously conceives of passion as resulting in death or intense suffering: “en amours mourut martir”.³¹ More curious, when Villon speaks of the anguish of dying, whom do we find as examples of death's victims? Paris and Helen—whom we would ordinarily associate with more symbolic forms of death, the courtly or sexual.³²

Et meure Paris ou Helaine,
Quinconques meurt, meurt a douleur
Telle qu'il pert vent et alaine;
Son fiel se creve sur son cuer,
Puis sue, Dieu scet quelle sueur! …

(T. 313-317)

Villon insists on the body of the beautiful young woman, naked, desirable, as particularly vulnerable to death. The appropriateness of the choice may stem in part from the erotically suggestive nature of the death described here:

La mort le fait fremir, pallir,
Le nez courber, les vaines tendre,
Le col enfler, la chair mollir,
Joinctes et nerfs croistre et estendre.
Corps femenin, qui tant es tendre,
Poly, souef, si precieux,
Te fauldra il ces maux attendre?
Oy, ou tout vif aller es cieulx.

(T. 321-328)

If the only escape is to “tout vif aller es cieulx” it is perhaps because the Virgin alone never ‘died’ in love.

The symbolic fabric of Villon's poetry is still more complex: fosse, as we have seen expands geographically and symbolically to encompass the general idea of prison, involves ultimately in its meaning all the vocabulary of walls and towers. Walls and towers can enclose in both a negative, imprisoning way, but also in a positive, protective one. Among the enormous numbers of walled cities and fortresses (which takes us back to weaponry …) in Villon's works, some are clearly beneficent, welcoming:

Combien qu'au plus fort de mes maulx,
En cheminant sans croix ne pille,
Dieu, qui les pelerins d'Esmaus
Conforta, ce dit l'Evangille,
Me monstra une bonne ville
Et pourveut du bon d'esperance; …

(T. 97-102)

Paris is a mother:

Le droit luy donne d'eschevin,
Que j'ay comme enfant de Paris …

(T. 1059-1060)

The Virgin is described as a “chastel”, a “fortress”,³³ offering protection and refuge. Saint Generou has a pleasantly mysterious aura, like a fairyland:

Se je parle ung peu poictevin,
Ice m'ont deux dames apris.
Elles sont tres belles et gentes,
Demourans a Saint Generou
Pres Saint Julien de Voventes,
Marche de Bretaigne ou Poictou.
Mais i ne di proprement ou
Yquelles passent tous les jours;
M'arme! i ne seu mie si fou,
Car i vueil celer mes amours.

(T. 1059-1069)

The symbolic importance of its location, of its almost magical power, is revealed by Villon's refusal to discuss it further.

Other cities are maleficent—in fact, the “dure prison de Mehun” is compared to a city and opposed to “bonne ville” by a pun:

Si prie au benoist fils de Dieu …
Qui m'a préservé de maint blasme
Et franchy de ville puissance.

(T. 49-54)

Even if one were not sure just what the historical references were concerning Douai and Lille,³⁴ it is clear to the reader, at least, that he would not want to visit them:

Si prieray pour luy [Thibault d'Aussigny] de bon cuer
Et pour l'ame de feu Cotart.
Mais quoy? ce sera donc par cuer,
Car de lire je suis fetart.
Priere en feray de Picart;
S'il ne la scet, voise l'apprendre,
S'il m'en croit, ains qu'il soit plus tart,
A Douai ou a l'Isle en Flandre!

(T. 33-40)

Still other cities are metaphors from criminal slang: aller à Montpipeau means voler en pipant, aller à Rueil means détrousser,³⁵ and they are both dangerous spots, deux lieux where one tends to lose his skin.³⁶Bordeau, of course, is a highly ambivalent place:

Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit.
Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit.
Lequel vault mielx? Chascun bien s'entresuit.
L'ung vault l'autre; c'est a mau rat mau chat.
Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit;
Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit.
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

(T. 1621-1627)

Rennes?

Moy, povre mercerot de Renes,
Mourray je pas? Oy, se Dieu plaist …

(T. 417-418)

Just as Villon here is any man, Rennes seems to be anyplace, and noplace. In short, the symbolic and equivocal nature of the walled city as protection and confinement pervades all the Testament, and the Lais.

The symbolic pattern which we have been discussing has several radical effects in the text. Themes which are theoretically very different, which in an ossified allegory would be irreconcilably opposed, lose their quality of polarization by being expressed with the same words or images. Life and death, sexual and religious or maternal love, freedom and imprisonment, though they may be intellectual dichotomies, are shown to be, affectively, very close indeed.

Thus, as I suggested earlier, woman is food and repose; a sheath for a sword, a garden, a place to hide. But she is also death, and imprisonment—be she Marthe, mother, or the Virgin Mary. She is protection, she is the ‘inside’. But a woman's love can also mean, for a man, being inside wanting out, and exile: being outside wanting in.

The Ballade des dames du temps jadis offers one excellent example of the way in which Villon symbolically invalidates traditional thematic—and intellectual—oppositions. After evoking in the first stanza women of classical legend and myth famous for their love, Villon in the second strophe asks:

Ou est la tres sage Helloïs,
Pour qui chastré fut et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart a Saint Denis?
Pour son amour ou ceste essoyne.
Semblablement, ou est la royne
Qui commanda que Buridan
Fust geté en ung sac en Saine?
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

(T. 337-344)

Here we find two couples. In each of the two, the man suffered for his love either mutilation or death. Though Helloïs was sage—a wise and virtuous woman—Peter Abelard ‘paid’ for his love for her by being castrated and then becoming a monk. As for the fate of Buridan,³⁷ he unites the triple symbolic postulation in Villon's poetry: love, prison, death. For the love of the queen he was tied up in a sack, at once prison and shroud, and was thrown to his death in the Seine.

Then we pass to the third strophe, where we first meet another queen:

La royne Blanche comme lis
Qui chantoit a voix de seraine,
Berte au grant pié, Bietris, Alis,
Haremburgis qui tint le Maine,
Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine
Qu'Englois brulerent a Rouan;
Ou sont ilz, ou Vierge souvraine?
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

(T. 345-352)

The queen Blanche comme lis is probably Blanche de Castille, the mother of Saint Louis.³⁸ The first line, stressing her lily-like purity, suggests an opposition between her and Buridan's cruel mistress. But this opposition—itself sabotaged by the erotic suggestion which the flower, lis, brings with it—will be of very short duration. In the next line Villon continues his description of the queen: she chantoit a voix de seraine. Blanche may be pure, but her voice is that of a siren. Is even a mother's love³⁹ dangerous?

In the rest of the poem Villon evokes first women famous for their families: Alis and Bietris were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, in the chanson de geste Hervi de Metz. Berte, Charlemagne's mother, was also Bietris's niece.⁴⁰ Haremburgis was the daughter and heiress of Hélie, the Compte de Maine.⁴¹ Finally, Villon evokes Jehanne la bonne Lorrainne, the Pucelle d'Orléans, famous for her patriotism, her love of country, as well as for her purity and holiness.

One thing that stands out in this poem is that every kind of love portrayed here proved dangerous. That Helloïs was sage was no protection to Abelard. Jehanne suffered no less than Buridan: he drowned, she burned. If anything, she suffered more—in some versions of the Buridan legend he had a boat waiting on the river under the Queen of Navarre's window … Blanche was no less dangerous, no less a seductress than Buridan's queen. Every kind of love presents a deadly threat, as this poem makes clear. But it is not just love that is fatal. Villon asks in the two ballads immediately following this one,⁴²ubi sunt the pope Calixtus and King Arthur and Du Guesclin and the preux of Vienne and Grenoble, and many, many others, and we realize that life itself is ‘fatal’.

In seeking to understand the nature of Villon's symbolic language one must study the opposition between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ which is fundamental in the poem.

Villon, the filles de joie, and all the poor in general have one important characteristic in common: they are all described as being on the outside, and more specifically, on the outside looking in. The relation of the poor to the banquet (in all the broad sense of that idea in Villon's poetry) of life is one of exclusion: they are naked, unprotected, starving:

Et les autres sont devenus,
Dieu mercy! grans seigneurs et maistres;
Les autres mendient tous nus
Et pain ne voient qu'aux fenestres;
Les autres sont entrez en cloistres
De Celestins et de Chartreux,
Botez, housez, com pescheurs d'oistres.
Voyez l'estat divers d'entre eux.

(T. 233-240)

They only see life by looking through windows into the homes and shops of the rich.

The Belle Hëaulmiere warns her girls, as we have seen:

“Et vous, la gente Saulciciere
Qui de dancier estes adestre,
Guillemete la Tapiciere,
Ne mesprenez vers vostre maistre:
Tost vous fauldra clorre fenestre;
Quant deviendrez vielle, flestrie,
Plus ne servirez qu'un viel prestre,
Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie.

(T. 541-548)

We see here exactly what the situation of the prostitute is in society—that of the spectator with a first-row seat. And this is the very cause for her anguish—she sees but can never experience la vraie vie, ever absente. She is only directly involved in this desirable world as something which it uses, as a piece of merchandise, or money. And it is as a piece of merchandise that she—like prostitutes today in certain cities of Europe—is seen through the window. With old age and its ugliness, she cannot even enjoy this vicarious participation; she is a coin which has passed from circulation, she must close her window on life.

Finally, we turn back to the passage where Villon describes himself as the spectator to a love scene.

Sur mol duvet assis, ung gras chanoine,
Lez ung brasier, en chambre bien natee,
A son costé gisant dame Sidoine,
Blanche, tendre, polie et attintee,
Boire ypocras, a jour et a nuytee,
Rire, jouer, mignonner et baisier,
Et nu a nu, pour mieulx des corps s'aisier,
Les vy tous deux, par ung trou de mortaise …

(T. 1473-1480)

The humurous sensuality of the first seven lines turns bitter in our mouth as we reach the last one, and find Villon thus degraded, even to get the most paltry and second-hand taste of life.

These three windows are all, we sense, one window—and all in the same wall: that which separates those who live from those who watch, those on the inside from those on the outside. Through this window we see the “chambre bien natee”,⁴³ with plump and polished lovers; the rich interiors of the cloisters into which “some” have “entered”;⁴⁴ the “bons ostels”⁴⁵ and the homes of the Jacques Cuers of the world, who later reside “soubz riche tombeau”.⁴⁶

What does this notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ allow us to explain—what in the Testament which may have been incomprehensible before, takes on a new meaning, a new relevance to the work as a whole? Rather, can this image reveal a coherence in Villon's work which otherwise might pass unnoticed? For otherwise, all this analysis is just a sterile notation of formal oppositions.

It is not an obscure historical reference, I think, but Villon's impression of being forever ‘outside’ that would explain the humor of a passage like the following:

Item, viengne Robin Turgis
A moy, je lui paieray son vin;
Combien, s'il treuve mon logis,
Plus fort sera que le devin.

(T. 1054-1057)

There is no danger that Robin Turgis will find his house, because Villon is essentially a ‘houseless’, ‘homeless’ man, an outsider. That he may actually have had a place to live is not necessarily relevant.

Moreover, that explains why it is a joke for Villon to leave even the simplest, smallest chapel of his own. It should be noted that he almost always leaves people either public property, or land or buildings belonging to someone else.

Item, a Chappelain je laisse
Ma chappelle a simple tonsure,
Chargiee d'une seiche messe
Ou il ne fault pas grant lecture.

(T. 1836-1839)

The mass is “dry”, that is, without consecration, and there is no reading of scripture necessary, because there is no chapel.

It is in this light that the Virgin's role as his only home, the only place he can take refuge, takes on its full import:

Autre chastel n'ay, ne fortresse,
Ou me retraye corps et ame,
Quant sur moy court malle destresse,
Ne ma mere, la povre femme!

(T. 869-872)

The role of a modern Alexander in his life would have been, precisely, to take him from that anti-home, poverty. As Villon quotes his fortunate double Diomedes, poverty is a singularly unhappy place to be:

Et saiche qu'en grant povreté
Ce mot se dit communement,
Ne gist pas grande loyauté …

(T. 150-152)

An Alexander would have ushered him into happiness (or Happiness):

Se Dieu m'eust donné rencontrer
Ung autre piteux Alixandre
Qui m'eust fait en bon eur entrer …

(T. 161-163)

Poverty, and misery and unhappiness in general, can be described both as being inside the wrong place (like being ‘in’ prison), or being on the outside of the right place. So we find a strophe like:

Je plains le temps de ma jeunesse,
(Ouquel j'ay plus qu'autre gallé
Jusques a l'entree de viellesse),
Qui son partement m'a celé.
Il ne s'en est a pié allé
N'a cheval: helas! comment don?
Soudainement s'en est vollé
Et ne m'a laissié quelque don.
Allé s'en est, et je demeure,
Povre de sens et de savoir,
Triste, failly, plus noir que meure,
Qui n'ay ne cens, rente, n'avoir …

(T. 169-180)

In this example we first see Villon's quasi-geographical passage from a pleasant place to an unpleasant one—from Jeunesse to Vieillesse. But then Villon drops that image, and adopts another: suddenly we see him not leaving Jeunesse but being abandoned by her—she flies off and leaves him, alone, and nowhere. We also see here, as in numerous other passages, the close link between being ‘outside’ and being poor—for as Jeunesse flies off, she leaves him sans don.

There are even passages where it is not clear to the reader whether Villon is complaning that he is inside wanting out or outside wanting in. In stanza X of the Lais, Villon says:

Item, a celle que j'ai dit,
Qui si durement m'a chassié
Que je suis de joye interdit
Et de tout plaisir dechassié
Je laisse mon cuer enchassié,
Palle, piteux, mort et transy:
Elle m'a ce mal pourchassié,
Mais Dieu luy en face mercy!

(L. 73-80)

One's immediate reaction to this huitain is, I think, that Villon is bewailing his rejection by “her”: she “drove him out”. But chassier, in French, does not only mean ‘drive away, chase out’ but also ‘hunt’ or ‘chase’. And only sixty lines earlier Villon had said:

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 souloit mon cuer debrisier.

(L. 9-16)

At the season when most people want to draw near to the warm fires of home, Villon wanted to break out of the prison of love in which she had enclosed him. So, in this passage, has she driven him away, or is he trying to escape from her?

What is the geographical location of the ‘outside’? In the out-of-doors: the poor, like the wolf, live hungry in the forest—

Necessité fait gens mesprendre
Et faim saillir le loup du bois.

(T. 167-168)

It is in part for this reason that nature, when it does appear in Villon's poetry, appears in such a negative light. His poems are scarcely the song of the open road: to be outside, in the countryside literally or metaphorically is to be on the ‘outside’, exiled from the city, the home, the ‘inside’.

Therefore, no matter what they think, Gontier and Hélène are crazy to find poverty—sleeping “soubz le bel esglantier”⁴⁷—preferable to life in the city, in a warm, carpeted room:

Tout leur mathon, ne toute leur potee,
Ne prise ung ail, je le dy sans noysier.
S'ilz se vantent couchier soubz le rosier,
Lequel vault mieulx? Lict costoyé de chaise?
Qu'en dites vous? Faut il a ce musier?
Il n'est tresor que de vivre a son aise.

(T. 148-192)

“Chambre bien natee”⁴⁸, with an elegant woman and good food, that is the “doulce vie”⁴⁹ which Villon—if not the cloddish country lovers—desires.

Exile is not an abstract idea in Villon's poetry—it does not just mean being in another land, or even being far from friends or family, but, very concretely, straying through the country, wandering around everywhere and nowhere: “cheminant sans croix ne pille”.⁵⁰

Et je croy bien que pas n'en ment;
Car chassié fut comme ung souillon
De ses amours hayneusement,
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,
Quant de ce monde voult partir.

(T. 2004-2011)

Nature is thus not green leaves and fields and flowers, except insofar as a woman, through her love, is nature and flowers and fruit for a man: Ambroise is Robert d'Estouteville's “lorier souef”, his “olivier franc”.⁵¹ Nature itself is fundamentally a negation, an absence; it is no-place, the anti-home.

But the poor, and le povre petit Villon, do have a sort of home: the brothel. Despite all the disgust in the Ballade de la Grosse Margot, one gets from it a very real sense that Villon is contained by this place—he is at home, he is host here:

Se j'ayme et sers la belle de bon hait,
M'en devez vous tenir ne vil ne sot?
Elle a en soy des biens a fin souhait.
Pour son amour sains bouclier et passot;
Quant viennent gens, je cours et happe un pot,
Au vin m'en fuis, sans demener grant bruit;
Je leur tens eaue, frommage, pain et fruit.
S'ilz paient bien, je leur dis: “Bene stat;
Retournez cy, quant vous serez en ruit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat!

(T. 1591-1600)

This is where he and Margot ply their trade, but this is their household, too—the place which is built, structured around them: the brothel indeed is where—anywhere—they are. In the envoi there may well be horror but there is also, one feels, a rueful sense of recognition; this is where Villon belongs: the very circularity of the syntax reflects the enfolding, encircling power of this place. Indeed, in its broadest significance, this home, this bordeau may well symbolize the world itself to Villon.

Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit.
Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit.
Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit.
L'ung vault l'autre; c'est a mau rat mau chat.
Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit;
Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit.
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

(T. 1621-1627)

These ersatz-containers do have an attractive force—the tavern and the brothel draw unto themselves all the homeless, the outsiders. This is where the peasant and the poor man and the criminal belong:

“Car ou soies porteur de bulles,
Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez,
Tailleur de faulx coings et te brusles
Comme ceulx qui sont eschaudez,
Traistres parjurs, de foy vuidez;
Soies larron, ravis ou pilles:
Ou en va l'acquest, que cuidez?
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

(T. 1692-1699)

To seek refuge in labor, to pretend not to belong here, is vain:

“De telz ordures te reculles,
Laboure, fauche champs et prez,
Sers et pense chevaux et mulles,
S'aucunement tu n'es lettrez;
Assez auras, se prens en grez.
Mais, se chanvre broyes ou tilles,
Ne tens ton labour qu'as ouvrez
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles?
“Chausses, pourpoins esguilletez,
Robes, et toutes vos drappilles,
Ains que vous fassiez pis, portez
Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

(T. 1708-1719)

It is inevitable that the brothel and bar be the ultimate destination of the homeless, and their belongings.

Such ‘containers’ have a definite influence on their inhabitants—they make a sort of (anti-)family. The name, or still more concrete the enseigne, is a ‘sign’ specifying the particular symbolizing power which a given place—brothel or tavern or street—possesses, and with which it marks, or infects, its inhabitants.

Item, a maistre Jacques James,
Qui se tue d'amasser biens,
Donne fiancer tant de femmes
Qu'il vouldra; mais d'espouser? riens.
Pour qui amasse il? Pour les siens?
Il ne plaint fors que ses morceaulx:
Ce qui fut aux truyes, je tiens
Qu'il doit de droit estre aux pourceaulx.

(T. 1812-1819)

Women who have lived on Sow's Street are pigs—and deserve to belong to pigs.

It is in this framework that Villon's mother, as he presents her to us, takes on her full meaning; not only is the Virgin for her, as for her son, her only chastel, her only real home. She is completely contained by the fortress of her love and faith in the Virgin and in Christ. She is the perfect container—“Comblée de foy”,⁵² second only in her perfection to the Virgin, who bore her son “sans rompure encourir”.⁵³ Villon presents her as full to the brim with God, with no room for doubt or questioning. And she is the perfectly contained: “En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir”.⁵⁴ She alone among the poor and the homeless finds her home fully in faith.

The brothel is an anti-home, a parody of a home, in the sense that if it enfolds, it enfolds everyone indiscriminately. And thus, it is described as a public school:

Item, a Marion l'Idolle
Et la grant Jehanne de Bretaigne
Donne tenir publique escolle
Ou l'escollier le maistre enseigne.

(T. 1628-1631)

Anyone can go to this school. It attracts all, and it has no inner structure, no order: the pupil can teach the teacher.

If the tavern or brothel is already a parody of a home, the prison is doubly so. It is the only place which is beyond the reach even of that all-encompassing institution, the publique escolle;

Lieu n'est ou ce marchié se tiengne,
Si non a la grisle de Mehun;
De quoy je dis: “Fy de l'enseigne,
Puis que l'ouvraige est si commun!”

(T. 1631-1635)

Prison is more like death than life: to be in jail is to be doubly cut off from la vraie vie, for there even the spectacle of life is gone; the prisoner is blinded by the thick walls:

Ou gist, il n'entre escler ne tourbillon:
De murs espoix on lui a fait bandeaux.
Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?

(IX. [Poèmes variés] 18-20)

Indeed, prison is more like death than death itself: for even the cemetery attracts prostitutes, who must be forbidden to seek clients in it:

Item, pour ce que scet sa Bible
Ma damoiselle de Bruyeres,
Donne preschier hors l'Evangille
A elle et a ses bachelieres,
Pour retraire ces villotieres
Qui ont le bec si affillé,
Mais que ce soit hors cymetieres,
Trop bien au Marchié au fillé.

(T. 1507-1514)

Another example, or a further extension, of the ‘anti-home’ is the place, the home, which Villon prescribes for his enemies Jehan and Françoys Perdrier, by the synecdoche of their tongues. They are not to be wounded or killed, but rather the ballad-recipe consists of a series of disgusting liquids and semi-liquids presented as a sauce in which their ‘tongues’ shall be fried:

En realgar, en arcenic rochier,
En orpiment, en salpestre et chaulx vive,
En plomb boullant pour mieulx les esmorchier,
En suif et poix destrempez de lessive
Faicte d'estrons et de pissat de juifve,
En lavailles de jambes a meseaulx,
En racleure de piez et viels houseaulx,
En sang d'aspic et drogues venimeuses,
En fiel de loups, de regnars et blereaulx,
Soient frittes ces langues envieuses.

(T. 1422-1431)

They are to be humiliated and degraded by their envelopment in this garbage gumbo.

How does death fit into this picture? and religion, insofar as it proposes destinations for the good and the wicked, or rather the absolved and the unabsolved? Let us return to the Virgin's role in the structure of Villon's universe. She is a temporal fortress, a chastel for the poor and the homeless. She also has a spatial role in relation to God: she is “chambre de la divinité”,⁵⁵ almost the enfolding home which holds the Trinity together. She is “dame du ciel”,⁵⁶ empress of God's highly structured and hierarchical⁵⁷ house, Heaven. After death the body lies in the Cemetery of the Innocents. Here, as in the brothel, the notion of anti-home is rendered by a lack of internal structure: the cemetery reduces all to the same indiscriminate dust.

Quant je considere ces testes
Entassees en ces charniers,
Tout furent maistres des requestes,
Au moins de la Chambre aux Deniers,
Ou tous furent portepanniers:
Autant puis l'ung que l'autre dire,
Car d'evesques ou lanterniers
Je n'y congnois rien a redire.

(T. 1744-1751)

Leaving the body, the soul seeks its eternal home:

Plaise a Dieu que l'ame ravie
En soit lassus en sa maison,
                              Au retour!

(T. 1791-93)

If the soul is refused entry to Heaven, if God refuses His pardon—l'Enfer. On the one hand, Villon presents Hell as having “seigneurie”⁵⁸ on the damned and sees the damned as being punished by fire there.

Mors estoient, et corps et ames,
En dampnee perdicion,
Corps pourris et ames en flammes,
De quelconque condicion.
Toutesfois, fais excepcion
Des patriarches et prophetes;
Car, selon ma concepcion,
Oncques n'eurent grant chault aux fesses.

(T. 801-808)

The words en dampnee perdicion do suggest, however, that Hell is less a place than a state of being: the damned are ‘in’ a state of ‘loss’ of alienation, of estrangement from God.

Perhaps the Ballade des Pendus expresses most fully the essential nature of Hell for Villon:

Freres humains qui après nous vivez,
N'ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis,
Car, se pitié de nous povres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.
Vous nous voiez cy attachez, cinq, six:
Quant de la chair, que trop avons nourrie,
Elle est pieça devorée et pourrie,
Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et pouldre.
De nostre mal personne ne s'en rie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre!

(XIV, 1-10)

In this first strophe, where we see Villon and his companions in death, not only is their flesh eaten away, rotted, but they themselves, their souls—nous—are compared to, assimilated to their bones: like their bodies, they are ashes, dust.

In the second strophe, Villon begs for prayers for mercy to God and to Jesus, son of Mary. Then he returns to his terrible description of the pendus:

La pluye nous a debuez et lavez,
Et le soleil dessechiez et noircis;
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez,
Et arrachié la barbe et les sourcis.
Jamais nul temps nous ne sommes assis;
Puis ça, puis la, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez a couldre.
Ne soiez donc de nostre confrairie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre!

(XIV, 21-30)

In this brutal and moving poem Villon expresses the anguish, the torment, mental and spiritual, of the damned. Their lot, unless God's absolution opens to them the doors of Heaven, is to be eternal wanderers, eternally homeless—for they are ‘imprisoned’ in their bodies, and their bodies are nowhere: “Puis ça, puis la, comme le vent varie.”

Two other semantic and symbolic fields—each of which is interesting in itself—may shed further light on certain basic structures of the imagery in Villon's poetry.

The first is the group of words of which we have just seen a striking example in “Freres humains …”: that which indicates family relationships. This group of words is a very rich one: the words mere, pere, ante, frere, seur, enfant, filz, fille⁵⁹ are remarkably frequent in this poetry. Obviously, one could object that it is quite natural that in a will there should be many references to relatives. It is precisely that which is so remarkable: only rarely do these words appear in that context; that is, rarely are they used to designate relatives of Villon whom he names as his heirs.

These terms are mostly used in a very positive sense, and Villon is perhaps at his most moving when he uses them. When he leaves a gift, even a silly one, to Guillaume de Villon:

Item, et a mon plus que pere,
Maistre Guillaume de Villon,
Qui esté m'a plus doulx que mere
A enfant levé de maillon:
Degeté m'a de maint boullon,
Et de cestuy pas ne s'esjoye,
Si luy requier a genouillon
Qu'il m'en laisse toute la joye …

(T. 849-856)

By the combination of the words plus que pere and mere, we feel, and we feel that Villon felt, the richness of the love and protection which the canon Villon gave or tried to give to his adoptive son.

Although conventionally it may be blasphemous for Villon to address an Old Testament Father as Pere Noé,⁶⁰ this familiarity, and the whole poem (the Ballade et oroison) in its exuberance, seem above all an expression of affection, and respect, for those who love and loved life.

Villon is very familiar with God all through the Testament; he teases and almost bosses Him as an ‘executor’. But it is never under the name ‘Father’, never as a paternal figure, that he mocks Him.

Villon's mother, his povre mere, as we see her, is the living proof that poverty can be a source of strength and saintliness; as a mother she would seem assimilated, in the poet's mind, to the Virgin Mother whom she worships.

Finally, perhaps the most famous of Villon's ballads begins, as we have seen, with a cry for brotherhood, for human solidarity.

Villon is deeply sensitive to the warmth of family love and to the qualities of the parents whom he shows us. He uses familial metaphors to describe human love in general. He defines selfishness and greed, precisely, as a lack of the sense of family:

Item, a maistre Jacques James,
Qui se tue d'amasser biens,
Donne fiancer tant de femmes
Qu'il vouldra; mais d'espouser? riens.
Pour qui amasse il? Pour les siens?
Il ne plaint fors que ses morceaulx:
Ce qui fut aux truyes, je tiens
Qu'il doit de droit estre aux pourceaulx.

(T. 1812-1819)

In this strophe which has generally been considered incomprehensible, I would suggest that Villon is prescribing for the selfish James a punishment to suit the crime: the impossibility of ‘marriage’, with, obviously, a double meaning.

Despite this sensitivity to the family it is nonetheless true that Villon is undeniably hostile to people with too many protective relations:

Item, et a filles de bien,
Qui ont peres, meres et antes,
Par m'ame! Je ne donne rien,
Car j'ay tout donné aux servantes.

(T. 1567-1570)

It is not just because they are rich, filles de bien, that Villon refuses them the slightest gift. It certainly is not because he has nothing left—his penury has never kept him from giving a gift before! It is because they have peres, meres et antes.

What is more, he even refuses a gift to orphans who have been “found”, adopted:

Item, riens aux Enfants Trouvez;
Mais les perdus faut que consolle.

(T. 1660-1661)

Why this closed fist to happy children? Perhaps because Villon sees himself not so much as an adult who accessorily might have a mother or a father, but in some fundamental way as a child. He is an “enfant de Paris”⁶¹, “un povre petit escollier”.⁶² He is no angel's son:

Si ne suis, bien le considere,
Filz d'ange portant dyademe
D'estoille ne d'autre sidere.

(T. 297-299)

He will think about reforming “quant seray hors d'enfance”.⁶³ That he says he is thirty years old, that his days “s'en sont allez errant”,⁶⁴ that “de viel porte voix et le ton”⁶⁵: make his ‘child-ness’ no less deeply true. He is moreover an unhappy child: Villon may have been a real “enfant perdu”, a delinquent; he is also one metaphorically. Though Villon may have a mother and a more-than-father, and though he had a real father of whom he speaks,⁶⁶ he seems to feel essentially vulnerable and alone. This sense of isolation he expresses in terms of family, of being a child outside of the protective bosom of the family. He feels abandoned by les siens.

Des miens le mendre, je dis voir,
De me desavouer s'avance,
Oubliant naturel devoir
Par faulte d'ung peu de chevance.

(T. 181-184)

If the Court is “mere des bons et seur des benois anges”,⁶⁷ Villon makes it clear that she is no relative of his.

The isolation of each human being before death is described as his having no family. Or else—this passage is ambiguous—before death even a family is no protection, is nullified. At any rate, we are each alone:

Et meure Paris ou Helaine,
Quiconques meurt, meurt a douleur
Telle qu'il pert vent et alaine;
Son fiel se creve sur son cuer
Puis sue, Dieu scet quelle sueur!
Et n'est qui de ses maux l'alege:
Car enfant n'a, frere ne seur,
Qui lors voulsist estre son plege.

(T. 313-320)

The anguished cry for human brotherhood takes on a new urgency. We are all vulnerable, all lost children, in the face of death. And there is a possibility for a brotherhood even beyond death: through their prayers men help their dead brothers to find access to heaven, their eternal home, their ultimate family: “Pere Eternel”,⁶⁸ “glorieuse Mere”,⁶⁹ and Christ, who is “le fils de la Vierge Marie”.⁷⁰

Paradoxically, by warning others away from their ghastly fraternity, the dead, the pendus, are brothers to the living:

Ne soiez donc de nostre confrairie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre!

(XIV, 29-30)⁷¹

Thus far we have been concerned with Villon as if he were an object: as contained by, or excluded from, love, prison, death; city, home, brothel; Heaven; family. But he is also a subject: he is also, himself, a container. There is a double movement in the Testament, that of being possessed (or rejected) and that of taking possession. So let us turn to this second postulation in Villon's work, to what one could term the language of ‘interiorization’.

The Testament opens with the affirmation:

En l'an de mon trentiesme aage,
Que toutes men hontes j'eus beues …

(T. 1-2)

Of course in one sense what this line emphasizes is Villon's past humiliations, his degradation. It also says a great deal more than that; but for the moment, what concerns us is the use here of a metaphor taken from the language of eating and drinking, to describe a way of relating to life and to experience in general: one drinks one's shame.

One drinks down joy, too. The advice which Villon gives to his amye may be hostile in many respects, but he tells her to drink down life, to enjoy and profit from her youth, even if it is with another man:

Or beuvez fort, tant que ru peut courir;
Ne donnez pas a tous ceste douleur …

(T. 963-4)

If Cotart is wonderful, it is because of his thirst, his constant and unquenchable thirst for life:

Brief, on n'eust sceu en ce monde serchier
Meilleur pyon, pour boire tost et tart.
Faictes entrer quant vous orrez huchier
L'ame du bon feu maistre Jehan Cotart!
Prince, il n'eust sceu jusqu'a terre crachier;
Tousjours crioit: “Haro! la gorge m'art.”
Et si ne sceust oncq sa seuf estanchier
L'ame du bon feu maistre Jehan Cotart.

(T. 1258-1265)

Food is indeed the food of life. And hunger and thirst are an affirmation of the goodness of life. This is one reason why starvation—physical privation—is so terrible. To go hungry is to be cut off from the possibility of love:

Bien est verté que j'ay amé
Et ameroie voulentiers;
Mais triste cuer, ventre affamé
Qui n'est rassasié au tiers
M'oste des amoureux sentiers.
Au fort, quelqu'ung s'en recompence,
Qui est ramply sur les chantiers!
Car la dance vient de la pance.

(T. 193-200)

It is to be cut off metaphorically as well as literally from a life source. To see bread only through windows⁷² is doubly significant:

Item, varletz et chamberieres
De bons hostelz (rien ne me nuyt)
Feront tartes, flans et goyeres,
Et grans ralias a myenuit
(Riens n'y font sept pintes ne huit),
Tant que gisent seigneur et dame;
Puis après, sans mener grand bruit,
Je leur ramentoy le jeu d'asne.

(T. 1559-1566)

To be old is to lose one's teeth, to be no longer able to bite into life:

Ung temps viendra qui fera dessechier,
Jaunir, flestrir vostre espanye fleur;
Je m'en risse, se tant peusse maschier
Lors; mais nennil, ce seroit donc foleur:
Viel je seray; vous, laide, sans couleur;
Or beuvez fort, tant que ru peut courir …

(T. 958-963)

We have not simply fallen back into ‘exclusion’ imagery. Being hungry, and suffering, being on the ‘outside’ of the joy of life, even that can nourish. As we saw, in the first two lines, shame can be bue—not just subie, or, to maintain the liquid metaphor, avalée. It is drunk down, digested. And for Villon pain feeds our understanding:

Or est vray qu'après plainz et pleurs
Et angoisseux gemissemens,
Après tristesses et douleurs,
Labeurs et griefz cheminemens,
Travail mes lubres sentemens,
Esquisez comme une pelote,
M'ouvrit plus que tous les Commens
D'Averroÿs sur Aristote.

(T. 89-96)

Villon has drunk down his travail: he has assimilated it, been opened by it, and grown,

Even torture can nourish:

Dieu mercy et Tacque Thibault,
Qui tant d'eaue froide m'a fait boire,
Mis en bas lieu, non pas en hault,
Mengier d'angoisse mainte poire.

(T. 737-740)

Though there may be a pun here, a poire d'angoisse meaning both a certain kind of pear and a form of torture,⁷³ the fact remains that in Villon's eyes pain is food. One does not have to be fed in order to eat, because life is food: it is enough just to be alive.

The Testament is an extension of Villon's self, as a containing, structuring, and expanding (ouvert by travail) body. Full as the poem is of hostility and anger, this positive, embracing aspect stands out, at least as powerfully. As Villon begins the will proper, he asserts:

Somme, plus ne diray qu'ung mot,
Car commencer vueil a tester:
Devant mon clerc Fremin qui m'ot,
S'il ne dort, je vueil protester
Que n'entens homme detester
En ceste presente ordonnance,
Et ne la vueil magnifester
Si non ou royaume de France …

(T. 777-784)

This desire to include everyone is carried through to the end. In Villon's inventory of the world and its inhabitants and furniture, there is some simple enumeration, considerable venting of bile, a real sense of magic power by the very wielding of names—but there is also a delight in exploring the minute details of this world:

Regarde m'en deux, trois, assises
Sur le bas du ply de leurs robes,
En ces moustiers, en ces eglises;
Tire toy pres, et ne te hobes;
Tu trouveras la, que Macrobes
Oncques ne fist tels jugemens.
Entens; quelque chose en desrobes:
Ce sont tous beaulx enseignements.

(T. 1543-1550)

There is here a joy in expanding, embracing as great a sector of reality as possible; in the Ballade des femmes de Paris, after two strophes packed full of names of places, Villon continues:

Brettes, Suysses, n'y sçavent guieres,
Gasconnes, n'aussi Toulousaines:
De Petit Pont deux harengieres
Les concluront, et les Lorraines,
Engloises et Calaisiennes,
(Ay je beaucoup de lieux compris?)
Picardes de Valenciennes;
Il n'est bon bec que de Paris.

(T. 1531-1538)

Even the Recipe for the frying of tongues has this same exuberance in its rattling off of filth.

As he is getting in his last swipes at his enemies, those “traistres chiens matins”,⁷⁴ he includes, unites them, too, in his riotous Testament, along with the “cuidereaux d'amour transsis chaussans sans meshaing fauves botes”,⁷⁵ the “filletes monstrans tetins pour avoir plus largement d'ostes”,⁷⁶ the “sotz et sotes, qui s'en vont siflant six a six”.⁷⁷

Qu'on leur froisse les quinze costes
De gros mailletz, fors et massis,
De plombees et telz pelotes.
Je crie a toutes gens mercis.

(T. 1992-1995)

Villon then ‘closes’ his work “Icy se clost le testament”.⁷⁸ But that is not the end: he adds a final, flamboyant gesture:

Prince; gent comme esmerillon,
Sachiez qu'il fist au departir:
Ung traict but de vin morillon,
Quant de ce monde voult partir.

(T. 2020-2023)

This subtle rappel of the opening of the Testament underlines the finely structured though discreet symbolic pattern of the work. Villon ends his will, as he began it, on an affirmation of life, even in the face of death—an affirmation of the drinking down, the accepting and the relishing of this world.

From the oppositions which we have been discussing, a certain image of man, and of the poet, emerges. Acted on by life and by the world, Villon also reacts. He tries to take possession of the world (both literally and symbolically …). He attempts to eat and to digest it, to make it his own. The poem itself is both an expression of this experience of interiorization and an attempt to go beyond it. The poem represents the poet's struggle to reëstablish a positive contact with the outside by communicating to and sharing with others his intimate experience, his inner world.

Notes

1. See, for example, François Villon, Oeuvres, Thuasne edition, Vol. II, p. 15.

2. Praeterition is that rhetorical device which stresses something while pretending not to: “Far be it from me to draw attention to the fact that …”

3. Je me tais du fourreau …

4. Thuasne is of the opinion that this ‘sheath’ is an anal one. See Vol. II, p. 282.

5. Testament, line 1033.

6. Testament, line 1340.

7. See Thuasne, Oeuvres, Vol. III, p. 352, for a discussion of this expression.

8. That is, in the Testament, lines 1022-1027.

9. My apologies for the unintentional puns, which make this passage sound like a study on venereal disease.

10. In the Testament, lines 580 and 1027.

11. In the Testament, line 1594.

12. Testament, line 522.

13. Testament, line 1621.

14. Pierre Guiraud, L'Argot (Paris, 1963), p. 57.

15. The sexual sense of “rose” comes, in large part, from Jehan de Meung's Roman de la Rose.

16. Lais, line 31.

17. Testament, line 955.

18. Testament, line 1611. See Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. III; p. 425, on this reading.

19. Testament, line 454 ff.

20. See Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. III, p. 500-501.

21. See Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. III, p. 533.

22. Testament, line 1699 ff.

23. See Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. II, p. 320.

24. In huitains XCV, XCVII, XCVIII, CIII, CXX, CXXXI, and so forth.

25. Testament, line 1876.

26. Epistre, line 3.

27. Testament, line 1892 ff.

28. The idea that love is a prison, or is fatal, is certainly not unique to Villon. What does seem peculiar to him, and original, is the complexity and intense ambivalence of the symbolic structures which give life to such poetic commonplaces.

29. Lais, line 15.

30. Testament, line 680.

31. Testament, line 2001.

32. In English, “to die”, meant quite specifically ‘to die in intercourse’.

33. Testament, line 869.

34. Douai and Lille were cities where witches were tried and burned during Villon's lifetime. See, for example, Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. II, p. 88.

35. See Longnon-Foulet, Glossary.

36. Testament, lines 1668-1675.

37. Buridan was rector of the University of Paris, around the middle of the fourteenth century. See the Longnon-Foulet Index.

38. See the Longnon-Foulet Index, and Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. II, p. 151.

39. Or if not a mother, a pure, lily-white woman.

40. See Thuasne, Œuvres, Vol. II, pp. 151-152.

41. See Longnon-Foulet Index.

42. The two ballades each entitled Autre ballade, and called, respectively, Ballade des seigneurs du temps jadis and Ballade en vieil langage françoys, lines 357-412.

43. Testament, line 1474.

44. Testament, line 237.

45. Testament, line 1560.

46. Testament, line 288.

47. Testament, line 1499.

48. Testament, line 1474.

49. Testament, line 1484.

50. Testament, line 98.

51. Testament, lines 1388-1389.

52. Testament, line 901.

53. Testament, line 890.

54. Testament, line 882 ff.

55. Testament, line 836.

56. Testament, line 873.

57. Testament, line 838: “les dignes neufs Ordres des cieulx.”

58. Ballade des Pendus, line 32.

59. See André Burger's Lexique de la langue de Villon for a complete index of these words.

60. Testament, line 1238.

61. Testament, line 1059.

62. Testament, line 1886.

63. Débat, line 9.

64. Testament, line 217.

65. Testament, line 735.

66. Testament, lines 273-280.

67. Louenge a la Court, line 10 ff.

68. Testament, line 793.

69. Testament, line 826.

70. L'Epitaphe Villon, line 16.

71. This notion of the human fraternity will be discussed at greater length in chapter IV.

72. Testament, line 236.

73. Testament, line 740.

74. Testament, line 1984.

75. Testament, lines 1973-1974.

76. Testament, lines 1976-1977.

77. Testament, lines 1980-1981.

78. Testament, line 1996.