[In this excerpt from the introduction to his translation of Villon's poems, Kinnell contrasts Villon's Laiswith his Testament as forms of mock-testaments, arguing that the later poem, despite its frequently comic tone, offers a very serious and unflinching view of death and mortality.]

François Montcorbier, also known as François des Loges, was born in Paris in 1431. He took his bachelor's degree in 1449, and his master's degree in 1452, according to records at the University of Paris. Villon is a nom de plume taken from his friend and benefactor, Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of the church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné.

Whatever else we know about Villon comes mainly from police records. In 1455 he got into a fight with a priest and killed him, but was pardoned a few months later on grounds of having acted in self-defense. A year later, the same year in which he wrote The Legacy, Villon and four accomplices broke into the College of Navarre and made off with a substantial amount of money. Then in 1461, Villon tells us in The Testament, he spent the summer in the prison of the bishop of Orléans, at Meung-sur-Loire (on what charge he doesn't say), and was released in the fall by Louis XI, who had ascended to the throne earlier that year. (It was customary for a newly anointed king to grant amnesty to prisoners when he passed through a town; records confirm that Louis passed through Meung on October 2, 1461.)

In 1462, Villon was arrested in Paris on a charge of theft. The charge was evidently baseless, but Villon was not released until he had signed a pledge to restore his share of the money stolen six years earlier from the College of Navarre. (Villon's part in the robbery had become known through the confession of Guy Tabarie, one of his accomplices.) In 1453 he was again arrested, following a street fight in which he may have been only a spectator. This time he was sentenced to be hanged, a judgement commuted on appeal to ten years' banishment from Paris.

This is the last bit of information we have about Villon. Except for two tall tales told by Rabelais—one that has him visiting England, and one in which he spends his last days at Saint-Maixent in Poitou—François Villon now vanishes from history. He was thirty-two.

Because nothing is known to have been written by him after 1463, it is assumed that Villon died not long after his banishment. In The Testament he indicated that he was sick, very poor, and prematurely aged, and we may fear that he died wretchedly. But we know nothing for a certainty beyond the information given above.

It is on this frail basis of fact that the great edifice of Villon biography and legend has arisen. No matter in which guise he is invoked—vagabond king, criminal, poète maudit, young gallant who tosses off verses between revels—Villon's life has so far proved more compelling than his poetry. Where biographical matter was lacking, vast amounts of it have been dreamed up. Indeed, to the extent the poetry has received critical attention, it usually has been treated as material for biography, and, in turn, subjected to heavily biographical interpretation.

One reason for this neglect of the work is simply that it is very hard to understand. Parts of those sections of The Legacy and The Testament, for example, in which Villon makes his bequests are quite obscure and were difficult even in 1533, less than a hundred years after they were written. In that year, Clément Marot, Villon's first editor, admitted his bafflement in his famous introduction:

As for the artistry of the bequests that Villon made in his testaments, to understand it truly one would have had to live in the Paris of his day and to have known the places, events, and men he speaks about; and the more the memory of them fades the less the skill of these bequests will be understood. For this reason whoever wishes to create a poem which will endure will not take as his subject such vulgar and particular matters.

Toward the end of the last century, there was an attempt to clear away the obscurities. A group of French scholars turned up references in fifteenth-century archives to most of the “vulgar and particular matters” that appear in Villon's poems. Occasionally these identifications help. When we learn, for example, that the “poor orphans” Villon speaks of so pityingly were in fact a financier, a salt speculator, and a rich pawnbroker, we at least confirm our sense of his tone of voice. Unfortunately, most of these identifications are rudimentary and tell us almost nothing about the person's relationship with Villon or his role in the poem. Even at its best, then, the “archivist” school of Villon scholarship throws little light on the poems. But this failure is not without its benefits. Having learned that historical information—at least the small amounts of it we are able to dig up—cannot clarify what is obscure in Villon, we have no choice but to look at the poems themselves.

The first full length study to take Villon's poetry completely seriously—David Kuhn's La Poétique de François Villon—was published only ten years ago. In this work Kuhn assumes that many difficulties in Villon's poems are due not to our lack of historical information, not to gaps in the biography, not to the unreliability of the manuscripts, and not (the last resort of critics) to Villon's often-evoked miseducation and addled brain, but rather to the complexity of the poems themselves. Kuhn examines the texture of the poetry closely, describing and elucidating its intellectual and emotional nuances. As far as possible he tries to hear in Villon's poetry the richness of meanings it must have had in Villon's own time. To this daunting task he brings a powerful intuitive understanding and great eruditon in medieval poetry and in fifteenth-century idioms and usages, including the double meanings used in the erotic jargon of the time. My own remarks below—in which I try to suggest ways of seeing The Legacy and The Testament as unified poems—owe much to David Kuhn's approach and borrow some of his specific interpretations.

The literary prototype of both The Legacy and The Testament is the mock testament, a widespread medieval form in which a dying testator, sometimes an animal, bequeaths the various parts of his body to different individuals. These bequests are often of an obscene nature and often involve ecclesiastical satire. A characteristic example is the anonymous testamentum porcelli, “The Pig's Testament”, in which a pig leaves his bones to the dicemaker, his feet to the errand runner, and his penis to the priest. Both The Legacy and The Testament, as the titles suggest, fall into this mock-legal genre—and, in fact, many of the legatees they name are the same. In almost all other respects, however, the two poems differ very sharply from each other.

The Legacy's ambiguity begins with its very tone. To some it will sound like the liveliest horseplay, while to others it will seem a work of considerable romantic sadness, at least in part. Both qualities exist in the poem. But it is hard to make an ultimate judgment because of the curious way The Legacy plays with styles. (This is also why it cannot be translated successfully!) The opening section, a congé d'amour in the tradition of Alain Chartier's Livre de la belle dame sans merci, depicts in a high-flown courtly style the conventional plight of a poet martyred by his cruel mistress. The middle section, the mock giving-away of the testator's belongings, uses a swift, wiry, hard-edged style suggesting that the leave-taking is not only from a cruel mistress but also from a false or conventional way of being. In the final section the style parodies the abstract language of Aristotelian psychology.

Did Villon put these three styles together out of caprice, or with some intention? The question may be unanswerable, for stylistic allusions and mockeries of this kind may have become impossible for us to catch. But let us suppose that the shift from style to style is purposeful. We may then note that the mock-courtly style at the beginning suits the farewell to courtly love, and that the swift style of the middle sections fits the satirical and sexual bequests. The reason for the stylistic parody at the end is less evident, however. Perhaps through the absurd abstractions of this third section Villon is merely commenting on the arid solipsisms of the Schoolmen. But the section also appears to suggest an act of masturbation: expressed in this preposterous language, it is an obscene joke completing the flight from idealized love.

The Testament adheres even more closely than The Legacy to the legal form of the genre. It begins by stating the testator's age and mental competence; it declares that the present document represents his last will; it gives the date. After much apparent digression it asserts that the document supersedes but does not annul its predecessor. It lists the testator's bequests, first to the Virgin Mary, the Earth, his parents and girlfriend; then to friends and acquaintances; and finally to institutions, hospitals, and charities. It names an interpreter for the will, specifies the burial place, provides the epitaph, and appoints the bell-ringers, executors, probator, and pallbearers.

Thus Villon makes full use of the legal framework of a form thought suitable up to this time only for comedy or satire. Villon retains (and heightens) the comic and satiric elements; at the same time he turns the form to such a personal, intensely serious, almost tragic use that among medieval examples of the genre, this testament is in a class entirely by itself.

At the opening of The Testament all the playful, literary, light-hearted mockery of The Legacy, written five years earlier, has vanished. In the opening stanzas of the later poem, one hears a cold hatred behind the correctness of tone. In The Legacy such terms as “prison,” “jailer,” and “death” were used as conventional romantic metaphors; in the opening of The Testament there is a real prison, a real jailer, and, more and more clearly as the poem continues, actual death. Villon's sense of degradation has now gone far beyond the mere conventional despair of being spurned in love; more particularly now it comes from his having been held in irons in a dungeon and subjected to torture and sexual abuse.

In the wondrously varied poem that follows from this grim beginning, Villon sets out to exorcise the physical and moral humiliations he suffered during that summer in the “hard prison” at Meung. He tells how he came to have hope of being able to change his life:

It's true that after laments
And tears and groans of anguish
After sadnesses and sorrows
Hard labor and bitter days on the road
Suffering unlocked my tangled feelings
About as sharp as a ball of wool
More than all the Commentaries
Of Averroës opened Aristotle.
And there in the depths of my woe
As I walked on without heads or tails
God who inspired the Emmaus
Pilgrims as the Gospel tells
Let me see a fair city
Blessed with the gift of hope
Even the most wretched of sinners
God hates only his perseverance.

Experience has changed and opened him and as a result he is able to see the City of God¹ and draw hope from it.

Evidence of the change Villon has undergone, from the playful satirist of The Legacy into the complete and serious poet of The Testament, is best seen in the long passages—about three hundred lines—on old age and death. Few writers have evoked these subjects with such harrowing reality as Villon does here or with less concern to sweeten or to compensate for them. His death verses begin with a conventional ubi sunt theme, but this is soon left behind. By the end nothing at all conventional remains. The poet's lament over decay and death begins among the beautiful, the famous, and the mighty, and ends among ordinary people. It begins in fable and in the distant past, and ends in the actual streets of Paris. Villon does not ever speak seriously of peace in heaven or moralize at all on the vanity of human life. He writes out of a peculiarly fierce attachment to our mortal experience. Sentiments, in the usual sense, are not involved. What he holds on to is only an unspecified vitality, the vitality of decay, perhaps, or of sorrow, or simply of speech. In these poems, which start out with conventional mourning for the passing of human glory, we are made to realize all of a sudden that this glory is, as much as it is anything, the vivid presence of an ordinary man or woman. The lament reaches deep into nature. It is a cry not only against the brevity of existence and the coming on of death but also against this dying life itself, this life so horrified by death and so deeply in need of it.

Soon after the death passages comes Villon's first statement that he himself is dying:

I feel my thirst coming on
White as cotton I spit …

That he is dying is, of course, a convention called for by the literary form, and we understand it as a spoof when he summons Fremin, the imaginary secretary, to his bedside in order to dictate the will—namely, the poem itself. But as the taste of the death poems is in our mouths, we are aware of reality devouring the convention. Explicitly death is still a conventional metaphor for lost love, as it was in The Legacy. (Sadly, the only love poem in The Testament, other than that actually very touching ballade addressed to the prostitute Margot, is composed to be spoken by someone else.) But in the course of the poem, as Villon speaks of sickness, baldness (perhaps the result not of disease but of having been shaved in prison), impotence, pain (possibly due to syphilis), hoarseness, and premature old age, we come to understand that his mock testament is a true testament also.

Villon is, among other things, a marvelous social satirist. Both in the opening section of eight hundred or so lines, which contains some of the most masterful poetry ever written, and in the twelve hundred or so lines of bequests that follow, Villon inveighs against hypocrisy and corruption, especially as found in the Church. And though it may seem that this poet is poorly placed to attack the vices of others, he takes advantage of his low station. Since he does not claim any virtue for himself, his voice remains free from self-righteousness. Indeed, he insists on placing himself at the very bottom, as in the following passage (the last two lines of which are quoted from Pontius Pilate) where he seems to be associating himself, in reverse, with Jesus, the most perfect of all:

I'm no judge nor a deputy
For pardoning or punishing wrongs
I'm the most imperfect of all
Praised be the mild Jesus Christ
Through me may they be satisfied
What I have written is written.

In this way Villon takes for himself, on the moral level, a position equivalent to the one taken by Socrates on the intellectual level, and he is able to show from this vantage point that the others who claim to be holy are just as sinful as he is—if not more so. The point of the Diomedes parable, told early in The Testament, is to establish this position.

The other main strand of the poem is its sexuality. From the beginning of the bequests proper to the end of the poem, sex is the dominant theme and the principal action is the distributing of sexual objects and qualities. Kuhn argues convincingly that whatever their surface meaning, Villon intended most of the items given away as bequests to have an erotic secondary meaning—with tools, purses, and coins, for example, serving as symbols for the penis, and gardens, houses, shoes, hats, stockings, and so on, representing the vagina. Villon assembles in The Testament a vast catalogue of erotic jargon, making its list of bequests a tour de force of sexual double meanings. In his life Villon claims to have given freely of his sexuality. In this poem he bequeaths his own remembered sexuality, as if to give life to the dead, and becomes a kind of “sacred fount”: in giving away his sexual powers, he gives away, in effect, his life itself. This is the sense in which, at the end of the poem, Villon is love's “martyr.”

One of the final bequests in The Testament is made to the same sick lovers to whom Alain Chartier a generation earlier had willed the power to “compose songs, speeches, and poems” so that they could win the hearts of their beloveds and thus be cured. To this gift Villon adds another:

Item I give the sick lovers
Along with Alain Chartier's legacy
A Holy Water basin for their bedsides
Which will soon fill up with tears
And a little sprig of eglantine
Always green as an aspergillum …

The ancient rite of exorcism Villon appropriates for his own purposes. The water to be sprinkled is lovers' tears; the ritual branch has been transmuted into the eglantine, the flower of poetry. This ceremonial healing is perhaps the true undertaking of the poem, even if only in an obscure, partly glimpsed way.

At the end of the poem come the funeral preparations and two final ballades. In this section especially, The Testament stands apart from The Legacy. For the first time Villon's voice assumes a tranquillity. It does not become elevated or tragic, and the poetry is still full of ironies, jokes, sexual puns, insults, and so on. But the fever has passed, things have come back to themselves again, and, as if inevitably, his voice takes on authority and calm, purified through the ordeal of the poem.

In the dyptich at the very end, these two strands of social satire and sexuality reappear. The first of the two ballades purports to make peace with society, the second to say farewell to sexual love. A reversal of intention takes place in both poems. The first ballade starts with Villon proceeding down the list of all the human types and asking forgiveness of each in turn. As long as he is addressing actors, cardsharps, clowns, and the like, he does this cordially. But the moment he turns to those who jailed him—bringing the poem back to its beginning—this ballade, whose intention is to make peace, explodes into violent denunciation.

The other ballade, ostensibly a farewell to sexual love, turns into a hymn in praise of it—or, at least, of its pain and importunity. This last ballade represents one of poetry's amazing acts of transformation. The sense of blessedness pervading it, in which the “spur of love” marvelously stabs Villon once more as he dies, is not dispelled by hints already given throughout The Testament that this spur is not only sexual desire but also perhaps venereal disease. There is nothing “poetic” anywhere in Villon's poetry.

Notes

1. See the note to line 101 of The Testament.

Selected Bibliography

Burger, Andre, Lexique de la langue de Villon (Genève-Paris, 1957).

Guiraud, Pierre, L'Argot (Paris: PUF [Que sais-je?], 1963).

Villon, François, Oeuvres, ed. crit. avec notices et glossaire, par Louis Thuasne, 3 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1923).

———, Oeuvres, ed. Auguste Longnon, 4e ed. revue par Lucien Foulet (Paris: Champion [CFMA], 1964).