SOURCE: “Gothic Love and Death: François Villon and the City of Paris,” in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 11, No.3, 1977, pp. 719-29.

[In this essay, Hayes focuses on the theme of death and dying to demonstrate how Villon wrote “city” poetry, in contrast to the courtly poetry of the aristocracy. In addition to literary analysis, Hayes draws from the culture of Medieval France and the art of the late Gothic era to establish Villon's place in the development of a more popular literature.]

In the popular imagination one literary figure from the close of the Middle Ages towers above all others, Francois Villon. Later ages have made much of his death-defying scrapes, underworld connections and grotesque cynicism. For the poets of nineteenth-century France he was the archetype of the romantic Bohemian. Robert Louis Stevenson described him as the “sorriest figure on the rolls of fame.” Our own, more cynical, age takes his phrase, “I laugh through tears,” for ironic motto. Whatever model his life may provide for the imagination of an era, the art of Villon has not lost its popular appeal since the appearance of the first printed edition of his works in 1489, for he is perhaps the first widely-known city poet of the Western world. I wish to address myself specifically to this notion, that Villon's art, forged out of the union of “courtly” and “popular” literary traditions, marks the first important appearance of an “urban imagination” in medieval letters.

My argument is threefold. First I wish to place Villon within the context of medieval poetic practice, particularly the conditions and themes of court poetry. Secondly, I present a discussion of Villon's particular view of the city of Paris as a locus for the transaction of amatory and commercial ventures. Finally I wish to suggest that the fusion of popular and courtly elements in Villon's Testament is accomplished by inverting the usual eros/thanatos conflict, wherein eros (the life principle) is seen as separating and dividing, and thanatos (the death instinct) is seen as uniting and equalizing.

I. THE COUNTRY

The literary context of Villon's oeuvre is important because “poetry” in late Gothic Europe was nominally a court art and Villon was an independent poet. His peers and predecessors, the medieval court poets (Guillaume de Machaut, Eustache Deschamps, Othe de Graunson), were often no more than entertainers for the king, and, of course, social inferiors. For these court poets writing lyrics could only be an avocation and not a vocation. Their livelihood depended on a noble patron, who might influence them in the subject matter, style and form of the work. Indeed the principal and sometimes sole means of social intercourse between the bourgeois poet and the court audience was the presentation and reading of poetry.

At best the system of patronage could encourage innovative and creative writing. More often, however, it could prohibit experimentation in subjects and styles objectionable to the patron. The interests of the medieval court poet, then, were inevitably those of the court circle, and politically and culturally conservative.

In the early Middle Ages the court itself was usually located in the countryside and the locus for most court poetry is the idealized bucolic setting, frequently modelled after descriptions of the golden age. In this pastoral setting the conventional contest between the lover-poet's hopeless ardor and the lady's cold aloofness (her danger) is displayed within the narrow confines of the court perspective. Literary love at court may be described as a series of small skirmishes between the poet and his lady, in which death—of the heart or the body—lurks decorously at the periphery of the erotic play. Moreover, we need to understand that this attitude was thought exclusive to the court circle and that it was a mark of nobility. As Johan Huizinga sums up so neatly: “Life [at court] is regulated like a noble game. Only a small aristocratic group can come up to the standard of this artistic game. … The aspiration to realize a dream of beauty in the forms of social life bears as a vitium originis the stamp of aristocratic exclusiveness” (Huizinga, pp. 39-40).

To state the case somewhat briefly, the tension between the lovelorn poet and the unresponsive lady turns eros into the process of separation and stratification. The court circle makes itself separate from the commons by giving elaborate conventions to literary love. Moreover, men and women in the court circle are seen as irreconcilable in erotic warfare, with man subjected to woman as sinner is subjected to saint. At the basis of the conflict are the wish for and hopelessness of achieving redemption through erotic union.

So pervasive is the medieval tradition of an erotic contest of wills in a bucolic setting that its features are retained even after the courts become more closely associated with the cities and, thus, a wider audience. While the themes and subjects of the lyric may not have changed radically in the late Middle Ages, the growing association of the court with an urban center did bring about an expansion in the audience for literature. The increasing economic and social power of the cities' magnates and the emergence of a commercant class eager to imitate genteel customs extended the reach of poetry outside of the narrow confines of the court (See Mathew, pp. 53; 107). Paradoxically, though, the interest of a city audience in amorous poetry of the old bucolic manner did not decline, but rather increased, probably because of aristocratic prestige. Increasingly, then, love poetry at the close of the Middle Ages, although reaching a wider audience, was in danger of becoming standardized and rigid, arid in its themes and attitudes. The expression of feeling and emotion, reduced to the contest between ardor and ladylike hauteur (danger) risked being formulated merely as a set of bald literary conventions.

I would like to suggest here that the important contribution of Francois Villon to literary culture is the revolt against this static, old bucolic ideal. In his poetic will, The Testament, the penniless rogue and sometime scholar replaces the old style with a new one, by the fusion of “popular” and “courtly” elements, to provide a new style which I wish to call “urban.”

By “courtly” I am referring to the concerns, mannerisms and fashions of the aristocratic, bucolic ideal. It is formal and discreet in its address, indirect in its reference to the object of erotic union and conventional in its language. The court poet is expected to exhibit courtesy (court manners) and never to provoke or chastise.

The term, “popular,” in medieval culture is more difficult to define. Indeed we should not think of courtly and popular concerns as mutually exclusive. For the purpose of discussion, I am construing the term “popular” as a free and unfettered mode of address (i.e., uncourtly) whose subjects and themes are not drawn from aristocratic circles. The popular poet may address whomever he wishes as he wishes; he may use informal and obscene language. Most importantly, his audience is not clearly defined. He may write to “all the ladies” or to “fellow drunks” or to no one in particular. If the court poet is formal and discreet in his address, Villon is slangy and reproachful. If the court poet refers only indirectly to erotic union, Villon brags of sexual contests, both his own and others'. If the court poet only alludes to unnamed ladies and allegorical personages, Villon celebrates the whores of Paris by name and invokes the likes of Pity and Death to bring pestilence on women who have mistreated him. What is important to understand here is that Villon acted as a reformer or reinterpreter of the courtly traditions themselves. He did not create his poetry de novo, but stayed with the externals of courtly form, which he wed to popular elements.

Villon's major innovations, I think, are twofold: 1) the presentation of a new kind of poetic persona, and 2) an original approach to the theme of love. He continued writing with the forms and genres of the courtly style, using the moral ballade and the lover's complainte as well as some of the familiar themes, but created a new persona out of the popular traditions of the drinking songs, sotes chansons and mocking poems.¹ Thus he solved the problem of finding a voice for his poetry by uniting a picaro persona with an aristocratic form. In so doing he created a revitalized poetry with a distinct style. I wish to suggest that this amalgam of the courtly and the popular has come to represent what we call a city poetry, in much the same manner that urban “aristocrats”—the cities' magnates—mingled courtly manners and commercial practices.

This new style is sardonic and cynical rather than romantic and idealizing. In blending the courtly with the popular modes, Villon made the formerly exclusive material of the bucolic court accessible to the city, and so, in turn, accessible to the widest audience. The freedom to develop this new style surely comes directly from Villon's freedom from the constraints of patronage.

His second innovation, the treatment of the theme of love, moves Villon securely into this new, urban tradition. In place of pining lovers and cold maidens, there are whores and pimps, in brothels and taverns, to populate the world of The Testament. In fact, Villon conceives of the city as a place principally inhabited by gamblers, counterfeiters, jesters, itinerant musicians, wandering players and drunks:

Then go work in the fields with the farmers
and patch up the sores on horses and mules
                    if you don't even know how to read:
you'll be all right, if you're not too impatient.

(ll. 1709-1712)

Paris and its lowlife become the sole context for the expression of love. Thus Villon's art is best understood through his view of fifteenth-century Paris and its special milieu.

II. THE CITY

For Villon, as for all medieval Christians, the universe contained two metaphors for the urban center—the City of God and the City of Man. Dante adds a third, or infernal city, Dis. It is a perverse place, made of an ever-narrowing funnel: I AM THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE. / I AM THE WAY TO A FORESAKEN PEOPLE. / I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW (Canto III, Inferno [Ciardi]). It was the goal of every Christian to reach a celestial city: in life to achieve the earthly cathedral and the sacred city of Jerusalem, at the end of life's pilgrimage to pass out of the earthly city to the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Compared with the overwhelming light of the celestial city, the city of man was a dark shade, a meager and imperfect inversion of the Great Jerusalem. Since it was a secular city, and a place of sin, medieval literature often singled it out as the appropriate stage for lust, and contrasted the love of man unfavorably with the love of God. In the moral literature of the period human love is consistently depicted as sickly, fleeting and subject to death, whereas divine love is unchanging and eternal. As a man of his age, and a city poet, Villon seizes as his central image the fact that human love alone is irrevocably associated with death and decay.

In the celestial city, eros is ultimately transformed into agape. In the medieval city of man, eros leads only to thanatos. In the heavenly city human love is widened into spirituality; in the earthly city human love is narrowed into nothingness. What unites the celestial and earthly cities, then, is the nexus of love and death. In response to the paradox of love (celestial) achieved by death in the City of God, medieval man posits the certainty of love (human) leading inexorably to death and decay in the city of man. In the literature of the Middle Ages the obsession with death and its inextricable union with love becomes almost a mania at the end of the Gothic age:

Since the thirteenth century, the popular preaching of the mendicant orders had made the eternal admonition to remember death swell into a sombre chorus ringing throughout the world. Towards the fifteenth century a new means of inculcating the awful thought into all minds was added to the words of the preacher, namely the popular woodcut. These two means of expression, sermons and woodcuts … could only represent death in a simple and striking form … the sense of the perishable nature of all things.

(Huizinga, ch. 8)

Nowhere else were all the images tending to evoke the horror of death assembled so strikingly as in the churchyard of the Innocents of Paris. There the medieval soul, fond of a religious shudder, could take its fill of the horrible. … Day after day, crowds of people walked under the cloisters, looking at the figures and reading the simple verses, which reminded them of the approaching end … it was a public lounge and a rendezvous. Shops were established before the charnel-houses and prostitutes strolled under the cloisters. … To such an extent had the horrible become familiar.

(Huizinga, ch. 10)

In line with this growing emphasis on the physical aspects of death in the waning Middle Ages Villon transforms the idealizing and formal description of love in the court lyric into a physical and concrete representation of it. For Villon death is more than a convention. We might say that in Villon's work death is the only reality. But since death has only a decorous place in the bucolic setting of court poetry, Villon had to move the poetic locus from the court to the city. I would suggest that with an increased sense of realism and physicality in late medieval art comes an inevitable shift of scene to the city (Swigart, pp. 32; 151).

If the union of love and death in the Heavenly City is to be found in the image of Christ's passion, where is it to be found in the secular city? In the human body and our attachment to it, matter which will decompose and vanish. Only through the flesh can sensual love be made known, only through the flesh can we find the manifestation of death in the city of man. Thus Villon focuses on the flesh in The Testament through three important themes—commerce, deception and metamorphosis.

Perhaps nowhere is Villon's attitude toward love made clearer than in the Ballade for Fat Margot. In this poem the commerce of love is the central theme, and two differing styles are used to develop it. Villon alternates the language and style of court poetry with the slangy idiom of low-life Paris. The first stanza is composed by alternating lines in the two styles for comic effect:

          If I love and serve my lovely lady willingly,
should you therefore think me vile and stupid?
          She has all the charms a man could want.
          For love of her I gird on sword and shield:
                    when people come I run and grab a pot
                    to go get wine, as quietly as possible;
          I serve them water, cheese, bread and fruit.
                    If they pay me well I say, “That's good,
and please come back whenever you're in rut,
                    to this brothel where we ply our trade.”

(ll. 1591-1600)

The old courtly ideals of gallantry and the heroic quest are turned inside out to become the service of a pimp to his whore and heroic expeditions to get wine and food for the lady/prostitute's clients/knights. The quest of love—a staple of medieval love poetry—is here reduced to a mercantile quest, the pursuit of greed by means of the lowest occupations. Ironically, Villon is not the noble lover striving valiantly for his chaste lady's love, but an amatory entrepreneur who offers her to other men. Her love is not sought as his exclusive property, but is offered to as wide an audience as possible. The milieu for exchange is Margot's bed; Villon acts as doorkeeper. Like an earnest member of the local chamber of commerce, Villon invites the clients to return during the next rutting season (Kuhn, p. 30). The pursuit of filth and the flight from honor are the principal occupation, but he concludes that at least it is a living, if a dishonorable one:

          Through wind, hail or frost my living's
made.
                    I am a lecher, and she's a lecher with me.
                    Which one of us is better? We're both alike:
the one as worthy as the other. Bad rat, bad cat,
                         We both love filth; and filth pursues us;
                         we flee from honor, honor flees from us,
                         in this brothel where we ply our trade.

(ll. 1621-1627)

The manner in which people use each other in their attachment to the flesh—openly and cynically—is an important part of Villon's commercial metaphor.

The Testament's larger theme of death and fleshly decay subsumes the metaphor of commercialism. In the Lament of the Belle Heaulmiere (“the old lady's longing for the days of her youth”), Villon presents the prostitute's, rather than the pimp's, view of bordello life. La belle Heaulmiere is Fat Margot grown old. At the center of her lament she contrasts the way she was—“my beauty used to give me [great power] over merchants, clerks and chuchmen”—with her present state:

Now my forehead's wrinkled, my hair gray,
          my eyebrows drooping, my eyes clouded—
                    those eyes whose glance and laughter
                                        was to many their undoing;
                              my nose is hooked—its beauty gone,
                    my ears hang down like moss,
          my face is pale, dead, and faded,
my chin puckered, my lips withered.

(ll. 509-516)

This catalogue of the ravages of time concludes with this observation, an echo of the late medieval cry, momento mori!:

                              So this is human beauty's end!
                    The arms short, the fingers stiff,
          the shoulders completely humped.
The breasts, you ask? All shrivelled—
                                        hips and paps, alike.
                    The vulva?—Horrors! The thighs
No longer thighs but skin and bone
                              mottled like some sausage.

(ll. 517-524)

If the sale of flesh provides Margot and Francois with a living, the decay of the flesh and its diminishing economic power are the themes of la belle Heaulmiere. Her lament is for “human beauty's end,” but her subsidiary theme is the end of human love. The change from youth to old age signifies for the old woman the loss of power which only her (evanescent) beauty had given her:

          Ah! You treacherous, fierce Old Age,
why have I been beaten down so soon?
                    Who will care if I strike myself
          and with that blow give up my life?

(ll. 457-460)

The poem's concluding vision of the “povres vielles sotes” (“poor old fools”) who are squatting on their haunches around the hemp-stalk fire summarizes the course of human beauty—youthful love flares up, burns brightly and briefly, and dies out quickly. Obviously the fate of la belle Heaulmiere is the fate of everywoman. If Margot's brothel is, in a sense, a metaphor for the world, where flesh is bought and sold, so too, we must see in the old prostitute's fate that all the world also comes to her fate: “But so it goes with one and all,” she says. The courtly lady and the daughter of joy are both prone to decay of the flesh. La belle Heaulmiere advises both to enjoy their youth. To the refrain, “love must find a place of virtue,” la belle Heaulmiere points out that age and poverty work to corrupt virtue, that honesty is the luxury of youth and wealth.

Villon urges the theme of death's inevitable corruption of love more directly in his Ballade to his Girlfriend. Here he depicts in grotesque detail the physical decay that comes in old age, urging Martha to put aside her pride. One of the conventions of the theme of carpe diem is the use of witty and indirect arguments. Villon breaks all these conventions by arguing with her directly, reproaching her with the cry: “See what you've done to me!” As a serious man, who frequently mingled sexual and financial commerce, and who values the women of the streets above all others, the courtly lady's danger is an exasperating affectation, to be mocked by time's harsh treatment:

A time will come when your flower, now in bloom,
                                        will dry up, wilt and turn yellow;
                    then I'll laugh, if I can still move my jaws;
                                             but no, that would be madness:
                              I'll be old, you ugly and without color.
                         So drink deep before the stream runs dry;
                    don't bring down this misery on everyone—
                              help a poor man without crushing him.

(ll. 958-965)

In sum, the placement of human love within the larger perspective of the decay of the flesh emphasizes two common and related themes of the late Middle Ages, the mutability of the world and the deception of women. Specifically, Villon sees woman's deception as a result of the inability to envision the end of life. Were Villon's women to feel, as he does, the link between copulation and death, they would not reserve themselves “for later.”

In the most famous and enigmatic of Villon's lyrics, the Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone Times, there is a haunting sense of the evanescence of the flesh and the transitoriness of earthly love which all critics find difficult to describe. To his usual themes of the commercialism and deception of human love, he adds a third theme, the concept of metamorphosis. Although the ballade's subject is once again the decay of the human flesh, the poem's range touches on many different kinds of love, from the profane to the mythological to the divine.

Most of the women in the poem undergo a transformation in love which allows them to transcend the decay of the body through myth or legend. Each of the dead women is the subject of a famous love legend. There are two prostitutes (Flora and Thais), a woman who dies injured for love (Echo), a queen who used and destroyed her lovers (Jeanne de Navarre), three heroines of the chanson de geste (Beatrice, Alice and Berthe), a woman who died for love of God and country (Jeanne d'Arc), another who became victim of the conflict between spiritual and human love (Heloise), and the only woman to transcend death through love (the Virgin).

The enigma of Villon's haunting refrain—“Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?”—reminds us that the decay of the flesh is eternal, but that the legend of love may survive beyond death. Death, the shadow of the infinite, is the common lover of all these women—saint, sinner and princess alike. Only human love, which decays with the flesh, may live on in poetry, and thus achieve a metamorphosis through poetry. Since all must reach the same end only the fleshly pleasure of youth and the memory of love after death will be eternal. Perhaps this is why Villon's answer to the question, “where?” is another question:

                              Prince, do not ask in a week
                    or yet in a year where they are;
                              I could only give this refrain:
But where are the snows of bygone years?

(ll. 353-356)

III. EROS/THANATOS

The interlocking circles of Villon's Paris—university, tavern, prison, and church—neatly hold everyone within the same precincts and contain their common struggles. Paris is its own universe and all its citizens share a common fate.² At court, the poet's role was to idealize and flatter his subjects, and the mark of his artistry was the separating and exclusive quality of the work. I wish to suggest that the city poet, in contrast to the court poet in his bucolic setting, makes all persons equal. His role is to show us more of what we have in common than how we differ. If we are not equal in the society of this world, we are all equal in the society of death.

The figure of Death leads us in the danse macabre, joining the hands of emperors with those of peasants:

                                        I know that rich and poor,
fools and wisemen, priests and laymen,
          nobles, peasants, princes and misers,
                    small and large, fair and ugly,
                              ladies with upturned collars,
          and of any class whatever, wearing
                    costly hats or simple bonnets,
               Death seizes without exception.

(ll. 305-312)

This image of death is one of the most important features of the late Gothic imagination throughout all of Europe. As Norman O. Brown has said, “the dance of life [is] the whole story of our wanderings; in a labyrinth of error, the labyrinth of this world” (Love's Body, p. 40). As a manifestation of the error of life, which is the error of the flesh, sexual love represents the consummate original error, the fall, and the act of making unequal: “The woman penetrated is the labyrinth. … Every coitus repeats the fall; brings death, birth, into the world” (p. 48). As Villon sees it, the city of the world is the body of the world. The decay of each body prefigures the decay of the race.

To the extent that the courtly, bucolic ideal of love denies the existence of death, except at the periphery of the erotic play, it attempts to elevate the court beyond the grip of thanatos. The bucolic setting suggests the prelapsarian etas prima. This may account for the coy treatment of themes of sexual fulfillment and death in court poetry. Villon changed this convention, however, by placing thanatos at the very center of eros, and in so doing, changed the bucolic ideal of separation into the urban ideal of equalization.

Psychologists tell us that eros is the instinct to make “whole,” whereas thanatos is divisive and destructive. I think that we must reverse this metaphor if we are to understand the popular mind of the Middle Ages. We must see that contrary to accepted theory love is what stratifies, divides, separates, drives asunder; is insecure and uncertain, a shadow of higher love, as it is codified in the court literature of Gothic Europe. Only when human love is finally described as subject to the death of the flesh is it possible to have “wholeness.” The city is the post-lapsarian state, the locus for observing the human condition. The city channels energy toward death or money, which is the same thing.³ At the waning of the Middle Ages, the poetic metropolis cannot be called the erotopolis; it is rather the necropolis.

By inverting the common metaphorical relationship between eros and thanatos Villon made possible a new kind of writing, wherein the identification of the self and the body—ordinarily reserved only for popular verse—can be combined with courtly subjects and themes. The late medieval obsession with the vision of death finds vivid representation in the works of Villon, paradoxically bringing new life to late medieval culture. No longer is the world of the self kept separate from the world as inhabited—a courtly rather than a popular sentiment—but that very self becomes itself, its own state: “The real apocalypse comes not with the vision of a city or a kingdom which would be external, but with the identification of the city and the kingdom with one's own body.”⁴ For the popular mind in art, at the dawn of the European Renaissance, eros was the way to separation from self, thanatos the road to union and equality. This is the lesson found in Francois Villon and his pursuit of love and death in the city of Paris.

Notes

1. Villon‘s ballad, “Des contres verites,” is written in the style per antiphrasim. “Epitre a Marie d'Orleans” is a royal panegyric. “Ballade a s'amye” is a lover's complainte as is the “Ballade de la Belle Heaulmiere.”

2. Augustine, City of God, XVIII.2; “The city of man, for all the width of its expansion throughout the world and for all the depth of its differences in this place and that, is a single community. The simple truth is that the bond of a common nature makes all human beings one.” Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 40: “For the true form of unification—which can be found either in psychoanalysis or in Christianity, in Freud or Pope John, or Karl Marx—is: ‘we are all members of one body.’”

3. “The dehumanization of man is his alienation of his own body. He thus acquires a soul …, but the soul is located in things. Money is the world's soul. And god is … the death of the body. … What then is a city? A city reflects the new masculine aggressive psychology of revolt against the female principles of dependence and nature” [N.O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 281-282]. Thus Villon's bequests of worthless coins, or goods which he does not possess, lifts from him the onus of money's corrupting influence: radix malorum est cupiditas.

4. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947), p. 431.