[In this essay, the author reviews Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist interpretations of the legend of Villon, arguing that such legends have been detrimental to readings of Villon's most famous poem. With comparisons to Le Roman de la Rose and the genre of hagiography, Uitti demonstrates how Villon illustrates issues of marginality and power in the context of Medieval France.]

My discussion will focus upon François Villon's best-known work, the 2,025-line poem called Le Grand Testament. This work, usually dated around 1461, may be contrasted with an earlier poem, often labeled Le Legs (“The Legacy”) or Le Petit Testament, from which it largely derives and to which it responds. Le Grand Testament is made up of a series of huitains, or octaves, each containing eight lines of eight syllables each; this narrative-like discourse, spoken in the first person, registers ostensibly as autobiographical. The tone is set from the start (lines 1-2) when the narrator declares: “En l'an de mon trentiesme aage, / Que toutes mes hontes j'eus beues” (In the time of my thirtieth year / When I had drunk down all my shames).¹ The huitains—about three-quarters of the poem—are periodically interrupted by certain lyric set pieces whose forms derive from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century tradition of the Seconde Rhétorique of which Villon was a past master: ballades, rondeaux, virelais, and the like.² The poem recounts how the narrator—who also often identifies himself in the third person as “le pauvre Villon,” bereft of material goods, victimized by those more powerful than he—formulates his last will and testament; it itemizes his bequests and terminates with a ballade in which a new narrator describes in the third person how “Villon” has died “a martyr in love” (line 2,001) and invites all and sundry to his funeral “when you [i.e., the audience: you and I] hear the carillon” (line 1,999). This new narrator further informs us of Villon that “He took a long swig of dead-black wine / As he made his way out of this world” (line 2,023). I shall return to this passage later.

Le Grand Testament is arguably medieval France's most famous literary work. It contains lyrics and lines known to every educated speaker of French: “Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?” (line 336), “Mais ou est le preux Charlemaigne?” (line 364), “En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat” (line 1,600). To many Romantic readers of the last century the injustices decried by the Testament—poverty, oppression—understandably seemed comparable to those which they continued to combat as heirs to the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830. These readers easily embraced Villon as their precursor. Also, in keeping with the Romantic taste for the “gothic” and the “grotesque,” poets and readers of the last century tended to see in the Testament an expression of the kind of bohemian spirit that some of them liked to affect; Villon's witty and sardonic fulminations against greedy commerçants were well received by those who felt revulsion at Guizot's injunction to his bourgeois constituency: “Enrichissez-vous!” They viewed the poem as a cri du coeur, as the direct articulation of the joys and cares of the Romantic, “alienated,” and rebellious young Parisian students they either had been or were themselves.

In 1859 the great Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve—who was attracted to much of the poetry of the Testament but denounced what he deemed the poet's scurrilousness and immorality—saw clearly that the “Villon” whose “story” is recounted in the poem had become a figure of legend: “Si Villon a eu bien des traverses et des mésaventures dans sa vie, il a eu bien du bonheur après sa mort, le plus grand bonheur et la meilleure fortune pour un poète: il a fait école; il a fait tradition, et a eu même sa légende.”³ There are several kinds of poets, Saint-Beuve goes on to say; the small group to which (like Victor Hugo?) Villon belongs consists of those who come to be known as “collective individuals,” who seem to sum up their time or a recognizable set of meanings, and who are no longer, as writers, taken literally.⁴ In fact, declares Sainte-Beuve, much in Villon's compositions escapes us—allusions to obscure events and to numerous unidentifiable people, slang, much annoyingly abstruse wordplay.

In another remark Sainte-Beuve warns against reading too much “melancholy” into Villon's poem; there is little to remind us, he notes, of a Lord Byron. Somewhat Jansenistically, he adds that Villon's sadnesses and his seeming bitterness belong to a past age when people were more tolerant of their own vices than we moderns are. We are, however, not justified in interpreting certain lines in Romantic fashion as “cries of a damned man” (p. 300). This is an interesting comment; I shall return to it.

For virtually a century after Sainte-Beuve's article—roughly, until the end of World War II—Villon's Testament served both to fuel the further elaboration of his legend as the poète maudit of the late nineteenth-century poets, the “Vagabond King” of Victor Herbert's popular operetta, the hero-poet of Ezra Pound's opera, and to stimulate more detailed historical or archival research and philological analysis.⁵ A number of scholars labored to establish and gloss Villon's texts—including the scabrous passages offensive to Sainte-Beuve—and to reconstitute more positively the facts of his life and its sociohistorical context. Man and work, in different ways and according to different criteria, thus became far more perfectly conflated than they had been for Sainte-Beuve. What for him as a critical historian of literature had been the Villon “legend,” a story not quite coterminous with Villon's poetry, became, along with that poetry, two varieties of or approaches to a single “reality” in the eyes of Sainte-Beuve's successors.

During this same period there emerged, particularly but not only among historians, the curious opposition that currently preoccupies numerous medievalist historians: that of ‘marginality’ versus ‘centrality’ (or power).⁶ I stress the binary character of this construct because, without some notion of what is “central” or, rightly or wrongly, construed to be “central” (as “power” tends to be viewed), the notion of “marginality” is hardly possible. Within a social structure predicated, say, on the monogamous heterosexual couple constructed for economic, political, and genealogical purposes and reasons—a couple dominated by a male partner concerned with his “lineage”—the homosexual or the harlot, or even women in general, would tend to be good candidates for “marginality.”⁷ Similarly, within a historiographic discourse focused on kingship, nationhood, and the powerful men of this world—soldiers, merchant princes, prelates—the day-to-day lives of simple peasants and housewives also frequently receive short shrift. A considerable injustice is involved here, of course, and also—perhaps more important—a disregard for truth. On the one hand, it was ideology that determined what was interpreted as “central”; on the other, understanding the “marginal” is not only indispensable to attempting to resolve the opposition of the “center” and the “margins,” but it opens the way to freedom from rigid categories that obfuscate more than they clarify. It might well be the case—indeed, I think it is true—that the further elaboration of the Villon “legend” from 1870 to 1914 in the formative years of literary modernism and the positivistically oriented philological research devoted to the glossing of Villon's deliberately “substandard,” even obscene language together contributed significantly to foment interest in the “marginal”—especially on the part of those who, during the second third of the twentieth century, would be labeled the Annales school and those contemporary historians who either derived from this school or reacted against it.

Sainte-Beuve's essay⁸ repeatedly identifies Villon—both negatively and positively⁹—as what nowadays would be called a figure of “marginality.”¹⁰ By contrast, for Sainte-Beuve and many who followed him, the aristocratic and courtly Charles d'Orléans is, at least socially speaking, “central.”¹¹ Villon was a thief, a cheat, and a liar; he regularly betrayed those who had the misfortune to be kind to him. Only scattered bits and pieces of poetry justify taking any interest in him at all. Villon's “marginality” clearly registers as negative for Sainte-Beuve when he goes beyond strictures on Villon's character to chide the scholar Antoine Campaux for his overly romantic appreciation of Villon:

Je laisse volontiers parler M. Campaux qui a veillé et pâli sur cette œuvre gothique bizarre, et qui a pu y saisir un secret et un art de composition qui n'y paraît pas d'abord; il va même jusqu'à y remarquer trois inspirations bien distinctes et comme trois époques. Pour moi, sans me faire plus indifférent ni plus sévère qu'il ne me convient sur Villon, je me contenterai, après cette lecture, de reconnaître en lui un des plus frappants exemples de ces natures à l'abandon, devenues étrangères à toute règle morale, incapables de toute conduite, mais obstinément douées de l'étincelle sacrée, et qui sont et demeurent en dépit de tout, et quoi qu'ils fassent, des merveilles.¹²

According to Sainte-Beuve, Campaux, dazzled by the brilliance of Villon's poetry, deserves to be counted as the latest victim of Villon's astounding abilities as a confidence man.¹³

Whereas Campaux was either apologetic or “understanding” about Villlon's crimes, several Romantics (e.g., Théophile Gautier) and their post-Baudelairian modernist successors focused on what they considered the necessary and positive links between Villon's criminal behavior and his poetry.¹⁴ The Villon “legend” surely constitutes a kind of subtext for what has been labeled the “myth of Rimbaud.” Villon's frequent recourse to the Ubi sunt? topic, as in “Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?” with its haunting confrontation of a glorious past by a present devoid of purity and authentic passion, certainly bears comparison with the subject of Charles Baudelaire's “Le Cygne.” Villon's self-identification with the city of Paris could also be understood—“read” in Romantic and Post-Romantic terms—as an obsession with the seamier side of human passion and love (exactly what Sainte-Beuve could not abide).¹⁵ Villon could be—and was—read as denouncing the essential hypocrisy of any and all forms of “respectability.” He deserved to be counted among the poètes maudits, who by virtue of their malediction were “seers” like Arthur Rimbaud's le Voyant, and who celebrated truth.¹⁶ Had Villon not been condemned and sentenced by courts of law just as Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were—or rather, in a piquant variation, their books were? Yet, when all was said and done, Villon's Testament perhaps attested to the authenticity of poetry: a discourse which, when well served in suffering and deprivation—perhaps especially then—by a perceptive poet, provides a glimpse for those few (the “socially” marginal?) capable of understanding it and grasping what things are all about. Proust once wrote that the artist's duty toward his reader is to elicit the certainty that the book the reader is reading is himself: “L'ouvrage de l'écrivain n'est qu'une espèce d'instrument qu'il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que, sans ce livre, il n'eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. … La reconnaissance en soi-même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre, est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci.”¹⁷ For many in the period 1870-1914 Villon was just that kind of writer. Quite symptomatically in this line, the scholar Lucien Foulet wrote, shortly after the First World War: François Villon “est notre premier poète moderne, c'est un de nos grands poètes.”¹⁸

Truth, transcendence, the ideal—all are at issue here, in intimate conjunction with language and, in particular, with the rejection of formulas and clichés. Stéphane Mallarmé's experiments with syntax are well-known, as is his description of the poet's task as “giving a purer sense to the words of the tribe.”¹⁹ Certain writers, like the poet Jehan Rictus, took to “imitating” Villon's use of slang.²⁰ For many modernists, Villon's wide-ranging tonalities, his wordplay, his apparent love affair with the Middle French equivalent of four-letter words, his deliberate uncourtliness (understood as his “rejection of cliché”), and, I would add, his very obscurity, constituted an important part of his “modernity” and “originality.” Many believed that Villon was the prototype of those who, to paraphrase Pound, wished to “Make It New.” Here again, “marginality” undergoes transformation into a precious example, a resource.

Analogously, for the generation of philologists trained by Gaston Paris and affiliated either with the École des Hautes Études or with the École nationale des chartes, the textual and lexical problems posed by Villon's oeuvre came to constitute a precious documentary resource.²¹ The first truly learned edition of this œuvre appeared in 1892;²² the young scholars of around 1900 (who had, of course, been schoolboys and university students during the final decades of the nineteenth century) studied Villon's writings passionately. They combed the archives to discover the meanings of his many allusions and references; they composed carefully documented word histories of his arcane vocabulary and criminal jargon. For them Villon became a means of approaching the facts—that is, the usage of spoken medieval French which they learned to consider as a language in itself, not merely a way station between vulgar Latin and modern French or material for the elaboration of intricate and necessarily somewhat abstract historical grammars, such as had been fashionable among central European Neogrammarians. Since Villon was taken to “speak” through his writings, he offered these philologist-linguist-textualists a key for opening up the use of written documentation (i.e., his works) in order to describe the popular spoken language of times past. Among the most outstanding of these scholars was Lucien Foulet, who, after World War I, published his marvelous Petite syntaxe de l'ancien fançais, the earliest major study devoted to Old French on its own terms. I believe that the very concept of this work owes a great deal to Foulet's earlier research on Villon.²³ Such philological investigation led quickly to complementary historical research. In 1913 Pierre Champion published his massive reconstruction, François Villon: Sa vie et son temps, with its detailed factual investigation of fifteenth-century Paris student life (the basoche), of police records, and of criminal associations like the Coquillards—in other words, much of what in the France of that remote time could appropriately be termed “marginal.”²⁴

For all the extraordinary value and interest of their work, both the scholars and the poets of the period we have been surveying failed to understand Le Grand Testament. This is not to say that these scholars and poets did not know and love that poem, nor that they did not have good reasons for trying to know it and love it as they did. Moreover, I do not mean in any manner to imply that Villon's “legend” was a useless thing. Ramifications of this “legend,” as I have already remarked, are to be found in the “myth” of Rimbaud;²⁵ they also persist, surely, in Jean-Paul Sartre's curious and lengthy essay on the quite Villonesque Jean Genet, to whom Sartre ascribes the epithet “saint and martyr” with his customary brilliance and irony.²⁶ The roles that Villon and his work were made to play in Romantic and post-Romantic France virtually down to our own day would, I am certain, reward an intensive study. I further believe, at least as far as Villon's Testament is concerned, that the “failure” of understanding noted above has something to do with the oppositions of centrality and marginality with which historians are currently so preoccupied. In my view such formulations have more in common with medieval hagiological constructs, above all in the vernacular, than with the kinds of fact that historians look for. Our understandings of “power,” “centrality,” and “marginality” differ profoundly from those that may be thought to have prevailed during Villon's lifetime. A worldview in which death possesses the kind of value it had for the author of the Testament simply does not ascribe to “centrality” and to “marginality” anything like the meanings attributed by a society for which issues of salvation and damnation are as nontranscendent as they have been over the past two centuries in much of the West. The “marginality” of the modern artist differs in kind from the “marginality” of Villon the exiled criminal, whose claim to the grace of God is no whit less than those put forth by princes and bishops. We moderns are not quite as sure as Villon was that God keeps us always in his sight.

Once again Sainte-Beuve, in a roundabout way, comes to our aid. Criticizing Campaux for having stressed the “originality” of Villon and other poets of his time in their use of the Ubi sunt? topic, Sainte-Beuve—followed by Leo Spitzer close to a century later²⁷—asserts that the earliest source for this use traces to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and other authors of the High Middle Ages: he cites Saint Bernard's Rythmus de Contemptu mundi. This work, composed of quatrains themselves made up “d'espèces d'alexandrins à césure marquée et se suivant sur quatre rimes plates, s'était dès longtemps demandé: Où est le noble Salomon? Où est Samson l'invincible? Dic ubi Salomon, olim tam nobilis? / Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis?”²⁸ Sainte-Beuve, to be sure, quickly states his disapproval of this kind of prosody and his preference for Villon's beautiful refrain lines, but, unlike the modernists—scholars as well as poets—carefully points out the properly medieval nature of the structure of topics that undergirds Villon's great poem; for him it is Villon's legend that is “modern,” not his poem. And his citing of Saint Bernard—Dante's teacher of Love—constitutes a remarkable flash of intuition.²⁹ We remember that Sainte-Beuve warned against taking the Testament as “un cri de damné.” Although it might possibly be the shout of a poète maudit, it is certainly not that of a man damned. A poète maudit by necessity fits the criteria of “marginality”; a man who is decidedly not damned, or at least has hope and faith that he is not, should in all likelihood be sought at or near the “center”—perhaps at the very heart of its power.

Several of these issues and their backgrounds deserve further consideration. I began by noting the apparently autobiographical character of Le Grand Testament. In the vernacular literature of the French Middle Ages, between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, autobiography and much biography—two genres difficult to separate—almost invariably correspond to two poetic modes that I have found useful to identify, respectively, as “lyric” (first-person songs) and “hagiographic” (biographies of saints, especially those in which the narrator supports his own truthfulness by recounting his own life alongside that of his subject). Jean de Joinville's splendid Histoire de saint Louis (1309) offers an excellent case in point: it is biographical and autobiographical; it derives from a very old man's participation at the canonization trial of a beloved royal figure, Louis IX, and it bears personal witness to that figure's saintliness at the time of the author's own youth. The eleventh- or early twelfth-century Old French Life of Saint Alexis is a biographical work ostensibly based on the saint's own autobiography, written at the finish of his earthly life. Analogously, the Old Provençal canso and the French grand chant courtois—immediate sources for much West European lyric poetry—bear witness to the poet-singer's “personal” experience of love, his aspiring to joy, his coupling with a feminine Other, and his craft as poet-singer. His—sometimes her—identity is that of a lover and poet-singer, as well as that of a person named William IX of Aquitaine, or the Countess of Dia, or Conon de Béthune.³⁰ Also relevant here are the “autobiographical” sections of nonhagiographic narrative like the Prologue to Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot) or the Prologue to Marie de France's Lais, where the two author-narrators describe the genesis of their respective works. (The Lancelot is dated around 1180, and the Lais, in all likelihood, were composed during the 1160s.) Chrétien in effect performs a kind of totally obedient “clerkly” service to “ma dame de Champagne” that parallels the sort of “chivalric” service placed by his protagonist, Lancelot, at the feet of Queen Guenevere.³¹ Meanwhile, Marie de France is dedicating the fruits of her nocturnal labors to “you, noble king, flower of chivalry.”³² The lyric first person is very much in evidence in both instances.

These procedures are found in fusion at the very core of The Romance of the Rose. Guillaume de Lorris's twenty-year-old Lover (who is Guillaume himself some five or more years before the poem's writing) is identified as being in the twentieth year of “mon aage,” at the time of life when “Love takes its toll of young men.” This verse strikingly foreshadows the initial line of Villon's Testament. The matter of the Rose is mainly that of a very expanded lyric chant courtois, but with several significant twists. The clerkly narrator in his mid-twenties (who learnedly quotes Macrobius) claims to be making his poem at the behest of Love and on behalf of “cele qui tant a de pris / E tant est dine d'estre amee / Qu'el doit estre Rose clamee.”³³ Furthermore, at the midpoint of the conjoined texts of Guillaume de Lorris and his successor, Jean de Meun, Guillaume is named by Jean and characterized by Love as being, together with Ovid, Catullus, and Tibullus, one of his mother Venus's “most faithful servants.”³⁴

A number of “persons” are involved here. The Guillaume de Lorris who at age twenty has, so to speak, fallen in love with Love and who, embarking on the Rose adventure, undergoes a series of failures nevertheless does learn from and about Love as he proceeds. There is also the Guillaume who recounts the story of this adventure which is incomplete as a plot but which, in a romance narrative form specifically identified as such by the poet-narrator, is integrated into the twenty-five-year-old Guillaume's lyric love service of “her who deserves to be proclaimed Rose.” In part 2 of the Rose, Guillaume's original twenty-year-old Lover-protagonist continues his adventure. However, in a speech made by Love to his troops, he is promoted to the rank of a “servant of ‘Lady’ Venus.” Following this merging of lyric protagonist and clerkly representative of translatio, Guillaume is named. And here too Jean de Meun introduces himself as the one who will “continue” and “perfect” the romance narrative begun by Guillaume under a new title—the “mirror [or speculum] of lovers” (line 10,651). The ‘truth’ of whoever the ‘historical’ Guillaume de Lorris might have been thus participates in at least four poetic functions that correspond to generic attributes found in courtly lyric and in rhymed courtly romance narrative. Finally, the process of translatio—from Ovid, Catullus, and Tibullus to Guillaume—engenders a ‘Jean de Meun’ who in continuing Guillaume's roman “perfects” it, proclaiming anew the truth and the power of poetic activity. The roman becomes a poetic encyclopedia, a romance narrative summa to rival the “powerful” summas stemming from the thirteenth-century Paris schools.

It would be useful at this juncture to consider the disrepute into which both courtly lyric and rhymed romance narrative had fallen by the 1220s when Guillaume presumably embarked on his work. Such poetry not only suffered at the hands of moralists and satirists but it also bore the brunt of many attacks from those whom I shall call “philosophers” and “historians”—those for whom rhyme and its exigencies stood suspected of mendacity.³⁵ This was the period when the old romances were being recast into prose “histories” and the first prose chronicles in French began to appear. Constraints of space prevent my proceeding farther into this question here, however.³⁶ Nevertheless, I will state my belief that verse—especially verse narrative—was then becoming increasingly “marginalized.” Serious writing was identified with the ‘truthful’ language of prose or that of scholastic Latin. And is it not a fact that writing labeled “serious” is usually also associated with “power”? What is more, the courts of the increasingly powerful Capetian kings were quite inhospitable to the poetic arts—for example, around 1270 Louis IX commissioned the Grandes Chroniques de France in prose, taking no interest in romances or in secular lyric. I would argue that Guillaume de Lorris's effort was designed in a more than merely incidental way to respond to this criticism; in several significant respects it is a defense of courtly poetry. Does he not say—quoting Macrobius, an ancient encyclopedic authority who wrote in Latin prose—that dreams are not mendacious, that they foretell what will come to pass? The very subject matter of Guillaume's poem is, of course, the story of his own dream.

It would, I think, be hard to overestimate the value of The Romance of the Rose to Villon as well as to the poetic tradition from which he emerged. This is not to say that the Testament in any way constitutes a slavish “imitation” of that work. Rather, Villon builds on the precedent it offered him. I shall now try to show how he does this.

Like the Guillaume of the Rose, the Villon of the Testament is a number of “persons.” He is the third-person “poor Villon” mentioned earlier. He is the first-person narrator-protagonist who declares himself the victim of Thibault d'Aussigny's injustice; he is the impoverished though highly educated young man who lives on the margins of society among whores, thieves, con men, and the exploited, looking in on those materially better off than he. He is the person who itemizes the objects in the series of bequests constituting so much of the poem's narrative. In these capacities he is also the lyric poet who observes, for example, the Belle Heaulmière and who records in ballade form her “Regrets.” Finally, his chosen form of a last will and testament suggests a kind of personalized encyclopedia, a summa of the individual, when all these persons and autobiographical facts are assembled into what he, Villon, was and is.

But who is Villon? The stuff, as Sainte-Beuve said, that legends are made of? The poète maudit? For answers to these questions, I want to maintain, the precedent of The Romance of the Rose will be indispensable. I will proceed by examining four key excerpts from Villon's Testament. The first is the initial huitain of the poem, its “prologue,” so to speak (lines 1-8):

En l'an de mon trentiesme aage,
Que toutes mes hontes j'eus beues,
Ne du tout fol, ne du tout sage,
Nonobstant maintes peines eues,
Lesquelles j'ay toutes receues
Soubz la main Thibault d'Aussigny …
S'evesque il est, seignant les rues,
Qu'il soit le mien je le regny.

In the time of my thirtieth year / When I had drunk down all my shames, / Not all foolish and not all wise / Despite the many blows I had / Every one of which I got / In the clutches of Thibault d'Aussigny / He may be a bishop blessing the streets / But that he is mine I deny [translator's punctuation removed]

Here are several noteworthy facets of this strange text: (1) Despite its extraordinary, even stately, prosodic regularity, its syntax does not parse. Punctuating it is a modern editor's nightmare. A main-clause preterite verb is lacking. I have found no other example of such syntax—or lack of it—in the Testament. (2) The first line of verse harkens back to the first line of Guillaume de Lorris's narrative (“En l'an de mon vintieme aage”); here Guillaume's twentieth year is replaced by a thirtieth year. (3) A double temporality is built into the huitain; the narrator is saying: “[I am now (but when?) telling you that] when I was in my thirtieth year, at which point in time I had drunk all my shames”; and then the huitain veers off on a present and present-perfect tangent. This, I believe, recalls and reverses Guillaume's twenty-year-old Lover protagonist who became the twenty-five-year-old Lover narrator (he who loves and serves “her who is worthy of being called ‘Rose’”). It is here that we expect the preterite verb. What did the narrator-protagonist do in his thirtieth year? (4) The whole text is fragmented, shardlike, “incomplete”—perhaps in imitation of Guillaume's formally incomplete part of the Rose—but, unlike Guillaume's text, it gives no promise of some possible or desired union with “Rose” that will restore the lyric situation to wholeness. We are left with the broken shards. Our Villon is clearly more “marginal,” less “central” and “powerful” than the ostensibly aristocratic and courtly person of Guillaume de Lorris.³⁷

But what of the union with a feminine Other that informs the grand chant courtois, the Roman de la Rose, and the French lyric down to Villon's own time? The initial huitain contains no allusion to a beloved lady or maiden. In the Rose-like context established by Villon's opening verses, this absence is striking. Let us take a look at another pair of excerpts from the Testament. The first, usually called “La Ballade pour prier Notre Dame,” is one of the many jewel-like set pieces (formes fixes) inserted into the body of the poem (lines 873-909):

Dame du ciel, regente terrienne,
Emperiere des infernaux palus,
Recevez moy, vostre humble chrestienne,
Que comprinse soye entre vos esleus,
Ce non obstant qu'oncques rien ne valus.
Les biens de vous, ma Dame et ma Maistresse,
Sont trop plus grans que ne suis pecheresse,
Sans lesquelz biens ame ne peut merir
N'avoir les cieulx. Je n'en suis jangleresse:
En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.
A vostre Filz dictes que je suis sienne;
De luy soyent mes pechiez abolus;
Pardonne moy comme a l'Egipcienne,
Ou comme il feist au clerc Theophilus, …
Lequel par vous fut quitte et absolus,
Combien qu'il eust au deable fait promesse.
Preservez moy de faire jamais ce,
Vierge portant, sans rompure encourir,
Le sacrement qu'on celebre a la messe:
En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.
Femme je suis povrette et ancïenne,
Qui riens ne sçay; oncques lettre ne lus.
Au moustier voy dont suis paroissienne
Paradis paint, ou sont harpes et lus,
Et ung enfer ou dampnez sont boullus;
L'ung me fait paour, l'autre joye et liesse.
La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse,
A qui percheurs doivent tous recourir,
Comblez de foy, sans fainte ne paresse:
En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.
Vous portastes, digne Vierge, princesse,
Iesus regnant qui n'a ne fin ne cesse.
Le Tout Puissant, prenant nostre foiblesse,
Laissa les cieulx et nous vint secourir,
Offrit a mort sa tres chiere jeunesse;
Nostre Seigneur tel est, tel le confesse:
En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.

Lady of heaven, regent of earth, / Empress over the swamps of hell, / Receive me your humble Christian / That I may be counted among your elect, / This even though I was never of worth: / Your bounties, my Lady and my Mistress, / Are greater by far than my sinfulness / And without them no soul could merit / Or enter heaven, I'm not pretending now, / In this faith I wish to live and to die.

Tell your Son that I belong to him, / Through him let my sins be washed away, / May he pardon me like the Egyptian woman / Or as he did Theophilus the clerk, … Who through you was acquitted and absolved / Although he had compacted with the devil, / Preserve me from ever doing this, / Virgin who bore with hymen unbroken / The sacrament we celebrate at Mass, / In this faith I wish to live and to die.

I'm just a poor old woman, / Who knows nothing and can't read a word, / At my own parish church I see / A painted paradise with harps and lutes / And a hell where they boil the damned, / One scares me, one gives me joy and bliss, / Let mine be the joyful one, high Goddess, / On whom all sinners must rely / Brimming with faith, without sham or sloth, / In this faith I wish to live and to die.

Virgin so worthy, princess, you bore / Iesus reigning without end or term, / Lord Almighty who took up our weakness / Left his heaven and came for our succor, / Offered to death his precious youth, / Now is Our Lord, so I acknowledge him, / In this faith I wish to live and to die.

As this beautiful and noble ballade royale demonstrates, women occupy an important place in the set pieces of the Testament; here, specifically, Villon addresses female nature, experience, and relationships with men.

In the previous huitain the poet-narrator explains that he is giving this ballade to his “poor mother,” for her to use in praying to the Virgin to intercede with her Son on behalf of the petitioner, the poet's own mother. A circular movement predicated on one fundamental male/female relationship—that of mother and son—obtains, then, as a son's words are appropriated by his mother to pray to a Mother to implore salvation from her Son for the mother who addresses her. This is accomplished through Villon's lyric integration with his mother. Together, mother and son form a kind of unit.

The creation of this unit is enacted within the diction of the ballade. It begins with the Latinate, learned—almost aureate—French of stanza 1. “Emperiere des infernaux palus” evokes the language of a fifteenth-century cleric, certainly not that of the illiterate old woman described in stanza 3. In stanza 2 this schoolmasterly diction gives way to the ‘literary’ French found, say, in the poems of Rutebeuf or The Romance of the Rose. In fact, references to “Theophilus” and the “Egyptian” suggest that Villon had Rutebeuf in mind, for two of the latter's most famous poems concern the Faust-like Miracle de Théophile and Saint Mary the Egyptian, stories of two repentant sinners who are saved through the intercession of the Virgin. Already vernacularized, though still literary, the diction becomes more exactly that of an ignorant old Frenchwoman in stanza 3. Villon's written language here becomes the speech of his mother. As the dialects proceed from the most “powerful” form of the vernacular to the most humble and ostensibly most “marginal,” the couple of Villon and his mother is created.

In the seven-line envoi the language becomes far more accessible; it resembles the language of Clément Marot's translation of the Psalms, a rather “classical” French. The language here fuses the simplicity and concreteness of Villon's mother's speech with the elegance of a poet whose command of all registers of French was outstanding. The acrostic, moreover, is noteworthy: villone, not the villon plus an unemphasized “E” printed without bold type in modern editions like the one quoted here. Villon's nom de guerre is unquestionably, and deliberately, rendered in its feminine form: he and his mother are conjoined in a special union—in what I have called a unit—refracting that of Christ and his Mother.³⁸ This is a remarkable avatar, I believe, of the lyric poet's traditional search for union with the feminine Other. And this union is something the poet achieves, as in the similar yet different case of Guillaume de Lorris.³⁹ Furthermore, the union at least hints at the process of imitatio Christi so often associated with hagiographic (auto)-biography. The descent of “languages” from those in “power” to those of utter “marginality” has been, in this new context, dramatically inverted. Indeed, as with the saint who renounces the empty glories of this world, the implication is that “marginality” really connects with authentic power, with real and unswerving Truth.⁴⁰ Something of the Blessed Virgin clings to Villon's “poor mother,” as the two women share the common attribute of motherhood.⁴¹ Analogously, through Christ's having been born the Son of Woman, something of him extends to Villon. It is the power of poetry meaningfully to convey this kind of analogy.

My third text is closely related to the one just examined:

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 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!»
Mais adoncques il y a grant deshait,
Quant sans argent s'en vient couchier Margot;
Veoir ne la puis, mon cuer a mort la hait.
Sa robe prens, demy saint et surcot,
Si luy jure qu'il tendra pour l'escot.
Par les costés se prent, «c'est l'Antecrist»
Crie, et jure par la mort Jhesucrist
Que non fera. Lors j'empoingne ung esclat;
Dessus son nez luy en fais ung escript,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.
Puis paix se fait, et me fait ung gros pet,
Plus enflee qu'ung vlimeux escharbot.
Riant, m'assiet son poing sur mon sommet,
Gogo me dit, et me fiert le jambot.
Tous deux yvres, dormons comme ung sabot.
Et, au resveil, quant le ventre lui bruit,
Monte sur moy, que ne gaste son fruit.
Soubz elle geins, plus qu'un aiz me fait plat;
De paillarder tout elle me destruit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.
Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit.
I 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.

If I love my fair and serve her gladly / Must I be taken for a wretch or fool? / She has graces for the subtlest desires, / For her I gird on shield and dagger, / When company comes I run and grab a pot, / Hurry for the wine careful to be quiet, / I offer them water, cheese, bread and fruit, / If they pay well I tell them, “Bene stat, / Drop in again the next time you feel horney, / In this whorehouse where we hold our state.”

But then there's real ill-will / When Margot comes to bed without a cent, / I can't look at her, I loathe her in my heart, / I snatch her dress, the waistband and skirt, / And swear to her it will serve as my cut, / She sticks her hands on her hips, “Anti-Christ!” / She screams and swears by the death of Jesus Christ / She won't have it. At which I pick up a slat, / Across her nose I beat it in writing / In this whorehouse where we hold our state.

Then we make peace and she lets me a big fart / Puffed up worse than a poisonous dung-beetle, / Laughing, she sits her fist on my crown, / “Baby,” she says and whacks my tail, / The two of us dead drunk we sleep like a top / And when we wake and her belly cries / She climbs aboard so as not to spoil her fruit, / I groan underneath, pressed flatter than a plank, / As she wipes out all the lechery in me / In this whorehouse where we hold our state.

When it hails, blows, freezes, my bread's baked, / I'm a lecher, she's a lecher to suit, / Which one is better? We're a good pair, / One's worth the other, bad rat bad cat, / We go for filth and filth is our lot, / From honor we run and honor runs from us / In this whorehouse where we hold our state.

(Lines 1591-1627)

In the preceding huitain the poet instructs that his ballade be read to La Grosse Margot after (one guesses) his death; he loves her, “la doulce sade” (line 1,588). The first line of this lyric sets up a courtly situation of love service in a context as unbelievable as the Latinate diction employed by Villon's mother in stanza 1 of the “Prière.” Margot is hardly the esteemed and honorable lady of the traditional chant courtois. Surely, moreover, to be an ignorant and amiable harlot like La Grosse Margot is to be as “powerless” as the illiterate and impoverished old woman who is the poet's mother. The parallels between the mother and the poet's strumpet mistress are striking, especially in the close relation of both women to him, to his life, and to his art.

He is her pimp, and thus her “servant.” But when she fails to bring in enough money he “loathes her.” The “power” of money is depicted as vitiating their love; they squabble, strike each other, and exchange foul words—at least until they drink plenty of cheap wine and Nature wins out, and with Margot on top, they make love. They are a couple if ever there was one—what François Rabelais would call a “beast with two backs”—but a more “marginal” couple would be difficult to imagine. As in the “Prière,” Villon's clerkly training emerges also in this ballade, for example, in the cant phrase “Bene stat” with which he responds to the orders given him by Margot's clientele.

The refrain “En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat” responds directly to the “Prière”'s “En ceste foy je vueil vivre et morir”; the two refrains mirror each other. Jointly they relate these two different unions of Man and Woman and underscore the triumph of the two unions. Is the union of Villon and La Grosse Margot totally unrelated to that of Jesus and Mary Magdalene? Or does the redoubled analogy between Villon and his mother and between Christ and the Virgin stop short of the clerkly pimp and the belle whom he serves “de bon hait”?

A conflation by the same means observed in the “Prière” occurs in this ballade. In its envoi the acrostic reappears, once again ignorantly misspelled by our editors and translator: villone. The envoi underscores the coupling of the poet-narrator and Margot which operates on several linguistic registers. The purely lexical level is represented by an adnominatio construction: paillart/paillarde, masculine and feminine forms of the same entity. Syntactical pairings are also pressed into service: Ordure amons / ordure nous / assuit: Nous deffuyons onneur, / il nous deffuit. Nous as both subject and object creates a single-like being out of a duality. Distinctive, morphologically genderless constructions are fairly frequent: lequel / l'un-l'autre / chascun / s'entresuit. Even the proverbial set phrase emphasizes non-gender-specific animality: mau rat / mau chat.

My final text is the ballade which ends the Testament. It follows a rather lengthy series of set pieces in which the poet-narrator composes his own epitaph, reconciles himself to God, and asks pardon of all his fellow men. These little poems are moving; some are acerbic and quite funny. For example, the executors he names for his will are police officers, priests, miserly money-lenders—would-be “powerful” men, whose being depends on their association with the institutions of power, and on cheating:

Icy se clost le testament
Et finist du pauvre Villon.
Venez a son enterrement,
Quant vous orrez le carrillon
Vestus rouge com vermillon,
Car en amours mourut martir;
Ce jura il sur son couillon,
Quant de ce monde voult partir.
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.
Il est ainsi et tellement,
Quant mourut n'avoit qu'ung haillon;
Qui plus, en mourant, mallement
L'espoignoit d'Amours l'esguillon;
Plus agu que le ranguillon
D'un baudrier luy faisoit sentir
(C'est de quoy nous esmerveillon),
Quant de ce monde voult partir.
Prince, gent comme esmerillon,
Sachiez qu'il fist au departir:
Ung traict but de vin morillon,
Quant de ce monde voult partir.

Here ends and finishes / The testament of poor Villon, / Come to his burial / When you hear the carillon / Dressed up in red-vermilion / For he died a martyr in [to?] love, / This he swore on his testicles / As he made his way out of this world.

And I think it isn't a lie / For he was chased like a scullion / By his loves so spitefully / That all the way to Roussillon / There isn't a bush or ravine / That didn't get, he tells the truth, / A strip of cloth from his back / As he made his way out of this world.

This is how it was, so much so / He had only a rag when he died, sorely / The spur of Love was pricking him, / Sharper than the buckle-tongue / Of a baldric he could feel it, / (And this is what we marvel at) / As he made his way out of this world.

Prince, beautiful [noble] as a merlin, / Hear what he did as he left, / He took a long swig of dead-black wine / As he made his way out of this world.

(Lines 1996-2023)

“Poor Villon” is dead. But if this is so, who is telling us this? Who is inviting us to his funeral? The first-person narrator talks of a Villon in the third person! Yet he speaks in Villon's language, at least in the language which we, as readers of the Testament, have grown to know well. Consequently, as we listen, his familiar speech induces us to credit his witnessing of Villon's own witness.⁴² The narrator informs us that Villon died a “martyr in [or to, of] love.” “He swore this on his balls when he decided [made up his mind] to leave this world.” Middle French voult, a past definite, is equivalent to modern French voulut “he decided.” The English translation given here reads incorrectly, and the mistake is a serious one.⁴³ Like Jean de Meun, who also wrote a Testament, our new narrator is continuing the work of a poetic predecessor who, however, was less Love's servant like Guillaume de Lorris than Love's witness and martyr.

At his death, we learn, Villon wore but a rag; he was pricked by the sharp spur of Love, and felt a pain more acute than if he had been stabbed by the buckle tongue of a sword belt. And “this is what we marvel at” (merveille in Old and Middle French has strong connotations of “miracle”). The imitatio Christi implications of the recounted circumstances of Villon's demise are startling and “marvelous.” The human Jesus expired after being stabbed by a lance; he was dressed in a loin cloth-like rag (and is depicted thus in countless medieval representations of the Crucifixion); he died a witness to Love. One final remark. In the envoi to this final ballade we learn that, once again like Christ before he gave up the ghost, Villon drank a swig of sour wine (or rotgut, something fairly close to vinegar).

I believe that the fist (did) and the but (drank) of the envoi bring up, and respond to, our puzzle about the missing preterite in the initial huitain of the Testament. There “in my thirtieth year, at which point in time I had drunk all my shames” left a sentence fragment dangling: “I had drunk all my shames” was not completed by a suitable main clause verb. The “he drank a swig” of the envoi links semantically to “I had drunk”—both clauses inflect boire. The first (je) and third (il) persons are quite in keeping with the self doubling that Villon displays in the masculine/feminine components of the acrostic villone. By completing the poem in this fashion as a “sentence,” that is, by causing it to buckle back to its starting point, Villon connects his Testament with Guillaume de Lorris's Romance of the Rose. Finally, he fulfills the life of a saintly sinner whose calling by God leads to “drinking up his shames,” and also to his real life (together with his efficacy as a saint as he dies, saved) bearing witness that his longing fully to experience the total power of God's Love is at last irrevocably satisfied.

A great deal more might be said concerning these matters; however, I believe that my main point has been substantiated. Villon's great poem addresses precisely, and in an authentically medieval way, the very complex issues of “marginality” and “power” in the Middle Ages. And it does so through the modalities and values we associate with the basic, originative, and structurally paradigmatic poetic genre of the vernaculars of medieval Europe: hagiography.

Notes

1. Quotations from the Testament are taken from François Villon, Œuvres, ed. Auguste Longnon, 4th ed. rev. by Lucien Foulet, Classiques Français du Moyen Âge, vol. 2 (Paris, 1932); subsequent references to line numbers are to this edition and will appear in the text. The English translations are from The Poems of François Villon, trans. Galway Kinnell (New York, 1965).

2. The term Seconde Rhétorique is generally applied to the poets after Guillaume de Machaut (1300?-1377) who adopted the lyric forms invented or popularized by him and described in detail by his pupil, Eustache Deschamps, in the latter's L'Art de dictier (1393). Among these poets are included Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, and Charles d'Orleans.

3. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “François Villon: Sa vie et ses œuvres” (article dated September 26, 1859), in Causeries du lundi, 3d ed. (Paris, n.d.), 14:279. The English translation is: “If Villon encountered many frustrations and misadventures in his lifetime, he has known much happiness since his death—the greatest happiness and the highest good fortune a poet can aspire to: he created a school; he established a tradition, and has even inspired his own legend.”

4. Sainte-Beuve writes of a “classe d'auteurs, à qui tout profite, même les défauts: ce sont ceux qui, une fois morts, tournent à la légende, qui deviennent types, comme on dit, dont le nom devient pour la postérité le signe abrégé d'une chose, d'une époque, d'un genre” (ibid., p. 282).

5. Pound pressed forward with his appreciation of Villon to the point of composing the music and setting for an opera made up of lengthy excerpts from the Testament and other works of Villon; it was staged at the Salle Pleyel on June 29, 1926. Pound also provided translations for the English version of this work. The Salle Pleyel event took place when Pound was at the height of his fame and influence as the leader of Anglo-American poetic modernism. See Ezra Pound, Testament. Libretto. Selections/Paroles de Villon/Musique d'Ezra Pound; Exécutants: Yves Tinayre (ténor), et al. Salle Pleyel, 29 juin 1926 (Paris, 1926). (Also, in Make It New [New Haven, Conn., 1935], Pound identifies as the second “most intensive form of criticism” what he calls “criticism via music, meaning definitely the setting of a poet's words; e.g., in Le Testament, Villon's words” [p. 4]). Bloomsbury was not far behind. In 1927, under the auspices of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press published The Judgment of François Villon: A Pageant-Episode Play in Five Acts, by Herbert Edward Palmer (1880-1961), a book like Pound's above-mentioned Testament to be found in the Rare Books collection of Princeton's Firestone Library.

6. French usage refers to criminals, the “underclass,” prostitutes, etc., as “des marginaux.” “Marginality”—perhaps in part because feminist scholars have tended to apply the term to women (e.g., Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation [Bloomington, Ind., 1987]; or Catherine E. Saunders, Writing the Margins: Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and the Literary Tradition of the Ruined Woman [Cambridge, Mass., 1987])—has become much used in literary-historical and historical analysis, and its connotations are far from being exclusively negative. Trail-blazing historical investigations of “marginality” in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Paris include two works by the Polish historian Bronislaw Geremek: Les Marginaux parisiens aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1976), translated as The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1987), and La Potence ou la pitié: L'Europe et les pauvres du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Bibliothèque des histoires (Paris, 1987). According to Alain Demurger, Geremek was the first to stress “le lien entre criminalité et marginalité” (Temps de crise, temps d'espoirs [XIV^e-XV^e siècle], Nouvelle Histoire de la France médiévale [Paris, 1990], 5:195). This increased interest in the phenomena of “marginality” grows out of the concerns of many earlier historiens des mentalités associated with the Annales group. Even greater concern for the marginaux is being evinced by those “new historians” who are now distancing themselves from their Annales predecessors. See François Dosse, L'Histoire en miettes: Des “Annales” à la “nouvelle histoire” (Paris, 1987); and Sabine Jockel, “Nouvelle histoire” und Literaturwissenschaft (Rheinfelden, 1984).

7. A great many more or less ideologically self-conscious attempts to remedy these very real deficiencies have appeared over the past decade and a half. Michael Mullett has studied the link between popular culture and social protest in his Popular Culture and Popular Protest in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London, 1987); the condition of the homosexual has been examined in John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980). See also Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society (Chicago, 1985). R. I. Moore attempts to define “marginalization” in his The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe (Oxford, 1987). Much is owed by these studies to earlier works by Jacques LeGoff, e.g., his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980). Studies of medieval women are legion, e.g., Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, Ga., 1987); and, as a guide to historiography, Women in Medieval History and Historiography. ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia, 1987). I would also single out Caroline Bynum's remarkable Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987).

8. Preceding Sainte-Beuve's discussion of Villon by a considerable number of years is the portrait of a kind of “Romantic” Villon given by Théophile Gautier (begun already in 1833 during the heyday of Romantic enthusiasm in France) and later published in his volume entitled Les Grotesques (1844).

9. It should be stated forthrightly that the matter is highly ambiguous. Thus, Nathan Edelman, studying what nowadays would be labeled Villon's “reception” by the Romantics, came to the conclusion that Villon was not particularly well liked by them. His argument draws a great deal on Sainte-Beuve. See his “La Vogue de François Villon en France, de 1828 à 1873,” Revue de L'Histoire littéraire de la France 43 (1936): 211-23, 321-29. Yet the very term “vogue” indicates Villon's strong presence among the literati of the first half of the French nineteenth century.

10. Villon as a symbol of low-life, but understood positively and even praised, can be observed in the twentieth-century writer Francis Carco, who published Le Roman de François Villon in 1926; Carco's own novelistic oeuvre is almost entirely dedicated to the depiction of criminals and outlaws in French society; he makes generous use of slang, and his Le Roman de François Villon appears to acknowledge his debt to the fifteenth-century poet.

11. Comparing and contrasting the courtly aristocrat Charles d'Orléans with his socially inferior contemporary François Villon and describing their possible association have become a scholarly commonplace. See Lucien Foulet, “Villon et Charles d'Orléans,” in Medieval Studies in Memory of Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis (Paris, 1927), pp. 335-80; Grace Frank, “Villon at the Court of Charles d'Orléans,” Modern Language Notes 47 (1932): 498-505; and, more recently, Gert Pinkemell, François Villon et Charles d'Orléans (1457 à 1461), d'après les “Poésies diverses” de Villon (Heidelberg, 1992).

12. Saint-Beuve (n. 3 above), p. 292.

13. “Eh bien! cet écolier que je me figure, qui a respiré la bonne âme de Villon et non la mauvaise, et pour qui le poète, même complètement connu plus tard, était démeuré une passion, il revit de nos jours, il est devenu maître et de la meilleure École, et c'est lui qui a été, cette fois, le commentateur, l'apologiste (là où c'était possible), l'interprète indulgent et intelligent de Villon par-devant la Faculté, et aussi devant le public” (ibid., p. 302).

14. This is one of the issues no less a poet, and modernist, than Paul Valéry felt compelled to address (Villon et Verlaine [Maastricht, 1937]).

15. In fact, does not Victor Hugo's splendid Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) offer a Romantic re-presentation of “Villon's Paris”?

16. The term poètes maudits belongs to Paul Verlaine, whose Les Poètes maudits first appeared in 1872 and in a second edition in 1888. Arthur Rimbaud's Lettre du Voyant, dated May 1871, was sent by him to his friend Paul Demeny; it is frequently read as his ars poetica. In it Rimbaud speaks of the necessity for the poet to impose upon himself what might well be called, in the present context, a process of systematic disruption and “marginalization,” i.e., “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.” The poet “cherche lui-même et épuise en lui-même tous les poisons pour n'en garder que les quintessences.” “Poet” and Voyant are, of course, one and the same.

17. Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, in À la Recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1954), 3:911.

18. Lucien Foulet, “François Villon et la poésie dans le royaume de France après la guerre de Cent Ans,” in Histoire de la littérature française, ed. Joseph Bédier and Paul Hazard (Paris, 1923), 1:117.

19. The expression belongs to Stéphane Mallarmé, upon whose Poet it is incumbent to “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” (“Tombeau d'Edgar Poë”).

20. “Jehan Rictus” is the nom de plume of Gabriel Randon; see his Les Soliloques du Pauvre (1897). An example: “Vous savez ben … Ia Grande en Noir / Qui tranch' les tronch's par ribambelles / Et dans les tas les pus rebelles / Envoie son Tranchoir en coup d'aile / Pour faire du Silence et du Soir.” In this context we recall also that the 1880s and 1890s were the golden age of the cabaret—the quite Villonesque Chat Noir, in particular—and the racy, slangy songs of Aristide Bruant as rendered by Yvette Guilbert (who was also known for her interpretations of medieval complaintes). Scenes of the Chat Noir—including Yvette Guilbert—have been immortalized in numerous paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The relationship between Villon and Bruant is dwelled upon by Marcel Mouloudji in his presentation essay devoted to Bruant in Aristide Bruant: Chansons d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1972), as in this 1924 quotation from G. de Pawlowsky, in the newspaper Le Journal: “Il faut du temps pour que certaines œuvres prennent leur place. On comprendra peut-être un jour que l'œuvre de Bruant n'a rien de commun avec celle de ses imitateurs pleurnichards qui encensent gigolettes et souteneurs, mais qu'elle se rattache plutôt à celle de François Villon” (p. 33). Closer to our own times, the postwar singer Georges Brassens was much appreciated for his versions of Villon's “La Ballade des dames du temps jadis.” We also ought not to forget the poet Jean Richepin who, in his slang-filled Chanson des gueux, identifies his work with the condemned books of Flaubert and Baudelaire (rev. ed. [Paris, 1915], p. xix). Also, along with numerous poems concerning the bas-fonds of Paris and a glossary of slang, he includes a ballade entitled “Ballade Villon,” the envoi of which reads: “Prince, arbore ton pavillon, / Et tant pis pour qui te renie, / Roi des poètes sans billon, / Escroc, truand, marlou, génie.” His book, Richepin warns us, “est non seulement un mauvais livre, mais encore une mauvaise action” (p. i). A more explicit connection between Villon's poetic genius, his criminal “marginality,” and his worthiness could hardly be drawn.

21. Mention must be made at this juncture of the little known, but quite interesting, poet, prosateur, and savant Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), a “modern writer” celebrated in Rémy de Gourmont's Le Livre des masques (1896) as one of the most promising and curious of contemporary men of letters. Schwob combined literary work of a creative nature with works of erudition, a good many of which were dedicated to Villon, his poetry, and his language. Already in 1892, at age twenty-five, he summarized contemporary scholarship on Villon to the wide readership of the Revue des Deux Mondes (“François Villon d'aprés des documents nouveaux,” RDM, 3e période, 112 [1892]: 375-412). Other articles of his appeared in such specialized journals as Romania. Schwob's major contributions to Villon studies—articles, papers given at learned society meetings—were collected and published posthumously by Pierre Champion under the title François Villon: rédactions et notes (Paris, 1912). He thus bridges the distance between poets and writers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the professional philologists and historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Schwob's rationale is unambiguously expressed in his reprinted “François Villon”: “C'est parce qu'il a su donner un accent si personnel à ses poèmes que le style et l'expression littéraire cédaient au frisson nouveau d'une âme ‘hardiment fausse et cruellement triste.’ Il faisait parler et crier les choses, dit M. Byvanck, jusque-là enchâssées dans de grandes machines de rhétorique qui branlaient sans cesse leur tête somnolente. Il transformait tout le legs du moyen âge en l'animant de son propre désespoir et des remords de sa vie perdue” (Œuvres [Paris, 1921], 1:10).

22. This edition (see n. 1 above) was prepared by Auguste Longnon and later revised by Lucien Foulet, who was a student at the École Normale Supérieure during the 1890s.

23. The chief representative of the Neogrammarian trend in Romance linguistics was Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (1861-1936), whose many works of etymological lexicography, historical phonetics, grammar, and syntax illustrate the operations of what were referred to as linguistic “laws” of evolution and development, especially in the area of sounds. For Meyer-Lübke and his many disciples, Old French served mainly to provide documentation for the “scientific” illustration and study of these operations. Lucien Foulet's Petite syntaxe de l'ancien français (Paris, 1919 [2d ed., 1923; 3d ed., 1930]) consciously changed the focus of study from historicoevolutionary matters to a meticulously descriptive analysis of Old French usage as displayed in surviving Old French texts: “Au lieu de voir dans le vieux français un idiome instable et provisoire dont la fonction propre est de relier deux langues complètes et définitives, le latin et le français moderne, on en vient ainsi à s'arrêter avec complaisance devant des phénomènes linguistiques dont les contemporains n'ont nullement soupçonné le caractère transitoire” (2d ed., p. v). It is impossible to believe that Foulet's long-standing interest in Villon and in his language, which he understood in terms of its coherence, was without influence upon this important change in perspective. See Iorgu Iordan and John Orr, An Introduction to Romance Linguistics, Its School and Scholars, rev. with a supplement by Rebecca Posner (Oxford, 1970).

24. Pierre Champion's two-volume study (François Villon: Sa vie et son temps) first appeared in 1913 (Paris); a second edition was published in 1934.

25. The term is that of René Étiemble, whose two-volume thèse d'État was entitled Le Mythe de Rimbaud (Paris, 1952, 1954) and who, in this work and many others, and without ever pointing out the analogy with Villon, attempts to separate the historical Rimbaud from the myths and legends that grew up around him (as in the case of Villon) in such a manner as to create a fictional “Rimbaud story.” Both cases display values “normally” associated with “marginality” undergoing a transformation to “centrality.” It is not impossible that these mythic, or legendary, stories derive consciously or unconsciously from Sainte-Beuve's somewhat bilious attribution of a legendary status to Villon—a status which, it might be added, he also accords in thinly veiled terms to his own famous contemporary Victor Hugo: “Et ils le diront et déjà ils le disent, parce qu'ils ont besoin de faire de vous tout ce que vous auriez dû être: car vous êtes l'enfant du siècle, vous le personnifiez à leurs yeux, et là où le périlleux modèle ne répond pas pleinement à l'idée et fait défaut, ils y mettront la main, ils vous achéveront … Nous y applaudirons et nous y applaudissons déjà, à ce commencement d'illusion, parce qu'après tout votre renommée charmante, si elle dépasse un peu vos œuvres, ne fera pourtant qu'égaler votre génie” (Saint-Beuve [n. 3 above], pp. 283-84).

26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint-Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris, 1952).

27. See Leo Spitzer, “Étude ahistorique d'un texte: ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis,’” Modern Language Quarterly 1 (1940): 7-22.

28. Sainte-Beuve, p. 297. The English translation is: “of kinds of alexandrine-type lines, with caesura and rhyming aaaa, had long before inquired: Where is the noble Solomon? Where is Samson the invincible?”

29. “Così ricorsi ancora a la dottrina / di colui [St. Bernard] ch'abbelliva di Maria, / come del sole stella mattutina” (canto 32, lines 106-8 in Paradiso, vol. 3, pt. 1, of Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. with commentary by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series, no. 80 [Princeton, N.J., 1975], p. 364).

30. A number of women composers of cansos—trobairitz—have been identified who worked within the forms associated with their more numerous male counterparts, the troubadours. Certain Old French lyric genres, e.g., the very early chanson de toile, are associated with a first-person female voice.

31. See the introduction to the edition, prepared by me in collaboration with the late Alfred Foulet, of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot), Classiques Garnier (Paris, 1989), pp. xxv-xxvi, xxix; and my study, with Michelle A. Freeman, Chrétien de Troyes Revisited, Twayne World Authors (New York, 1995).

32. “En l'onur de vus, nobles reis, / ki tant estes pruz e curteis, / a qui tute joie s'encline, / e en qui quer tuz biens racine, / m'entremis des lais assembler, / par rime faire e reconter” (“Prologue,” lines 43-48, in Lais de Marie de France, traduits, presentés et annotés par Laurence Harf-Lancner, ed. Karl Warnke, Lettres Gothiques [Paris, 1990], p. 24).

33. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, Société des Anciens Textes Français (Paris, 1920), 2:3, lines 42-44. The English translation is: “She is the one who has so much merit and is so worthy of being loved that she deserves to be proclaimed Rose.” For previous analyses of some of the issues discussed here, see my “From Clerc to Poète: The Relevance of the Romance of the Rose to Machaut's World,” in Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Bruce Chandler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (New York, 1978), 314:209-16, and my “‘Cele qui doit estre Rose clamée' (Rose, vv. 40-44): Guillaume's Intentionality,” in Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose,” ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 39-64.

34. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, Société des Anciens Textes Français (Paris, 1921), 3:164-65, lines 10,517, 10,522, 10,539.

35. The author of the Old French prose translation of the Latin Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle—a certain “Johannes” who wrote at the start of the thirteenth century—may be considered typical of those who expressed this idea: “Et por ce que rime se velt afeitier de moz conqueilliz hors de l'estoire, voust li cuens que cist livres fust sanz rime selonc le latin de l'estoire que Torpins l'arcevesque de Reins traita et escrist si com il le vit et oï” (And because rhyme desires to clothe itself with words gathered from outside the story, the count wanted this book to be without rhyme, following the example of the Latin of the story which Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, treated and wrote down just as he had seen and heard it), in Ronald N. Walpole, The Old French Johannes Translation of the “Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle”: A Critical Edition (Berkeley, 1976), p. 130. See also Jeanette M. A. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages, Études de philologie et d'histoire, no. 38 (Geneva, 1981), esp. chap. 2, “Truth and the Eye-Witness.”

36. This period also witnessed the emergence of scribes who in transcribing the works of such twelfth-century romancers as Chrétien de Troyes deliberately downplayed the importance ascribed by these romancers to rhetoricopoetic “ornaments” like rich rhyme, adnominatio, chiasmus, and the like. Guiot, for one, tended in this way to “prosify” Chrétien in his transcription of the latter's works (MS Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 794); he displays indifference—perhaps even hostility—toward these stylistic colorings. See Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot) (Uitti and Foulet, eds.), p. xxxviii.

37. It is tempting to imagine that Villon envisioned the Guillaume of the Rose as a figure resembling his own older contemporary and sometime patron Charles d'Orléans, a courtly—indeed, princely—love-poet if ever there was one.

38. This usage is still heard today in the French provinces, as in “Dites donc, père Simon, comment va la Simone?” “La Simone” can be no other than Simon's wife. Together, they constitute, as it were, a unit of “Simon-ness.”

39. It is worth remembering here that “Villon” was not the poet's birth name, which was either François de Montcorbier or des Loges; he assumed later the name of his benefactor, the priest Guillaume de Villon, who oversaw his education. “Villon” was consequently his “poet's name.”

40. In a sense, then, Villon's Romantic and modernist devotees, pace Saint-Beuve, got Villon right, although their understanding of their own “marginality”—if the generalization may be allowed—is based on entirely different grounds from those informing the Testament. Modernist ‘Truth’, at least when viewed alongside that professed by Villon, is aesthetic. One is frequently under the impression that the prevailing sin of modern times is its vulgarity and philistinism. Nor is Villon's protagonist—unlike Joyce's Stephen Dedalus—interested in forging anything like the “conscience” of his “race.” The medieval saint's power is not really his: he bears witness to the power, and love, of God.

41. Without pushing the analogies too far, it can be recalled that both their sons lived in constant danger of capital punishment on the part of official justice; Villon had been several times exiled, jailed, and sentenced to death.

42. I am reminded of the four witnesses to Christ's life and sayings which constitute the Gospels. These are at the same time the revealed Word of God and human witnesses to a human existence. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John narrate Christ's Word, much as the narrator here seems to be witnessing in speaking that of Villon.

43. Despite this criticism, I have found Galway Kinnell's English version of the Testament to be among the best we have: it is idiomatic, mostly correct, and pleasant to read. It is ideal for English-speaking readers not familiar with Middle French.