SOURCE: “‘Faulte d'Argent M'a Si fort Enchanté’: Money and François Villon,” in Romance Studies, Vol. 24, 1992, pp. 59-70.

[In this essay, Freeman contends that the critical tendency to interpret Villon as a precursor to Romantic poets has caused scholars to overlook the importance of money and poverty in Villon's oeuvre. Focusing on Le Lais and Le Testament, Freeman suggests that the modern view of the Romantic starving artist cannot take into account Villon's real desire and need for material security.]

Since he was rediscovered at the beginning of the 19th century (one thinks of Théophile Gautier's seminal chapter in Les Grotesques for example), François Villon has become best known as the poet of passing time, of regret for misspent youth, of the pangs of dispriz'd love, and of the vanity of human wishes.¹ His work has been widely—if patchily—anthologized, and what is perhaps his most famous line (‘Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?’) has passed into a number of languages with the status of a proverb. As a result of this foregrounding of the lyrical aspect of the poet's work (which is not surprising given that some of his verses on the universal themes mentioned above are often evocative and enchanting, whereas satirical poetry is frequently topical and thus over-contextualized), less attention has been paid to other possible sources of inspiration. It is true that as distinguished and sensitive a critic as Marcel Schwob could claim to see in Villon's Testament a pamphlet aimed at exposing the corruption of the moneyed elite of his day but, generally speaking, a view of Villon the proto-Romantic has prevailed.

It is worth remembering, though, that of the 3000 or so extant lines which can be safely attributed to François Villon, some 2300 (in fact 2343) are incorporated into works whose structure links them to the worlds of law and … finance.² Villon's two major works are Le Lais (written probably at the beginning of 1457) and Le Testament, which he himself dates at 1461 and which he probably put together in its final form after his return to Paris in 1462. Both works are, then, mock wills and as such inevitably to do with money, being largely made up of spurious bequests in which the poet distributes his fictional goods and/or money to various figures drawn from contemporary Paris society. Villon's tongue is firmly in his cheek, and he pointedly bestows his gifts on the haves rather than the have-nots. With typical black humour, he leaves to the blind his ‘grans lunectes’ (Testament, v. 1733), while to each of those unfortunates forced to sleep rough under Paris market stalls he gives a punch in the eye, and wishes them continued poverty and ill health (Lais, vv. 235-40).

The first of these works, Le Lais, is on the whole good-humoured and without bitterness. The poet claims to be leaving Paris because of a broken heart. The real reason may well have been quite different. Some time around Christmas 1456, Villon was involved in a major robbery. The wealthy Collège de Navarre, a constituent college of the University of Paris of which he had been a member, was broken into and robbed of some 500 escus. Now it might be argued that this was just part of an elaborate act of derring-do.³ The truth is that he almost certainly needed the money. Though well educated, he was not from a wealthy background, and the sort of lifestyle he wished to cultivate needed more money than he could muster. He signs off his work by referring to himself archly as ‘le bien renommé Villon’, but there are enough indications in this short and breezy work to suggest that lack of money is already getting to him. He ends by jokily claiming, for example, that he has given all his worldly goods to his friends (as one would, of course, in a will), adding significantly that he has only a little money left, which will soon be all gone:

Et n'a mais q'un peu de billon
Qui sera tantost a fin mis.

(Lais, vv. 319-20).

In this work, written when the poet was perhaps no more than 25 or so and when he appears not yet to have experienced real suffering, he shows his awareness of what he already no doubt saw as the good things in life. Many of his jokes are at the expense of his legatees, pointing up their physical or sexual shortcomings, but reference to luxury items (no doubt entirely imaginary) such as the gloves and silk cloak he bequeaths to ‘mon ami Jacques Cardon’, in fact a wealthy draper with a shop on the place Maubert, suggests that neither is a stranger to fine living, an impression strengthened by the gift of generous quantities of food and drink with which he completes this huitain (Lais, vv. 121-28).

After the robbery at the Collège de Navarre, the poet effectively took to the roads, presumably for fear of being implicated and arrested. Now his troubles were to begin in earnest. From the spring of 1457 until his (brief) return to Paris in 1462 he was to know hardship, hunger, prison, deprivation and, of course, lack of money. Not surprisingly, money was to become an obsession with him, one that he shared with the age as a whole. After the departure of the English from Paris in 1437, the city recovered remarkably quickly. By the time Villon was a student at the Sorbonne in the 1450s, the atmosphere in Paris was one of unbridled enthusiasm for material pleasures, something which had of course been missing from the lives of Parisians for so long. Villon must have participated fully in this pursuit of pleasure. The only trouble was that he did not really have the sort of money that it took to run with the smartest hounds. Living by your pen was not really an option, even if he did so occasionally and on a smallish scale. As Bronislaw Geremek has shown, career prospects were not good for arts graduates (Villon was made a Bachelor of Arts in 1449 and was awarded an M.A. in 1452) in fifteenth-century France.⁴ All things considered, it is no surprise that many a young man with wit, a ready tongue, and a keen interest in fast living should look favourably on a life of crime as a way out of his dilemma. It must all have looked so easy to François Villon in the spring of 1457. Four and a half years later, when he was released after spending the summer in the ‘dure prison de Mehun’ he saw things very differently.⁵

In Le Testament, his greatest work, he tells us from the start that he is a sadder and wiser man. He has suffered at the hands of corrupt judges and policemen, had more than his share of bad luck (he is, as always, careful never to divulge the extent of his criminal activities) and allowed himself to be bamboozled by women. But then again, he asks, who hasn't? The leitmotiv of the work, which is always detectable even if it comes to the surface only sporadically, is his obsession with money. He describes himself as being ‘foible … de biens’ (Testament, vv. 73-74) and speaks of tramping the roads of France, in the slough of despond (‘au plus fort de mes maulx’) and without a penny (Testament, vv. 97-98).

References to his poverty, and consequent lack of opportunity in life, abound in his work. Sometimes in the form of aphorism or proverbial expression, as when he remarks that he can no longer compete with well-fed rivals for women's favours, since a ‘triste cueur, ventre affamé’ (Testament, v. 195) are not the best qualifications for a successful lover, especially as ‘la dance vient de la pance’ (v. 200) … At times he can develop the theme at length, recounting the story of the pirate Diomedes who had the good fortune to meet up with the emperor Alexander, taking advantage of this encounter to treat him to a disquisition on inequality. Villon tells us that for a poor man ‘les mons ne bougent de leurs lieux’ (neither forwards nor backwards, he gratuitously adds to undercut the seriousness of his point with sly humour) and shows how Alexander took pity on the pirate and gave him his chance to reform and prosper. Sadly, no such understanding patron had come the poet's way, and he ruefully points out that

Neccessité fait gens mesprendre
Et fain saillir le loup du boys.

(Testament, vv. 167-68).

(Mea culpa, no doubt). Elsewhere, real bitterness comes through. He claims, although with what truth we cannot know, that members of his family turned their backs on him, ‘oubliant naturel devoir’, because he lacks money—‘par faulte d'un peu de chevance’ (Testament, vv. 183-84).

An overall picture has, then, begun to emerge early on in Le Testament. Villon blames lack of money for his predicament and personal failings. In one of the most revealing passages in this work, he tells us with obvious anguish that he is perfectly aware that if he had only studied more in the days of his wild youth and behaved more responsibly, he would now have a house and a soft bed:

Bien sçay, se j'eusse estudié
Ou temps de ma jeunesse folle
Et a bonnes meurs dedié
J'eusse maisson et couche molle …

(Testament, vv. 201-04)

No mention of spiritual enlightenment or the getting of wisdom. No, what he regrets—and here, for once, we do not need to doubt his sincerity—is the missed opportunity to find material security. When he goes on to examine the careers of former drinking companions from his university days (no names mentioned, of course), he shows how some have done well, while others have been reduced to beggary, and ‘pain ne voient qu'aux fenestres' (Testament, v. 236). Some of the ‘gracieux galans' he once knew have become ‘grans seigneurs et maistres’, while others have fallen on hard times. His description of their different fates is expressed entirely in material terms; the fine wines and dishes of the rich are put before us merely as examples of the sort of thing a poor man like Villon never had the chance to taste. He is, after all, he tells us, of ‘povre et de peticte extrasse’ (Testament, v. 274), and lack of money is the root of all evil. He was born poor, and is likely to die poor unless a generous Maecenas will lend a sensitive ear to his tale of woe. He tries to console himself with the thought that death takes the high and the low and that even the likes of the ‘riche pillart’ (Testament, v. 422) he sees and envies as they advertize their wealth on the streets of Paris will have to face death and judgement. There can be little doubt, though, that his obsession with his poverty is at the heart of his satirical (and indeed lyrical) impulse.

The episode of the Belle Heaulmiere illustrates this very well. One of Villon's best known creations, she is portrayed as an ageing woman of the streets, abandoned to her fate now that her looks have faded. The message she delivers in the ballade Villon has her address to younger and still active ‘filles de joie’ is a harsh and cynical one. Essentially, it is that young women should not trust either their looks or their men, for

          vielles n'ont ne cours ne estre
Ne que monnoye qu'on descrye.

(Testament, vv. 539-40).

For her—and of course for Villon himself—women are reduced (as are poets whose faces do not fit, he would seem to be implying) to a currency that has been devalued. There could be no clearer indication of the way in which the poet views human relationships. He is no moralist, except perhaps in his cups, but he is clearly aiming to strike a chord with his readers by drawing attention to the harsh laws that govern such matters. Everyone is mercenary, he says. Money rules, and dog eats dog in the tough, unsentimental world of post-war (post-Hundred Years War, that is) Paris. Loyalty, love, generosity are as nothing once the desire for money gets the upper hand, as it appears to have increasingly done in the France of the time. Numerous contemporary texts paint a similar picture, but Villon's testimony is without doubt the most graphic evidence we have, perhaps because he felt it the more keenly, having suffered more than most. Suffice it to say that, for him, it would seem that sex, good living and what he would appear to see as the good life are inextricably linked to one's ability to pay.⁶

He outlines his personal philosophy, which is in essence that nothing compares to living in comfort, in a clever parody of two famous poems, written by Phillipe de Vitri (c. 1290-1361) and Pierre d'Ailly (1351-1420), on the theme of Franc Gontier, the poor countryman who delights in his freedom and frugal existence far from the temptations of court and city life. Villon pokes merciless fun at these self-indulgent and basically hypocritical poems. He derides the world-view of the fictional Gontier, whom he claims not to fear as he is also poor—il n'a nulz hommes / Et mieulx que moy n'est herité’ (Testament, vv. 1465-66)—and engages in a debate with him about the relative merits of poverty and wealth. To underline his point, he invents a fat canon who is shown lolling on a soft bed (vows of chastity, etc. notwithstanding) with a lady of dubious morals. They deny themselves nothing, taking advantage of a warm well furnished room, ‘hypocras’,⁷ and a soft bed on which they indulge their naked bodies. Only when I saw them—through a crack in the wall, he knowingly adds—did I fully understand that: ‘Il n'est tresor que de vivre a son aise’. So much of Villon's attitude to life is summed up in these lines! How many times when he was on the run, or spending an uncomfortable night in some draughty barn, must he have dreamt of a warm room and a bed with sheets? To be able to drink fine wines, eat good food, mingle with ‘grans seigneurs et maistres’ and enjoy the favours of pretty women, however, one needs money in abundance. There is no mistaking the bitterness in lines such as ‘Car povres gens ont assez maulx’, or ‘A menues gens menue monnoye’ (Testament, vv. 1647 and 1651). The little man gets little money, these are the rules of the game. For someone like Villon, who could not find a patron wise enough to recognize his talents and take him on warts and all, it would seem that crime was the only way out. If only, he seems to be implying, some understanding soul would come along and free me from this vicious circle. It all comes back, in his version of events, to a ‘peu de chevance’. For everything and everybody can be bought and sold. The famous ‘Ballade de la Grosse Margot’ makes this clear. In this poem Villon portrays himself as a pimp, living with and off Margot, whom he does not hesitate to beat up

Quant sans argent s'en vient coucher Margot

(Testament, v. 1602).

But when the clients pay well, all is fine between them. Once again, love is reduced to sexual desire; in other words, to a commodity which can be merchandized. For Villon, the brothel in which they live ‘in state’ symbolizes not so much depravity as a form of realism. This is a provocative poem which is perhaps not all it seems. None the less, the sub-text remains that money is what really matters, not respect or love or honour, which he specifically derides. Villon sets this poem in the Parisian underworld with which he was familiar, the world in which outlaws lived dangerously (and perhaps, to him, excitingly) but where, having earned their money at the risk of their necks, they invariably threw it away ‘aux tavernes et aux filles’. Perhaps this is the secret of success: the really clever villains, the well-heeled judges, churchmen, pillars of the Establishment to a man, knew how to hang on to their ill-gotten gains. The marginaux, the petty crooks, the street musicians, the young whores showing off their breasts ‘pour avoir plus largement hostes’ (Testament, v. 1977), the bohemian crowd of eternal students among whom Villon moved, had never learned how to keep what little money came their way. They were small fry, anyway. But they were his people, the ones with whom he felt most at ease, and whose joys and sadnesses he could identify with and give voice to. As for the others, especially those who had imprisoned and tortured him, he would, he defiantly claims, willingly fart and belch in their faces, were he not sitting down. He turns once more to schadenfreude for consolation. Looking at what remains of the bodies of the rich in the Paris cemetery of the Innocents, he notes that it is impossible to tell a wealthy skeleton from a poor one. In this place, he remarks, there are no fun and games (presumably sexual, above all), and he asks us to consider what use to the rich their wealth is now—the word ‘chevances’ again. They once frolicked in luxurious beds, drank as much wine as they could and filled their bellies (‘panses’) with rich food. Where they are now, the very memory of such pleasures will have been lost. It is surely significant that even the dead are categorized in terms of their purchasing power, and of the creams and powders with which they pampered their bodies. It is as if Villon welcomes death as a means of relieving the rich of their money, of reducing all mankind, rich and poor alike, to a shared anonymity.

Villon defines himself, then, in terms of his poverty. He is, after all, merely a ‘povre petit escollier’ (Testament, v. 1886), both penniless and humble. He also extends this self-identification, and that of his milieu, to the dead and those who (all of us in fact) are what the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa calls corpses in-waiting. All humanity is thus defined in terms of money. It is the key to success and, in his case, failure. Much of his satire is aimed at the financially secure and at the dishonesty (or so he suggests) which has allowed them to achieve wealth and status. It is no surprise to find Villon comparing himself with the famous financier Jacques Coeur and maintaining (in a passage which is probably a twist on a biblical theme) that he would rather be alive and poor than dead and rich like Coeur. However much he tries to persuade himself of such a view (and he does so, too, in poems such as the ‘Ballade de bon conseil’ and the ‘Ballade de Fortune’, significantly not in Le Testament), it is apparent that lack of money is not only the key to the poet's life but also to his work. It runs throughout Le Testament and informs his attitude to life and to literature.

It is nowhere more obvious, however, than in the ballade which is usually known as the ‘Requeste à Monseigneur de Bourbon’. It is something of a mystery why this poem has not received more critical attention than it has, for it seems to me to go to the very heart of Villon's dilemma. A certain reluctance on the part of critics to engage with it may stem from the fact that it is difficult both to date and to localize. It appears in the Chansonnier de Rohan manuscript (thought to date from about 1475 and now in Berlin) and in two later (early sixteenth-century) ones, as well as in the Pierre Levet edition of 1489. But only in the printed edition of 1489 (and in later editions which derive from it) and one of the sixteenth-century manuscripts does it come with a title, identifying it as a poem dedicated to ‘Monseigneur de Bourbon’. The Duke of Bourbon in question would presumably be Jean II, who became duke in 1456 and who was a patron of the arts. He was a friend of Charles d'Orléans, and a member of his poetic circle. Villon scholars have traditionally followed Lucien Foulet in believing that the poem was indeed sent to (or at least written for) the Duke of Bourbon and support their case by drawing attention to the passage in Le Testament in which the poet appears to suggest that at some point in his painful past he paid a visit to the town of Moulins, where the Duke had his seat, in order to plead for help. His pleas would appear not to have fallen on deaf ears, and he describes himself as being eternally grateful. It has to be said that huitain XIII of Le Testament does seem to lend weight to such a view. Villon could well have appealed, then, to the Duke during his wanderings—and at his lowest point—and would be tempted to do so again. It is all very plausible. Recently, however, critics have begun to doubt this version of events and wondered whether the poem was not addressed instead to Charles d'Orléans, dating it from the time Villon was at Blois, or after he was released from the prison at Meung.⁸ It could be argued that all this constitutes external and not especially relevant evidence and that the poem should be looked at with purely internal evidence in mind. The difficulty is that this ‘requeste’ is of interest primarily for biographical reasons, and failure to agree on date, place and intention is not unreasonably seen as a major obstacle to interpretation.

Another factor which has perhaps dissuaded critics from taking the piece seriously is its tone, at times mischievous and witty but otherwise embarrassingly grovelling in its unashamedly naked appeal for help. This really is literature of the stomach. Villon admits to being weary, to having been ‘tamed’ (‘dompté’) by blows and beatings. Humility is now the name of the game, an uncomfortable (both for the poet and for his admirers) but necessary posture.⁹ In this text which, by its function, is effectively para-literary, there is no place for stylistic conceit. Villon is writing to be understood, and for a purpose. It can safely be assumed, therefore, that there is an element of sincerity in it, which is not always the case, by any means, in his work. This is especially clear in the opening lines of the third strophe:

Si je pouoie vendre de ma santé
A ung Lombart, usurier par nature,
Faulte d'argent m'a si fort enchanté
Que j'en prendroie, ce croy bien, l'avanture.
Argent ne pend a gipon n'a saincture.

(vv. 21-25)

Here Villon, in extremis, feels no compunction in displaying a life-long and major preoccupation, namely his lack of money. He ends the poem in what purports to be a note on the back of his begging letter by stating again that ‘faulte d'argent si m'assault’ (v. 39). Under the whimsical and deliberately light-hearted manner, the authentic voice of pain and humiliation comes through. The reference to beatings, to a previous loan of six escuz (v. 13) and, above all, to the fact that lack of money has effectively turned his mind (‘enchanter’ meaning to bewitch or spellbind) shows how close this apparently trivial poem is to Villon's coeur and to his corps. He had claimed in Le Lais that he was leaving Paris because of a broken heart, and that he is one of love's victims, an ‘amant martir’. In reality his sudden departure had more to do with the need to escape the clutches of the police. Not enough has been made of his no doubt conscious decision, at the close of Le Testament, to return to this same theme. So, when he proclaims that he is dying as a martyr to love—‘Car en amours mourut martir’ (v. 2001)—he is tipping the wink to those in the know (and just how many were there?) that his real problems lie elsewhere. Critics who have seized on these passages to talk at length about Villon and love may well have been missing the point. What they have failed to notice, in particular, is that in the same final ballade of his (mock) last will and testament he refers to his pitiful condition, telling his readers that ‘Quant mourut, n'avoit q'un haillon’ (Testament, v. 2013), an obvious allusion to the deleterious effects of lack of money. I would argue, indeed, that his sex life was likely to have been less traumatic for him than the discomfort caused by his financial plight. Perhaps he merely played at being a martyr to love. He was really more of a martyr to poverty.¹⁰ Having no house or warm bed, and no food to put in his stomach, was no literary joke. The unhealed trauma that lay at the heart of Villon's life and work was his inability, whether through his criminal or poetic activity, to find lasting material security. It would be foolish to pretend that lack of money doth a poet make, but it is obvious from his writings—and we must be careful to read all his works, and not just those which fit into a convenient ‘Romantic’ package—that he was permanently scarred by his failure to make a success of his life in the sort of terms which the age in which he lived best understood.

As we have seen, the Paris of the 1450s was notorious for its hunger for consumption and display, an understandable reaction, perhaps, after the real hunger its inhabitants had known for generations. Villon inevitably reflects this mood, and the poet cannot but see himself as a loser.¹¹ Two recent publications make this same point. In his edition of Villon's poetry, Claude Thiry states that there is a ‘dialectique de la pauvreté qui anime l'oeuvre de Villon’,¹² and in a thought-provoking monograph Jacques T. E. Thomas stresses the tone of ‘récrimination sociale’ which pervades Le Testament.¹³ Some eighty years ago the eminent critic Pierre Champion had been even more categorical: ‘Villon ne fut ni un altruiste ni un réformateur. Il manquait seulement d'argent; ayant désiré beaucoup d'en avoir il a maudit ceux qui lui en avaient refusé.¹⁴ But Villon's preoccupation with money goes further than being the source of his (often cruel) satire. It also colours his aesthetic and lyrical outlook. A true child of his time, he defines himself and others in terms of their wealth and outward appearance. Even the dead are not spared, from rich ladies who are pointedly reminded that they no longer have any need for creams and lotions to the criminals swinging on the gallows in the haunting ‘Epitaphe Villon’ (or ‘Ballade des pendus’)—for Thiry a ‘ballade de pauvres’—who admit to having once pampered their bodies, but neglected their souls. Speaking on their behalf, Villon refers ruefully to the ‘chair que trop avons nourrie’. Once again, his obsession with good living comes to the fore. Good living in the strictly material sense, that is.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics have, on the whole, shied away from linking Villon's desire for wealth too closely to the wellspring of his satirical and, a fortiori, lyrical poetry. They have presumably regarded such a source of inspiration as demeaning. Yet everyone who has ever studied Villon's life and works in any depth knows that here was a man who stole and killed; it is more comfortable, however, to explain away his misdeeds as part of his ‘mystery’ or ‘enigma’ than to look at what we know of his personal history in terms of a need to live well and ‘a son aise’, to quote his own words.¹⁵ Readers of his poetry in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, on the other hand, seem to have had no such inhibitions. The ‘Requeste’, given short shrift by most modern commentators, was given pride of place by poets of the following generation who strove to capture the ‘Villon touch’. Jean Marot imitates it closely in a poem written, similarly, with financial gain in mind:

Et, comme dit Villon en ses brocars,
De ma santé je vendrois aux Lombards,
Voire mes ans, se argent vouloient produire!

And in an ‘épitre’ addressed to François Ier, the court poet Guillaume Cretin speaks approvingly of Villon's skill at extracting money from the Duke of Bourbon and congratulates ‘ce gentil Villon’ on receiving ‘soulas pour ung peu de billon’. Clément Marot, himself, penned in 1532 a huitain to ‘ung sien Amy’, who was in fact Jacques Colin, the king's secretary and lecteur, in which he makes an undisguised plea for a ‘gracieux prest’ by means of a variation on Villon's poem on the same theme. Marot clearly assumes that both his friend and his royal master will grasp the allusion and see the joke. And, naturally, come up with the money.¹⁶

There can be no better indication, though, of the reception of Villon's work in the years immediately after it was written than the existence of a series of verse tales known as the Repeues franches, which probably date from around 1490 and which show the various (largely disreputable) means by which an enterprising young man such as Villon could find ways of getting himself a free meal. The number of editions of these puerile and badly written stories is both a pointer to popular taste at the time and a guide to the durability of the self-created myth of Villon the ‘bon follastre’. For the first couple of generations of readers, at least, Villon was mostly appreciated for his mischievous (Marot and others would see it as quintessentially ‘Parisian’) charm. Writers of varying talents up to and including Rabelais seem to have seen him primarily as a ‘farceur’ and, to quote Pierre Champion, an ‘écornifleur joyeux’.¹⁷ But they were all acutely aware of a poet's need to debase himself on occasion simply to survive. Anyone attempting to live by his pen would have been constantly reminded of the power of money. This applied as much to a Cretin or a Marot as it did to Villon, and helps explain why aspects of his work which inevitably have limited resonance today were looked upon at the time as typifying a poet's condition, and duly memorized and repeated. Villon's painful but often witty exposition of what would have seemed to his original audience an obsessive but natural preoccupation with money could not fail, therefore, to strike a chord.¹⁸ Living, as we do, in quite different times, we are more sensitive to his genius for adding flesh to the bare bones of human existence in verses of stark and often haunting beauty. The snows of yesteryear, which were for Rabelais little more than an excuse for a joke, have come to symbolize for modern readers of Villon's poetry man's powerlessness when faced with the passing of time and pitiless death.¹⁹ Who can be sure what Villon meant?²⁰ What we can say with certainty is that he was very much a man of his time, just as all those who read, admire and analyse his works are of theirs.

Notes

1. The history of ‘Villon-Rezeption’ is expertly summarized by Jean Dufournet in his Villon et sa fortune littéraire (Saint-Médard-en-Jalles: Guy Ducros, 1970). It transpires that, from the middle of the sixteenth century until the early years of the nineteenth, Villon was not much read in France. His work had become too difficult, from a linguistic point of view, for most potential readers, and, due to a shift in taste from the 1550s onwards, too coarse for the cultured elite. Two recent bibliographies underline this point: see Robert D. Peckam, François Villon. A Bibliography (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1990), and Rudolf Sturm, François Villon. Bibliographie et matériaux littéraires 1489-1988 (Munchen: K. G. Saur, 1990, 2 vol.). Gautier's study was first published in La France Littéraire in 1834, before reaching a wider public in Les Grotesques ten years later.

2. All references to Villon's poems are taken from the critical editions published by J. Rychner and A. Henry, Le Testament Villon. I. Texte. II. Commentaire (Genève: Droz, 1974); Le Lais Villon et les Poèmes variés. I. Textes. II. Commentaire (Genève: Droz, 1977).

3. Thanks to research undertaken more than a century ago, we know that Villon had been in trouble with the police before. On the evening of the 5th of June 1455 he had been involved in an argument with a priest which had ended in blows, … and with Villon's dagger in his adversary's groin. The priest later died of his wounds. For a recent examination of this incident and its consequences, see Pierre Braun, ‘Les Lettres de rémission accordées à François Villon’, in Villon hier et aujourd'hui. Actes du colloque pour le cinq-centième anniversaire de l'impression du Testament de Villon, réunis et publiés par Jean Dérens, Jean Dufournet et Michael Freeman (Paris: Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, 1993), pp. 53-72. Archival investigation also yielded up the names of the gang-members who took part with Villon in the robbery at the Collège de Navarre. In view of the care he took to cover his traces, the poet would no doubt be horrified to know that scholars have managed to piece together crucial events in his life.

4. See Bronislaw Geremek, Les Marginaux parisiens aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), and especially pp. 175-84.

5. It is by no means clear quite why Villon found himself in Bishop Thibaut d'Aussigny's prison at Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, for a ‘whole summer’ in 1461. What is clear, though, is that the experience was to mark him deeply.

6. See Pierre Le Gentil's description of life in Paris in Villon's day: ‘Sous les yeux de Villon, Paris avait donc repris sa physionomie habituelle, sa prospérité, son animation. Après les privations des années sombres, on s'y employait à bien vivre, à condition d'en avoir les moyens: d'où les redoutables tentations auxquelles devaient faire face ceux que le sort avait moins favorisés et qui voyaient autour d'eux s'étaler le luxe de la table ou du costume’ (Villon, Paris: Connaissance des Lettres, Hatier, 1967, pp.77-78). A similar picture emerges from Jean Favier, François Villon (Paris: Fayard, 1982), and from the same author's Paris au XVe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1974).

7. ‘Hypocras’, a mulled wine made with sugar, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, was thought to be a powerful aphrodisiac. There is no evidence that it had any effect, other than in the mind.

8. Rychner and Henry, in their edition of Villon's works (Le Lais, II, Commentaire, p.81), conclude that the poem was probably written for Charles d'Orléans, ‘vers la fin du séjour à Blois’. Gert Pinkernell, in his recent book on François Villon et Charles d'Orléans, (1457 à 1461): D'après les ‘Poésies diverses’, de Villon (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992), has a chapter (pp. 163-78) whose very title makes it clear where he stands on the question: ‘La Requeste au Seigneur et Prince: une supplique adressée au duc Charles après la libération de Meung’. This is the fullest discussion of the piece to date. In an article published in 1987 Luciano Rossi also examines the ballade, but starts from the dubious premise that it is all an elaborate joke, written to amuse Charles d'Orléans and his circle of effete poetry lovers: see ‘François Villon et son prince redoubté: notes sur deux ballades’, in Romania ingeniosa. Festschrift für Gerold Hilty (Bern: 1987), pp.201-20. An article by Daniel Poirion on ‘Le fol et le sage “auprès de la fontaine”: la rencontre de François Villon et Charles d'Orléans’, in Travaux de linguistique et de littérature, VI, 1968, pp.52-68, similarly mixes intuition with fantasy.

9. Pinkernell points out (op.cit., pp. 168-69) that ‘la critique moderne (…) a toujours goûté la pièce, sans la prendre trop au sérieux et sans lui consacrer de grands efforts exégétiques’. The examples he goes on to quote show this to be true; Gaston Paris wrote dismissively of the poem at the turn of the century as ‘un modèle dans l'art de quémander avec désinvolture et une sorte d'élégance, art qui resta en faveur parmi les beaux esprits plus de deux siècles après Villon. Nous sommes devenus peu sensibles à ce genre de talent’. In a book of 540 pages, Jean Favier devotes just four to the requête, presumably on the grounds that its ‘souffle poétique est court’, (François Villon, p.432). He accepts that the poem was written for Jean de Bourbon, but suggests that Villon need not have travelled as far as Moulins to deliver a poem to a wealthy aristocrat who was frequently on the move and who, in any case, maintained a large house in Paris.

10. The interpretation of huitain XXV seems to me to be crucial in this respect. In it Villon bemoans the fact that lack of money, bringing in its train depression and hunger, prevents him from being a successful lover:

    Bien est verté que j'é aymé
    Et aymeroye voulentiers;
    Mais triste cueur, ventre affamé,
    Qui n'est rassassié au tiers,
    M'oste des amoureux sentiers.
    Au fort, quelc'um s'en recompence
    Qui est remply sur les chantiers,
    Car la dance vient de la pance!

    (Testament, vv. 193-200).

    He does, of course, tell us, and at some length, that he was one of Love's victims. Like Samson, Solomon and King David, among others, in fact. It is after all axiomatic that ‘Folles amours font les gens bestes’ (v.629). His intended reader could be expected to sympathize with Villon's description of himself as an example of man's inability to resist woman's charms, and the poet exploits this implicitly misogynistic theme to the full. The suffering he claims to have endured because of his unrequited love provides him with a perfect excuse for explaining away his ‘misadventures’ (for which we can now read ‘crimes’). He makes great play of the fact that some unnamed woman, whom he ‘served with good heart and loyally’, turned his head and made him act out of character, although we are invited to assume that by the time he was writing his Testament he had seen the error of his ways. Despite Villon's (deliberately playful?) protestations, one is forced to agree with André Lanly that ‘la peine d'amour invoquée n'est qu'un paravent’ and that ‘le poète a joué devant nous un rôle d'amant martyr selon la bonne tradition littéraire’. Like Lanly, I find it hard to see Villon, who boasts almost of his familiarity with the world of prostitution and crime, as ‘à trente ans, l'homme d'une grande passion amoureuse’: see François Villon, Oeuvres, Traduction en français moderne accompagnée de notes explicatives, par André Lanly (Paris: Champion, 2 vols., 3e édition, 1978) I. p.121.

11. As Pierre Le Gentil rightly points out, ‘Villon se persuade que sa pauvreté est la vraie cause de ses déboires et de ses fautes’ (op.cit., p.105).

12. See François Villon, Poésies complètes. Présentation, édition et annotations de Claude Thiry (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1991), p.33.

13. See Jacques T. E. Thomas, Lecture du Testament Villon (Genève: Droz, 1992), p.102.

14. Quoted by Jean-Claude Delclos in Villon, Le Testament, Le Lais, Poésies diverses, extraits, etc., (Paris: Bordas, 1987), p.126.

15. As Bronislaw Geremek correctly states in a perceptive article on ‘Le rire et la souffrance chez François Villon’: ‘Les historiens ont de la peine à admettre qu'un poète ait pu être aussi un voleur habituel’ (p.157).

16. These three well-known poems are quoted by Pinkernell (op.cit., pp. 167-68). The first two probably date from the very beginning of the sixteenth century. The authors of all three clearly assume that Villon's piece will be familiar to the recipients of their own poems, and to a wider audience. They can therefore be said to provide us with a fine example of premeditated intertextuality. The poets' imitation of Villon's humorous manner helps them deflect attention from their potentially humiliating subservience.

17. See Pierre Champion, François Villon. Sa vie et son temps, 2e édition avec un nouvel avant-propos. Nouveau tirage, 2 vol., (Paris: Champion, 1967), II, p.279: ‘Il semble bien que vers ce temps là les Repues Franches, dont le succès fut considérable, données comme les gentillesses mêmes de François, ont fixé la légende de Villon qui sera décidément celle d'un écornifleur joyeux’.

18. Even if few could have guessed at the real circumstances of Villon's life. His poems are consciously ambiguous, and by the time they found their way into print (in 1489) were already difficult to decode, as Clément Marot recognized in the remarkable preface to his edition of Villon's works in 1533.

19. According to François Rabelais (Pantagruel, ch.XIV), the whereabouts of the ‘neiges d'antan’ was ‘le plus grand soucy que eust Villon, le poëte parisien’. The epithet ‘parisien’ is not without significance. None of Rabelais's references to Villon ever shows him in anything other than an amusing light, in which he displays all the typically Parisian characteristics of insolence and a ready wit.

20. A fascinating new reading of the famous ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ is proposed by Paul Verhuyck in his ‘Villon et les neiges d'antan’, in Villon hier et aujourd'hui, op.cit., pp.177-89. He suggests that the ‘neiges d'antan’ were in fact ‘de vraies figures de neige, que Villon a pu voir dans les rues de la ville’ (p.181). So the plot thickens, as the snows melt …