SOURCE: “Francois Villon's Testament and the Poetics of Transformation,” in Fifteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 11, 1985, pp. 71-83.

[In this essay, Peckham considers the mix of high and low—spiritual and crude—in Villon's Testamentas a sign of the transformation of the narrator that takes place within the poem.]

Readers have long observed ambiguities in François Villon's Testament (T.). Some of these have been deemed the incidental results of an extended period of composition,¹ but more recent scholarship tends to view them as the deliberate acts of a truly protean poetic voice.² Furthermore, studies by Jean Dufournet within the last two years show them to be numerous, and one might well conclude that they are fundamental rather than exceptional elements of Villon's testamentary poetics.³

Transformation and substitution are two processes which often create these ambiguities. Their mechanics are quite visible, especially in the T.'s narrative frame, which is in large part a fiction about the work's composition. In this paper we shall examine the principal varieties of transformation and substitution in T., their poetic functions and several rhetorical devices associated with them.

To begin, there are nearly a dozen instances of conformatio in T. where the infusion of the narrator's persona is intense enough to be called character transformation. For la Belle Heaulmière, the narrator signals his rhetorical empathy with a number of parallels. Both he and she are old and poor, thin and dry. In both cases the image of a consuming fire or flame is used to convey the all too rapid passage of time. For Villon as narrator, T. 217-22 states:

Mes jours s'en sont alez errant,
Comme dit Job, d'une touaille
Font les filletz, quant tixerant
En son poing tient ardente paille:
Lors s'il y a nulbout qui saille
Soudainement il le ravit.(4)

For la Belle Heaulmière and her companions, we read in T. 529-31:

A petit feu de chenevoctes,
Tost alumees,tost estainctes …
Et jadiz fusmes si mignotes!

Both Villon and la Belle Heaulmière have been hurt emotionally by lovers who seemed more interested in money than in love (T. 910-17 T. 475-76). Both portray themselves at one time or another as naked and beaten, alone and rejected by the opposite sex.

It is in his thirtieth year “En l'an trentiesme de mon aage” (T. 1) that Villon delivers a warning lesson to younger men or boys who are following the same crooked path as he did. However, his “Belle leccon aux enfants perduz” (T. 1668-91), which begins as a fairly serious condemnation of the dissolute life, waxes lyrical and carpe diem in the “Ballade de bonne doctrine” (T. 1692-1719), where the refrain refers to money: “Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.” Similarly, la Belle Heaulmière, thirty years after her first lover's death, regrets the errors of her youth and the ravages of time on her human form. She too changes the tone of her lament with a carpe diem ballad of instruction to younger prostitutes (T. 533-60). Again the refrain speaks of money: “Ne que monnoye qu'on descrie”. These two passages, near the end and beginning of the Testament respectively, are both mirror images of the Testament itself, opening with regrets and ending with advice bequeathed to a variety of people who are designated either by name or by what they do to get their money.

Villon accomplishes the transition between his initial first person narrator and la Belle Heaulmière through an intermediate persona, “le povre vielart” (T. 424), depicted entirely in the third person (a kind of mime character). Rychner and Henry in the notes to their edition call him “… représentant collectif de tous les hommes accablés par l'âge et la misère.” to which they add “… grace à ce caractère général et symbolique il fait la liaison entre Villon et la Belle Heaulmière”.⁵ For both characters, solidarity with others of their kind is suggested through somewhat derogatory non-human terms: “Toujours viel cinge est desplaisant” (T. 431) for “le povre vielart”, and “Tout en ung tas, comme peloctes” (T. 528) for la Belle Heaulmière and her companions. To show us the negative changes wrought by time, la Belle Heaulmière gives the reader an explicit before-and-after anatomical effictio of herself (T. 489-524). For the old man, we are told of negative reactions to the wit and antics which brought him positive acclaim in his youth (T. 437-44). It is interesting to note also that both contemplate but do not commit suicide (T. 459-60, T. 433-36). With this intermediate persona structure in mind, it is not surprising to see that the mysterious third person narrator who describes Villon's death in the final ballad (T. 1996-2023) appears to serve as a kind of chrysalis for an emergent narrative “I” and “we”, seen in T. 2004: “Et ce je croy bien que ne ment” and T. 2018: “C'est de quoy nous esmerveillon”. In effect, the narratee is transformed into a new narrator.

Another equally complex character transformation can be seen in the famous “Ballade pour prier Nostre Dame” (T. 873-909). Part of Villon's ambiguity emerges in the introductory octave (T. 865-72) as a kind of binary system, with the interpretatio “chastel … ne forteresse” (T. 869), the normally antithetical concepts “corps ne ame” paired to signal completeness or wholeness (T. 870), a topical orientation of the stanza which is balanced between mother and son and structurally identical to the pattern of the stanza introducing Villon's bequest to his adoptive father (T. 849-56). This poetic bisexuality is a lyric structuring device in the ballad, where a son gives his words to his mother to address another mother for the favor of her son. There are no less than three male-female pairs in the poem: Villon and his mother, Jesus and the Virgin, Thëophilus and l'Egipcïenne. In addition, the ballad's first stanza is essentially a set of beliefs about the Virgin while the envoy is a credo about Jesus. We sense the same binary system in the poem's tone, which shifts from the latinized language of the first stanza to the still bookish but popular legends of l'Egipcïenne and Thëophilus in the second, both more readily associated with the clerky Villon than with his mother. The second half of the ballad continues with a shift from the elliptical but popular liturgical image of Christ as the bread of the Eucarist in the Virgin's womb to the less complex artistic representations of heaven and hell painted in the parish church, and the often spoken formula of the credo in the envoy. This half is more easily associated with Villon's illiterate and church-going mother.

From a rhetorical standpoint, the mystical process of transubstantiation mentioned in the mathematical center of the ballad (T. 891) seems to highlight the significance of two other elements of transformation. The first is the truth claim: “je n'en suis jangleresse” (T. 881), here the term “jangleresse” is quite possibly an ironic play on the word “jongleresse”, a female jongleur. The double irony lies in the fact that his mother is using Villon's works (his song) to pray, and at the same time, Villon is using his mother's voice to speak (or sing). The second element is the envoy's feminine acrostic VILLONE, interesting because “Villon”, the poet's pseudonym, is feminized and passed from son to mother rather than from mother to son.

An identical feminine accrostic is found on the other side of T., in what Professor Karl Uitti considers, with some minor adjustment, a counter balance position.⁶ However, this time it is part of a ballad describing the narrator's vision of cohabitation with la Grosse Margot, where the central line in the envoy establishes parity between pimp and prostitute: “L'un vault l'autre, c'est mau rat mau chat” (T. 1624). Here also we find a phonetically constructed chiasmus or commutatio: “Je suis paillart, la paillarde me suyt” (T. 1622). It may be more than a figure of speech, because, along with the acrostic, it seems to reinforce the theme of transformation.

Other examples of this binary system include what might be a rhetorical centering attempt in Villon's bequest to Saint Amant's wife in T. 1011-13:

Pour le Cheval blanc qui ne
bouge
Lui changë a une jument,
Et la Mulle a ung asne rouge.

The passage stands out because the testator is referring directly back to a bequest made in Lais 92-95, not to Saint Amant's wife, but to Saint Amant himself. Also the exchange mandated in the T. seems a violation of the promise made earlier concerning the Lais's bequests: “Pour les revocquer ne le diz” (T. 761). Jean Dufournet has aptly pointed out that this substitution is physically and symbolically one of sexual potency and lubricity for sterility.⁷ More importantly though, it forms a pattern which reflects symmetrically the process of exchange: That of a male animal for a female and then a female for a male, a-b-b-a. This commutatio or chiasmus is not simply ornamental, but an important rhetorical device in Villon's testamentary poetics, as we shall see again and again.

Another central bequest, this one to sire Denis Hynselin in the next stanza, presents an interesting substitution:

Item, donne a sire Denis
Hyncelin, esleu de Paris,
Quatorze muys de vin d'Aulnys
Prins sur Turgis a mes perilz;
S'il en buvoit tant que periz
En fust son sens et sa raison,
Qu'on mecte de l'eaue es bariz:
Vin pert mainte bonne maison.

(T. 1014-21)

After bequeathing “Quatorze muys de vin d'Aulnis” (T. 1016), Villon suggests that the wine be exchanged for water. A burlesque image of the Cana wedding miracle, this carnavalesque process is one of three elements in a rhetorical balance. The other two operate in tandem like an expanded epanadelepsis (thematic rather than lexical). In T. 2, Villon begins to say that his work was written “Que toutes mes hontes j'euz beues”. The word “hontes” is the figurative representation of prison water, as T. 14 and T. 738 demonstrate. However, by T. 2022 Villon is drinking quite a different beverage: “Un traict but de vin morillon”. Thus we have a central substitution of water for a wine bequest and a change of water to wine made manifest in the second and second to last lines of T.

This antipodal symmetry or epanadelepsis can be multiplied or extended inward if one considers the mention of personal suffering and abuse in T. 4 “Non obstant maintes peines eues” and on the other end, T. 2014-17:

Qui plus, en mourant mallement
L'espoignoit d'Amours l'esguillon;
Plus agu que le ranguillon
D'un baudrier lui faisoit sentir.

As we continue toward the center from the beginning, we note that Villon transforms a prayerful curse on Thibault d'Aussigny into a Deus laudamus and then a benediction on Louis XI and his heirs (T. 30-64). In the antipodal position, T. 1968-95, our poet turns his plea for forgiveness in the “Ballade de mercy” into another curse on Thibault d'Aussigny. Interestingly enough, Villon, who claims to be neither “son serf ne sa biche” in T. 12, portrays the bishop and his people as hunting dogs “traitres chiens matins” in T. 1984. Going still further inward, we see that Villon transforms his “… gracieux galans / Que je suivoye ou temps jadiz” (T. 225-26) into a three-class human cosmology: those who are “grans seigneurs et maistres” (T. 234), those naked beggars of whom he says “Et pain ne voient qu'aux fenestres” (T. 236) and those who prosper in religious orders (T. 237). In the counter balance position, T. 1736-67, it is the transforming power of decay and the spacial exigency of the Innocents cemetery that finally reunites members of these groups in a truly classless society, a carnival of souls in a world inside-out:

Ensemble en ung tas, pesle mesle;
Seigneuries leur sont ravies,
Clerc ne maistre ne s'i appelle.

(T. 1757-59)

Other forces operate within the T. to turn the world inside out and upside down. One of these, mad passionate love, has the power to change nice girls into prostitutes, as Villon hypothesises in T. 590-616. We note how he uses commutatio to reflect this change at its beginning, in T. 592-93: “Ne furent-ilz pas femmes honnestes? / Honnestes si furent vrayement”. Famous men both wise and powerful are not exempt, as we discover in the gallery of Love's fools, the “Double Ballade” (T. 625-72). “Folles amours font les gens bestes” says Villon in T. 629. Victims of this folly include Solomon, Samson, David and the poet himself. After explaining to his readers how his mistress demonstrated her interest and friendship, he complains of her insincerity, using another commutatio between stanzas: “Mais ce n'estoit qu'en m'abusant. / Abusé m'a et fait entendre / Tousjours d'un que ce fust un autre:” (T. 688-90). Villon goes on to show readers the credulous lover's perspective with a litany of absurd contrevérités. These substitutions can be summarized in the much discussed lapidary in T. 695-96: “—Tousjours trompeur autruy engautre / Et rend vecyes pour lanternes—”.

Carnival-like also is the poetic universe where a sinner vehemently adjures love in T. 713-14: “Je regnye Amours et despite / Et deffie a feu et a sang”, then dies a martyr of love in T. 2001: “Car en amour mourut martir”, is buried in saintly red with bells ringing at his funeral, and has a church shrine (Saint Avoye) complete with pilgrim-like visitors. Ah, but is this not the same poet who said: “Il n'est foy que d'homme qui regnye” in v.7 of his “Ballade des contre vérités”?⁸ We muse silently and ask ourselves if the central position and sexual nature of the Saint Amant bequest (T. 1006-13) do not lend some hagiographical overtones to the Testament.

This same world-inside-out theme is further reinforced by another kind of commutatio structure in Diomedes' reply to Alexander's accusation that he is a pirate:

Pourquoi laron me faiz clamer?
Pour ce qu'on me voit escumer
En une petïote fuste?
Se comme toy me peusse armer,
Comme toy empereur je feusse

(T. 140-44)

This time the a-b-b-a pattern is thematic rather than lexical. We have only to see T. 140 and T. 144 as lines that label the two individuals, whereas T. 141-42 and T. 143 state why the labels were used.⁹

Finally there is the poor-man-on-top depiction of the hereafter in an interesting vernacularization of the Lazarus-Dives parable from Luke 16:

C'est de Jhesus la parabolle
Touchant du riche ensevely
En feu, non pas en couche molle,
Et du ladre de dessus ly.

(T. 813-16)

Within the larger context of this same vernacularization (T. 799-824), there is an illustration of Villon's transformation or subversion of tone which I do not find discussed in Professor Evelyn Vitz's The Crossroad of Intentions.¹⁰ Villon, using his testamentary invocation as a launching pad for a digression, is discussing rather pedantically the state of those who died before Christ came. Suddenly in T. 807-808, his diction waxes comic with creaturial realism. Using a kind of internalized debate mechanism, he questions not the appropriateness of his tone, but rather the theological soundness of the statement, claiming that the narrator has no degree in theology. In response, the narrator cites the Lazarus-Dives parable and reasons through a fairly well constructed argument in support of his statement. Finally, in T. 821-24, he again contaminates the tone, which is beginning to wax serious, by claiming the parable shows that heavy drinkers would suffer much in hell from the paucity of drink.

Shifting tone, as well as the many transformations in the Testament's poetic voice have caused speculation that this multiform lyrico-narrative work is an anthology, perhaps even a casual conflation.¹¹ This seems unlikely to me for two reasons. One is the previously outlined rhetorical design, consisting in part of an expanded and multiple thematic epanadelapsis, along with mathematically centered bequests to Saint Amant's wife (T. 1006-13) and to sire Denis Hyncelin (T. 1014-20). The second is the artfully casual approach of Villon, who manufactures the curious illusion that his work is not a finished product, but rather a text in process, a first draft bristling with raw material and defects. Indeed, the Testament seems at times to be a wasteland littered with incomplete sentences, like the first, where there is no verb to go with the initial long-winded adverbial clause (T. 1-6). Often our poet pretends that he has accidentally strayed from the subject, and then strives to regain his focus on it: “En cest incident me suis mis, / Qui de riens ne sert a mon fait.” (T. 257-58). In addition, he alleges self-censure with formulae such as “et reliqua” (T. 743, T. 1175), “D'en plus parler je me desiste” (T. 373), and the like. The very name he gives his fictitious scribe, “Firmen l'Estourdis”, is intended to arouse his reader's suspicion. Villon complains in T. 53-60 that his earlier work, which we call the Lais is changing, out of his control, and has already been given an unauthorized title. Yet, he gives to Jehan de Calais, a man who does not know him, official permission to make changes, correct errors, glose and comment, diminish and augment his work; in short, anything he sees fit to do (T. 1844-59).

At the same time that the above-mentioned narrative frame may confuse the reader and hide a rhetorically balanced design, it also participates in the poetic process we have been discussing all along, that of transformation or change, which is itself an alleged motivation for the creation of the T.:

Escript l'ay l'an soixante et ung,
Lors que le roy me delivra
De la dure prison de Mehun
Et que vie me recouvra,

(T. 81-84)

This change from an atmosphere of despair to one of hope is also reflected in T. 97-102:

Combien, au plus fort de mes maulx,
En cheminant sans croix ne pille,
Dieu, qui les pelerins d'Esmaulx
Conforta, ce dit l'Euvangille,
Me monstra une bonne ville,
Et pourveut du don d'esperance:

The rest of the stanza sheds some light on my final element of transformation, one which has spawned much discussion: repentance (“les regrets”). Describing God's attitude toward sin, Villon states: “Combien que pechiez si soit ville, / Riens ne het que perseverance.” (T. 103-104). Obviously, though even the blackest sin is forgivable, obdurate sinfulness is for the narrator (as it is in much medieval thought) a static existence, and anathema in the eyes of God, who does not want the poet's death, but rather that he turn from his wickedness and be transformed:

Je suis pecheur, je le scay bien
Pourtant ne veult pas Dieu ma mort,
Mais convertisse et vive en bien,
Et tout autre que pechié mort.

(T. 105-108)

On a metaphorical level, this major theme suggests a kind of static-versus-dynamic dialectic, which would be interesting to investigate. But for now, let us place Villon's preoccupation with repentance back in its carnival context and ask ourselves why it is that some consider the two themes to be incongruous and therefore proof of the Testament's disunity. Is the juxtaposition of “cette introduction grave et poignante, pleine d'amertume et de science douloureuse” truly inconsistent with “… la suite abracadabrante de gaillardises, de plaisanteries, d'équivoques et de parodies” as it is in Siciliano's view of the Testament's regrets and bequests?¹² My response is no, not any more than frivolous Carnival is inconsistent with the gravity of Lent, for one is a kind of preparation for the other, and both are consubstantial in the process of transformation.

Notes

1. Italo Siciliano, François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du moyen âge (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1967), pp. 445-57; Louis Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française, des origines à 1900. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1926), pp. 389-90; Antoine Campaux, François Villon. Sa Vie et ses oeuvres (Paris A. Durand, 1859), pp. 247-48.

2. Norris Lacy, “Mouvement and Montage in Villon's Testament, in A Medieval French Miscellany. Papers of the 1970 Conference on Medieval French Literature, University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, 42 (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Publications, 1972), pp. 79-85; Pierre Demarolle, L'Esprit de Villon: Etude de style, Collection “Style et Esprit Français (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1968) and Villon, un testament ambigue, Thèmes et Textes (Paris: Larousse, 1973), pp. 190-96; Jean-Claude Muhlethaler, Poétiques du quinzième siécle. Situation de François Villon et Michault Taillevant (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1983; E. Vitz, The Crossroad of Intentions. A Study of Symbolic Contamination in the Poetry of François Villon, De Proprietatibus Litterarium, Series Practica, 93 (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).

3. “La Permanence d'une figure mythique, ou Villon-Merlin,” Europe, Revue litteraire mensuelle, 61, No. 634 (octobre 1983), 83-92 and “Les Formes de l'ambiguïté dans le Testament de Villon,” Revue des langues romanes, 86, No. 2 (1982), 191-219.

4. Jean Rychert et Albert Henry, éds., Le Testament Villon, Textes Littéraires Français, 207-208 (Geneva: Droz, 1974) and Le Lais Villon et les Poémes Variés, TLF, 239-240 (Geneva: Droz, 1977). In both cases, Vol. I is Texte and Vol. II is Commentaire. All quotations of Villon's work are from these editions.

5. Le Testament Villon, II, p. 70.

6. “A Note on Villon's Poetics,” Romance Philology, 30, No. 1 (August 1976), 188.

7. Recherches sur le Testament de François Villon, seconde édition revue et augmentée (Paris: SEDES, 1971), Vol. I, pp. 292-94.

8. Le Lais Villon et les Poèmes Variés, I, p. 56.

9. Other examples of commutatio include the terms “valleton/viel/viel/jeune cocquart” (T. 733-36), variations on the base verbs amer and renier in “L'amant remis et renye. / Je regnye Amours et despite” (T. 712-13) and the subject-infinitive-infinitive-subject pattern in “Neccessité fait gens mesprendre / Et fain saillir le loup du bois.” (T. 167-68). Note that all three are thematically associated with change and ambiguity.

10. See note 2.

11. See note 1.

12. Siciliano, pp. 454-55.