SOURCE: “Writing and the Fragmentation of Authority,” in Villon's Last Will: Language and Authority in the Testament, Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 13-33.

[In this excerpt, Hunt examines the methods by which Villon calls into question the authority of his narrator in Le Testament, including his asides to the “scribe,” his allusions to other sources, and his use of irony.]

Ce que j'ay escript est escript.(1)
[What I have written is written]

The testator places some emphasis on the writing of the Testament, that is, on its status as a written record—‘Escript l'ay l'an soixante et ung’ (81). There is never the slightest doubt that he is a highly literate man addressing an educated audience. Biographers will point out that in 1452 François Villon gained the Master of Arts degree of the University of Paris, but without departing from the text we are bound to take with a pinch of salt such self-deprecating descriptions by the testator as ‘povre de sens et de savoir’ (178) and references to ‘mon plain sens / Sy peu que Dieu m'en a presté’ (75), for learned allusions abound in his lively account of his experiences. The ‘povre Villon’ of the will plays down both the extent and value of his education,

Mais quoy! je fuyoie l'escolle
Comme fait le mauvaiz enffant.
[So what did I do? I played truant from school like a naughty child]

(205-6)

but this provocative (and preposterous) claim is ironically undercut by the testator's own reference to writing,

En escripvant ceste parolle
A peu que le cueur ne me fent.
[As I write these words, my heart is almost breaking]

(207-8)

and by the hollowness of his simulated regrets as he reveals the true nature of his remorse:

Bien sçay, se j'eusse estudïé
Ou temps de ma jeunesse folle,
Et a bonnes meurs dedïé,
J'eusse maison et couche molle.

(201-4)

[I know! If only I'd studied in my misspent youth and tried to behave properly, I'd now have a plush place of my own]

The ‘couche molle’ (‘comfortable pad’) as a desirable acquisition recurs in the Lazarus story at line 815. But the learned Villon is really here parodying Proverbs 24:3-4 by taking the verses literally, before proceeding to ironic manipulation of another sapiential book, Ecclesiastes, in the following stanza:

Sapientia aedificabitur domus
          et prudentia roborabitur;
in doctrina replebuntur cellaria
          universa substantia pretiosa et pulcherrima.

(3-4)

[Through wisdom is an house builded: and by understanding it is established:

And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.]

The testator likes to mock traditional beliefs and authorities. His pretence of regretting his failure to achieve the promised rewards need not delude us, for he promptly accords greater value to the School of Life than to the Academy:

Travail mes lubres sentemens,
Esguisez comme une pelocte,
M'ouvrist plus que tous les commens
D'Averroÿs sur Arristote.

(93-6)

[Hardship clarified my erratic thoughts, as sharp as a pelota ball, much more than all Averroës' commentaries on Aristotle]

The self-mocking irony of the antiphrasis ‘esguisez’ and the appearance of the word ‘lubres’ (‘erratic’) once again put us on our guard against taking the testator's statements too seriously, as does the irony with which he proceeds to undermine his own proposition by indicating that, so far from learning any lesson at all, he was saved ‘au plus fort de mes maulx’ (97) by divine intervention (99), an assertion which, like many of the testator's religious references, is kept at a critical distance by an appeal to authority:

Dieu, qui les pelerins d'Esmaulx
Conforta, ce dit L'Euvangille.

(99-100; cf. Luke 24: 13-35)

[God, who comforted the pilgrims of Emmaus, according to what the Gospel says]

The connection with the preceding lines (93-4) is established by the fact that in the Gospel Christ addresses the pilgrims as ‘stulti’ and proceeds to instruct them:

Et ipse dixit ad eos: O stulti, et tardi corde ad credendum in omnibus quae locuti sunt prophetae!

(25)

Tunc aperuit illis sensum ut intelligerent scripturas

(45)

[Then he said unto them, o fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Then opened he [cf. m'ouvrist, 95] their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.]

Whether hardship (travail) has really been so instructive we may be inclined to doubt. Certainly, at the outset of the Testament the testator seems to deny that the hardship of the prison at Meung at any rate has had any influence on him, refusing to Thibault the satisfaction of ‘teaching him a lesson’ or in any way reforming him. We should therefore be reluctant to see in travail a specific allusion to imprisonment, even though it is apparently distinguished from the rest of his suffering (plains et pleurs, angoisseux gemissemens, tritresses et douleurs, labeurs et griefz cheminemens). Travail recurs in the ‘Requeste au prince’:

Françoys Villon, que Travail a dompté
A coups orbes, à force de bature …

(3-4)

[François Villon, whom Hardship has battered into submission with hurtful blows]

The catalogue of suffering in lines 89 ff. certainly seems overdone. But it looks as if the testator intends to present God in a providential role as the true ‘instructor’ who equipped (pourveut, 102) him with hope, even though he was not a pilgrim or a rich man (he puns on sans croix ne pille, 98, ‘penniless’ and ‘without a cross or thick cloth’).

We see from the outset, therefore, that the testator cloaks his own education in a series of ironic protestations, which seem to favour the power of providence and concede little to the influence of the schools, whilst yet skilfully exploiting learned references. What are these learned references? To what sort of authorities do they refer? And what kind of writing do they involve? To understand the dialogism of the Testament and its author's treatment of language we need to look carefully at his handling of written authorities and sources. His evocation of the voices of tradition and authority, encompassing all kinds of conventional wisdom, is almost always double-edged.

For example, the treatment of the Alexander and Diomedes story seems to constitute a parody of the use of exempla by moralistic writers. Like the ‘povre Villon’ himself, Diomedes invokes fortune and povreté to excuse the fact that he is a criminal, more specifically, a pirate. Is the charge of criminality made because he ‘escume’ (141) or because he does it only ‘en une petiote fuste’ (142)? Alexander, in apparent acquiescence to his reasoning, duly changes Diomedes' fortune ‘mauvaise en bonne’ (156). But what is the moral of this tale, apart from the obvious one of the benefits of patronage? Apparently this:

… Onc puis ne mesdit
A personne, mais fut vray homme.

(157-8)

[He never again spoke ill of anyone, but showed himself an upright man]

The first part of the statement seems at first comprehensible enough, but what does vray mean?—‘just’ or ‘truth-loving’ or ‘mature’? We are forced to reconsider to whom the reference applies. Who was taught a lesson by this encounter? Grammatically the statement is irremediably—and therefore surely intentionally—ambiguous. That is to say we can advance equally plausible arguments for the claim that it is Alexander who learned not to speak ill of a man of whom he knew nothing (but called a laron en mer) and the alternative interpretation that Diomedes himself learned to hold his tongue, once his fortune had changed.² But, we may ask, would the testator really cease to speak ill of, for example, Thibault d'Aussigny, if Fortune smiled on him? It seems doubtful. He has already used the verb mesdire antiphrastically in the line 20 where he mockingly anticipates the charge of calumny by simultaneously denying and illustrating it (see below pp. 40 f.). Here then is an exemplum with no clearly intelligible moral, indeed with a moral that remains insolubly ambiguous. And precisely the difficult word puzzling us, that is vray, is repeated as the testator reaches for an authority and tells us,

Valere pour vray le bauldit
Qui fut nommé le Grant a Romme.

(159-60)

[Valerius, known in Rome as Maximus, vouches for its truth]

We instinctively know that the authority will be a hoax, and so it is. There is nothing appropriate in Valerius Maximus, well known as he certainly was in the fifteenth century,³ and though it is possible that the testator has in mind the Epitome of ps.- Callisthenes by Julius Valerius or the Alexander romance of Julius Valerius [Alexander Polemius], neither actually has the story. Here, then, is an anecdote about a man who became ‘truthful’ recounted by a ‘narrator’ who guarantees the ‘truth’ of the story by a false source reference! The voices of Diomedes and Alexander are heard—and heard by each other—but with what result? No single interpretation is authorized and no unequivocal confirmation of the story's reliability is offered.

The question of competing voices and authorized interpretations is raised in another didactic passage, where the testator cites the authority of Ecclesiastes. His technique here perfectly illustrates his mischievous selectivity in the handling of his sources. In what amounts to a mise en abyme of tendentiously interpretative reading (cf. 19) he admits that he lighted on words of Solomon (‘le dit du Saige’, 209) particularly favourable to his own cause, ‘to suit his own book’ as we might say, and quotes accurately Ecclesiastes 11:9 (first phrase). He confesses his own bias in such careful selectivity by acknowledging that ‘Solomon’ ‘ailleurs sert bien d'un autre mes’ (213, ‘elsewhere serves up a very different dish’), that is, says something quite different. This ‘correction’ of his oversimplified summary of ‘the Sage's’ wisdom is disingenuous. In proceeding to illustrate his ‘correction’ by producing another accurate quotation, duly illustrating the contrary of what he had first attributed to ‘Solomon’, he underlines the apparent contradiction of the two statements with the observation ‘C'est son parler, ne moins ne mes’ (215, ‘that's what he says, neither more nor less’). This is all thoroughly misleading. The author of Ecclesiastes says rather more than what is quoted here and the testator himself suppresses it in yet a further act of selection. The testator's mock confession of his cavalier way with quotations derives particular piquancy and audacity from the ironic use of the word ailleurs (213), which leads us to expect a quotation drawn from a quite different part of the source, whereas in reality the ailleurs turns out to be an antiphrasis for ibidem—in the same place.⁴ What the testator has done is to quote the first phrase of Ecclesiastes 11:9 and, as an apparent corrective, the last phrase of 11: 10 whilst suppressing everything in the middle:

Laetare ergo, juvenis, in adolescentia tua [et in bono sit cor tuum in diebus juventutis tuae, et ambula in viis cordis tuae, et in intuitu oculorum tuorum, et scito quod pro omnibus his adducet te in judicium]

[Aufer iram a corde tuo, et amove malitiam a carne tua] Adolescentia enim et voluptas vana sunt.

(11:9-10)

[Rejoice, o young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgement.

Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.]

In this way he creates two voices by omitting the link which unites them. He thus constitutes a ‘carpe diem’ theme and its contrasting counterpart ‘vanity, vanity, all is vanity’, allowing this juxtaposition of contraries to appear as the redressing of the balance which betokens his own fairmindedness. The single voice of ‘the Sage’ is thus fragmented. Of course, the (omitted) admonitions to clean living and prudent concern for the day of judgement are not at all to the testator's taste and by no means opportune, so they are promptly passed over. This is not the only case where he suppresses those details which provide the crucial context for determining the significance of a phrase he is quoting and thereby reveals the precariousness of meaning. At precisely the moment when he mocks his own manner of playing fast and loose with sources, including quoting out of context, he is up to his old tricks, illustrating once again the very type of distortion which he has just affected to regret, neatly suppressing both the notion of judicium (however appropriate it might be to the situation of a testament) and the idea of sorrow and carnal pleasure (relevant in a fairly obvious way to his experience of prison and his adventures as an ‘amant martyr’).

For good measure, the testator proceeds to invert this technique in the next stanza (217 ff.) in relation to Job 7:6 to which he surreptitiously now adds. The Vulgate has simply,

Dies mei velocius transierunt quam a texente tela succiditur, et consumpti sunt absque illa spe.

(7:6)

[My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and are spent without hope.]

The next verse would be entirely suitable for a man making his last will and testament:

Memento quia ventus est vita mea et non revertetur oculus meus ut videat bona.

[O remember that my life is wind; mine eye shall no more see good.]

But here a new image is formed to replace the wind, that of snuffing out life:

                                                  … quant tixerant
En son poing tient ardente paille:
Lors s'il y a nul bout qui saille,
Soudainement il le ravit.

(219-22)

[… when a weaver holds a burning straw in his hand: the moment there is an end protruding, he promptly removes it]

Whether or not Villon misread succiditur (‘is cut’) as succenditur (‘set alight’), thus prompting the addition (inspired also by Isaiah 38: 12 ‘praecisa est velut a textente vita mea’, ‘I have cut off like a weaver my life’?), the new image conforms perfectly to the notion of the testator as a victim, so that he can now say ‘Sy ne crains plus que riens m'assaille’ (223, ‘I no longer fear whatever befalls me’). It is the testator's characteristic presentation of himself as a victim that has determined the treatment of the source here, a treatment which involves both omission and addition. This time he has combined two voices instead of splitting a single voice and has attributed the two voices to a single authority.

Elsewhere in invoking ‘le Saige’ the testator again resorts to conflation. This is in the bequest to Andry Courault of ‘Les Contreditz Franc Gontier’ (stanza 142). The title refers to a refutation or counter-claim, reply, or objection to the ideal of rustic life exemplified in a poem on Franc Gontier and Elena written by the poet-musician, and Bishop of Meaux, Philippe de Vitry (d. 1361), which itself attracted a contrasting depiction of the life of tyranny by another bishop (of Cambrai), and Chancellor of the University of Paris, Pierre d'Ailly (d. 1420). This latter work was quickly associated with the idyll of Franc Gontier and the two works were printed together in 1490.⁵ The joke is that whilst the testator is prepared to contest the idyll of Franc Gontier with a ballade (1473-506) which represents the ‘Contreditz’, he draws back from pitting himself against the ‘tirant seant en hault’, the tyrant sitting at the high table. The reason he gives is as follows:

Le Saige ne veult que contende
Contre puissant povre homme las,
Affin que ses filletz ne tende
Et qu'il ne trebuche en ses las.

(1461-4)

[According to the Wise Man it is better that a weak man does not contend against a powerful one, lest the one lay his nets and the other fall into the snares]

In this instance ‘the Sage’ is the author of Ecclesiasticus (never actually identified with Solomon at that time or since), who in book 8 (‘Monita de quibusdam cavendis in conversatione cum hominibus’) writes:

Non litiges cum homine potente,
          ne forte incidas in manus illius.
Non contendas cum viro locuplete,
          ne forte contra te constituat litem tibi.

(1-2)

[Do not pit yourself against the great,
          for fear of falling into their power
Do not quarrel with the rich,
          for fear they will outbid you(6)]

‘Don't argue with a bully!’ The phrase ‘povre homme las’ is instantly recognizable as the testator's own favourite self-designation. The image of ‘ses las’ (1464), however, renders another maxim, from book 9 (‘De quibusdam servandis in conversatione cum mulieribus’):

Ne respicias mulierem multivolam,
          ne forte incidas in laqueos illius.

(3)⁷

[Do not go near a loose woman,
          Or you may fall into her snares]

This is a warning against rapacious women. The testator therefore manages to insinuate, through conflating two passages of his source, that the tyrants he will not argue with are women, those no doubt who have fleeced him or even given him a drubbing (see 656-64 and below pp. 55 f.).

Still later, in another allusion to the Bible, the testator quotes Psalm 102 (AV 103): 16 (‘et non cognoscet amplius locum suum’, ‘son lieu ne cognoistra jamaiz’, 292; compare Job 7: 10), but refuses to embroil himself in its full elucidation (seurplus, 293), an elucidation which is, ironically, rather necessary given the complexity and ambiguity of the thoughts expressed:

Aux theologiens le remectz,
Car c'est office de prescheur.

(295-6)

[I leave that to the theologians, for it's a matter for the preacher]

Behind the screen of being ‘de lire … fetart’ (‘lazy about reading’, 36), the testator manipulates written authorities with consummate skill. His frequently inaccurate reporting of what he has read, his tampering with the evidence, always serves a definite ironic purpose, leaving us with the dialogism of multiple voices lacking any unitary authority. A striking example of the complex treatment of sources is the case of the Roman de la Rose. The Testament actually begins with an ironic reminiscence of this work. The martyr to love called ‘povre Villon’ is clearly beyond the age of love, what Guillaume de Lorris at the beginning of his work describes as the ‘vintieme an de mon aage / el point qu'Amors prent le paage / des jones genz’ (see below p. 36). His own youth, now behind him, will, he hopes, be excused by those who appreciate the teaching of the Roman de la Rose:

Et comme le noble Roumant
De la Rose dit et confesse
En son premier commancement
C'on doit jeune cueur en jeunesse,
Quant on le voit viel en viellesse,
Excuser, helas! il dit voir.

(113-18)

[As the noble Romance of the Rose declares at the very beginning, one ought to forgive a young heart and its youth when one sees it mature in its maturity—alas, that is so true!]

At first blush this opening reference might naturally suggest an early passage in Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose, particularly lines 4409 ff. on Jonesce and Viellesce (compare the reference to God's grace in 4429 and Testament, 112), but in fact it is a close textual reminiscence of another work by Jean de Meun—his own Testament.⁸ There is no question of an error here. The situation is carefully engineered and the quotation, though deliberately presented out of context, is textually accurate. Jean de Meun, born in the place of the testator's great misfortune, wrote his own literary testament c.1290 and it survives in 116 manuscripts. This is the third quatrain:

Bien doit estre escusez jeune cuer en
jeunesce
Quant Diex li donne grace d'estre viel
en viellesce;
Mais moult est granz vertus et tres haute noblesce
Quant cuer en jeune aage a meürté s'adresce.

(9-12)

[A young heart in its youth deserves forgiveness when by God's grace it becomes mature in maturity, but it is a signal virtue and most noble act when a heart strives for maturity while still young]

Another selective quotation! The testator is careful not to cite the last two lines, which are not part of his programme at all, for he is intent, as usual, on appearing a victim whose good intentions are frustrated by the opposition of his enemies who do not want to see him grow up: ‘En meürté ne me voldroient voir’ (120). Jean de Meun, on the contrary, had argued in stanza 4 that many resist growing up and cling to youth as if they were sure of living for ever:

Maiz li uns et maint autre sont de si grant durté
Qu'en nul estat ne veulent venir a meürté,
Ainz se sont a jeunesce si joint et ahurté
Com se de touzjours vivre eüssent seürté.

(13-16)

[But there are many who are so obdurate that at no point in their career do they wish to achieve maturity, but are attached to youth as if they were sure of living for ever]

The testator wishes to present himself as a victim and places his faith in God's mercy: ‘par sa grace pardon m'acorde’ (112, compare Jean de Meun, 10). Significantly, the context of Jean de Meun's opening remarks is that of writing. In his youth Jean composed ‘maint dit par vanité’, including the Roman de la Rose no doubt, but he hopes in future with God's help that he will write something more in conformity with Christian morality:

J'ai fait en ma jeunesce maint dit par vanité,
Ou maintes gens se sont plusieurs foiz delité;
Or m'en doint Diex un faire par vraie charité
Pour amender les autres qui poi m'ont proufité.

(5-8)

[In my youth, it is true, I composed a number of works which regularly gave pleasure to a variety of people; may God now allow me to compose one out of real charity to make up for those others which have profited me little]

As in the passage from Job, we have the suppression of the important contextual element concerned with personal discipline or reform, and also concealment of the fact that Jean is dealing with his own writing in a work which, far from being ironic like Villon's Testament, is pious and didactic. The initiated for whom the latter is composed would savour the joke: an ironic twist is being given to the words of another writer's ‘testament’ which is wholly serious and which embodies regrets at a youth misspent not in carousing, but in writing the Roman de la Rose, the work to which the regrets are mischievously attributed.

Elsewhere the problems of writing are confronted much more directly. The figure of the scribe Firmin⁹ is invented and there are reflections on the fragility of the written word:

Enregistrer j'ay fait ses diz
Par mon clerc Fremin l'estourdiz,
Aussi rassiz que je pense estre,(10)
S'il me desment, je le mauldiz:
Selon le clerc est deu le maistre.

(564-8)

[I've had these words recorded by my scatterbrained secretary Firmin, as sound in mind as I reckon I am; if he proves me wrong, I curse him. The master is only as good as his clerk]

‘Firmin the scatterbrain’ (who is still in the narrative frame at 1927) is certainly an inauspicious name for a scribe or secretary.¹¹ The passage is heavily tinged with irony. Line 566 is ambiguous in that it may refer to Firmin or to the testator himself. If applied to the scribe, it would be antiphrastic, the sense being that if the scatter-brained scribe turns out not to be (‘me desment’) as disorganized (or non compos mentis) as his master (‘about as organized as I reckon myself to be’—antiphrastic), but produces an orderly piece of work, then the testator curses him—for the scribe misrepresents the author. If, on the other hand, the reference is to the testator (‘je’), then the sense is that if the scatterbrained Firmin garbles the thoughts of the testator ‘rassiz’ (compos mentis), he shall equally be cursed for misrepresenting the master. In addition to this expression of distrust of the scribe, there is also the ironic inversion of a familiar, proverbial saying—‘Tel maître, tel valet’, ‘the servant is as good as the master’¹² (a medieval form of which is ‘Selon seigneur maisgnie duicte’)—which stresses the author's dependence on the scribe:

Selon le clerc est deu le maistre.

(568)

[The master is only as good as his secretary]

In addition to its wit, this statement represents a fundamental truth about writing in the fifteenth century,¹³ one which is borne out by the transmission of the Testament, for none of the four surviving witnesses on its own would give an adequate representation of what the author wrote and it took many years before the superiority of MS C was recognized.

Later the testator revives this theme of the problems of textual authenticity, accuracy, and transmission by pointing out that his earlier poem (‘certains laiz’) was given a title he never authorized:

Qu'aucuns, sans mon consentement,
Voulurent nommer testament;
Leur plaisir fut, non pas le myen.

(756-8)

[which some, without my authorization, insisted on calling a will; it was their pleasure to do so, not mine]

and quotes another aphorism in support:

Mais quoy! on dit communement
Qu'ung chacun n'est maistre du scien.

(759-60)

[But after all, they do say, don't they, that no one really has control over what is his]

This is a nice allusion to a celebrated medieval tag ‘Fata sua habent libelli’—books have their own destinies. The testator openly acknowledges the precariousness and fragility of the productions of the writer, who has no power to influence their fate. Once more, we have the theme of the fragmentation of authority, here illustrated by the separation of author and text through the conferment of an unauthorized title (‘testament’, 757) on his work.

After almost 800 lines the testator has at last arrived at the threshold of his will proper and at this crucial moment he provides another reference to the scribe Firmin which is every bit as ironic as the earlier passage. It begins,

Car commencer vueil a tester.
Devant mon clerc Fremin qui m'ot,
S'il ne dort, je vueil protester
Que n'entens homme detester
En ceste presente ordonnance,
Et ne la vueil manifester …
Synom ou royaume de France.

(778-84)

[I wish to begin dictating my will. In the presence of my secretary Firmin, who will be listening (if he's not asleep), I wish to make it clear that I have no wish to malign anyone in the present instructions, and I do not wish them to be made public … except in France]

The idea of the will being broadcast throughout France is, of course, unconventional and ironically juxtaposed to a mock confidentiality, ‘Fremin, siez toy pres de mon lit, / Que l'en ne me viengne espïer’ (787-8) and to ‘ne la vueil manifester’ (783). The scribe is present—but awake or asleep? Assuming the former, the testator's instructions are unexpected and constitute a further infringement of the norm:

Ce que nomme escriptz vistement,
Puis fay le partout coppïer.

(790-1)

[Write down quickly what I tell you to, and publish it everywhere]

There turns out to be nothing confidential about this will, dictated at speed to a scatterbrained scribe in pursuit of the widest possible circulation. Nor is there anything benign about the testator's will—in the sense of intention (consider the play on tester, protester, and detester). He knows only too well how to alarm his audience:

                                        Je vueil protester
Que n'entens homme detester
En ceste presente ordonnance.

(780-2)

[I wish to declare publicly, place on record, that it is no part of my intention to disparage/disinherit (detester) anyone in the present proclamation/dispositions of the will (ordonnance)]

The puns (detester, ordonnance) serve to remind the audience or addressees how much they would prefer to be disinherited, that is, kept out of this will (and its satire), which is destined to be so publicly proclaimed, than be included in it. Being left out of the will is what they must most passionately desire and this ironic paradox enables the testator to enjoy himself at their expense (cf. stanza 77) whilst feigning a benevolent concern for them. Those who get left out should not complain—as if they would!

There are, of course, other references to authors and authorities in the Testament and when examined carefully each one yields its own irony, in particular the equivocalness of language as the expression or incarnation of authority. In stanza 128 the ‘trois orphelins’ (antiphrastic for usurers) are bidden to study with maistre Pierre Richier (the punning name of course implying that maistre Pierre is both rich and a teacher of how to become rich) since ‘Le Donat est pour eulx trop rude’ (1284), too difficult. The point here is that Donatus is the name given to an elementary school textbook by the fourth-century grammarian of that name, Aelius Donatus, an authority uncongenial to them because Donat puns on ‘donner’, ‘to give’, an activity which usurers find difficult. So the testator recommends Richier, whose name alone indicates a much more appropriate teacher for usurers. The sort of text that would suit them is a parody of a Marian hymn: Ave salus, tiby decus (1287) is a comic distortion of the honorific greeting Ave decus virginum, Ave salus hominum, and alludes to golden coins (saluts) which were still circulating under Charles VII, with decus providing a play on d'ecus, so that we have something in the spirit of the Usurer's Credo¹⁴ which was popular in the Middle Ages. The phrase ‘sans plus grans lettres enserchier’ (1288) means ‘without more advanced study’ and the last line ‘clerks don't always come off best’ is a wry reflection by the penniless but educated testator.

Another ‘school’ text and authority was Macrobius' commentary on Cicero's Somnium Scipionis (‘The Dream of Scipio’). When the testator mocks the chatter and gossip of ‘les dames parisïennes’ (1539), he adds at the end of the ballade he devotes to them,

Tu trouveras la que Macrobes
Oncques ne fist telz jugemens.
Entens, quelque chose en desrobes:
Ce sont tous beaux enseignemens.

(1547-50)

[You will there hear made judgements such as Macrobius never dreamed of. Listen, and you'll catch a sample. They're really instructive!]

The reference here is not so much to Macrobius as an authority on dreams, as he appears in the opening lines of the Roman de la Rose (lines 7-8 ‘… Macrobes / Qui ne tint pas songes a lobes’), rather to his standing as explicator par excellence of ‘fables’, or what he called narratio fabulosa. In his Commentary (1. 2. 7) he stated that they may serve simply to gratify the ear or to encourage to good works. Fabulae, ‘old wives’ tales', are frivolous, but the narratio fabulosa (e.g. myth and allegory) expresses the truth of philosophical doctrines. Macrobius was outstanding for drawing this truth from what might easily be dismissed as idle tales. The point here is that even the ingenuity of Macrobius did not uncover such ‘beaux enseignemens’ as those of Parisian chatterboxes. The phrase is of course ironic. There is no comparison between the idle and mischievous tittle-tattle of these women, not at all conducive to virtue, and the morally useful lessons derived from fables by Macrobius. The mismatch of the authority of the Neoplatonist philosopher and the subject matter of female gossip relativizes both as part of the dialogic approach discernible throughout the Testament.

Another reference to Jean de Meun occurs in stanza 118. There is no denying the historicity of this allusion:

Quoy que maistre Jehan de Poullieu
En voulsist dire et relicqua,
Contraint et en publicque lieu
Honteusement s'en revocqua.
Maistre Jehan de Meun s'en mocqua
De leur façon; si fist Mathieu;
Mais on doit honnorer ce qu'a
Honnoré l'Eglise de Dieu.

(1174-81)

[Whatever Jean de Poullieu had intended to say against them (=the Mendicants), he was humiliatingly obliged in public to withdraw it. Jean de Meun satirized them and so did Matheolus; but we ought to respect anything that is respected by the Church of God]

Here, it is the final two lines which are most obviously ironic. Jean de Pouilly was a celebrated master of the University of Paris, and a preacher, who wrote a number of tracts against the Mendicant orders and saw his views condemned by Pope John XXII in 1321, obliging him to make a public retraction. Villon is said to have supported the University. At any rate the testator adduces the evidence of Jean de Meun's mockery of the Mendicants in Faux Semblant's discussion of mendicity in the Roman de la Rose (11315 ff.), where he supports Guillaume de Saint Amour (1202-72), a Rector of the University of Paris, who was an outstanding opponent of the Mendicants. In particular their right to hear confessions was challenged, as is shown in ‘Mathieu’, namely the Liber lamentationum Matheoluli (c.1298), lines 1263-361. The Testament supposes its audience's familiarity with these two writings so that they may appreciate the irony of the testator's declaration that nevertheless God's Church must be respected, by which he means the Pope and compulsion by papal power. There is also a more strictly textual irony in this passage. Whilst it is true that the Latin ‘Matheolus’ has a long passage criticizing the use of the Mendicants as confessors, the French ‘Mathieu’, namely his translator Jean le Fevre (1380s), explicitly declines to criticize them: ‘Pour ce n'ay voulenté de mordre / sur les freres ne sur leur ordre’ (see Appendix 1). One of his reasons for this is that Matheolus and Jean de Meun have already done so. The Latin Matheolus has no reference to Jean de Meun, but the French does and it is certainly Jean le Fevre's translation which is alluded to in stanza 118. Here, then, the testator extends his virtuoso treatment of written sources by playing on the ambiguity of titles which can refer either to a Latin original (here the Lamentationes Matheoluli¹⁵) or to a vernacular translation (here Jean le Fevre's Livre de lamentations¹⁶), without the two being at all equivalent. At one level (taking Mathieu to indicate the French translation), therefore, the two authorities he quotes, Jean de Meun and Mathieu, are actually at odds with each other, but at another (taking ‘Mathieu’ to indicate the Latin) they are concordant. We thus recognize another example of the fragmentation of authority. It cannot safely be objected that the author of the Testament did not know the Latin, for Matheolus cites the bull Omnis utriusque sexus to which allusion is made on two occasions, as we shall now see.

A reference to Church authority is found in stanza 62. The testator mounts an inquiry into the lives of prostitutes and loose women before their ‘fall’. Were they not once respectable, taking a lover—clerk, layman, or monk—to assuage their sexual needs?¹⁷

Or firent selon ce decret
Leurs amys, et bien y appert:
Ilz amoient en lieu secret,
Car autre d'eulx n'y avoit part.

(601-4)

[Their arrangements with their male friends met the requirements of the decree; they did their loving in secret, nobody else was involved]

An earlier generation of critics saw in ce decret, printed Decret, a reference to the celebrated compendium of canon law by the Italian Gratian (c.1156) known as the Decretum. The phrase ‘selon ce Decret’ was then held by some to be antiphrastic, meaning ‘contrary to the Decretum’. However, the connection was always a slim one. What is much more likely is that it resembles a passage in the Lais:

Et le decret qui articule
Omnis utriusque sexus
Contre la Carmeliste bulle
Laisse aux curés, pour mettre sus.

(93-6)

[And the decree with the Omnis utriusque sexus article against the bull in favour of the Carmelites, I bequeath to the clergy, for them to impose]

This refers to a canon of the Lateran Council of 1215 insisting on annual confession for every Christian and in which the confessor is enjoined to be ‘discretus et cautus’. The mission of hearing confessions was entrusted to the Dominicans by Pope Honorius III in 1221 (though, ironically, the authenticity of this bull has been challenged). But, more significant, a bull of Pope Nicholas V (1409), contested by the University, gave the Mendicants, particularly the Carmelites, power to hear confessions at the expense of the regular clergy, whose authority the testator ostensibly wishes to strengthen by his bequest of the Omnis utriusque sexus. In the passage from the Testament the irony resides in the analogy between lovers and confessors. The ladies in question took lovers (or were taken by them) who were as discreet (‘discretus et cautus’) as confessors—often no doubt because they were themselves members of the clergy. The reference ‘ce decret’ therefore indicates the one that had already been ‘given’ as a bequest in the Lais.¹⁸ The sort of lover envisaged is illustrated in stanza 172 by Jean Chapelain on whom the testator confers a benefice, whilst also punning on the homophony of cure and d'ames/dames:

Resiné lui eusse ma cure,
Mais point ne veult de charge d'ames;
De conffesser, ce dit, n'a cure
Synon chamberieres et dames.

(1840-3)

[I would have made over my curacy, but he's got no interest in the care of souls; according to him the only sort of confessing he likes is that involving chambermaids and ladies]

Thus once more there opens up an ironic discrepancy between the original meaning of a written authority and one which arises from its insertion in a quite new context, a familiar technique designed to destabilize textual meaning yet again.

A more literary allusion is found in stanza 167 where the testator formulates the wish for ‘maistre Lomer’, saddled with the task of clearing certain streets of the Cité of prostitutes, to enjoy without charge the pleasure of ‘faire ung soir cent foiz la faffee, / En despit d'Auger le Danois’ (1802-3), that is making love a hundred times in a single evening, putting to shame Ogier le Danois. The reference is almost certainly to the mock boasts (gabs) and accomplishments of Charlemagne's knights at the court of the Emperor of Constantinople in the parodic epic Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. But the reference is doubly inaccurate, since it is not Ogier who undertakes to have intercourse a hundred times in a night with the emperor's daughter, but, unexpectedly, Olivier (stanzas 27, 43-4), who in fact only manages it thirty times but is protected from punishment by the Emperor's daughter herself, who declares that he fulfilled his boast. Here in the Testament the irony works through the fact that despite the striking nature of the boast, it is undermined by being falsely attributed—so much for the durability of sexual boasting and its literary transmission! Then, relying on his audience's appreciation of the deception involved in the feigned accomplishment of the feat, the testator renders the whole allusion innocuous. ‘Outdoing Ogier’ really amounts to nothing, since Ogier was not the perpetrator of the action envisaged and, further, the action was never accomplished anyway.

However, the real tour de force so far as the ironization of writing is concerned is the equation of writing with crime. To understand this, though, we have to go outside the poem and accept the relevance of certain historical data. Stanza 88 contains the testator's bequest to his ‘plus que pere’ Guillaume de Villon. What is the bequest? ‘Je lui donne ma librarye’—the library of someone who ‘stayed out of school’ (205) we might presume to be modest to the point of non-existence, that is, purely imaginary. So there is probably the initial irony that like several other bequests this one is worthless or non-existent. Maybe the library is that of the testator's adoptive father and so is simply being returned as a gift. How much more tangible should we regard the gift of a romance, that of the Devil's Fart, ‘le roumant du Pet au Diable’? The Devil's Fart was a large stone (there was another one known as ‘la vesse’) which university students twice in the early 1450s stole from its place in the Île de la Cité (more particularly, the Hotel du Pet-au-Diable belonging to Mlle de Bruyères who is named in line 1508) and dumped on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève, resulting in a number of run-ins with the police. According to the testator, his romance—presumably about crimes of this sort—was copied/amplified (grossa) by Guy Tabarie ‘qui est homs veritable’—pure irony, this, for Guy Tabarie was involved with François Villon in the robbery of the Collège de Navarre but later shopped his accomplice by ‘grassing’ to the authorities, thereby ‘amplifying’ the crime (or ‘copying the romance’). By ‘homs veritable’ is meant ‘a man with an unhealthy fondness for the truth’. However, this ‘Romance of the Devil's Fart’ lies in (unbound) quires (‘cahiers’) under a table. The word ‘cayeulx’ is both a dialectal (Champenois, Burgundian) form of ‘cahiers’ and a punning reference to Colin de Cayeux (see 1675), a lockpicker, accomplice, and ‘mauvais génie’ of Villon in the robbery who was eventually (1460) hanged. The table is probably a table in a tavern where the conspirators were plotting. The testator continues that, however badly constructed or planned (‘rudement fait’) the work, its subject matter is ‘si tres notable’ (‘so remarkable/notorious’, with a punning association with ‘notaire’?) ‘Qu'elle admende tout le meffait’, that it makes up for its faults, that is to say, the picaresque theme/bold conception of the robber makes up for the faults/the crime. Here then writing appears as a metaphor for the crime with which the testator now ironically confronts his adoptive father.

What degree of faith the testator really places in the written word and its transmission, however, may be gauged from his willingness to hand over everything to the ‘honnorable homme’, Jean de Calais. Jean may well have had the job of verifying wills at the Châtelet, but the testator's description of him undermines his credibility completely. How can this man understand well the testator's ‘entente’ (1844) when he neither knows his name (1847) nor has seen him for thirty years (i.e. has never seen him)? The introductory description of this ‘honnorable homme’ (honourable because he has had no truck whatever with the testator but will see through the Testament all right?) is a typical piece of ironic insouciance which helps to subvert the value of the entire document, which was announced with the following words:

J'ay ce testament tres estable
Fait, de derreniere voulenté,
Seul pour tout et inrevocable.

(78-80)

[I've drawn up this definitive testament, my last will, indivisible and irrevocable]

The testator's abandonment of the will to Jean de Calais contradicts each assertion in these lines—that the will is definitive, represents the testator's very last wishes, is indivisible, and cannot be revoked (cf. 761). The discretion granted to Jean totally undermines the testator's earlier claim, ‘ce que j'ay escript est escript’ (264). According to the new instructions any offending element in the will may be removed (1850) ‘jusqu'au rez d'une pomme’ (1850)—surely a reference to erasure (with a razor or pumice), rendering the surface as thin as an apple-skin?¹⁹ Here, then, is a satire in which a reviser is authorized to remove anything that gives offence (‘s'aucun y a difficulté …’, 1849). The testator goes even further and authorizes every conceivable operation which may be performed on a text by a reviser or commentator: gloser, commenter, diffinir, descripre, diminuer, augmenter, canceller, perscripre; and ‘if he doesn't know how to write’, interpreter, donner sens … meilleur ou pire (1852-8). This comically exaggerated catalogue obviously goes well beyond the legal changes required by a verifier of wills. Notwithstanding what appears to be carte blanche,²⁰ the testator then pedantically argues that if one of the legatees has died (‘estoit alé de mort à vie’, borrowing the paradoxical language of Christian spirituality to indicate passage from this life to the next, everlasting, life) the bequest should be moved (‘que ceste aulmosne ailleurs transporte’, 1865) so that the order of the legatees should not be disturbed (1863-4)—as if he were distributing a finite quantity of real goods or had to prevent quarrels by over-zealous claimants over precedence. In fact, the dead legatees will be the only happy ones!

In the final absence of all writing materials (‘escriptouoire’), ‘povre Villon’ accepts an epitaph drawn in charcoal or coal, large but without such pressure as would damage the plaster in the chapel (1879-81). The value of writing seems to have been exhausted. The author of the Testament has treated, and ironized, a comprehensive range of writing activities: the author's disposition or causa scribendi (73 ff.), the value of learned writing (93-6), the use of the exemplum (129-60), the writer's handling of sources (209 ff.), dictation and the role of the scribe (564 ff.), textual authenticity (753 ff.), the vagaries of transmission and publication (769 ff.), censorship, correction, and even suppression, as well as ironizing the meaning of written documents by recontextualizing them. He is emphatically no respecter of authorities, himself included. The whole value of the enterprise is thus neatly undercut. There is nothing in Le Testament for posterity and the testator evades responsibility for its contents by an imprimatur which sanctions anything. He has not tried to produce a literary monument, but rather a more modest dramatic performance, as impermanent as the charcoal writing on his tomb, in which posterity is not implicated. If the very exercise of writing the Testament is subjected to such ironic ambiguity, and the evidence of written authorities fragmented with such self-conscious wit, it should not surprise us to find that there is nothing ‘estable’ anywhere in this will. The multiplication of voices, the fragmentation of authority, and the destabilizing of the text remain the salient features of a production which has so often been scrutinized solely from the angle of historical referentiality, but which truly reveals its secrets only when the author's ironic techniques have been fully comprehended.

Notes

1. Testament, 264.

2. Robert-Léon Wagner has advanced the view that we should retain both interpretations as part of a ‘valeur ambiguë’, see the notes in Rychner and Henry's edn.

3. He was translated by Simon de Hesdin (c.1375) and Nicolas de Gonesse, see G. di Stefano, Essais sur le moyen français (Padua, 1977), 17-19, 25-45, 49-67. There are many additions, including the incorporation of glosses, in Hesdin's translation.

4. Mühlethaler, Poétiques, 37 in emphasizing the dialectic ‘sic et non’ style of verbal juxtaposition misses the point about how the verbal juxtaposition is brought about.

5. See A. Piaget, ‘Le Chapel des fleurs de lis par Philippe de Vitri’, Romania, 27 (1898) [55-92], 61-5.

6. Translation from the Revised English Bible.

7. Cf. Testament, 679-80: ‘J'eusse mis paine aucunement / De moy retraire de ses las.’

8. See S. Buzzetti-Gallarati, Le Testament maistre Jehan de Meun (Alessandria, 1989). For Jean's own personal will see ead., ‘Le Codicille maistre Jehan de Meun’, Medioevo romanzo, 17 (1992), 339-89.

9. ‘Fremin’ has sometimes been identified with a ‘Frémiz le May’, a public scribe whose father was ‘libraire et notaire de la Cour à l'Official de Paris’ (ed. Thuasne ii., 196). Cf. the figure of the scribe in the printed text (Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhetorique) of Pierre de Hauteville's La Confession et testament de l'amant trespassé de deuil, ed. R. M. Bidler (Montreal, 1982), 95 ‘Comme le malade parle a son clerc: Sus, mon clerc, il te fault penser. / Apporte moy encre et papier / Et escry cy mon ordonnance / Et pense tost de t'avancer / Sans aucunement deslayer / Ce que diray a ma plaisance. Le serviteur: Sire, le voycy ja tout prest / Sans empeschement ny arrest; /Or nommez ce que j'escriray / Et dictes tout au long que c'est. / Je l'escriray ainsi qu'il est / Et que direz sans nul delay.’

10. Cf. Lais, 2-3: ‘Je, Françoys Villon, escollier, / Considerant, de sens rassis …’

11. Cf. the figure of ‘maistre Robert Valee’, ‘povre clerjot en Parlement’: ‘Puis qu'il n'a sens ne q'une aulmoire, / De recouvrer sur Mau Pensé, / Qu'on luy baille, l'Art de memoire’ (Lais, 110-12).

12. Cf. ‘Ballade des menus propos’, 11: ‘Je congnois le maistre au varlet.’

13. Cf. Mühlethaler, Poétiques, 41.

14. See E. Ilvonen, Parodies de thèmes pieux dans la poésie française du moyen âge (Helsingfors, 1914), 83-103.

15. See A. Schmitt, Matheus von Boulogne: ‘Lamentationes Matheoluli’ (Kommentierte und kritische Edition der beiden ersten Bücher) (Bonn, 1974). As with the Testament, it is uncertain that the ostensibly autobiographical data furnished by the first-person narrator can be transferred to the author Matthew of Boulogne.

16. See A. G. van Hamel (ed.), Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de leesce de Jehan le Fevre, de Ressons, 2 vols. (Paris, 1895, 1905).

17. It is, of course, uncertain whether it is men or women who form the subject of the verb ‘prindrent’ in line 597.

18. For a text of the relevant passage of the canon see P. Demarolle, ‘Encore le vers 601 du Testament de Villon: S'agit-il vraiment du Decretum Gratiani?’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 87 (1971), 244-8. Demarolle concludes that ‘les huitains parodient le texte pontifical et que la mission du confesseur, auquel l'amant est comparé, est tournée en dérision’.

19. W. Mettmann's view (‘“Oster jusqu'au rez d'une pomme”: Villon: Testament v. 1850’, Romanische Forschungen, 73 (1961), 148-50) that Jean de Calais's right to removal of offending material is limited to the worthless (rez de pomme) is surely in contradiction to the ambitious modifications permitted in stanza 174.

20. See also his appointment of a second trio of executors, to stand in for the first set if necessary, of whom he says, ‘Point n'auront de contreroleur, / Mais a leur seul plaisir en taillent’ (1950-1) and who are antiphrastically described as ‘troys hommes de bien et d'onneur’ (1945, cf. 1940).