Villon's three ballades concerning the flight of time and the ubi sunt topos have rarely been studied as an ensemble. This failure is doubtless due both to the traditional penchant for excerpting parts of the Testament, without considering context or respecting the integrity of his poem, and to the conviction that the second and third members of the trilogy are seriously inferior to the Ballade des dames du temps iadis. Gaston Paris, for example, found the Ballade des seigneurs “banale et médiocre,” and Spitzer noted that “tout ce qui était suggestion rêveuse dans la première ballade est devenu ici plate déclaration,” adding that Villon has simply drawn up a list of puissants inconnus who offer no real interest.¹

If the second ballade incurs the censure of critics, the third is often not even accorded the dignity of criticism; it is generally passed over in silence. The Ballade en vieil langage françoys, with its numerous errors of Old French, is of course a philologist's delight, but few critics have even asked whether the poem might possess redeeming features, whether Villon might have had a purpose in mind in choosing to write an Old French that he probably knew to be flawed.

If we acknowledge Villon as the consummate poet of the closing Middle Ages, we cannot lightly dismiss any portion of his text without asking such questions. If he wrote three ballades on the same subject and inserted them into his work one after the other, then there can be no justification for retaining one and discarding two others. Certainly, it does Villon a serious injustice to assume, as some have done, that he was carried away by his poetic achievement in Dames [Ballade des dames du temps iadis.] and simply tried to repeat his success in two additional but largely misguided efforts. The three pieces constitute, as Danielle Kada-Benoist points out, “une unité poétique”,² and it can be shown that their theme is far more effectively conveyed by the progression from one ballade to another than it could be merely by its presentation in any one of them—or by the three taken separately.

The most obvious fact about Dames (and a fact that sets the direction of the trilogy) is its composition by questions. Villon avoids assertions in this poem (the only ones he uses are in subordinate clauses; e.g., “la Royne Blanche … qui chantoit,” vss. 345-6); a poem composed entirely of questions, as this one is, may prove quite suggestive, but whatever its evocative appeal, it remains largely incapable of forceful, specific statement. This is however in harmony with the poet's apparent intent, which is to question rather than draw conclusions.

It is significant that, although the ladies who populate this ballade are generally celebrated, Villon tends to immortalize them not for their own merits but because of their effects on others or because of incidental attributes. In other words, their poetic treatment transfers emphasis from the characters' identities to their functions.³ And, in most instances, that function is destructive. Heloïse, for example, is memorable not for her brilliance, but only for her love for Abelard and, more significantly, for the tragic effect of that love—on him; that is, she is immortalized by Abelard's castration. The next woman mentioned in the poem is similarly treated: she is recalled because Buridan was supposedly thrown into the Seine on her account. Moreover, we do not even learn her name (she is referred to simply as la royne qui …, vss. 341-2); she is apparently less important than what happened to Buridan. This reference to a character's destructive effect on someone else is reduced somewhat in the following stanza, but Villon continues to emphasize a single characteristic of each person. “La Royne Blanche” offers us a name (or perhaps an attribute), and then she is described simply in terms of her singing voice: she has the voice of a siren (vs. 346), an appropriately ambiguous reference to both beauty and danger. After listing several other women, Villon defines Joan of Are not as a liberator or a heroine, but purely as a victim of an English pyre. It is characteristic of Villon's irony—and illustrative of his themes—that those who are recalled are memorable for the wrong reasons: for their destructive influence or, in the case of Joan, because of her death rather than her life and accomplishments.

The point in the first ballade is that these are ladies from time well past, and their temporal distance from us is accompanied by poetic distance: the poem makes a poignant case which the reader is likely to accept intellectually, but which is unlikely to impress upon us the urgency of death and time's flight. With the Seigneurs, [Ballade des seigneurs] Villon begins to diminish the distance separating his subjects from the present, by listing men who died less than a decade before he wrote the Testament. While we may admire, and agree with, the sentiments expressed in the first poem, this one must speak to us with more immediacy, but, ironically, we must also be struck by the narrator's uncertainty—all the more notable because it concerns near contemporaries. For example, he must rely on hearsay (“le roy scotiste qui demy face ot, ce dit on,” vss. 365-6, my emphasis), an uncertainty that never entered his voice in Dames, despite the interrogative refrain. The identity of certain men mentioned in this poem is far from firmly established, and in some cases their relative insignificance is pointed up ironically by their bearing illustrious names. Artus, for example, is not King Arthur, but only Arthur III of Brittany; Lancellot too evokes chivalry and the Round Table but is actually Ladislas or Lazlo, le roy de Behaygne (vs. 378). Villon's uncertainty in Seigneurs increases when he speaks of the king duquel je ne sçay pas le nom (vs. 371). This humorous and brilliant poetic detail both underlines the narrator's fallibility and, especially, dramatizes the fleeting nature of fame; even the name escapes. Sic transit gloria mundi.

While we may question Spitzer's contention that this ballade offers a list of unknowns, these men are undeniably less remarkable and interesting than are the ladies enumerated previously; but this fact, rather than diminishing the poem's worth, clearly increases its value as a contribution to the trilogy and to the entirety of the Testament. What better way to dramatize the ubi sunt motif than to illustrate it with examples of men who, once famous and powerful, are very recently dead and, yet, already half forgotten? The saddest commentary on fame is the line quoted earlier: “… le bon roy … duquel je ne sçay pas le nom.” This king has been identified, convincingly enough, as Henri II, but in fact, speculation about his identity obscures the text instead of clarifying it. The point, quite evidently, is not who he is, but the fact that the poet does not know who he is. He could be any king, and therein lies the tragedy the poet wishes to communicate to us.

The refrain of the second ballade is the converse of that of the Dames. In the earlier piece, the author mentioned famous women and then asked where were past snows (i.e., that which is most fragile). That is, if the likes of Thaÿs, Echo, Heloïse have disappeared, can we wonder at the transitoriness of what lasts but a moment? This refrain prepares the second ballade; but there, after naming recent illustrious, but relatively little-known, men, Villon then wonders at Charlemagne's disappearance.⁴ He is turning his own method on its head, beginning by those closest to him and emphasizing their loss and their relative insignificance by measuring them against the preux Charlemaigne.

Reichenberger sees the third ballade as a departure from the first two, in that it dispenses with names and offers instead a list of categories, “une série de titres sociaux” (p. 262): ly sains appostolles, l'imperieres, le roy, etc. However, it is a departure that is perfectly justified, for this piece simply continues the development already established. The first poem lists ladies of genuine fame; the second enumerates men whose fame is far more fleeting. In the final case, names are not necessarily forgotten: they are simply irrelevant. The individual is now subsumed by his function. It no longer matters who he was, a fact that reveals less the flawed memory of others (as the first two ballades might suggest) than the fundamental insignificance of the individual. From this point of view, the third poem must be seen not as a pale and ineffective imitation of, but an indispensable conclusion to, the first two.

There remains the question of the language, the Old French that was archaic when Villon wrote it. Kada-Benoist contends (p. 308) that the Old French points up the way language “résiste à la mort.” I think the exact opposite is true. Although the poet himself must die, at least his monuments, his words, should resist death—but this poem implies that even words are not immune to the ravages of time. Villon is merciless here: he shows the impermanence not only of worldly fame and life but of poetic inspiration and its product—his own poem. In a sense, this piece is even more effective than its predecessors; they expressed their subject in words and suggested it in a variety of ways, while this one communicates it directly. That is, the very vehicle of expression serves as the best confirmation of the theme. The medium is quite literally the message. We cannot of course know with certainly that Villon was aware of making errors in his Old French, but if he was not, they are a most happy accident and, in any case, a brilliantly effective illustration of his refrain: Autant en emporte ly vens!

The subject of Villon's linguistic flaws calls to mind another of his celebrated errors: the presence of one Archipïadés in the first of the poems. It is generally recognized that this name, listed alongside Flora, Thaÿs, and Echo, is an apparent reference to Alcibiades, who, we are told, was commonly thought in the Middle Ages to be a woman. I have no reason to doubt the identification. Nor do I have any specific reason to think that Villon knew it to be erroneous, but we must conclude that Alcibiades's miraculous sex-change was no less felicitous than were Villon's linguistic lapses. In poems characterized uncertainty about facts and even identities, confusion of a person's gender is as appropriate as the loss of a name. Whether Villon erred intentionally or not, we must acknowledge that the subject of the work justifies “Archipïadés's” inclusion.

Without going into greater detail, I think we can contend with some confidence that, at this point in the Testament, Villon did not commit one success and two failures. First of all, the three ballades constitute a single movement in the work; secondly, they offer a continuous and logical development of a single theme. Yet, it is far from a simple development. Villon progressively narrows his focus and moves from the distant past toward the present; but instead of moving in the direction of the concrete and specific (the ultimate movement of the Testament), the trilogy becomes increasingly vague and imprecise, as identities are obscured and finally lost. But by an ironic twist, justified by the trilogy's theme, imprecision and vagueness constitute a specific and very effective statement of the ubi sunt motif. The first ballade presents the motif, the second illustrates it further, and the final one takes it very nearly to its logical conclusion. To separate the ballades is to limit and distort their value. To perceive and retain their intensity, we must respect their integrity.

Notes

1. These judgments are quoted by Kurt Reichenberger, “Actualité et critique littéraire: problèmes de l'esthétique de la réception: la Ballade des Seigneurs du Temps Jadis de Villon,” in Studies on The Seven Sages of Rome and Other Essays in Medieval Literature, ed. H. Niedzielski et al. (Honolulu, 1978), pp. 259-69.

2. “Le Phénomène de désagréation dans les trois ballades du temps jadis de Villon,” Le Moyen Age, 80, No. 2 (1974), 301-18. Similarly, Jean Rychner and Albert Henry observe that “on notera d'abord l'unité dialectique de contenu. … On peut parler, en outre, d'une unité dialectique par la forme. …” See their Le Testament Villon (Geneva: Droz, 1974), II, 65.

3. See also Evelyn Vitz, The Crossroad of Intentions: A Study of Symbolic Expression in the Poetry of François Villon (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 46.

4. Spitzer notes that Charlemagne “… vient écraser de son poids des plus petits et des moins puissants que lui”; see his “Etude ahistorique d'un texte: Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis,” Modern Language Quarterly, 1 (1940), 17. Notably, the line preceding the first appearance of the refrain asks where is Charles VII, qualified as le bon; see vs. 363. The next line, with its reference to le preux Charlemaigne, establishes an inevitable contrast between the two Charleses, to the obvious disadvantage of the former.