François Villon's 1456 Lais is a pleasant, amusing, and poetically inconsequential text. That this statement accurately summarizes prevailing scholarly sentiment is beyond dispute. For example, Barbara Sargent-Baur, in her 1990 book Brothers of Dragons, largely dismissed the Lais as part of Villon's “juvenalia”; she characterized it as “competent and occasionally entertaining” but implied, if I read her correctly, that it possesses little or no enduring literary value (70).

Sargent-Baur is by no means alone in her assessment of the Lais. In 1984, when John Fox wrote for the “Critical Guides to French Texts” series, he entitled his volume Villon's “Poems,” but he quickly made it clear that those poems—at least those that merit discussion—do not include the Lais. He wrote that Villon owes his fame to the “first thousand lines of the Testament, several short passages later in that work, and two ballades from the loosely knit Poésies diverses” (9). He added that the purpose of his volume was to provide a detailed analysis—of those passages. The Lais is absent, except for a couple of perfunctory mentions. Five years later, David A. Fein devoted a book to François Villon and His Reader and announced in his introduction that he was limiting himself to the Testament—but that many of his observations could be applied as well to the Lais (10); the fact that he chose not to make such an application implies that the Lais, for him as well as for most critics, is an appendage or a preamble to the Testament and a dispensable component of the poet's work. Recently, Jane H. M. Taylor has further confirmed these views: although she identifies the Lais as one of Villon's “two major poems,” she nevertheless describes it as “a sketch for [his] major work, the Testament” (840).

By citing such judgments I intend no condemnation of their authors, all of whom are distinguished scholars. I simply wish to call attention to the phenomenon: the Lais is customarily neglected or dismissed,¹ praise is rare and, when it can be found at all, perfunctory and faint.² Examples could easily be multiplied, but their number is less important than the reasons for critical neglect or censure. Foremost among those reasons, as indicated by the citations that open this essay, is the Lais's presumed relationship to the Testament: the earlier text has consistently been considered little more than a lightweight first draft of what Villon, reaching his poetic maturity, would polish into his masterpiece. As a consequence, the Lais has at best been accorded archival status.

But if, as I will argue, it is something quite unlike an early draft, if it is something other than a youthful indiscretion that Villon would later correct, then prevalent critical opinion surely constitutes a miscarriage of evaluative justice. The present essay argues that the Lais deserves far better than it has received and that we must begin to read it as an autonomous creation, with merits and flaws alike definable without reference to another text.

That is not meant to suggest, however, that the Lais is unconnected to the Testament: quite the opposite. Indeed, the poet himself deliberately emphasizes the relationship of the two at virtually every turn. First of all, in the Testament, he makes explicit reference to the earlier text:

Si me souvient bien, Dieu mercis,
Que je feis a mon partement
Certains laiz, l'an cinquante six,
Qu'aucuns, sans mon consentement,
Voulurent nommer Testament.

(753-56)

Villon overtly establishes further links between the two works by populating the Testament with some characters who had first appeared in the Lais. In the example most familiar to most readers, he refers to “mes trois povres orphelins,” that is, to the three notorious usurers he had discussed in the earlier poem (193ff.), and he says that those poor orphans have now grown up (Test., [Le Testament] 1274ff.).

His method here, the explicit appropriation of material from the first poem for use in the second, clearly presupposes that his readers will connect them and bring a knowledge of the Lais to our reading of the Testament, of which it is a subtext. However, a subtext is by no means the same as an avant-texte or a first draft, to be discarded once the “final version”—the Testament—is completed. Nor should we forget that Villon himself appears not to be dismissive of his earlier effort, but only, as the preceding citation indicates, of those who mistitled it and presumably misconstrued its character. To him, obviously, it was not something to be passed over in semi-embarrassed silence.

By reproducing or replicating some of the earlier legacies while renewing their spirit with bitterness and cynicism, Villon invests his later poem with an undeniable degree of high seriousness. Consequently, the effect of the Testament is to no small extent dependent on the knowledge of the Lais that we bring to it.³ If the Lais is playful and lighthearted (or even, as some would contend, lightweight), that fact serves to foreground the greater gravity of the Testament. To put the matter negatively, if Villon had not written the Lais first, we would respond in a substantially different way to its successor: unable to compare it with the lighter spirit of a more youthful narrator, we would be less aware of the seriousness that most commentators attribute to the maturing Villon.

It is indisputably true, therefore, that the Lais can assist us in an exegesis, or at least an appreciation, of the Testament. However, such a defense—that our response to the Testament is guided in part by the Lais—falls far short of demonstrating that the earlier composition possesses any intrinsic merit. We must look further, reexamining the text without the critical baggage of received ideas; we will then find not only that the poem is fundamentally unlike its successor but also that it merits our attention and rewards our reading. My effort to demonstrate those facts will take three forms: a consideration of Villon's dual personas, brief suggestions bearing on the structural and thematic integrity of the Lais, and a coda concerning the question of the text's seriousness.⁴

If the Lais and the Testament have a great deal in common, they also differ in important ways, in terms not only of construction—only the middle section of the Lais, presenting the bequests, has its counterpart in the later poem—but especially of poetic expression. In regard to the latter, the two texts work in dramatically dissimilar fashion, and the crucial distinction turns on the poetic personas behind the texts. Our essential first step is to move beyond the biographical approach—or what we might, facetiously but not inaccurately, call the “povre petit escollier” school of Villon criticism (from Test., 1886)—and to acknowledge that in both poems, the Testament no less than the Lais, the first-person narrator is neither a fifteenth-century student nor a criminal, but a fictional construction.⁵

That the dramatization of a first-person narrator inevitably entails the creation of a persona is a notion that is so self-evident and by now so traditional as to be merely trivial—except, I would suggest, in Villon studies.⁶ Both casual and some scholarly readers of Villon (and especially of the Testament) seem to have found the use of the first-person pronoun seductive, even irresistible,⁷ despite the poet's multiple levels of irony, the direct contradictions, and the fragmentation of the poetic voice. Perhaps the notion of a created persona risks impoverishing the poems for a good many readers; certainly it frustrates those who want to see the Villon of the Testament as a poète engagé, staring death in the face and reacting with a mixture of rebellion and existential angst. The assumption appears to be that, at best, Villon may be joking in the Lais and consequently presenting a mask to us, but in the Testament he has elected to express his most sincere and personal sentiments in his own unmediated voice.⁸

However, literary creation, by definition, involves mediation—it is mediation—and we must begin by recognizing the distinction between poetic voice and the poet's voice. Oversimplifying to a degree, we can characterize the persona of the Testament, though not necessarily the poet, as an aging and embittered man facing death and composing his will. The poem is in fact the mock testament of a literary character who dies a mock death. That these may not be the experiences of the historical Villon—who may not have been ailing and who, in his thirties, was certainly not old (see below, n. 8)—should not diminish their appeal. Indeed, the text achieves remarkable power in its evocation of age, infirmity, and impending death, but it depicts the experiences of its narrator/persona, not of its author.

Villon's persona in the Lais is entirely unlike that of the Testament, and that single fact goes far in explaining the radically dissimilar character of the two texts. The Lais depicts a trickster persona, the protagonist of a mock testament in which the emphasis remains resolutely on the mockery and the jocularity. The narrator/persona makes no effort to portray angst (except as ironic pretense) but instead has a great deal of fun at the expense of his contemporaries, of the notions of love and scholasticism—and I will return to the relationship of those two—and of his own literary form.

In addition, the personas of the two poems differ in another fundamental way. Whereas Villon, in the Testament, will systematically fragment the persona and split the first-person voice into two or more,⁹ he largely maintains the integrity of his persona in the earlier poem, which is thus characterized by a relative consistency of voice. It is unarguably a less complex persona than that of the Testament, but it can prove equally effective in giving textual form to the poet's voice.

As it is a trickster's voice we hear in the Lais, it follows that the poet rejects gravity (though not mock gravity) in favor of levity. In fact, it is not entirely inaccurate to suggest that the Lais is a large, very successful, and often malicious joke, and if that alone makes us admire it less than the “serious” Testament, then we may be displaying a traditional prejudice against the ludic spirit and in favor of artistic sobriety.¹⁰

A joke it may be, but Villon has given careful attention to both its construction and its expression, which are in fact inseparable elements of his creation. A proper appreciation of the poem requires attention to both—to the poem's thematic and architectural balance and to the wit and linguistic inventiveness with which Villon realizes his design. That wit is undoubtedly most in evidence in the least understood part of the poem: the late section known as Villon's entr'oubli (273-320), in which he momentarily loses contact with reality and his own literary project.

Having completed the comical or ironic bequests that take up the center of the poem,¹¹ Villon returns to pseudo-autobiographical matters. He depicts himself in his cold room, unable to continue writing because his candle has gone out and his ink has frozen. (That he manages somehow to write with frozen ink, in order to explain that his ink has frozen and left him unable to write, can only be part of his joke, though a part overlooked by many readers.) Then he launches into a burlesque scholastic analysis of his sentiments and experiences.

Commentators have traditionally been perplexed by this section of the poem, puzzled about what they should or could make of the digression on scholastic philosophy and mental faculties—reasoning, judgment, imagination, will, and the like.¹² Most critics have described this final division of the poem simply as a mockery of scholasticism, and it surely is that. But it is also much more: it is indisputably an erotic (or rather, autoerotic) joke as well,¹³ a fact that must be recognized if we are to understand the function of this sequence in the architectonics of the poem.

Once we recall that both extinguished candles and depleted or frozen ink were traditional orgasmic references (Kuhn 120), the passage should fall easily enough into place. The section, evoking scholastic categories, is far more complex and detailed than a brief discussion can indicate. For present purposes, though, it will suffice to note that imagination (says the poet) awakens all his organs and holds la souveraine partie in suspense. The “sovereign part” has traditionally been taken as a scholastic reference to the rational faculty, but in Villon's system of erotic metaphors, it can only designate a far less abstract “part.” The narrator is describing the process by which his imagination leads to sexual excitement, which he himself dissipates, extinguishing, as it were, his heat and light.¹⁴ Eventually, his mental faculties begin to sort themselves out again, and he would be ready to resume writing were his candle not out and his ink not frozen.¹⁵

The primary purpose of these observations is less to rehearse yet again the autoeroticism of the ending—I cannot improve on Kuhn's analysis—than to point out its contribution to the structure and unity of the poem. Specifically, the “scholastic” passage is the logical conclusion and completion of the poem's initial sequence.

When the poet opens the Lais in the form of a traditional congé d'amour, a lover's leave-taking from his beloved, he complains that his love for his lady is unrequited. His laments are couched in elaborate courtly and allegorical diction, which includes references to doulx regars et beaux semblans (recalling Le Roman de la Rose in particular), and he calls himself a martyred lover, to be numbered among the saints of love (47).

However, as critics now recognize, his courtly and ostensibly refined expression cleverly incorporates a series of sexual innuendoes. Rebuffed, he announces that he is leaving his lady and Paris and going to Angers. A literal, biographical reading of these passages, such as was long customary, can be accomplished only if the reader ignores the extensive sexual imagery. Villon has indicated, for example, his determination to find a different field to plow (31), a barely veiled reference to copulation. He then says he sees no solution except to flee, but, as Kuhn points out (109), the verb he uses (fouïr) is a doublet that in Middle French refers to both flight and copulation. Further, by apparent association with the verbs ongier and angier, an allusion to sexual climax, “going to Angers” was, in the erotic slang of the time, an attested orgasmic reference (Kuhn 109). Readers attentive to the language of the poem (or at least to textual notes), having seen that he joins in a single word allusions to flight and to sexual activity, will doubtless anticipate that he is leaving one woman only to find another. Indeed, this initial sequence does open a development that will be concluded only at the end of the poem—but it will conclude in decidedly surprising fashion, dispensing with the need for the opposite sex.

Thus, without the specific details of the final sequence and our proper understanding of it, Villon's initial prediction, that, frustrated in love, he will find other sources of satisfaction (“other fields to plow”), would remain unrealized. However, it does not, for his “I am going to Angers” announces the onanistic conclusion of his poem and closes the circle of the text. Villon's sly sexual humor may not appeal to all sensibilities, but his attention to structural detail and symmetry is undeniable.

Should there remain any question about the way we should read this final sequence, it will suffice to consider Villon's customary manipulation of linguistic structures. His technique in the Lais (and in much of the Testament as well) involves a systematic linguistic displacement. On the one hand, he endows the most routine words and phrases with a figurative meaning, usually drawn from contemporary slang and often erotic or obscene in nature; on the other hand, he unfailingly renders in literal fashion those formulations that ordinarily carry a figurative or symbolic meaning. This fundamental interchange of literal and figurative also holds the key to interpreting a good many specific passages.

For example, at the beginning of the Lais, when Villon speaks of Christmas (10), he opts not for the traditional symbolic meaning of the season—life, birth, optimism—but for an interpretation related to the season's physical desolation and to the misery of those whose lives are shaped by unpleasant material realities. It is thus not the saison vivante but conversely, in his words, a morte saison, an association that, strictly speaking, is perfectly logical but that produces something of a shock nonetheless, by juxtaposing Christmas with death rather than with birth.

What this example and others that we might cite reveal about his technique makes it virtually predictable that Villon would associate his sovereign part, aroused by his imagination, not with human reasoning but with genitalia (or, perhaps more accurately, with both). He thus closes the circle of the text, making a clever and malicious off-color joke about the excesses of scholasticism. The congé, though traditionally inspired by a sad or even bitter situation, was often an idealistic event and poetic form—but not for Villon, in whose poetry there is rarely room for idealism. Instead, and almost inevitably, he transforms an affair of the heart into an unembarrassed depiction of the most immediate physical pleasure.

Those who insist, however, that the poem must have a serious point if it is to possess enduring value will not be disappointed. There is such a point, but it has too often been missed, no doubt because we find it difficult to accept a lesson taught through humor. Underlying the eroticism and the jocular spirit of the poem is an implicit but devastating critique of the artifice of language systems. Villon takes direct aim at two such systems (courtly rhetoric at the beginning and scholastic obfuscation at the end) that were venerable and institutionalized, one in letters, the other in the church and school. The two are related by their factitiousness: neither is direct and natural, and, as Villon's treatment demonstrates, neither is clear and unambiguous. In this poem, the courtly section, barely masking erotic references, promises an elaboration that is realized in the scholastic, and equally erotic, conclusion. In the resolution of the suspended opening sequence, both rhetorical systems are deflated, indeed demolished.¹⁶

But if the poet has an implicit distrust of language, he cannot easily exempt his own from that distrust. That fact goes far toward explaining the instability of his own linguistic constructions: richly textured and multi-layered, his language readily fragments under scrutiny, revealing ambiguities and equivocations that constantly deflect meaning from the obvious and the expected.

Here, in fact, we see a theme or attitude that clearly anticipates the Testament, where the impermanence of life and fame (cf. “Ou sont les neiges d'antan?”) is echoed by the impermanence of language and poetry themselves. In the later poem, Villon undermines linguistic stability in a number of ways, such as writing a ballade in notoriously flawed Old French (see Lacy, “Flight”); in the Lais he does it by demonstrating the vanity of artificial or institutionalized language. In both he does it, of course, with the puns, the clever or crude plays on words, and the innuendoes that never mean quite what they seem to mean—or else they mean both that and something quite different as well.

Thus, in its commentary on language and on poetic creation, the Lais is no less “serious” than the Testament. And yet, the degree of seriousness, of redeeming social or philosophical value, that we can locate in a poem is at best an unreliable standard for judgment. There is every reason to believe that the poet himself valued his “low” comedy no less than his high seriousness. Moreover, unless we simply discount the impressive creativity of his erotic humor (in which case we surely ought to do the same with Chaucer, Rabelais, and many another author), we must acknowledge both that the Lais presents a coherent thematic organization and a balanced structure and that it is most assuredly not an awkward early draft of the Testament, to be discarded once the “final version” is completed.

It is evident that both of Villon's longer poems continue to suffer under the weight of received critical ideas and resolutely biographical readings, but the Lais suffers doubly, hidden as it is in the shadow of its more illustrious successor. It can certainly not be considered the equal of the Testament in terms of poetic value and appeal—how many poems can?—but it both requires and deserves at least modest rehabilitation. By its function no less than by its title, it is a considerable part of Villon's poetic legacy to us, and it is a legacy that his later composition will acknowledge and extend, even as it eclipses it. In other words, the poet neither ignored nor forgot the Lais, and we should let his example be our guide.

Notes

1. The most dramatic of such assessments—and surely the most decidedly wrong-headed one—is that of Jean Favier, who tells us that Villon wrote a testament in two successive versions, the first one called the Lais, the second known as the Grand Testament (973). It is true that Favier is writing in a literary dictionary, not in a work of Villon scholarship, but that fact itself implies that the views he expresses are scholarly received ideas; and, of course, his repetition of such ideas serves to shape further the impressions of future readers of Villon.

2. Among the few exceptions to this statement we must count in particular Gert Pinkernell's François Villon, Lais: Versuch einer Gesamtdeutung, a modest and flawed but nonetheless earnest exploration of the Lais and a lonely exception to the lack of critical interest in the poem. To the exceedingly short list must, of course, be added a minor portion of Kuhn's important study; and we should include as well a few articles (e.g., Burger) that, however misguided (see below, n. 5), attempt seriously to explicate a portion of the poem or to relate it to the presumed circumstances of Villon's life.

3. Ironically, this is true also, though less subtly, for critics who dismiss the earlier poem: their very dismissal of it establishes an implicit contrast with the Testament.

4. In the process, I cannot provide a thorough analysis of the text, and I will deliberately give short shrift to the central portion of the poem (the actual legacies), though without intending to imply that they are without interest or significance.

5. Both the Testament and the Lais have been a veritable playground for biographical critics. On the subject of the biographical method, see especially Vitz (16). She characterizes this approach as pessimistic, since it presupposes that we cannot properly understand the poem unless we can “conjure up” the historical Villon, agonizing or riant en pleurs. She further points out that we know so little about the actual Villon that we cannot expect to apprehend his poetry through biographical criticism. Indeed, the very assumption that poetic autobiography might be reliable historical evidence is dangerous: it is the worst of guides both to historical reality and to literary meaning.

6. This despite the fact that responsible Villon scholars have repeatedly insisted on his poetic project, on his creation of voices that may—or may not—represent the historical author. See, most recently, Hunt 11-12. Such insistence, unfortunately, has not yet shaken traditional ideas about Villon.

7. In this regard, “favorite” lines from the Testament include “je plains le temps de ma jeunesse” (169), “Hé! Dieu, se j'eusse estudié / Ou temps de ma jeunesse folle” (201-02), “Povre je suis de ma jeunesse” (273), and a handful of others.

8. It simply happens that Villon, especially in the Testament, creates a more complex and more thoroughly dramatized persona than do most other poets, and by doing so with uncommon skill, he manages to persuade most readers that he is speaking directly and sincerely. The effectiveness of that persona led Ezra Pound to argue that Villon is great precisely because he is without illusions, without imagination, without literary ambition, almost without art (169, 171). That is, Pound implies that Villon is presenting his own world and his own experience directly, without poetic mediation. I would suggest instead that Villon's supreme poetic accomplishment is precisely the crafting of a persona so effective that it convinces Pound—and many others—that it is not a persona. An attitude such as Pound's causes difficulties, however, and they go beyond the theoretical impossibility of abolishing a persona or making the persona coincide precisely with the person. It also requires critics to explain away some textual difficulties in less than satisfactory manner. One is the poet's insistence on his age, when (Test., 171) he says in the past tense that old age overtook him. Yet Villon was by no means old when he wrote that line; he was a little over thirty. Biographical critics might suggest that, given his life and the time in which he lived, he was indeed comparatively old and was reasonably enough drawing up a will; recognition of his literary project would remind us instead that he was writing a mock-testament (a traditional and recognized literary form, after all) and that that form presupposed a reason for it: old age and/or poor health. Once that premise is accepted, everything else in the Testament flows naturally and persuasively from it: the talk of death and the necessity of preparing for it, the pretense of bequeathing his possessions to others, and the dramatization of his own death at the end of the poem.

9. A proper understanding of the Testament requires a recognition of this “split” persona, which I have treated briefly in my “The Voices of Villon's Testament.”

10. Even today, we do not ordinarily give Academy Awards to comedies; by their nature, they appear less worthy of recognition. They are not “serious” art.

11. Unfortunately, the design of this article precludes a detailed discussion of the bequests, which are of course the core of the poem. It might be noted, although this is not intended as a defense or justification, that most studies of Villon give short shrift to the actual bequests in either poem, at most picking and choosing a few of them for discussion but, for the Testament, concentrating instead on the lyric pieces inserted into the text.

12. These passages surely perplex also those readers who expect everything in the Lais to foreshadow something in the Testament.

13. To the best of my knowledge, Villon's autoeroticism was first suggested in print by Kuhn (see esp. 118-21). Even had he not done so, that element of the Lais ought, I believe, to be self-evident, but for a good many readers, it does not appear to be so. Nor, curiously, do Kuhn's suggestions seem to have influenced readings of the poem to the extent we might expect.

14. Kuhn sees this section as “une fantaisie érotique” and as a “rêve sexuel,” in which the poet “perd conscience dans une espèce d'orgasme” (120). Presumably he is proceeding delicately—a kind of orgasm?—but his meaning is clear.

15. Interestingly, this passage implies a parallel between poetic creation and autoeroticism, a fascinating suggestion that Villon does not overtly develop beyond this passage. Through much of his work, though, sexual function (or, more often, disfunction) serves as a metaphor for various kinds of aberrancies—economic, political, moral.

16. Kuhn emphasized that relationship in regard to the sexual character of the two passages. He also pointed out that both of them use artificial systems of rhetoric, but he draws an odd and perplexing conclusion when he notes that, after showing the futility of amorous rhetoric in the first part, the scholastic jargon “nous fait voir l'espèce de poésie qu'il se propose d'y substituer” (119).

Works Cited

Burger, André. “L'Entroubli de Villon.” Romania 79 (1958): 485-95.

Favier, Jean. Dictionnaire de la France médiévale. Paris: Fayard, 1993.

Fein, David. François Villon and His Reader. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1989.

Fox, John. Villon: Poems. London: Grant and Cutler, 1984.

Hunt, Tony. Villon's Last Will: Language and Authority in the “Testament.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

Kuhn, David. La Poétique de François Villon. Paris: Colin, 1967. (More recently republished with author's name given as David Mus.)

Lacy, Norris J. “Villon's Trilogy of Ballades.” Romance Notes 23.3 (1982): 353-58.

—. “The Voices of Villon's Testament.” Dalhousie French Studies 4 (1982): 3-12.

Pinkernell, Gert. François Villon, Lais: Versuch einer Gesamtdeutung. Heidelberg: Winter, 1979.

Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, n.d. 169, 171. (The essay on Villon dates from 1910.)

Sargent-Baur, Barbara. Brothers of Dragons: “Job Dolens” and François Villon. New York: Garland, 1990.

Taylor, Jane. “François Villon.” The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Ed. Peter France. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.

Villon, François. Œuvres. Ed. Auguste Longnon and Lucien Foulet. Paris: Champion, 1976.

Vitz, Evelyn Birge. The Crossroad of Intentions. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.