Villon, François

Vil·lon (vē-yōɴʹ), François. 1431-1463?.

French poet. His satirical lyrics are contained in Le Petit Testament (c. 1456) and Le Testament (c. 1461).

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orig. François de Montcorbier or François des Loges

born 1431, Paris, France

died after 1463

French lyric poet.

Villon was a rigorously trained scholar who led a life of criminal excess; he killed a priest in 1455, then joined a criminal organization and became involved in robbery, theft, and brawling. Incarcerated several times, in 1462 he received a death sentence that was commuted to banishment. He was never heard from again. His works, published posthumously, include the poem Le Petit testament (1489), which takes the form of ironic bequests to friends and acquaintances; Le Testament (1489), which reviews his life with great emotional and poetic depth; and various ballades, chansons, and rondeaux. His themes range from drunkenness and prostitution to a humble ballade-prayer to the Virgin written at his mother's request. Villon's verse makes a direct, unsentimental appeal to the emotions but also displays remarkable control of rhyme and disciplined composition.

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▪ French poet

Introduction

pseudonym of  François de Montcorbier  or  François des Loges 

born 1431, Paris

died after 1463

 one of the greatest French lyric poets. He was known for his life of criminal excess, spending much time in prison or in banishment from medieval Paris. His chief works include Le Lais (Le Petit Testament), Le Grand Testament, and various ballades, chansons, and rondeaux.

Life

      Villon's father died while he was still a child, and he was brought up by the canon Guillaume de Villon, chaplain of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné. The register of the faculty of arts of the University of Paris records that in March 1449 Villon received the degree of bachelor, and in May–August 1452, that of master. On June 5, 1455, a violent quarrel broke out in the cloisters of Saint-Benoît among himself, some drinking companions, and a priest, Philippe Sermoise, whom Villon killed with a sword thrust. He was banished from the city but, in January 1456, won a royal pardon. Just before Christmas of the same year, however, he was implicated in a theft from the Collège de Navarre and was again obliged to leave Paris.

      At about this time he composed the poem his editors have called Le Petit Testament, which he himself entitled Le Lais (The Legacy). It takes the form of a list of “bequests,” ironically conceived, made to friends and acquaintances before leaving them and the city. To his barber he leaves the clippings from his hair; to three well-known local usurers, some small change; to the clerk of criminal justice, his sword (which was in pawn).

      After leaving Paris, he probably went for a while to Angers. He certainly went to Blois and stayed on the estates of Charles, duc d'Orléans (Orléans, Charles, duc d'), who was himself a poet. Here, further excesses brought him another prison sentence, this time remitted because of a general amnesty declared at the birth of Charles's daughter, Marie d'Orléans, on December 19, 1457. Villon entered his ballade “Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine” (“I die of thirst beside the fountain”) in a poetry contest organized by the prince, who is said to have had some of Villon's poems (including the “letter” dedicated to the young child, “Épître à Marie d'Orléans”) transcribed into a manuscript of his own work.

      At some later time, Villon is known to have been in Bourges and in the Bourbonnais, where he possibly stayed at Moulins. But throughout the summer of 1461 he was once more in prison. He was not released until October 2, when the prisons were emptied because King Louis XI was passing through.

      Free once more, Villon wrote his longest work, Le Testament (or Le Grand Testament, as it has since been known). It contains 2,023 octosyllabic lines in 185 huitains (eight-line stanzas). These huitains are interspersed with a number of fixed-form poems, chiefly ballades (usually poems of three 10-line stanzas, plus an envoi of between 4 and 7 lines) and chansons (songs written in a variety of metres and with varied verse patterns), some of which he had composed earlier.

      In Le Testament Villon reviews his life and expresses his horror of sickness, prison, old age, and his fear of death. It is from this work especially that his poignant regret for his wasted youth and squandered talent is known. He re-creates the taverns and brothels of the Paris underworld, recalling many of his old friends in drunkenness and dissipation, to whom he had made various “bequests” in Le Lais. But Villon's tone is here much more scathing than in his earlier work, and he writes with greater ironic detachment.

      Shortly after his release from the prison at Meung-sur-Loire he was arrested, in 1462, for robbery and detained at the Châtelet in Paris. He was freed on November 7 but was in prison the following year for his part in a brawl in the rue de la Parcheminerie. This time he was condemned to be pendu et etranglé (“hanged and strangled”). While under the sentence of death he wrote his superb "Ballade des pendus," or "L'Épitaphe Villon" , in which he imagines himself hanging on the scaffold, his body rotting, and he makes a plea to God against the “justice” of men. At this time, too, he wrote his famous wry quatrain "Je suis Françoys, dont il me poise" (“I am François, they have caught me”). He also made an appeal to the Parlement, however, and on January 5, 1463, his sentence was commuted to banishment from Paris for 10 years. He was never heard from again.

Poetry

      The criminal history of Villon's life can all too easily obscure the scholar, trained in the rigorous intellectual disciplines of the medieval schools. While it is true that his poetry makes a direct unsentimental appeal to our emotions, it is also true that it displays a remarkable control of rhyme and reveals a disciplined composition that suggests a deep concern with form, and not just random inspiration. For example, the ballade "Fausse beauté, qui tant me couste chier" (“False beauty, for which I pay so dear a price”), addressed to his friend, a prostitute, not only supports a double rhyme pattern but is also an acrostic, with the first letter of each line of the first two stanzas spelling out the names Françoys and Marthe. Even the arrangement of stanzas in the poem seems to follow a determined order, difficult to determine, but certainly not the result of happy accident. An even higher estimate of Villon's technical ability would probably be reached if more were known about the manner and rules of composition of the time.

      A romantic notion of Villon's life as some sort of medieval vie de bohème—a conception reinforced by the 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud, Arthur), who saw him as the “accursed poet”—has been challenged by modern critical studies. David Kuhn has examined the way most texts were made to yield literal, allegorical, moral, and spiritual meanings, following a type of biblical exegesis prevalent in that theocentric age. He has discovered in Le Testament a numerical pattern according to which Villon distributed the stanzas. If his analysis is correct, then it would seem Le Testament is a poem of cosmic significance, to be interpreted on many levels. Kuhn believes, for example, that the stanza numbered 33—the number of years Jesus Christ lived—refers directly to Jesus, which, if true, could hardly be regarded as the random inspiration of a “lost child.” The critic Pierre Guiraud sees the poems as codes that, when broken, reveal the satire of a Burgundian cleric against a corps of judges and attorneys in Paris.

      That Villon was a man of culture familiar with the traditional forms of poetry and possessing an acute sense of the past is evident from the poems themselves. There is the ballade composed in Old French, parodying the language of the 13th century; Le Testament, which stands directly in the tradition of Jehan Bodel (Bodel, Jehan)'s Congés (“Leave-takings”), poetry that poets such as Adam De La Halle and Bodel before him had composed when setting out on a journey; best of all, perhaps, there is his "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" (“Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone Times,” included in Le Testament), with its famous, incantatory refrain “Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?” (“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”).

      However farfetched some of these insights into Villon may appear to be, it is not surprising that the poet—given the historical context of learning—should inform his own work with depth of thought, meaning, and significance. But an “intellectual” approach to Villon's work should not distract from its burning sincerity nor contradict the accepted belief that fidelity to genuine, often painful, personal experience was the source of the harsh inspiration whereby he illuminated his largely traditional subject matter—the cortège of shattered illusions, the regrets for a lost past, the bitterness of love betrayed, and, above all, the hideous fear of death so often found in literature and art at that time of pestilence and plague, massacre and war.

      The little knowledge of Villon's life that has come down to the present is chiefly the result of the patient research of the 19th-century French scholar Auguste Longnon, who brought to light a number of historical documents—most of them judicial records—relating to the poet. But after Villon's banishment by the Parlement in 1463 all trace of him vanishes. Still, it is a wonder that any of his poetry should have survived, and there exist about 3,000 lines, the greater part published as early as 1489 by the Parisian bookseller Pierre Levet, whose edition served as the basis for some 20 more in the next century. Apart from the works mentioned, there are also 12 single ballades and rondeaux (basically 13-line poems with a sophisticated double rhyme pattern), another 4 of doubtful authenticity, and 7 ballades in jargon and jobelin—the slang of the day. Two stories about the poet were later recounted by François Rabelais (Rabelais, François): one told of his being in England, the other of his seeking refuge at the monastery of Saint-Maixent in Poitou. Neither is credible, nor is it known when or where Villon died.

Assessment

      Perhaps the most deeply moving of French lyric poets, Villon ranges in his verse from themes of drunkenness and prostitution to the unsentimental humility of a ballade-prayer to “Our Lady,” "Pour prier Nostre-Dame," written at the request of his mother. He speaks, with marvelous directness, of love and death, reveals a deep compassion for all suffering humanity, and tells unforgettably of regret for the wasted past.

      His work marks the end of an epoch, the waning of the Middle Ages, and it has commonly been read as the inspiration of a “lost child.” But as more becomes known about the poetic traditions and disciplines of his day, this interpretation seems inadequate. It is probably either too early or too late fully to understand Villon's work, as one critic has suggested; but although the scholar must still face a variety of critical problems, enough is known about Villon's life and times to mark him as a poet of genius, whose work is charged with meaning and great emotional force.

Régine Pernoud Ed.

Additional Reading

Editions and translations

Important among early editions were Antoine Vérard (ed.), Jardin de plaisance (1501, reprinted in 2 vol., 1910–25); Clément Marot, Les Oeuvres de Françoys Villon… (1533), the first critical edition; J.H.R. Prompsault, Oeuvres (1832), the first complete edition; and P. Lacroix, Oeuvres complètes, new ed. (1854). The standard edition of Villon's poems is by Auguste Longnon (1892), revised for Lucien Foulet, Les Classiques français du moyen âge (1914; 4th ed., 1932). Also useful are the critical edition, with commentary, by L. Thuasne, Oeuvres, 3 vol. (1923, reprinted 1967); and by A. Mary, Oeuvres poétiques (1965). A. Lanley, François Villon, Oeuvres (1969), is useful for those unfamiliar with medieval French, and the notes clarify many textual difficulties. Individual poems have been translated into English by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, W.E. Henley, and J.M. Synge, among others; the most useful translation is the Complete Works of François Villon, ed., with parallel translations, by A. Bonner (1960).

Bibliographies

L. de Cons, État présent des études sur Villon (1936), is a fine study, especially when used in conjunction with J. Dufournet, Villon et sa fortune littéraire (1970), which gives an account of Villon studies to date.

Biography and criticism

A. Longnon, Étude biographique sur François Villon (1877), a work of admirable scholarship, also reproduces the historical documentary material relating to the poet; P. Champion, François Villon, sa vie et son temps, 2 vol. (1913), is an excellent study of the poet's life and times; D.B. Wyndham Lewis, François Villon: A Documented Survey (1928), with preface by Hilaire Belloc, and selected poems with translations, is an imaginative reconstruction of Villon's life and times; I. Siciliano, François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du moyen âge (1934), provides a well-documented study; E.F. Chaney, François Villon in His Environment (1946); J.H. Fox, The Poetry of Villon (1962); S. Nagel, François Villon: Versuch einer kritischen Darstellung seines Lebens nach seinen Gedichten (1856), unravels very skillfully the acrostic puzzles in Villon's poetry; A. Ziwes, and A. de Bercy, Le Jargon de M. François Villon, 2 vol. (1954), provides an interesting study of the argot of the 15th century; A. Burger, Lexique de la langue de Villon: précédé de notes critiques pour l'établissement du texte (1957), helpfully discusses linguistic issues; D. Kuhn, La Poétique de François Villon (1967), is full of interesting insights, but not all his conclusions are acceptable; P. Guiraud, Le Testament de Villon, ou le Gai Savoir de la Basoche (1970), rejects the historical approach to Villon's work; J. Dufournet, Recherches sur le Testament de François Villon, 3 vol. (1967); and Odette Petit-Morphy, François Villon et la Scolastique, 2 vol. (1977). Aubrey Burl, Danse Macabre: Francois Villon, Poetry, & Murder in Medieval France (2000), is the first biographical study in several decades.

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