regular clergy was apparently not for him a viable choice; nor, in the absence of an
independent income or a patron, was it possible for him to become a professional writer.
He turned to living by his wits, in the company of other unemployed clercs and even
more lowly individuals; and this led him into repeated brushes with the law, mainly for
theft but once for manslaughter. As an écolier, he was entitled to the church’s protection
from the full rigor of secular justice; but it looks as if he lost the benefit of clergy, as well
as many months of freedom, when he was condemned to prison at Meung-sur-Loire in
1461 by the bishop of Orléans.
It was his long police record, rather than one final and spectacular crime, that drove
the exasperated secular authorities in late 1462 to pass a capital sentence; the Parlement,
on appeal, commuted this to a ten-year banishment from Paris and its environs. Sadly, it
is owing to his activities as part-time criminal that much of the information about Villon
has come to us, for the abundant records have been preserved in the Paris archives. They
supplement the hints, half-truths, special pleading, and down-right lies that bestrew the
poet’s own writings.
Such a biographical excursus is particularly indicated in Villon’s case, for much of his
work is highly personal without always being informative or even candid. His feelings
take precedence over the exact cause for them, his hatred for his enemies overshadows
the ways whereby the latter have earned his resentment, and the possibility that the poet
himself might somehow have provoked or deserved rough handling is pushed far into the
background. Yet the interweaving of concrete if unreliable allusions to persons and
events on the one hand, of passionate response on the other, makes of Villon an
autobiographical lyricist to an unusual degree.
His themes, though, are universal ones, colored by his cultural milieu and his own
subjectivity. Adversity, suffering, insecurity, the hunger for love, the transitoriness of
youth and of all good things, the approach of death, the faith that sees beyond it—these
are the timbers of which his work is built. Through the 2,000 lines of the Testament, he
turns these notions over and over, in a composition structured by association of ideas and
shifting moods rather than logical or formal progression. This begins as early as the first
stanzas, which move with great rapidity from the testator’s age and mental condition to
his state of health and thence to his recent hardships and the person responsible for them;
and with the name of Bishop Thibaut d’Aussigny, the memory of the preceding summer’s
incarceration, and probable degradation from clerical status, comes flooding back,
making him sacrifice syntax to sarcasm: yes, he will pray for his enemy—with a cursing
psalm. For good measure, he adds a prayer for Louis, le bon roy de France. On he goes,
intermingling complaint, piety, and half-admissions of unsatisfactory behavior. Yet a
sinner in his situation is pardonable: Neccessité fait gens mesprendre/Et fain saillir le
loup du boys (“It’s need drives folks to go astray,/And hunger, the wolf to leave the
woods”; ll. 167–68). He has abundant grounds for lamentation. His youth has flown; he is
prematurely old, poor, rejected by his kin, disappointed in love, regretting his old friends
(where are they now?), knowing that death will come for him as it has for the lovely
ladies and great potentates of the past. These are themes to which he returns, obsessively
but not uninterruptedly; for a great number of bequests remain to be formulated and the
whole apparatus of the fictitious testament to be worked in.
There is a good deal of humor in all this, of a rough, pun-filled, scabrous character;
and the poet takes advantage of the safety afforded by the last-will-and-testament schema
The Encyclopedia 1815