to take verbal revenge on the individuals and classes who have earned his disapproval;
after all, the document, according to the poetic fiction, will not be read until after his
decease. We are led once again to the theme that underlies the Testament as a whole. It
sometimes is expressed with gentle gravity, as in the Ballade des dames du temps jadis;
in grimmer moments, the poet’s thought turns to scenes commonly beheld in Paris: the
piled-up and anonymous bones in the Cemetery of the Innocents, the cadav-ers of
executed criminals dangling from the Montfaucon gibbet, the last agony awaiting each
man and woman. In the Europe of the 15th century, the body’s death was but a stage in
the soul’s journey; prayers and allusions to Heaven and Hell throng the octaves and
fixed-form pieces. In the intervals of anxiety about death and what is in store for himself
and all humankind, Villon repeatedly turns to common experience, particularly its darker
side. Happiness is rare and fleeting; sorrow, fear, physical discomfort, and decrepitude—
these are the lot of the human race. Why had Villon, why had so many men and women
known suffering? Why does a just God permit malevolent Fortune to afflict the innocent?
The poet’s own stance, at least as early as the independent Épître a ses amis (presumably
composed during the 1461 incarceration at Meung-sur-Loire) is that of a blameless
victim, and he cries out with the words of the archetypical righteous sufferer, Job (11. 1–
2): Ayez pictié, ayez pictié de moy/A tout le moins, s’i vous plaist, mes amis! (“Have pity,
do have pity upon me,/You at least, if you please, who are my friends”). This explicit
kinship with Job is affirmed repeatedly through the Testament; it has become the poet’s
characteristic way of making sense of what has befallen him, of understanding, as well,
the human condition.
Villon’s themes are by no means original, nor is his use of archetypes in working them
out. As an educated man, he was steeped in the Latin classics and in the Bible, those
storehouses of human experience and its literary expression; to allude to traditional topoi,
stories, and personages was second nature for him, as it was for other writers of the day.
His preoccupation with death and decay, his frequent melancholy, his startling
coarseness, his mingling of jest and seriousness, are also features common in late-
medieval writing, and in the visual arts as well. What sets him apart is the immediacy of
his communication with the reader. His verse revivifies the notion of lyric: not poems to
be sung, but poems expressive of feeling. Unlike the conventional and impersonal je of
much contemporary writing, Villon’s je most frequently is his unique and unruly self,
temporarily brought to order by the discipline of his octaves and his fixed-form pieces.
Much 15th-century poetry treats of love, again in courtly and stereotyped ways, for the
stylized worship of the lady was still very much alive. Villon writes of love, too, but
mostly from his own limited experience: it is a snare and a delusion, at best a fleeting joy.
By and large, women are sensual and venal (but not to be condemned, for it is nature
femeninne [Testament, l. 611] that moves them), and in any case their attractiveness soon
withers. Indeed, woman’s charms, such a staple among mainstream masculine writers of
the period, do not feature much here except in the context of bitter reminiscence and of
regret for the transitoriness of all things desirable. It would in fact not be easy to find
another major poet so indifferent to beauty; but then visual description of any sort does
not stand out in Villon’s verses. He inclines to naming persons and places, to evoking
action and speech and gesture, rather than to painting word pictures. Even his self-
description is limited to a few qualifiers: sec et noir; plus maigre que chimere (“skinny
and dark”; “thinner than a wraith”). What he does give us is his reactions to his
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1816