Lais, dated 1456, is a series of burlesque legacies oc-
casioned by being, as Villon asserts, crossed in love, and
consequently deciding to quit Paris, perhaps never to
return. The Testament (1461) takes up again the legacy
pattern but refi nes it into the articles of a last will and
testament, complete with legal clauses and phraseol-
ogy, the fi ction now being that the author is near death
and bethinking himself of soul and body as well as
of worldly goods. This, Villon’s major work, written,
in octaves (eight-line strophes of octosyllabic verse),
contains fi xed-form pieces as well, some of which may
antedate or even postdate 1461. The whole amounts to a
personal literary anthology as well as the poet’s artistic
testament and monument. The rest of his œuvre is made
up of a fulsome Louange of Princess Marie d’Orléans,
with attached double ballade and much Latin adornment;
a Ballade franco-latine, even more latinate; a number
of diffi cult poems in the jargon of the medieval French
underworld; and some ballades made up of the rhetorical
devices dear to the schoolroom and fashionable court.
Jumbled in with them are some pieces so intensely felt,
so personal, so perfectly marrying form and content,
that they belong by right to the greatest world literature.
Among these are the Épître à ses amis, Villon’s De pro-
fundis; the yes-and-no meditation on fate and individual
responsibility best called Débat de Villon et de son cœur,
and the Ballade des pendus, with its unbearable yet
inescapable vision of legally executed bodies (includ-
ing the poet’s?) and its reiterated solicitation of prayer
for their souls. Villon’s last poems appear to fi t into the
interval between his last imprisonment and appeal, the
commutation of his death sentence to a ten-year exile,
and his departure in 1463 to an unknown end.
Villon was born into a poor family (Testament,
ll. 273–75) in 1431, the year marked by the death of
Jeanne d’Arc, celebrated in the Testament (ll. 351–52)
as ... Jehanne la bonne Lorraine/Qu’Engloys brulerent
a Rouen (“Joan, the brave girl from Lorraine/Burned by
the English at Rouen”). The Hundred Years’ War was
dragging on; disease, food-shortages, and protracted
spells of cold, wet weather affl icted everyone, the poor
especially. It was out of harsh necessity, no doubt, that
the future poet’s mother entrusted her child to a pre-
sumed relative, Guillaume de Villon, the kindly chaplain
of the Parisian church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné not
far from the Sorbonne, who would be the boy’s plus que
père (Testament, 1. 849).
Young François, originally called de Montcorbier or
des Loges, took the surname of his adoptive father, and
much else besides: security, relative comfort, clerical
status, and the opportunity for the best formal education
then available. In 1449, he obtained the baccalaureate
degree and three years later the License and the degree
of Maître ès Arts. This and his connections ought to have
smoothed Villon’s path into the learned professions;
but these were overpopulated in the mid-15th century.
To enter the secular or 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 benefi t 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 fi nal
and spectacular crime, that drove the exasperated secu-
lar 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 ar-
chives. They supplement the hints, half-truths, special
pleading, and downright 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 per-
sonal 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 un-
reliable 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 transitori-
ness 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 progres-
sion. This begins as early as the fi rst 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 fl ood-
ing back, making him sacrifi ce syntax to sarcasm: yes,
he will pray for his enemy—with a cursing psalm. ForVILLON, FRANÇOIS