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 fl own; he is prematurely old,
poor, rejected by his kin, disappointed in love, regret-
ting 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 fi ctitious testament to
be worked in.
There is a good deal of humor in all this, of a rough,
pun-fi lled, scabrous character; and the poet takes advan-
tage of the safety afforded by the last-will-and-testament
schema to take verbal revenge on the individuals and
classes who have earned his disapproval; after all, the
document, according to the poetic fi ction, 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 mo-
ments, the poet’s thought turns to scenes commonly
beheld in Paris: the piled-up and anonymous bones in
the Cemetery of the Innocents, the cadavers 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 fi xed-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 fl eeting; 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 affl ict the innocent? The poet’s own stance,
at least as early as the independent Épître à 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 af-
fi rmed 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 revivi-
fi es 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, tempo-
rarily brought to order by the discipline of his octaves
and his fi xed-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
fl eeting joy. By and large, women are sensual and venal
(but not to be condemned, for it is nature femeninne
[Testament, 1. 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 fi nd 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 qualifi ers: sec et noir;
plus maigre que chimere (“skinny and dark”; “thinner
than a wraith”). What he does give us is his reactions
to his experience, and a sketch of late-medieval France
as he knew it. This is a world of people living by their
wits and not hampered by scruples: entertainers, prosti-
tutes, counterfeiters, tavern keepers and tavern haunters,
jailers and moat cleaners, peddlers, beggars, dissolute
monks—Villon’s poetry opens the door upon a teeming
world, lacking in grace or nobility but intensely alive.
Most vital of all are the poet’s own self and experience,
given expression that transcends his own time and milieu
so as to be at once personal and universal.
Villon’s works have been preserved in a number of
manuscripts and fragments, and in a printed edition of
1489, These early sources vary in completeness, from
the Lais, the Testament, and numerous independent
pieces, down to two or three ballades; they differ also
in degree of reliability. The manuscript copies, the in-VILLON, FRANÇOIS