poet and exerted himself to catch the eye of such highly placed connoisseurs as Charles
d’Orléans; but for unknown reasons, he did not achieve more than a small gift of money
here and there. Greater success in his lifetime, however, might well have spelled later
obscurity; his poésies de circonstance, composed, we must assume, to curry favor,
competent though they are, are by and large forgettable. Rather than spend much of his
career in turning out pleasing official verse, he was driven by circumstance, and perhaps
also by a jarring personality, to live by expedients, know misery, reflect on it, and write
amateur poetry of a unique stamp.
The body of Villon’s works is of moderate dimensions: some 3,300 lines. It comprises
independent pieces in fixed form (ballades and rondeaux) and two unified compositions,
the Lais and the Testament. The Lais, dated 1456, is a series of burlesque legacies
occasioned 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
refines it into the articles of a last will and testament, complete with legal clauses and
phraseology, the fiction 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 fixed-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
difficult 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 a ses amis, Villon’s De profundis; 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 (including
the poet’s?) and its reiterated solicitation of prayer for their souls. Villon’s last poems
appear to fit 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 afflicted everyone, the
poor especially. It was out of harsh necessity, no doubt, that the future poet’s mother
entrusted her child to a presumed 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, l. 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
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1814