From the poem "Testament", a ballad to his mother, by the French poet Francois Villion, at a time when she speaks of seeing paradise written on the walls of the chapel.
(Trans. by Rossetti)
pseudonym of FRANÇOIS DE MONTCORBIER, or
FRANÇOIS DES LOGES (b. 1431, Paris--d. after 1463), one
of the greatest French lyric poets. He was known for his life of
criminal excess, spending much time in prison or in
banishment from medieval Paris. His chief works include Le
Lais, or Le Petit Testament, Le Grand Testament, and various
ballades, chansons, and rondeaux.
Life
At about this time he composed the poem his editors have
called Le Petit Testament, which he himself entitled Le Lais
(The Legacy). It takes the form of a list of "bequests,"
ironically conceived, made to friends and acquaintances before
leaving them and the city. To his barber he leaves the clippings
from his hair; to three well-known local usurers, some small
change; to the clerk of criminal justice, his sword (which was
in pawn).
After leaving Paris, he probably went for a while to Angers.
He certainly went to Blois and stayed on the estates of Charles,
duc d'Orléans, who was himself a poet. Here, further excesses
brought him another prison sentence, this time remitted
because of a general amnesty declared at the birth of Charles's
daughter, Marie d'Orléans, on Dec. 19, 1457. Villon entered
his ballade "Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine" ("I die of
thirst beside the fountain") in a poetry contest organized by the
Prince, who is said to have had some of Villon's poems
(including the "letter" dedicated to the young child, "Épître à
Marie d'Orléans") transcribed into a manuscript of his own
work.
At some later time, Villon is known to have been in Bourges
and in the Bourbonnais, where he possibly stayed at Moulins.
But throughout the summer of 1461 he was once more in
prison. He was not released until October 2, when the prisons
were emptied because King Louis XI was passing through.
Free once more, Villon wrote his longest work, Le Testament
(or Le Grand Testament, as it has since been known). It
contains 2,023 octosyllabic lines in 185 huitains (eight-line
stanzas). These huitains are interspersed with a number of
fixed-form poems, chiefly ballades (usually poems of three
10-line stanzas, plus an envoi of between 4 and 7 lines) and
chansons (songs written in a variety of metres and with varied
verse patterns), some of which he had composed earlier.
In Le Testament Villon reviews his life and expresses his
horror of sickness, prison, old age, and his fear of death. It is
from this work especially that his poignant regret for his
wasted youth and squandered talent is known. He re-creates
the taverns and brothels of the Paris underworld, recalling
many of his old friends in drunkenness and dissipation, to
whom he had made various "bequests" in Le Lais. But Villon's
tone is here much more scathing than in his earlier work, and
he writes with greater ironic detachment.
Shortly after his release from the prison at Meung-sur-Loire
he was arrested, in 1462, for robbery and detained at the
Châtelet in Paris. He was freed on November 7 but was in
prison the following year for his part in a brawl in the rue de
la Parcheminerie. This time he was condemned to be pendu et
etranglé ("hanged and strangled"). While under the sentence of
death he wrote his superb "Ballade des pendus," or
"L'Épitaphe Villon," in which he imagines himself hanging on
the scaffold, his body rotting, and he makes a plea to God
against the "justice" of men. At this time, too, he wrote his
famous wry quatrain "Je suis Françoys, dont il me poise," "I
am François, they have caught me." He also made an appeal to
the Parlement, however, and on Jan. 5, 1463, his sentence was
commuted to banishment from Paris for 10 years. He was
never heard from again.
Poetry
The criminal history of Villon's life can all too easily obscure
the scholar, trained in the rigorous intellectual disciplines of
the medieval schools. While it is true that his poetry makes a
direct unsentimental appeal to our emotions, it is also true that
it displays a remarkable control of rhyme and reveals a
disciplined composition that suggests a deep concern with
form, and not just random inspiration. For example, the
ballade "Fausse beauté, qui tant me couste chier" ("False
beauty, for which I pay so dear a price"), addressed to his
friend, a harlot, not only supports a double rhyme pattern but
is also an acrostic, with the first letter of each line of the first
two stanzas spelling out the names Françoys and Marthe. Even
the arrangement of stanzas in the poem seems to follow a
determined order, difficult to determine, but certainly not the
result of happy accident. An even higher estimate of Villon's
technical ability would probably be reached if more were
known about the manner and rules of composition of the time.
A romantic notion of Villon's life as some sort of medieval
vie de bohème--a conception reinforced by the 19th-century
Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who saw him as the
"accursed poet"--has been challenged by modern critical
studies. David Kuhn has examined the way most texts were
made to yield literal, allegorical, moral, and spiritual
meanings, following a type of biblical exegesis prevalent in
that theocentric age. He has discovered in Le Testament a
numerical pattern according to which Villon distributed the
stanzas. If his analysis is correct, then it would seem Le
Testament is a poem of cosmic significance, to be interpreted
on many levels. For example, stanza 33--the number of years
in Christ's age--Kuhn believes refers directly to Jesus, and
this would certainly be impossible to regard as the random
inspiration of a "lost child." The critic Pierre Guiraud sees the
poems as codes that, when broken, reveal the satire of a
Burgundian cleric against a corps of judges and attorneys in
Paris.
That Villon was a man of culture familiar with the traditional
forms of poetry and possessing an acute sense of the past is
evident from the poems themselves. There is the ballade
composed in Old French, parodying the language of the 13th
century; Le Testament, which stands directly in the tradition of
Jehan Bodel's Congés ("Leave-takings"), poetry that poets
such as Adam de la Halle and Bodel before him had composed
when setting out on a journey; best of all, perhaps, there is his
"Ballade des dames du temps jadis" ("Ballade of the Ladies of
Bygone Times," included in Le Testament), with its famous,
incantatory refrain "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" ("But
where are the snows of yesteryear?").
However farfetched some of these insights into Villon may
appear to be, it is not surprising that the poet--given the
historical context of learning--should inform his own work
with depth of thought, meaning, and significance. But an
"intellectual" approach to Villon's work should not distract
from its burning sincerity nor contradict the accepted belief
that fidelity to genuine, often painful, personal experience was
the source of the harsh inspiration whereby he illuminated his
largely traditional subject matter--the cortège of shattered
illusions, the regrets for a lost past, the bitterness of love
betrayed, and, above all, the hideous fear of death so often
found in literature and art at that time of pestilence and
plague, massacre and war.
The little knowledge of Villon's life that has come down to
the present is chiefly the result of the patient research of the
19th-century French scholar Auguste Longnon, who brought
to light a number of historical documents--most of them
judicial records--relating to the poet. But after his banishment
by the Parlement in 1463 all trace of Villon is lost. Still, it is
a wonder that any of his poetry should have survived, and there
exist about 3,000 lines, the greater part published as early as
1489 by the Parisian bookseller Pierre Levet, whose edition
served as the basis for some 20 more in the next century. Apart
from the works mentioned, there are also 12 single ballades
and rondeaux (basically 13-line poems with a sophisticated
double rhyme pattern), another 4 of doubtful authenticity, and
7 ballades in jargon and jobelin--the slang of the day. Two
stories about the poet were later recounted by Rabelais: one
told of his being in England, the other of his seeking refuge at
the monastery of Saint-Maixent in Poitou. Neither is credible,
nor is it known when or where François Villon died.
Assessment
Perhaps the most deeply moving of French lyric poets, Villon
ranges in his verse from themes of drunkenness and
prostitution to the unsentimental humility of a ballade-prayer
to "Our Lady," "Pour prier Nostre-Dame," written at the
request of his mother. He speaks, with marvelous directness,
of love and death, reveals a deep compassion for all suffering
humanity, and tells unforgettably of regret for the wasted past.
His work marks the end of an epoch, the waning of the Middle
Ages, and it has commonly been read as the inspiration of a
"lost child." But as more becomes known about the poetic
traditions and disciplines of his day, this interpretation seems
inadequate. It is probably either too early or too late fully to
understand Villon's work, as one critic has suggested; but
although the scholar must still face a variety of critical
problems, enough is known about Villon's life and times to
mark him as a poet of genius, whose work is charged with
meaning and great emotional force. (R.Pe.)
A pitful poor women, shrunk and old,
I am, and nothing learn'd in letter-lore.
Within my parish-cloister I behold
A painted heaven where harps and lutes adore,
And eke an Hell whose damned folk seethe full sore:
One bringeth fear, the other joy, to me.