François Villon

French poet

• Born: 1431
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: 1463?
• Place of death: Unknown

In his intensely personal, forthright verse, which was sordidly realistic yet devout, Villon was the greatest poet of late medieval-early Renaissance France.

Early Life

Born in Paris in 1431, François Villon (frah-swaw vee-yohn) was originally named François de Montcorbier. Apparently his father died when the child was quite young, for François was sent to live with Guillaume de Villon, a priest who was chaplain to the church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bientourné, near the University of Paris. His protector gave the boy a home and an education; the grateful François adopted his name, Villon, and several times wrote fondly of him in his verse, calling him “more than father . . . who has been to me more tender than a mother and raised me from swaddling-clothes.” Nothing is known of his real father, not even his first name; Villon called himself “of poor and obscure extraction.” His mother, for whom he wrote “Ballade to Our Lady,” he describes at the time as a poor old woman who knew nothing of letters.

Nothing is known of Villon’s boyhood. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake the year he was born, and for the first five years of his life, Paris was in the hands of the English conquerors, while the ineffectual Charles VII nominally ruled the unoccupied part of France. Most of the country had been ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War, and bands of freebooters were plundering whatever of value remained in the countryside or the capital. In 1434, there was the coldest winter in memory, followed in 1436 by a famine, which was succeeded in 1438 by an epidemic of smallpox that claimed some fifty thousand victims. Starving wolves invaded Paris and preyed on children and the weak. It was a grim, harsh era, and as a child, Villon must have seen violence and famine and been surrounded by death.

When he was about twelve, Villon was enrolled at the University of Paris, from which he was graduated in March, 1449, with a bachelor of arts degree. He was tonsured and received minor holy orders, affording him some protection from the police which he needed, as he was involved in student escapades that were typical of the medieval conflict between town and gown, including stealing boundary stones and house signs that were then carried off to the student quarter, which in turn was raided by the police. Despite his peccadilloes, Villon received a master of arts degree in August of 1452.

Life’s Work

Despite his education and the opportunities that it might have provided him, Villon fell in with a group of criminals known as Coquillards and began a life of crime. Among his cronies, who are featured in his poems, were Colin des Cayeulx, described by the authorities as a thief and picklock, and Regnier de Montigny, a thief, murderer, and church robber. Both of them were hanged, and Villon wrote their epitaphs. Villon also prowled around Paris with Guy Tabarie, Jehan the Wolf, and Casin Cholet, all thieves, and spent much time at brothels and taverns such as the Mule and the Pomme de Pin, whose proprietor, Robin Turgis, was often a target of Villon’s humor.

According to a poem of the time entitled “Repues Franches,” thought to be by Friar Baulde de la Mare, Villon and his rascally friends had a genius for conning free fish, meat, bread, and wine from gullible victims. Soon Villon’s picaresque career became more sinister. In the evening of June 5, 1455, the Feast of Corpus Christi, Villon was seated under the clock of Saint-Benoît-le-Bientourné, in company with a priest and a woman named Ysabeau, when another priest, Philip Chermoye, who had apparently been harboring a grudge, started a quarrel with Villon, drew a dagger, and slashed his upper lip. Bleeding copiously, Villon drew his own dagger and stabbed Chermoye in the groin; when Chermoye still attempted to injure him, Villon threw a rock that struck him in the face. After having his wound dressed, Villon fled from the city. Chermoye was taken to the Hôtel-Dieu, where he died after a few days.

According to one account, Chermoye on his deathbed confessed that he had started the fight and forgave Villon. Thus Villon’s friends were able to get him a pardon in January of 1456, and he then returned to Paris. There, he fell in love with Katherine de Vausselles, who may have been a kinswoman of a colleague of Guillaume de Villon. At any rate, she teased and tormented Villon and eventually left him for Noël Joliz, who beat him in her presence. Heartsick and purse poor, Villon resolved to leave Paris at the end of 1456 and wrote for the occasion his first important work of poetry, Le Lais (1489; The Legacy , 1878, also known as Le Petit Testament, The Little Testament), in which he bids an ironic farewell to his friends and mockingly bequeaths them his worldly goods.

Before departing, he and four of his Coquillard cronies, probably on Christmas Eve, climbed over the wall into the College of Navarre, broke into the sacristy, and stole five hundred gold crowns from the faculty of theology. With his one-fifth share, Villon left the city, going first to Angers and thence wandering for the next four and a half years. In the meantime, Guy Tabarie boasted of the crime, was arrested and tortured, and confessed the details. A wanted man, Villon stayed on the run, going at one time to the court of Blois, where he associated with the courtly poet Charles d’Orléans, to whose daughter Marie he wrote a poetic epistle. Otherwise, except for a few clues that he drops in his verse, his activities are unknown until the summer of 1460, when he was in a dungeon at Orléans under sentence of death, from which he was pardoned during the passage through the city of the princess Marie.

A year later, at Meung-sur-Loire, he was tried at the ecclesiastical court of Thibault d’Aussigny, bishop of Orléans, who chained him in a dungeon under the moat and inflicted the water torture on him. Villon’s health was broken, but he once more received a pardon when King Louis XI made a royal progress through the town and freed the prisoners.

Hiding near Paris, during the winter of 1461, Villon wrote his major work, aside from some of the ballades, Le Grand Testament (1489; The Great Testament , 1878), which follows the form of the earlier The Legacy

Yet once more Villon cheated the gallows. He appealed to Parliament, and since he had not taken part in the fight and the victim had not died, his sentence was annulled and changed to ten years’ exile from Paris. In response, Villon wrote his “Panegyric to the Court of Parliament,” requesting three days to prepare for his departure, and his sardonic “Question to the Clerk of the Prison Gate.” In January, 1463, he left Paris and vanished from history and into legend. Though only thirty-two years old, he may have died from the lasting effects of imprisonment and torture. In The Great Testament, he speaks of having the worn-out body of an old man and of “spitting white” a hint that he may have had a lung disease, perhaps tuberculosis. A century later, François Rabelais recounts Villon’s having gone to England and received the protection of Edward V; Rabelais also tells of Villon’but has far more depth and texture and which also incorporates a number of ballades, chansons, and rondeaux. Back in Paris itself, he was arrested in November, 1462, for petty theft; before he was released, the authorities made him sign a bond promising to repay the money that was stolen from the College of Navarre. Shortly thereafter, following an evening of revelry, one of Villon’s companions got into a brawl with a papal scribe and wounded the man with a dagger thrust. Though Villon had left at the first sign of trouble, he was identified, arrested as an accomplice, and imprisoned in the Châtelet, where he was tortured and sentenced to the gallows. While awaiting execution, he wrote an ironic “Quatrain” and his great “L’Épitaphe Villon,” otherwise known as “Ballade of the Hanged,” in which he imagines himself and six others rotting on the gibbet and prays to God to absolve them all.s having retired in his old age to Poitou. Without any corroborating evidence, however, Rabelais’s accounts are probably fiction. At any rate, no more of Villon’s poetry is recorded after he left Paris.

The Legacy is made up of forty octaves or huitains of octosyllabic lines; The Great Testament has 175 such octaves, among which are interspersed sixteen ballades, a triple ballade, three rondels, and Belle Leçon; in addition, there is Villon’s codicil, containing other ballades, the quatrain written after his being sentenced to death, and a number of poems in thieves’ jargon. The standard ballade consists of three stanzas of eight octosyllabic lines each, followed by a four-line envoi generally beginning with the vocative “Prince!” though Villon’s may be addressed to Fortune, a mistress, a fellow poet, or God. The rhyme scheme is invariably ababbcbc in the octave and bcbc in the envoi. A difficult verse form with only three rhymes, the ballade went out of favor after Villon’s time and was not revived until nineteenth century imitations of Villon.

The Legacy is minor apprentice work, but after his career of crime, five years of vagabondage, and several ordeals under torture, Villon emerged as a great poet in The Great Testament. In it, he re-creates with vivid intensity the underworld of medieval Paris the same setting as Victor Hugo’s Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1833). Writing sometimes in thieves’ jargon, Villon takes the reader through the taverns, brothels, thieves’ dens, and prisons. His is a world of ribald bawdry, crime, revelry, profanity, prostitution, disease, and the dance of death, but it is redeemed by sardonic wit, by an intense relish for life, and, despite Villon’s sacrilege, by a devout reverence for medieval Christianity and an awareness of the vanity of his riotous life. Outstanding among his poems are his “Ballade of Fat Margot”; “Lament of the Belle Heaulmière” (the beautiful armoress), about an aging prostitute; the ballades to the ladies and lords of bygone times, the first with its haunting refrain, “But where are the snows of yesteryear?”; the “Ballade of the Hanged”; the “Ballade as a Prayer to Our Lady,” which he put into the mouth of his aged mother; the “Ballade Against the Enemies of France”; and “The Dialogue Between the Heart and Body of Villon.”

Significance

The first critical edition of Villon’s poems was made in 1533 by Clément Marot, himself a major poet of the Renaissance. Thereafter, Villon’s life and works fell into obscurity for the next three centuries. Not until the 1830’s did Villon resurface, when Théophile Gautier began to write about him as a precursor to the Romantics and bohemians and to praise Villon’s defiance of bourgeois values. In England, Villon was quite unknown until the 1860’s, but during the rest of the century, he received a considerable amount of attention, his work appearing in numerous translations, most notably by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, both of whom tried to make the French poet fit into their Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and who portrayed him as a rebel against middle-class morality. Following them, a number of other poets Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Walter Besant did routine translations of some of Villon’s poems as well as imitations of him.

In 1878, John Payne published the first complete translation of Villon’s work, issued to subscribers called “The Villon Society” to circumvent Victorian censorship. An edition for the public three years later was bowdlerized and expurgated of Villon’s frank realism.

In 1877, Auguste Longnon published the first biography of Villon, following which a number of articles appeared in British periodicals providing a condensed account of Villon’s life and exploiting the sensationalism of Longnon’s discoveries. Several used Villon as a cautionary example to condemn bohemianism and aestheticism. Despite his own genteel bohemianism, Robert Louis Stevenson, in an article in 1877, presented Villon as an example of dissipation and degradation, one lacking the dignity of a Victorian gentleman, and condemned his “way of looking upon the sordid and ugly aspects of life,” which he found becoming prominent in the work of such nineteenth century French writers as Émile Zola. Stevenson believed that one should bear one’s sufferings stoically and complained that “Villon, who had not the courage to be poor with honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his teeth upon the dungheap with an ugly snarl.” In the same year, Stevenson published his first short story, “A Lodging for the Night,” about Villon’s supposedly whining, cowardly behavior after his friend de Montigny murdered a priest. All the nineteenth century writers who saw in Villon a reflection of certain features of their own time oversimplify his life and his works and ignore the complexity of the medieval Christian not only indulging in debauchery, theft, murder, and sacrilege but also repenting and expressing a profound faith.

Reversing the portrayal by Stevenson and other nineteenth century writers, twentieth century fiction transformed Villon into the dashing and noble hero of swashbuckling romance. In 1901, Justin Huntly McCarthy’s novel and play If I Were King turned Villon into a king of vagabonds who becomes grand constable of France for a week and saves Paris from the invading Burgundians. The narrative is melodramatic and posturing; the characters speak what W. S. Gilbert called “platitudes in stained-glass attitudes.” The title poem, the best-known “verses” of Villon, are not by Villon at all but by McCarthy. If I Were King was turned into the popular operetta The Vagabond King (1925), with music by Rudolf Friml, which has been filmed twice, and a variation on the novel has been filmed three times, with William Farnum, John Barrymore, and Ronald Colman, respectively, playing Villon. It sounds an essentially false note but has colored the popular impression of Villon.

In a more serious vein, Villon influenced Ezra Pound, who wrote an opera about him, The Testament of François Villon (1926); an appreciative essay, “Montcorbier, alias Villon”; and several “Villonaud” poems. Pound and T. S. Eliot also borrow for their own work the opening line of The Great Testament. Among Villon’s other modern admirers was poet William Carlos Williams, who praised Villon’s “intensity of consciousness,” his psychological forthrightness and artistic integrity, his wit and daring realism, and the immediacy and modernism of his personal note. Of all the poets of the Middle Ages, Villon speaks most forthrightly to modern readers.

Bibliography

Anacker, Robert H. François Villon. New York: Twayne, 1968. A critical survey in the Twayne World Authors series, Anacker’s work follows the standard format for that series, with a chronology; a brief account of Villon’s world and of his life; chapters analyzing The Legacy, The Great Testament, and other works; and an annotated bibliography. Dismisses the simplistic view of Villon as a “carefree vagabond,” a “tavern minstrel,” a bohemian, a Romantic lover, and a forerunner of beatniks and hippies; tries to see him in the context of his times.

Burl, Aubrey. Danse Macabre: François Villon Poetry and Murder in Medieval France., Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2000. This detailed biography emphasizes the contrast between Villon’s chaotic life of crime and depravity and the extremely controlled and technically dazzling poetry. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Daniel, Robert R. The Poetry of Villon and Baudelaire: Two Worlds, One Human Condition. New York: P. Lang, 1997. Comparison of Villon with one of the great poets of the nineteenth century. Emphasizes the fundamental thematic and metaphysical similarities between the two, despite the very different eras in which they lived. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Fein, David A. François Villon Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1997. Emphasizes that many of the references in Villon’s poems are to specific persons and events that are beyond recovery by modern scholarship. Argues that the best way for a contemporary reader to understand Villon’s work is therefore to take note of its internal structure: patterns of imagery, recurring themes, the relationship between different narrative voices, and so on. Includes one illustration, bibliographic references, and index.

Fein, David A. A Reading of Villon’s Testament. Birmingham, Ala.: Summa, 1984. Fein reads the poetry on three levels: surface value, “that which Villon appears to be saying”; travesty, when Villon praises or blesses his enemies; and symbolic meaning. Quotes extensively from Villon.

Freeman, Michael. François Villon in His Works: The Villain’s Tale. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Reads Villon’s poetry as a direct, self-conscious attempt to gain acceptance from his peers and to convince them that he was rehabilitated and deserved to return to French society. Also provides an account of the way in which the poetry was actually received at the time. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Lewis, D. B. Wyndham. François Villon: A Documented Survey. New York: Coward-McCann, 1928. The best biographical and critical study in English, Lewis’s volume reconstructs in vivid detail the life of fifteenth century Paris. The biographical section is sometimes conjectural, as the author, writing in the first person, imagines the character of some of Villon’s associates and dramatizes some of his escapades. Lewis also provides commentary on the works, followed by a variety of translations and an extensive bibliography of French sources.

Morsberger, Robert E. “Villon and the Victorians.” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 23 (December, 1969): 189-196. A study of the rediscovery of Villon; his influence on such nineteenth century writers as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the interpretations and misinterpretations of him by the Victorian decadents and aesthetes; and his transformation in twentieth century fiction and films into a noble hero of romance.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. “François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker.” In Familiar Studies of Men and Books. London: Collins, 1956. A sometimes biased study, Stevenson’s article condemns Villon for not having the traits of a Victorian gentleman but is important for showing the reaction of a leading Victorian writer. The article led to and parallels Stevenson’s first short story, “A Lodging for the Night.”

Taylor, Jane H. M. The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Where other scholars have tended to represent Villon’s verse as simultaneously derivative and divorced from the poetry of his time, Taylor attempts to demonstrate that his work was in fact both original and brilliantly responsive to the verse of his contemporaries. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Villon, François. The Complete Works of François Villon. Translated by Anthony Bonner. New York: Bantam Books, 1960. This edition gives the works in their original French, with Bonner’s unrhymed translation on the facing page. The introductory material includes an appreciative essay by poet William Carlos Williams and a brief biography. The thirty-seven pages of notes are extremely thorough, identifying all the poems’ characters, allusions, and historical details. A brief bibliography refers the reader chiefly to sources in French.

Villon, François. Poems. Translated by John Heron Lepper. New York: Horace Liveright, 1926. A complete translation, following Villon’s rhyme scheme, with an introduction by Lepper. Includes as well the first complete and unabridged translation by John Payne (also in Villon’s rhyme scheme), as well as Payne’s introduction to his 1883 edition and translations by Swinburne, Rossetti, Arthur Symons, and Ezra Pound.

Vitz, Evelyn Birge. The Crossroads of Intention: A Study of Symbolic Expression in the Poetry of François Villon. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1974. Vitz studies the symbolic expression in Villon’s poetry the process by which places, people, and things become symbolic. Considers the sexual symbolism, the symbolism in writing a will, and the contrast between Villon’s self and the symbolic persona he assumes. Analyzes the medieval concept of psychology and cosmography.