Le Lais by François Villon

First transcribed: Written at, or shortly after, Christmas 1456; doubtless circulated in manuscript, the Lais (legacy) was first edited with Villon’s other poetry in 1489: Le Grand testament Villon et le petit. Son codicille. Le Jargon et ses balades, 1489

Type of work: Poetry

Critical Evaluation:

François Villon’s LAIS (the “Little Testament” of early editors) is a youthful poem of bequests, ironic, equivocal, made to a very mixed group of acquaintances and enemies, whom the poet singled out for high-spirited mockery, sarcasm, insulting “gauloiserie” and spiteful attack because of their hostility or uncharitableness towards him. Each bequest fits its recipient’s position in society, or his weaknesses, or his treatment of the “povre Villon.” The difficulties of such a poem, written for the poet and his intimate friends, are obvious. However, it introduces the reader to the Villonesque manner and prepares him for the poet’s greater work.

Longnon and Vitu’s independent research into the archives and police records of Paris provided a major breakthrough in the understanding of Villon’s allusions, and consequently of the poet’s tone and manner. Yet we are still far from grasping all the innuendoes of the LAIS, nor can we be certain precisely when and why the poem was written. Almost certainly it was written shortly after Villon participated in a robbery of the College de Navarre at Christmas, 1456, his first grave, deliberate criminal act. Villon was then twenty-five, a maitre-es-arts of the University thanks to his foster father, the canon Guillaume Villon, had had a profitable career in the church open to him, and knew influential men, such as Robert d’Estouteville, Provost of Paris. Yet he, no victim of society, if not a member of an organized band of criminals, at least chose to associate freely with the riff-raff of town and gown.

The LAIS consists of forty eight-line stanzas of supple octosyllabic verse, rhyming alternately. The first eight stanzas tell us, in a parody of the courtly manner of an Alain Chartier or a Charles d’Orleans, that Villon, the “amant martir” of a treacherous mistress, has decided “Sur le Noel” of the year 1456 to escape the dangers of his “amoureuse prison” and leave Paris for Angers. At least in part the reason for his leaving, the girl becomes a butt of ridicule on two levels. To the ironic mockery of the courtly parody, she being no more a “lady” than he an “amant martir,” Villon manages to add (Stanza IV) obscenity in a contrasting colloquialism:

Et se j’ay prins en ma faveurCes doulx regars et beaux semblansDe tres decevante saveurMe trespersans jusque aux flans,Bien ilz ont vers moy les piez blansEt me faillent au grant besoing.Planter me fault autres complansEt frapper en ung autre coing.

(“And if I interpreted favourably those sweet looks and fair appearances, most deceptive in taste, which pierce me to the quick, I’ve had no change out of them, and they fail me in my greatest need. I’ll have to sew my seed in other plots, go strike my coins in another mould.”)

The uncertainty of the journey and of his return lead Villon to the formal establishment of the bequests, which take up the next twenty-six stanzas. Thirty-one individuals appear in the will: Guillaume Villon, the cruel mistress, representatives, high and low of the Parlement, the Law and the Chatelet prison, the Church, the nobility, the merchant and professional classes, the world of finance. Seven bequests are made to groups such as the sergeants of the guard, the Mendicants, the Filles Dieu, Beguines, Carmes, the hospitals.

In Line 51, Villon speaks of his “povre sens”; in Line 316, he describes himself in self-denigrating terms: “Qui ne menjue figue ne date/Sec et noir comme escouvillon” (“who eats no figs nor dates,/Dry and black as a flue-brush”). This sense of poverty, physical and spiritual, a major theme of Villon’s masterpiece, the TESTAMENT, here, incipient, muted in the high-spirited LAIS, gives significance to the order of bequests. Following Guillaume and Villon’s mistress, the next six victims are all rich men. They are never far from his thoughts, reappearing in Stanzas XXV to XXIX and at the end of the poem, Stanzas XXIII to XXXIV.

Villon’s is a mercurial, though penetrating, mind whose thoughts follow one upon another in a kind of free association of ideas. Within Stanza XII, for example, his thoughts pass from Saint-Amant, a rich financier, to the Carmelites, hated order of Mendicants, quite possibly because Saint-Amant’s wife “Me mist ou renc de cayement” treated him as a “mendicant,” a beggar. One can speak of the unity of the LAIS, but it is one of spite, psychological rather than logical.

A discussion of each bequest being inappropriate in brief space, a number of random examples must suffice to illustrate Villon’s poetic manner. The irony of antiphrasis is at the very heart of his style. His last words on his mistress were “Mais Dieu luy en face mercy!” (“May God be merciful to her!”), The celebrated “trois petis enfans tous nus” (“three little naked children”), Stanzas XXV, XXVI, object of the Romantics’ pity, were three of the wealthiest men in Paris. Villon similarly mocks Guillaume Cotin and Thibault de Victry:

Deux povres clers, parlans latin,Paisibles enfans, sans estry,Humbles, bien chantans au lectry;Je leur laisse cens recevoirSur la maison Guillot Gueldry,En attendant de mieulx avoir.

(“Two poor priests who know their Latin, peaceful children, never squabbling, humble, fine singers at the lectern; I leave them receipt of revenue from the Guillot Gueldry house, until something better comes along.”)

The biographical difficulties of the LAIS for the modern reader are well illustrated by this bequest to the two rich, ignorant, quarrelsome, land-owning canons of Notre-Dame: rent from a ruined house whose tenant was bankrupt, until death overtakes them. The reader may refer to the COMMENTAIRES ET NOTES of Louis Thuasne’s critical edition of Villon for a two-page discussion of the implications of this stanza.

The irony of giving what he does not have, or even of taking what he cannot hope to be given, appears often in Villon’s LAIS. Playing at “grand seigneur” in Stanza IX, he gave his foster-father, along with his reputation, “Mes tentes et mon pavillon” (“My tents and my pavillion”). Of his own relatives, quick to disown him, he wrote, bitterly:

On ne doit trop prendre des siensNe son amy trop surquerir.

(“One ought not to take too much from one’s relatives, nor request overmuch of one’s friends.”) Ambiguity is similarly fundamental to Villon’s manner. Although he attacks with mockery, he proceeds with caution, perhaps the caution of an individual who feels himself to be on the periphery of society. We may recall that in January of 1456, on a plea of self-defense, he had obtained two letters of remission for the murder of Sermoise, one under the name “François de Montcorbier” (his name by birth), the other under “François des Loges, autrement dit de Villon.” Equivocations, sometimes multiple, are therefore common in the LAIS (the title itself is ambiguous, Legacy or Lay). Stanza XXIV contains simple examples:

Item, au Loup et a CholetJe laisse a la fois ung canartPrins sur les murs, comme on souloit,Envers les fossez, sur le tart,Et a chascun ung grant tabartDe cordelier jusques aux piez,Busche, charbon et poix au lart,Et mes houseaulx sans avantpiez.

(Item, to Loup and to Cholet between them, I leave a duck caught in the usual way (or as we used to catch them), by the walls, over against the ditches, at dusk. And to each a great full-length friar’s cloak, wood, charcoal, pork and peas; and my leggings without toe-caps.) In this picturesque thumb-nail sketch of the two poaching ditch-diggers (Villon included?—“comme on souloit”) who became sergeants at the Chatelet prison, Villon seems to play on the colloquial expression “donner un canard”—“a gift of that which the giver cannot keep” as Cotgrave defines it in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. The “tabart” is to be used here to conceal the theft; the “houseaulx sans avantpiez” would be useless to watermen, but also possess an erotic connotation. In connection with Villon’s obscenities and “gauloiserie” it might be remembered that he is simply using the language of his time, a language not shunned by contemporary preachers.

The LAIS is not rich in imagery. In it Villon is not, as in the TESTAMENT, attempting to explain his own misfortune and, by extension, that of others like him. Nevertheless, the image of thirst, which recurs in the TESTAMENT and seems to be associated with the poet’s misfortune, does appear in the LAIS. Villon describes himself as “plus altere d’umeur” than a “soret de Boulonge” (“More dried up than a Boulogne red herring”); he is “Sec et noir comme escouvillon.” Black and white appear in his images but colors do not. For all the allusions to details of Parisian life in the fifteenth century, there are no “tableaux” of the streets and taverns so familiar to the poet. The conscious, elliptical, concentrated nature of Villon’s poetry gives rise to its vividness and reflects the poet’s way of thought:

Item, je laisse aux hospitauxMes chassiz tissus d’arignee,Et aux gisans soubz les estaux,Chascun sur l’oeil une grongniee,Trembler a chiere renfrongniee,Megres, velus et morfondus,Chausses courtes, robe rongniee,Gelez, murdris et enfondus.

(“Item, I leave to the hospitals my windows hung with spiders’ webs, to those lying under the market stalls, a punch in the eye, (I give them leave) to shiver with pinched faces, lean, tousled, chilled, bare-kneed and in tattered cloak, frozen, bruised, soaked to the bone.”)

This stanza illustrates too some of the extremely rich, youthfully exuberant rhymes of the farcical LAIS in contrast with the rhymes of the mature, introspective TESTAMENT.

The LAIS closes with five enigmatic stanzas in which Villon, hearing the evening Angelus rung by the bell of the Sorbonne, stops to pray, falls into a mysterious state of semi-consciousness:

Ce faisant, je m’entroublie,Non pas par force de vin boire,Mon esperit comme lie;Lors je sentis dame MemoireReprendre et mettre en son aumoireSes especes collateralles,Oppinative faulce et voire,Et autres intellectualles,

(“So doing, I become confused, not from drinking wine, my mind being seemingly paralysed; then I felt Dame Memory take back and put into her store-house the faculties subject to her: opinative, false and true, and the other faculties of the intellect.”)

As this obvious parody of scholastic jargon continues, the poet’s reason ceases to function, giving way to the organs of feeling, aroused by the imagination. His will, the “souveraine partie,” is kept in a state of suspension, deadened. Such is the recent interpretation of this passage by Andre Burger. Recovering from this “entroubli” (likened to drunkenness, Line 282; to the madness of a lunatic, Line 294), the poet wishes to return to the bequests, but finds his ink frozen, his candle burned out, and so he goes to sleep, wrapped up against the cold night:

Mais mon ancre trouve geleEt mon cierge trouve souffle;De feu je n’ausse peu finer;Si m’endormis, tout enmoufle,Et ne peus autrement finer.

Burger’s thesis is that the “entroubli” refers to the hours of the College de Navarre robbery, in which Villon was not an enthusiastic participant. But he needed the money to go to Angers, to Rene d’Anjou, hopefully as court poet, shaking off his criminal friends. Villon’s last words are that he has but “ung peu de billon” left.

Villon’s originality lies in the fact of his having written of lived experience, of his having achieved, in the TESTAMENT, a universal compassion through attempts to explain his own misfortunes. For all its complexity, the LAIS reflects the same kind of lived experience.