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The Structure of Villon's Testament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Leo Spitzer's well-known article on Villon's “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” published in 1940, had an evident double purpose. His sensitive and sensible explication of the ballade was at the same time the occasion for a statement of the need to revitalize medieval studies. Spitzer put it bluntly: “L'interprétation de la littérature médiévale me semble souffrir, dans tous les pays, d'une grande tare: de la carence du sens esthétique.” The treatment of Villon's ballade was then explicitly meant as a model of the new critical approach, and obviously the choice of poet was made with the polemic purpose clearly in mind. Villon is an ideal subject for resolutely “esthetic” explication, and his works on every level demonstrate a poetic craftsmanship which detailed reading can bring out to best advantage.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967
References
1 “Etude ahistorique d'un texte: Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” MLQ, i (1940), 7–22; reprinted in Spitzer's Romanische Literaturstudien 1936–1956 (Tübingen, 1959), pp. 113–129.
2 MLQ, p. 7.
3 MLQ, pp. 16–17.
4 Histoire de la littérature française des origines à 1900 (Paris, 1896–1900), ii, 433, 489.
5 Histoire de la littérature française (Paris, 1963), p. 177. A similar judgment was expressed in 1936 by Louis Cons; see his Etal présent des études sur Villon (Paris, 1936), p. 146. The equation of structure with some version of classical symmetry is the reason for these critics' refusal to see Le Testament as a formal whole. Jean Rousset's caution to those seeking to analyze literary structures is appropriate: “on évitera de tout ramener aux seules vertus de proportion et d'harmonie.” Forme et signification (Paris, 1964), p. xii.
6 François Villon et les thèmes poétiques du moyen âge (Paris, 1934).
7 Siciliano, pp. 452–457; cf. also pp. 449–450. Contrast with this the much more modern attitude of Kurt Wais: “Das alles sind wechselnde Gesichter des einen Villon,” in his recent article, “'Le bien renommé Villon …': Selbst-ironie bei François Villon,” Medium Ævum Romanicum (Festschrift für Hans Rheinfelder), ed. H. Bihler and A. Noyer-Weidner (München, 1963), p. 384. Siciliano's effort, p. 457 of his book, to recoup the “unité d'une âme 'humaine'” imposes an untenable distinction between this sort of “human unity” and the unity of the “composition matérielle de l'œuvre.” No such distinction is possible because the poem is all we have to go on.
8 The only critic, I believe, who has attempted to show what the unity of Le Testament actually consists of is Louis Thuasne. His demonstration took the form of a paraphrase of the poem which claimed to clarify its “logique” and the “liaison d'idées” creating “une chaîne … solide et souple à la fois” (François Villon: Œuvres, Paris, 1923, i, 92). But such a résumé can hardly do more than reproduce the effect of a connected reading of the poem itself.
9 Line references are to Auguste Longnon, François Villon: Œuvres, 4e éd. revue par Lucien Foulet, Classiques français du moyen âge (Paris, 1964). Any italics in passages quoted are added.
10 The phrase is Pierre Champion's. See his François Villon: sa vie et son temps (Paris, 1913), II, 181–182 (résumé of Schwob); Winthrop H. Rice, The European Ancestry of Villon's Satirical Testaments, Syracuse Univ. Monographs No. 1 (New York, 1941), pp. 17–21.
11 The Poetry of Villon (London, 1962), p. 82.
12 See n. 8.
13 Throughout this discussion I am concerned with the fictive person who expresses himself in Le Testament. His relationship to the historical Villon, while evidently quite fraternal, is not completely reversible. Cf. Spitzer's attitude in his article, “Note on the Poetic and Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio, iv (1946), 419, n. 9; reprinted in Romanische Literaturstudien 1936–1956, p. 107, n. 1: “To treat [Le Testament] as a biographical document instead of a work of fiction is doing wrong to the work of art. … The protagonist of the Testaments speaks with his ‘poetic I’.”
14 The settling of personal grudges will become an important element of the third thematic wave.
15 The second thematic wave will be characterized by a disposition to prayer and a respect for religion a good deal more sincere than the “Picard's prayer” we see here.
16 This prayer will become part of the body of personal thanks and acknowledgments which will form the more positive side of the third thematic wave.
17 See Rice, Ancestry of Villon's Testaments, p. 17.
18 This affirmation and the whole huitain xiv seem free of any ironical or satirical intention, and to this extent decisive with regard to the testator's religious sincerity.
19 Fox, Villon, p. 137.
20 Except for verbally carrying over the Prayer's word “foy” into the pun “foye,” there is no “transition” between the second and third waves. Structurally this avoids dilution of the piety of the second wave's final prayer. This atmosphere is set aside, but it is set aside pure, and the atmosphere of the third wave takes over.
21 Longnon-Foulet prints “Rose” without any discussion; Thuasne has “rose”; André Burger, Lexique de la langue de Villon (Genève, 1957), s.v. “rose,” agrees with Thuasne, as does E. Vidal, “Deux legs de Villon,” RPh, xii (1958–59), 251–257.
22 On this debate, see Siciliano, Pt. ii, Ch. v; Blanche H. Dow, The Varying A tlitudes toward Women in French Literature of the Fifteenth Century: The Opening Years (New York, 1936), esp. p. 58; Eileen Power, “The Position of Women,” in The Legacy of the Middle Ages, ed. C. G. Crump (Oxford, 1951), esp. p. 401. Villon mentions Jean de Meun (l. 1178) and Matheolus (Mathieu), author of the anti-feminist Lamentaliones (l. 1179).
23 See Burger, Lexique, s.v. cuer, foy, foye, and n. 20 above.
24 See Thuasne, ii, 265, and Champion, ii, 156, and n. 1.
25 Characteristically the poet is much more sincere in his devotion to their heavenly counterparts, the “dignes neuf Ordres des cieulx” (l. 838). Again the sharp structural distinction between the second and third waves is enforced.
26 The “sotte ballade”; Siciliano, pp. 398–399.
27 Thuasne's arguments (iii, 421–422) for replacing “la belle” with “ma dame” (l. 1591) are convincing.
28 Rather than any sort of condemnation of his life with Margot on grounds of immorality—surely not Villon's style—the testator's judgment here seems fundamentally a reaction against the pure human waste represented by the life the ballade portrays. But some readers take “Margot” in precisely the opposite way, as Villon's ebullient celebration of lust. At the center of the argument is one's position about where Margot herself is to be located in the life of the testator, given the present tense of the ballade. In support of my own view I would contend: that the opening lines of Le Testament clearly establish a stance of reflection upon and judgment of the past from a point of present relative calm (“Que toutes mes hontes j'eus beues” [l. 2]); that the series of “jeunesse-viellesse” antitheses and the importance of the ubi sunt theme are based on this stance and confirm the disjunction of past and present attitudes; that (illustrating this disjunction on the material level) the testator is no longer in possession of the physical vigor depicted in “Margot” (cf. ll. 733–735); that within the ballade itself the defensive tonality of “M'en devez vous tenir ne vil ne sot?” makes the bravade of “Ordure amons” seem rather hollow; finally, that the bequests of the entire third wave represent the same sort of retrospective, reactive confrontation with the poet's past that I claim for “Margot.”
29 Final exception is made in the third and fourth stanzas for Thibault d'Aussigny and his evil minions, who instead and last of all receive their recompensatory bequests, only to have a physiological difficulty snatch them away (ll. 1989–90).
30 The “Autre Ballade” which follows the “Ballade de Mercy,” from the point of view of the structure of the whole poem, seems an odd addition. The themes it takes up do not play nearly the same role in the rest of the poem as they are made to play here. Helmer Lång thought that the “Autre Ballade” was spurious (see “Villon's Testament and the ‘Ballade pour servir de conclusion’,” Symposium, ix, 1955, 308–323), and the unity of Le Testament does seem compromised by it. We might perhaps take the poem as an ultimate irony in which our “bon follastre” (l. 1883) allows himself the final pleasure of inviting us to his own funeral. Thematically, the “Ballade” seizes exclusively upon the language of the “Epitaphe” (the “amour-martir” theme). But what in the “Epitaphe” was a willful exaggeration of the courtly love conceit, a transparent lie spoken in the testator's own voice, here lacks the same irony because another voice is speaking. In general the themes which dominate the “Ballade de Mercy” seem much more essential, and a more fitting conclusion to the poem.
31 This essay was awarded the Marguerite A. Peyre prize for 1965 in the Graduate School, Yale Univ. I thank Professors Jeffrey J. Carre and Norman B. Spector for their criticisms and their encouragement.