Testament

   by François Villon

(1461)

   The major work on which the reputation of the great French poet François VILLON chiefly rests is his 2,000-line poem Testament. The poem, written (we are told in its first lines) in 1461 when the poet was 30 years old, comprises 186 eight-line stanzas, into which Villon has inserted several short fixedform lyrics including 16 BALLADES, two RONDEAUX, and a chanson. Essentially the poem purports to be a last will and testament, in which Villon’s primary purpose is to bequeath his possessions to his friends and acquaintances before what he suggests may be his imminent death.

   Immediately prior to his composition of the Testament, Villon had been arrested and imprisoned at Meung on the orders of Thibaud d’Aussigny, bishop of Orléans. He was released from imprisonment by order of King Louis XI in 1461. Accordingly, Villon begins the poem with a bitter invective against the bishop, praying that God will do to the bishop what the bishop has done to Villon. This is followed by praise for the king who freed him, and from here moves to a consideration of what he has learned through his suffering. Although he is a sinner,Villon tells us, God desires his conversion and reformation, not his death. In several stanzas, Villon laments his lost youth and blames his poverty for forcing him into a life of crime.He includes an anecdote about Alexander and a Pirate, in which the Pirate tells Alexander that he is a criminal because he has only one ship—if he had a fleet, he would be an emperor. From here,Villon moves to a lament on the impermanence of worldly things—in particular Villon bemoans the transience of beauty, particularly in the deaths of beautiful women, and inserts his famous “Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballade of the Ladies of Bygone Days”), which includes the famous refrain most often translated “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

   Villon goes on to consider the ravages of age on both men and women, and includes another ballade in the voice of an old woman advising young ones to make the most of their youth. But Villon continues to focus on women in general, and then on women’s love, inserting a double ballade on the unfortunate consequences of love. Ultimately he repudiates love itself, giving it up forever. Now considering his own broken body, Villon returns to his tirade against the bishop of Orléans, and curses the bishop as he describes the tortures to which he was subjected in Meung. Finally,Villon moves on to the bequests that make up the testament. He begins by bequeathing his soul to God and his body to the earth, then moves on to his father, to whom he leaves his books. He has nothing to give his mother except a prayer for her to recite to the Virgin, which he includes as a ballade. He follows these with a variety of other bequests, some somewhat serious in the form of individual lyric poems, some outlandish, some apparently based on topical or private references that are incomprehensible to us.

   Villon moves on to a discussion of Parisian women, and includes a well-known and graphically ribald ballade about “Fat Margot” and her sexual appetite. Ultimately, he makes some requests about his burial; forgoing any appeal for a tomb, he writes a verse for his own epitaph, asking for eternal rest after a life of hard knocks. He then names his executors—rich men with whom he was never acquainted—and adds a ballade in which he pardons everyone he can think of, including whores and swindlers and fools, but denies his pardon to those who made his life difficult—for them, he wishes a hammer would crush their ribs. Overall, the Testament shows a technical mastery of form and meter. However, its overall structure seems formless: As the above summary shows, the poem is organized around an association of ideas and images rather than by any logical progression. Villon focuses repeatedly on the transience of earthly things, and employs the traditional ubi sunt (“Where are they?”) topos of classical literature: Where are the years of my youth, he asks? Where are the beautiful women gone? Where are my old companions? Where, indeed, are the snows of yesteryear? But Villon, a master of many styles, also includes mocking satire in his repeated attacks on those who he believes have wronged him in life.What makes the Testament a classic of medieval French poetry is its variety of language, style, and tone, moving from the somber to the satirical, from the moving to the mocking, sometimes within the same stanza. The poem has made Villon one of the most admired poets in the French language.

   Bibliography

   ■ Burl, Aubrey. Danse Macabre: François Villon, Poetry, & Murder in Medieval France. Stroud, Gloucestershire, U.K.: Sutton, 2000.

   ■ Fein, David. François Villon Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1997.

   ■ Sargent-Baur, Barbara N. Brothers of Dragons: Job Dolens and François Villon. New York: Garland, 1990.

   ■ Taylor, Jane H. M. The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

   ■ Villon, François. Complete Poems. Edited with English translations and commentary by Barbara N. Sargent- Baur. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994.