François de Montcorbier (de Loges) was born in Paris in 1431, during the time of English rule. The poverty that surrounded his cradle matched the misfortune of the people and, specifically, the misfortune of the capital. One might have expected that the literature of the time would be suffused with a patriotic pathos and a thirst for revenge for the offended dignity of the nation. However, neither in Villon nor in his contemporaries do we find such feelings. France, occupied by foreigners, showed herself a real woman. Like a woman in captivity, she devoted her main attention to the details of her customary and cultural toilette, sizing up the conquerors with curiosity. High society, right behind its poets, was carried away as before by fantasy into the fourth dimension of the Gardens of Love and the Gardens of Delight, and for the common people the lights of the taverns were lit in the evenings, and on holidays farces and mysteries were played.
The feminine-passive nature of the epoch left a profound imprint on the fate and on the character of Villon. Throughout his whole aimless life he carried the firm conviction that someone had to look after him, to manage his affairs and extract him from difficult situations. Even as a mature man, thrown into the basement-dungeon of Meung sur Loire by the Bishop of Orléans, he called plaintively to his friends: “Le laisserez-vous là, le pauvre Villon?”1 The social career of François de Montcorbier began from the time that Guillaume de Villon, the worthy canon of the monastery church of Saint Benoît-le-Bétourné, took him under his tutelage. By Villon’s own acknowledgement, the old canon was “more than a mother” to him. In 1449 he received the baccalaureate degree; in 1452, the licenciate and master’s degree. “O Lord, if I had studied in the days of my heedless youth and dedicated myself to good morals, I would have received a house and a soft bed. But what’s the use of talking! I escaped from school like a cunning urchin: as I write these words, my heart bleeds.” Strange as it may seem, Maître François Villon had several students, at one time, and instructed them, as best he could, in scholastic wisdom. But, with his characteristic self-honesty, he acknowledged he had no right to be called Maître and in his ballads preferred to call himself a “poor little scholar.” And it really was especially difficult for Villon to keep working because, as luck would have it, the years of his study coincided with the student agitations of 1451–1453.
Medieval people loved to consider themselves children of the city, of the church, of the university. But the “children of the university” were exceptionally inclined to mischief. A heroic hunt was organized for the most popular signboards of the Paris market. The Stag was to marry off the She-Goat to the Bear, and the Parrot was meant to be a gift. The students stole a boundary stone from the estate of Mademoiselle de Bruyères, erected it on top of Mount St. Genevieve, calling it la vesse, and, having won it from the authorities by force, fastened it to the spot with iron bands. On this round stone they placed another one, oblong in shape—“Pet au Diable”2—and they worshipped there nights, strewing the stones with flowers, dancing around them to the sounds of flute and tambourine. The furious butchers and the offended lady brought suit. The provost of Paris declared war on the students. Two jurisdictions clashed, and the audacious ringleaders had to go on their knees with lit candles in their hands to beg mercy of the rector. Villon, who undoubtedly stood at the center of these events, engraved them in his romance “Le Pet au Diable,” which has not come down to us.
Villon was a Parisian. He loved the city and idleness. Toward nature he nourished no tenderness of any sort, and even mocked at her. Even in the fifteenth century, Paris was the kind of sea in which one could swim without being bored, forgetting about the rest of the universe. Yet how easy to run aground on one of the numberless reefs of an idle existence! Villon becomes a murderer. The passivity of his fate is remarkable. Almost as though it awaits the occasion of its realization, all the same whether that be good or bad. In a foolish street brawl of the fifth of June, Villon kills the priest Sermoise with a heavy stone. Sentenced to hanging, he appeals; pardoned, he makes his way into exile. Vagabondage decisively shattered his morality, bringing him in touch with the Coquille criminal band, a member of which he then became. On returning to Paris, he takes part in the great burglary in the Collège de Navarre and immediately flees to Angers—because of a broken heart, as he would assert; in actual fact, to make preparations for robbing his rich uncle. Disappearing from the Parisian horizon, Villon publishes his Petit Testament. Years of aimless wandering follow, with pauses at feudal courts and in prisons. Amnestied by Louis XI on October 2, 1461, Villon experiences a deep creative unrest, his thoughts and feeling become exceptionally sharp, and he composes the Grand Testament, his memorial for the ages. In November, 1463, François Villon was the eyewitness of a quarrel and a murder on the Rue St. Jacques. Here our information about his life comes to an end and his dark biography breaks off.
The fifteenth century was cruel to personal destinies. It turned many of its respectable and sober people into Jobs, murmuring in the depths of their gloomy dungeons and accusing God of injustice. A special kind of prison poetry was created, suffused with biblical bitterness and severity, insofar as these modes were accessible to the courtly Romance soul. From this chorus of convicts, however, Villon’s voice may be sharply distinguished. His revolt is more like a legal action than like a mutiny. He knew how to combine in one and the same person the plaintiff and the defendant. In his attitude to himself, Villon never exceeds certain limits of intimacy. He is tender, attentive, concerned with himself no more than a good lawyer would be with his client. Self-pity is a parasitic emotion, corruptive of the spirit and the organism. But the dry juridical pity which Villon affords himself is for him a source of boldness and firm conviction in the justice of his “case.” A most unscrupulous, “amoral” man, like a proper heir of the Romans, he lives entirely in a legal world and cannot conceive of any relationships outside of feudal jurisdiction and the norm. A lyric poet is by his nature a bisexual being capable of endless fission in the name of interior dialogue. In none was this “lyrical hermaphroditism” more pronounced than in Villon. What a varied selection of enchanting duets: the offended and the comforter, mother and child, judge and accused, property-owner and beggar.
All his life, property beckoned to Villon like a musical siren and made a thief out of him . . . and a poet. A pathetic vagabond, he appropriated for himself goods that were inaccessible to him, with the aid of his witty irony.
Our contemporary French Symbolists are in love with things, like property-owners. Perhaps the very “soul of things” is nothing other than the feeling of the property-owner, spiritualized and ennobled in the laboratory of subsequent generations. Villon was highly conscious of the abyss between subject and object, but understood it as the impossibility of possession. The moon and other neutral “objects” are irrevocably excluded from his poetic usage. But then he comes instantly to life when the talk turns to roast duck in sauce, or to eternal bliss, which he never loses final hope of acquiring.
Villon depicts a bewitching intérieur, in Dutch taste, while peeking through the keyhole.
Villon’s sympathies for the dregs of society, for everything suspect and criminal, are by no means an expression of his demonism. The shady company which he so quickly and intimately joined captivated his feminine nature with its abundance of passion, its powerful rhythm of life, which he could not find in other spheres of society. One ought to listen with what taste Villon tells in the “Ballade de la grosse Margot” about the profession of souteneur (pimp), to which he obviously was no stranger: “When clients come I grab the jug and run for wine.” Neither waning feudalism nor the newly emergent bourgeoisie, with its tendency to Flemish headiness and importance, could provide an outlet for the immense dynamic ability stored and concentrated by some kind of miracle in this Parisian clerc. Dry and dark, eyebrowless, thin as a chimera, with a head that suggested according to his own testimony a husked and roasted nut, hiding his sword in the half-feminine dress of the student, Villon lived in Paris like a squirrel in a wheel, without knowing a moment’s rest. He loved in himself the predatory lean little beast and cherished his own shabby little hide: “Is it not true, Granier, I did well that I appealed,” he writes to his own prosecutor after having been spared the gallows; “it isn’t every beast would know how to extricate himself that way.” If Villon had been able to give his poetic credo, he undoubtedly would have exclaimed like Verlaine: “Du mouvement avant toute chose!”3