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Francois Villon In the smoky years of the last third of 15th century France, Francois Villon, adoptee, poet, graduate, thief, vagabond, roisterer, possible murderer, disappeared from public view. Born at Pontoise in 1431 he died sometime after 1463 - date of the last recorded evidence of him. His natal name was Montfaucon but little is known of his father and he took the surname of Villon on becoming the adopted son of Guillaume Villon, a local parish priest. It seems quite possible his mother survived him, though his reference to her in the Testament suggests she was, at the time of his writing, in poor health. Most information about Villon is his own as revealed in Le Lais and Le Testament and various limited self-disclosures in other poems. An original Jacques-le-Garcon, clearly something of his not-unlearned foster-home rubbed off on Francois. However, the high-spirited, unstable and dissolute elements he also shows (and testifies to) may also point up an uncertain beginning, though he speaks warmly enough - if only minimally en passant - about Guillaume ("mon plus que pere" (Verse LXXXVII Le Testament) and in reference to his mother (Verse LXXXIX Le Testament), bequeathing her a prayer to the Virgin Mary. The most remarkable feature of Villon’s work is that it transcends his age whilst most acutely revealing it - and especially at just those points. Condition humaine and all that! What became of him after 1463? It seems unlikely that, given his ease of utterance and range of perception, he simply shut up shop - though the ‘Will & Testament’ format of his most important documents might be thought to signify something terminal. However, for all that, his liveliness of manner, sardonic humour and self-awareness would suggest he would have gone on surveying and commenting on his world and finding ready ears for his observations. There is, it seems, no record. Perhaps, after his youthful escapades and narrow escapes (all the more nerve-wracking in view of the age’s propensity for torture and public execution - which he was only too familiar with), he threw over his Jack-the-Lad existence, including his corresponding minstrelsy - never perhaps pursued with total seriousness - for some quiet obscurity in which to live out his days. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely, on the strength of what he reveals in his surviving work. Maybe the end came soon after that final sighting of him - an experienced but still young man of 32 - as he speaks of himself in his last poems. His friends and companions had died violent and early deaths. If his too came soon after, it would be no surprise. But we don’t know. There is no record. His work is remarkable for its sustained, ongoing angst, offset (or confirmed) by erotic and scatalogical references whose implications at this late date are not always clear. But Villon represents a mixture of the sophisticated University-educated world and that of the coquillard, the street-cred life of the copain. He’s a rebel. His learning sharpens his observation, but his experience on the wrong side of the tracks brings home to him the cruel inhumanity of his society. He relishes and mythologises its outlaws and registers himself as one of them. Yet for all his waywardness he cannot but acknowledge the value of high human attainment and philanthropy such as he had personally felt in his own adoption. The hardest-bitten prostitutes, he notes, were led astray at first and for a first time, whilst sheer want drives most criminals into crime. Villon’s is a mocking, knowing, street-wise voice: from underneath, however, emerges a note of tragic perception about the precariousness and uncertainty of life, its brevity, and the finality of death. Villon’s is a peculiarly modern consciousness. The anti-clericalism and scepticism which marked his short trajectory through 15th century France speaks with a sharp resonance to our different era. |
Copyright © Peter Dean 2002