Danse Macabre: François Villon. Poetry & Murder in Medieval France

264 Pages·2000·14.25 MB·English

by  Aubrey Burl

PARIS in the middle of the fifteenth
century w as a dark pl.ac®BWie midst
of the I kindred Years War, the city was
gripped hy famine. Ikinds of discharged
soldiers rampaged, pillaging and raping
wherever they went. People were in constant
fear of being rohhed or having* their
properties looted. Starving wolves crossed
the Seine and killed Parisian babies for food.
Above the mêlée C«iIles de Rais - the original
Bluebeard 7 practised his diabolical craft of
child abuse and alchemy
Into this world, and in the same year as the
execution of Prance's heroine and hope Joan
of Arc, was born Francois Villon ( 14.3 l-l46a?).
I le grew up to be one of the great enigmas of
French medieval history: a lyric poet of
surpassing beauty and depth, he was also a
murderer, pimp, thief and deni/en of the
seething underworld of contemporary Paris.
Born into a peasant family, Villon was
adopted by a priest and sent to university.
Very soon he took his first steps on a life of
crime when he was publicly flogged outside
the home of a young woman he had slandered.
In 1455 lie became involved in a scuffle
which ended w ith his killing a priest. The rest
of his short life was .1 round of arrests,
imprisonment and torture, save for a heady
period at the chateau of C.haHcs, Due
d’Orléans, one of the most civilised and
artistic courts in I urope. I le.was finally
implicated in a killing of w hich he was
probably innocent. I le fled, never to be seen
again.
I his biographical tour Jr forer takes apart
the man and his age, seeking out the truth
behind the poet's crimes, and the truth within
the criminal’s poetry. Scandal, iniquity,
poverty and great art are here. To read it is to
be transported to another world.

danse
ÜÇ)aca6re
François Villon
Poetry & Murder in
Medieval France
A U B R E Y B U R L
SUTTON PUBLISHING
First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by
Sutton Publishing Limited • Phoenix Mill
Thrupp • Stroud • Gloucestershire • GL5 2BU
Copyright © Aubrey Burl, 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publisher and copyright holder.
Aubrey Burl hereby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of
this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-7509-2177-3
‘Je congnois tout fors que moy mesmes’
I know everything except myself
François Villon, Poésies Diverses, 6
Typeset in 10.5/13.5pt Sabon.
Typesetting and origination by
Sutton Publishing Limited.
Printed in Great Britain by
MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall.
Contents
Acknowledgements iv
A Note on the Poetry V
Preface vii
1 Childhood Years, 1431-50 1
2 The Affair of the Pet-au-Deable, 1451-4 25
3 Death in Painting, in Poetry and in Practice,
1452-5 45
4 The First Exile, /wwe 2455 to January 1456 73
5 The First ‘Testament’,
Villon’s Legacies, 2456 91
6 Lust, Love and Larceny, December 1456 111
7 The Second Exile, 1457-60 131
8 Meung-sur-Loire, 1461 159
9 The Great Testament, 1462 179
Interlude. The Debate between Villon and
his Heart 207
10 The Third Exile, 1463. Disappearance? 211
Notes 226
Select Bibliography 234
Further Reading 235
Index 238
Acknowledgements
To Sebastian d’Orsay of Leicester’s New Walk for finding me
my first copy of Wyndham Lewis’s biography of François
Villon; to M. Spenser Tachon OBE for his kindness in allowing
me to explore the dungeons and oubliette of his château at
Meung-sur-Loire; to Mlle S. Gautier for informing me of
Meung’s other poets, Jean de Meung and Gaston Coûté; to
Margaret Jones for her linguistic ability that lightened my
problems; to Joyce Kirk for her ability to locate the most elusive
of volumes; to the librarians of the Society of Antiquaries of
London and of the University of Birmingham for providing me
with much material; to Christopher Feeney, my editor at Sutton
Publishing, and Anne Bennett for their patience and encourage­
ment; and, above all, to Judith, my wife. All of them are part of
this book.
A Note on the Poetry
By convention the poems of François Villon, little more than
3300 lines, are divided into four groups: The Lais or The
Legacies, a light-hearted collection of comical bequests. Six
years later these were followed by another group of legacies, not
so farcical, the Testament or Great Testament. Among them are
many of Villon’s loveliest ballades. Other poems are placed in
the Poésies Diverses or miscellaneous poems. Finally there are
verses in an almost incomprehensible language, the Jargon,
written in the slang of criminals known as the Coquillards.
References to these works are quoted as L, 1-40 for the forty
stanzas of the Lais, followed by the lines, 1-320, wherever
relevant, as for example, L, 40, 313, for the first line of the last
stanza. The Testament is cited as T, 1-186 for its 2023 lines
whose 186 stanzas are frequently interrupted by the inter­
polation of ballades, rondeaux and songs. These were
unnumbered. A reference such as T, 89+ means that the ballade
of his mother at prayer, ‘Dame du Ciel . . .’, occurs immediately
after stanza 89. The Poésies Diverses are quoted as PD, 1-16
and the Jargon as J, 1-11, numbers 8 to 11 being doubtful.
Long translations are cited in square brackets, e.g. [T, 86+].
There have been increasingly accurate editions. Longnon’s,
revised by Foulet, was for long pre-eminent but has been
improved by the texts of Rychner and Henry, the Testament,
1974, the Lais and Poésies Diverses, 1977, and the Index, 1985.
Because in Rychner-Henry the Poésies Diverses are listed in a
different order from the Longnon canon the poems are quoted
as PD, 1 (L, 8). The complete list is: PD, 1 (L, 8); PD, 2 (L, 7);
PD, 3 (L, -); PD, 4 (L, 10); PD, 5 (L, 2); PD, 6 (L, 3); PD, 7 (L,
VI A Note on the Poetry
4); PD, 8 (L, 5); PD, 9 (L, 1); PD, 10 (L, 12); PD, 11 (L, 14);
PD, 12 (L, 9); PD, 13 (L, 11); PD, 14 (L, 13); PD, 15 (L, 16);
PD, 16 (L, 15); Jenin l’Avenu, PD - (L, 6).
For an English reader the most accessible edition of the entire
corpus, based on Rychner-Henry but with literal line-by-line
translations, is that by Sargent-Baur, 1994. Published by the
University of Toronto it is available in Britain from the Marston
Book Services Ltd, Unit 160, Milton Park, Abingdon,
Oxfordshire 0X14 4SD. The numerical sequence of poems and
the quotations in French from them are taken from that text.
Writers of long English translations are named at the end of the
verses. Unless stated to the contrary short translations are by the
writer.
Before 1940 anyone attempting to turn Villon into English
was handicapped by social inhibitions that denied faithful
rendering of some of the coarser verse. Since that date there
have been several translations, usually with the original French
placed opposite the English. In verse there have been
publications by McCaskie, 1946; Bonner, 1960; Dale, 1973, and
Kinnell, 1965, revised in 1977 and 1982. In 1952 Cameron
produced an English text with no accompanying French. In it
the Testament's stanzas are misnumbered after T, 46, T, 57
becoming T, 47.
Endeavours to keep to Villon’s rhyme-schemes and verse
constructions sometimes resulted in distortions and
misinterpretations in all these works. There have been attempts
to keep closer to the original meanings by offering prose
paraphrases. As well as Sargent-Baur in 1994 Chaney published
an English text in 1940. A well-annotated translation was
offered by Saklatvala in 1968. Fox, an authority on Villon’s
poetry, published a slim, very accurate rendition in 1984. His
masterly explanation of the poetry’s structure and imagery
appeared in 1962.