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

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

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.

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