Villon presents his Testament en l'an de mon trentiesme aage , a juncture that he sees as the moral mid-point of his life, for he is ne du tout fol ne du tout sage. This 30 years, while it may fall in with poetic convention (cf. line 1 of Le Roman de la Rose, by Guillaume de Loris), also coincides with the age at which the future governors of Plato's Republic must withdraw from the world of sense, for this is where he holds his estat (ll.1600-27). As testate, Villon is about to attempt to order, to re-order the old hierarchy, but his education as 'governor' is incomplete ; his viewpoint will be partial, based on experiential categories, and firmly rooted in the world of sense : La dance vient de la pance. In ll. 195-6, Villon acknowledges that he is lacking in 'thymos', strength of will. The executive arm to enforce the decisions of Reason is weak, and, faced with a conflict between reason and desire, Villon shrugs his shoulders and drifts towards the world of sense : Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The thematic content of the Testament will derive from and be coloured by this tendency .
It is only in this 'inferior' world of sense that Villon can measure contemporary conventional themes against the harsh reality of experience. He tells us that his painful experiences in life ouvrit plus que tous les Commens d'Averroys sur Aristote. Themes that tend to aspire towards a misty, eternal spirituality--Love, Woman, Fortune, the Martyr in Love, la Belle Dame sans Merci--these will have a hard task-master.
Villon's structural approach can be discerned from the allusion to Job, VII, 6 in ll. 217-24, for this strophe is a statement.The Biblical allusion is subverted, for, while Job does say Mes jours sont plus rapides que la navette du tisserand, he does not say comme....paille. So the lines 218-22 are a functional elaboration by Villon of the weaver's activities. In the Cratylus, Plato describes a man making a wooden shuttle. He takes his given material, and all the time that he is carving and putting it together, what he has to keep his mind fixed on is the work of the weaver. He does not fashion it according to his own whims, but in subordination to a predetermined end which controls the structure it is to have. As in Plato, so with Villon, procedure and function are the relevant issues. By analogy with the weaver's activities, Villon will strip the conventional of all its loose ends, will reduce the existential to the essential. As testate, Villon will 'render therefore unto Cesar the things which are Cesar's ; and unto God the things that are God's', as, how, at which point, and in what proportion he deems appropriate : a ballad, a prayer, a taillemousse, or rien.
In Villon's world of sense, Villon bears down on three basic situations of Man, points at which Man is most vulnerable : sex, death, and the degradation of poverty and hunger. These are points of references in the world he knows, and in relation to which he can measure the validity of all other postures, conventions, whether temporal or deemed eternal. These three are his themes. To the rest he will apply his ardente paille, when he deems appropriate.
In the Testament, Villon appears to render these themes in a jumbled fashion, but his thinking is associative : it is 'stream of consciousness' thinking, rendered by soliloquy.The setting is the Cemetery of the Innocents, with its adjoining market-place : a concourse of the living, a meeting-place of the dead. Villon seems at one point to be relocated in his room,. but later, in one of his legacies, he implies that the room is non-existent. If there is any immanent spirit in the Testament, it is that of Danse Macabre at the Innocents ; its moral tale imbues and sustains Villon. He is at a climactic juncture of his life. He stands at the juncture of life and death in the Innocents. He can now render his verdict.
Poverty and Hunger
It is clear from Villon's account of his release from the Meung jail, that his stay there has contributed much to his physical decrepitude. But this account, larded by the Alexander-Diomedes parable that follows, underlines what is for Villon a fundamental truth : chance is an influential factor in the continuum between life and death. If Dame Fortune's wheel can be wielded haphazardly and at will by anyone with enough power--Louis, Alexander, or d'Aussigny, for that matter--then Fate and Dame Fortune can be discounted as having no eternal relevance to Man's condition. The tripartite character--reason, desires, and 'thymos'--of the individual is not fixed, and is distributed haphazardly. Villon acknowledges (l.196) that he n'est rassasie au tiers, he bewails his misspent youth (169; 201ff.), and the consequence is that he has a ventre affame (195). The cause of Villon's present plight, then, is attributable both internally and externally to chance. The effect is constraint on his physical and moral well-being and on his love-life (193-200), and ostracism from his family (181-4).
But Villon does not shrug it all off to chance. The individual can influence his destiny in order to improve his material well-being (204) : money, too, is power. And the lack of it sows the seeds of envy, and criminal intent (167-8). Poverty makes the femelettes envy the young girls their beauty, but only in respect that beauty--again distributed haphazardly--is power, e.g. the franchise of the heaulmiere (462). In short, beauty gives them the power and the opportunity to improve their well-being. Avarice produces a new development : a new order of belle dame sans merci (536-7). Avarice, too, Villon argues, makes femmes diffamees out of women who are sans reproches ne blasmes.
In the legacy section, money, wine, food, taillemousse and all are doled out, but this time discriminately. As testate, this is Villon's sole opportunity to wield power, yet, unfortunately for him, it has to be d'outre-tombe. Since he started off without cens, rente, avoir (180), his only tangible legacy must be words, whether of satire, irony, grossness, debunking, or ribaldry. The key to all his slapstick is in line 856. His only serious moments are with the prayer for his mother and in ll.1644-7, the common factor here being their poverty.
As for the rich, be it Thais, Jacques Coeur, or Dame Sidoine, Ont-ilz bien boute soubz le nez ? Their virtue lies only in the chance and good fortune of wealth. For Villon, it all comes down to two simple equations :
Poverty equals Impotence equals Moral and Physical Lassitude
Wealth equals Power equals Moral and Physical Well-being
Il n'est tresor que de vivre a son aise .
Sex
For the retrospective Villon, the jeuness ouquel j'ay plus qu'autre galle (170-2) should have been directed towards material ends. The connection between sex and money is made. Those who have better ordered their lives enjoy the sexual benefits : Dame Sidoine, or the monks--bene stat--who call in at ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat. Those whom chance and misfortune have placed among the 'have-nots' must debase themselves in a scrabble for what is for them the linch-pin of power : money.
Youth is when one's sexuality is at a premium, universally. It is a time that confers social importance (426), projects people across boundaries--Flora, Thais--but only in terms of the basic commodity--sex--and its possible, though not universal, concomitant : beauty. It is a time when there is the very real possibility of love growing out of a single, stable and virtuous relationship. But money and power call the tune : these relationships are disrupted (593-608), a new class of amant martyr is established, where the basis for the lover's complaints is not his lady's sexual reticence, but rather, her sexual prodigality :673ff., 926ff., 1591ff.
In lines 577-84, the earlier connection between sex and money is amplified, made more explicit. And in the legacy section, Villon proceeds to dole out bourses, ecus, patart with great zest. Whether these are read either as sperm, testicles, sexuality in general, or as genuine financial legacies, the fact remains that they are intangibles. On one hand, he has no cens, rente, avoir. On the other, he is oste des amouruex sentiers (197), and in lines 1591-1627 there is the suggestion that, sexually, Villon is well-nigh impotent. In any case, the sexuality he endows in the legacies is necessarily useless, for it comes d'outre-tombe. That love, for Villon, is contingent on material factors is evident in the Ballade de la Grosse Margot. Je l'aime de propre, he says (1587). But this changes to hate if she has not 'earned her keep'. They proceed to have sex, but that is a common denominator for any male and female wherever they hold their estat.
As the Testament progresses, one increasingly sees that sex is a universal resource, a commodity to be exploited by both man and woman to enhance their temporal well-being. But for each individual, this resource is not limit-less. Whether it be for la royne blanche comme lis, the heaulmiere, or Villon living off Margot's money, Time and Chance mark out the boundaries of this commodity, and physical decay and death are their uncompromising, undiscriminating handmaidens. Ou sont les neiges d'antan ? applies, affectively, across the board. It is an acknowledgement that youth, beauty, and life itself are ephemeral, but it is an acknowledgement stamped with the hallmark of experience. It is the important cry of the known in the face of the all-powerful, indifferent unknown.
Death
Youth, beauty, sex, wealth, politics,religion : all are resources or media that one can exploit to enhance one's temporal well-being. They are powers or the means to power. But they are all temporal, impotent in the face of the one power that can be conclusively vouched for in the world of experience : death. For the individual in society, those temporal powers can establish a new social importance, a new social order. But, tous sommes soubz mortel coutel (423). For Villon, that galaxy of powers have proved to be too contingent, relative : chance, birth, opportunity or the lack of it--all impinge on the possibility of savouring and wielding that power. In this, for Villon, they are unreliable : their seeming importance at the time is only a chimera. Death, on the other hand, is, paradoxically, the one power Villon can savour in life. He can savour the prospect that all the powers he missed out on, for whatever reason, come to nought in death, and that all those who wielded temporal power will end up peslemesle in the Innocents. The contingency that imbues the temporal social order is annulled by the guarantee that in death alone there is social harmony, but no social order.
Villon cannot wield the power of death, but he can wield his knowledge of this final truth : Autant en emporte ly vens. Since he is close to death, Villon can seem to have a heightened awareness, a more approximate conception of this great mystery. And so the worldly-wise, the deathly-aware Villon steps out of the dungeon of Meung, casts a jaundiced eye over the concourse of life, and renders his Testament in soliloquy. His theme : 'All is vanity' (Ecclesiastes). His is a partial view, rooted in the world of sense, but also of experience. Most importantly--and he speaks for his fellow poor--it is the view of ung povre : the outsider looking in at those who have power. He zooms across time into the court of Alexander, he only sees bread through windows (236), he listens in to the lesson the heaulmiere gives to her apprentices.In true fashion of a hungry man, he conjures up a list of delectable foods (249-52), he paints a convincing cameo of the drunken Jean Cotart (1238-65), he looks in at the luxuriance of dame Sidoine and friend par ung trou de mortaise, or at the rustic fare of Franc Gontier and Helaine. And in the legacies he is prodigal with food and wine. In all this, Villon is the voyeur supreme, the povre homme who needs must look in at other people savouring their power. But he looks in with a sardonic smile, and with the pungent non-sequitur on his lips : 'Death levels all'.
By means of the Testament, Villon can depict his own version of the Danse Macabre : he can become the all-powerful, active, grinning skeleton, le Mort. He can immobilise, petrify the once-powerful, in print. He scans the temporal, for this has the most relevance for his account of experience. But, by inserting the diverse ballads du temps jadis, he sets the temporal against the historical perspective, in order to show that death knows no boundaries, temporal or spatial.
But there is something else in these ballads du temps jadis : it is the sense that in the historical perspective the name of a famous person or a particular epithet applied to him or her--gracieux, tiers, le bon, preux--somehow harnesses and encapsulates the essence of that person. And further, that this essence is set off from the historical perspective and fixed like a new star in the eternal constellation. That this naming and apportioning of essence comes from the oral and written tradition is underlined by ce dit on (366), de renon (369), In the Testament, Villon uses his poetic art, he wields his ardente paille (220), to reduce the existential to the essential : he conjoins povre with mere (865), grosse with Margot, la belle qui fut with heaulmiere, povre with Villon. He razes away the loose ends, so that his chosen epithet encapsulates and is consubstantial with the noun, with the result that he has propelled the povre Villon, his povre mere, la grosse Margot and la belle qui fut heaulmiere out of a pocket in time, and fixed them in the eternal constellation. This is the povre homme wielding his sole enduring power : his poetic art .
