A Literary Language Is Born
In this turbulent and disorderly century France still produced a famous poet and a great historian. One result of its national, centralized economy was that the speech of Paris became the literary language of France, and authors, whether from Brittany, Burgundy or Provence, wrote in it. As if to show France's maturity, Philippe de Commynes chose French rather than Latin for his Memoirs.
Philippe de Commynes
He took his name from his birthplace, Comines in Flanders, and came from a respectable family. He was raised at the Burgundian court and at seventeen (1464) became one of the officers of the Count of Charolais. When the count became Charles the Bold and imprisoned Louis XI at Péronne, Commynes turned away from the duke's conduct. Perhaps he also foresaw the duke's decline, and he wisely entered the king's service. Louis made him chief of his private chamber and enriched him with money and property. Charles VIII later sent him on important political missions.
Meanwhile Commynes wrote two books that rank among historical literature: the Memoirs, covering the events and reign of Louis XI, and the account of the reign of Charles VIII. Both are narratives by a man who knew the world well and took part in the events he describes, written in clear, simple French prose.
The First Philosophical Historian
These books testify to the extraordinary wealth of French literature in memoirs. They contain errors, and much of their space goes to describing wars. Their clarity and charm do not match the works of Froissart, Villehardouin or Joinville. The author praises Louis XI's unprincipled statecraft while humbling himself before God, and his pointless digressions often make the text tedious.
Even so, Commynes is the first philosophical historian of the modern world. He looks for cause and effect in events and analyzes character, motives and causes. He judges the conduct of his heroes objectively and studies events and first-hand documents to illuminate human nature and the nature of the state. In these respects, and in his pessimism about humankind, he precedes Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Neither natural reason, nor our own knowledge, nor love of neighbors, nor anything else can stop us from encroaching on others or from keeping our own property and seizing that of others by whatever means. Evil-minded men and wrongdoers grow worse from day to day by the way they think, while good men improve every day.
Like Machiavelli, he hopes his book will help rulers and teach them a statecraft maxim or two. Commoners may not trouble themselves to read these memoirs, but princes ought to take the trouble, for they will find information that repays the effort. Princes and their enemies are never quite the same, but their deeds are often alike, so knowing what has happened in the past is far from useless. One of the greatest sources of human wisdom is the study of history, which teaches one to shape one's measures after the examples of the past, for human life is very short and too brief to gather needed experience.
The Emperor Charles V, the wisest Christian ruler of his day, agreed with Commynes and treated his Memoirs as a guide and daily handbook.
Romance, Farce and the Popular Stage
The masses preferred romances, farces and satires. In 1508 a French version of the romance Amadis de Gaul was published. Many troupes of actors kept performing mysteries, moralities, farces and sotties (comic plays with foolish characters). In the more recent plays everything and everyone, even priests and kings, was mocked. Pierre Gringore was the acknowledged master of this kind of play. For a whole generation he wrote sotties and played in them himself, with passion and success.
Master Pathelin
The most enduring farce in French literature, Master Pierre Pathelin, first appeared on the stage in 1464, according to the book, and was still being played in 1872. Pathelin is a poor, penniless lawyer who would die for a lawsuit.
He talks a draper into selling him six ells of cloth and tells him to come to his house that evening for supper and payment. When the draper arrives, he finds Pathelin in bed, feigning delirium from fever, and knowing nothing of the cloth or the supper invitation. The draper leaves in disgust and anger.
By chance, halfway home the draper meets his shepherd and accuses him of secretly selling some of his sheep, and drags the poor shepherd to court. The shepherd looks for a cheap lawyer and falls into Pathelin's net. Pathelin tells him to play the fool in court and answer all the judge's questions with a sheep's bleat. The judge is baffled by the shepherd's bleating and confused by the draper, who now complains about both shepherd and lawyer. He utters a phrase famous in France: "Let us get back to these sheep." Finally, unable to make any sense of the uproar, he dismisses the case.
Pathelin, victorious, asks the shepherd for his fee, but the man only answers "Baa," and so the simple shepherd gets the better of the clever, deceitful lawyer. The story captures the spirit of a Gallic argument well. Rabelais may have had Pathelin in mind when he created Panurge, and Molière may be the reincarnation of Gringore and of the unknown author of this play.
François Villon
One of the unforgettable figures of fifteenth-century French literature is François Villon. He was a man who lied, stole, cheated and visited prostitutes, and who, like the kings and nobles of his time, but with more reason and occasion, killed. He was so poor he could not even call his name his own.
The Making of a Thief-Poet
He was born in 1431 as François de Montcorbier, raised in poverty and amid a plague that ravaged Paris, and adopted by a kindly priest named Guillaume de Villon. François took his surname and made it disreputable yet immortal. Guillaume put up with his playful tricks, laziness and truancy. He paid for his university education, and when François earned his bachelor's degree in arts (1452) he felt a consoling pride. For three years afterward he provided lodging, food and clothing at the cloister of Saint-Benoît and waited for the scholar to mature.
Guillaume and his mother must have been deeply grieved when François turned from piety to poetry and from theology to theft and fraud. Paris was full of loose people: prostitutes, rogues and cheats, thieves, beggars, braggarts, pimps and drunkards. This reckless, bold young man had friends in almost all these classes, and for a time he worked as a go-between himself. Perhaps he had too much religious education and found monastic life dull. For a priest's child especially, keeping the Ten Commandments is hard.
On June 5, 1455, a priest named Philippe Sermoise (as François tells it) quarreled with him and cut his lip with a knife. In return Villon stabbed him in the groin so badly that he died a week later. Our poet, who was now a hero among his companions but a criminal pursued by the police, fled Paris and spent nearly a year in the surrounding country.
The Little Testament
He came back to Paris "withered and pale," his skin dried on his bones, watching for gendarmes, sometimes picking a pocket, sometimes breaking a shop lock, hungry for food and affection. He fell in love with a young bourgeois girl, who lived with him until she found a more heroic lover, who beat François. Yet François's love for her only grew, though he later refers to her as "my sweetheart with the crooked nose."
At this time (1456) he composed the Little Testament, a poem of mock legacies, since he had many debts and damages to pay and did not know how soon his life would end. In it he reproaches his stingy love, sends his stockings to Robert Valée so that he may humbly put them on his mistress, and leaves Perrenet Marchand three bundles of straw so that he need not sleep on bare ground and can play love's game on them. To his barber he gives the "scraps of his beard and hair," and he leaves his heart, "pale, numb and dying," to the fair one who so stubbornly refused to see him.
Robbery, Wandering and Prison
After bequeathing all this wealth, he found himself in need of bread. On Christmas night in 1456, with three others, he stole 500 crowns (12,500 dollars in the book's conversion) from the Collège de Navarre. With his share he again left the city. For a year he disappears from history, and then in the winter of 1457 we find him among the poets gathered around Charles d'Orléans at Blois. Villon joined in the poetry contests and performances there, and he must have pleased Charles, who for a few weeks received him as a guest and filled the poet's holey, "money-eating" purse. Afterward a joke or quarrel seems to have upset them both, and François left, writing a verse apology.
He wandered south as far as Bourges, wrote a poem for John II, Duke of Bourbon, in exchange for a gift, and strayed on to Roussillon. From his poems we can picture him living on gifts and loans, eating fruit and nuts, stealing chickens from fields beside the road, making love to village girls and tavern prostitutes, singing and whistling along the roads, and slipping into holes and corners to escape the watch in towns. Then we lose his trail again, and suddenly find him in the prison of Orléans, condemned to death (1460).
Pardons and the Great Testament
We do not know what put him in prison. We only know that in July that year Marie d'Orléans, daughter of the poet-duke, made her official entry into the city, and Charles celebrated her arrival with a general pardon of prisoners. Beside himself with joy, Villon escaped death and began life again. But soon hunger drove him to theft once more. He was caught again and, given his past crimes, thrown into a dark, damp dungeon at Meung-sur-Loire near Orléans. There he spent four full months among rats and toads, biting his wounded lip, and swore to take revenge on this base world that gives thieves their reward and starves poets.
But not everyone in the world was base and unkind. When Louis XI passed through Orléans he again declared a general pardon, and when Villon was told he was free, he danced for joy on the straw of his cell. He hurried back to Paris or its outskirts. Now thirty, old and broken, bald and penniless, he wrote the greatest poems of his life. He simply called them his "bequests," but posterity, seeing that many of them were again ironic legacies, called the work the Great Testament (1461–1462).
Poems of Beauty and Death
In this poem Villon leaves his eyeglasses to the hospital, to be given to blind beggars so that, among the skeletons in the charnel house of the Innocents, they may tell good from bad and base from noble. At that early age the terror of death had so settled on him that he laments the passing of beauty. In the ballad of the ladies of bygone times he asks where Flora, the beautiful Roman, has gone, and where Thaïs and Archipiada, those two incomparable beauties, can be found. He asks where Echo, lovelier than any mortal beauty, is, she who answers from the air when her name is called by a running river or over pools, and, in the refrain, where the snows of last year have gone.
Villon finds it unforgivable that nature deceives us with beauties and then reduces them to nothing in our arms. His most piteous poem is the lament of the old woman who was once a fair helmet-maker's girl. She asks where her smooth, crystal forehead, arched brows and golden hair have gone, and her bright eyes that deceived the wisest of men. She goes on to the little nose, the lovely ears, the dimpled chin and the soft red lips, passing from one beautiful part to another and omitting none, until she mourns the ruin of all this beauty. The breasts are quite withered, and the hips, once so firm, are gone. The thighs no longer look like thighs but like dried sausages.
In this way Villon, who neither seeks love nor loves life any longer, surrenders his body to the earth, our mother. He regrets only that the earthworms will get little of it, for hunger has worn it down over the years.
Gratitude, Forgiveness and the Gallows
Out of gratitude he dedicated his books to his adoptive father, and as a farewell gift to his aged mother he wrote a poem full of need and humility about the Virgin. He asked mercy for everyone except those who imprisoned him: monks and nuns, actors and singers, rakes and parasites, "loose women who display all their beauties," brawlers, conjurers and merry tumblers, and rogues with their stalls. He asked pardon of the pure of heart and the simple, living and dead. And so the testaments of poor Villon, great and small, end. He hopes that when death takes him and bells ring over his head, people will visit his grave.
In 1462, with all these bequests and farewells, his cup of life did not run over as he expected. He returned to Guillaume de Villon at the cloister, and his mother was overjoyed at his coming. But the law had not forgotten his crimes. On a complaint from the Collège de Navarre he was arrested and was released only on condition that he repay the money stolen six years earlier, forty crowns a year for three years. On the night of his release, by ill luck, he was with two old criminal friends. Drunk, they began quarreling and brawling and wounded a priest. Villon, who seems to have been innocent of this crime, went home and prayed to God for peace of mind. Even so, he was arrested again. He was tortured by having water forced down his throat until he almost burst, and then, to his utter astonishment, sentenced to death. For several weeks, between fear and hope, he lingered in a narrow, dark prison. Expecting death for himself and his comrades, he composed a heart-rending poem and said farewell to the world.
In it, the hanged men address the living: "Brothers who live on after us, do not harden your hearts against us, for if you take pity on us poor wretches, God will have mercy on you." They describe five or six of them hanging from the gibbet, their once-fat flesh being eaten and rotting away, and their bones becoming dust and ashes. They ask that no one laugh at the sorrowful, but pray that God may forgive them. Rain has washed them, the sun has dried and blackened them, and magpies and crows have picked out their eyes and plucked the hair of their brows and beards. They have no rest even for a moment, and the birds' pecking falls on them, driven back and forth by the wind, more thickly than fruit falls from trees. They beg again not to be mocked, but prayed for.
Banishment and Farewell
Villon, not entirely without hope, persuaded his jailer to carry a message to his adoptive father, so that he could appeal the unjust sentence to the Parlement. Guillaume de Villon, who was willing to forgive his ungrateful foster son seventy-seven times, interceded once more for the poet, who no doubt had virtues that inspired such reckless love in the old priest.
On January 3, 1463, according to surviving records, the court ruled that the earlier sentence be annulled and that, in view of his past conduct and corruption, François Villon be banished from Paris and its surroundings for ten years. François thanked the court in a joyful poem and asked for three days "to pack my traveling clothes and bid my people farewell." The court agreed, and apparently he went to see his adoptive father and his mother for the last time.
He packed his bundle, took the purse and flask of wine that kind Guillaume gave him, and, with the old man's blessing, left the gates of Paris and of history together. We hear no more of him.
The Verdict on Villon
He was a thief, but a sweet-tongued one, and the world needed sweet speech. At times, as in the ballad of Fat Margot, he was crude and foul-mouthed, called women who did not satisfy his desires by ugly and obscene names, and was shameless in describing the details of the human body. But for the wrongs done to him in return for his sins, and for the lively, tender spirit and stirring music of his poems, we forgive him all this. He paid the penalty for his deeds himself and left only the reward to us.