Danse macabre, Saint Germain Church, La Ferté-Loupière, Yonne (89). 15th century.
“I know that poor and rich,
Wise and foolish, priest and layman,
Noble and peasant, generous and miserly,
Small and great, handsome and ugly,
Ladies with turned-down collars,
Whatever their condition,
Wearing headdresses and fine clothes—
Death seizes them all without exception.”
Villon is remembered above all for his stark visions of death. The Ballad of the Hanged Men, written when he believed himself condemned, is startling in its sincerity. It seems to reveal the Middle Ages at full intensity: the physical proximity of death, trust in divine grace and the longing for forgiveness. The poem blends the physical and the metaphysical.
Brothers, men who live after us,
Don’t let your hearts harden against us,
For if you take pity on us poor men,
God will sooner have mercy on you.
You see us here, five or six of us hanged:
As for the flesh we fed too well,
It’s been devoured and has rotted,
And we, the bones, are turning to dust and ashes.
Let no one laugh at our misfortune,
But pray that God absolve us all.
(Trans. Galway Kinnell)
Medieval life exposed people to nature, illness, local powers, guilds and heavy taxation. It is easy to imagine why grace mattered so deeply. Salvation came first.
God sees, and in his mercy,
If my conscience troubles me,
Through his grace may he forgive.
Grace also depended on the grace one showed to others. Villon invokes it regarding the bishop who had tormented him in Meung-sur-Loire:
If he was harsh and cruel to me—
More than I can tell here—
I pray the eternal God
To be the same with him.
Yet the Church teaches
That we must pray for our enemies.
I admit that I am wrong and ashamed:
May all his deeds be forgiven by God.
(Trans. Galway Kinnell)
Whoso dies, dies in bitter woe;
When wind and breath together part,
The gall breaks inward on the heart.
Testament, XV
Anatomy, Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Musée Condé, Chantilly.
Like the calendar on another page of the Très Riches Heures, the body shown here incorporates astrological elements. Medieval thought operated through analogy: the Cartesian universe was still far in the future.
The danse macabre at the top of the illumination shows skeletons inviting a cleric to dance. The scene is tragic, although a mocking smile runs through it. The same tone infuses Villon’s writing. The rapid decay of the body strikes him as grotesque:
When I think, tired, of the good times—
What I was, what I have become;
When I look at myself naked
And see how changed I am,
Poor, thin, shriveled, small—
I am almost beside myself with rage.
His irony also touches emotions and moral values. Virtue and selflessness collapse cheerfully under his pen. Courtly love feels very distant.
False beauty, which costs me so dear,
Harsh in truth, hypocritical sweetness;
Love is harder than iron to chew.
A rowdy student of the Latin Quarter, Villon lived between brawls, brothels and petty crime. His longing for forgiveness and his fear of death never kept him from writing about his disorderly, debauched life in verses of astonishing freedom and brutality. Literature would not see anything comparable for centuries:
Then peace is made, and she lets out a big fart,
Swollen bigger than a poisonous beetle.
Laughing, she thumps me on the head,
Calls me “Gogo,” and slaps my leg.
Both drunk, we sleep like logs;
When she wakes and her belly growls,
She climbs on top of me to protect her fruit.
I groan beneath her; flatter than a board she makes me.
She wrecks me with her lewdness
In this brothel where we live our lives.
Rain, hail, frost—my bread is baked!
I’m a lecher, the slut follows me.
Which of us is better? each fits the other.
One’s as good as the other—bad cat, bad rat.
We love filth, and filth clings to us.
We avoid honor, and honor avoids us,
In this brothel where we live our lives.
Testament