Dernières Recherches sur Villon (review)

For the past forty-five years, Jean Dufournet has published scores of articles, reviews, and books on François Villon. Though many essay titles of the present miscellany suggest works previously published through 2005, for the most part, they reflect continuously updated research concerns. Overall, Dufournet’s book puts Villon’s work in the attitudinal and stylistic context of its age, develops an important unity between Lais and Testament, and shows dramatic differences in the poet’s reception history. The introductory essay reveals this tripartite structure. The second demonstrates how Villon’s work aesthetically mirrors Pathelin, Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Les Évangiles des quenouilles, Commynes’ Mémoires, Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage, and others as literary witnesses to the age of Louis XI, where wealth, deceit and verbal ambivalence abound. Dufournet frames his comparisons in a discussion of the rhetoric, phonetics, and vocabulary of ambiguity. In the third, Dufournet examines the double significance of Meung in Villon’s life: locus of torture, the affliction caused by Thibault d’Aussigny, and the work of Jean de Meung, which has a number of echoes in Villon own œuvre, especially in the unity of the Lais and the Testament. The Roman-de-la-Rose-as-hypotext connection is credibly and extensively presented. The fourth develops the image of Villon as a Parisian poet, writing his Testament mostly in exile, demonstrating how well he knew the city with very detailed explications, including gazette-like geographic and sociological intimacy, and linguistic evidence. Paris is Villon’s dream city in its colourful and carnivalesque sense, where little is what it seems, where polyvalence and equivocal expression makes it both heaven and hell Villon becomes a symbol of his rememorated Paris. The fifth essay is written not only to explain the artistic unity of the Testament, but also to reinforce the very strong thematic, stylistic and linguistic ties between the Lais and Testament, which had been established in Dufournet’s discussion of the Roman de la Rose. The sixth treats the ‘Ballade pour Robert d’Estouteville’, discussed extensively by Dufournet outside this volume. However, he is able to repurpose the symbolic duality in the laurel and the olive, the offsetting image of La Grosse Margot, and other binary aspects through the victory of the Love-Nature-Reason alliance in the Roman de la Rose, supporting his key thesis, and he makes a convincing argument for this as an example of Villon’s best work. The seventh through ninth essays present three very different examples of reception history. First, Dufournet paints the scholarly and philological passion of Marcel Schwob for François Villon, a frequent subject of his fiction, appending annexes containing a partial catalogue of Schwob’s library and selections from the trial of the Coquillards. The next, on the work of Austrian mathematician and novelist Leo Perutz, shows Villon in the unique cameo role of a mysterious Italian poet, Mancino. The last discusses the Villon of Patrick Toussaint, whose novel, Villon et les dames du temps jadis, is a detailed mirror of the Villon vulgate. Let us all hope that the ‘Dernières’ of the title means ‘Latest’.