François Villon

André Suarès

Villon

François Villon

Je ris en pleurs.

I laugh in tears.

I

Good folk, who will doubtless one day go to see him hang at Montfaucon, look at the bad boy strolling, this evening, in the Cemetery of the Innocents. You laugh, and he laughs more than you. You drink, and he drinks. He chases after the girl; and perhaps, slipping a note into the young neighbour’s hand, he picks the purse of the burgher her father. He is fertile in good tricks. He passes between the wimpled wife and her old husband, and finds the means to kiss Jeannette on the lips; he even slips her his tongue a little between her teeth. He is known as a poet, the good rogue; but much more as a famous freeloader. And yet Master François is no ordinary brawler: he is learned, almost a man of the Church; he will perhaps become a doctor, or a great judge, or a bishop, or who knows what? In the meantime, he plays the ribald and the scamp.

At the Cemetery of the Innocents, everyone turns and turns among the tombs: it is the garden of Paris in those old times. People go there to take the fresh air. Here one sings and amuses oneself. One even dances there, and chases; one pinches and kisses.

And yet, a day of June, however long, comes at last to its end; and the twilight comes, that makes ready the bed for the very hot night.

All the living go off to sup, and leave behind the dead who are there, for fifteen hundred years, by millions and millions more than by thousands. There lie buried the fifteen centuries of the City, all those myriads of poor people, who laughed too, in their day, no one knows just when. And if they still had eyes, they would see their children, this crowd they carry, who have left them to sit down at the table, to sleep presently and to caress one another in love, until tomorrow, when it will be their own turn to lie beneath, all served up at the worms’ table, well wedged one against another, head to head and laughing with terror or mortal spite.

They have left the cemetery, for a few days or a few seasons, not thinking of the long visit one pays feet first. But he, the bad boy, the poor scholar, François Villon, stays. The Charnel of the Innocents is his oratory, his tavern of wisdom, his Louvre, his great hall of assembly. The fresh tombs press beneath his feet, head to tail, head to foot, the hundred thousand sheep that sleep against the earth, pallid and shorn. And not one of them dreams.

Four galleries make the round of the garden, at more than one storey. And beneath the arches, the dead crowds and the millions of days that were the people of Paris make mountains of debris. The latest comers are still skeletons; but as in the forest the lowest branches fall to crumbs and mingle with the dead leaves, beneath the puppets of men there is a quarry of disjointed bones, a whole yellowed sand where the pebbles were once living, the tibia in the vomer, the femur in the mouth, the teeth in the ischium, the tarsals and carpals in the iliac bowl, and the pretty little neck-bones to play with, at night, when pain and oblivion have their game on a carpet of funerals.

And yet, here is the sweet body of young women; and the very good father who has grown old at his labour, to feed the household; and the very gentle mother, who has carried her little ones in this womb which suffers and which, first of all, rots. Here are the brothers and the sisters. Here are the lovers, drunk with one another, for whom the world is no world, save the mouth they press and the eyes they cherish. Where are the lips of love? Where the strong hand of the man, that gives, that welcomes, that sets upright? Where the breast of the mother? and the cheek of the children, like the first red apple among the leaves and the laughing Hawthorn?

Villon, this son of a fairy, comes and goes in the galleries. He summons before himself this people of peoples: those who have been and those who are, indeed quite equal and alike in their bones. There, the loose girls; and the kings, and the queens; and the rich, always avaricious; and the poor, always greedy; and the magistrates who judge, and who always cheat with the just; and the violent who do evil, and the weak who suffer it. And the poets, since there are some of them at last, who are all of these at once, violent and weak, rich and poor, queens and kings; and even judges, when the mania takes them.

Death in all things, and everywhere, and she alone. It is here that Villon learns to read, and that he mocks. Here, he weeps. His school is here, and his church. Then, suddenly, thinking of the cares and the tears of his old mother of a woman, the poor little thing who knows nothing but to love well and to pray Our Lady, for herself and for her son, in great fear of boiling hell, and in lively hope of sweet paradise, he trembles, and his eyes grow blurred; and he too, François Villon, more than sorrow, spirit that denies, he turns toward Jesus and the Virgin, lost if he does not fear them, lost if he does not believe in them, and too dead in this horrible and delicious life, where to live is a vain dream, and

universal death the eternal awakening on the brink of the foretold abyss.

But what, poor soul of man? The more death surrounds and besieges you, the more the desire for life presses you. And love goads you.

Voluptuousness is the bed of the dream, if all is dream. And ardent desire rises out of sadness, as the moon comes out of the rainy night. And poor Villon, with an impulse nothing moderates, leaving his full water of death, swims with all his heart toward the enchantment of being alive — wine, dice, girls, free meals at the tavern, drunkenness, and always the maddest; the delight that is in the dear body of women, like the perfumed juice of all the summer in the pulp of peaches.

A few days off, and perhaps the very day the English burned Joan, the good Lorrainer, at Rouen, François Villon was being born at Paris, near Pontoise.

His parents were poor. His good mother quite simple, pious and without letters. The family was of the petty bourgeoisie. He was raised by a master in canon law, the good priest Guillaume de Villon, “his more than father.” He took his degrees up to master of arts. He could have made a doctor, a man of law or of the Church. But the most schoolboyish of schoolboys, in a time of general anarchy, when sedition was continual in Paris, and the Latin Quarter a chaos within the chaos, Villon lived madly, without bridle or rules, always at the taverns, with the riotous, the cheats and the girls.

He stole; he was a ruffian; he took his rank in the underworld. He knew the Coquillards, the most famous troop of that century, a swarm of ribalds, of thieves and of bad larcenists. At Paris and in the provinces he was of the band.

He is condemned to death two or three times. He spends months in the dungeon, on the straw, in the prisons of Meung-sur-Loire and of Paris. The gallows watches him, where he has seen several of his friends hoisted. At thirty-three years he disappears, whether he died of illness, whether he made a retreat, or otherwise.

Closer to us than any other, Villon has emerged from legend only for us. The last three centuries could read him: they did not feel him. There had to be a world that is dying, and universal disorder, to give him back to us: then, the individual has all his force. Like ourselves amid a human race that is tearing itself to make a new skin, Villon pushed up in the agony of the Middle Ages, between the arms of a half-dead France, which was preparing in convulsions to be reborn under a new form.

At last, Verlaine had to come. Poor Lélian, born like Villon at the same hour of the century, succeeded him in every way, since he seems to have begun his sad life as vagabond and sacred poet at the age at which Villon ended his own. And, in truth, it is in this order that they succeed one another. Villon is a Verlaine, much more virile and more green, who departs, a young man still, at thirty; while Verlaine, far more tender and more undone, wandering in the parks of the rainy autumn, weeping under the porch of the church, is a Villon of the thirtieth year to the fiftieth.

II — Of poetry

Villon is the first poet in the modern manner: the first in whom one recognizes the soul of the astonishing poet, such as France conceived him, such as Paris created him, such as he has remained, and such as he was bound to be among us since Master François. Foreigners do not succeed in understanding him, if their understanding has not been enlightened by the antique light.

Elsewhere, pure feeling makes the poet, love or hatred, prayer or invective. Here, passion that rolls like a tide; or else the man who loses himself in nature, with no other impulse than to lend himself to it. There, he who describes objects, as if he were drawing up an inventory, or as if they were distinct from him, and he wished to furnish proof of it. Or again, the all-powerful imagination, which effaces feelings and beings in order to reform them in its own image, without even being aware of it.

But Villon is no dupe. Not only does he see: he knows that he sees. He bends over himself by vocation, without willing it, without trying. His passion is that one, and that is all. Better still, his master passion is to understand them all, even the most secret, to seize them by the mind, and so to renew them for his pleasure and his torment. As he plays the buffoon with genius, he had the stuff of a great comic poet.

Wanting to know himself, sometimes he possesses himself thoroughly; sometimes he wanders astray: but always he questions himself and takes himself to task. What the Greeks did for actions and objects, the poet of France has done for himself and for the inner life. Even the most pagan among them, no great poet in France is one who is not Christian, if the essence of the Christian soul is the inward look, the confession of feelings, the colloquies of love and of sin. I call a great poet one who has a song. Eloquence is not song.

The poet of France, in Villon’s manner, is a realist whatever he may say. Rhetoric alone has done with reality. I so detest orators, in verse or in prose, that I do not even wish to think of them. The only lines of Villon that are not worthy of him are an attempt at eloquence. In the same way, this odious tone has falsified two or three times Baudelaire’s organs and Verlaine’s viol.

Here, the heart is never altogether the victim of the mind, nor its tyrant. Here, the mind is never altogether the plaything of the heart. In the blackest darkness, in the reddest straying of the passions, a glimmer keeps watch: the clear depth of intelligence. And on the most disastrous ruins of thought, in the cruellest debris of analysis, the heart remains alive, capable of play, capable of pleasure, capable of impassioned hope.

Consciousness is the ground of this strange poetry, which the other peoples have had such trouble hearing; sooner or later they will come to it nonetheless. Consciousness, and as becomes men, consciousness that tortures itself: the debate of the body and the heart, as Villon says; and the judging mind, sometimes as cruel judge that mocks, sometimes as pitying father: such is the great poetry of France, unique in the world by its thinking virtue, even unto the abandonment of all thought. This remainder of soul in the ruins — it is from there that there rises that human tone without arrogance, that profound indulgence which prefers, perhaps, the hot crimes and the supreme sins to mediocre virtues. Save for the rhetoricians, so numerous moreover in French, the beautiful poets of France are the penitents of humanity.

They fear nothing, then. They dare to paint what they see. They dare to confess what they feel. They are not forgiven for it. And because they are true, which is the only morality, they are said to be without morals.

There is the French poet. Intelligence runs the whole head; and the swaying of the senses, the bounds of the heart, the lips and the eyes, however free they may be, and whatever licence they take, all this is underneath, like the horses of the team beneath the reins: the brow bears thought; the mind holds the bridles even of the most unbridled feelings. In the end, intelligence is never silent.

Villon’s emotions are violent and profound. But they do not deprive him of reason, even if they deprive him of will. They do not blind him, even if they crush him. They can lose him, but not deceive him. His mind is so piercing that it passes through his passion. What he does not know, he guesses. Such a fine head — ha, do not hoist it for me to the beaks of the ravens.

His memory, which retains forms faithfully, transmits them all to the faculty that discerns, and which is impatient to know. If God is intelligence, He has His fine garden on earth in the kingdom of France; and Master François is one of His little gardeners.

Who, before him, Dante alone excepted, has dominated life as Villon does? Is he not made into a sort of child? But, on the contrary, all the poets seem puerile who preceded him, and most of those who followed.

He dominates over the misfortunes of his life. And the strongest thing is that he reigns over this bad life by giving himself up to it, by drowning in it. He loses himself, but not unwittingly. He judges himself, as if there were no question of him. Such is the power of intelligence. Villon is without peer for the trial he has made of his crimes. That is the root of this cruel melancholy, which is as it were the bottom of the coffin in which he lies down, to sing his misery, laughing under his breath on the bass of the death-knells, and from which he rises to let go his jests. Now, it is he himself, and he alone, who lifts the lid.

From there, he sees everything in painting, and perhaps everything on the walls of the charnel: himself and his destiny, the grandeurs of the past, the powers of the present, the chances and the vicissitudes. He shrugs his shoulders; he laughs, he seems to take pleasure in good sayings, and in the tricks of a mountebank; but he places all people in their rank, in the dance macabre, and all things.

Gay nevertheless, gay blackbird of Paris, despite this vast brow, because the wine is good, and dainty the easy meals, because the flesh of the wild women is sweet, Villon adorns the dismal round in carnival, and on all these dead he puts a mask.

The sincere Villon. So true even, that no one ever was so as he is. Rather than a knave, he is a cynic. Villon’s genius is clairvoyance.

He is admirable at seeing himself and others; surprising thereafter at painting what he sees. Before Baudelaire, he is the most realistic and the most confiding of poets.

How well he knows himself, he who always worries about knowing himself! And the proof is that he says: “I do not know myself.” His doubt about himself is at the root of his double nature. All that he attempts against others, he carries out against himself. His words are true; and more so than is ordinary with poets. He does not accommodate the truth to the opinion he wants to give of himself: he does not make himself an ornament of it. He does not confess one weakness in order to adorn himself with a hundred virtues. His misery, his sins; his needs, his gallows-bound loves; his prostituted pleasures, his repentance and his relapses; his hot meals in the mire, and always without shame; his terrors and his cold sweats — all the ill that can be said of him, it is from him that one knows it. He does not spare himself.

Whence comes Villon’s unique charm? He is the speaking rose of his sincerity, the hard garlic and the poppy too. His tongue is not the most beautiful in France; and it pleases, as if it had more beauty than another. He has no dazzling images; he has almost none at all. He makes nothing of nature. For him there is only the passing-through of the city. The cemetery is his countryside; his sunsets are the brawls in the street.

This tongue pleases by the unbelievable savour of one word beside another. And the word springs from the thing, like a spring from the rock under the trees. The short phrase is a simple dish, of perfect quality, seasoned with perfect spices. The whole mouth is enchanted by it. The palate is perfumed. The savour spreads throughout the head. One tastes what he says. One has it, one feels it with him: one is there.

III — Of luxury

S’ils n’ayment fors que pour l’argent,

On ne les ayme que pour l’eure.

If they love only for money, they are loved only for the hour.

Et m’eust il fait les rains trayner,

S’il m’eust dit que je le baisasse …

And had he made me drag my loins, if he had told me to kiss him …

Mais que ce jeune bacheler

Laissast ces jeunes bacheletes ?

Non ! et le deust on vif brusler.

But that this young bachelor should leave these young bachelor-maids? No! though one were to burn him alive for it.

Faulse beauté qui tant me couste chier,

Charme félon, la mort d’ung povre cuer, …

False beauty that costs me so dear, felon charm, the death of a poor heart, …

Et nu à nu pour mieulx des corps s’aisier…

And naked to naked, the better to ease their bodies…

Tout aux tavernes et aux filles…

All to taverns and to girls…

Pas ne le dy pour vous le reprouchier…

I do not say it to reproach you for it…

Car en amours mourut martir,

Où mieulx te plaist qu’onneur ceste meschance.

For in love he died a martyr, since this misfortune pleases thee better than honour.

Villon, the first as well, seems to me to have known the extreme bitterness of luxury. It is what most deceives, while never ceasing to seduce. Where does luxury begin? and what is it, after all?

Innocent like pleasure, but less happy, luxury is the passionate disquiet of the senses, and the ardent search for a satisfaction that flees ever further away, if indeed it is not inaccessible. It is the luxury of the carnal powers, their own cruelty and their black ennui. Luxury is the share of the mind in voluptuousness, and the madness of the amorous imagination.

How many lovers have promised themselves luxury who cannot even secure for themselves a little real pleasure. The truly lecherous are rare, who are not so merely in intention. And as they fail in the purpose for which they live, they are at fault, being in default, and feel themselves guilty. Their sin is not so much one of luxury, as of not being equal to it. And they are damned, no less than the miser dying of hunger and cold, one winter night, on his dunghill of gold.

The common people, who are indignant against luxury, would be struck with astonishment if they entered into the lecherous soul of the poet. They would see it devoured with desire, and vowed to the delights, as to the tortures, of the imagination. Ah, beautiful restless victims, from Villon to Baudelaire and Verlaine. I believe great artists capable of anything, as they say; and above all of conquering themselves; but not all of them, nor at all times. And in the end, their curiosity is insatiable, even when they refuse to satisfy it.

All true artists, or near enough, are endowed with luxury; or stricken with it, if one prefers. I do not say this to praise them for it. Nor to reproach them for it.

That is why their morals are readily attacked. They are always a little suspect. People suspect in them such-and-such violences or such-and-such detours of instinct, which are the furies of the imagination. And people look for what could well be said against them, when there is nothing to say.

But luxury speaks cruelly to itself, without moving the lips. And the more silent he is, the more his sin is inexhaustible in secret postulations, in inward words. For luxury is full of remorse. And irony is no stronger, in Villon, than is repentance present everywhere.

Without remorse there is no true luxury. It bears with it a supplication of Psyche, drowned in the malefices of desire.

The carnal remorse is the supreme form of regret: not quite repentance; but the despair of failing one’s dream nourishes a terrible regret.

It is so proper to luxury that one cannot conceive of it without it. And such is its sadness. For if luxury could be satisfied, it would be no more than the habit of pleasure, that muddy fellow so content with the pavement and with all the scraps he fishes there. Now, luxury is the recourse of the imagination against all habit. Luxury is first of all the appetite that habit disgusts.

Every poet, every artist, in his time of luxury, makes orison:

“Lord, you see the fury of my sin, and whether I suffer for it.

“I am bound up in it, like the wife of the sultan tied to the cat and to the viper, in the sack one throws into the Bosphorus. I am tortured by it, until I die, like the scorpion, who makes a ring with the she-scorpion, that she may devour him; like the dogs corded to one another by stiff desire, who whine at being unable any longer to separate; or like the prince of bees, who expires in the body of his intoxicating and fecundated queen.

“Save you, Lord, nothing can tear me from this profound grasp. Nothing can save me. And no one can break, save you, Lord, this cruel attachment.”

Whatever his repentance, Villon leaps upon the first hope he meets; and he begins to laugh. He capers before the gibbet, and thumbs his nose at the hangman. Mockery is his spiritual luxury, no less keen than the other. Two fingers from the rope, he bequeaths to the blind of the Quinze-Vingts his great spectacles, without their case, that they may separate, in the cemetery, “the good people from the dishonest.” He has horror of death, but he flouts it. He must mock; he must scoff at his very terror, and even at his dear life. Passing from death to voluptuousness, ceaselessly, and without weariness, from desire to fright, having that one, he has every luxury.

That is what he died of, saved from being hanged.

Plus noir que mûre, plus maigre que chimère.

Blacker than mulberry, thinner than chimera.

Eyes lively as merlins. All brown, all dry. Agile and quick to flight when need be; slow when he can, and full of nonchalance. A small man with a piercing gaze, in a hollow socket. Hair sparse, and early bald the brow. He willingly wore the tonsure, losing nothing by passing for a cleric. Here and there, in his prisons, they shaved his head, scalp, beard and brow, like a turnip that one grates.

A great shaved skull, a high and naked brow; the face long and haggard; neither cheeks nor lips. Hard bones under a stretched skin, a true leather of the open road, roasted by the sun, tanned by the wind and the rains. The equivocal air of those who always hide, having often something to hide. But not the shifty manners, nor the furtive eye that people speak of. Villon is much rather insolent. Even when crafty, this sidelong smile is not timid: he drives in the irony, and he provokes. Master François is polite, when it pleases him; he is courteous. He has a lofty mien, for a thief; and even for a prince. Though he lowered his head, he is not so humble as he seems: the pride of the spirit shines beneath, and perhaps the fire of the poet.

A laugher at all laughter, and quick to tears; very hard to all the ills of misery, and tender as a woman to fear, to blows, to dungeons, to torments. He has the strong health of a pilgrim, that neither debauchery nor prison has worn out. Every pleasure pleases him and calls to him.

He loves everything that fortune gives, and that he does not have: he takes it.

Thin, thin! All the little Parisians were thin in those days: and those who did not become canons remained so. It is the time when the wolves entered Paris and ate children between Vincennes and the Bastille.

Thin, very thin. He went hungry, many days at a stretch and weeks, on dry bread and raw water; he sampled the deepest dungeons; they ironed his feet in a stock. They made him drink a good deal of water, at the funnel of the question, poor Villon — he, such a good drinker of dark wine; and he prefers it from Anjou and from Burgundy.

Money! money! he must have money.

One steals as one plays. And one plays to win money. Villon is a gambler to the point of losing his soul, to the point of gambling his sweetheart. One day, he left his breeches in pledge. He cheats to make merry. He is the poor man who wants his share of revelry. One was never so little stoic; one cared never less about it. Is the man-about-town, or the man of fashion, any more so on the boulevard?

You will not make me believe that Big Margot is of so rare a species in the palaces and mansions of the rich. Infamous as she is, Big Margot has virtues that your accursed Fifth Avenue virtues do not have, and still less if they were thrown into the street, reduced to their body without a chemise. Your damned women lack only a little of having the sign over the door. Big Margot pays with her own person.

He needs money, this Villon. So do you.

To have it, you do not steal, or pillage? So much the better for you: it is because you have some. You do not pander? Indeed.

But he kills? — A fine business: it is what you would not do. Besides, he does not kill, properly speaking: he defends himself. He fights; he returns the blows. He does not want them to filch from under his left arm his sweetheart, nor his life.

IV

A sadness that reaches very far, because it appears necessary: it accompanies a superior view of the passions. There is the modern accent, which one finds nowhere among the Ancients, except in the Bible. And for having had it, with so powerful a voice, Dante, the great poet of the Middle Ages, still lives among us, and perhaps for all times.

This fatal sadness descends in man to such depths that it bears off all the enchanted palaces of hope and illusion. The feeling of death everywhere present is one of its roots: and the other, the instinct of mockery: the need to mock at reality and to flout the age — this appetite for irony occupies the anger of a great heart. So the proud Florentine: who would have nourished his fury, his rancour and his disdains, had he not delivered to them as fodder the victors of this world? Irony flogs them, macerates them, cooks them and re-cooks them. It gives a vent to insatiable anger, as if mockery succeeded at last in correcting all the injustices of the earth, in punishing all the prostitutions of opinion, and in drawing vengeance from them.

V

As he has much more wit than Verlaine, he is also much more laughing. Verlaine is too tender to laugh: all his feelings are steeped in tears, or in the perverse blood of kisses. Villon is of a more virile humour.

What a lad that one is! How one sees that he is young! A mad gaiety runs through his Testament, hung from the bequests like a garland of lanterns on a feast night; and the gothic archways of the cemetery are illuminated like the others. Besides, Villon’s gaiety is not so light: it is always buffoonish; and at the end of the rope there is perhaps a hanged man. It is the gift of wit, that it does not cease to seize the ridicules of action, the jests of chance, and the inexhaustible derision of life. The young man is more sensible to the drama of existence than to the comedy; but he amuses himself with it almost equally. When passion does not lend its seriousness to life, and does not make it a tragic stage, the spirit of mockery sees in it an enormous farce. The man fully formed, master of the drama and of his own irony, often concludes to the tragic farce.

Villon has all the tones of buffoonery. He touches on violent farce: I believe him capable of making people laugh, and not laughing himself. More than once it is his comic force, it is his youth, that pushes out the burst of laughter: but is it really he? The genius of satire is the most involuntary. One does not know what Villon would have been in his maturer age.

VI

I see nothing, in Villon, of that strange perversity that is attributed to him, more than reproached to him. If he were perverse, he would not be so strong.

On the contrary, he is criminal with innocence. Like Verlaine, and still more. A perversity without design is not very guilty. Actions are not so perverse as conscience. In the end, perversity does not lie so much in doing evil, as in the pleasure one takes in it.

People have made of Villon a monster of duplicity, of wheedling guile, of suppleness and of lying. I know nothing so false as this view. In his verses Villon is the most sincere of men. He does not even boast of his sins or his vices.

Many wish to be true who are not so by nature; and it is in vain, then, that they make efforts to be so; they dissimulate without knowing it; the choice is made in them, and not by them, of what they have to say. Or else they deceive themselves about themselves; they see themselves as they would wish to be seen. They are incapable of knowing themselves. Villon is true, by nature. He really sees, and he makes one see. He paints Margot, the Belle Heaulmière, and Franc Gontier, in the manner of Velasquez, of Goya.

One finds perversity everywhere, if one looks for it. It is where one desires it: one has only to put it there.

VII

Learned, and not of the people.

Villon knows Latin. He knows the laws. He has read the histories, and the chronicles of his time. He knows the Scriptures. He knows a great deal.

Speaking of the Greeks and the Ancients, when he is mistaken, he seems to do it on purpose. His errors are delicious. One would say that he enjoyed them, like Shakespeare.

He never plays the savant; he rather plays the ignorant. He is ingenuous, not naive. In the ingenuous, there is the genius. So much a poet that he is quite capable of inventing a fine name for the rhyme, provided it sounds in the distance, with grace and melancholy.

He is not at all popular. His verve makes one believe in the greenness of the people; but his young strength is his own. He has the cynic’s tone, because he has more than one tone. Then, cynic is not coarse, far from it. Even with the accent of the dives, he speaks only to the lettered. Villon, like every French poet, has from then on written only for the elite, people of wit and of good culture. He is at times subtle like Verlaine; but as is fitting to the difference of the times, a painter as much as Verlaine is a musician. He has the gift of colour and of the strong stroke in the light. He is not only a realist in the Flemish or Spanish manner; but having meditated upon what he has strongly seen, he adds his very soul to the painting.

VIII

Love.

Why is it that they will not have him be a martyr of love? Because he loves unworthy women? Fine reason. And if it is a good one, such a love more than another is martyrdom. He says so at the foot of the gibbet. Would he have to be a virgin as well?

He loves woman, one feels it too much, to the point of loving them and hating them all. He cannot do without them; he desires them as much as he scorns them. His kisses are laced with invectives; and the insults stitch, with a bloody thread, his lips to the lips that he caresses.

He loves; he is deceived. A bad ruffian of trollops, ill-suited to his trade, thief, robbed in turn, he is loved only for his money, when he has any. He beats the women, and is beaten like linen one wrings out. The one whom he cherishes by tenderness is hard and felonious to him. Ardent for pleasure, he despairs of love; and for want of a beloved, he is always in quest of a mistress, to curse his torment or to debase himself in it without mercy. The unworthiness of the loves does not banish from them their martyrdom.

IX

Villon, in his blackguard ways, or at the court of Orléans, in the dungeon, on the roads, remains always a schoolboy, and always a little of the law-clerks’ guild. He has lived and grown up against the flank of the Sorbonne.

His world is that of the Palace, pell-mell the condemned with the Judges, the great provosts and the picklocks, the hangmen and the hanged. There is no such great difference, after all. He who looks into the depths of man sees there the slime of the common mother. Especially in centuries well churned by discord, like those, where some violence always comes in season to confound everything, the cream with the whey; and all goes to the ground, before the butter is made, the pail overturned in the farmyard, the well-water on top of it, the straws and the dung.

Am I slandering these doctors and these dead ermines? What would they all have to complain of? It is very well for them to have known Villon, and to have put him to ill. If they still have a name, it is thanks to him. Without that scoundrel they tormented, we could not even mock at their ugly mugs. So much the worse for them, if they hunted him, if they put him to the torture, too hard and without pity. Villon had predicted it to them: “May God be such to him, as he hath been to me.”

The same fatality drives the bones of poor wretches to the Innocents, along the walls, even up onto the garret-walks, and the poor scholar in the narrow way of life. Cheat at dice, when one has no goods; companion of the Coquille, when one cannot sit in Parlement or in some better confraternity; toady of the tavern rather than of the Sorbonne; and hanged, for want of better. Or for want of being a judge: he would say it, I think.

X

How he loves his dear Paris! How he knows it! All the streets, all the taverns are familiar to him, all the shops. The signs are landscapes to him, or like old friends: he calls out to them; they speak to him: he plays the buffoon with them, and they with him. Paris is already fifteen centuries old. For Villon, Paris is already a Rome. The city of the popes is hardly more ancient than the city of the kings.

Villon’s mother was no doubt from Anjou. He, Villon, is a Parisian of Paris, if ever there was one. And there too, the first.

XI

Blackbird more than nightingale: blackbird of the mountain of Sainte-Geneviève, where for five or six hundred years now the whole aviary of the West has been practising the song of intelligence. Here, gossip Guilleri braves dangers in every season. They never manage to break both his wings. Without losing his voice, he haunts the woods of a life far harder than that of the forests, more bristling with caprices and with violences. He perches on the gallows, and he whistles in the charnels.

Wit must have been his strongest grace, this rascal Villon’s. As much as his poor mother, he no doubt charmed the gravest and the most morose. One is amused to see him with all sorts of friends, and even the wife of the great provost. He was a man fit to please a great deal, without pleasing altogether; and to displease a great deal, without making himself hated. People loved him with spite; and ended by breaking with him, not without regret.

XII

He made one blush for him. His pleasantries are too good: this ruffian, this thief, this man condemned to death, this thrice-hanged and unhanged, who names as his legatees the most austere personages and the most learned in the law! He charges the counsellors at Parlement to watch over the bequests he claims to make to men condemned like himself; and theologians receive the holy mission of sending into the enjoyment of his burlesque gifts a band of sacrileges, of whores and of scoundrels.

XIII

As Verlaine goes to make a retreat at the hospital, or as he was taken in by some friend, between two illnesses and two dark adventures, Villon, from one gallows to another and from one prison to another, would go to make a stay at the Porte-Rouge, in the cloister of Saint-Benoît, with Master Guillaume, his “more than father.” Or else, he would take refuge with his mother, “poor woman.” Did he not go to weep with her? He would sit at her feet. She would take in her lap that mad head, that bad head, always so loved and always threatened. In tears, she would lean over the bad boy, good to her nonetheless. What mothers know when everyone is ignorant of it, she knew, that her son was not like the others, and a victim rather than a culprit; she kissed him, weeping, now the hair, now the cheek, now the brow, reproaching him for so much trouble that he always caused her: for in the end, a mother must also make her reproaches. And he, thief, swindler, occasional murderer, pander, ever a child beside his poor old woman, and no worse than another, listens to the litany smiling painfully; he caresses the hands wrinkled at the washtub and at the stove, all black; and always finishing by making the poor woman laugh, he gladdens the eyes red with tears nonetheless; he unfurrows, for an instant, the old face plissed by the so long and so deep ravines of anguish. And perhaps he does not go away without having said with her the Our Father, or some prayer to Our Lady.

She knew well, she, that her boy was not so bad. And so lively, so pleasant! How much wit he has! Counsellor to the king, even chancellor, he could have been; such was the opinion of messire Guillaume, so much a man of worth, venerable, learned, and all. Poor François, so gay, so sad, all in caprice, alas, a mad child! And the women have ruined him, Holy Virgin, and the bad companies.

XIV

Does one think that Villon was ever the dupe of the figures he took on? Dupe he cannot be, not even of his passions. Wherever he passes, he looks and judges in his own fashion, which is to laugh by halves, half pleasure, half irony. From the start, with the thieves, with the girls, as with the doctors, he is present in spirit at all the comedy and at his own personage in it. He fails at it rarely, I think: even if he plays an ignoble part in the farce, or a dangerous one; even if he runs the risk of being seized by the collar by the demon of the drama.

It seems to me that, for Villon, the pleasure of pleasure, the sharpest of the voluptuousness, is spiritual: it is the profound mockery; and who knows, where it pricks the heart so subtly, whether it does not make it weep.

XV

His friends, going and coming, he has them by chance, and not one of them, no doubt, solid and well-grounded. One would have had to be like him, of every rank and every manner at the same time. He amuses himself where he can, and gives himself his ease where he is invited. He does not sulk at life, knowing it to be so precarious and so short, all plunged in death like a tuft of reeds in the middle of an ocean.

By this, in the first place, he is suited to all society: his character destines him for the company of a prince, and accustoms him just as well to beggars. One feels in him an astonishing suppleness of mind. He is courteous and obscene, exquisite and lewd. He knows how to please: it is his talent and his ruin.

But in the end, the underworld is more his thing than the court of dukes: because he is poor; because he is free, as one never was, in Montaigne’s manner. The passion for liberty is a kind of madness in bad fortune; and there it often turns to crime. Villon’s friends are hanged. And more than one: Colin des Cayeux, Regnier de Montigny, Gui Tabarie, they have well and truly stuck out their tongues at Montfaucon, the comrades.

In this sort of temperament, an element is hidden that remains unnamed. Hampered by misery, the insatiable man is almost always cynical. One cannot change anything in a man like Villon, an indomitable and fugitive nature, so lively and so diverse. They are well made for a century where everything is in question, where the rule everywhere gives way to the breath of chance, and under the thumb of violence. The necessities of life mark Villon for the fall; and like the fleur-de-lis on the shoulder, they designate him for disorder and for begging, if not for the hangman.

One must well understand that this soul so weak and so strong at once, so indolent to everything that hampers it, so prompt to its pleasure, animates a warm flesh of a young man. Without a name, without goods, without hope, the fire of genius is then a malefice. Villon must have seen himself outside every rank. Having nothing of the social, he had not what is needed to make a regular fortune. The mere idea of toiling all his life in the boredom of a secular charge, to end as a good old priest, like his father Guillaume, or to become a stinking sanctimonious hypocrite, avaricious and cold, like Thibault de Vitry and master Cotin, would have made him gallop out of a society where all is foreseen, except genius, and where besides genius alone is not legitimate, its rights being indeed founded only on itself.

Thus, the underworld may be the only society in which the non-social man can make his rights felt, and live a little at his ease. Even if there is nausea, at least he vomits in his own time. The man of double and triple nature, of a hundred faces, who never does anything but what pleases him, is the very poet. Often their destinies are contrary, and the artists leave behind the most different figures in the memory of the centuries. But by this deep trait, they resemble one another; and at every degree, from the poor scholar to the prince of spirits, the same man makes himself known, who does not let himself be bent to the common constraint.

XVI

He is made out as too perverse, or too puerile. He is neither one nor the other, being perverse at his hours, and a child the rest of the time. Let him be taken for what he is, a true poet: he is all that nature wills him to be. The contraries are in him. From the occasion of what he is, one feels all that he can be. Perverse child, he is no more so, nor less, than Verlaine. I cannot forget that we have nothing of him past the age of thirty-three years. What true poet, above all in misfortune, is not a perverse child, at least with the dreams that haunt him and the woman whom he caresses?

The erudite do not know how poets and musicians are made. They know only the books, or those enormous rocks of rhetoric, the illustrious poets, around whom they walk, a measuring-rod in hand. Musicians and poets by nature are like women, but only for one half. They must obey the moon, their feelings must have an outlet, in the end must burst forth. Their emotions are never so violent as for having been contained. They swell into a flood that carries them off, and to which they abandon themselves, whatever they do. It is one of their perversities to give themselves up to it, all the while knowing sometimes that they could defend themselves from it, and often that they ought to. It is another, an act of manly power, that they prepare the bed for the tide, and that they open to the flood a calculated and prescribed outlet.

Neither woman, nor child, despite all, in what they see being done. There is no artist who is not, for one half, his own witness. There, they hear themselves laugh; and there, they listen to themselves weep. They taste their own tears; whether they be sweeter; or whether they be more bitter. It is not that they always enjoy them: far from it; but they try the salt, they weigh the honey of these tears; they want to know the content of gall or of nectar that enters into them.

In the end, they must give free rein to their nature, and it must overflow. In these excesses, which are the painful joy or the necessity of their life, they silence their reason and their judgment. But do not believe that they smother them: they do not prevent them from keeping watch. Reason holds the candle, like messire Georges Dandin himself, at the command of his cruel companion, who is still all warm from her lover, and whose name is Angélique, being the cruelty of love. That is why they see the good and do the worst. They almost always know what ought to be done, and do what ought not. What is called their weakness is the unbridled strength of their hidden nature, and the bit between the teeth of their own secret, the moment they let go the rein.

XVII

Villon knows well his bad life. But it is good to know, as he does, that he could not have had another.

At the lowest of the ladder, the wretched are the serfs of misery. They are chained in the galley of daily bread. And they cannot leave it.

At the highest, in the order of spirits, continued poverty, or sickness, or an unworthy passion — these are three inviolable chains, that the strongest will neither files nor unseals. If Verlaine had been able to lead the life of a little clerk at the Hôtel de Ville, he would never have been Verlaine. And he would have been so more often, had he not had to consume so many detestable days in destitution and at the hospital.

Let no one laugh at Villon for accusing poverty of his death and of his crimes. He makes me shudder. He, always so true, lets fall the avowal that greater men dare not make. Misery does not perhaps kill genius; but it deforms it, and hampers it; it makes of it those oaks and those cryptomerias that the Japanese rear in a thimble.

To gain one’s life, one loses one’s reasons for living. The great vocation of a free soul is a reason for living so powerful that it can never agree with the need to gain one’s living. Still less to submit to it. The skilful, they, are born to gain their living well; and success vaunts them.

There is, then, a heroic party in the dishonour of Villon and the weakness of Verlaine: they have sacrificed themselves to their own genius. There are perhaps some who despair at not being able to: it is their weakness, that they have too much honour. With a soul like Goethe’s, who would be Goethe without a prince, without a fortune, without Weimar, and who would be capable of giving twenty years of his life to the theory of colours, and to Faust half a century?

One must be true: poets are not glorified bodies. They are spirits more ardent whom the ardent sheath of the body burns and torments the more.

XVIII

A deep knowledge of life makes Villon’s mockery so profound: a knowledge had only by the poor, when poverty has not destroyed the spiritual forces, as so often happens.

Men of conscience or of criminal imagination know what peaceful spirits do not suspect. The poets are of the small number who visit the abysses, or who dream of descending into them.

All good and full of evil, all evil and full of good, bitter and sweet, recidivist of the law-courts and without malice nevertheless, an assassin without violence, Villon does not give a fig for anything.

A passionate derision of life carries him away; and an untiring love of being alive animates his derision.

His own passion must seem derisory to him. But irony does not succeed in destroying it. It has more force than acridness. Villon is a young man: one would have had to see him at fifty.

He believes in nothing, according to the order and the laws of the world. But he can believe in everything, according to his own feeling.

Yet the universal vanity and the universal chance make him bitterly smile. His derision is steeped in them again. He sees himself in the void, by dint of seeing the void of the world. A nihilist accomplished, his Parisian malice carries him to mock at it, even in despair. He has so much wit that the horror of life yields to the ridicules; mockery binds him to pleasure, far from turning him from it. To laugh at the cemetery, he does not wait until he is forced there, beneath it. Villon, often, is Yorick at Paris.

Error carries men hither and thither, as the wind the leaves. Poverty is the source of all injustice. It makes weakness; evil follows from it, with crime. It even kills love.

Lost youth, the unique occasion of happiness, a breath, a flight, a little sand that scatters. And why? One does not even know how. And always death, everywhere and for all. Where are the beautiful beloved women? Where are the lovers? Where are the great of the earth? Where the little? Where am I going myself, says and repeats Villon? Death gives the same answer to every question. And the horror of every question is that, except for that one, there is no answer. I alone for me, thinks Villon; and it is nothing. He considers the universal nullity with a serenity mingled with terror, and very strange. He plunges into it, as if to feel all his weakness, the folly and the wickedness of men. But to know them so is to forgive. From there, this acute sadness and this mockery, and this boundless indulgence. There is nothing more terrible, at times, than the indulgence of the spirit that denies, except the indulgence of an entirely intelligent soul. Villon concludes to death as the unique reality, and to voluptuousness, here below, as paradise.

He believes therefore in his misfortune more than in his unworthiness. He does not feel himself so guilty, save against himself. And then in the end, he is going to die; and who comes to his aid? Now, criminal if one will, condemned, wretched, he does not forget Jesus, who is yet against the powerful, against the rich and the happy.

Villon is not a great poet by the splendour of images, nor by the invention of the poem. But he is one by the depth of feeling. He has put an admirable force into the expression of two or three eternal feelings. He has thrown himself entirely into it, like the daughter of the Chinese founder into the molten metal, to melt down her own blood and to give her own voice to the unique sound of the bell.

He signs hideously with his name the envoi of his ballade to Margot. The laugh of the cynical schoolboy does not give the change on the dark depth of his thought: it holds the middle between secret God and the atrocious nullity of the world. All the ignominy of the void is at the sign of the girl, in that bed where all the men pass, like the Seine between her two banks, flattering themselves that they will content in it their love of life.

L’ung vault l’autre.

The one is worth the other.

Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit ;

Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit,

En ce bordeau où tenons nostre estat.

Filth we love, filth pursues us; we flee honour, it flees us, in this brothel where we hold our state.

And as for me, I know well what Villon puts in the brothel: it is life.

XIX

Where, in the end, to go, across this charnel? and to whom have recourse, if God did not remain the only hope?

Yes, in this void without bounds and without exception, God alone remains to us, and Our Lady at the half-way. Just like his mother, the poor woman, Villon does not know himself any other refuge, any other asylum, nor any other fortress, than the Virgin, “Our Mistress.” Mocking the priests, he does not turn the Church to ridicule: he is wary of it, fearful and sly, prudent and docile, ambiguous and withdrawn. He is religious despairingly.

But he is so in the good manner: this magnificent intelligence abdicates. Without losing an ounce of its weight, it withdraws before the heart of the child. There is wherein Villon is so modern. He bites like aqua fortis into the thoughts of the void. The poet is then, to my taste, the man par excellence: he who penetrates, more than any other, the condition of all; who suffers for all, since among us he has passionate consciousness of it. And his charity flowers from his egoistic agonies. The “povre petit escollier” has pity on all the poor, like himself. He forgets the terrible indulgence that the sight of the void inspires in him; or rather, he reserves its tenderness for all those little ones whom misery treads down and whom evil overwhelms. He has compassion for the sick and the captives, for the tortured and the girls. He does not laugh cruelly at the gallows nor at the hospital. He calls upon people, in the name of God, to think a little of him. He has pity on himself, without vanity and without self-indulgence: this look upon oneself is what one can conceive of as the most just and the truest: oneself, the poor man whom one knows the best. And, in the end of all accounts, in that death where he is already up to his neck, crying mercy to all folk, he implores a sweet thought, and it is perpetual rest that he asks. But surely all the lovers of life, all those who know what it costs to live without counting, who have poured treasures into a single hour, and out of all their happiness have fed the eager instants of a dear folly — those will say always more than one verset and more than one psalm for the soul of the poor little scholar who was named François Villon.

Le povre Villon

Au Charnier des Innocents,

Dans l’éternel tourbillon

Où roule toute la terre,

Où tout s’en va pourrissant,

Feuilles et fruits, fils et mère,

Tu dors, ô pauvre Villon :

C’est toi le plus innocent.

At the Charnel of the Innocents, in the eternal whirlwind where rolls the whole earth, where all goes off rotting, leaves and fruits, son and mother, thou sleepest, O poor Villon: thou art the most innocent.

Les chats fourrés glapissant,

Sorbonne, ce corbillon

D’ânes et d’oies tant altières,

Les sots mîtrés, ni les cent

Vertus, ni les cent vipères

Ne te feront plus misère :

C’est toi le plus innocent.

The furred cats yelping, the Sorbonne, that little basket of asses and of geese so haughty, the mitred fools, nor the hundred Virtues, nor the hundred vipers will any more do thee misery: thou art the most innocent.

Tous ceux qui furent paissant

Un quignon de vie amère

Dans les pleurs et la misère,

Le cul nu, en guenillons,

Te chantent avec ta mère :

Dors bien, mon pauvre Villon,

C’est toi le plus innocent.

All those who were grazing upon a crust of bitter life in tears and misery, bare-arsed, in tatters, sing to thee with thy mother: sleep well, my poor Villon, thou art the most innocent.

Plus gras et plus pourrissant

Dans leurs hautains pavillons,

Les rois sont au cimetière ;

Leur chair pue et leur chef sent.

Bonne nuit et bonne terre,

Dors bien, mon pauvre Villon :

C’est toi le plus innocent.

Fatter and more rotting in their haughty pavilions, the kings are at the cemetery; their flesh stinks and their head smells. Good night and good earth, sleep well, my poor Villon: thou art the most innocent.

Princes de l’or et du sang,

Ici, au commun sillon,

Vos Louvres n’ont plus de pierres ;

Le moindre est le plus puissant :

Plus que vous, il dure en terre !

Dors bien, ô pauvre Villon :

C’est toi le plus innocent.

Princes of gold and of blood, here, at the common furrow, your Louvres have no more stones; the least is the most powerful: more than you, he endures in the earth! Sleep well, O poor Villon: thou art the most innocent.

1912

Villon and his painter

I

There is in Paris an artist who is growing little by little in force and in clarity, full of patience and of reflection, scrupulous at his work, and if he is not already so, who will be of the highest order. The first works of the engraver Bernard Naudin had greatly astonished me and greatly held me. Imagine a man of Paris, in 1905, who seems to live only in the shadow of Rembrandt. Without being his kinsman in the least, nor of the same family, he imitated him or met up with him to the point of making one smile, obsessed by the black and white of the great visionary, as one has seen so many musicians under the spell of Wagner.

And yet I had confidence in this disciple; I felt him living of himself, and a man of faith. Bernard Naudin kept a savour of his own, even in the most direct imitation. His figures of women and children were quite his own, and always of here. I discerned an incisive soul, which may well have its encounters with the immense love of Rembrandt, but which assuredly has not the same foundation nor the same origin. And first of all, less of passion than of wit.

Naudin is not tragic in the Shakespearean manner. He is so in the French manner. He carries the precision of analysis into every feeling, and even into the macabre. His smile is the rarest of elegances; and elegance never fails him: it is his mark. I compare it to those words of delicious disdain that the marquises had for the guillotine, as they were going to have their necks cut off.

Everywhere this trait of a keen eye, this gaze that penetrates, this gift for characters; and in violence or in horror itself, this exquisite elegance which is the perfume of all our refinements.

It goes without saying that he loves music, and is no doubt a musician. Nevertheless, his devotion to Beethoven has served him ill. That is the least part of his work, the only one in which he swells the voice, in which he declaims. Elsewhere, one feels in him the faith, as much as or perhaps more than he has; here, where he is so faithful, he appears to believe less in what he loves than to be preoccupied with study. Decidedly, one must leave Beethoven alone. Is it not high time the advice were given to painters and to statuaries? Beethoven lends too much to the anecdote, and to the eloquence, that anecdote of the Apocalypse. He is not plastic. People want to make a lion: and they have only an old sick cat. A certain inward sublime, which in no way agrees with the build and the bearing of the man, leads straight to caricature; and the hero is painted in the colours of his own parody. No, that big tomcat with brows eternally knit, who spits without end a fishbone he cannot digest, those gaunt cheeks, that brow which is not a brow but a cupola of laurels — no, I do not recognize the solitary and familiar king of music in the desert. It is not the master of the Quartets in his chamber, but the dishevelled wild beast of German orchestra-conductors; for there is not one of them who does not for a long time, like an actor at the mirror, give himself Beethoven’s wild-maned head and his eyes like fatal caverns. But I laugh at the cavern; and if I say: “Well roared!” it is to Bottom.

With Naudin as with Watteau, the grace of Paris is indeed Athenian.

In the street and in the drawing-rooms, in war and in garrets, even on the hospital beds, Bernard Naudin would make one take a liking to his personages, were it to the horror of the most hideous, and even to the stupidity of the dolts, if any were in his work. But were one to find wicked people there, one would see no fools. The taste one takes in Naudin’s work for what disgusts us in another is the spiritual taste that he puts everywhere: there is no form, however unfortunate, into which he does not slip some trait of his own fineness and of his elegance. That is what he adds to Goya, in that beautiful drawing of Spanish Music, as if the marshal’s-lady’s powder, and the amber of Watteau, were tempering the powerful odour of the tuberose. There, moreover, is Naudin’s weakness: he is hardly a painter, up to now. In him there is much more intelligence than instinct.

His taste is not simple; but it is exquisite. Never does his tact deceive him. He touches with the fingernail what need only be brushed; and he has a hatchet for what must be struck with the hatchet. Yet his hatchet is also of an elegant form. It is of fine steel as much as sharp. It is hafted with grace. Naudin is always less brutal than cruel. His rascals, his beggars, his worst tatterdemalions, sons of the gutter and fiancés of the Widow, still have a kind of charm. Naudin’s pen unravels a great mystery: even in the infamy and the extreme misery of the individuals, it is the race that remains elegant.

At last, Naudin has found his subject, which Rembrandt would never have chosen. He has drawn, on the text of Villon, about a hundred plates, full of sense and of wit, almost all in the freest form, and some of them admirable.

He has understood the immense scope of Villon. He has penetrated very far into the man and the poem. He has loved them so much that he has been able to live them over again. He has been not only the one who comments; but a witness, the companion of the road who has seen with his own eyes, and who remembers. He has lain down beside Villon, in prison and in the hayricks. He has followed him into the garrets. He has known the face of the man alone, when he dreams or reflects, and when he sleeps. What fine images Bernard Naudin could give us, now, of Verlaine.

He has truly created a type of Villon, that one can no longer forget, and that one will no longer separate from the poet. Now, that is to say a great deal. Villon is not what one believes. It is not a question of a more or less great poet. Whether he be the imperfect sketch of it or the accomplished trial, Villon is, in France, the poet.

Here, all the personages and all the scenes are nourished with truth and rich in poetry. Naudin carefully guards himself from local colour; and he has too much taste to put himself to trouble over history. He asks of his imagination the living reality, which is not in the documents. He imagines his men of the fifteenth century; and if one likes, he invents them; but they are quite so, to our eyes, being all they ought to be. In art, one has no use for exact research. The Theatre is the proof of it: people there are not dressed, but in costume; and what is not a picture is always a backdrop. Local colour is the masquerade.

Bernard Naudin flees that carnival art. His accent is of a rare emotion and a rare certitude. It is the certain that disgusts us with the exact. Learned exactness is made only of tinsel. What does the perfection of a costume matter to us, come from Lahore or from Byzantium, after a journey of a thousand years, if it must be seen on the back of a young girl, born yesterday, in Montmartre? The artist finds in himself, first, around him, next, all the necessary reality. Taste makes the harmony between what he observes and what he imagines.

The charming elegance of Naudin and his incisive force suffice well for the figures he draws. If his beggars are heroes, they owe it only to him. The greenness of his feeling justifies the poetry of his wretches. And there then, in the midst of this court, like a king who sings, is Villon, the proscribed poet.

Bernard Naudin is a man who meditates and who is not content with the first stroke.

The art of sacrifices has no secrets for him. He knows its value; he practises its virtues. In the plate of the gibbets, only one of his three hanged men, the one in the middle, is a true dead-man-by-the-rope, in all the sneering horror of the hanging: the tongue out, with life; and putrefaction close, beginning to wander from head to foot. The other bad boy is seen only from behind; thus the face is spared. One guesses at it. The last, finally, is barely indicated in his great stiff and funereal lines. How greatly do the hideousness of death and the atrocity of the torment not gain by this exception? They are ten times increased by being gathered on a single head: and the unique wretch who exhales it makes the stench of the cadaver felt much more than three would.

And by that, this infamous Calvary better evokes the memory of the other. The thieves of Montfaucon make appear the more poignant the misery of the man between two. And they exalt it. The gallows is higher; and has it not arms? Then surges up the divine memory and the sublime example. Thus the man, criminal or not, dungeon-game set and dressed upon the rope, or king laid on his bed of state, the man is indeed what he is, rotting between two obscure deaths: always in death, and the great victim who figures them all; always the host that has need of salvation, even if it bears it, and that calls for redemption for all that steeps, like itself, in the full vase of the night.

II

In his portrait of himself, Naudin has the face hollow and worn before its time, biting and caressing eyes, sparse hair, a great spiritual mouth, the dreaming brow: a head of a priest, who has looked much at the misery of humans, who has no doubt experienced it and much heard the confession of it, without saying whether he has succoured it. He has given of his features to Villon; and although Villon described himself as a small and slight man, Naudin has wished to make him tall in stature. One divines the reasons, and he draws from it so just an advantage that one approves them. Taller, Villon is the more dangerous and the more bold by it. Thinner as well, he appears the more cynical. His long legs scythe space the better. He must have the kick more lively and more extended into the round paunches and the well-seated usages. It becomes him, this air of a powerful grasshopper, who leaps over the laws and received ideas, until they nail it to the wall, and impale it on some good lawsuit, well in order and well sharp.

III

The mockery of Villon, such as Bernard Naudin has conceived it, is steeped in sadness. It is at times terrible, like a laughing gaze in an atrocious suffering. This gaiety haunts too much the charnels, the courts of justice, the dungeons, the magistracies furred with ermine and with hypocrisy, not to be bitter. All the chambers of the question are familiar to it, which are the changing lodgings of life for the poor, the criminals, the sick and all who suffer. Now, if a man has conscience, he is always a sick man, and always at the question. He suffers; and what avails it to say that he suffers by his own fault?

Villon makes it felt in his bold laugh, cruel poet. Dante, in the Purgatory, traverses this sovereign region of true poetry. But he is too pure; and Beatrice’s reproaches, his great questioning soul, may well wring tears from him, and make him blush: they do not put him to the torture. His sins commit him to purgatory only in the country nearest paradise. His greatest faults are still noble. His vices, his anger, his harsh thirst for justice, his soul athirst for vengeance — everything with him starts from a natural grandeur and from the original purity. And all his weaknesses plunge into the hardest pride.

Villon is sullied enough to know the places of contrition. He does not perhaps repent; but he knows, he weighs all the reasons he would have for shutting himself up in remorse, were he not, for his ultimate penalty, above repentance, knowing it as vain as sin is necessary.

The sadness of Villon is a new world. It was formed slowly in the Bible, and in the chants of the Church. Villon embraces the cruel necessity of living and of being what one is: of being impure, of being infamous, of enjoying it avidly and of suffering for it. The more he mocks, the more he is bitter; but he mocks also at his bitterness. Bernard Naudin has well seen him laugh at his own burial: he laughs at himself, he laughs at you; he laughs at what he has not, and at what he leaves you; he laughs at his misery and at the bequests he makes you of it; and in the death where here he is, he laughs at life, as he has laughed at everything, having been so constantly in death during the time he lived.

To every reproach, Villon answers by suffering. Better still, he makes us answer for him. If he weeps over himself, and if he cries for help, he does not vaunt his tears. He would laugh at them rather; in the very face of the executioners, to finish being free, his suffering mocks at itself by mocking at them. It took four centuries before anyone went further in the emotion and the knowledge of self. Such is the astonishing novelty of Villon and his original grasp upon us: he has the genius of sorrowful conscience. Not only Yorick, Villon is the Good Thief at Paris. And such he was, in my opinion, such he is at present in the images of Bernard Naudin, born for the povre Villon and to give him back to us.

December 1912.