A Basket of Cloves in Villon’s Grand Testament (1462)
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François Villon was an over-educated spite-filled poet and criminal who lived in France in the middle of the fifteenth century. Failing to find work after training as a clerk in Paris, he participated in an apparently well-planned burglary of the Collège de Navarre at Christmas 1456. Some months after the crime, one of the gang members blabbed to an informant while drunk and, under torture, gave up the names of his co-conspirators. Villon was subsequently banished from Paris but returned in 1462 after some distressing misadventures in Meung-sur-Loire, where he had been imprisoned.
It was then that he wrote his greatest literary work, Le (Grand) Testament, a poem in 2023 lines which developed on an earlier poem of 1456/7, Le Petit Testament ‘The Small Testament’ or Le Lais Villon, usually translated into English as The Legacy. In these two poems Villon attacks his many enemies with sarcastic bequests in a parody of a will. The sheer number of double entendres and ironic references make the poems tricky to translate and they require considerable exegesis even for those familiar with classical allusion and late-medieval France, but both works, especially the longer and later one, are extremely energetic and full of (the less edifying side of) humanity. Villon’s work is still popular, and some of his refrains — particularly mais ou sont les neiges danten ‘but where are the snows of yesteryear?’ from the Ballade des dames du temps jadis (Figure 1) — are among the most well-known in French poetry.
Villon probably died in 1463, perhaps by hanging or perhaps from wounds sustained during torture; given his lifestyle he may have died in a brawl. His poems were popular, though, and they survive in a number of manuscripts copied within a couple of decades of his death: The Legacy seems to have circulated in Paris even during Villon’s exile in Meung.
As a spite-filled and over-educated person myself, I must say that I’m a fan of Villon. I was given Anthony Mortimer’s lauded 2013 edition and translation of Villon’s major works (The Testament and Other Poems) for my birthday last year, and it’s remarkably good stuff: Villon’s poetry has the energy of someone who knows that they will soon die. There are some extraordinary images and pithy lines.
One of the verses in the Grand Testament concerns an ironic bequest of cloves (giroffle — the flowers of Syzygium aromaticum), and this is of course interesting as yet another example of Indonesian agricultural produce appearing in a medieval European text. The verse occurs in a section of the Testament entitled Ballade pour Jehan Cotart (lines 1238–1377), a generally neglected part of the poem (see Pickens 2001 for an extended discussion). Jehan Cotart was Villon’s lawyer, and he is satirised in the ballade as an incompetent drunk. He had his own problems with the law and had in 1459 been imprisoned in the Grand Châtelet in Paris — the same court/dungeon in which Villon found himself upon his return to the city.
The people who populate the Testament are usually enemies or others towards whom Villon, for whatever reason, directs his seemingly boundless ill will. In the verse below we encounter Pierre Basannier, a notary at the Grand Châtelet; Jehan de Rueil, an auditor at the Châtelet whose brother Pierre was a spice merchant (hence the reference to cloves in this verse); Jehan Mautaint, who was responsible for investigating the burglary of the Collège de Navarre; and Nicolas Rosnel, an examiner at the Châtelet. The Lord ‘who serves St Christopher’ at the end of the verse is an oblique reference to the boss of the Châtelet, Robert d’Estouteville (Figure 2), who is in fact the subject of the next ballade.
It’s difficult to establish the necessary context here; the Testament is long and involved and it involves many layers and allusions. It isn’t immediately obvious from the extract below why Villon would want to bequeath a basket of cloves to any of these people, and you’ll have to read a bit of the poem and get used to Villon’s style before it will start to make sense. The essential context, though, is that Villon hates all these people, and his bequests are all ironic references intended to mock and belittle. The implication is that the things these people are given are the very opposite of what they deserve.
The text below has been taken from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 20041 (formerly Saint-Germain français, 1662), which was copied in the last quarter of the fifteenth century by an unknown scribe. It is considered an authoritative witness and contains the Legacy (Le Petit Testament), the Testament (Le Grand Testament), and some of Villon’s miscellaneous ballades. The extract below is to be found on f.139r (Figure 3):
TEXT
Item, Je donne a basennier
Noctaire et greffier criminel
De giroffle plain ung panier
prins sur maistre Jehan de Rueil
Tant a mautaint tant a Rosnel
Et auec ce don de girofle
Seruir de cueur gent et ysnel
Le seigneur que sert saint xp᷈ofle
MY ALL-TOO-LITERAL TRANSLATION
Item, I give to Basannier,
Criminal registrar and notary,
A whole basket of cloves,
Courtesy of Jehan de Rueil —
The same to Mautaint, the same to Rosnel —
And with this gift of cloves
Serve with pleasant and lively heart
The Lord who serves St Christopher
Anthony Mortimer’s Nicer Translation (2013:112–113):
Item, to Basennier, notary
And registrar of crimes, this nice
Full bag of cloves in hope that he
Will perk up with a touch of spice,
And Mautant and Roisnel likewise;
And with these cloves I also offer
Your loyal service to that wise
Lord who still serves St Christopher…
Thus far we have come across cloves in medieval European texts signifying luxury and unreal exotic fantasies and as ingredients in broths and sauces. We read of cloves being stuffed into chickens’ hearts to cure hunting falcons. In Dante’s Inferno the rich use of cloves in flavouring roasting meat condemns a man to Hell. And here in Villon’s Testament we find an imagined basket of cloves (Figure 4) deployed as a vehicle of malice.
What did cloves mean in medieval Europe? It seems that this question can’t be answered simply in the abstract. Cloves — dried flowers harvested by pagans and Muslims in eastern Indonesia, far closer to New Guinea and Australia than the Loire Valley — were part of everyday life in France even before the advent of European colonialism. They certainly came from far away, on tortuous journeys through the Indo-Malaysian archipelago and across several seas, and while a basket of cloves wouldn’t break the bank they were definitely more expensive than wheat flour or raw wool by weight — but they weren’t imaginary or even rare per se. They formed part of the tangible, visible, everyday world, and that meant that their implications weren’t fixed: A poet could use cloves to mean one thing or many things all at once depending on their real-world associations, or a cook could devise new culinary applications for them through experiment, or a veterinarian could find that cloves are good at curing digestive distress in prized birds.
When we imagine that things like this could have only one meaning — as ‘spices’, symbols of Oriental riches, as part of ‘the spice trade’ — we shrink the medieval world arbitrarily and take away from it its true complexity.
I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be updating the blog in future but I opened the Testament on a whim and saw this verse by accident. Naturally, I had to write it up here. I’m supposed to be working on my thesis — and I am, of course — but everyone needs a break sometimes, even if that break actually constitutes more, well, work.
A. J. West, March 2020.
REFERENCES
Mortimer, Anthony. 2013. The Testament and other poems. Richmond: Alma Classics.
Pickens, Rupert T. 2001. Villon’s Ballade for Jehan Cotart. Implications of a poetics of water and wine. Romance philology. 55(1):1–20.
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