SOURCE: “The Lais” in François Villon Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1997, pp. 20-34.

In this excerpt, Fein details the groups of people Villon addresses in his earlier mock-testament, many of which reappear in The Testament. Fein demonstrates the variety of tones—playful, ironic, cruel, sympathetic—Villon uses in portraying the various classes of society.

Although it was long believed that Villon participated in the Navarre theft and wrote the Lais on the same night—Christmas Eve of 1456—most critics now doubt that these events occurred so close together. First, we must remember that Villon's dating of the poem is somewhat approximate:

En ce temps, que j'ay dit devant, Sur le Noël, morte saison 

(9-10)

[At the time I said before, Toward Christmas, the dead time of the year] 

The phrase “Sur le Noël” can be read as either “at Christmas” or (as Barbara Sargent-Baur translates it) “toward...