SOURCE: “The Flight of Time: Villon's Trilogy of Ballades,” in Romance Notes, Vol. 22, No.3, 1982, pp. 353-78.

In this essay, Lacy, an important Villon scholar, suggests that the latter two ballades of the trilogy on the ubi sunt theme—“Ballade des seigneurs”” and “Ballade en vieil langage françoys”—have been undervalued by modern critics. Lacy argues that as a unit, the ballades represent Villon's continuing development of a unified theme, that of fleeting fame and the relentless forgetfulness of history.

Villon's three ballades concerning the flight of time and the ubi sunt topos have rarely been studied as an ensemble. This failure is doubtless due both to the traditional penchant for excerpting parts of the Testament, without considering context or respecting the integrity of his poem, and to the conviction that the second and third members of the trilogy are seriously inferior to the Ballade des dames du...