Villon’s evidence, writes Grand-Cartaret, one can still call to mind the “brothel-rich” streets where girls, who were known as filles de joie (pleasure girls) even then, tried to entice passers-by with waves or calls from the windows. Amongst these was fat Margot, who lived with several professional colleagues near the Notre-Dame-aux-Bois monastery (later the Abbaye-aux-Bois), which seemed convenient for the countless clerics who lived in or frequented the monastery. His other women included little Marie d’Orléans, Isabeau, Jeanneton, and also Denise, who brought the poet before the church court because he had insulted her. We must not forget his “dear Rose”, who, “preferred a purse full of thalers [coins]” to his intimacies, nor Marion, about whom indecent lyrics circulated throughout Paris, and all the other “public teachers of the art of love”.
The names of numerous prostitutes, together with their descriptive epithets, such as “la Blanche” (the white one), “la parcheminée” (the parchment-coloured one), “le cyclope” (the one-eyed one), and “la verolée” (the pox-scarred one), have come down to us from documents and title-deeds of house sales – “bad girls” for use by “bad boys”.
The filles de joie have always faced dangerous competition: from lower middle-class girls who, whilst ostensibly following a career, were also willing to oblige any man in return for money and nice words. With Villon’s help, we make the acquaintance of the beautiful glove-seller, the attractive sausage-seller, Blanche the woman cobbler, Jeanneton the hood-maker, and the charming helmet-maker, whose faded charms the poet describes with the utmost realism. All professions and all guilds are represented. “It appears,” comments John Grand-Cartaret, “that one had access to the bodies of these hard-working professional women as easily as one did to their shops. But just like their goods, these saleswomen were only to be had for money. An old proverb runs: ‘The shop is open to all. The goods and the woman offering them for sale are available to everyone at a price.’”
They are called “delicacies”, pleasing “to look at and listen to”. Even then, these Parisian girls were evidently attractive to foreign visitors to the city. Their appreciation makes the well-known ballad by Villon even more poignant.
In those days, Italian women were still considered the most attractive. That said, the Parisienne wins hands down in competition with her fellow creatures. From the Reformation onwards, German and Italian travellers praised Parisian filles de joie in their accounts. In kissing, too, the mouth of a Parisian woman at that time was considered exceptionally experienced – whether we are speaking of milkmaids, chambermaids, Court ladies, middle-class girls, secret or public prostitutes, or even abbesses. Even they were not above sexual gratification, as is clear from the trial through which the Abbess Huguette du Hamel’s scandalous way of life became public knowledge. Even in those days, part of the extraordinary fascination Paris exercised on foreigners lay in the laxness of its morals. Women from abroad flocked to Paris in large numbers. Villon mentions women from Florence, Venice, Prussia, Spain, as well as from many other nations, and the registers of the Trésors des Chartres (Royal Archives) officially confirm the poet’s data.
Villon’s main work is Le Testament, which he conceived under the shadow of the gallows that were beckoning him. As Karlheinz Stierle notes that Villon’s Testament is urban poetry about Paris (without the city being specifically named) with scenography that reveals an enormous comédie humaine in which lust for life is found alongside a closeness to death.
Villon is a kind of guide through the Paris of that time. He had the same significance for 15th-century Paris, as Rétif de la Bretonne had for the 18th century. Both were acute observers, whose eyes missed nothing.
Grand Bal paré et masqué (Masked Costume Ball), c. 1835. Coloured lithograph.
Erotic fairytales.
Erotic fairytales, 1909. Illustration. Vienna.
Miniature illustration for Boccacio’s Decameron, 14th century.
The Court in the 16th Century
The historian Leopold von Ranke once said about the time of Henri II: “If you wish to learn about the ideas and opinions of contemporary France, you must read Rabelais.” Anyone who wishes to learn about the times of Charles IX and Henri III must read Brantôme.
In the Paris of François Rabelais (1483–1553), as in that of Villon’s time, public incitation to depravity was just as much on the agenda. Prostitutes and pimps, as well as male and female procurers, offered their services in broad daylight. Whilst public procuresses exercised more or less strict supervision over the brothels, private procuresses advertised their wares vigorously in all conceivable places – especially in churches. It is no wonder that prostitution – albeit in a primitive form – was already booming. After sunset, remarks Grand-Carteret, Paris no longer belonged to the King of France but to the roi des Ribauds (king of the ribalds; officer of the royal household, overseeing the policing of prostitution in Paris) and the “priestesses of Venus”.
In his novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais, the supreme master of crude satire, depicts the vices and immorality of his contemporaries. He shows the unrestrained sexual life of his times as vulgar as it actually was, never deviating from depicting repulsive words or images. Nor did he spare the female gender his coruscating mockery, being shown as lustful and shameless. They never got tired of the “stick”. He doesn’t shrink from any kind of exaggeration. On his wanderings, Pantagruel meets women whose clitorises, the laborator naturae, are so highly developed that they could wrap them around their bodies several times and use them as spears if they needed a weapon. With unsurpassed humour, Rabelais castigates the shortcomings of the Church and the monks, as well as their scandalous lives. In his Psychology of French Literature (1884), even the prudish literary historian Eduard Engel is forced to confess that:
Consistently and without any scruples whatsoever does he use the most offensive word in the language for the appropriately offensive action, and he often seems drunk on the vulgarity of his vocabulary. Many chapters in Gargantua and Pantagruel are complete dictionaries of pornography – more complete than anything else in the wide territory of French literature. But he does not take pleasure in doing so – using such passages for no other purpose than for the accurate depiction of uncouth characters in scurrilous situations.
Towards the end of the 16th century, coarseness in morals slowly began to fade away. Uncouth prostitution began to give way to gallantry. A dense network of royal castles was built around Paris. The Court and its courtiers practically settled in Paris, and the reflected glory of its splendour and magnificence soon gave Paris the character of the animated and luxurious metropolis, which gradually became the central focus of Europe. Brantôme remarks:
As far as our lovely French women are concerned, in the past they have been extremely uncultivated – contenting themselves with a clumsy form of love. However, over the last 50 years, they have acquired from other nations so many forms of beauty and flattery, charms and outstanding qualities, and learnt so much in terms of clothing, grace, and lasciviousness, either acquiring these things naturally or taking the trouble to teach themselves, that now one must say that they surpass all others in every way. I have also heard strangers say that they are far worthier than others, except insofar as unchaste words sound much more lascivious, more exciting, and more melodious from a French mouth than any other.
For a long time, there were rivalries between Parisiennes and the women of Lyon and Rouen. Yet now – as a result of the Renaissance – there began a form of competition against those women skilled
