This ballad depicts Margot in a pornographic scene, presenting her as a sex worker with the narrator acting as her pimp.
Both the character and the ballad are considered examples of Villon's subversion of courtly love poetry and the moral standards of his time.
The poet begins with a loving passage addressed to Margot, which contrasts sharply with the rest of the ballad and suggests that Villon likely composed the piece before Le Testament:[1] Très doulce face et pourtraicture, Foy que doy Brelare Bigod, Assez devote creature.
[5] Margot's name is deliberately chosen by Villon for its pejorative connotation, meaning "magpie, a talkative woman of dubious morals".
[6][13] In addition to depicting a pornographic scene that legitimizes prostitution and composing a love song for a sex worker, elevating her to the status of nobility typically receiving love poems,[3] it is possible that she is portrayed as pregnant during the sexual act, which was particularly frowned upon in the society Villon inhabited:[12] Monte sur moy, que ne gaste son fruit.
More subtly, Villon contrasts Margot with Mary from the Ballade pour prier Notre Dame, thereby subverting the Christian values also promoted in his work—the sex worker replaces the Virgin.
[6][13] In the ballad, the author also critiques the "power of money that corrupts their relationship", with the brothel serving as a miniature metaphor for a world where the wealthy can purchase bodies.
The verbal play does not, however, distract from a careful reading of the ‘acute anxiety that the poet veils beneath humor, irony, and bawdiness.’ A parallel manifestation of this same phenomenon is the tendency to transform ‘signs’ in the streets into signs within textual discourse [...]The most illustrious example of this practice appears in La Grosse Margot (1583).
The poem also seems to reflect a new form of moral relativism unique to Villon in these two lines, which echo other questions posed in Le Testament.
[2][19][20][21] Roger Dragonetti describes the final lines of the ballad by highlighting the harmony that emerges:[22] Similarly, Villon's name, regenerated by the Virgin Mother and also found fragmented as an acrostic in the Ballade de la Grosse Margot, seems to exist only to exorcise, in a sort of monstrous union, the satanic fantasy of the maternal womb of creation.
This harmony resembles, if not redemption, at least a kind of accord whose rhythm integrates, within a 'pacified' space, the noise of the name of shame: ‘Then peace is made, and she lets out a big fart at me’ (1611).In the 1489 edition, Margot was depicted standing and holding a flower.
[24] The ballad played a significant role in the aesthetic of ugliness developed by Baudelaire[25] and is also revisited by Algernon Swinburne, who interpreted it as a deeply Sadean poem.