Villon in the Theatre of Over-interpretation

The article ironically links the procedure of over-interpreting literary texts with the idea of literature as a potential palimpsest. Experienced readers tend to over-interpret texts. This tendency is discussed on the example of „Catherine la Dentelliere”, a story by M. Schwob from his volume „Vies Imaginaires” (1896). It is analyzed through references to a famous collection of poems by the fi fteenth-century poet F. Villon „Le Grand Testament”. Though the poet is not directly mentioned by Schwob, he is in fact the main protagonist of the story that inspired Schwob: „A Lodging of the Night. A Story of François Villon” by R. L. Stevenson (1877). The scenes and the mood of these texts are evoked in J.L. Borges’s story „The Rose of Paracelse” (1983), which in turn it can be read via the motto taken from T. De Quincey’s essay (1845) which considers the text as a palimpsest.