Deschamps’s bulky œuvre is almost all preserved in a single thick manuscript
compiled a few years after his death (B.N. fr. 840). Ballades predominate, 1,017
surviving. In addition, there are 171 rondeaux, eighty-four virelais, 139 chansons royales,
fourteen lais, and fifty-nine other pieces, including twelve poems in Latin. His one
important prose piece is the Art de dictier et de fere chançons (1392), probably written to
instruct one of his “great lords” in the composition of lyrics; it is the only extant treatise
on the art of poetry from 14th-century France. Notable is Deschamps’s classification and
discussion of poetry without music as “natural music”; musical notation is for him
“artificial music.” The treatise otherwise concentrates on illustrating the ballade, virelai,
rondeau, and lai.
Neither of Deschamps’s two extant long poems was completed, and in both cases
rubrics state that death prevented the author from finishing them. The Fiction du lyon is a
beast-fable on political events in France, with Charles VI presented as Noble the Lion,
Charles the Bad of Navarre as Renard the Fox, and Richard II of England as the Leopard.
Deschamps’s Miroir de mariage is his longest poem by far, 12,004 lines in octosyllabic
couplets. Drawing on standard writings against matrimony like St. Jerome’s Adversus
Jovinianum, it opens with a discussion of friendship, which leads to the main question,
whether a young man named Franc Vouloir (Free Will) should marry. While such friends
as Desir and Folie advise him to take a wife, Repertoire de Science (Wisdom) counsels
against it in a long enumeration of the dangers and ills of carnal marriage. He contrasts
spiritual marriage, which Franc Vouloir eventually chooses. The work ends with a poorly
integrated review of history, interrupted at the Treaty of Brétigny (1360). The Miroir has
been thought an important source for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but this is
questionable.
The great bulk of poetry preserved in the major Deschamps manuscript, edited in
eleven impressive volumes, his ballade to Chaucer, his wit, and his interest in current
affairs have made Deschamps seem a more important poet than he was. Had it not been
for a literary friend who gathered his works together after his death and had them copied,
there would remain little evidence of his versifying. Much of the work is journalistic, and
virtually none of the alleged influence on Chaucer is sure. Nevertheless, Deschamps was
undoubtedly a master of the ballade, and his reports of quotidian incident, dialogues,
petitions to his patrons, observances of ceremonial events, and a great variety of other
discourses in ballade form are often amusing and well done. Without his work, we would
certainly know much less about public life and literature in late 14th-century France.
James I.Wimsatt
[See also: ANTIFEMINISM; ARTS DE SECONDE RHÉTORIQUE; BALLADE;
JARDIN DE PLAISANCE ET FLEUR DE RÉTHORIQUE]
Deschamps, Eustache. Œuvres complètes d’Eustache Deschamps, ed. Auguste Queux de Saint-
Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud. 11 vols. Paris: Didot, 1878–1903. [Vol. 11 includes biographical
study and survey of sources.]
Hoepffner, Ernest. Eustache Deschamps: Leben und Werke. Strassburg: Trübner, 1904.
Thundy, Zacharias. “Matheolus, Chaucer, and the Wife of Bath.” In Chaucer Problems and
Perspectives, ed. Edward Vasta and Zacharias Thundy. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University
Press, 1979, pp. 24–58.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 560