excluded from the fold, in a begging-poem addressed to François I asking to be
put on the court payroll after the death of his father, also a court poet:
L’Estat est faict, les Personnes rengées,
Le Parc est clos, et les Brebis logées
Toutes, fors moy, le moindre du Trouppeau,
Qui n’a Toyson ne Laine sur la Peau.
[“The estate is settled, all persons ranked, the park is closed and the ewes in
their pens, all except me, the littlest of theflock, who has neitherfleece nor
wool on his skin.”] Clément Marot,Les Epîtres, ed. C. A. Mayer (London,
1958 ), 136 ( 13 – 16 ). In another epistle, to the Chancelier Du Prat, he uses the
same metaphor, punning this time on the Chancellor’s name:
Ce temps pendant à pasturer m’ordonne;
Et pour trouver plus d’Herbe franche et bonne,
M’a adressé au Pré mieulxflorissant
De son Royaulme ample, large et puissant. ( 140 , 15 – 18 )
[“This present time commands me to go out to pasture; and tofind more good
fresh grass, I turn to the mostflourishing meadow in his wide, vast and
powerful kingdom.”]
60 .Cf.Deschamps, 5 ,dcccciii:“Or est au bois, a la froidure, mis / Le suppliant qui trop
doubte la glace”[“Now this suppliant, who has great fear of the frost, is put out in
the woods and the cold”]. This proves to be no way to treat another aged and
balding poet“Qui sur sa teste a grant froit a la fois / Pour ses cheveulx qui s’en sont
departis”[“whose head is now very cold on account of the hair which has left it”].
61 .On“concretization,”the reader’s activity of“removing orfilling out the inde-
terminacies, gaps, or schematized aspects in the text,”see Robert C. Holub,
Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction(London, 1984 ), 25 – 29 ( 26 ).
62 .Deschamps, 4 ,dcccix; see also 7 ,mccci, where he likens himself to a seller of
“oublies,”complete with appropriate street-cry.
63. Cf. Walter of Châtillon’s“A la feste sui venuz,”written to celebrate the
carnivalesque“Feast of the Staff,”in which the satiric poet adopts the voice
of God at the Last Judgement:“et edos ab ovibus veni segregare”[“I come to
separate the sheep from the goats”].M-S G, no. 13 , st. 1 , line 4.
64. Rutebeuf,“La pauvreté de Rutebeuf,” 25 – 29.
65. Deschamps is troubled by an inverse relationship between the gaze of all and
his sense of self ( 5 ,dccccxxi):
Dont puet venir tele desordonnance
Encontre moy et tele descongnoissance?...
Plus me voit on, tant sui je moins prisiez. ( 26 – 27 , 30 )
[“How is it that such disorder should come to me, and such disregard? The
more they see me, the less they prize me.”]
66. This widely usedfigure is perhaps most fully developed by Deschamps, 6 ,
mcix, an allegory in which“Medecin prince terrien / Figure”( 21 – 22 ).
Notes to Pages 76 – 78 199