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.His son Gilles was already involved in a dispute about hisfather s estate on March 26, 1405.Given the fact thatDeschamps, very atypically, raised no protest about thefailure to honor the promise to appoint him financial general,it is likely that he died not long after of the  sudden and fatalillness mentioned by the copyists of BNF Fonds français 840.76Artistic AchievementDeschamps, as Walter Besant remarked,  wrote no fewer than90,000 verses, an amount which represents four times thework of Virgil and twice that of Homer (82).77 If he had acareer as a writer of about fifty years, from the mid- 1350suntil his death in 1404, that figure translates as about ten linesof verse for every day of his adult life.The very counting ofthe 1,501 works of poetry and prose that appear in the eleven-volume Société des Anciens Textes Français (SATF) edi tion 78of his works has been an occasion of division among scholars,mainly because a few works appear two or three times, andalso because some defy easy categorizing.With this caveat, ourcount produces 1,014 balades, 138 chansons royales, 173rondeaux, 84 virelais, 14 lays, 34 nonstrophic dits, 10 non-fixed- form lyrics, and 11 pieces in Latin.In addition, there arealso four prose works, one in Latin, and, most significant,L Art de dictier.Deschamps s works occupy the entire lengthof one of the most voluminous manuscripts in medievalFrench literature, BNF Fonds français 840.INTRODUCTION 29To say that Deschamps was a prolific writer is anunderstatement.He was also a compulsive writer, turning outverse while presiding in his own law courts to rescue himselffrom the tedium of his office as judge of those brought beforehim.He also admits to writing poetry in church.Given theangry reactions to his verse while he was on active militarycampaign, there is every reason to suppose that he wrotethere too as perhaps he did in the inns of Bohemia or whilewatch ing diners at court.79 The epistolary character of muchof his verse almost sug gests that he preferred poetry to proseas his everyday means of communication, including as hiscorrespondents the Deity and certain elevated allegorical ormythological personages, kings, princes, aristocrats, courtiers,the middle classes, peasants, enemies, criminals, foreigners,friends, his children, and, most of all, himself.The list mightbe extended to include animals, inanimate objects such as thecastle of Fismes, and also certain parts of the body, which aremade to deliver speeches or take part in conversations.80Deschamps wrote as unhesitatingly about the state of81nations as he did about toothache.He was as forceful incondemning the morals of the nobility as he was about thebehavior of waiters who insisted on serving the food before82pouring the wine.Even what he believed to be themisconduct of the war against the English and the callousoppression of the French peasantry by their own country menwere presented no more hallucinatingly than the horrors offoreign hotels.83 As is the case with most French lyric poetsbefore him, he was capable of turning out pretty verses inpraise of women, but he was even more eloquent about the84advantages of getting a bed to himself.He shared theconventional medieval view of the wisdom of the ancients ascompared with the folly of his own times but was alsoinclined to believe that the true gift of omniscience was morelikely to belong to contemporary domesticated dogs prowlingthe streets of Paris.85Deschamps enjoyed many foreign cities, and praised theirgood qualities lavishly, 86 but never relinquished his regionalchauvinism: Paris and its environs were the uncontestedcenter of the universe.87 His poems are peopled with histor30 EUSTACHE DESCHAMPSical and archetypal characters culled from the law court, theroyal court, and the peasants courtyard.Some of the poems88are raucous and scurrilous by modern standards; yetothers, staid and moralizing, prophesying doom for theungodly.89 The latter have contributed to his unduly somberreputation in recent times, but they were among the firstpoems recognized in the eighteenth century, whose crit icspraised the poems morality while condemning contemporarydecadence.But the range of Deschamps s voice, expressed bestin the short verse forms as well as the range of his topics, is onthe whole comic and benign rather than condemna tory orpreachy.True, he mocked hypochondriacs, women of fashion,impotent men, crones, peasants, and their social betters; hecatalogued kinds of laughter, excesses of courtly manners, thehorrors of senescence and disease; he peered into kitchens anddining rooms, battlefields and bedrooms.But he foundhimself the most amusing character of all, reveling in his ownself-contradictions and eccentricities; he made poetry out ofhis own authorial pretensions as well as his own real orimagined personal predicaments with the same zest as hespoofed knights, nobles, thieves, and judges.What isremarkable is that this public ser vant, who survived in hisoffices until his death, not only expressed his personaldiscontent, but also rebuked his patrons, including the king ofFrance and his brothers, for their poor judgment,contradictions, and misdeeds.The liberties Deschampsallowed himself bear witness to the authority given him byhis writ ing as well as to his courage.Confronted by the daunting problem of imposing someorder on the appar ently random collection of his completeworks and perhaps following the author s own wishes, thecopyists of BNF Fonds français 840 (see note 111, p.45)attempted to place at least some of Deschamps s lyric works intwo general cate gories according to subject matter: lovepoetry and moral poetry,  poesies amoureuses and poesiesmorales. We know that the distinction must have beenimportant to Deschamps because of the sheer number ofpoems on love topics versus other topics, so we do him thecourtesy of taking account of it in catego rizing his works.At aINTRODUCTION 31rough count, 68 percent of his virelais, 43 percent of hisrondeaux, 18 percent of his balades, and 5 percent of hischansons royales can be described as love lyrics.Since thereare fewer than 400 virelais, rondeaux, and chansons royalesbut over 1,000 balades, one needs to add together all theselyric forms to get perspective: just over 23 percent of the totalnumber of virelais, ron deaux, balades, and chansons royalesare love lyrics.It is not possible to continue this exercise withthe longer poems, and Deschamps s copyists made no attemptto bring them into their categorization system [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]