SOURCE: Sautman, Francesca Canadé. “Eustache Deschamps in the Forest of Folklore.” In Eustache Deschamps: French Courtier-Poet, His Work and His World, ed. Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, pp. 195-207. New York: AMS Press, Inc. 1998.

[In the essay which follows, Sautman explores the ways folkloric motifs and themes suffuse a number of Deschamps's poems.]

Carl Lindahl's study of Chaucer and folklore felicitously reopens the question of the place occupied by folklore and folklife in great works of Western literature. A number of medieval and Renaissance authors and works have been interpreted in a variety of ways within this framework.¹

Lindahl warns of several misreadings of folklore in relation to medieval literature. One is that limiting folklore to a list of items, for instance to artistic genres, as earlier scholars tended to do, merges medieval folklore and medieval literature because the concept of authority is so compelling to medieval authors that they do not hesitate to borrow and retell traditional tales. Secondly, contrary to what folklorists like Taylor, Thompson, and Utley held, medieval folklore cannot be based on oral-memorial transmission exclusively, for this ignores the particular and complex relations between oral and written sources in medieval culture (Lindahl 4-8). Both these welcome corrections to the study of medieval folklore will prove extremely valuable in understanding Eustache Deschamps's work. Indeed, Gaston Raynaud's 1903 introduction to the edition of Deschamps's complete works² illustrates the pitfalls of a restrictive understanding of folklore. Stating that folklore is poorly represented in Deschamps and only citing two folk beliefs, he is ignoring the function of folklore as a totalization of human experience with many interfaces between folk life, folk practice, folk belief and the imaginary itself (XI:324). This is the approach to folklore which will be adopted in this essay.

Too long neglected by students of medieval French literature,³ Eustache Deschamps occupies an interesting, even perplexing, position. The sheer volume of his work makes him a formidable vulgarisateur and the variety of subjects and topoi covered in his poetry, a mirror of his time.

Some of his poetic devices based on folklore are common enough and in keeping with the imitation of folklore genres in literature, such as the incorporation of dictons and proverbs as refrains to ballades (Whiting passim). He at times uses familiar lines from medieval folk songs.⁴ He is extremely fond of puns and word play (XI:280-281). He engages in poetic facéties favored by the vernacular culture of the Middle Ages, such as a letter where he creates “par esbatement la maniere de son testament,” a most probable source for Villon (Lettres 1411, VIII:29).⁵ He indulges in scatological pastimes (“Ballade 1363,” VII:201), a complex and recurrent aspect of folkloric expression (Gaignebet 30-57, 99a).

Yet Deschamps's work can be termed popular in a more profound sense. Although his bureaucratic functions (Kendrick “Rhetoric”) may cast him as a “bourgeois” writer, with close and cherished ties to the Court, he demonstrates real knowledge of popular life and he echoes decisively plebeian complaints, such as his distaste for the Lent menu,⁶ or his diatribe against the folly of his time voiced by a housewife, a ploughman, a shepherd, a vineyard worker and a woodcutter (“Ballade 339,” III:51).

Deschamps also provides examples of convergence between high and low culture, often seen as an original reinvestment into folk culture by later poets, Villon for instance. A half-century before Villon's ballade “Des langues envieuses”, a ballade attributed to Deschamps, “De couperos, d'alun, de ver de gris … soient servis au disner mesdisans” (Pièce attribuable à Deschamps 25, X:xxxi)⁷, was a powerful example of poetry as curse, based on commonly known black magic substances.⁸

Deschamps neither derides nor critiques folk belief, or as it is termed, “superstition,” and he has a distinctive tolerance for astrology; he merely rails against witchcraft and divination, apparently, in a fit of religious fervor (Demoustracions contre sortileges 1361, VII:192). This ingenuous appropriation of folk culture is a sobering commentary on the flaws of restrictive definitions of folklore: not unlike other periods, medieval culture embraces the coexistence of a general, mass, “vernacular” culture, shared by the many, with more specific cultures based on gender, ethnicity/regionalism, social class or occupation (Sautman “Medieval Folklore”), and it is this process we witness in Deschamps's poetry.

Deschamps is an eloquent representative of vernacular culture and he covers a diverse field of experience within it. This includes agricultural savvy, as when Raison says that no man is to open the earth up in August to plant, because Nature could not feed it and that March is the only appropriate time to sow (“Ballade 1156,” 17-19, VI:91). He refers to a calendar rhythm at variance with the scholastic foursome division, his summer encompassing March to September (“Ballade 1161,” 36-38, VI:98), a duality more akin to the Celtic calendar.⁹ Beliefs concerning ill omens appear in different contexts: beware of a beardless man, of a turning weather vane (“Ballade 1180,” 9, 11, VI:131); avoid the game of dice, because it leads to blasphemy and a sinful death, marked by the mocking call of the cuckoo (“the cuckoo will sing on him”), a sign of folly (Le Dit du gieu des dez 1395, VII:253-65, ll. 373-74; Opie and Tatem 112-114);¹⁰ the Devil is a fiddle player who serenades sinners to sleep (“Chanson Royale 1429,” 44, VIII:90). Astrological symbolism is familiar to Deschamps who even practiced the art in his youth to supplement his income (XI:148);¹¹ this symbolism blends with popular belief when the planet Mars calls on his helpers, the beasts who work evil, the fox, the raven, the crow and the screech owl (Fiction du Lyon VIII).¹² Deschamps's food aversions, which he sometimes addresses to his physician friends (XI:295-96; 315), hail from a variety of sources, biblical and classical, along with vulgarized dietary concerns which intersect with folklore, for instance, the fear that fish who dwell at the bottom of waterways, eels in particular, are venomous (Notable enseignement pour continuer sante 1496, 110, VIII:342).¹³

On one occasion, he mentions a colt's tooth which may be a talisman (“Ballade 865,” V:43)¹⁴ and in one long poem, the customs and superstitions of dice players (“Ballade 1395,” V:82; cf. also “Ballade 783,” IV:286). These include attributing bad luck to another player's presence, to coughing or to the barking of a dog. In this poem, Deschamps also provides a substantial list of virulent curses and blasphemies: players not only deny Saint Nicholas and all the saints, but even the Virgin Mary and God himself (101-04, 211-12, 225), they curse Saint Peter (164) and the blood, body (155-56) and face of God (268), the load carried by Christopher,—and even if God is not named, comments the poet, we know who that is—(290-98), they call Mary insulting names (303). Blasphemy and the increasingly severe official response to it, (in the seventeenth century, it typically entailed mutilation and execution), as a cultural phenomenon, have warranted the attention of historical anthropology.¹⁵ The extreme denial of Christian precepts and morals implicit in these violent curses and the harsh punishment that ensued raise interesting questions as to what prompted players to indulge in such dangerous language. This type of cursing may be connected to the magical workings of luck-control through mechanisms of verbal abuse and committing transgression well known to anthropologists in other contexts.¹⁶

Deschamps is also familiar with the atmosphere and imagery of drinking societies in which he was quite active (XI:282-83), as Maistre des Gilbertins de Crépy, or under the name of Jean Fumée, empereur et sire des Fumeux, whom he also links to Folly and Melancholy (Chartre des fumeux 1398 VII:213; Chartre 1399 VII:320, Chartre 1400 VII:323, Chartre 1401 VII:332). These societies are an important element in medieval folklife (see Dinaux passim), regardless of social composition, because they promote male bonding through age and interest groups, and reflect carnivalesque culture with the practice of burlesque “parlements” or fake courts passing seemingly absurd sentences. They are also an early testimony to the formation of a “grotesque” sub-culture in art and literature, the domain of ribauds and ruffians, of which Molinet and Coquillart became the main heralds.¹⁷ Nonsense speech is often favored by Deschamps. In one of the most interesting texts attributed to him, folklore is a poetic texture and mode of expression. The “Remede contre l'Empedimie” 80 (X:xcii), with the conclusion that once the remedy has been ingested, the patient should lie down between two sheets of warm ice, contains twenty-five rigorously constructed impossibilities. They combine allusions to proverbs (“l'erbe qui croist dans ung four,” “les iii fers d'un rocinhol,”)¹⁸ mythical animals (“un blanc courbel,” cf. modern French “connu comme le loup blanc,”) images of time in reverse “lait de pucelle,” or of mythical time: “de la racine de la lune,” creating a striking world of contradictory imagery, accumulated with incantational force.

The facetious judgment against the wolves of Epernay (Chartre 1402, VII:336), in which the wolves are brought to task for their wrongdoings against livestock and then given permission to steal animals outside the fortifications, is an early allusion to a well established late medieval practice, continued until the seventeenth century, of sentencing noxious animals who were even defended by an assigned lawyer. This practice was folkloric in the broad sense, since the trials were held under the auspices of the Church and lay authorities (Ménabréa).¹⁹ Deschamps's sentence is also passed on November 4, a date which fits into the calendar of the “mini-Carnival” cycle (as Van Gennep calls it) of St. Martin's Day (November 11).

A rather misogynist text (Willard; Kendrick, “Transgression”), the Miroir de mariage, provides a rough catalogue of beliefs concerning pregnancy and childbearing, such as the long list of unreasonable and bizarre cravings of pregnant women who want to eat impossible and contradictory products (IX:3782-3842). It also repeats the widely held belief that a wetnurse's milk influences a child's character. Milk itself is a precarious substance, prone to spoil; thus, it goes bad over one year, a male child generates better milk than a girl, and a comely wetnurse is better than an old, fat one who can hurt the child with her tainted milk (3027-3041).

Deschamps gives a consistently cruel and heinous treatment to the old woman, the Vetula, borrowing much from the Livre de Sidrac and the poem Vetula (XI:246-47), fallaciously attributed to Ovid (Cocheris), a type which extends from Latin literature to Sorel's Histoire Comique de Francion (1623). Yet, learned discourses on the noxious character of female aging and popular beliefs that the crone becomes poisonous tend to overlap (Jacquart and Thomasset 103-06).

The folklore of saints is essential to medieval culture,²⁰ and it is widely present in Deschamps's work. He invokes the ten major intercessors: Denis, George, Blasius, Christopher, Gilles, Catherine, Martha, Christina, Barbara and Margaret (“Ballade 1237,” VI:243).²¹ Martyrdom is evoked in a saying “They will be stoned more heavily than Saint Stephen” (“plus lapidez seront que saint Estene”) (“Ballade 1094,” 27, V:403). In several places, he curses an enemy with the evil of Saint Leu, or epilepsy (“Ballades 1287,” “1289” VII:33,36). Other saints' illness are mentioned: the “mal saint Espoint” or stomach ache (Miroir XXXIII, IX:100), the “mal Saint Flour,” or deafness and the “mal Saint Matthieu”, or ulcers and sores (“Ballade 1300” VII:54), the Mal Saint Mor or gout, one of the most frequently mentioned in medieval vernacular texts (“Ballade 784” IV:288; “Ballade 833” V:2; “Ballade 853” V:27; “Ballade 1230” VI:232; “Ballade 1300” VII:54; Lettres 1408 VIII:21), the “mal saint Riquer” or fever (“Ballade 1230”). Elsewhere, he refuses to desist from veneric pleasures even if he is affected by the diseases of St. Aquaire, St. Mor, St. Cosme, and St. Vincent all at once (Pièce attribuable xxii, X:17-24). In his Miroir de mariage, he echoes a tradition surrounding Saint John the Baptist which is at variance with canonic hagiography. It says that Herodias and her daughter were punished for their crime by losing their minds and by being caught up into an uncontrollable dance which became a curse visited on their descendants, a motif related to the broader theme of the cursed dancers. The implication is that these women will suffer from such fits before giving birth, which explains why John the Baptist is invoked by pregnant women, in spite of the saint's bad experience with them:

Impetree par le dancier
leur convint la encommencier
une trop laide dancerie
procedant de forsenerie
.....Et danceront en leurs eslays
et danceront au commencement
de leur mal et de leur tourment
avant ce qu'ilz doient cheoir.

(2759-62; 2768-71)

(Caught up by the dancing, they had then to begin a very ugly dance stemming from madness. And they will dance in a sudden rush and will dance in the beginning of their illness and torment until they are ready to fall.)

Deschamps's role as a transmitter of medieval folklore appears most clearly in the aforementioned story of Saint Dalibras (Tarbé), of all accounts, a Deschamps original.²² This is a long narrative poem concerning a fictitious saint in which two bona fide medieval saints, Saint Leu and Saint Nyvard, are also mentioned. It tells how the fire of Saint Dalibras burned the river Marne to the bottom between Cumières and Bras. Fire attributed to a saint who wreaks havoc rather than bringing good is the basis for many popular beliefs, particularly around Saint Anthony (Estienne II:256). The burning river was noticed by two masons setting up their pillars who found twenty-three perch swimming with charred tails. The river was filled with smoke from all the burning fish so the masons took their perch and carried them to Hautvilliers—site of St. Nyvard's abbey—and dropped them in a fountain. Overnight the fountain filled up with charred six-foot long perch, who were scooped out in the quantity of forty-three muis, and sold for a tidy sum. However, the monks who ate them became as black as berries, as did their habits and the fountain itself. Then, St. Nyvard “by his prayer and art” returned the fountain back to its original state, for on his feast day one goes to the top of the mount to stick one's head in a hole in the fountain, to be cured from fire, fever, and the ailment of Saint Leu, a treatment which has benefited “many wives and husbands.” The Saint also restored the Marne, which was still burning, to its normal condition.

The acts of Saint Nyvard record no such event, although it would unquestionably qualify as a decent sort of miracle. The closest analogue to the burned fish motif in the story can be found in the folklore of the Montaillou region.²³ Yet, Deschamps is quite specific, localizing his hagiographic tale close to the abbey, on the banks of the Marne near two identified towns. It is quite possible that he is echoing a very local popular tale which hagiographers did not pick up, in spite of their usual thoroughness. Aspects of the story, such as the aetiological explanation of the monks's habit, the naming of a important feast day (September 1, Saint Leu-Saint Gilles) in honor of a local saint credited with the miracle, favor that conclusion. Many other motifs of the story are also echoes of facetious literature of fabliaux and Rutebeuf tradition, with clerics dipping their alacritous pen into folkloric material, providing a rich legacy which Deschamps, in turn, passed on to the punsters of the fifteenth century. For instance, Deschamps is fond of the conflation between the various meanings and contexts of the verb “cheoir,” the basis for his punning conclusion to the Saint Dalibras story: to fall, to have an epileptic seizure, to engage in sex. There is another pun on Bras and Dalibras, whose closest analogue might be Brice, the saint who mended his own father's arm (Da-li-bras), although Brice is from the Tours region and Deschamps's multiple references to local topography cannot be ignored. Nyvard's feast, invoked in the performance of the miracle, takes place on September 1st, which would explain the association with the more famous Saint Loup (Leu) also celebrated on that date.²⁴ Nyvard's sister-in-law, Bertha of Avenay, who cures folly because she inflicted it on her murderers, performed the miracle of tracing a river bed with her distaff and is feasted on May 1st (Gandilhon 56; Pétin; Du Broc de Segangé). These connections may be significant because Deschamps sometimes refers to the nonsense parliaments held on May 1st, especially by basochiens. Deschamps's narrative reads as a perfect local hagiographical legend, no more fanciful than most, and at the same time, it is a facétie replete with motifs and themes familiar to medieval folklore.

Deschamps is a crucial lifeline between various cultural strata of his time: university (Bambeck) and lay, provincial and courtly, written and oral, high and low. In what seems to be recycling of old wine into new flasks, Deschamps, before Villon, Coquillart, and Molinet, picked characters and situations from oral tradition, dressed them up in scholastic robes and also broached standard topics of vulgarized culture with dimensions enriched by folk culture, recalling Rutebeuf but going even farther. Although establishing origins can be an uncertain proposition, and many folk images and themes are infinitely older than the Middle Ages, Eustache Deschamps may be considered the first true “poet-folklorist” of French literature. Well acquainted with the many paths of the folklore forest, Deschamps artfully wove his verse through them, adducing new meaning to his poetry and splashing it with the bright hues of popular culture before winding his way back to the world of poets and clerics.

Notes

1. Giovanni Bronzini has published numerous articles on Dante and folklore in the last few decades. Philippe Walter reinterprets the legend of Tristan and Ysolde, the work of Chrétien de Troyes (Le Gant de verre) and the story of Aucassin et Nicolette (“Nicolas et Nicolette”). Claude Gaignebet's monumental work on Rabelais studies the interface of folklore and hermeticism (Rabelais). Giovanni Sercambi is the object of ongoing study by Giuseppe Di Scipio.

   Among others, Guiraud's controversial work on languages in Villon, Jean Dufournet's extensive commentaries, and Francesca Sautman (“L'Homme,” “Des Vessies”) have focused on folklore in Villon.

   For some time, studies have pointed to the role of folklore in Shakespeare's work, including Leslie Hotson, Robert Weimann, and R. W. Dent.

2. The first five volumes were edited by De Queux de St-Hilaire, 1888-1889. Citations of Deschamps's work will be given in the text, with the volume and poem number of this edition. References to Raynaud's work will also be to this edition.

3. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi recently brought him back to the fore as a valid object of literary scrutiny in a 1987 dissertation and through colloquia dedicated to his work. Scholarship still tends to study him within a group of authors: witness Glynnis M. Cropp and Christine M. Scollen-Jimack.

4. “Avec bonne compaignie / Fait bon joye mener” (Dit des quatre offices 487-88, VII:192); Joli fevre labeure! Or, forge, forge, martelet! Resveille toy, Robin! (Lettres 1414).

5. For a comparison of these two works, see Ingenschay.

6. “De tout mon temps ne vi si dur caresme” (refrain, Ballade 1198 [VI:181, 1402]); Pièces attribuées à Deschamps (X:xx) takes up the already old (thirteenth century) theme of Karesme opposed to the benevolent Charnage. The poet cries: “Alas! Lent does me great villeny / I must complain of him and praise Charnage”, (“Helas! Karesme me fait grant vilenie / Plaindre m'en doy et loer de Charnage”) and the refrain threatens “May he be hanged for he comes so oft” (“Pendus soit il quand il vient sy souvant”), “for he has me making soup of fava beans / and for eggs and cheese gives me / oil-based soup and stinking herring” (“Car de feves me fait fere potage Et me donne pour eulx et pour frommage / la souppe a l'uile et le harent puant”); only the rich are well fed, while the poor are disregarded but he will hang the “stinking herrings” when Easter (Pasque Florie) returns.

7. These substances include black and white hellebore, arsenic, vitriol, the flesh of the basilisk, old roosters and rotten cats, stuffed snakes and lizards, mixed with spices and aromatics used in medical preparations.

8. Elliott has also written eloquent pages on the subject which have not lost their saliency (15-48).

9. On calendar divisions see Gaignebet (Le Carnaval 266). He discusses the presence of a Celtic two-part division of the year in the portals of the Strasbourg cathedral and stresses that the persistence of such a calendar in the Middle Ages is far from impossible.

10. A Flemish and German legend tells of a dishonest baker who taunted God's patience and was transformed into a cuckoo (Bouyer 95-96).

11. On Deschamps's views concerning free will, see XI:161.

12. On the screech owl and ill omens, Opie cites beliefs in Theophrastus, Chaucer, and Shakespeare (295).

13. This well known motif appears in the English ballad of Lord Randall (Child 12, I:151-166); the notes include a much older version, a Venetian ballad called “l'Avvelenato,” known in fragments as early as 1629.

14. However, the passage does not absolutely clarify that the poet meant a talisman.

15. See Delumeau, in particular the essay by Elisabeth Belmas on blasphemy and punishment prior to the eighteenth century.

16. For instance, it has been found that the use of swearing and obscenity among dockers in Oregon increased in proportion with the danger of the task (Apte 62). For a general discussion of the forbidden and transgression, see Douglas and Lévi-Makarius.

17. Although Deschamps fiercely attacks “ribaud” culture, he is one of its first articulators in the French tradition; Molinet, Coquillart, the eighteenth-century “langage blesquin” (and eventually Victor Hugo) can all trace their common thread back to him.

18. See Morawski for a list of proverbs current at the time, including those used by Deschamps.

19. Ménabréa presents a number of interesting cases, most of them from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For instance, in 1451, the bishop of Lausanne put the leeches of the Bern territory on trial and was praised by the Heidelberg doctors (30).

20. Gaignebet's work on medieval folklore was an important turning point in recognizing the all-pervading impact of the cult of the saints on medieval culture and folklore.

21. However, his list of famous martyrs differs slightly: they are SS. Stephen, Lawrence, Vincent, Hippolytus, John the Baptist, James, Denis, Agatha, Margaret, Thecla (Miroir de Mariage LXIX, IX:253).

22. Tarbé claimed that it was a well-known legend, but my research concurs with Raynaud's conclusion (XI:283) that the legend is not retrieved as of now.

23. Duvernoy (1978, III: 1070). In the Albigense Sabarthès, a legend, lost today, told of a fountain of Saint-Lizier, in which fish arrived half cooked and still jumping from a mysterious place. An exemplum (Tubach 2071) mentions a man burned by cold water for committing the sin of fornication.

24. There are many Saints Loup in that region: Saint Loup of Troyes, (died ca. 478, feast day July 29), Saint Loup of Chalon-sur-Saone (died ca. 610, feast Jan. 27), but Saint Loup de Sens has generated the most cult activity and has the same feast day as Saint Nivard.

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