SOURCE: Laurie, Ian. “Deschamps and Comedy.” Romance Languages Annual 7 (1995): 107-11.

[In the essay below, Laurie defends Deschamps from the long-standing characterization as a humorless moralist by noting comic elements throughout a number of his works.]

DESCHAMPS AND COMEDY

At least since Deschamps's work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, it has not been common to view him as a comic writer. On the contrary, his first modern editors, beginning with Crapelet, writing shortly after the Revolution of 1830, and Tarbé, publishing a year after the Revolution of 1848, viewed Deschamps primarily as a stern and uncompromising moralist to be used as a weapon against all those of whom they disapproved, from the eighteenth-century “philosophes” to the socialists and revolutionaries of their own time:

Eustache Deschamps could have gone in for socialism and other forms of hair-brained philanthropy. But he had some common sense. He thought only of service to his country. A devoted servant of the monarchy, an implacable adversary of political charlatans and schemers out to make their fortunes, Deschamps did not confuse the welcome breeze of wise reforms and the hurricane of revolutions. … The duel between Good and Evil began with the creation of the world and it will cease only with its destruction. Confronted by the relentless struggle, society must fight and seek for victory, if for no other reason, then simply to preserve itself. Let us never forget the names of those men who drew their swords to defend it, all those who carried the flag and braved the thunderbolts of the great and the savagery of the poor. Eustache Deschamps called Morel, Lord of Barbonval, King's doorman, Bailiff of Senlis and Keeper of the Castle of Fismes, lived and died in their ranks.

(1)

It is possible to argue that Deschamps's reputation has never fully recovered from Tarbé's politico-moral manifesto.

Even the admirable Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, who took on the immense task of editing the poet's complete works for the Société des anciens textes français in 1878 may have been influenced by similar sentiments. He was sustained in his labors because he believed that people in polite society might find “in the past a social ideal which their own honour required them to comprehend and in some degree to revive”; this view of Deschamps as a patrician role-model for the French establishment was confirmed for him in very personal terms when he discovered the name of one of his own ancestors, Le Queux, in Deschamps's verse.¹

The Marquis died over his labors and his work was brought to completion by Gaston Raynaud who does not appear to have shared these counter-revolutionary ideas or the Marquis's delight in family history. Instead, he compared his own efforts with those of Voltaire unwillingly laboring through the lengthy works of all the Fathers of the Church simply in order to be able to take vengeance on them. Raynaud also admitted to serious doubts on the moral value of Deschamps's work, wondering whether modern readers would find it palatable. Scouring his edition for a politically correct and also non-moralizing line which might strike a chord with readers raised on the Enlightenment and also on nineteenth-century Romanticism, he discovered a dew-drop and exclaimed: “May that dew-drop of which Deschamps sings bring him forgiveness for many things!” (11: 341).

At the time when Raynaud wrote these words in France, Ernst Hoepffner in Germany was writing a book on the poet's life and works. Hoepffner did not attempt to counter anyone's revolution with his study but did view Deschamps primarily as an austere writer who grew increasingly gloomy with age (102).

The above views on Deschamps have had a decisive influence on his reputation in our own century. Doubts were, however, raised about this sombre reputation even in the nineteenth century, for example by Walter Besant, who included Deschamps in a book on French humorists in 1873 (74-90).

A criticism of the view that Deschamps was no more than a stern judgmental moralist was made by Karl Vossler in a review of the SATF edition and also of Hoepffner's book in 1905. He found that it did not seem to have occurred to the eminent scholars who had devoted themselves to Deschamps that they were dealing with a comic writer.

Had Karl Vossler's words shaped our view of Deschamps since 1905, the present paper would not have been written. Sadly, they did not. At best the most positive things said about Deschamps since 1905 have been that he is a rich source of material for the social historian or a precursor of better poetry to come.² At worst, most notably in Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages, he is viewed as a cheerless, cantankerous writer symptomatic of the despondency, defeatism and exhaustion of his age (35-36). It is possible to take Huizinga's severe judgment as no more than a development of the doubts first expressed by Gaston Raynaud. Le Queux de St. Hilaire and earlier nineteenth-century editors had presented a Deschamps who was reaching for high values, Raynaud and Huizinga saw him as stooping to low ones. At least they were all agreed that he was very serious about these values whatever they might be.

What was Deschamps's reputation in his own time? Philippe de Mézières, as is pointed out by Raynaud (11: 333), condemned chansons and virelais as a manifestation of folly, vanity and sin but did approve of what he called Deschamps's “dictiés vertueulx,” ranking them beside the works of Saint Augustine on an approved reading list for the royal house. Christine de Pizan writing much later, in 1404, the probable year of Deschamps's death,³ singles out Deschamps's commitment to sound moral principles for special praise in her epistle to the poet. Deschamps in his reply to her in “Ballade 1242” gave no reason for supposing that he was not flattered by her judgment and recommended her work in equally ponderous terms for its freight of learning.

What reputation did Deschamps seek for himself? Towards the end of his life, working in his personal library in Compiègne in 1403 (Lettres 1407), he probably gave some attention as to how his work should be preserved and presented to posterity. Perhaps he was tinkering with a project of refining the two categories of poetry he had distinguished on thematic grounds in the Art de dictier, much earlier, in 1392, i.e. a specialized category of “courtly poetry” and a general one on poetry on other subjects.⁴ It may be that he included much of his own verse in the category of what he jokingly refers to as “philosophie morele” in that same poem (Lettres 1407, line 287). He died before bringing any such project to completion but it may well be that the scriptorium which produced a copy of his complete works (in the manuscript now to be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 840), shortly after his death may simply have been following the poet's wishes on presentation. For the short refrain lyrics they established two main categories. The smaller of these, the category of love poetry (“balades amoureuses”), requires no explanation. The larger, the category of what they call “moral” poetry (“balades de moralitez” and also “balades morales”), probably does. If it means what nineteenth-century scholars and readers apparently took it to mean, i.e. that this was edifying poetry, if Deschamps himself used the term to mean exactly that, the task of anyone now who might wish to argue that Deschamps is a largely unrecognized comic writer becomes a little difficult.

That task nevertheless seems to me to be worth attempting simply because Deschamps's reputation as a versifier of high moral principles is at variance with a great part of his work. Raynaud's judgment was that Philippe de Mézière's term “dictiés vertueux” can probably be applied to the “balades de moralitez” in Vols. 1 and 2 of the SATF edition, although he admits it may also apply to a collection of poems which is now lost (11: 133). The difficulties in equating these terms may be appreciated when it is remembered that, under the rubric of “balades de moralitez,” there are to be found such poems as “Ballade 84,” which provides wild scenes of shipboard life compared with the poet's own comfort in Paris while under “Ballades morales” we find an obscene question and answer session given the number 1443. The latter poem is not even a ballade at all but the undiscriminating use of this term to apply to almost any lyric is typical of the manuscript.

There is, of course, no compelling reason for supposing that either Deschamps or the copyists of BN fonds français 840 would have found such terms as morality ballades and moral ballades strange when applied to poems such as these or even to his comic poems on impotence (“Ballades 1226-28”), including his fond memories of the male equipment which had once been his when he was a student at Orléans (“Ballade 1105”). Admittedly the copyists do not use terms consistently and much of Deschamps's production escapes such classification entirely but, since it includes some of the most eccentric and also the most morally ambiguous collection of themes ever found in any medieval French poet, it is clear to me that they did not mean by it what Philippe de Mézières meant by “dictiés vertueulx.” It is likely that they were using the term “moral” in its older and broader sense to mean writing on the subject of human behavior. I find in the term “balades de moralitez” an analogy with medieval French morality plays (“moralités”) which also accommodate a great range of human behavior. Within the context of the French tradition, this might classify Deschamps as a “moraliste” of the kind who presents a great part of the human comedy without being impelled always to use it as ammunition for a catechism class. This does not, of course, necessarily indicate that he was a comic writer or that he had an interest in the theatre or that he may have had ambitions to be a comic actor. Only an examination of the voices in which he speaks or the characters he creates in order to present human behavior can do that.

One of the principal comic characters to interest Deschamps was his own. In one of his first datable poems, the “Chartre des fumeux” (loosely: “The Practical Jokers' Charter,” No. 1398 in the SATF edition) of 1368 he gives considerable space to the study of his own personality. In this poem, as in the other early Chartes et Commissions (1399-1404) as well as in poems written much later in 1400 (“Dit 1404” and “Ballade 1405”), he presents himself as the president of a society of eccentrics. These epistles (“lettres”) are devoted to self-contradiction and to all kinds of outrageous behaviour. They sound like a year-round version of the Feast of Fools but structurally the society may well be a provincial version of the Basoche in so far as it elects its own monarch who metes out justice, exercises authority in reviewing his subjects, etc. Perhaps he is simply carnivalizing his own real-life role as bailiff, as he does in “Lettres 1401” when he passes sentence against drunken friends at Vitry. It is as impossible to know whether these groups existed more in Deschamps's imagination than in real life as to know whether their activities extended to theatrical or semi-theatrical activities. At least we can be certain that he attributes to himself the central role in the group. In it, he awards himself the first prize for melancholy as the “palatins des merencolieux.” Elsewhere he presents himself as the Emperor of confusion (“empereur de toute fumee”), as Chancellor of the confused or of the practical jokers (“chancelliers des fumeux”), as the sovereign lord of drinkers (“souverain des frequentans”) in “Lettres 1399-1400” and in “Ballade 813” and as the Master of the Gilbertins, a drinking society at Crépy in “Lettres 1418.” He is close to making of himself a stock character in a morality play.

A similar role is claimed by Deschamps in poems which do not necessarily have anything to do with such societies. In “Ballade 813,” for example, he claims to be a compulsive brooder, always losing himself in private meditation for reasons he cannot understand, since he believes himself to be melancholy by nature and is reconciled to his fate of spending his life as a thoroughly unreliable dreamer. The personality attributed to himself in this verse is not intrinsically comic on the rational level but there is something self-dramatizing about it. It is pushed so far as to become self-caricature and hence a fit subject for laughter. It is this that might just have saved him from being diagnosed as a manic-depressive in our own time, although this disorder appears to be very common among professional comics.

There are some reasons for believing that Deschamps's role-playing as a professional melancholic may be traced back as far as 1365 or even earlier. He wrote the “Chartre des fumeux” in 1368 and claims in line 253 that he is already in his third year of office. In “Lettres 1411,” dated in June 1375, he boasts in lines 82-87 that he has just written the most excessively melancholy virelai he has produced for ten years. Given the fact that, by my reckoning, around 68٪ of his virelais are love-lyrics, this claim may suggest that the Deschamps of around 1365 was already given to playing the melancholy role of the unrequited lover. Elsewhere, in “Ballade 456,” he claims with ludicrous precision to have been in the service of the ladies since he was fourteen and a half years old. This may amount to a boast that he had been writing love poetry since around 1355. Evidence based on interpreting the spectacular eccentricities of Deschamps's poetic persona as if they constituted straight autobiography is not of course strong, and I would not wish to press any of this to a firm conclusion. It is at least certain that from 1368 and consistently thereafter Deschamps turns his claim to be a melancholic and an eccentric into comic verse. He does not speak of this as if he were playing the part of the buffoon or the court jester simply to amuse his patrons. He speaks of it in terms of an inner compulsion which he expects his readers to find as comic as he does himself. The image of the theatre again comes irresistibly to mind. It is as if he were watching himself acting a strange part in a play, a part which he has not chosen for himself but with which he has decided he has to live.

It is this self-dramatizing element in Deschamps which deserves more attention than it has ever received. The personality he attributes to himself in these early poems is only one of several he assumes in his other works and they in turn are no more than a selection of the other characters which inhabit his work as a whole.

We might take, for example, the numerous poems in which he presents himself as victim. Many of these are so obviously comic as not to require examination here, poems in which he describes himself as the victim of practical jokes, of the suspicious peasants in Brie, who jump away over their ditches like grasshoppers at his approach, of his own law courts in Senlis where he is obliged to sit like a clay idol acting the part of the reliable professional, of the horrors he suffers in foreign hotels etc. It becomes a little more difficult to see him as a comic writer in the poems in which he assumes the role of the passionately loyal, entirely disinterested royal servant, never accorded the recognition he deserves, a role common enough in any literature of patronage. However, Deschamps is unable to resist the temptation of caricaturing himself in that role, metamorphizing himself into an old horse with clipped ears, sent out to pasture with the nuns at La Saussaye or into a peddler selling cookies in Paris (“Ballade 1301”). Similar remarks may be made when he assumes the role of the victim of debt, badgering his patrons for the payment of sums of money due to him. Intrinsically, poems of this kind risk being about as interesting as versified bank statements. Deschamps rescues them from this fate, again via comic metamorphosis, turning himself in “Ballades 875” and “866” from Eustache Morel into Brulé Deschamps, the burnt-out case who has to cope with the financial ruin brought on him by the burning of his house at Vertus by an English raiding party. Again, in “Ballade 90,” when attempting to pin down the royal treasurers who owe him money, he transports himself to the mountains, assuming the role of a lost horseman attempting to track down the elusive men he has been commissioned to find. He is also capable of turning his horses into victims of debt too, for example in a series of poems which describe the expenses of hotel living in Paris (“Ballades 791,” “794,” “857,” “866,” “882,” “884,” “891;” “Rondeaux 666,” “669,” “1439”) where he claims that it is really his horses who are in trouble, since they appear to be less able than himself to find friends of their own species to feed them.

What is it possible to say about Deschamps as a comic when he assumes the role of the judgmental moralist so admired by Tarbé, relentlessly condemning the world in poems so numerous, so repetitive and of such intolerably high moral rectitude that they discourage all readers save for professional medievalists? What was Deschamps's view of himself in this dismal role of the “laudator temporis acti,” the mass-producer of moral thunderbolts against time present? Wryly he admits in “Ballade 1266” that such complaints, like all his regrets for the past, are unattractive manifestations of old age and even adds elsewhere that as a result of such complaints, four thousand people drop dead. Of boredom, perhaps?

Ironic distancing, parody, and systematic subversion of his own literary role-playing can be identified in his conventional role of the courtly lover dependent on his lady for inspiration. In “Ballade 447” he tries his luck in persuading Machaut's lady of the Voir Dit, Péronne, to adopt this role, which, he claims, she would be free to do as a result of Machaut's death. In “Ballade 493,” however, cheerfully admitting that Péronne has turned him down, he propositions a lady called Gauteronne, telling her she is the second choice after Péronne. Parody and self-contradiction are also characteristic even of the most unpleasant role assumed by Deschamps, that of the misogynist. This vein can probably be found at most stages of Deschamps's career and, if the copyist of BN fonds français 840 is to be believed, even at the time of his last sudden and also fatal illness in 1404 that, which copyist claims, prevented Deschamps from finishing his long anti-feminist poem, the Miroir de Mariage.⁵ If this is true, it contains an irony of its own, since he must have been actually writing the work at the same time as Christine de Pizan addressed him as her dear master and friend. The misogynist vein can also probably be found at the beginning of Deschamps's career when at least one reader of his anti-feminist poetry, Simon Ployart, was moved to charge Deschamps with self-contradiction on the grounds that the poet had condemned marriage in his writings and nevertheless married himself. Deschamps, in his reply, side-steps the issue entirely, simply claiming to be much in love with his wife (“Ballades 829-31”). These poems, if they refer to Deschamps's only known marriage in the 1360s might predate the “Chartre des fumeux” of 1368. Deschamps's wife dies in childbirth in 1375 or 1376 but he still remembers her fondly nearly twenty years later on the occasion of his daughter's marriage in “Ballade 1151” in 1393. Again if the copyist of BN fonds français 840 is to be believed⁶ he wrote “Ballade 1438” at an even later period. This poem presents marriage as the greatest joy to which human beings can aspire. This did not prevent Deschamps from making comic complaints about the expenses of his daughter's wedding in “Ballade 1149” and “1234” or satirizing dowries and avaricious sons-in-law in “Ballade 1150.” There are more contradictions to come: in 1403 he wrote “Lettres 1407” and perhaps poems such as “Ballade 1482” in which he expresses scorn for those who condemn marriage in their writings and nevertheless marry themselves. The fact is that Deschamps took no interest in bringing these discordant voices into harmony. The modern reader might view them as two actors in the same play who manage never to argue or to resolve their differences.

Deschamps does not restrict role-playing, subversive or otherwise, to the first-person narrator in his poems. He indulged his taste for contradictions and disputes in his many dialogue or character lyrics, poems “a personnaiges” as he calls them. It is in these remarkable pieces that he does organize conflict and argument, attempting to compress what a later period might have presented as a scene from a play into the tight grid of the chanson royale, five short strophes and an envoi complete with a refrain. These poems are to the theatre what French miniatures are to Italian painting of the period. They present a conversation, generally an argument between two or more characters and sometimes even develop a short narrative with violent events. Sometimes the conflict is resolved by argument, sometimes by physical combat and sometimes by the authorities. In all cases, however, the interest lies not simply in the situation in which the people are placed, but also in their moral character and in their behavior. In other words, there is a case to be made for calling these poems embryonic “comédies de caractère” and “comédies de moeurs.”

Stylistically, the antecedents for these dialogue lyrics are of course to be found in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century pastourelle and bergerette, genres which had early ossified into situational comedy of a very repetitive kind. Deschamps's pastourelles are radically different. In “Pastourelles 337,” “344,” and “359,” for example, his peasants take time off from digging their turnips and sowing their crops to exchange views on how best to end the war with the English. If Deschamps had been an American, he might have said that his peasants were enjoying quality time.

There are interesting questions to be raised about these mini-dramas in the refrain lyric. Did Deschamps arrange to have them performed, perhaps by the members of one of the provincial societies mentioned earlier? Did he perhaps have a gift for performance and even mimicry himself, acting out one role after another to entertain his royal patrons? Was his liking for role-playing and direct speech related to a hope that he might increase the audience for his poetry through livelier performance? Was this in its turn another aspect of his ambition to discredit his great rivals, the court musicians and all their works by making it clear that the purely verbal polyphony inherent in many-faceted character lyrics constituted an altogether superior genre?

We may never be able to answer these questions with any certainty but one should not forget that Deschamps did venture outside the lyric into the comic theatre itself in his Farce de M. Trubert et Antrongnart and also in his version of the Geta and Amphitrion.

I cannot leave the subject of comedy in Deschamps without noting that he himself attempts to give some explanation for what makes him laugh. He may not quite produce his own theory of laughter but he at least explores its physical manifestations and, typically of him, seeks to relate these to character and manners. In “Ballade 843” on laughter and again in “Ballade 844” on the subject of how people eat their meals at court, Deschamps explains his own motivation as observer and also the effect which these scenes have on him. He would not be Deschamps if he missed the chance to contradict himself even on this issue. The sight of people eating rescues him from a fit of depression. Here laughter acts as a coping mechanism. The sight of people laughing, however, plunges him into the deepest despair. Here laughter is no longer therapeutic but actually provokes the malady Deschamps is trying to avoid.

In these poems, as with most of the others mentioned in this paper, it is obvious that Deschamps's best jokes have a serious point. Some of them go so far in this direction as to sound jaundiced. It is, however, just as obvious that this is also true of most non-belly-laugh comics of most periods, so that it does not enable us to identify Deschamps's particular brand of the comic with any precision. In my opinion, what is specific to Deschamps as a comic is self-dramatization and theatricality. Current research on the interaction between the theatre and the law from antiquity to at least the end of the Middle Ages provides a context for this view of Deschamps.⁷ I have addressed a few aspects of this in the present paper but I believe there is room for a book on the subject, which I am currently writing. In the meantime, it does seem to me that more should be done to dispel those heavy nineteenth-century clouds which have obscured Deschamps's mastery of the comic and his sense of the theatre, undervaluing his work as a result. After all, any fool can be serious. It takes talent to be funny.

Notes

1. All references to Deschamps's work are to the Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps (ed. P. Tarbe). See the obituary on Saint Hilaire by Gaston Paris at the beginning of Vol. 6 of this edition.

2. There are numerous references to Deschamps's work in this vein in, for example, Poirion's Le Poète et le prince: l'évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans.

3. The references to events in Deschamps's life and dates attributed to his works in this paper do not always coincide with those supplied by other biographers. The evidence for them may be found in my new biography of the poet, “Life of Deschamps.”

4. L'Art de dictier, n° 1396, 7: 270-71: “Et ja soit ce que ceste musique naturele se face de volunté amoureuse a la louenge des dames et en autres manieres, selon les materes et le sentement de ceuls qui en ceste musique s'appliquent.”

5. Miroir de mariage, n° 1498. See the scribe's note, Oeuvres complètes (10: 388).

6. See Oeuvres complètes (8: 75) where the copyists claim that the collection of ‘balades morales’ which follow were written after those they transcribed earlier. They may be very unreliable: Rondeau 1439 which they include under this heading must have been written in the 1380s.

7. A substantial contribution to this area of research is made in Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama. On the more general theme of medieval laughter including that of Deschamps see also Le Rire au moyen âge dans la littérature des arts, Bouché and Charpentier, eds.

References

Besant, Walter. The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century. London: Bentley, 1873.

Bouché, T. and H. Charpentier, eds. Le Rire au moyen âge dans la littérature des arts. Actes du colloque international des 17, 18, et 19 novembre 1988. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1990.

Crapelet, G. Eustache Deschamps, poésie morale et historique avec un précis historique et littéraire sur l'auteur. Paris: Crapelet, 1832.

Enders, J. Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama. Rhetoric and Society Series. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Hoepffner, Ernst. Eustache Deschamps Leben und Werke. Strassburg: Trübner, 1904.

Huizinga, J. The Waning of the Middle Ages. London: Pelican, 1955.

Laurie, Ian. “Life of Deschamps.” Eustache Deschamps, Fourteenth Century Courtier Poet: His Work and His World. Ed. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi. New York: AMS Press, forthcoming in 1995. 1-72.

Poirion, Daniel. Le Poète et le prince: l'évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans. 1965. Geneva: Slatkine, 1978.

Raynaud, Gaston and Auguste Henri Edouard, Le Marquis de Queux de Saint Hilaire, eds. Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps. 11 vols. SATF. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878-1903; Rpt. New York: Johnson, 1966.

Tarbé, P. Oeuvres inédites d'Eustache Deschamps. Poètes de Champagne antérieures au XVI^e siècle, IV-V. 2 vols. Rheims and Paris: Techener, 1849.

Vossler, K. “Eustache Deschamps Leben und Werke.” ZFSL 28 (1905): 40-43.