SOURCE: Black, Iris. “Beyond Dietetics: The Use of Language of Food and Drink in the Allegorical Battles of Eustache Deschamps.” Dalhousie French Studies 48, (fall 1999): 3-18.

[In the following essay, Black focuses on images and themes of food and consumption in two of Deschamps poems that present comic allegorical battles.]

Food and drink, as elements of literature, are almost inevitably bound up with notions of social practice, individual consumption, or both. They are reminders of a world beyond the written text; they threaten to disrupt the integrity of the word. Yet even as they do so, they mirror and define its readers, bringing them closer to the literary construct which they help to create.¹

Eustache Deschamps, fourteenth-century court administrator and poet, regularly uses alimentary images in ways which shed light on the social experience of dining in his time, as well as on individual food habits. He may focus on particular classes, social sub-groups, or nationalities at table, or he may show how outside forces and circumstances—religious observances, war, social change—cut across such divisions and recall, in the end, the physical commonality of humanity. At the same time, he often addresses the relationship of the individual to his or her food, offering plentiful dietary advice in order to promote physical and spiritual health, exploiting traditional links between food and sexuality (stemming from their common associations with appetite, pleasure, survival), using dwindling chewing and digestive capacities as signs of aging, and even defining certain real personalities by their food habits. “Ballade V:844,” “Sur les différentes manières de manger,”² provides an example of the use of food and drink in connection with both social milieu and individual ingestion, since here Deschamps breaks the court meal down into an observation of component characters, each attacking a dish in his or her distinct way, without ever losing track of the particular collective context in which such people-watching sport is possible.

Nevertheless, the presence of food or drink in any text does more than provide examples of social and psychological realism; it reflects a conscious rhetorical choice on the part of a writer. If alimentary images can reveal much about the real world of collective and individual experience, they can also offer important glimpses into poetic technique and imagination.

So it is in the works of Deschamps. His allusions to food and drink, as well as having a thematic significance relative to society or to the individual—as ingester, gastronome or glutton—are themselves ingredients in his literary compositions. While considerable work has been done on the general impact of food and drink in his poems—for example, on how they narrow the gap between the courtly lyric and pragmatic texts (Becker), or how they contribute to social satire (Bliggenstorfer), little attention has so far been given to the rhetoric of food and drink: how these images work within individual pieces. In fact, Deschamps's different structural and rhetorical treatments of food and drink help us to interpret the nature of the whole feast he sets forth. This study will begin to explore that banquet of language.

There are many aspects of alimentary rhetoric to be considered in the works of Deschamps. The poet frequently uses food and drink within pre-existing contexts: proverbs, proverbial phrases, and fables, borrowed whole or as fragments from everyday life, popular wisdom, and specific written sources. He revels in words for and about food and drink, offering vivid descriptions of wine (good and bad),³ of particular dishes,⁴ of culinary taboos⁵ and gastronomic nightmares.⁶ Sometimes he invests food images with a figurative value, and uses them to develop ideas quite beyond those of physical nutrition—depicting love as spiritual nourishment,⁷ maturity as the transforming of unripe vines into wine,⁸ or writing itself as a form of tripe.⁹ He also draws on the structural impact of food enumerations, for example letting a veritable ripaille of culinary insults define the nature and form the substance of an imprecatory ballade.¹⁰ Each of these rhetorical techniques merits exploration in its own right.

The present study, however, will concentrate on the role of alimentary allusions in a particular category of texts whose governing principles encourage a rich mixture of rhetorical techniques: the allegorical battle. In two separate literary “battles,” the “Dit des.IIII. offices” (“VII:1360”) and a chanson royale, “Contre le carême” (“III:350”), Deschamps uses food and drink as both stakes and weapons, allowing them to enter discourse as directly as possible, and exploiting their tastes, smells and textures for all they are worth. In both cases, realistic food and drink are accorded an importance out of all proportion to their role in ordinary life, providing much of the meat of the debate or conflict, and contributing to its organisation and affective strength.

The two battles share important dramatic qualities. Indeed, the “Dit” is not actually a lyric, but a short play. While there is no record of its having been performed, and while it contains no stage directions, its manuscript rubric states that it is “a jouer par personnaiges,” and even if this indication (as likely editorial as authorial) were not present, it would be clear that this is a highly performable work. It has long speeches periodically sharply cut by quick, energetic exchanges, and many actions—mostly different kinds of blows—are called for by the text, especially in the final mêlée. Moreover, its speeches are linked by the mnemonic device so commonly found in medieval drama: the last line of one speech is rhymed with the first of the next. In its mise en scène of allegorical characters, the “Dit” anticipates the soties and to a lesser extent the moralités of the fifteenth century (Frappier and Gossart 7-8). In itself, however, it simply constitutes a festive dramatisation of the practicalities of daily life in a noble or royal household.

The chanson royale “Contre le carême,” on the other hand, represents a mise en lyrique of a popular dramatic tradition. The Lent-Carnival battle was a common theme associated with Mardi Gras revelry. Vernacular texts on the subject began to appear in the thirteenth century (Grinberg and Kinser), but it is almost certain that they mirrored street activity whose roots may go as far back as pre-Christian rituals¹¹ (though medieval versions were clearly tied to the Church's organisation and domination of the liturgical year). Deschamps's text is not a documentary report of such a riotous mock-combat, but a verse interpretation of the theme, in which the savant tradition of literary allegory fuses with the transforming elements of dramatic representation. In carnival drama, individuals take on roles which both distill and magnify human experience: personal physical hardship is personified, and the larger-than-life personifications produce an expressionist stylisation of the highs and lows of the liturgical year, as it intrudes on all members of society; the drama itself in turn invites wide public participation. The temporary inversion of the official order, however, could not exist had that official order not imposed such successful constraints on human behaviour over most of the year. The festive revolution is contained within a broader system of social control. In Deschamps's poem, too, we find an insertion of “chaos” into order at several levels simultaneously: Lent besieges and disturbs the natural human order of meat-time until, at Easter, meat-time returns in triumph; in its celebration of that triumph, the rebellious human spirit challenges the repression of official order; food images threaten to overrun the literary construct throughout the poem. Yet the organisation of the fixed-form text works in opposition to the unruly battle it depicts, and the “battle” itself only exists because of the systems of thought provided by allegory.

That Deschamps creates allegorical works out of food practices and customs is a reflection of the nature of allegory in his time: after its gradual evolution through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it had become “une habitude de langage, de pensée, et la forme privilégiée de l'expression poétique” (Strubel 261). No longer obsessed with offering multiple levels of meaning, nor concentrated on love or religion, Deschamps's allegory aims to project all aspects of life—including the most banal—onto a wide screen, where vigorous personifications entertain courtly audiences in a manner appropriate to their literary conventions, while parodying their non-literary routines. An allegory whose main elements come from the kitchen, cellars, great hall and city streets becomes, by definition, a festive, satirical work, yet the very order imposed by the allegorical mood and enhanced by its structural development limits the playful chaos of each piece. Deschamps's allegorical battles are representations of the subversive, the carnivalesque in their glorification of appetite and consumption, their relationship to theatre, their very emphasis on physicality, digestion and food vocabulary, all normally excluded from “serious” literature. Yet ultimately they are contained by their contexts: thematic (food and drink are represented as part of the social status quo), formal (rhymed octosyllabic couplets for the “Dit,” the strict organisation of the chanson royale) and physical (each work is directed, in different circumstances, at a courtly audience).

THE “DIT DES.III. OFFICES”

Thematically, the playlet belongs to a sub-category of allegorical literature which grew out of the Psychomachia model in the thirteenth century (Strubel 257). Specifically, it is a mixture of “debate” and “battle,” with the measure and organisation of the first dissolving into the chaotic activity of the second. Its closest ancestor is probably the Bataille des vins of Henri d'Andeli, although the social setting of Deschamps's “Dit” is much more linked to reality, and the allegory more fluid. Indeed, this is the sort of piece that might well have been integrated into a real social situation, in accordance with the late medieval taste for allegorising many aspects of daily life; it is easy to imagine it as, for instance, an entremets at a courtly banquet, whose preparation it stages.

Structurally, the “Dit” is built largely around discord and progressive fragmentation, and it encourages us above all to enjoy the diversity of the claims and arguments put forth. Its conciliatory conclusion is the work of an outsider, the maître d'hôtel; thus the whole piece becomes a kind of illustration of his job as co-ordinator of practical dining services in a noble household. (Certainly Deschamps's own experience as maître d'hôtel for the Duke of Orléans would have provided him with the raw ingredients for this piece [see Deschamps XI, p. 66].) However, despite the squabbling tone, there is an underlying unity to the text, for it reflects the overall importance of variety, individual taste and balance of elements in any (highly organised) gastronomic feast.

The fact that the “Dit” deals with issues of food and drink within a courtly household helps determine its overall character. The nature of the battle here is distinct from that of the Bataille de Caresme et de Charnage, for example,—itself already a parody of more serious allegorical texts—in the very triviality and restricted sphere of interest of its subject matter; it is, after all, only really about the process of producing a meal for courtly tables. A debate on questions which are ultimately inconsequential, providing only festive entertainment, predictably degenerates into a brawl, where the theatrical interest of farcical blows easily overrides the reasons for which they are being dealt.

But what role do food and drink play in the unfolding of the action and the build-up of the conflict? At first, it is a somewhat indirect and carefully contained one. The primary concern of the “Dit” in terms of subject matter is with service to the tables of king and court, not food and drink as such. The speakers themselves are offices—not true abstractions, but functions—and as such are unusually complex characters to treat allegorically. Even in real life, an office involves a mixture of people, food, equipment and physical space. Here, the identities of the offices fluctuate; sometimes they are providers of the product that is their responsibility, sometimes they become that product, and sometimes they show signs of having consumed it. Thus Eschançonnerie can state: “Je sers de vin le Roy de France” (14), but Panneterie can accuse her of being the wine that intoxicates:

Tu faiz batailles et ryos;
Uns saiges homs est par toy sos …

(71-72)

Similarly, Panneterie can speak of her own “lieu” where “N'a que beau pain et linge blanc” (135), but Eschançonnerie can treat her as if she is the linen, and not so white at that:

Nappe orde, mouillie et trouée,
Povre touaille renouée!

(161-62)

A few lines later, though, Panneterie is back to being addressed as possessor of the cloths:

On feroit bien d'un lavement
De tes nappes a un couvent
Bonnes soupes et gras potaige …

(163-65)

The different facets—positive, negative, nutritional, religious, ceremonial—of the foods and drinks associated with each office encourage the multiplicity of characteristics by which Deschamps defines each one.

The fluidity of the characters means that they can move nearer to, or further away from, the foods or beverages with which they are linked. Eschançonnerie and Panneterie in particular have a haughty, “noble” side which, they imply, has everything to do with abstract values and social hierarchy, and as little as possible to do with the messy business of eating and drinking.¹² Cuisine and Sausserie are by definition more attached to the kitchen, but they too have their pretensions:

CUISINE

Par moi est la court gouvernée
Et son estat soustenu;
Certes tout seroit bien perdu,
Se saigement ne gouvernoye.

(284-87)

SAUSSERIE

Je sens bon, j'oste la puour
De mainte viande et l'odour;
Je la faiz bien cuire et confire
Et digerer, bien doit souffire,
Car se ne fust ma pourveance,
Pluseurs fussent en grant doubtance
Et en peril de desvier;
Mais g'y a voulu obvier
Par mon sens et par ma dotrine.

(368-76)

Aspirations to wisdom and learning are typically incompatible with the acts of eating and drinking in medieval literature. Here, though, Cuisine claims to hold “saige” authority over all the court, while Sausserie alludes to her power to render rotten food edible through her theoretical knowledge. Sauce-making becomes blurred with sauce itself, which in turn becomes physician.

The general shape of the “Dit,” however, is marked by an evolution of arguments from lofty and abstract to base and increasingly concrete. The ideas dwindle and the foods proliferate, until in the final row, language makes a fine hodgepodge of characters and food, implements, weapons and blows. Alimentary images are of great importance in this progress of the dialogue from superficial but civilised to petty and downright crude. For example, the first reference to actual drink made by Eschançonnerie has spiritual overtones: “On fait par moi le sacrement / Du vin” (7-8). She goes on to link her functions with joyous entertainment in lines 8-9—already a rather swift desertion of the highest things, yet one expressed with the most courtly language possible: “esbatement,” “joie,” “soulas.” She follows up with proofs of her status and widespread power, which take the form of a list of all those she serves, concentrating on the nobles (11-22). The next time wine is mentioned, it is in the form of hypocras (23), a spiced beverage suitable for the “yssue” course of fine dinners. Her first speech concludes with a complaint about how overworked she is, as everyone comes to her constantly, filling containers made of all substances from gold to earthenware (26-43), and a claim that she is justly “cherie sur tous estats” (45). The opening speech of the “Dit” thus refers to wine as sacrament, celebratory libation, drink of the well-born and indeed of all others (though they are defined by their vessels rather than named).

It is left to Panneterie brusquely to evoke the physical act of drinking to excess, with her first line: “A! Dame Yvroingne, parlez bas …” (46). Another identity slippage has taken place here; Eschançonnerie is not a purveyor of wine, but a drunkard. In the speech that follows, Panneterie further develops her scolding of her rival on the basis of the latter's connection with drunkenness, but not before she has made some lofty claims of her own. Bread, like wine, is a sacrament (55); it feeds the great and the many (57-60); “C'est la premeraine viande / Que chascuns au mangier demande” (61-62).¹³

Eschançonnerie reacts to Panneterie's prim accusations with scorn, and much of the vocabulary of the insults she directs at her fellow office is drawn from the latter's own wholesome “strengths”—bread and baking—which she turns on their heads, stressing their commonness:

Povre chetive boulengiere:
Il n'y a bergier ne bergiere
Qui ne t'ait a son desjunon.
Tu ne sers se meschans gens non;
Ceuls que tu sers sont sec et chiche;
Tu n'as pouoir fors d'une miche
Ou d'un morsiau de pain faitis
Donner; tes pouoirs est petis.

(81-88)

She interrupts her criticisms briefly to draw a contrast between Panneterie's servitude and her own authority (gouvernement)—

Plus cras sont ceuls que je gouverne:
N'ay je au monde mainte taverne
Ou les grans seigneurs vont deduire?

(89-91)

—before carrying on: wine is worth many times the value of bread; Panneterie is bound by a drudge-like routine, and is ugly and flour-covered, and dirty because of it (92-101). Later in this same speech, however, Eschançonnerie's jibes are not limited to those dependent on snob value; taste and texture have also begun to be factors:

Que vault pain sec en un couvent
S'il n'y a vin pour le mouillier
Ou graisse pour l'amolier?

(106-08)

Alimentary detail has begun to moisten and enrich the language.

The first three long speeches, then, have already presented us with a range of values for alimentary allusions, whether as materials of self-praise or weapons of invective. References to food and drink will be used in both ways throughout the “Dit,” becoming increasingly vivid. The insults are particularly inflammatory to the “enemy,” and no wonder; they often consist of turning a rather attractive image into one of disgust. We have already seen this procedure in Eschançonnerie's retort to Panneterie in lines 161-62. The latter goes on, ranting about Panneterie's soiled cloths, to talk about how they affect the bread:

Mais les gettes tout en un tas
Sur ton pain qui en est tous gras.

(173-74)

Similarly, Cuisine's succulent catalogue of offerings—

Tousjours vont les gens par les voies
A tous grans plas tous plains de souppes …
Je leur depars de cras lopins
De bouilli, de rost, de connins,
De faisans, d'oes, de chapons,
De poucins, lappereaulx, paons,
De perdrix et d'autre volille
Il n'y a riens de bon en la ville
Dont je ne soye devanciere …

(262-63; 267-73)

—is changed by Panneterie into something extremely vile:

Quant la viande est toute crue,
Uns paillars, uns souillars la rue
Sur un fiens tout plommée
Quant il a sa teste gratée
Ou son cul; puis la prant après
Et l'euvre, puis, un autre est près,
Tous deschaulx, vilz, salles et ors,
Qui n'a vestu dessus son corps
Qui vaille.II. sous de tournoys:
De telz gens est servis ly Rois.
Sa viande va par cent mains
Ains qu'il l'ait, encore est ce au mains …

(297-308)

Cuisine is treated to particularly picturesque food and hygiene insults by the other two offices as well. It is worth remembering that cooks and all things culinary had been a standard subject of comedy for centuries before Deschamps; Cuisine is thus an especially ready target for mockery (Curtius 431-35).

At times, all four offices seek to support their alimentary boasts with social or literary associations. They attempt to place a value on themselves, according to their power, to the quality of people they serve (or even “govern”—see above), and/or the amount they cause people to spend. In addition, Panneterie, who cannot claim much monetary value for her chief product, bread, produces a literary alternative borrowed from the pastoral tradition of praise for the simple life (115-22). All of these self-judgements represent a wilful if futile stab at subordination of instinctive, bodily concerns to more objective, codified or principled ones. Panneterie even asserts: “Je ne suy pas femme de sanc; / Mon pain ne fait nullui combattre” (136-37). She is, of course, shortly to prove herself wrong.

When the battle does break out, it is as if isolated phrases related to war and table service have crashed into one another with as much vigour as the four offices. The mêlée of language of blows, food and utensils in effect creates the fray. Several times, Deschamps makes use of words with multiple meanings. When he has Eschançonnerie cry: “Vous averez ceste colée / Et ce lopin de ce pot cy” (414-15), he is playing on two senses of “lopin”: “morsel” but also “blow.” Panneterie's reply is similarly laden with possibilities: “Ha dya! te joues tu ainsi? / Je vueil jouer: tien ceste briche!” (416-17). Gaston Raynaud gives only “coup” as the sense of “briche,” but it could also mean “loaf,” as well as “ruse” or “trick,” a kind of game, an uncomfortable situation, and even an engine of war for hurling stones (see Godefroy I:730-31, Greimas 83). Thus, Deschamps evokes not only the general idea of a blow, but also of a weapon particularly appropriate to Panneterie, linking the action with the language of play and of conflict that has led up to its delivery. Over the next two lines he takes the idea of bread and pushes it a step further, so that “miche” becomes a metaphor for strength or power, and “levain” represents something like mettle—the stuff the speaker is made of:

Maintenant sçaras se ma miche
Est levée de bon levain.

(418-19)

There are several other instances of kitchen language entering the fray. To Panneterie, Eschançonnerie declares: “[…] vous n'arez froment ne orge / De ce mois, qu'il ne vous souviengne / De mon fait […]” (422-24). Receiving wheat and barley is so much a part of Panneterie's existence that this threat becomes an alimentary approximation of “You're going to feel this every time you sit down.” Cuisine gives Eschançonnerie a clout with a “cuiller” and threatens: “Tant vous bateray vostre pel / Que il faudra de vin un baril / Pour vous getter de ce peril” (442-46). If the spoon is Cuisine's weapon, then the wine is Eschançonnerie's defence—her life-blood, her antiseptic, and her consolation.

Sausserie, like Cuisine, begins her participation in the actual fray with a reproach. But it is a half-hearted one, degenerating into a threat before the sentence is finished:

C'est mal fait, vueillez tout laissier,
Dame Cuisine, a ma requeste,
Ou vous arez par mi la teste
Incontinent de ce pilet.

(448-51)

From now on, the pestle, earlier a secret to Sausserie's magic (397), will be her particular weapon.

Cuisine's retort involves an oath by “Saint Poul”—no doubt not only a slight deformation of the spelling of “Saint Paul,” but also an evocation of chicken¹⁴—and a likening of Sausserie to an “ors moustardiers.” It is significant that, in the list of elaborate sauces that Sausserie has already given (346-54), neither mustard nor any preparation involving it has figured at all. Mustard was, as Deschamps's own “Ballade IV:780” indicates, the most ubiquitous of seasonings, especially in certain regions, and everywhere it was regarded as the “poor man's pepper” (Henisch 102ff.). Grinding mustard was also a popular metaphor for sexual intercourse (Deschamps “VI:1227”). Hence, calling Sausserie a mustard-pot is reducing her to the most plebeian roots of her real function, and also making a sexual slur on her reputation.

The brawl scene in the “Dit des.IIII. offices” is a piece of virtuoso writing, in which the language of food and drink make the action of physical conflict especially vivid. At the end of the piece, however, there is a summary resolution, brought about by the maître d'hôtel appearing like a deus ex culina. He turns a negative dispute into a positive reconciliation, a set of diverse elements into a meal:

Bien sçay que l'Eschançonnerie
A grant pouoir par son donner,
Et le Pain fait a honourer;
La Cuisine fait chaude bouche;
Si fait la Sausse, qui y touche,
Bonne saveur avoir aux dens.
Advis m'est que ce sera sens
Que vous soiez amis tous quatre,
Et ne vueillez plus debatre,
Car il ne fut ne hui ne hier
Que l'un n'eust de l'autre mestier.
Souffise a chascun son estat;
N'aiez plus ensemble debat:
Departez vous en bonne paix.

TOUS QUATRE

Nous le voulons, acors est fais.
Chantons donc a chiere lie,
Sanz plus debatre ne tenser:
Avec bonne compaignie
Fait il bon joye mener.

(470-88)

So it is that various kinds of food and drink, having stepped out of their ordinary positions in daily life to animate the conflict by claiming star status for themselves, return docilely to cooperative roles dedicated to the pleasure of humankind. (It may be that even within this festive frame, we hear an echo of Deschamps the moralist: “Souffis a chascun son estat” is a message he presents directly elsewhere—and an anticipation of the sixteenth-century Condamnation du Banquet). The song which ends the play can be compared to the snippets of religious music which conclude some of the Miracles de Notre Dame and other early theatre; it is a confirmation of the piece's status as a performable work that is perhaps a parody of serious drama. The incongruity of moral claims made by figures representing the satisfaction of physical needs ensures that this battle remains firmly in the realm of carnivalesque comedy.

“CONTRE LE CARêME” (III:350)

Deschamps's most famous poem against Lent, “Chanson Royale III:350,” also releases food and drink temporarily from their ordinary places in human existence. In this case, however, the significance accorded various unpleasant foodstuffs for the duration of Lent reflects how most people, especially the less privileged, came to regard them over that purgatorial season of monotonous meals. The poem is a re-working of the allegorical battle of Lent and Carnival, which had already had several literary manifestations by Deschamps's time.¹⁵ The particular emphasis Deschamps gives to the misery of the poor—as the main sufferers in a conflict between two great powers—may in fact reflect a broader social reality: the real-life deprivations of the Hundred Years War. Subjected alternately to siege warfare and the ravages of the marauding routiers, the pauvres gens all too often found their food supply in danger of becoming as uncertain and as unpalatable as at Lent. (Deschamps specifically addresses the subject of their ongoing dietary hardship elsewhere, for example in “Ballade III:359”).

The role of food and drink in the poem is more than just documentary of Lenten experience, however. Alimentary imagery shapes the progress and breaking of the siege that Caresme mounts against Charnage and Mardi Gras. The alimentary allusions in this poem are of two types: allegorical abstractions relating to food practices, and lists of actual foods eaten during meat-time and Lent. Only Caresme, Charnage and Mardi Gras are consistently personified; other animate characters in the poem are real people, albeit for the most part of humble status. Thus, like the “Dit,” the chanson royale constitutes an allegory that is thoroughly integrated into the human world, though on this occasion the context is far more generalized than that of the noble households. In contrast to the scenario of some other Lent-Carnival battles, the foods themselves remain inanimate: weapons or dishes, but not soldiers. However, because the personified characters are not depicted in any physical way, the lists of foods also substitute for detailed portraits of their governing abstractions.

The poem incorporates some 51 different “real” foodstuffs, with allusions in every stanza, including the envoy. They form a logical progression, taking the poem from meat-time through Lent and back again. From the simple, colourful raw ingredients (many still “on the hoof,” potential food) of the first stanza which people are forced to abandon, we move to the drab vegan assortment of stanza two, requiring the drudgery of long cooking, and featuring such unappetizing staples as “huile de chenevis” (hemp oil), “[n]oix moysies” (mouldy walnuts) and “pain faitis” (coarse, third-class bread) (see Desportes 97). In stanza three, Caresme becomes more pressing: instead of just forcing people to cultivate their own dreary diet, he assaults them with even less attractive ammunition:

Harens puans, poissons de mer pourris,
Purée et pois et feves en un tas,
Pommes cuites, orge mondé et ris.

(22-24)

Not only does Deschamps exploit the alliterative plosives and rough rhythms of the passage to enhance the impression of aggressive attack, he also seems to have evoked smells and textures deliberately. Since the foods named constitute Caresme's “artillerie,” there is a suggestion here of external administration of food—something akin to the “food fight” in the “Dit”—and in such a situation, odour and feel would be more important than taste.

Food does not remain outside for long, however. Caresme moves on to a kind of direct interference with the natural condition of the human digestive system:

Dieux! qu'il a fait de mal aux moines gris
Et aux Chartreux, maintes religions!
Toudis leur fait june et afflictions,(16)
Et a pluseurs tenir povre mesnaige,
Le ventre emfler souvent par ses poissons.
Maudit soit il, et benoit soit Charnaige.
Aux bien peuz fait avoir ventres plas,
Il vuide ceuls que j'avoie raemplis,
Souppe a huile leur donne et l'avenas,
Corde leur çaint, trop leur est ennemis.

(25-34)

Thus disagreeable food becomes Caresme's instrument of torture, bloating some bellies with indigestible fare, emptying others.

Ultimately, however, Caresme is bound to be overthrown. In stanza five, Charnage appears with a triumphal feast, including foods as appropriate to meat-time as those in stanza one, but more obviously prepared. What Deschamps provides in these lines is, in effect, a sketch of an actual dinner menu:

[…] car le dimanche es plas
Yert Charnaige avec ses bons amis;
Harens seront, figues, raisins honnis;
Porrée au lart, pastez, la ne faillons,
Connins, cabriz, oes, tartes et flaons.

(43-47)

Lent's ubiquitous herrings, figs and raisins will be humiliated, predicts Mardi Gras, by the heartening entrance of more tempting foods. “Porrée” (pureed vegetables) is not particularly exotic, but it will be dressed up with bacon just emerging from its forty-day ban. “Pastez” have been associated elsewhere in Deschamps (“Ballade IV:798”) with all the small delights of Paris, and here, along with “tartes” and “flaons,” they represent carefully-made parcels of gustatory pleasure, as opposed to the bland, unadorned dishes that have plagued Lenten tables. “Connins,” “cabriz” and “oes” are all aristocratic foods,¹⁷ and the first of the three also has strong sexual connotations, appropriate to the licentious celebrations that prevailed in medieval communities before and after Lent. There is alliteration in these lines, but it is not so intense as in lines 22-24, and it is lightened by sharp changes in vowels that follow the initial consonants: po to pa, co to ca. The emphasis is on variety rather than on an oppressive sameness. All in all, this passage underlines the impression that the struggle is past, and that the festivities can take over.

The envoy, in terms of content, acts as a summary of what has gone before: suffering caused by the deprivations of Lent will be succeeded by the triumph of meat-time. But the grip on the allegory has been abruptly loosened, or rather, the allegory has been relegated to the rank of illustrative procedure, rather than independent fiction. “Nous”—the people of reality—have replaced “Mardi Gras,” “Charnage” and the faceless “povres gens” of the poem. Instead of being besieged and taking revenge, this “nous” will suffer patiently. The envoy, in fact, frames the content of the rest of the poem as a self-conscious piece of rhetoric, rather than a skilfully imagined and maintained drama (a procedure analogous to the conclusion of the “Dit”).

This leads us to what Deschamps may really be trying to show about Lent, not just here, but within a range of poems dealing with fasting.¹⁸

It is for his anti-Lenten, anti-fasting poems that Deschamps is most often remembered. They entertain through their vivid images—gustatory, olfactory, tactile—and through their tone of complaint. It is enlightening and enjoyable for us to measure modern eating habits against discriminating medieval palates and sensitive medieval stomachs. And although all three anti-Lenten poems focus on Lent, their prevailing mentality belongs to flesh-time. They are preoccupied with food, bodily experience, material existence. Two of the three (350 and 20) express gloating triumph at Lent's downfall, thus epitomising the carnivalesque spirit which was allowed, briefly, to overturn Christian order. From our secular point of view, it is easier to respond to such poetry than to religious lyrics.

Deschamps's approach to fasting and Lent is not only secular, however. “Rondeau 625” and “chanson royale 352” present Christian self-restraint in a completely different light. “625” is a stern exhortation to keep Ember Day fasts, but “352” is about Lent, and a very close partner to “350.” Instead of emphasising the practice of Lent, it stresses its purpose. Its recurrent themes are purgation, redemption, divine mercy.

Both pro-fasting poems are virtually free of allusions to literal food and drink, though they do allude to doing without them. In “352,” however, there is spiritual food: the fruit by which Eve wrought “nostre dampnation” (11-12)—and “drink”: the fountain of divine love “dont li ruisseaulx rescuscite les mors” (36-38). Taken as a pair, “350” “against” Lent and “352” “for” it exemplify the dichotomy of food in late medieval literature: it can be the most concrete, most realistic of image, or part of a surreal, mystical construction.

The poems against Lent are reinterpretations of Carnival; the body triumphs and spiritual concerns are forgotten. The poems in praise of fasting, on the other hand, are Lent. In them, the human body appears only in the most distant, transformed guises, as if it has been humiliated out of existence through obedience to divine law. In poems “X:20” and “III:350,” a conventional war against Lent is fought and won, for the opponent's only powers are unpleasant physical ones. But the poems defending Lent scorn such a struggle: purged, themselves, of food weapons, they represent Lent as a much more formidable force against the pleasures of meat-time, one whose strength, exemplified by the Church militant and spiritual refreshment, comes from an entirely different source.

Thus, the two thematic types act as adversaries of one another. The battle in “III:350” is only really a struggle within a struggle, subsumed into the debate of whether the physical or the spiritual should govern human existence. If there is no declared winner in this debate, nevertheless the poems that avoid entanglements with food, signs of corporeal dependency, are the ones whose message asks to be taken more seriously. Deschamps's own retreat from wholehearted immersion in comic allegory at the end of “350” seems evidence that he sees complaints against Lent as joking ways of boosting morale, and of developing the cantankerous aspects of his own poetic persona—but never of making a serious challenge to the principle behind it all.

Because of the frequency with which food and drink make an appearance in Deschamps's works—allusions are present in about one-fifth of his poems—there is a tendency for the modern reader to simplify his poetic persona as part social historian, part proto-Rabelaisian bon viveur.¹⁹ To do so, however, is to ignore the importance of both the moral thrust of his work and its “musique naturele.”

Deschamps's alimentary images do, in themselves, reflect contemporary life and beliefs, and create illusions of positive or negative abundance. But they are also carefully controlled by the poet. In the texts that have been examined here, they help map out the development of each work; they participate in the build-up to the battle, and in its execution. They underline the physicality of daily life, whether at court or in the broader context of society, not only by drawing attention to consumption, but also by having bodily concerns literally escape control, whether in the brawl of the “Dit” or in the Lenten tyranny endured in the ballade. As they dominate their own characters, allegorical or human, they impose themselves on the reader as well, using vivid language, including wordplay and effects of sound, to promote reactions of delight or disgust.

Food and drink in allegorical satire in Deschamps thus play an essential role in developing the lightweight, sensory appeal of these pieces. Taste here is ultimately an affair of entertainment, not edification. But the insertion of food images into an allegorical framework indicates a deep-seated respect on the part of the poet for the prevailing order of his day—social, spiritual, moral, and literary. In creating comic allegory, Deschamps plays with tradition, but does not challenge it. The alimentary anarchy of the “Dit des.III. offices” and the chanson royale “Contre le carême” is exuberant, but fleeting.

Notes

1. Questions of the relationship between food and literature, with particular reference to medieval texts, are discussed in Black 1993.

2. All references to works by Deschamps will be identified by volume, item number, and brief title (titles were mainly assigned by the manuscript's nineteenth-century editors; italics will be used where the title given is original to the manuscript).

3. “Ballade V:925,” “Deschamps demande conseil à maître Matthieu et à maître Regnault,” speaks of the ideal wine to counteract summer heat:

   —Maistre, et quel vin?—Au froit faictes l'assault,
   Qui soit raiant, gracieus, vert, claret,
   Frique, friant, odorant, vermillet …

   (12-14)

   “Ballade VII:1374,” “De la verdure des vins,” on the other hand, criticises the present-year's immature wine with a series of metaphors for raw, brutal taste, beginning with “Planne d'acier dont l'en fait les cerciaulx …” (1).

4. “Ballade VII:1272,” “Comment chascun veult mangier des trippes,” presents an exuberant, ambivalent celebration of tripe (i.e. offal) worthy of Rabelais himself.

5. “Ballade II:215,” “Contre les truffes,” lashes out against the modish but unhealthy truffle; “Ballade VI:1236” against filthy pork meat.

6. Deschamps frequently uses food images to satirise a foreign (and therefore inadequate or even appalling) eating experience. Bliggerstorfer has listed and discussed the pieces employing this technique (360-62). See also my own discussion of images—often alimentary—of alien cultures in Black 1995.

7. For example, in “Virelai IV:559,” “Demande d'amour à une dame”:

   Faictes mon triste cuer gay,
   De vo douce norreture
   Par doulx octroy que je n'ay;
   Lors aray douce pasture …

   (5-8)

   The (female) love object as a spiritual food/drink is a medieval commonplace, used for example by Thibaut de Champagne (Chanson XXIV, stanza 3) and the writer of an anonymous chanson de croisade; see The Penguin Book of French Verse I:114.

8. The refrain of “Ballade V:1049,” “Allégorie à la vigne,” urges the young king Charles VI to “Muez vostre verdeur en vin.”

9. “Rondeau VII:1273,” “Les tripes ne sont pas un mets délicat,” presents another intriguing depiction of offal, this time mixed up with the vocabulary of writing, creation, pleasure and putrifaction.

10. “Ballade X:25” of the attributed pieces, which opens: “De couperos, d'alun, de vers de gris …,” is largely made up of a collection of disgusting or poisonous substances the author suggests should be served to “mesdisans” (see Spilsbury).

11. Ethnologist Jean-Loic Le Quellec spoke on parallels between classical, religious and folkloric traditions, as exemplified in the festivals of medieval France and reflected in the texts of Rabelais, in a talk at the Alliance Française, Halifax, April 1997. See also Davis 101-109.

12. Courtly literature—epic, romance or lyric—tends to avoid references to realistic food, preferring only rare symbolic images, and Panneterie and Eschançonnerie appear to wish they could do likewise. Of course they cannot keep this up: the ironic humour of the situation derives from the fact that they could not exist without the bodily needs whose existence they strive to minimise. Perhaps Deschamps is hinting that the court itself cannot exist on artifice alone.

13. “Premeraine” can be taken in the sense of “first” or “most noble/important’.” Desportes points out that “[a]uprès du roi, la paneterie était le premier des six offices de l'hôtel, avant l'échansonnerie, la cuisine de char et de poisson, l'écurie et la fourrière” (139). Desportes also quotes from the sixteenth-century treatise, L'agriculture et maison rustique: “Il est tout à fait certain que le pain tient premier rang entre les choses qui donnent nourriture à l'homme […]. C'est le dernier appétit perdu et le premier recouvré en maladie; en santé, c'est le premier et le dernier manger, plaisant et agréable en toutes sortes de repas” (7). Although Deschamps has Paneterie assert her supremacy on the grounds of moderation and suffisaunce (115-21), he sets aside both official and nutritional idées reçues concerning the importance of bread in exchange for the freedom of writing the “Dit” without indicating a standard favorite.

14. The idea of foods as saints and martyrs is exploited thoroughly in the sermons joyeux (see the Recueil de sermons joyeux).

15. The best-known of these can be found in the thirteenth-century Bataille de Carême et de Charnage, but Deschamps's poem fits into a tradition of texts ranging from courtly lyric to street drama, and continuing until at least the seventeenth century (see Grinberg and Kinser).

16. A reference to the year-round rigorous cycles of fasting and abstinence within certain religious orders, here depicted as unpleasant as a prolonged Lent.

17. Recipes for all three appear in the most popular court recipe collection of the time, Le Viandier de Taillevent.

18. The others are “Ballade VI:1198” and “Ballade X:20” in the appendix of attributed pieces (both anti-fast), and “Rondeau IV:625” and “Ballade III:352” (both supporting such Church-imposed times of restraint).

19. Martineau underlines the importance of Deschamps as a physical character in his own work, and compares his alimentary lexicon to that of Rabelais (51, 70).

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