Deschamps, EUSTACHE

Deschamps, EUSTACHE, a French poet, who was born at Vertus, in Champagne, in 1328. He was educated at Orléans University, and was in the course of his life a soldier, a magistrate, a court favourite, and a traveller in Italy and Hungary. He held several important posts in his native province, but his possessions were ravaged by the English, and he seems to have been a poor man when he died in 1415. He was both a popular and voluminous writer. He composed 1175 ballades, a multitude of rondeaux, virelais, and other lyrics, besides a long poem of 13,000 lines, entitled the Miroir de Mariage—his works in all amounting to more than 100,000 lines. Deschamps was an ardent patriot, in whose verse hatred of the English and of the native oppressors of the French poor finds repeated and bitter expression. His thought is, as a rule, grave and dignified, but his style is somewhat wanting in elegance and ease. Occasionally, however, as in his lament for Du Guesclin, his verse is both graceful and touching; and in one at least of his pieces, an apologue exposing the exactions of the rich, he gives proof of a grim and trenchant satiric faculty. The edition of his Poéties Morales, edited by M. Crokelet (1832), is superseded by the complete edition for the Old French Text Society by the Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire (1878-95). See the monograph by Sarradin (1878), and Besant's Early French Poets (1868).