Eustache Deschamps
Eustache Deschamps (* 1345 in Vertus / Champagne, † 1404), also known as Eustache Morel, was a French poet. He is regarded as the most important French poets of the second half of the 14th century.
Life and work
Deschamps was perhaps a nephew of Guillaume de Machaut, but in any case a time his pupil at the cathedral school of Reims. He studied law at Orléans and became, thanks to his talents as a poet and as an entertainer in 1368 the patronage of King Charles V, and after his death ( 1380 ) of Charles VI. and especially of its kunstliebendem and ambitious younger brother Duke Louis d' Orléans, where he served from 1390. From its patrons he was assigned several smaller royal offices, of which he and his children (his wife died young in 1376 after the birth of the third child ) could live passable, even if he frequently complained. In 1389 he was raised to the seigneur de Barbonval and thus ennobled. He mostly stayed in Paris at the court, but was also traveling a lot with his princes and for them. So it was 1384/85 member of a diplomatic mission to Hungary and Croatia, in 1397 he traveled as an ambassador of Louis d' Orléans to Moravia. By 1400 he withdrew more and more back, in poor health and unhappy with the power struggles at court, where different cliques, not the least of his patron Louis, tried to manipulate the intermittently insane king.
As a poet, Deschamps was in the succession of Guillaume de Machaut. With about 1500 poems preserved in all then current generation, most notably over 1100 ballads and the 200 rondeaus on many subjects, he was one of the most prolific and thematically, formally and stylistically innovative poet of the French Middle Ages. His influence on the authors next to him, for example, Geoffrey Chaucer, and after him was large and continued until well into the 15th century, such as Christine de Pizan and François Villon.
While his poems dedicated to the theme of love usually remain rather conventional, his moral and social problems, such as those of the court life, dedicated lyrics seem (mostly ballads ) very personal. Highly regarded by his contemporaries were his philosophical, didactic and satirical ballads.
A central theme Deschamps ' is the decline of France by the death of Charles V. after repeated outbreaks of the Hundred Years War. In a ballad he laments about how ( 1380 ) and his own country residence was ransacked and burned down near his birthplace of Vertus English soldiery. In the remaining fragment allegorical poetry & La Fiction du lion, where he represents France as impotent Lions and England as agile leopards, he laments the notorious weakness of France under Charles VI. Another political issue, namely the Great Schism in the Catholic church, he treats in La Complainte de l' Eglise désolée ( " action of the desolate Church," 1393 ).
In his last years he worked on the unfinished satirical poetry & Le Miroir du mariage ( " marriage mirror " ), where he ( most likely this ) marriage discusses the pros and cons.
Deschamps is also interesting as the author of the first written in French poetry ( poetry teaching), L'art de dictier et de fere chançons, ballades, virelais et rondeaux ( 1392 ), a compilation of rules and recipes for writing metric bound texts. It comes to him more on the " musique naturelle " of the language as the " musique Artificielle " of the melody, for he was one of the first, which largely gave up a setting and musical accompaniment lyrical text.