7 - After Deschamps: Chaucer’s French Fame

Summary

Lenvoy

Poete hault, loenge d’escuiye,

En ton jardin ne seroie qu’ortie:

Considere ce que j’ay dit premier,

Ton noble plant, ta douce melodie,

Mais pour scavoir, de rescripre te prie

Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier!

[Envoi High poet, pride of the English squires, I would be just a nettle in your garden: remember what I mentioned at the beginning about your noble plant, and your sweet melody but write me back, so that I really know it: Great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer!]

Eustache Deschamps’ balade, dedicated, in the early 1390s, to the ‘grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier’, has weighted status as the ‘first’ of all literary references to Chaucer. That it was written in French has contributed to the complexity of the poem's modern reception. In 1925 Caroline Spurgeon wrote of Deschamps’ ‘charming greeting’ that: ‘It is curious that the earliest tribute of praise to Chaucer as a poet should have been written by a Frenchman.’ The provenance of the balade has added considerably to its twentieth- and twenty-first-century appeal. As Derek Brewer put it, some fifty years after Spurgeon: ‘what other English author has been so heartily praised by a French contemporary?’

Yet critics have rarely taken the ‘Frenchness’ of Deschamps’ poem as a point of departure for assessment of Chaucer's renown beyond England and the Middle Ages. How might audiences in France from the late fourteenth century onwards have come into contact with the English poet's writing, or – often more crucially in the French context – his name? Names themselves, bearers of fame and infamy, have a lasting impact on developing narratives of literary history and disputes over cultural patrimony, from the Middle Ages to modernity. A crucial aspect that has been missed in the long critical history of reading Deschamps’ balade to Chaucer is its emphasis on names and naming, and on Chaucer's name in particular. This begs the question: with what or with whom did other French readers, from the late fourteenth century onwards, associate Chaucer's name, and in what different contexts was it spoken? In this essay, the balade and the modern critical commentary that surrounds it provide both a point of departure and an analytical frame for assessing Chaucer's reputation in late medieval and early modern France.