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Rh Crapelet in 1832, preceded by a literary and historical monograph. The value of his writings being recognized, another and more critical edition was brought out, in 1849, by M. Prosper Tarbe. The same editor published Le Miroir de Manage in 1865, and a long poem entitled Le Lay des douze Estats du Monde, in 1870. Deschamps excelled in the use of the ballad and chanson royal. In each of these forms of verse he was the greatest master of his time. One of his ballads is addressed to the English poet &quot; Geoffrey Chaucier,&quot; to whom he says Tu es d amours mondains dieux en Albie Et de la Rose en la terre Angelique. In Eustache Deschamps the modern language of France first found a pure lyrical expression ; his long life seems to connect the literature of Theobald IV. with that of Charles of Orleans.

 DESERT. See.

 DESFONTAINES, (1751-1833),French botanist, was a native of Brittany, born at Tremblay, in the department of Ile-et-Vilaine, in 1751 or 1752. He was sent to the town school, but made slow progress in learning, and was at length dismissed by the schoolmaster as a dullard and a robber of apple orchards. This treat ment left a life-long painful impression on his mind. At the college of Rennes, to which he was next sent, he applied himself heartily to study, and rejoiced in a success which falsified the judgment of his old master. From Rennes he passed to Paris, to study medicine ; but this soon became a secondary pursuit, his chief attention being drawn to the study of plants. At Paris he acquired the friendship of Lemonnier, physician to the king, and of Jussieu. At the age of thirty he took his degree of M.D., and in 1783 he was elected member of the Academy of Sciences. In the same year he set out for North Africa, and spent two years in a scientific exploration of Barbary. In 1785 he returned to Paris, bringing with him a large collection of plants, animals, and other objects illustra tive of natural history. The collection, it is stated, comprised 1600 species of plants, of which about 300 were described for the first time. His successful labours were rewarded, and a new congenial field of work was opened to him, by his nomination by Buff on to the post of pro fessor at the Jardin des Plantes, vacated in his favour by his friend Lemonnier. The garden, says one of his biographers, now became his world. His life was thence forth marked by few incidents. He devoted himself to his pupils, to his plants, and to the preparation of various botanical works. He purposed to publish a narrative of his African explorations, but the manuscript journal being lent to Lemonnier, and by him to the king, Louis XVI., was lost, and only a few fragments of the narrative appeared. His great work is entitled Flora Atlantica sive historia plantarum quae in Atlante, agro Tunetano et Algeriensi crescunt. It was published in 2 vols. 4to in 1798, and is esteemed for the singular clearness and precision of its descriptions and its nomenclature. Desfontaines, as a recluse student, escaped the perils of the Reign of Terror. On two occasions he courageously quitted his retirement to rescue the naturalists Ramond and Lheritier from prison and from death. He was admitted to the Legion of Honour at the time of its establishment. At the age of sixty-three he married a young wife, but the prospect of happiness thus opened was soon closed by her death. In 1831 he became blind, and was reduced to the recognition of his favourite plants by touch alone. Desfontaines was author of many valuable memoirs on vegetable anatomy and physiology, descriptions of new genera and species, &c., contributed to learned societies and scientific journals. One of the most important was the &quot; Memoir on the Organization of the Monocotyledons,&quot; which gave him a high place among discoverers. He published in 1804 a Tableau de I ecole botanique du museum d histoire naturelle de Paris, of which a third edition appeared in 1831, under the new title Catalogus Plantarum Horti Regii Parisiensis. His modesty, simplicity of life, and good humour endeared him to his friends and to his pupils. He died at Paris on the 16th November 1833, a daughter surviving him. His Barbary collection was bequeathed to the museum, and his general collection passed into the hands of the botanist Webb.

 DESHOULIÈRES, (1634-1694), a French poetess, born at Paris, was the daughter of the Chevalier de la Garde, maitre d hotel to the queens Mary de Medici and Anne of Austria. She received a careful and very complete education, acquiring while still young a knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and Italian, and studying prosody under the direction of the poet Hesnaut. At the age of eighteen she married the Seigneur Deshoulieres, who had soon afterwards to go abroad along with the prince of Conde on account of his complicity in the Fronde. Madame Deshoulieres returned for a time to the house of her parents, where she gave herself to writing poetry and studying the philosophy of Gassendi. She rejoined her husband at Rocroi, near Brussels, where, being distinguished for her personal beauty, she became the object of embarrassing attentions on the part of the prince of Conde, against which, how ever, she knew how to protect herself. Having made herself obnoxious to the Government by her urgent demand for the arrears of her husband s pay, she was imprisoned in the chateau of Wilworden, the hardships being increased by the refusal of all books except the Bible and some volumes of the fathers. After a few months she was freed by her husband, who attacked the chateau at the head of a small band of soldiers. A,n amnesty having been proclaimed, they returned to France, where Madame Deshoulieres soon became a conspicuous personage at the court of Louis XIV. and in literary society. She won the friendship and admiration of the most eminent literary men of the age some of her more zealous flatterers even going so far as to style her the tenth muse, and the French Calliope. Her poems were very numerous, and included specimens of nearly all the minor forms, odes, eclogues, idylls, elegies, chansons, ballads, madrigals, &c. Of these the idylls alone, and only some of them, have stood the test of time, the others being entirely forgotten. She wrote several dramatic works, the best of which do not rise to mediocrity, and the worst of which are worthy of the taste that could prefer the Phedre of Pradon to that of Racine. Voltaire pronounced her, nevertheless, the most successful of the female poets of France ; and her reputation with her contemporaries is indicated by her election as a member of the Academy of the Ricovrati of Padua, and of the Academy of Aries. In 1688 a pension of 2000 livres was bestowed upon her by the king, and she was thus raised from the poverty in which she had long lived. She died at Paris on the 17th February 1694. Complete editions of her works were published at Paris in 1797 and 1799. These include a few poems by her daughter Antoinette Therese Deshoulieres (1662-1718), who in herited her talent.

 DESIDERIO DA SETTIGNANO, sculptor, was born nearly at the beginning of the 15th century, and died in all probability in 1485. Vasari s statement, that he died at the age of twenty-eight, is altogether a mistake. Settignano is a village on the southern slope of the hill of Fiesole, still surrounded by the quarries of sandstone of which the hill is formed, and still inhabited, as it was 400 years ago, by a race of &quot; stone-cutters,&quot; several of whom, though not disdaining the title of &quot; lapicida,&quot; earned for themselves honoured places in the roll of Florentine 