Like his contemporaries Antoine de Nervèze and François du Souhait, Des Escuteaux is one of the authors most often associated with the so-called "sentimental novel" (or "amours") published during the reign of Henry IV of France.
Occasionally however, Des Escuteaux abandons the adventurous tradition for more realistic situations, such as portraying Italian courtly marriage alliances (Clarimond et Antonide) or the impact of the unintended killing of an uncle on the family of the beloved (Lydiam et Floriande).
Des Escuteaux's novels take place in a variety of far-flung settings and historical periods (including in France during the reign of Charles VII of France, the Baltic under the Vandals, Armenia and Cappadocia, and the Eastern coast of Africa (Sofala)) and generally feature a sublimely beautiful virgin lady (whose beauty drives men crazy) and a noble knight who is trying to rescue her.
In a few of his novels, Des Escuteaux abandons the idealized portrait of his female characters and portrays them as flighty, vicious or cruel (vain and avaricious mothers who seek socially advantageous marriages for their daughters are a preferred target of his criticism).
In the first half of the 17th century, Des Escuteaux was often grouped with Nervèze by critics (such as Charles Sorel) who decried their stylized, rhetorically ornate and metaphoric language, but he is an essential figure in the development of language (prefiguring the Précieuses) and the novel in France and had a direct influence on Madeleine de Scudéry and other novelists in the 1640s.