Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/768

 734 JOINVILLE king on his last and fatal expedition. Some years later, in 1282, he was one of the witnesses whose testimony was formally given at St Denis in the matter of the canonization of Louis, and long afterwards, in 1298, being then a man of more than seventy years, he was present at the exhuma tion of the saint s body. It was not till even later that he began his literary work, the occasion being a request from Jeanne of Navarre, the wife of Philippe le Bel and the mother of Louis le Hutin. The great interval between his experiences and the period of the composition of his history is important for the due comprehension of the latter. Books were not hastily written in those days, and some years passed before the task was completed, on its own showing, in October 1309. Jeanne was by this time dead, and Joinville presented his book to her son Louis the Quarreller. This the original manuscript is now lost, whereby hangs a tale. Great as was his age, Joinville had not ceased to be actively loyal, and in 1315, being then almost ninety, he complied with the royal summons to bear arms against the Flemings. He was at Joinville again in 1317, and on the llth July 1319 he died at the age of ninety-five, leaving his possessions and his position as seneschal of Champagne to his second son Anselm. He was buried in the neighbouring church of St Laurent, where during the Revolution his bones underwent the usual pro fanation. In the next generation but one his male heirs failed, and the fief passed by marriage through the house of Lorraine to the Guises, and so to the house of Orleans. Besides his Histoire de Saint Louis and his Credo or &quot; Confession of Faith,&quot; written much earlier, a considerable number, relatively speaking, of letters and business documents concerning the fief of Joinville and so forth are extant. These have an importance which we shall consider further on ; but Joinville owes his place in general estimation only to his history of his crusading experiences and of the subsequent fate of his hero. Of the famous French history books of the Middle Ages Jomville s is beyond all doubt that which bears most vivid impress of the personal characteristics of its composer. It does not, like Villehardouin, give us the picture of the temper and habits of a whole order or cast of men during an heroic period of human history ; it falls far short of Froissart in vivid pourtraying of the picturesque and external aspects of social life ; but it is altogether a more personal book than either. As has been already noticed, the age and circumstances of the writer must not be forgotten in reading it. He is a very old man telling of circumstances which occurred in his youth. He evidently thinks that the times have not changed for the better what with the frequency with which the devil is invoked in modern France, and the sinful expenditure common in the matter of embroidered silk coats. But his laudation of times past concentrates itself almost wholly on the person of the sainted king whom, while with feudal independence he had declined to swear fealty to him, &quot; because I was not his man,&quot; he evidently regarded with an unlimited reverence. His age, too, while it is garrulous to a degree, seems to have been entirely free from the slightest taint of boasting. No one perhaps ever took less trouble to make himself out a hero than Joinville. He is constantly admitting that on such and such an occasion he was terribly afraid ; he confesses without the least shame that, when one of his followers suggested defiance of the Saracens and voluntary death, he (Joinville) paid not the least attention to him ; nor does he attempt to gloss in any way his refusal to accompany St Louis on his unlucky second crusade, or his invincible conviction that it was better to be in mortal sin than to have the leprosy, or his decided preference for wine as little watered as might be, or any other weakness. Yet he was a sincerely religious man, as the curious Credo written at Acre and forming a kind of anticipated appendix to the history seems sufficiently to show. He presents him self as an altogether human person, brave enough in the field, and at least when young capable of extravagant devo tion to an ideal, provided the ideal was fashionable, but having at bottom a sufficient respect for his own skin and a full consciousness of the side on which his bread is buttered. Nor can he be said to be in all respects an in telligent traveller. There were in him what may be called glimmerings of deliberate literature, but they were hardly more than glimmerings. His famous description of Greek fire has a most provoking mixture of circumstantial detail with absence of verifying particulars. It is as matter of fact and comparative as Dante, without a touch of Dante s genius. &quot; The fashion of Greek fire was such that it came to us as great as a tun of verjuice, and the fiery tail of it was as big as a mighty lance ; it made such noise in the coming that it seemed like the thunder from heaven, and looked like a dragon flying through the air ; so great a light did it throw that throughout the host men saw as though it were day for the light it threw.&quot; Certainly the excellent seneschal has not stinted himself of comparisons here, yet they can hardly be said to be luminous. That the thing made a great flame, a great noise, and struck terror into the beholder, is about the sum of it all. Every now and then indeed a striking circumstance, strikingly told, occurs in Joinville, such as the famous incident of the woman who carried in one hand a chafing dish of fire, in the other a phial of water, that she might burn heaven and quench hell, lest in future any man should serve God merely for hope of the one or fear of the other. But in these cases the author only repeats what he has heard from others. On his own account he is much more interested in small personal details than in greater things. How the Saracens, when they took him prisoner, he being half dead with a complication of diseases, kindly left him &quot; un mien couverture d ecarlate &quot; which his mother had given him, and which he put over him, having made a hole therein and bound it round him with a cord ; how when he came to Acre in a dilapidated condition an old servant of his house presented himself, and &quot; brought me clean white hoods and combed my hair most comfortably &quot; ; how lie bought a hundred tuns of wine and served it the best first, according to high authority well-watered to his private soldiers, somewhat less watered to the squires, and to the knights neat, but with a suggestive phial of the weaker liquid to mix &quot;si comme ils vouloient,&quot; these are the details in which he seems to take greatest pleasure, and for readers six hundred years after date perhaps they are not the least interesting details. It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Joinville s book is exclusively or even mainly a chronicle of small beer. If he is not a Villehardouin or a Carlyle, his battlepieces are vivid and truthful, and he has occasional passages of no small episodic importance, such as that dealing with the Old Man of the Mountain. But, above all, the central figure of his book redeems it from the possibility of the charge of being commonplace or ignoble. To St Louis Joinville is a nobler Boswell ; and hero- worshipper, hero, and heroic ideal, all have something of the sublime about them. The very pettiness of the details in which the good seneschal indulges as to his own weak nesses only serves to enhance the sublime unworlclliness of the king. Joinville is a better warrior than Louis, but, while the former frankly prays for his own safety, the latter only thinks of his army s when they have escaped from the hands of the aliens. One of the king s knights boasts that ten thousand pieces have been &quot; forconte&quot;s &quot; (counted short) to the Saracens ; and it is with the utmost trouble that Joinville and the rest can persuade the king that this is a