d as a
child, where she had learned to know the famous men through whose aid
Charles V. had well-nigh regenerated France. It is not surprising that
Philippe de Bourgogne should think of her as specially fitted to
undertake a task requiring intimate knowledge of that king and his time.
The duke, sending for her one day as she sat in the midst of a pile of
books, pen in hand, asked her to undertake the writing of a life of his
great brother.

With ready devotion she set about writing the life of Charles V., of the
king who, "when I was a child, gave me my bread." In due time her book,
_Le Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V._, was completed;
but he for whom she had written it had died in 1404, before half was
done. The loss of her generous friend and protector was a serious blow
to the poetess. Her mother had also died; while Christine must plod
wearily on, though "her heart was filled with joy when she remembered
that the day was not very far off when she herself would go to join the
loved ones."

The history of Charles V. is a work of which one hardly knows what to
say. As history, it is manifestly a failure, for Christine had either no
wish or no opportunity to present facts in a narrative at once accurate,
detailed, and clear; her work lacks both the accuracy and the breadth of
view of genuine history; it is rather, as one critic remarks, an
_eloge_, a eulogy upon Charles V.--which, indeed, had been what Philippe
desired. The book is in prose, and though the style lacks the clearness
and vividness to which we are accustomed in such men of genius as
Villehardouin, Joinville, and her own contemporary, Froissart, we must
remember that these men had reached the high-water mark of French style,
not to be equalled, in sober truth, till the Renaissance, the "New
Birth," had regenerated the fallen life and literature of Europe. As
prose of the early fifteenth century, Christine's work is better than
any other then written, except that of Froissart; and not a little of
his charm comes less from the style than from the matters of which he
chose to write. There is in Christine's book little of the gorgeousness
of chivalry: was not the king in whose praise she wrote a king who won
his battles at the council table, while Du Guesclin, upon the field of
battle, gave the hard knocks which his sovereign, weak and sickly, could
neither give nor take? Where Christine does succeed is in her portraits
of the king and his c