was destroyed during the Revolution. He died in
1319. He accompanied Saint Louis on his unfortunate crusade in 1248,
but not in his final and fatal expedition to Tunis. Most of the few
later events of his life known to us were connected with the
canonisation of the king; but he is known to have taken part in active
service when past his ninetieth year. His historical work, a biography
of St. Louis, deals chiefly with the crusade, and is one of the most
circumstantial records we have of mediaeval life and thought. It is of
much greater bulk than Villehardouin's _Conquete_, and is composed upon
a different principle, the author being somewhat addicted to gossip and
apt to digress from the main course of his narrative. It has, however,
to be remembered that Joinville's first object was not, like
Villehardouin's, to give an account of a single and definite enterprise,
but to display the character of his hero, to which end a certain amount
of desultoriness was necessary and desirable. His style has less vigour
than that of his countryman and predecessor, but it has more grace. It
is evident that Joinville occasionally set himself with deliberate
purpose to describe things in a literary fashion, and his interspersed
reflections on manners and political subjects considerably increase the
material value of his work. It is unfortunate that nothing like a
contemporary manuscript has come down to us, the earliest in existence
being one of the late fourteenth century, when considerable changes had
passed over the language. With the aid of some contemporary documents on
matters of business which Joinville seems to have dictated, M. de Wailly
has effected an exceedingly ingenious conjectural restoration of the
text of the book, but the interest of this is in strictness diminished
by the fact that it is undoubtedly conjectural. The period of
composition of Joinville's book was somewhat late in his life,
apparently in the first years of the fourteenth century, and about 1310
he presented it to Louis le Hutin, though it does not appear what became
of the manuscript.

The period between Joinville and Froissart is peculiarly barren in
chronicles. Besides the serial publications already noticed, the
_Chroniques de France_ and the _Chroniques de Flandre_, there are
perhaps only two which are worth mentioning. The first is a _Chronique
des Quatre Premiers Valois_, written with exactness and careful
attention to authentic sources of informat