e of
Louis himself; the _Conseil_, a treatise on law by Pierre de Fontaines,
who died in 1289, and the _Coutumes du Beauvoisis_ of Philippe de
Beaumanoir, who wrote in 1283. The legal literature of the fourteenth
century is abundant, but possesses considerably less interest.

[Sidenote: Miscellanies and Didactic Works.]

Last of all, before coming to prose fiction, a vast if not very
interesting class of miscellaneous prose work must be mentioned. The
word class has been used, but perhaps improperly, for classification is
almost impossible. Books of accounts and domestic economy of all sorts
(generally called _livres de raison_) were very common; treatises of all
kinds of more general character on household management abounded. We
have a _Menagier de Paris_, a _Viandier de Paris_, both of the
fourteenth century. But much earlier the orderly and symmetrical spirit
which has always distinguished the French makes itself apparent in
literature. The _Livre des Metiers de Paris_ of Etienne Boileau, dating
from the thirteenth century, gives a complete idea of the organisation
of guilds and trades at that time. An innumerable multitude of treatises
on the minor morals, on love, on manners, exists in manuscript, and in
rare instances in print. The _Tresors_, or compendious encyclopaedias,
which have already been noticed in verse, began in the thirteenth
century to be composed in prose, the most remarkable being that of
Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who avowedly used French as his
vehicle of composition, because it was the most commonly read of
European languages. This book was written apparently about or before
1270. Nor did the separate arts lack illustration in prose. Medicine and
alchemy, astronomy and poetry, war and chess, had their treatises, while
Bestiaries and Lapidaries are almost as numerous in prose as in verse.
Finally, there is the important category of books of travel. There are a
certain number of voyages to the Holy Land[143]; some miscellaneous
travels mostly, though not universally, translated from the Latin; and
last, but not least, the great book of Marco Polo, which seems to have
been written originally in French, the author, when in captivity at
Genoa, having dictated it to Rusticien of Pisa, who also figures as a
compiler of late versions of the Arthurian legend, and who thus had some
skill in French composition.

[Sidenote: Fiction]

The prose fiction of the period has been kept to the last,