On hearing of the Queen's death, Froissart settled in his own country
of Hainault. There he won favor from princes, as was his custom, by
giving them manuscripts of his chronicle, which was growing apace. By
the middle of 1373 we find him become a churchman and provided with a
living, in which he remained ten years, compiling fresh history and
correcting what he had already written and put in circulation. A
little later, 1376 to 1383, he made a more thorough revision of his
chronicle, going so far as to modify its spirit, which had been
favorable to English character and policy, and make it more agreeable
to partisans of France. Although Froissart was not a Frenchman, his
writings are all in the French language, which was of course his
native tongue.

About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at
Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he
observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them
immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were
however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388,
hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man
likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and
Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book
of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to
travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of
the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various
towns upon their route had suffered.

"At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they
pleased me much, and right well did I retain them all; and as
soon as I had dismounted at the hostelries along the road
which we traveled together, I wrote them down, at evening as
in the morning, to have a better record of them in times to
come; for there is nothing so retentive as writing."

Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months'
sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many
towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much
of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except
with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which
enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last
in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than
1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410.

It i