history, application and
genius, yet I can put to my credit a year of active, if eccentric,
experience in a French barrack room, and a complete segregation during
those twelve memorable months wherein I could study the very soul of
this sincere, creative, and tenacious people.

Your learning, my singular adventure, have increased in us, it must be
confessed, a permanent and reasoned admiration for this people's
qualities. Such an attitude of mind is rare enough and often dangerous:
it is but a qualification the more for beginning the work. It permits us
to follow the main line of the past of the French, to comprehend and not
to be troubled by the energy of their present, to catch the advancing
omens of their future.

Indeed, if anything of France is to be explained in English and to
people reading English, I could not desire a better alliance than yours
and mine.

But if you ask me why the Renaissance especially--or why in the
Renaissance these six poets alone--should have formed the subject of my
first endeavour, I can only tell you that in so vast a province, whereof
the most ample leisure could not in a lifetime exhaust a tithe, Chance,
that happy Goddess, led me at random to their groves.

Whether it will be possible to continue such interpretation I do not
know, but if it be so possible, I know still less what next may be put
into my hands: Racine, perhaps, may call me, or those forgotten men who
urged the Revolution with phrases of fire.

H. BELLOC.
CHELSEA, _January, 1904._

CHARLES OF ORLEANS.

I put down Charles of Orleans here as the first representative of that
long glory which it is the business of this little book to recall: but
to give him such a place at the threshold requires some apology.

The origins of a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal
or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not
indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a
shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion,
unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest,
a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures
appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort
is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of
the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy
from its social condition) denie