_A son bon signour Looys, Jehans sires de Joinville salut et amour;_
and immediately afterwards, _Chiers sire_, not _Chiers seigneur_.
If we compare this old French declension with the grammar of modern
French, we find that the accusative or the oblique form has become the
only recognized form, both in the singular and plural. Hence—
[Corone] [Ans] [Flors] [Chántere] le
chantre.
Corone An Flor Chanteór le
chanteur.
[Corones] [An] [Flors] [Chanteór].
Corones Ans Flors Chanteórs.
A few traces only of the old system remain in such words as _fils_,
_bras_, _Charles_, _Jacques_, etc.
Not less curious than the changes of form are the changes of meaning which
have taken place in the French language since the days of Joinville. Thus,
_la viande_, which now only means meat, is used by Joinville in its
original and more general sense of _victuals_, the Latin _vivenda_. For
instance (p. 248 D), “_Et nous requeismes que en nous donnast la viande_,”
“And we asked that one might give us something to eat.” And soon after,
“_Les viandes que il nous donnèrent, ce furent begniet de fourmaiges qui
estoient roti au soliel, pour ce que li ver n’i venissent, et oef dur __
cuit de quatre jours ou de cinc_,” “And the viands which they gave us were
cheese-cakes roasted in the sun, that the worms might not get at them, and
hard eggs boiled four or five days ago.”
_Payer_, to pay, is still used in its original sense of pacifying or
satisfying, the Latin _pacare_. Thus a priest who has received from his
bishop an explanation of some difficulty and other ghostly comfort “_se
tint bin pour paié_” (p. 34 C), he “considered himself well satisfied.”
When the King objected to certain words in the oath which he had to take,
Joinville says that he does not know how the oath was finally arranged,
but he adds, “_Li amiral se tindrent lien apaié_,” “The admirals
considered themselves satisfied” (p. 242 C). The same word, however, is
likewise used in the usual sense of paying.
_Noise_, a word which has almost disappeared from modern French, occurs
several times in Joinville; and we can watch in different passages the
growth of its various meanings. In one passage Joinville relates (p. 198)
that one of his knights had been killed, and was lying on a bier in his
chapel. While the priest was performing his office, six other knights were
talking very loud, and “_Faisoient noise au prestre_,” “They annoyed or
disturbed the priest; they caused him annoyance.” Here _noise_ has still
the same sense as the Latin _nausea_, from which it is derived. In another
passage, however, Joinville uses _noise_ as synonymous with _bruit_ (p.
152 A), _Vint li roys à toute sa bataille, à grant noyse et à grant bruit
de trompes et nacaires_, _i.e._ _vint le roi avec tout son corps de
bataille, à grand cris et à grand bruit de trompettes et de timbales._
Here _noise_ may still mean an annoying noise, but we can see the easy
transition from that to noise in general.
Another English word, “to purchase,” finds its explanation in Joinville.
Originally _pourchasser_ meant to hunt after a thing, to pursue it.
Joinville frequently uses the expression “_par son pourchas_” (p. 458 E)
in the sense of “by his endeavors.” When the King had reconciled two
adversaries, peace is said to have been made _par son pourchas_.
“_Pourchasser_” afterwards took the sense of “procuring,” “catering,” and
lastly, in English, of “buying.”
To return to Joinville’s History, the scarcity of MSS. is very instructive
from an historical point of view. As far as we know at present, his great
work existed for centuries in two copies only, one preserved in his own
castle, the other in the library of the Kings of France. We can hardly say
that it was published, even in the restricted sense which that word had
during the fourteenth century, and there certainly is no evidence that it
was read by any one except by members of the royal family of France, and
possibly by descendants of Joinville. It exercised no influence; and if
two or three copies had not luckily escaped (one of them, it must be
confessed, clearly showing the traces of mice’s teeth), we should have
known very little indeed either of the military or of the literary
achievements of one who is now ranked among the chief historians of
France, or even of Europe. After Joinville’s History had once emerged from
its obscurity, it soon became the fashion to praise it, and to praise it
somewhat indiscriminately. Joinville became a general favorite both in and
out of France; and after all had been said in his praise that might be
truly and properly said, each successive admirer tried to add a little
more, till at last, as a matter of course, he was compared to Thucydides,
and lauded for the graces of his style, the vigor of his language, the
subtlety of his mind, and his worship of the harmonious and the beautiful,
in such a manner that the old bluff soldier would have been highly
perplexed and disgusted, could he have listened to the praises of his
admirers. Well might M. Paulin Paris say, “I shall not stop to praise what
everybody has praised before me; to recall the graceful _naïveté_ of the
good Sénéchal, would it not be, as the English poet said, ‘to gild the
gold and paint the lily white?’ ”
It is surprising to find in the large crowd of indiscriminate admirers a
man so accurate in his thoughts and in his words as the late Sir James
Stephen. Considering how little Joinville’s History was noticed by his
contemporaries, how little it was read by the people before it was printed
during the reign of François I., it must seem more than doubtful whether
Joinville really deserved a place in a series of lectures, “On the Power
of the Pen in France.” But, waiving that point, is it quite exact to say,
as Sir James Stephen does, “that three writers only retain, and probably
they alone deserve, at this day the admiration which greeted them in their
own,—I refer to Joinville, Froissart, and to Philippe de Comines?” And is
the following a sober and correct description of Joinville’s style?—
“Over the whole picture the genial spirit of France glows with all
the natural warmth which we seek in vain among the dry bones of
earlier chroniclers. Without the use of any didactic forms of
speech, Joinville teaches the highest of all wisdom—the wisdom of
love. Without the pedantry of the schools, he occasionally
exhibits an eager thirst of knowledge, and a graceful facility of
imparting it, which attest that he is of the lineage of the great
father of history, and of those modern historians who have taken
Herodotus for their model.” (Vol. ii. pp. 209, 219.)
Now, all this sounds to our ears just an octave too high. There is some
truth in it, but the truth is spoilt by being exaggerated. Joinville’s
book is very pleasant to read, because he gives himself no airs, and tells
us as well as he can what he recollects of his excellent King, and of the
fearful time which they spent together during the crusade. He writes very
much as an old soldier would speak. He seems to know that people will
listen to him with respect, and that they will believe what he tells them.
He does not weary them with arguments. He rather likes now and then to
evoke a smile, and he maintains the glow of attention by thinking more of
his hearers than of himself. He had evidently told his stories many times
before he finally dictated them in the form in which we read them, and
this is what gives to some of them a certain finish and the appearance of
art. Yet, if we speak of style at all,—not of the style of thought, but of
the style of language,—the blemishes in Joinville’s History are so
apparent that one feels reluctant to point them out. He repeats his words,
he repeats his remarks, he drops the thread of his story, begins a new
subject, leaves it because, as he says himself, it would carry him too
far, and then, after a time, returns to it again. His descriptions of the
scenery where the camp was pitched, and the battles fought, are neither
sufficiently broad nor sufficiently distinct to give the reader that view
of the whole which he receives from such writers as Cæsar, Thiers,
Carlyle, or Russell. Nor is there any attempt at describing or analyzing
the character of the principal actors in the crusade of St. Louis, beyond
relating some of their remarks or occasional conversations. It is an
ungrateful task to draw up these indictments against a man whom one
probably admires much more sincerely than those who bespatter him with
undeserved praise. Joinville’s book is readable, and it is readable even
in spite of the antiquated and sometimes difficult language in which it is
written. There are few books of which we could say the same. What makes
his book readable is partly the interest attaching to the subject of which
it treats, but far more the simple, natural, straightforward way in which
Joinville tells what he has to tell. From one point of view it may be
truly said that no higher praise could be bestowed on any style than to
say that it is simple, natural, straightforward, and charming. But if his
indiscriminate admirers had appreciated this artless art, they would not
have applied to the pleasant gossip of an old general epithets that are
appropriate only to the masterpieces of classical literature.
It is important to bear in mind what suggested to Joinville the first idea
of writing his book. He was asked to do so by the Queen of Philip le Bel.
After the death of the Queen, however, Joinville did not dedicate his work
to the King, but to his son, who was then the heir apparent. This may be
explained by the fact that he himself was Sénéchal de Champagne, and
Louis, the son of Philip le Bel, Comte de Champagne. But it admits of
another and more probable explanation. Joinville was dissatisfied with the
proceedings of Philip le Bel, and from the very beginning of his reign he
opposed his encroachments on the privileges of the nobility and the
liberties of the people. He was punished for his opposition, and excluded
from the assemblies in Champagne in 1287; and though his name appeared
again on the roll in 1291, Joinville then occupied only the sixth instead
of the first place. In 1314 matters came to a crisis in Champagne, and
Joinville called together the nobility in order to declare openly against
the King. The opportune death of Philip alone prevented the breaking out
of a rebellion. It is true that there are no direct allusions to these
matters in the body of Joinville’s book, yet an impression is left on the
reader that he wrote some portion of the Life of St. Louis as a lesson to
the young prince to whom it is dedicated. Once or twice, indeed, he uses
language which sounds ominous, and which would hardly be tolerated in
France, even after the lapse of five centuries. When speaking of the great
honor which St. Louis conferred on his family, he says “that it was,
indeed, a great honor to those of his descendants who would follow his
example by good works, but a great dishonor to those who would do evil.
For people would point at them with their fingers, and would say that the
sainted King from whom they descended would have despised such
wickedness.” There is another passage even stronger than this. After
relating how St. Louis escaped from many dangers by the grace of God, he
suddenly exclaims, “Let the King who now reigns (Philip le Bel) take care,
for he has escaped from as great dangers—nay, from greater ones—than we;
let him see whether he cannot amend his evil ways, so that God may not
strike him and his affairs cruelly.”
This surely is strong language, considering that it was used in a book
dedicated to the son of the then reigning King. To the father of Philip le
Bel, Joinville seems to have spoken with the same frankness as to his son;
and he tells us himself how he reproved the King, Philip le Hardi, for his
extravagant dress, and admonished him to follow the example of his father.
Similar remarks occur again and again; and though the Life of St. Louis
was certainly not written merely for didactic purposes, yet one cannot
help seeing that it was written with a practical object. In the
introduction Joinville says, “I send the book to you, that you and your
brother and others who hear it may take an example, and that they may
carry it out in their life, for which God will bless them.” And again (p.
268), “These things shall I cause to be written, that those who hear them
may have faith in God in their persecutions and tribulations, and God will
help them, as He did me.” Again (p. 380), “These things I have told you,
that you may guard against taking an oath without reason, for, as the wise
say, ‘He who swears readily, forswears himself readily.’ ”
It seems, therefore, that when Joinville took to dictating his
recollections of St. Louis, he did so partly to redeem a promise given to
the Queen, who, he says, loved him much, and whom he could not refuse,
partly to place in the hands of the young princes a book full of
historical lessons which they might read, mark, and inwardly digest.
And well might he do so, and well might his book be read by all young
princes, and by all who are able to learn a lesson from the pages of
history; for few kings, if any, did ever wear their crowns so worthily as
Louis IX. of France; and few saints, if any, did deserve their halo better
than St. Louis. Here lies the deep and lasting interest of Joinville’s
work. It allows us an insight into a life which we could hardly realize,
nay, which we should hardly believe in, unless we had the testimony of
that trusty witness, Joinville, the King’s friend and comrade. The
legendary lives of St. Louis would have destroyed in the eyes of posterity
the real greatness and the real sanctity of the King’s character. We
should never have known the man, but only his saintly caricature. After
reading Joinville, we must make up our mind that such a life as he there
describes was really lived, and was lived in those very palaces which we
are accustomed to consider as the sinks of wickedness and vice. From other
descriptions we might have imagined Louis IX. as a bigoted, priest-ridden,
credulous King. From Joinville we learn that, though unwavering in his
faith, and most strict in the observance of his religious duties, the King
was by no means narrow in his sympathies, or partial to the encroachments
of priestcraft. We find Joinville speaking to the King on subjects of
religion with the greatest freedom, and as no courtier would have dared to
speak during the later years of Louis XIV.’s reign. When the King asked
him whether in the holy week he ever washed the feet of the poor,
Joinville replied that he would never wash the feet of such villains. For
this remark he was, no doubt, reproved by the King, who, as we are told by
Beaulieu, with the most unpleasant details, washed the feet of the poor
every Saturday. But the reply, though somewhat irreverent, is,
nevertheless, highly creditable to the courtier’s frankness. Another time
he shocked his royal friend still more by telling him, in the presence of
several priests, that he would rather have committed thirty mortal sins
than be a leper. The King said nothing at the time, but he sent for him
the next day, and reproved him in the most gentle manner for his
thoughtless speech.
Joinville, too, with all the respect which he entertained for his King,
would never hesitate to speak his mind when he thought that the King was
in the wrong. On one occasion the Abbot of Cluny presented the King with
two horses, worth five hundred _livres_. The next day the Abbot came again
to the King to discuss some matters of business. Joinville observed that
the King listened to him with marked attention. After the Abbot was gone,
he went to the King, and said, “ ‘Sire, may I ask you whether you listened
to the Abbot more cheerfully because he presented you yesterday with two
horses?’ The King meditated for a time, and then said to me, ‘Truly, yes.’
‘Sire,’ said I, ‘do you know why I asked you this question?’ ‘Why?’ said
he. ‘Because, Sire,’ I said, ‘I advise you, when you return to France, to
prohibit all sworn counselors from accepting anything from those who have
to bring their affairs before them. For you may be certain, if they accept
anything, they will listen more cheerfully and attentively to those who
give, as you did yourself with the Abbot of Cluny.’ ”
Surely a king who could listen to such language is not likely to have had
his court filled with hypocrites, whether lay or clerical. The bishops,
though they might count on the King for any help he could give them in the
great work of teaching, raising, and comforting the people, tried in vain
to make him commit an injustice in defense of what they considered
religion. One day a numerous deputation of prelates asked for an
interview. It was readily granted. When they appeared before the King,
their spokesman said, “Sire, these lords who are here, archbishops and
bishops, have asked me to tell you that Christianity is perishing at your
hands.” The King signed himself with the cross, and said, “Tell me how can
that be?” “Sire,” he said, “it is because people care so little nowadays
for excommunication that they would rather die excommunicated than have
themselves absolved and give satisfaction to the Church. Now, we pray you,
Sire, for the sake of God, and because it is your duty, that you command
your provosts and bailiffs that by seizing the goods of those who allow
themselves to be excommunicated for the space of one year, they may force
them to come and be absolved.” Then the King replied that he would do this
willingly with all those of whom it could be _proved_ that they were in
the wrong (which would, in fact, have given the King jurisdiction in
ecclesiastical matters). The bishops said that they could not do this at
any price; they would never bring their causes before his court. Then the
King said he could not do it otherwise, for it would be against God and
against reason. He reminded them of the case of the Comte de Bretagne, who
had been excommunicated by the prelates of Brittany for the space of seven
years, and who, when he appealed to the Pope, gained his cause, while the
prelates were condemned. “Now then,” the King said, “if I had forced the
Comte de Bretagne to get absolution from the prelates after the first
year, should I not have sinned against God and against him?”
This is not the language of a bigoted man; and if we find in the life of
St. Louis traces of what in our age we might feel inclined to call bigotry
or credulity, we must consider that the religious and intellectual
atmosphere of the reign of St. Louis was very different from our own.
There are, no doubt, some of the sayings and doings recorded by Joinville
of his beloved King which at present would be unanimously condemned even
by the most orthodox and narrow-minded. Think of an assembly of
theologians in the monastery of Cluny who had invited a distinguished
rabbi to discuss certain points of Christian doctrine with them. A knight,
who happened to be staying with the abbot, asked for leave to open the
discussion, and he addressed the Jew in the following words: “Do you
believe that the Virgin Mary was a virgin and Mother of God?” When the Jew
replied, “No!” the knight took his crutch and felled the poor Jew to the
ground. The King, who relates this to Joinville, draws one very wise
lesson from, it—namely, that no one who is not a very good theologian
should enter upon a controversy with Jews on such subjects. But when he
goes on to say that a layman who hears the Christian religion evil spoken
of should take to the sword as the right weapon of defense, and run it
into the miscreant’s body as far as it would go, we perceive at once that
we are in the thirteenth and not in the nineteenth century. The
punishments which the King inflicted for swearing were most cruel. At
Cesarea, Joinville tells us that he saw a goldsmith fastened to a ladder,
with the entrails of a pig twisted round his neck right up to his nose,
because he had used irreverent language. Nay, after his return from the
Holy Land, he heard that the King ordered a man’s nose and lower lip to be
burnt for the same offense. The Pope himself had to interfere to prevent
St. Louis from inflicting on blasphemers mutilation and death. “I would
myself be branded with a hot iron,” the King said, “if thus I could drive
away all swearing from my kingdom.” He himself, as Joinville assures us,
never used an oath, nor did he pronounce the name of the Devil except when
reading the lives of the saints. His soul, we cannot doubt, was grieved
when he heard the names which to him were the most sacred, employed for
profane purposes; and this feeling of indignation was shared by his honest
chronicler. “In my castle,” says Joinville, “whosoever uses bad language
receives a good pommeling, and this has nearly put down that bad habit.”
Here again we see the upright character of Joinville. He does not, like
most courtiers, try to outbid his sovereign in pious indignation; on the
contrary, while sharing his feelings, he gently reproves the King for his
excessive zeal and cruelty, and this after the King had been raised to the
exalted position of a saint.
To doubt of any points of the Christian doctrine was considered at
Joinville’s time, as it is even now, as a temptation of the Devil. But
here again we see at the court of St. Louis a wonderful mixture of
tolerance and intolerance. Joinville, who evidently spoke his mind freely
on all things, received frequent reproofs and lessons from the King; and
we hardly know which to wonder at most, the weakness of the arguments, or
the gentle and truly Christian spirit in which the King used them. The
King once asked Joinville how he knew that his father’s name was Symon.
Joinville replied he knew it because his mother had told him so. “Then,”
the King said, “you ought likewise firmly to believe all the articles of
faith which the Apostles attest, as you hear them sung every Sunday in the
Creed.” The use of such an argument by such a man leaves an impression on
the mind that the King himself was not free from religious doubts and
difficulties, and that his faith was built upon ground which was apt to
shake. And this impression is confirmed by a conversation which
immediately follows after this argument. It is long, but it is far too
important to be here omitted. The Bishop of Paris had told the King,
probably in order to comfort him after receiving from him the confession
of some of his own religious difficulties, that one day he received a
visit from a great master in divinity. The master threw himself at the
Bishop’s feet and cried bitterly. The Bishop said to him,—
“ ‘Master, do not despair; no one can sin so much that God could not
forgive him.’
“The master said, ‘I cannot help crying, for I believe I am a miscreant:
for I cannot bring my heart to believe the sacrament of the altar, as the
holy Church teaches it, and I know full well that it is the temptation of
the enemy.’
“ ‘Master,’ replied the Bishop, ‘tell me, when the enemy sends you this
temptation, does it please you?’
“And the master said, ‘Sir, it pains me as much as anything can pain.’
“ ‘Then I ask you,’ the Bishop continued, ‘would you take gold or silver
in order to avow with your mouth anything that is against the sacrament of
the altar, or against the other sacred sacraments of the Church?’
“And the master said, ‘Know, sir, that there is nothing in the world that
I should take; I would rather that all my limbs were torn from my body
than openly avow this.’
“ ‘Then,’ said the Bishop, ‘I shall tell you something else. You know that
the King of France made war against the King of England, and you know that
the castle which is nearest to the frontier is La Rochelle, in Poitou.
Now, I shall ask you, if the King had trusted you to defend La Rochelle,
and he had trusted me to defend the Castle of Laon, which is in the heart
of France, where the country is at peace, to whom ought the King to be
more beholden at the end of the war,—to you who had defended La Rochelle
without losing it, or to me who kept the Castle of Laon?’
“ ‘In the name of God,’ said the master, ‘to me who had kept La Rochelle
with losing it.’
“ ‘Master,’ said the Bishop, ‘I tell you that my heart is like the Castle
of Laon (Montleheri), for I feel no temptation and no doubt as to the
sacrament of the altar; therefore, I tell you, if God gives me one reward
because I believe firmly and in peace, He will give you four, because you
keep your heart for Him in this fight of tribulation, and have such
goodwill toward Him that for no earthly good, nor for any pain inflicted
on your body, you would forsake Him. Therefore, I say to you, be at ease;
your state is more pleasing to our Lord than my own.’ ”
When the master had heard this, he fell on his knees before the Bishop,
and felt again at peace.
Surely, if the cruel punishment inflicted by St. Louis on blasphemers is
behind our age, is not the love, the humility, the truthfulness of this
Bishop,—is not the spirit in which he acted toward the priest, and the
spirit in which he related this conversation to the King, somewhat in
advance of the century in which we live?
If we only dwell on certain passages of Joinville’s memoirs, it is easy to
say that he and his King, and the whole age in which they moved, were
credulous, engrossed by the mere formalities of religion, and fanatical in
their enterprise to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Land. But let us
candidly enter into their view of life, and many things which at first
seem strange and startling will become intelligible. Joinville does not
relate many miracles; and such is his good faith that we may implicitly
believe the facts, such as he states them, however we may differ as to the
interpretation by which, to Joinville’s mind, these facts assumed a
miraculous character. On their way to the Holy Land it seems that their
ship was windbound for several days, and that they were in danger of being
taken prisoners by the pirates of Barbary. Joinville recollected the
saying of a priest who had told him that, whatever had happened in his
parish, whether too much rain or too little rain, or anything else, if he
made three processions for three successive Saturdays, his prayer was
always heard. Joinville, therefore, recommended the same remedy. Seasick
as he was, he was carried on deck, and the procession was formed round the
two masts of the ship. As soon as this was done, the wind rose, and the
ship arrived at Cyprus the third Saturday. The same remedy was resorted to
a second time, and with equal effect. The King was waiting at Damietta for
his brother, the Comte de Poitiers, and his army, and was very uneasy
about the delay in his arrival. Joinville told the legate of the miracle
that had happened on their voyage to Cyprus. The legate consented to have
three processions on three successive Saturdays, and on the third Saturday
the Comte de Poitiers and his fleet arrived before Damietta. One more
instance may suffice. On their return to France a sailor fell overboard,
and was left in the water. Joinville, whose ship was close by, saw
something in the water; but, as he observed no struggle, he imagined it
was a cask. The man, however, was picked up; and when asked why he did not
exert himself, he replied that he saw no necessity for it. As soon as he
fell into the water he commended himself to _Nostre Dame_, and she
supported him by his shoulders till he was picked up by the King’s galley.
Joinville had a window painted in his chapel to commemorate this miracle;
and there, no doubt, the Virgin would be represented as supporting the
sailor exactly as he described it.
Now, it must be admitted that before the tribunal of the ordinary
philosophy of the nineteenth century, these miracles would be put down
either as inventions or as exaggerations. But let us examine the thoughts
and the language of that age, and we shall take a more charitable, and, we
believe, a more correct view. Men like Joinville did not distinguish
between a general and a special providence, and few who have carefully
examined the true import of words would blame him for that. Whatever
happened to him and his friends, the smallest as well as the greatest
events were taken alike as so many communications from God to man. Nothing
could happen to any one of them unless God willed it. “God wills it,” they
exclaimed, and put the cross on their breasts, and left house and home,
and wife and children, to fight the infidels in the Holy Land. The King
was ill and on the point of death, when he made a vow that if he
recovered, he would undertake a crusade. In spite of the dangers which
threatened him and his country, where every vassal was a rival, in spite
of the despair of his excellent mother, the King fulfilled his vow, and
risked not only his crown, but his life, without a complaint and without a
regret. It may be that the prospect of Eastern booty, or even of an
Eastern throne, had some part in exciting the pious zeal of the French
chivalry. Yet if we read of Joinville, who was then a young and gay
nobleman of twenty-four, with a young wife and a beautiful castle in
Champagne, giving up everything, confessing his sins, making reparation,
performing pilgrimages, and then starting for the East, there to endure
for five years the most horrible hardships; when we read of his sailors
singing a _Veni, Creator Spiritus_, before they hoisted their sails; when
we see how every day, in the midst of pestilence and battle, the King and
his Sénéchal and his knights say their prayers and perform their religious
duties; how in every danger they commend themselves to God or to their
saints; how for every blessing, for every escape from danger, they return
thanks to Heaven,—we easily learn to understand how natural it was that
such men should see miracles in every blessing vouchsafed to them, whether
great or small, just as the Jews of old, in that sense the true people of
God, saw miracles, saw the finger of God in every plague that visited
their camp, and in every spring of water that saved them from destruction.
When the Egyptians were throwing the Greek fire into the camp of the
Crusaders, St. Louis raised himself in his bed at the report of every
discharge of those murderous missiles, and, stretching forth his hands
towards heaven, he said, crying, “Good Lord God, protect my people.”
Joinville, after relating this, remarks, “And I believe truly that his
prayers served us well in our need.” And was he not right in this belief,
as right as the Israelites were when they saw Moses lifting up his heavy
arms, and they prevailed against Amalek? Surely this belief was put to a
hard test when a fearful plague broke out in the camp, when nearly the
whole French army was massacred, when the King was taken prisoner, when
the Queen, in childbed, had to make her old chamberlain swear that he
would kill her at the first approach of the enemy, when the small remnant
of that mighty French army had to purchase its return to France by a heavy
ransom. Yet nothing could shake Joinville’s faith in the ever-ready help
of our Lord, of the Virgin, and of the saints. “Be certain,” he writes,
“that the Virgin helped us, and she would have helped us more if we had
not offended her, her and her Son, as I said before.” Surely, with such
faith, credulity ceases to be credulity. Where there is credulity without
that living faith which sees the hand of God in everything, man’s
indignation is rightly roused. That credulity leads to self-conceit,
hypocrisy, and unbelief. But such was not the credulity of Joinville or of
his King, or of the Bishop who comforted the great master in theology. A
modern historian would not call the rescue of the drowning sailor, nor the
favorable wind which brought the Crusaders to Cyprus, nor the opportune
arrival of the Comte de Poitiers miracles, because the word “miracle” has
a different sense with us from what it had during the Middle Ages, from
what it had at the time of the Apostles, and from what it had at the time
of Moses. Yet to the drowning sailor his rescue was miraculous; to the
despairing King the arrival of his brother was a godsend; and to Joinville
and his crew, who were in imminent danger of being carried off as slaves
by Moorish pirates, the wind that brought them safe to Cyprus was more
than a fortunate accident. Our language differs from the language of
Joinville, yet in our heart of hearts we mean the same thing.
And nothing shows better the reality and healthiness of the religion of
those brave knights than their cheerful and open countenance, their
thorough enjoyment of all the good things of this life, their freedom in
thought and speech. You never catch Joinville canting, or with an
expression of blank solemnity. When his ship was surrounded by the galleys
of the Sultan, and when they held a council as to whether they should
surrender themselves to the Sultan’s fleet or to his army on shore, one of
his servants objected to all surrender. “Let us all be killed,” he said to
Joinville, “and then we shall all go straight to Paradise.” His advice,
however, was not followed, because, as Joinville says, “we did not believe
it.”
If we bear in mind that Joinville’s History was written after Louis has
been raised to the rank of a saint, his way of speaking of the King,
though always respectful, strikes us, nevertheless, as it must have struck
his contemporaries, as sometimes very plain and familiar. It is well known
that an attempt was actually made by the notorious Jesuit, le Père
Hardouin, to prove Joinville’s work as spurious, or, at all events, as
full of interpolations, inserted by the enemies of the Church. It was an
attempt which thoroughly failed, and which was too dangerous to be
repeated; but, on reading Joinville after reading the life and miracles of
St. Louis, one can easily understand that the soldier’s account of the
brave King was not quite palatable or welcome to the authors of the
legends of the royal saint. At the time when the King’s bones had begun to
work wretched miracles, the following story could hardly have sounded
respectful: “When the King was at Acre,” Joinville writes, “some pilgrims
on their way to Jerusalem wished to see him. Joinville went to the King,
and said, ‘Sire, there is a crowd of people who have asked me to show them
the royal saint, though _I_ have no wish as yet to kiss your bones.’ The
King laughed loud, and asked me to bring the people.”
In the thick of the battle, in which Joinville received five wounds and
his horse fifteen, and when death seemed almost certain, Joinville tells
us that the good Count of Soissons rode up to him and chaffed him, saying,
“Let those dogs loose, for, _par la quoife Dieu_,”—as he always used to
swear,—“we shall still talk of this day in the rooms of our ladies.”
The Crusades and the Crusaders, though they are only five or six centuries
removed from us, have assumed a kind of romantic character, which makes it
very difficult even for the historian to feel towards them the same human
interest which we feel for Cæsar or Pericles. Works like that of Joinville
are most useful in dispelling that mist which the chroniclers of old and
the romances of Walter Scott and others have raised round the heroes of
these holy wars. St. Louis and his companions, as described by Joinville,
not only in their glistening armor, but in their everyday attire, are
brought nearer to us, become intelligible to us, and teach us lessons of
humanity which we can learn from men only, and not from saints and heroes.
Here lies the real value of real history. It makes us familiar with the
thoughts of men who differ from us in manners and language, in thought and
religion, and yet with whom we are able to sympathize, and from whom we
are able to learn. It widens our minds and our hearts, and gives us that
true knowledge of the world and of human nature in all its phases which
but few can gain in the short span of their own life, and in the narrow
sphere of their friends and enemies. We can hardly imagine a better book
for boys to read or for men to ponder over; and we hope that M. de
Wailly’s laudable efforts may be crowned with complete success, and that,
whether in France or in England, no student of history will in future
imagine that he knows the true spirit of the Crusades and the Crusaders
who has not read once, and more than once, the original Memoirs of
Joinville, as edited, translated, and explained by the eminent Keeper of
the Imperial Library at Paris, M. Natalis de Wailly.
1866.