The first edition of Joinville was printed at Poitiers in 1547, and dedicated to François I. The editor, Pierre Antoine de Rieux, tells us that when, in 1542, he examined some old documents at Beaufort en Valée, in Anjou, he found among the MSS. the Chronicle of King Louis, written by a Seigneur de Joinville, Sénéchal de Champagne, who lived at that time, and had accompanied the said St. Louis in all his wars. But because it was badly arranged or written in a very rude language, he had it polished and put in better order, a proceeding of which he is evidently very proud, as we may gather from a remark of his friend Guillaume de Perrière, that “it is no smaller praise to polish a diamond than to find it quite raw” (_toute brute_). This text, which could hardly be called Joinville’s, remained for a time the received text. It was reproduced in 1595, in 1596, and in 1609. In 1617 a new edition was published by Claude Menard. He states that he found at Laval a heap of old papers, which had escaped the ravages committed by the Protestants in some of the monasteries at Anjou. When he compared the MS. of Joinville with the edition of Pierre Antoine de Rieux, he found that the ancient style of Joinville had been greatly changed. He therefore undertook a new edition, more faithful to the original. Unfortunately, however, his original MS. was but a modern copy, and his edition, though an improvement on that of 1547, was still very far from the style and language of the beginning of the fourteenth century. The learned Du Cange searched in vain for more trustworthy materials for restoring the text of Joinville. Invaluable as are the dissertations which he wrote on Joinville, his own text of the History, published in 1668, could only be based on the two editions that had preceded his own. It was not till 1761 that real progress was made in restoring the text of Joinville. An ancient MS. had been brought from Brussels by the Maréchal Maurice de Saxe. It was carefully edited by M. Capperonnier, and it has served, with few exceptions, as the foundation of all later editions. It is now in the Imperial Library. The editors of the “Recueil des Historiens de France” express their belief that the MS. might actually be the original. At the end of it are the words, “Ce fu escript en l’an de grâce mil CCC et IX, on moys d’octovre.” This, however, is no real proof of the date of the MS. Transcribers of MSS., it is well known, were in the habit of mechanically copying all they saw in the original, and hence we find very commonly the date of an old MS. repeated over and over again in modern copies.