Neither his noble birth, nor his noble deeds, nor the friendship of kings and princes, would have saved Joinville from that inevitable oblivion which has blotted from the memory of living men the names of his more eminent companions,—Robert, Count of Artois; Alphonse, Count of Poitiers; Charles, Count of Anjou; Hugue, Duke of Burgundy; William, Count of Flanders, and many more. A little book which the old warrior wrote or dictated,—for it is very doubtful whether he could have written it himself,—a book which for many years attracted nobody’s attention, and which even now we do not possess in the original language of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth centuries—has secured to the name of Jean de Joinville a living immortality, and a fame that will last long after the bronze statue which was erected in his native place in 1853 shall have shared the fate of his castle, of his church, and of his tomb. Nothing could have been further from the mind of the old nobleman when, at the age of eighty-five, he began the history of his royal comrade, St. Louis, than the hope of literary fame. He would have scouted it. That kind of fame might have been good enough for monks and abbots, but it would never at that time have roused the ambition of a man of Joinville’s stamp. How the book came to be written he tells us himself in his dedication, dated in the year 1309, and addressed to Louis le Hutin, then only King of Navarre and Count of Champagne, but afterwards King of France. His mother, Jeanne of Navarre, the daughter of Joinville’s former liege lord, the last of the Counts of Champagne, who was married to Philip le Bel, the grandson of St. Louis, had asked him “to have a book made for her, containing the sacred words and good actions of our King, St. Looys.” She died before the book was finished, and Joinville, therefore, sent it to her son. How it was received by him we do not know; nor is there any reason to suppose that there were more than a few copies made of a work which was intended chiefly for members of the royal family of France and of his own family. It is never quoted by historical writers of that time; and the first historian who refers to it is said to be Pierre le Baud, who, toward the end of the fifteenth century, wrote his “Histoire de Bretagne.” It has been proved that for a long time no mention of the dedication copy occurs in the inventories of the private libraries of the Kings of France. At the death of Louis le Hutin his library consisted of twenty-nine volumes, and among them the History of St. Louis does not occur. There is, indeed, one entry, “Quatre caiers de Saint Looys;” but this could not be meant for the work of Joinville, which was in one volume. These four _cahiers_ or quires of paper were more likely manuscript notes of St. Louis himself. His confessor, Geoffroy de Beaulieu, relates that the King, before his last illness, wrote down with his own hand some salutary counsels in French, of