The book in which this interesting story is told has had a literary history which less affects its matter than the vicissitudes to which Froissart has been subjected, but which is hardly less curious in its way. There is no reason for supposing that Joinville indulged in various editions, such as those which have given Kervyn de Lettenhove and Siméon Luce so much trouble, and which make so vast a difference between the first and the last redaction of the chronicler of the Hundred Years' War. Indeed the great age of the seneschal of Champagne, and his intimate first-hand acquaintance with his subject, made such variations extremely improbable. But, whereas there is no great difficulty (though much labour) in ascertaining the original and all subsequent texts of Froissart, the original text of Joinville was until recently unknown, and even now may be said to be in the state of a conjectural restoration. It has been said that the book was presented to Louis le Hutin. Now we have a catalogue of Louis le Hutin's library, and, strange to say, Joinville does not figure in it. His book seems to have undergone very much the same fate as that which befell the originals of the first two volumes of the _Paston Letters_ which Sir John Fenn presented to George the Third. Several royal library catalogues of the 14th century are known, but in none of these does the _Histoire de St Louis_ appear. It does appear in that of Charles V. (1411), but apparently no copy even of this survives. As everybody knows, however, books could be and were multiplied by the process of copying tolerably freely, and a copy at first or second hand which belonged to the fiddler king René of Provence in the 15th century was used for the first printed edition in 1547. Other editions were printed from other versions, all evidently posterior to the original. But in 1741 the well-known medievalist La Curne de St Palaye found at Lucca a manuscript of the 16th century, evidently representing an older text than any yet printed. Three years later a 14th-century copy was found at Brussels, and this is the standard manuscript authority for the text of Joinville. Those who prefer to rest on MS. authority will probably hold to this text, which appears in the well-known collection of Michaud and Poujoulat as well as that of Buchon, and in a careful and useful separate edition by Francisque Michel. The modern science of critical editing, however, which applies to medieval texts the principles long recognized in editing the classics, has discovered in the 16th-century manuscript, and still more in the original miscellaneous works of Joinville, the letters, deeds, &c., already alluded to, the materials for what we have already called a conjectural restoration, which is not without its interest, though perhaps it is possible for that interest to be exaggerated.