About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388, hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various towns upon their route had suffered. "At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they pleased me much, and right well did I retain them all; and as soon as I had dismounted at the hostelries along the road which we traveled together, I wrote them down, at evening as in the morning, to have a better record of them in times to come; for there is nothing so retentive as writing." Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months' sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than 1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410. It is an engaging picture, this, of a genial, sharp-eyed, somewhat worldly churchman, riding his gray horse over hill and dale in quest of knowledge. We can fancy him arriving at his inn of an evening, and at once asking the obsequious host what knight or other great person dwells in the neighborhood. He loses no time before calling at the castle, and is gladly admitted when he tells his well-known name. He is ready to pay for any historical information with a story from his own collection. He is welcome everywhere, and for his part does not regret the time thus spent, nor the money,--several fortunes, by his own count,--for he has the light heart of the true traveler. It is always sunshine where he goes. The clangor of arms and the blare of trumpets hover ever above the horizon. Around the corner of every hill sits a fair castle by a shining river. From town to town, from province to province, his love of listening draws him on. To realize the charm of journeying in those days, we must remember that the local customs and qualities were almost undisturbed by communication; two French cities only a score of miles apart would often differ from each other as much as Nuremberg does from Venice.