‘We may excuse him for having written, under the title of a General History of France, the particular history of Burgundy, and for having only treated of that of France incidentally, in as far as it interested the burgundian princes. We may, indeed, more readily pardon him for having painted Charles VII. as a voluptuous monarch, and Louis XI. sometimes as a tyrant, at others as a deep and ferocious politician, holding in contempt the most sacred engagements. But the fidelity of history required that he should not have been silent as to the vices of the duke of Burgundy and his son, who plunged France into an abyss of calamities, and that his predilection for these two princes should not burst forth in every page. ‘The person who continued this first part of the chronicles of Monstrelet has been hitherto unknown, but I believe a lucky accident has enabled me to discover him. Dom Berthod, a learned benedictine monk of the congregation of St Vanne, having employed himself for these many years in searching the libraries and ancient rolls in Flanders for facts relative to our history, has made a report with extracts from numerous manuscripts, of which we had only vague ideas. He has had the goodness to communicate some of them to me, and among others the chronicle of Jacques du Clercq,[11] which begins at 1448, and ends, like the continuator of Monstrelet, at the death of the duke of Burgundy in 1467. In order to give a general idea of the contents of the work, D. Berthod has copied, with the utmost exactness, the table of chapters composed by Jacques du Clercq himself, as he tells us in his prologue. I have compared this table and the extracts with the continuation of Monstrelet, and have observed such a similarity, particularly from the year 1453 to 1467, that I think it impossible for any two writers to be so exactly the same unless one had copied after the other. ‘As we do not possess the whole of this chronicle, I can but offer this as a very probable conjecture, which will be corroborated, when it is considered that Jacques du Clercq and the continuator of Monstrelet lived in the same country. The first resided in Arras; and by the minute details the second enters into concerning Flanders, we may judge that he was an inhabitant of that country. Some villages burnt, or events still less interesting, and unknown beyond the places where they happened, are introduced into his history. In like manner, we should discover without difficulty (if it were otherwise unknown), that the editor of the Grandes Chroniques was a monk of the abbey of St Denis, when he gravely relates, as an important event, that on such a day the scullion of the abbey was found dead in his bed,—and that a peasant of Clignancourt beat his wife until she died.