But love songs alone could not support a family of five; the Church, so often the refuge of forlorn women, might have offered Christine a refuge, but not support for those dependent on her, since she had not sufficient influence to assure herself of any office of dignity and emolument in the convents of the proud and wealthy. Her pen must be her resource; and thus Christine de Pisan became not merely an authoress, but the first authoress to support herself by her pen. For some of her shorter poems she received not inconsiderable sums; but longer works, works of more permanent value must be undertaken, and Christine valiantly set to work. Her first task was to secure a patron, for only some great lord could afford to pay sums sufficient to enable her to live: there was no eager public of thousands, educated by the printing press to expect, to welcome, to demand fresh intellectual food. One of her patrons was the great Duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Hardi, to whom she dedicated a very long and partly autobiographical poem called _La Mutation de Fortune_. She tells her story with rather too much display of the fact that she knows all the famous apologues and anecdotes that might apply to her case; still, it is an earnest and in some ways interesting account of how she had been compelled to take up a profession not then regarded as befitting a woman how,--as she says, she had turned herself "from woman to man." She read this work to Philippe de Bourgogne in that same palace where she had once been a familiar inmate, where she had played as a child, where she had learned to know the famous men through whose aid Charles V. had well-nigh regenerated France. It is not surprising that Philippe de Bourgogne should think of her as specially fitted to undertake a task requiring intimate knowledge of that king and his time. The duke, sending for her one day as she sat in the midst of a pile of books, pen in hand, asked her to undertake the writing of a life of his great brother. With ready devotion she set about writing the life of Charles V., of the king who, "when I was a child, gave me my bread." In due time her book, _Le Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V._, was completed; but he for whom she had written it had died in 1404, before half was done. The loss of her generous friend and protector was a serious blow to the poetess. Her mother had also died; while Christine must plod wearily on, though "her heart was filled with joy when she remembered that the day was not very far off when she herself would go to join the loved ones."