The history of Charles V. is a work of which one hardly knows what to say. As history, it is manifestly a failure, for Christine had either no wish or no opportunity to present facts in a narrative at once accurate, detailed, and clear; her work lacks both the accuracy and the breadth of view of genuine history; it is rather, as one critic remarks, an _éloge_, a eulogy upon Charles V.--which, indeed, had been what Philippe desired. The book is in prose, and though the style lacks the clearness and vividness to which we are accustomed in such men of genius as Villehardouin, Joinville, and her own contemporary, Froissart, we must remember that these men had reached the high-water mark of French style, not to be equalled, in sober truth, till the Renaissance, the "New Birth," had regenerated the fallen life and literature of Europe. As prose of the early fifteenth century, Christine's work is better than any other then written, except that of Froissart; and not a little of his charm comes less from the style than from the matters of which he chose to write. There is in Christine's book little of the gorgeousness of chivalry: was not the king in whose praise she wrote a king who won his battles at the council table, while Du Guesclin, upon the field of battle, gave the hard knocks which his sovereign, weak and sickly, could neither give nor take? Where Christine does succeed is in her portraits of the king and his courtiers, whose characters she knew perfectly and whose good and bad traits she does not scruple to depict with such even justice as she may. To quote the words of one of her most recent critics, who does not fail to call attention to the awkward Latinisms of her diction and the lopsided Ciceronian periods in her attempts at elevation or eloquence: "No one has made us feel more distinctly the winning grace of the Duke d'Orléans, brother of Charles VI., nor has any one better depicted the physical aspect of Charles V.; clearly do we see the long face, the broad forehead, the prominent eyes, and the thin lips; the beard is very thick, the cheekbones high and prominent, the skin brown and pale, the whole countenance thin to emaciation; it is the face of an ascetic, tempered by the gentleness of the expression and something staid and thoughtful in the whole look. Nor is there mere banality and commonplace in the moral portrait of the king; if she praises his chevalerie (chivalry), she does not conceal the fact that, weak and sickly, his hand never drew the sword from the day of his accession to the day of his death."