THE MEMOIRS OF JOINVILLE.* THIS is one of the most

delightful books we have come across for a long time. The translation is spirited and excellent ; the preface and notes are just what a reader wants, and no more than he wants, for intelligent enjoyment of one of the great stories of all time.

Joinville's Memoirs differ from the usual run of mediaeval chronicles in one very important point. He has a hero. The character of Louis IX. stands out from his pages with extra- ordinary vividness ; surrounded by heroes, there can be no doubt that the King himself was the greatest character of all. Not that Joinville describes his sainted master with any courtly flattery, or with the "extravagant eulogy" of other writers on the subject. He is not afraid to mention the King's tempers and oddities, or to sympathise with the Queen, who sometimes found her truly Royal husband somewhat trying in daily life. But in a series of wonderfully vivid pictures he sets St. Louis before us as a real Christian and a man of quite extraordinary nobility of nature ; a typical figure, it is true, of the best side of the Middle Ages, and yet an entirely human and living creature who might belong to our own day, and whose virtues of unselfishness, justice, generosity, loftiness of mind, are just as rare and as admirable now as they were then.

Jean, Sieur de Joinville and Hereditary Seneschal of Cham- pagne, was one of the great nobles of France and the nearest companions of the King. He wrote his Memoirs for Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel, the unworthy grandson of his hero. Though he wrote fifty years after the events he had to chronicle, his memory was so keen that he described the unlucky Crusade and all its adventures as if he had gone through them only the day before. He had a genius for vivid narration. If he had been with Louis on the last fatal expedi- tion from which the King never returned, we should have had a death-bed story unrivalled in pathos and simplicity.

We are inclined to quote one or two of Joinville's best pictures of the King, his surroundings and adventures, partly by way of introducing his fascinating history to readers un- acquainted with it, and partly to justify our praise of Miss Wedgwood's translation :— "Many a time it chanced in summer, that he would go and sit in the forest of Vincennes, after mass, and all who had business would come and talk with him, without hindrance from ushers or any one. Theii he would ask them with his own lips : Is there any one here that has a suit P '—and those that had suits stood up. Then he would say Keep silence, all of you ; and you shall be dealt with in order.' rhen he would call up my lord Peter of rontaines and my lord Geoffrey of Villette, and say to one of them:—' Despatch me this suit !'—and if, in the speech of those who were speaking in behalf of others, he saw that a point might be better put, he himself would put it for them with his own lips. I have seen him sometimes in summer, when to hear his people's suits, he would come into the gardens of Paris, clad in a camel's-hair coat, with a sleeveless snrcoat of tiretaine, a cloak of black taffety round his neck, his hair well combed and without a qnoif, and a white swansdown hat upon his head. He would cause a carpet to be spread, that we might sit round him ; and all the people who had business before him stood round about, and then he caused their snits to be despatched,—just as I told you before about the forest of Vincennes."

It might have been well for the French people if their good King could have escaped the almost mortal sickness from which he only recovered to take the Cross. But these are matters which cannot be judged by a standard to distant and so different.

The story of the Crusade is well known : how the King and his

followers sailed from Marseilles, singing Veal Creator Spiritus: how they arrived in Cyprus, where King Louis received

messengers from the King of the Tartars, and sent him in return a tent of scarlet cloth made like a chapel, with pictures

from the Creed, "to entice them into our faith " : how they sailed to Egypt, and found a Saracen force awaiting them, which fled, so that they took possession of Damietta: than the match on Cairo, and the wonderful description of the * The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville. A New English Version by Ethel SiTedgvrota. With Mluittstions. London: John Murray. pa hat]

Nile, "that river which flows out of the Earthly Paradise," and spreads itself in seven streams over Egypt

Before the river reaches Egypt, men who are practised in it cast their nets loose into the stream at nightfall, and when morning comes, they find in their nets such raw goods as are imported into this country ; to wit, ginger, rhubarb, aloes and cinnamon. And it is said, that these things are washed down from the Earthly Paradise ; that the wind blows down the trees of Eden just as the wind in this country blows down the dry wood ; and that what the merchants sell to us in this country, is the dry wood that falls into the river there."

There was search made in those days for the sources of the Nile. The Sultan's men, according to Joinville, went as far as a great wall of rock over which the river fell, and where they

saw "marvellous strange wild beasts of various kinds, lions and serpents and elephants, that came and gazed at them from the water below, as they went climbing upwards along the river bank." •

The description of the long river fight with the Saracens

which led up to the battle of Mansoora is an interesting lesson in mediaeval warfare; and the account which follows it of the terrible sufferings of the Crusading army, with their final surrender to the Saracens, is full of extraordinary details which bring the whole series of frightful scenes before our eyes. It is full, too, of characteristic touches of nature: there is a certain pagan chivalry mingled with the cruelty of the Sultan and his Emirs. After the murder of the Sultan by his own people, it is curious to read that the Emirs talked of making the captive King of France Sultan of Egypt, so much had his greatness impressed them. And Louis told Joinville himself that "he would most certainly not have refused it."

They were only hindered, Joinville says, by the determined nature of the King's Christianity. They feared that "if this nation were to make him their Sultan, they would either have to turn Christians or he would put them all to death." The King and his army were allowed to leave Egypt on

payment of a ransom of two hundred thousand pounds' weight of gold, his brother, the Count of Poitiers, being kept as a hostage till the money was paid. It was collected slowly and with difficulty, and some were doubtful of the

Count's safety :—

" There were some among the Council who would have dissuaded the King from paying over the money until he should have his brother back. But the King replied, that he should pay it over, for it was in his agreement; and let them in return keep their part of the bargain, if they were honestly minded. Then Lord Philip of Annemoes (Nemours P) told the King, that they had done the Saracens out of a ten thousand pounds' weight; where- upon the King became violently angry, and said that he insisted on the ten thousand pounds being restored to them, since he had agreed to pay them two hundred thousand pounds before leaving the river. Then I trod on Lord Philip's foot, and told the King not to pay any heed to him, for he was not speaking the truth, for that the Saracens would out-cheat anybody in the world. And Lord Philip said, that what I said was true, for he had only said it in jest. And the King said that : That kind of jest came to grief. And I command you,' said the King to Lord Philip, by the faith you owe me, and as my vassal that you are, that if those ten thousand pounds have not been paid, you will have them paid.' "

This, of course, is only one among the many fine sayings and doings recorded by Joinville of his master. Stern and short Louis could be with the unworthy : a renegade Christian, for

instance, was quickly sent out of his presence. "And the King said to him : 'Get you hence :—for I have no more to say to you." But there never was a soul more tender and con- stant to his own people. One likes to dwell upon that event of the shipwreck, when, after further wars in Syria, the King was returning to France with his wife and children and five hundred others, and the mariners, going full speed ahead in a fog, ran the chip aground on a sandbank oft Cyprus. The King was advised to transfer himself and his family to

another ship for the reel of the voyage, leaving his whole company behind in Cyprus to take the chance of getting home at some future day. For though the ship was not an actual

wreck, so that the sailors declined to abandon her, her sea- worthiness was doubtful. But Louis quite refused to give

himself and his family this extra chance of a happy return :—

"Then said the King: 'Sirs, I have heard your opinion, and the opinion of my followers, and now in return I will tell you mine, which is this : If I leave this ship, there are in her five hundred persons and more, who will remain in Cyprus for dread of the danger they may run; for there is no one whose life is not of as much value to him as mine to me ; and maybe they will never get home at alL—And so I prefer to trust my life and my

wife and children in God's hands, rather than cause such injury to such a vast number of people as are here on board."

It was the same nature which would not leave three boat- loads of men behind at Pantellaria, when they bad gone ashore to get fruit at the Queen's request. They were so long in returning that the sailors made sure they had fallen into the hands of the Saracens, and begged the King to sail on without them from these unfriendly seas. But he would not listen; and if the boats had not reappeared, the King's little fleet would have put back to the island in search of them.

These and many other things the Sieur de Joinville wrote down lovingly in honour of his good lord King LOWS.