[In the following essay, Marzials provides a brief biographical discussion of Joinville, followed by an overview of the style of Vie de Saint Louis. Marzials also analyzes Joinville's characterization of King Louis.]

… Joinville was born, it is believed, in 1224. He embarked with St. Lewis for the Crusade on the 28th August 1248; he returned to France in the July of 1254. His Memoirs, as he himself tells us, were written, i.e. concluded, in the month of October, 1309, that is to say, when he was eighty-five years of age, and more than half a century after the events he had set himself to narrate. Thus while Villehardouin writes as a middle-aged soldier, succinctly, soberly, with eye intent on important events, and only casually alive to the passing show of things, Joinville writes as an old man looking lovingly, lingeringly, at the past—garrulous, discursive, glad of a listener. Nothing is beneath his attention. He lingers here, lingers there, picks up an anecdote as he goes along, tells how people looked, and what they wore, describes the manners and customs of the outlandish folk with whom he is brought into contact; has his innocent superstitions his suspicions of spiritualistic influence, stops to tell you about a tumbler's tricks, about a strange fossil that has struck his fancy; illustrates, discusses, moralises; reports at length his conversations, especially with the king; and would have a tendency to repeat himself in any case, even if he had not adopted, to begin with, a defective plan of narration, that involved much repetition. And with such a charm in it all! The man is so simple, so honest, so lovable. Fine fellow as he undoubtedly is, he makes claim to no heroic sentiments—tells you how he was afraid to turn his eyes towards his castle as he went away, leaving wife and children behind him—how he trembled, partly with fear, when he fell into the hands of the enemy. And his judgments upon his fellows are so essentially the judgments of a gentleman. Then he has the graphic gift: we see what he sees, and we know the people that he brings before us. All that world of the Crusade lives in his pages. Not even in Chaucer's immortal “Prologue” do we get so near to the life of the Middle Ages.

Yes, as one reads the chronicle, it is impossible not to love the chronicler. If a snob be, according to Thackeray's definition, one who meanly admires mean things, then surely one who grandly admires heroic things may be pronounced a hero. And Joinville had before him in St. Lewis a high ideal of Christian manhood, and all his heart went out in love and veneration for the friend, long dead when he wrote, who had been to him king and saint. He looks back with pride at that great figure which had loomed so large in his earlier manhood. He sees him once more as he rode in the field among his knights, flashing in arms, overtopping them all, the goodliest presence there.¹ He dwells upon his old chief's fearlessness, his courage before the enemy, his undaunted fortitude under the combined assault of disaster, defeat, and sickness unto death. He marks his refusal to selfishly abandon the people God had committed to his charge and secure his own safety. He notes that neither the prospect of death, nor torture, has power to move him one hair's-breadth from what he holds to be right, and notes also how, in his unswerving rectitude, he will keep to his word, even though that word has been given to the infidel, and though the infidel are far from keeping a reciprocal faith. Then, in more peaceful times, in the ordinary course of justice, he shows the king's determination that right shall be done, with no respect of persons, between man and man, and as between monarch and subject, and his passionate desire for a pure administration. And when, finally, St. Lewis is canonised—when Rome sets its seal and mark upon him for all time—then the loyal, loving servant seems to utter a kind of Nunc dimittis. Joinville feels that he himself may now depart in peace.

Not that there is any Boswellism about him. All that St. Lewis does is not of necessity good in Joinville's eyes. The servant keeps his own judgment quite clear even when judging of his master's acts, and is unduly swayed neither by love nor reverence. Thus, when the Abbot of Cluny gives the king two costly palfreys as a preliminary to a discussion on certain business matters pending between them, Joinville does not hesitate to ask the king whether the gift had inclined him to listen with greater favour to what the abbot had to say, and to push home the obvious moral—a moral, be it said, in view of certain municipal facts, which the twentieth century might lay to heart with the same advantages as the contemporaries of St. Lewis.

Again, when some fifteen years after the return from Palestine, St. Lewis, prematurely old and broken in health, determines to turn Crusade once again (1270), Joinville not only refuses to accompany him, but evidently does all he can to dissuade his master from a policy so disastrous. “I thought that those committed a mortal sin who advised him to undertake that journey,” says the upright counsellor, who was no parasite; and he thanks God he had no part or lot in that expedition.

And so too Joinville is not satisfied of the king's “good manners” in his relations with the queen. The queen, after being brought to bed of my lady Blanche, journeys by sea from Jaffa to rejoin the king at Sayette. Joinville goes to the shore to meet her—there is nothing to show why the king did not lovingly perform this office himself—and brings her up to the castle, reporting her arrival to the king, who is in his chapel. The king knew where Joinville was going, and has delayed the sermon till his return, and asks whether his wife and children are in good health. “And I bring these things to your notice,” says Joinville, “because I had been in his company five years, and never yet had he spoken a word to me about the queen, or about his children—nor to any one else, so far as I ever heard. And, so it seems to me,” adds the good chronicler, “there was some want of good manners” (mores in the Latin sense, I take it), “in being thus a stranger to one's wife and children.”

To this the reader will, no doubt, be inclined to subscribe. Indeed, the want of more obviously cordial relations between the king and queen which may almost be inferred from Joinville's book, affords matter for surprise, seeing who and what that king and queen both were. For if Lewis was a hero and a saint, Margaret of Provence, the “falcon-hearted dove” of Mrs. Hemans' poem, was a heroine, and not all unfit, as men and women go, for canonisation. When she figures in Joinville's narrative it is as a woman altogether brave and lovable, and possessing a sense of humour withal. There are few more striking scenes in history than those in which she appears as a queen, about to become a mother, her husband and his host prisoners, the city in which she is, beleaguered and likely to fall—and kneels before the good old knight, and asks him to strike off her head or ever she falls into the enemy's hands; or that second scene, on the day after the birth of the child—Tristram they called him for sorrow—when she summons round her bed those who would basely surrender the city, and appealing to the babe's weakness and her own womanhood, seeks to inspire them with her own courage.

One might have thought, primâ facie, that there would be some record of the meeting between king and queen after scenes like these, some written word to show how the queen greeted the king when he came out of captivity and sore peril, and how the king acknowledged her proud bearing in extreme danger. But the chronicler, who loved them both, is silent. And yet he stays to give us the picture of an earlier time, and not so much earlier, when the relations between the royal couple had been more loverlike. He tells how Blanche, the queen-mother, had tyrannised over them, as the maîtresse-femme, the woman accustomed to authority, will tyrannise in all stations of life, and how, to secure some privacy of intercourse, they had arranged a meeting-place on a hidden stairway, each scuttling back like a rabbit at the approach of the maternal enemy. And he tells of the younger woman's passionate appeal—one of those appeals that are so human that they ring through the ages, like the appeal of Marie Antoinette to her motherhood—tells how Margaret lay after child-birth, as all thought dying, and the king hung over her, and the queen-mother ordered him away, and the wife cried: “Alas! whether dead or alive, you will not suffer me to see my lord!” “Whereupon she fainted, and they thought she was dead, and the king, who thought she was dying, came back.”²

It has been conjectured that politics came, to some extent, between the king and queen, and that the king wished to be unfettered by her influence in state affairs.³ For Margaret was no lay-figure. She played a not unimportant part in the world's affairs. Failing the arbitration of Lewis himself, Henry III. and the English barons agreed to refer their differences to her. That arbitration proving abortive, she sided throughout and very actively with Henry, whose wife Eleanor was her younger sister. All her life long she passionately maintained her claims on Provence as against the king's brother. Possibly, therefore, St. Lewis may, while agreeing to allow her a certain independence of action, have preferred to remain outside the sphere of her activities. One cannot tell. The heart-relations between two human beings are always difficult to unravel—often too tangled to be unravelled even by the two persons most interested. At the same time, as I said, one cannot but agree with Joinville, that the king's “good manners” in relation to the queen are somewhat open to question. For myself I confess that I should have thought it better “manners,” if, when the ship struck on the sand-bank, and death seemed imminent, he had gone to encourage his wife and children, instead of prostrating himself “crosswise, on the deck of the vessel … before the body of our Lord.”

To a man of St. Lewis's temperament, the cloister must have offered attractions wellnigh irresistible; and it is recorded that, on one occasion at least, he expressed a determination to seek its retirement, when the queen effectually combated his resolution by silently fetching his children, and placing them before him. Had such monkish ideals anything to do with his attitude towards his wife? Had he a kind of feeling that marriage acted as a restraint, not certainly on his passions, but on his piety? Was he swayed, in marriage, voluntarily or involuntarily, towards the celibate life? I scarcely think so. For the man, with all his religious fervour, was essentially sane of heart and head. His ethics were those of a saint, but they were also those of a supremely honest and upright man. Nor was he in the least priest-ridden. When the assembled bishops of France came to him, and proposed a course which his own conscience did not approve, he unhesitatingly refused to acquiesce, and give them powers they might misuse. He offers the example, rare at all times, and under every form of government, whether monarchic, aristocratic, or democratic, of a ruler bent on ruling according to the moral law alone.

With such a guiding spirit, with pure religious zeal and honesty at the helm, there can be no question as to the aims and objects of the Crusade, nor any necessity, or indeed excuse, for such a disquisition as that with which I introduced Villehardouin's chronicle. Dandolo, Montferrat, Baldwin, even Henry, nearly all the leading actors on Villehardouin's stage, may have been swayed this way and that, by motives not all avowable. St. Lewis had but one motive, and that open as the day, from the time when, in his sore sickness, and being then some thirty years of age (1244), he vowed to take the cross. Broadly, the condition of affairs in the Holy Land remained at that date pretty much what they had been when Montferrat's host embarked at Venice fifty-two years before (1202). (True, the intervening years had been crowded with action. Apart from the constantly-recurring local episodes of battle and siege, bloodshed and famine, and slaughter, there had been a descent into Egypt, with siege and sack of Damietta (1219), and a disastrous advance on Cairo, an expedition curiously similar in its incidents to that which St. Lewis was about to undertake. There had been the expedition to the Holy Land of the brilliant and cultured Frederick II. of Germany, who by treaty had obtained possession of Jerusalem (1229)—curiously enough he was at the time under ban of excommunication—and had been crowned there as king. There had been, also for a time, a recrudescence of Christian power and influence. But this had passed away. The tide had set against the West and against the Cross. A few strongholds on the shore of Judæa alone remained in Frank hands. As in 1202, so in 1248, when St. Lewis sailed from Aigues-Mortes, the task of reconquering Jerusalem still remained to be accomplished. That was the task to which St. Lewis set himself with all singleness of heart and aim,—and he failed. His generalship was clearly not on a level with his personal courage or self-devotion. Jerusalem had finally passed into Moslem hands. But the man himself, the story of him, the record of his loving follower and friend—these live for all time.

As to Joinville's style, why, I fear I have done him some wrong in speaking of his age and garrulity. No doubt he was eighty-five when he finished his book, and like most old men, he liked to hear himself talk. But those whom the gods love die young, and they die young not because their span of life is short, but because they carry into extreme age, nay to the very grave itself, the fresh youth of their spirit. And, in this sense, Joinville was young at four score years and five. With all his garrulity, his readiness to turn aside and be beguiled from the forward path by incident or episode, his love for going over the past lingeringly—with all this, his outlook is as keen, as full of interest, as blithe, as the outlook of a boy. He sees clearly, he describes well, and his touch is light and bright—not perhaps, to speak with perfect accuracy, the touch of a writer in the French tradition, because the French tradition was scarcely formed, but of a writer who occupies his due place in the formation of that tradition. Here again “the style is the man himself.” …

Notes

1. Joinville is here quite lyrical. He brings to mind Sir Richard Vernon's speech on the royal army, in the first part of King Henry IV.:—

   “I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
   His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm’d,
   Rise from the ground like feather’d Mercury,” etc.

2. Should one smile or sigh? The same Margaret, in after years, tried to exercise her influence most unduly over her own son Philip, and induced him to swear that he would remain subject to her authority till he had attained the age of thirty—with other like stipulations. See p. 422, Revue des Questions Historiques, 1867, Vol. III.

3. See the extremely interesting article entitled Marguerite de Provence, son caractère, son rôle politique, in the Revue des Questions Historiques, Vol. III., 1867, pp. 417-458.