affaire ne fut entreprise de nulles gens, depuis que le monde fut créé.'
Who does not feel at such words as these, across the ages, the thrill of
the old adventure!

A higher level of interest and significance is reached by JOINVILLE in
his _Vie de Saint Louis_, written towards the close of the century. The
fascination of the book lies in its human qualities. Joinville narrates,
in the easy flowing tone of familiar conversation, his reminiscences of
the good king in whose service he had spent the active years of his
life, and whose memory he held in adoration. The deeds, the words, the
noble sentiments, the saintly devotion of Louis--these things he relates
with a charming and ingenuous sympathy, yet with a perfect freedom and
an absolute veracity. Nor is it only the character of his master that
Joinville has brought into his pages; his book is as much a
self-revelation as a biography. Unlike Villehardouin, whose chronicle
shows hardly a trace of personal feeling, Joinville speaks of himself
unceasingly, and has impressed his work indelibly with the mark of his
own individuality. Much of its charm depends upon the contrast which he
thus almost unconsciously reveals between himself and his master--the
vivacious, common-sense, eminently human nobleman, and the grave,
elevated, idealizing king. In their conversations, recounted with such
detail and such relish by Joinville, the whole force of this contrast
becomes delightfully apparent. One seems to see in them, compressed and
symbolized in the characters of these two friends, the conflicting
qualities of sense and spirit, of worldliness and self-immolation, of
the most shrewd and literal perspicacity and the most visionary
exaltation, which make up the singular antithesis of the Middle Ages.

A contrast no less complete, though of a different nature, is to be
found in the most important poetical work of the thirteenth century--_Le