not take his seat until the latter had been chosen president of the provincial republic. His deafness prevented him from making any figure in the assembly, and he resigned his seat in 1876. In 1886 the provisions of the law against pretenders to the throne deprived him of his rank as vice-admiral, but he continued to live in France, and died in Paris on the 16th of June 1900. He had married in 1843 the princess Francisca, sister of Pedro II., emperor of Brazil, and had a son, the duc de Penthièvre (born in 1845), also brought up to the navy, and a daughter Françoise (1844–) who married the duc de Chartres in 1863.
The prince de Joinville was the author of several essays and pamphlets on naval affairs and other matters of public interest, which were originally published for the most part either unsigned or pseudonymously, and subsequently republished under his own name after the fall of the Empire. They include Essais sur la marine française (1853); Études sur la marine (1859 and 1870); La Guerre d’Amérique, campagne du Potomac (1862 and 1872); Encore un mot sur Sadowa (Brussels, 1868); and Vieux souvenirs (1894).
JOINVILLE, JEAN, Sire de (1224–1319), was the second
great writer of history in Old French, and in a manner occupies
the interval between Villehardouin and Froissart. Numerous
minor chroniclers fill up the gaps, but no one of them has the
idiosyncrasy which distinguishes these three writers, who illustrate
the three periods of the middle ages—adolescence, complete
manhood, and decadence. Joinville was the head of a noble
family of the province of Champagne (see Joinville, above).
The provincial court of the counts of Champagne had long been
a distinguished one, and the action of Thibaut the poet, together
with the proximity of the district to Paris, made the province
less rebellious than most of the great feudal divisions of France
to the royal authority. Joinville’s first appearance at the king’s
court was in 1241, on the occasion of the knighting of Louis IX.’s
younger brother Alphonse. Seven years afterwards he took the
cross, thereby giving St Louis a valuable follower, and supplying
himself with the occasion of an eternal memory. The crusade,
in which he distinguished himself equally by wisdom and prowess,
taught his practical spirit several lessons. He returned with
the king in 1254. But, though his reverence for the personal
character of his prince seems to have known no bounds, he had
probably gauged the strategic faculties of the saintly king, and
he certainly had imbibed the spirit of the dictum that a man’s
first duties are those to his own house. He was in the intervals
of residence on his own fief a constant attendant on the court,
but he declined to accompany the king on his last and fatal
expedition. In 1282 he was one of the witnesses whose testimony
was formally given at St Denis in the matter of the canonization
of Louis, and in 1298 he was present at the exhumation of the
saint’s body. It was not till even later that he began his literary
work, the occasion being a request from Jeanne of Navarre, the
wife of Philippe le Bel and the mother of Louis le Hutin. The
great interval between his experiences and the period of the
composition of his history is important for the due comprehension
of the latter. Some years passed before the task was completed,
on its own showing, in October 1309. Jeanne was by
this time dead, and Joinville presented his book to her son Louis
the Quarreller. This original manuscript is now lost, whereby
hangs a tale. Great as was his age, Joinville had not ceased to
be actively loyal, and in 1315 he complied with the royal summons
to bear arms against the Flemings. He was at Joinville
again in 1317, and on the 11th of July 1319 he died at the age of
ninety-five, leaving his possessions and his position as seneschal
of Champagne to his second son Anselm. He was buried in the
neighbouring church of St Laurent, where during the Revolution
his bones underwent profanation. Besides his Histoire de Saint
Louis and his Credo or “Confession of Faith” written much
earlier, a considerable number, relatively speaking, of letters and
business documents concerning the fief of Joinville and so forth
are extant. These have an importance which we shall consider
further on; but Joinville owes his place in general estimation
only to his history of his crusading experiences and of the subsequent
fate of St Louis.
Of the famous French history books of the middle ages Joinville’s bears the most vivid impress of the personal characteristics of its composer. It does not, like Villehardouin, give us a picture of the temper and habits of a whole order or cast of men during a heroic period of human history; it falls far short of Froissart in vivid portraying of the picturesque and external aspects of social life; but it is a more personal book than either. The age and circumstances of the writer must not be forgotten in reading it. He is a very old man telling of circumstances which occurred in his youth. He evidently thinks that the times have not changed for the better—what with the frequency with which the devil is invoked in modern France, and the sinful expenditure common in the matter of embroidered silk coats. But this laudation of times past concentrates itself almost wholly on the person of the sainted king whom, while with feudal independence he had declined to swear fealty to him, “because I was not his man,” he evidently regarded with an unlimited reverence. His age, too, while garrulous to a degree, seems to have been free from the slightest taint of boasting. No one perhaps ever took less trouble to make himself out a hero than Joinville. He is constantly admitting that on such and such an occasion he was terribly afraid; he confesses without the least shame that, when one of his followers suggested defiance of the Saracens and voluntary death, he (Joinville) paid not the least attention to him; nor does he attempt to gloss in any way his refusal to accompany St Louis on his unlucky second crusade, or his invincible conviction that it was better to be in mortal sin than to have the leprosy, or his decided preference for wine as little watered as might be, or any other weakness. Yet he was a sincerely religious man, as the curious Credo, written at Acre and forming a kind of anticipatory appendix to the history, sufficiently shows. He presents himself as an altogether human person, brave enough in the field, and, at least when young, capable of extravagant devotion to an ideal, provided the ideal was fashionable, but having at bottom a sufficient respect for his own skin and a full consciousness of the side on which his bread is buttered. Nor can he be said to be in all respects an intelligent traveller. There were in him what may be called glimmerings of deliberate literature, but they were hardly more than glimmerings. His famous description of Greek fire has a most provoking mixture of circumstantial detail with absence of verifying particulars. It is as matter-of-fact and comparative as Dante, without a touch of Dante’s genius. “The fashion of Greek fire was such that it came to us as great as a tun of verjuice, and the fiery tail of it was as big as a mighty lance; it made such noise in the coming that it seemed like the thunder from heaven, and looked like a dragon flying through the air; so great a light did it throw that throughout the host men saw as though it were day for the light it threw.” Certainly the excellent seneschal has not stinted himself of comparisons here, yet they can hardly be said to be luminous. That the thing made a great flame, a great noise, and struck terror into the beholder is about the sum of it all. Every now and then indeed a striking circumstance, strikingly told, occurs in Joinville, such as the famous incident of the woman who carried in one hand a chafing dish of fire, in the other a phial of water, that she might burn heaven and quench hell, lest in future any man should serve God merely for hope of the one or fear of the other. But in these cases the author only repeats what he has heard from others. On his own account he is much more interested in small personal details than in greater things. How the Saracens, when they took him prisoner, he being half dead with a complication of diseases, kindly left him “un mien couverture d’écarlate” which his mother had given him, and which he put over him, having made a hole therein and bound it round him with a cord; how when he came to Acre in a pitiable condition an old servant of his house presented himself, and “brought me clean white hoods and combed my hair most comfortably”, how he bought a hundred tuns of wine and served it—the best first, according to high authority—well-watered to his private soldiers, somewhat less watered to the squires, and to the knights neat, but with a suggestive phial of the weaker liquid to mix “si comme ils vouloient”—these are the details in which he seems to take greatest pleasure, and for readers six hundred years after date perhaps they are not the least interesting details.
