trouveres would have indulged. It is curious, for instance, to
compare the scanty references to the material marvels of Constantinople
which Villehardouin saw in their glory, which perished by
sack and fire under his very eyes, and which live chiefly in the
melancholy pages of his Greek contemporary Nicetas, with the
elaborate descriptions of the scarcely greater wonders of fabulous
courts at Constantinople itself, at Babylon, and elsewhere, to be
found in his other contemporaries, the later chanson de geste writers
and the earlier embroiderers of the Arthurian romances and romans
d'aventures. And this later contrast is all the more striking that
Villehardouin agrees with, and not impossibly borrows from, these
very writers in many points of style and phraseology. The brief
chapters of his work have been justly compared to the laisses or
tirades of a chanson in what may be called the vignetting of the
subject of each, in the absence of any attempt to run on the narrative,
in the stock forms, and in the poetical rather than prosaic
word-order of the sentences. Undoubtedly this half-poetic style
(animated as it is and redeemed from any charge of bastardy by the
freshness and vigour which pervade it) adds not a little to the
charm of the book. Its succession of word pictures, conventional
and yet vigorous as the illuminations of a medieval manuscript,
and in their very conventionality free from all thought of literary
presentation, must charm all readers. The sober lists of names
with which it opens; the account of the embassy, so business-like
in its estimates of costs and terms, and suddenly breaking into
a fervent description of how the six deputies, “prostrating
themselves on the earth and weeping warm tears, begged the doge and
people of Venice to have pity on Jerusalem”; the story immediately
following, how the young count Thibault of Champagne, raising
himself from a sickbed in his joy at the successful return of his
ambassadors, “leva sus et chevaucha, et laz! com grant domages,
car onques puis ne chevaucha que cele foiz,” compose a most striking
overture. Then the history relapses into the business vein and tells
of the debates which took place as to the best means of carrying
out the vow after the count's decease, the rendezvous, too ill kept
at Venice, the plausible suggestion of the Venetians that the balance
due to them should be made up by a joint attack on their enemy,
the king of Hungary. Villehardouin does not in the least conceal
the fact that the pope (“l'apostoilles de Rome,” as he calls him,
in the very phrase of the chansons) was very angry with this;
for his own part he seems to think of little or nothing but the
reparation due to the republic, which had loyally kept its bargain
and been defrauded of the price, of the infamy of breaking company
on the part of members of a joint association, and perhaps of the
unknightliness of not taking up an adventure whenever it presents
itself. For here again the restoration of the disinherited prince of
Constantinople supplied an excuse quite as plausible as the liquidation
of the debt to Venice. A famous passage, and one short enough
to quote, is that describing the old blind doge Dandolo, who had
“Grant ochoison de remanoir (reason for staying at home), car viels
hom ere, et si avoit les yaulx en la teste biaus et n'en véoit gote
(goutte),” and yet was the foremost in fight.
It would be out of place to attempt any further analysis of the Conquête here. But it is not impertinent, and is at the same time an excuse for what has been already said, to repeat that Villehardouin's book, brief as it is, is in reality one of the capital books of literature, not merely for its merit, but because it is the most authentic and the most striking embodiment in contemporary literature of the sentiments which determined the action of a great and important period of history. There are but very few books which hold this position, and Villehardouin's is one of them. If every other contemporary record of the crusades perished, we should still be able by aid of this to understand and realize what the mental attitude of crusaders, of Teutonic knights, and the rest was, and without this we should lack the earliest, the most undoubtedly genuine, and the most characteristic of all such records. The very inconsistency with which Villehardouin is chargeable, the absence of compunction with which he relates the changing of a sacred religious pilgrimage into something by no means unlike a mere filibustering raid on the great scale, add a charm to the book. For, religious as it is, it is entirely free from the very slightest touch of hypocrisy or indeed of self-consciousness of any kind. The famous description of the crusades, gesta Dei per Francos, was evidently to Villehardouin a plain matter-of-fact description, and it no more occurred to him to doubt the divine favour being extended to the expeditions against Alexius or Theodore than to doubt that it was shown to expeditions against Saracens and Turks.
The person of Villehardouin reappears for us once, but once only, in the chronicle of his continuator, Henri de Valenciennes. There is a great gap in style, though none in subject, between the really poetical prose of the first historian of the fifth crusade and the Latin empire and the awkward mannerism (so awkward that it has been taken to represent a “disrhymed” verse chronicle) of his follower. But the much greater length at which Villehardouin appears on this one occasion shows us the restraint which he must have exercised in the passages which deal with himself in his own work. He again led the vanguard in the emperor Henry's expedition against Burilas the Bulgarian, and he is represented by the Valenciennes scribe as encouraging his sovereign to the attack in a long speech. Then he disappears altogether, with the exception of some brief and chiefly diplomatic mentions. Du Cange discovered and quoted a deed of donation by him dated 1207, by which certain properties were devised to the churches of Notre Dame de Foissy and Notre Dame de Troyes, with the reservation of life interests to his daughters Alix and Damerones, and his sisters Emmeline and Haye, all of whom appear to have embraced a monastic life. A letter addressed from the East to Blanche of Champagne is cited, and a papal record of 1212 styles him still “marshal of Romania.” The next year this title passed to his son Erard; and 1213 is accordingly given as the date of his death, which, as there is no record or hint of his having returned to France, may be supposed to have happened at Messinople, where also he must have written the Conquête.
The book appears to have been known in the ages immediately succeeding his own; and, though there is no contemporary manuscript in existence, there are some half-dozen which appear to date from the end of the 13th or the course of the 14th century, while one at least appears to be a copy made from his own work in that spirit of unintelligent faithfulness which is much more valuable to posterity than more pragmatical editing. The first printed edition of the book, by a certain Blaise de Vigenere, dates from 1585, is dedicated to the seignior of Venice (Villehardouin, it should be said, has been accused of a rather unfair predilection for the Venetians), and speaks of either a part or the whole of the memoirs as having been printed twelve years earlier. Of this earlier copy nothing seems to be known. A better edition, founded on a Netherlandish MS., appeared at Lyons in 1601. But both these were completely antiquated by the great edition of Du Cange in 1657, wherein that learned writer employed all his knowledge, never since equalled, of the subject, but added a translation, or rather paraphrase, into modern French which is scarcely worthy either of himself or his author. Dom Brial gave a new edition from different MS. sources in 1823, and the book figures with different degrees of dependence on Du Cange and Brial in the collections of Petitot, Buchon, and Michaud and Poujoulat. All these, however, have been superseded for the modern student by the editions of Natalis de Wailly (1872 and 1874), in which the text is critically edited from all the available MSS. and a new translation added, while there is a still later and rather handier one by E. Bouchet (2 vols., Paris, 1891), which, however, rests mainly on N. de Wailly for text. The charm of Villehardouin can escape no reader; but few readers will fail to derive some additional pleasure from the two essays which Sainte-Beuve devoted to him, reprinted in the ninth volume of the Causeries du lundi. See also A. Debidour, Les Chroniqueurs (1888). There are English translations by T. Smith (1829), and (more literally) Sir F. T . Marzials (Everyman's Library, 1908). (G. Sa.)
VILLÈLE, JEAN BAPTISTE GUILLAUME MARIE ANNE SÉRAPHIN, Comte de (1773–1854), French statesman, was born at Toulouse on the 14th of April 1773 and educated for the navy. He joined the “Bayonnaise” at Brest in July 1788 and served in the West and East Indies. Arrested in the Isle of Bourbon under the Terror, he was set free by the revolution of Thermidor (July 1794). He acquired some property in the island, and married in 1799 the daughter of a great proprietor, M. Desbassyns de Richemont, whose estates he had managed. His apprenticeship to politics was served in the Colonial Assembly of Bourbon, where he fought successfully to preserve the colony from the consequences of perpetual interference from the authorities in Paris, and on the other hand to prevent local discontent from appealing to the English for protection. The arrival of General Decaen, sent out by Bonaparte in 1802, restored security to the island, and five years later Villèle, who had now realized a large fortune, returned to France. He was mayor of his commune, and a member of the council of the Haute-Garonne under the Empire. At the restoration of 1814 he at once declared for royalist principles. He was mayor of Toulouse in 1814–15 and deputy for the Haute-Garonne in the “Chambre Introuvable” of 1815 Villèle, who before the promulgation of the charter had written some Observations sur le projet de constitution opposing it, as too democratic in character, naturally took his place on the extreme right with the ultra-royalists. In the new Chamber of 1816 Villèle found his party in a minority, but his personal authority nevertheless increased. He was looked on by the
