improvement on that of 1547, was still very far from
the style and language of the beginning of the fourteenth century.

The learned Du Cange searched in vain for more trustworthy materials for
restoring the text of Joinville. Invaluable as are the dissertations which
he wrote on Joinville, his own text of the History, published in 1668,
could only be based on the two editions that had preceded his own.

It was not till 1761 that real progress was made in restoring the text of
Joinville. An ancient MS. had been brought from Brussels by the Marechal
Maurice de Saxe. It was carefully edited by M. Capperonnier, and it has
served, with few exceptions, as the foundation of all later editions. It
is now in the Imperial Library. The editors of the "Recueil des Historiens
de France" express their belief that the MS. might actually be the
original. At the end of it are the words, "Ce fu escript en l'an de grace
mil CCC et IX, on moys d'octovre." This, however, is no real proof of the
date of the MS. Transcribers of MSS., it is well known, were in the habit
of mechanically copying all they saw in the original, and hence we find
very commonly the date of an old MS. repeated over and over again in
modern copies.

The arguments by which in 1839 M. Paulin Paris proved that this, the
oldest MS. of Joinville, belongs not to the beginning, but to the end of
the fourteenth century, seem unanswerable, though they failed to convince
M. Daunou, who, in the twentieth volume of the "Historiens de France,"
published in 1840, still looks upon this MS. as written in 1309, or at
least during Joinville's life-time. M. Paulin Paris establishes, first of
all, that this MS. cannot be the same as that which was so carefully
described in the catalogue of Charles V. What became of that MS. once
belonging to the private library of the Kings of France, no one knows, but
there is no reason, even now, why it should not still be recovered. The
MS. of Joinville, which now belongs to the Imperial Library, is written by
the same scribe who wrote another MS. of "La Vie et les Miracles de Saint
Louis." Now, this MS. of "La Vie et les Miracles" is a copy of an older
MS., which likewise exists at Paris. This more ancient MS., probably the
original, and written, therefore, in the beginning of the fourteenth
century, had been carefully revised before it served as the model for the
later copy, executed by the same scribe who, as we saw, wrote the old MS.
of Joinvill