e. A number of letters were scratched out, words erased, and
sometimes whole sentences altered or suppressed, a red line being drawn
across the words which had to be omitted. It looks, in fact, like a
manuscript prepared for the printer. Now, if the same copyist who copied
this MS. copied likewise the MS. of Joinville, it follows that he was
separated from the original of Joinville by the same interval which
separates the corrected MSS. of "La Vie et les Miracles" from their
original, or from the beginning of the fourteenth century. This line of
argument seems to establish satisfactorily the approximate date of the
oldest MS. of Joinville as belonging to the end of the fourteenth century.

Another MS. was discovered at Lucca. As it had belonged to the Dukes of
Guise, great expectations were at one time entertained of its value. It
was bought by the Royal Library at Paris in 1741 for 360 livres, but it
was soon proved not to be older than about 1500, representing the language
of the time of Francois I. rather than of St. Louis, but nevertheless
preserving occasionally a more ancient spelling than the other MS. which
was copied two hundred years before. This MS. bears the arms of the
Princess Antoinette de Bourbon and of her husband, Claude de Lorraine, who
was "Duc de Guise, Comte d'Aumale, Marquis de Mayence et d'Elbeuf, and
Baron de Joinville." Their marriage took place in 1513; he died in 1550,
she in 1583.

There is a third MS. which has lately been discovered. It belonged to M.
Brissart-Binet of Rheims, became known to M. Paulin Paris, and was lent to
M. de Wailly for his new edition of Joinville. It seems to be a copy of
the so-called MS. of Lucca, the MS. belonging to the Princess Antoinette
de Bourbon, and it is most likely the very copy which that Princess
ordered to be made for Louis Lassere, canon of St. Martin of Tours who
published an abridgment of it in 1541. By a most fortunate accident it
supplies the passages from page 88 to 112, and from page 126 to 139, which
are wanting in the MS. of Lucca.

It must be admitted, therefore, that for an accurate study of the
historical growth of the French language, the work of Joinville is of less
importance than it would have been if it had been preserved in its
original orthography, and with all the grammatical peculiarities which
mark the French of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth
century. There may be no more than a distance of not quite a hundre