Joinville has recounted a scene which took place between him and his friend, that is one of the fairest things in literature, slight episode though it is. In council, in Palestine, the barons urged the king to return to France. Almost alone, Joinville held out against such a course while their retainers were still unredeemed from captivity. For he remembered how a knight of his family had admonished him: “You are going beyond the seas. Be careful how you come back. For no knight, rich or poor, can return an honored man if he leaves in Saracen hands the humble folk of Our Lord with whom he started forth.”
The king listened in silence at the council, and in silence sat through the banquet that followed, paying no heed to Joinville, who was placed by his side. The seneschal, saddened by what he thought to be his friend’s displeasure, was standing alone, leaning against a casement, thinking that when the others returned to France, he would join the Prince of Antioch, his cousin, till another crusade came to deliver the “little people of the Lord” unransomed still in Egypt. As he leaned against the window bars he felt friendly arms laid about his shoulders: “Have done, Monseigneur,” he cried, thinking it was one of the barons come to mock him, “leave me in peace.” Then the loving hands slipped over his face and he recognized the emerald ring worn by the king. The dear words of mock reproach: “What you, the youngest, dare advise me against all the great and the wise men of France? Tell me, you think I would do wrong in leaving?” Then sturdy Joinville, who paints his friend, too, by the confession, “Never did I lie to him,” made answer, “Yes, Sire, as God is my aid.” “And if I stay, will you stay?” asked the king.
The bloom of the exquisite moment has come to us across the dividing centuries because Joinville was not thinking of making a book when he wrote his reminiscences. His object was to have others understand the gracious distinction, the tender familiarity with him of this king-crusader whom he loved and who loved him. Written artlessly, and in entire good faith, his book is full of that indefinable quality called charm. The seneschal’s honest heart is in its infinitely precious pages.
In that other early monument of French prose, the grave Villehardouin rises to the historian’s plane in depicting the Fourth Crusade. Joinville cannot be said to have taken in the Sixth Crusade as a whole; he muddles the battle scenes; he digresses to right and to left in idle details, then catches himself up with happy ease, as if saying, “Dear me! I forgot to mention,” imparting to his chronicle an inimitable quality all its own. No one would have Joinville different. Amiable, jocund, unaffected, the soul of honor, candor itself, he does not fear to acknowledge that he could tremble with fright in battle despite his stalwart six feet and over. He beguiled his captivity by trying to convert a Mohammedan by highly colored descriptions of hell. He whiled away the long hours in Syria in composing a treatise of theology, a Credo, wherein he warns every prud’homme to hold on to God with both arms lest that felon, the devil, come between. And the two arms by which a man was to hold on to God were Faith and Good Works. “You must have both, if you wish to keep God: one without the other is worthless,” warns the young seneschal. No quibbling then!
Joinville had also that quality which the French term enjouement, hard to translate, a playful, most lovable frankness, a mocking vivacity which was for St. Louis a source of relaxation. The king loved conversation; he thought there was no book so good as quolibet, or say what you please. Some Armenian pilgrims besought of the seneschal a glimpse of the saint-king. Joinville came merrily to tell his friend, warning him that he, the seneschal, was not yet prepared to kiss his bones. And the king laughed, too, but because he knew it would give the devout Armenians pleasure, he accorded them an interview. Stroke by stroke, Joinville filled in the picture of Louis IX, and all the while he unconsciously paints himself as well. He is so eager to make you love his hero that you learn to love himself. A tear is always close to the eye in reading Joinville, not that what he relates is sad, but because this story of a high soul, written by his loyal friend, touches things that lie deep in all true hearts.
Joinville was to survive his friend for half a century. He died in 1317. With a character ripened by six years of intimacy with the bon saint-homme roy, he came back from the East and set himself to work for his people’s welfare, the “little people of the Lord” by whom he had stood in their hour of need. He was then but thirty. In his old age he was the accepted arbiter of good taste, admired as the last of a generation of courtesy. When over ninety, this vigorous old crusader rode into Flanders on a military expedition for the crown. He had seen the reigns of six French kings and the passing away of the crusader’s spirit. He had seen his own Champagne become a part of the royal domain, when the heiress Jeanne was married to the grandson of St. Louis. And it was at the bidding of that queen of Philippe-le-Bel that Joinville wrote down his memories of Louis IX.
France has high advocates to plead for her before the Throne in hours of national peril. Jeanne d’Arc said that she saw St. Louis petitioning God in the dire hour of foreign invasion. “May they never deny Thy name,” prayed the saint-king at Tunis, as he rendered “his pure soul unto his captain, Christ, under whose colors he had fought so long.” And in the men of 1914-18, true prud’hommes after the heart of St. Louis and his dear friend Joinville, stirred the crusader blood of their ancestors.
THE COLLEGIATE OF MANTES[98]
The king was very well built, of easy bearing and smiling countenance, bald, high-colored, a great eater and drinker. Toward his friends he was most generous; toward those who displeased him he was very firm; in his designs he was foresighted and tenacious, very catholic in his beliefs, and he judged rapidly and with great perspicacity. Easy to arouse, he was also easy to appease. Upon the great who disobeyed him he was hard, and he enjoyed sowing discord among them, and to make use of the little people in his purposes.—Portrait of Philippe-Auguste by a canon of St. Martin, Tours.
