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The good Froissart came here in the year 1388, having ridden and chatted about arms all along the route with the chevalier Messire Espaing de Lyon; he lodged in the inn of the Beautiful Hostess, which was then called the hotel of the Moon. The count Gaston Phoebus sent in all haste to seek him: “for he was the lord who of all the world the most gladly entertained the stranger in order to hear the news.” Froissart passed twelve weeks in his hotel: “for they made him good cheer and fed well his horses, and in all things also ordered well.”
Froissart is a child, and sometimes an old child. At that time thought was expanding, as in Greece in the time of Herodotus. But, while we feel that in Greece it is going on to unfold itself to the very end, we discover here that an obstacle checks it: there is a knot in the tree; the arrested sap can mount no higher. This knot is scholasticism.
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For, during three centuries already they had written in verse, and for two centuries in prose; after this long culture, see what a historian is Froissart. One morning he mounts on horseback with several valets, under a beautiful sun, and gallops onward; a lord meets him whom he accosts: “Sir, what is this castle?” The other tells him about the sieges, and what grand sword-thrusts were there exchanged. “Holy Mary,” cried Froissart, “but your words please me and do me a deal of good, while you tell them off to me! And you shall not lose them, for all shall be set in remembrance and chronicled in the history which I am pursuing.” Then he has explained to himself the kindred of the seigneur, his alliances, how his friends and enemies have lived and are dead, and the whole skein of the adventures interwoven during two centuries and in three countries. “And as soon as I had alighted at the hotels, on the road that we were following together, I wrote them down, were it evening or morning, for the better memory of them in times to come; for there is no such exact retentive as writing.” All is found here, the pell-mell and the hundred shifts of the conversations, the reflections, the little accidents of the journey. An old squire recounts to him mountain legends, how Pierre de Beam, having once killed an enormous bear, could no longer sleep in peace, but thenceforward he awaked each night, “making such a noise and such clatter that it seemed that all the devils in hell should have carried away everything and were inside with him.” Froissart judges that this bear was perhaps a knight turned into a beast for some misdeed; cites in support the story of Actæon, an “accomplished and pretty knight who was changed into a stag.” Thus goes his life and thus his history is composed; it resembles a tapestry of the period, brilliant and varied, full of hunting, of tournaments, battles and processions. He gives himself and his hearers the pleasure of imagining ceremonies and adventures; no other idea, or rather no idea. Of criticism, general considerations, reasoning upon man or society, counsels or forecast, there is no trace; it is a herald at arms who seeks to please curious eyes, the warlike spirit and the empty minds of robust knights, great eaters, lovers of thumps and pomps. Is it not strange, this barrenness of reason! In Greece, at the end of an hundred years, Thucydides, Plato and Xenophon, philosophy and science had appeared. By way of climax, read the verses of Froissart, those ballads, roundelays and virelays that he recited of evenings to the Count de Foix, “who took great solace in hearing them indeed,” the old rubbish of decadence, worn, affected allegories, the garrulousness of a broken-down pedant who amuses himself in composing wearisome turns of address. And the rest are all alike. Charles d’Orleans has a sort of faded grace and nothing-more, Christine de Pisan but an official solemnity.
Such feeble spirits want the force to give birth to general ideas; they are bowed down under the weight of those which have been hooked on to them.