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Updated: June 18, 2025
On November 25, 1560, he gave up the ghost: he was a great seaman, but still more a passionate lover of his country; despotic in his love, but not the less a noble Genoese patriot. Brantôme, Hommes illustres étrangers. Œuvres, i. 279. Froissart's Chron., transl. T. Johnes ii. 446, 465, ff. See the Story of Turkey, 170. See Jurien de la Gravière, Les Corsaires Barbaresques, 193-215.
But occasionally the most famous of Froissart's knights were old, crippled and blinded. Chandos, the best lance of his day, must have been over seventy when he lost his life through being charged upon the side on which he had already lost an eye. He was well on to that age when he rode out from the English army and slew the Spanish champion, big Marten Ferrara, upon the morning of Navaretta.
Froissart's saying, if it was Froissart's, that the English amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were glad or not when they looked gay.
The poetic illusion inspired by Froissart's chronicles of knightly deeds and manners is rudely torn when we read Petrarch's description of France after the battle of Poitiers; "I could not believe that this was the same France which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, land uncultivated, houses in ruins.
I beheld tall, stately caps, and trim bodices, according to fashions which have been handed down from mother to daughter for centuries, the exact counterparts of those worn in the time of the Conqueror; and which surprised me by their faithful resemblance to those which I had seen in the old pictures of Froissart's Chronicles, and in the paintings of illuminated manuscripts.
Let the reader look into Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Politics and see how inconceivable the cultivated Greek found what is now the ideal of a modern democracy. "Citizens" should own landed property, and work it by slaves, barbarians and servants. They should not be "ignoble" mechanics or petty traders. Compare the spirit of Froissart's Chronicles, in the Middle Ages.
Froissart's knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the other duties which indeed are not duties at all when they conflict with it, but plain wickednesses behaved bravely, admirably, and, in the final analysis, public-spiritedly.
There is a class whose value I should designate as favorites; such as Froissart's Chronicles; Southey's Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes; Sully's Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De Quincey; a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice.
"You are much better now," I said, when she had again lain down. "Tell me how it happened." She smiled languidly. "It was not my fault," she said, "but Froissart's. Do you remember that Froissart?" Remember it! I should think so. "Froissart!" I exclaimed. "Why, what had he to do with it?" "Only this. I usually kept him on the top of the bookcase that fell down this evening.
Higher then this, because more picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems to take life and motion as we read.
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