‘As we do not possess the whole of this chronicle, I can but offer this as a very probable conjecture, which will be corroborated, when it is considered that Jacques du Clercq and the continuator of Monstrelet lived in the same country. The first resided in Arras; and by the minute details the second enters into concerning Flanders, we may judge that he was an inhabitant of that country. Some villages burnt, or events still less interesting, and unknown beyond the places where they happened, are introduced into his history. In like manner, we should discover without difficulty (if it were otherwise unknown), that the editor of the Grandes Chroniques was a monk of the abbey of St Denis, when he gravely relates, as an important event, that on such a day the scullion of the abbey was found dead in his bed,—and that a peasant of Clignancourt beat his wife until she died.
‘To these divers relations between the two writers, we must add the period when they wrote. We see by the preface of Jacques du Clercq, that he composed his history shortly after the death of Philip duke of Burgundy in 1467; and the continuator of Monstrelet, when speaking of the arrest of the bastard de Rubempré in Holland, whither he had been sent by Louis XI. says, that the bastard was a prisoner at the time he was writing, ‘at the end of February 1468, before Easter;’ that is to say, that he was at work on his history in the month of February 1469, according to our mode of beginning the year.
‘Whether this continuation be an abridgment of the chronicle of Jacques du Clercq or an original chronicle, it seems very clear that Monstrelet has been tried by the merits of this third volume, and that his reputation of being a party-writer has been grounded on the false opinion that he was the author of it.
‘I cannot close this essay without expressing my surprise that no one, before the publication of the article respecting Monstrelet in the register of the Cordeliers, had suspected that part, at least, of this third volume, which has been attributed to him, could not have come from his hand. Any attentive reader must have been struck with the passage where the continuator relates the death of Charles duke of Orleans, when, after recapitulating in a few words the misfortunes which the murder of his father had caused to France, he refers the reader for more ample details to the history ‘of Monstrelet:’ as ‘may be seen,’ says he, ‘in the Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet.’