‘This defect, however, we cannot without injustice attribute to the continuator of Monstrelet,—for it is clearly perceptible that he only treats of the general history of France in as far as it is connected with that of Burgundy, and we cannot suppose that he would repeat twice events foreign to the principal object of his work. It is much more natural to believe that the abridged accounts are his, and that the first copiers, thinking they were too short, have added the whole detail of these articles from the Grandes Chroniques or from Jean Chartier, whence he had been satisfied with merely making extracts.
‘From the death of Charles VII. in 1461, to that of Philip duke of Burgundy, we meet with no more of these repetitions. The historian (for he then deserves the name) leaves off copying the Chronicles, and advances without a guide: consequently, he is very frequently bewildered. I shall not attempt to notice his faults, which are the same with those of Monstrelet, and I could but repeat what I have said before. There is, however, one which is peculiar to him, and which pervades the whole work: it is an outrageous partiality for the house of Burgundy.
‘We may excuse him for having written, under the title of a General History of France, the particular history of Burgundy, and for having only treated of that of France incidentally, in as far as it interested the burgundian princes. We may, indeed, more readily pardon him for having painted Charles VII. as a voluptuous monarch, and Louis XI. sometimes as a tyrant, at others as a deep and ferocious politician, holding in contempt the most sacred engagements. But the fidelity of history required that he should not have been silent as to the vices of the duke of Burgundy and his son, who plunged France into an abyss of calamities, and that his predilection for these two princes should not burst forth in every page.
‘The person who continued this first part of the chronicles of Monstrelet has been hitherto unknown, but I believe a lucky accident has enabled me to discover him. Dom Berthod, a learned benedictine monk of the congregation of St Vanne, having employed himself for these many years in searching the libraries and ancient rolls in Flanders for facts relative to our history, has made a report with extracts from numerous manuscripts, of which we had only vague ideas. He has had the goodness to communicate some of them to me, and among others the chronicle of Jacques du Clercq,[11] which begins at 1448, and ends, like the continuator of Monstrelet, at the death of the duke of Burgundy in 1467. In order to give a general idea of the contents of the work, D. Berthod has copied, with the utmost exactness, the table of chapters composed by Jacques du Clercq himself, as he tells us in his prologue. I have compared this table and the extracts with the continuation of Monstrelet, and have observed such a similarity, particularly from the year 1453 to 1467, that I think it impossible for any two writers to be so exactly the same unless one had copied after the other.
