‘An infinite number of traits throughout his work proves the fidelity of his narration. He marks the difference between facts of which he is perfectly sure and those of which he is doubtful: if he cannot produce his proof, he says so, and does not advance more. When he thinks that he has omitted some details which he ought to have known, he frankly owns that he has forgotten them. For instance, when speaking of the conversation between the duke of Burgundy and the Pucelle d’Orléans, at which he was present, he recollects that some circumstances have escaped his memory, and avows that he does not remember them.
‘When after having related any event, he gains further knowledge concerning it, he immediately informs his readers of it, and either adds to or retrenches from his former narration, conformably to the last information he had received. Froissart acted in a similar manner; and Montaigne praises him for it. ‘The good Froissart,’ says he, ‘proceeds in his undertaking with such frank simplicity that having committed a mistake he is no way afraid of owning it, and of correcting it at the moment he is sensible of it.’[5] We ought certainly to feel ourselves obliged to these two writers for their attention in returning back to correct any mistakes; but we should have been more thankful to them if they had been pleased to add their corrections to the articles which had been mistated, instead of scattering their amendments at hazard, as it were, and leaving the readers to connect and compare them with the original article as well as they can.
‘This is not the only defect common to both these historians. The greater part of the chronological mistakes, which have been so ably corrected by M. de Sainte Palaye in Froissart, are to be found in Monstrelet; and what deserves particularly to be noticed, to avoid falling into errors, is, that each of them, when passing from the history of one country to another, introduces events of an earlier date, without ever mentioning it, and intermix them in the same chapter, as if they had taken place in the same period,—but Monstrelet has the advantage of Froissart in the correctness of counting the years, which he invariably begins on Easter-day and closes them on Easter-eve.