Villehardouin reappears for us once, but once only, in the chron icle of his continuator, Henri de Valenciennes. There is a great gap in style, though none in subject, between the really poetical prose of the first historian of the fifth crusade and the Latin empire and the awkward mannerism (so awkward that it has been taken to represent a "disrhymed" verse chronicle) of his follower. But the much greater length at which Villehardouin appears on this one occasion shows us the restraint which he must have exer cised in the passages which deal with himself in his own work. He again led the vanguard in the emperor Henry's expedition against Burilas the Bulgarian, and he is represented by the Valenciennes scribe as encouraging his sovereign to the attack in a long speech. Then he disappears altogether, with the exception of some brief and chiefly diplomatic mentions. Du Cange discovered and quoted a deed of donation by him dated 1207, by which certain properties were devised to the churches of Notre Dame de Foissy and Notre Dame de Troyes, with the reservation of life interests to his daughters Alix and Damerones, and his sisters Emmeline and Haye, all of whom appear to have embraced a monastic life. A letter addressed from the East to Blanche of Champagne is cited, and a papal record of 1212 styles him still "marshal of Romania." The next year this title passed to his son Erard and 1213 is accordingly given as the date of his death.
It would be out of place to attempt any further analysis of the Conquete here. But it is not impertinent, and is at the same time an excuse for what has been already said, to repeat that Villehar douin's book, brief as it is, is in reality one of the capital books of literature, not merely for its merit, but because it is the most authentic and the most striking embodiment in contemporary lit erature of the sentiments which determined the action of a great and important period of history. There are but very few books which hold this position, and Villehardouin's is one of them. If every other contemporary record of the crusades perished, we should still be able by aid of this to understand and realize what the mental attitude of crusaders, of Teutonic knights, and the rest was, and without this we should lack the earliest, the most un doubtedly genuine, and the most characteristic of all such records. The very inconsistency with which Villehardouin is chargeable, the absence of compunction with which he relates the changing of a sacred religious pilgrimage into something by no means unlike a mere filibustering raid on the great scale, add a charm.
The book appears to have been known in the ages immediately succeeding his own ; and, though there is no contemporary manu script in existence, there are some half-dozen which appear to date from the end of the 13th or the course of the 14th century, while one at least appears to be a copy made from his own work in that spirit of unintelligent faithfulness which is much more valuable to posterity than more pragmatical editing. The first printed edition of the book, by a certain Blaise de Vigenere, dates from 1585, is dedicated to the seigniory of Venice (Villehardouin, it should be said, has been accused of a rather unfair predilection for the Venetians) , and speaks of either a part or the whole of the memoirs as having been printed twelve years earlier. Of this earlier copy nothing seems to be known. A better edition, founded on a Nether landish ms., appeared at Lyons in 1601. But both these were com pletely antiquated by the great edition of Du Cange in 1657, wherein that learned writer employed all his knowledge, never since equalled, of the subject, but added a translation, or rather paraphrase, into modern French which is scarcely worthy either of himself or his author. Dom Brial gave a new edition from different ms. sources in 1823, and the book figures with different degrees of dependence on Du Cange and Brial in the collections of Petitot, Buchon, and Michaud and Poujoulat.
All these, however, have been superseded for the modern student by the editions of Natalis de Wailly (1872 and 5874), in which the text is critically edited from all the available mss. and a new transla tion added, while there is a still later and rather handier one by E. Bouchet (2 vols., Paris, 1891), which, however, rests mainly on N. de Wailly for text. The charm of Villehardouin can escape no reader; but few readers will fail to derive some additional pleasure from the two essays which Sainte-Beuve devoted to him, reprinted in the ninth volume of the Causeries du lundi. See also A. Debidour, Les Chroniqueurs (1888). There are English translations by T. Smith (1829), and (more literally) Sir F. T. Marzials (Everyman's Library, 1908).