Note 89 — Chapter III
George Godfrey Berry translation
It would be instructive to draw up a list of the celebrated historical works, such as Augustin Thierry's Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands, whose authority has been completely destroyed after the authorship of their sources has been studied. Nothing amuses the gallery more than to see an historian convicted of having built a theory on falsified documents. Nothing is more calculated to cover an historian with confusion than to find that he has fallen into the error of treating seriously documents which are no documents at all.