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Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Chronique des règnes de Jean II et de Charles V has been regarded as an official history of the two reigns. It is thought to have been an initiative of King Charles V himself, who entrusted its writing not to the monks of Saint-Denis, often chosen by his predecessors, but to one of his closest officials, a layman: the chancellor Pierre d’Orgemont. The idea of Charles V’s direct influence on the text dates from the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was introduced by the chronicle’s publisher, Roland Delachenal. The present contribution aims to restore Pierre d’Orgemont’s authorial role. To do so, we will first examine the hints that the author was able to leave in the text about his own existence, about the space in which he lived and moved. We also consider his careful chronological notation in the light of what we know about his professional activities. The article then raises the question of the genesis of the work: despite the clear differences between the account of the reign of John II and that of Charles V, the general consensus has been that the chronicle was composed in a single draft in the 1370s. The king’s manuscript (Paris, BnF, fr. 2813) is said to be the perfect model. But an examination of the manuscript tradition, and a parallel reading of the Chronique française (attributed to Guillaume de Nangis and expanded repeatedly over the fourteenth century), allows us to distinguish two drafting periods. The first part was written on the sole initiative of Pierre d’Orgemont, then king’s counselor at the Parlement de Paris; it was mainly composed before the death of John II. Furthermore, taking into account the entire chronicle, including the two expansions that take us up to 1381 and then 1384, invites to reconsider the viewpoint of this historiographical project. Initiated several years before Charles V became king, it was continued beyond his death by the same author, who in the course of his long career served both the duchy of Burgundy and its apanagist prince, Philip the Bold, and the king of France.