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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Jeanne d'Arc
+       Her Life And Death
+
+Author: Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2006 [EBook #2553]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JEANNE D'ARC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers
+
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC, HER LIFE AND DEATH
+
+
+by Mrs. Oliphant
+
+
+Author of "Makers of Florence," "Makers of Venice," etc.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+COUSIN ANNIE (MRS. HARRY COGHILL)
+
+THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED IN LOVE OF OUR COMMON HEROINE AND IN REMEMBRANCE
+OF LONG AND FAITHFUL AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
+
+
+     PREPARER'S NOTE
+
+     The original book for this text was published as a volume in a
+     series "Heroes of the Nations," edited by Evelyn Abbot, M.H.,
+     Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and published by G.P. Putnam's
+     Sons _The Knickerbocker Press_ in 1896. The title material
+     includes the note:
+
+     FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE
+     GLORIA RERUM--OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265.
+     THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
+     FAME SHALL LIVE.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+CHAPTER I — FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 1412-1423.
+
+CHAPTER II — DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429.
+
+CHAPTER III — BEFORE THE KING. FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER IV — THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS. MAY 1-8, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER V — THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE. JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER VI — THE CORONATION. JULY 17, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER VII — THE SECOND PERIOD. 1429-1430.
+
+CHAPTER VIII — DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT. AUTUMN, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER IX — COMPIÈGNE. 1430.
+
+CHAPTER X — THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XI — THE JUDGES. 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XII — BEFORE THE TRIAL. LENT, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XIII — THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION. FEBRUARY, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XIV —THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON. LENT, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XV — RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XVI — THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XVIII — THE SACRIFICE. MAY 31, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XVIII — AFTER.
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I -- FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 1412-1423.
+
+It is no small effort for the mind, even of the most well-informed, how
+much more of those whose exact knowledge is not great (which is the
+case with most readers, and alas! with most writers also), to transport
+itself out of this nineteenth century which we know so thoroughly, and
+which has trained us in all our present habits and modes of thought,
+into the fifteenth, four hundred years back in time, and worlds apart
+in every custom and action of life. What is there indeed the same in
+the two ages? Nothing but the man and the woman, the living agents in
+spheres so different; nothing but love and grief, the affections and
+the sufferings by which humanity is ruled and of which it is capable.
+Everything else is changed: the customs of life, and its methods, and
+even its motives, the ruling principles of its continuance. Peace and
+mutual consideration, the policy which even in its selfish developments
+is so far good that it enables men to live together, making existence
+possible,--scarcely existed in those days. The highest ideal was that of
+war, war no doubt sometimes for good ends, to redress wrongs, to avenge
+injuries, to make crooked things straight--but yet always war, implying
+a state of affairs in which the last thing that men thought of was
+the golden rule, and the highest attainment to be looked for was the
+position of a protector, doer of justice, deliverer of the oppressed.
+Our aim now that no one should be oppressed, that every man should
+have justice as by the order of nature, was a thing unthought of. What
+individual help did feebly for the sufferer then, the laws do for us
+now, without fear or favour: which is a much greater thing to say
+than that the organisation of modern life, the mechanical helps, the
+comforts, the easements of the modern world, had no existence in those
+days. We are often told that the poorest peasant in our own time has
+aids to existence that had not been dreamt of for princes in the Middle
+Ages. Thirty years ago the world was mostly of opinion that the balance
+was entirely on our side, and that in everything we were so much better
+off than our fathers, that comparison was impossible. Since then there
+have been many revolutions of opinion, and we think it is now the
+general conclusion of wise men, that one period has little to boast
+itself of against another, that one form of civilisation replaces
+another without improving upon it, at least to the extent which appears
+on the surface. But yet the general prevalence of peace, interrupted
+only by occasional wars, even when we recognise a certain large
+and terrible utility in war itself, must always make a difference
+incalculable between the condition of the nations now, and then.
+
+It is difficult, indeed, to imagine any concatenation of affairs which
+could reduce a country now to the condition in which France was in the
+beginning of the fifteenth century. A strong and splendid kingdom, to
+which in early ages one great man had given the force and supremacy of
+a united nation, had fallen into a disintegration which seems almost
+incredible when regarded in the light of that warm flame of nationality
+which now illumines, almost above all others, the French nation. But
+Frenchmen were not Frenchmen, they were Burgundians, Armagnacs, Bretons,
+Provençaux five hundred years ago. The interests of one part of the
+kingdom were not those of the other. Unity had no existence. Princes of
+the same family were more furious enemies to each other, at the head of
+their respective fiefs and provinces, than the traditional foes of their
+race; and instead of meeting an invader with a united force of patriotic
+resistance, one or more of these subordinate rulers was sure to side
+with the invader and to execute greater atrocities against his own flesh
+and blood than anything the alien could do.
+
+When Charles VII. of France began, nominally, his reign, his uncles and
+cousins, his nearest kinsmen, were as determinedly his opponents, as was
+Henry V. of England, whose frank object was to take the crown from his
+head. The country was torn in pieces with different causes and cries.
+The English were but little farther off from the Parisian than was the
+Burgundian, and the English king was only a trifle less French than
+were the members of the royal family of France. These circumstances are
+little taken into consideration in face of the general history, in which
+a careless reader sees nothing but the two nations pitted against each
+other as they might be now, the French united in one strong and distinct
+nationality, the three kingdoms of Great Britain all welded into one.
+In the beginning of the fifteenth century the Scots fought on the French
+side, against their intimate enemy of England, and if there had been any
+unity in Ireland, the Irish would have done the same. The advantages
+and disadvantages of subdivision were in full play. The Scots fought
+furiously against the English--and when the latter won, as was usually
+the case, the Scots contingent, whatever bounty might be shown to the
+French, was always exterminated. On the other side the Burgundians, the
+Armagnacs, and Royalists met each other almost more fiercely than the
+latter encountered the English. Each country was convulsed by struggles
+of its own, and fiercely sought its kindred foes in the ranks of its
+more honest and natural enemy.
+
+When we add to these strange circumstances the facts that the French
+King, Charles VI., was mad, and incapable of any real share either in
+the internal government of his country or in resistance to its invader:
+that his only son, the Dauphin, was no more than a foolish boy, led by
+incompetent councillors, and even of doubtful legitimacy, regarded with
+hesitation and uncertainty by many, everybody being willing to believe
+the worst of his mother, especially after the treaty of Troyes in which
+she virtually gave him up: that the King's brothers or cousins at the
+head of their respective fiefs were all seeking their own advantage, and
+that some of them, especially the Duke of Burgundy, had cruel wrongs
+to avenge: it will be more easily understood that France had reached a
+period of depression and apparent despair which no principle of national
+elasticity or new spring of national impulse was present to amend. The
+extraordinary aspect of whole districts in so strong and populous a
+country, which disowned the native monarch, and of towns and castles
+innumerable which were held by the native nobility in the name of
+a foreign king, could scarcely have been possible under other
+circumstances. Everything was out of joint. It is said to be
+characteristic of the nation that it is unable to play publicly (as
+we say) a losing game; but it is equally characteristic of the race
+to forget its humiliations as if they had never been, and to come out
+intact when the fortune of war changes, more French than ever, almost
+unabashed and wholly uninjured, by the catastrophe which had seemed
+fatal.
+
+If we had any right to theorise on such a subject--which is a thing the
+French themselves above all other men love to do,--we should be disposed
+to say, that wars and revolutions, legislation and politics, are things
+which go on over the head of France, so to speak--boilings on the
+surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such a word
+may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while she
+herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually
+obstinate, tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit
+of a certain kind of well-being congenial to her--goes steadily on,
+less susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less
+excitable on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the
+commotion is over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving, uninjured
+in any essential particular by the most terrific of convulsions. This of
+course is to be said more or less of every country, the strain of
+common life being always, thank God, too strong for every temporary
+commotion--but it is true in a special way of France:--witness the
+extraordinary manner in which in our own time, and under our own eyes,
+that wonderful country righted herself after the tremendous misfortunes
+of the Franco-German war, in which for a moment not only her prestige,
+her honour, but her money and credit seemed to be lost.
+
+It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary
+tenacity of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and
+solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and light
+head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous _élan_, which are
+popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France--at
+the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful
+embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc.
+To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic
+revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's
+fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of any man--even a
+poet:--for the man, even in his most uncontrolled imaginations, carries
+with him a certain practical limitation of what can be--whereas
+the woman at her highest is absolute, and disregards all bounds of
+possibility. The Maid of Orleans, the Virgin of France, is the sole
+being of her kind who has ever attained full expression in this world.
+She can neither be classified, as her countrymen love to classify, nor
+traced to any system of evolution as we all attempt to do nowadays. She
+is the impossible verified and attained. She is the thing in every race,
+in every form of humanity, which the dreaming girl, the visionary maid,
+held in at every turn by innumerable restrictions, her feet bound, her
+actions restrained, not only by outward force, but by the law of her
+nature, more effectual still,--has desired to be. That voiceless poet,
+to whom what can be is nothing, but only what should be if miracle could
+be attained to fulfil her trance and rapture of desire--is held by no
+conditions, modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her,
+the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers.
+Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination.
+She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable,
+alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable
+path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers
+in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are
+common to us all.
+
+And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country
+of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to
+the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that has
+brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations.
+This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and
+charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights.
+How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted
+and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain,
+and failure of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God,
+by the inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of
+nature, which is over nature, can put any trust. No evolution, no system
+of development, can explain Jeanne. There is but one of her and no more
+in all the astonished world.
+
+With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and
+beautiful name. To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary.
+Though she is the finest emblem to the world in general of that noble,
+fearless, and spotless Virginity which is one of the finest inspirations
+of the mediæval mind, yet she is inherently French, though France
+scarcely was in her time: and national, though as yet there were rather
+the elements of a nation than any indivisible People in that great
+country. Was not she herself one of the strongest and purest threads
+of gold to draw that broken race together and bind it irrevocably,
+beneficially, into one?
+
+It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of French
+territory that this national deliverer came. It is a commonplace that
+a Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own country against the
+other from which but a line divides him in fact, and scarcely so much
+in race--than the calmer inhabitant of the midland country who knows no
+such press of constant antagonism; and Jeanne is another example of this
+well known fact. It is even a question still languidly discussed whether
+Jeanne and her family were actually on one side of the line or the
+other. "Il faut opter," says M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest
+biographers, as if the peasant household of 1412 had inhabited an
+Alsatian cottage in 1872. When the line is drawn so closely, it is
+difficult to determine, but Jeanne herself does not ever seem to have
+entertained a moment's doubt on the subject, and she after all is the
+best authority. Perhaps Villon was thinking more of his rhyme than of
+absolute fact when he spoke of "Jeanne la bonne Lorraine." She was born
+on the 5th of January, 1412, in the village of Domremy, on the banks
+of the Meuse, one of those little grey hamlets, with its little church
+tower, and remains of a little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound
+not sufficient for the name of hill--which are scattered everywhere
+through those level countries, like places which have never been built,
+which have grown out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity--perhaps,
+one feels, only a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old--yet always
+inhabitable in all the ages, with the same names lingering about, the
+same surroundings, the same mild rural occupations, simple plenty and
+bare want mingling together with as little difference of level as exists
+in the sweeping lines of the landscape round.
+
+The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to
+the invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the
+universal conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak,
+the adjacent village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English
+alliance, while little Domremy was for the King. And once at least when
+Jeanne was a girl at home, the family were startled in their quiet by
+the swoop of an armed party of Burgundians, and had to gather up
+babies and what portable property they might have, and flee across the
+frontier, where the good Lorrainers received and sheltered them, till
+they could go back to their village, sacked and pillaged and devastated
+in the meantime by the passing storm. Thus even in their humility and
+inoffensiveness the Domremy villagers knew what war and its miseries
+were, and the recollection would no doubt be vivid among the children,
+of that half terrible, half exhilarating adventure, the fright and
+excitement of personal participation in the troubles, of which, night
+and day, from one quarter or another, they must have heard.
+
+Domremy had originally belonged(1) to the Abbey of St. Remy at
+Rheims--the ancient church of which, in its great antiquity, is still an
+interest and a wonder even in comparison with the amazing splendour of
+the cathedral of that place, so rich and ornate, which draws the eyes of
+the visitor to itself, and its greater associations. It is possible that
+this ancient connection with Rheims may have brought the great ceremony
+for which it is ever memorable, the consecration of the kings of France,
+more distinctly before the musing vision of the village girl; but I
+doubt whether such chance associations are ever much to be relied upon.
+The village was on the high-road to Germany; it must have been therefore
+in the way of news, and of many rumours of what was going on in the
+centres of national life, more than many towns of importance. Feudal
+bands, a rustic Seigneur with his little troop, going out for their
+forty days' service, or returning home after it, must have passed along
+the banks of the lazy Meuse many days during the fighting season, and
+indeed throughout the year, for garrison duty would be as necessary in
+winter as in summer; or a wandering pair of friars who had seen strange
+sights must have passed with their wallets from the neighbouring
+convents, collecting the day's provision, and leaving news and
+gossip behind, such as flowed to these monastic hostelries from all
+quarters--tales of battles, and anecdotes of the Court, and dreadful
+stories of English atrocities, to stir the village and rouse ever
+generous sentiment and stirring of national indignation. They are said
+by Michelet to have been no man's vassals, these outlying hamlets of
+Champagne; the men were not called upon to follow their lord's banner
+at a day's notice, as were the sons of other villages. There is no
+appearance even of a lord at all upon this piece of Church land, which
+was, we are told, directly held under the King, and would only therefore
+be touched by a general levy _en masse_--not even perhaps by that,
+so far off were they, and so near the frontier, where a reluctant
+man-at-arms could without difficulty make his escape, as the unwilling
+conscript sometimes does now.
+
+There would seem to have been no one of more importance in Domremy than
+Jacques d'Arc himself and his wife, respectable peasants, with a little
+money, a considerable rural property in flocks and herds and pastures,
+and a good reputation among their kind. He had three sons working with
+their father in the peaceful routine of the fields; and two daughters,
+of whom some authorities indicate Jeanne as the younger, and some as the
+elder. The cottage interior, however, appears more clearly to us than
+the outward aspect of the family life. The daughters were not, like the
+children of poorer peasants, brought up to the rude outdoor labours
+of the little farm. Painters have represented Jeanne as keeping her
+father's sheep, and even the early witnesses say the same; but it is
+contradicted by herself, who ought to know best--(except in taking her
+turn to herd them into a place of safety on an alarm). If she followed
+the flocks to the fields, it must have been, she says, in her childhood,
+and she has no recollection of it. Hers was a more sheltered and safer
+lot. The girls were brought up by their mother indoors in all the
+labours of housewifery, but also in the delicate art of needlework,
+so much more exquisite in those days than now. Perhaps Isabeau, the
+mistress of the house, was of convent training, perhaps some ancient
+privilege in respect to the manufacture of ornaments for the altar, and
+church vestments, was still retained by the tenants of what had been
+Church lands. At all events this, and other kindred works of the needle,
+seems to have been the chief occupation to which Jeanne was brought up.
+
+The education of this humble house seems to have come entirely from the
+mother. It was natural that the children should not know A from B, as
+Jeanne afterward said; but no one did, probably, in the village nor even
+on much higher levels than that occupied by the family of Jacques d'Arc.
+But the children at their mother's knee learned the Credo, they
+learned the simple universal prayers which are common to the wisest and
+simplest, which no great savant or poet could improve, and no child fail
+to understand: "Our Father, which art in Heaven," and that "Hail, Mary,
+full of grace," which the world in that day put next. These were the
+alphabet of life to the little Champagnards in their rough woollen
+frocks and clattering sabots; and when the house had been set in
+order,--a house not without comfort, with its big wooden presses full of
+linen, and the _pot au feu_ hung over the cheerful fire,--came the
+real work, perhaps embroideries for the Church, perhaps only good stout
+shirts made of flax spun by their own hands for the father and the boys,
+and the fine distinctive coif of the village for the women. "Asked if
+she had learned any art or trade, said: Yes, that her mother had taught
+her to sew and spin, and so well, that she did not think any woman in
+Rouen could teach her anything." When the lady in the ballad makes her
+conditions with the peasant woman who is to bring up her boy, her "gay
+goss hawk," and have him trained in the use of sword and lance, she
+undertakes to teach the "turtle-doo," the woman child substituted for
+him, "to lay gold with her hand." No doubt Isabeau's child learned
+this difficult and dainty art, and how to do the beautiful and delicate
+embroidery which fills the treasuries of the old churches.
+
+And while they sat by the table in the window, with their shining silks
+and gold thread, the mother made the quiet hours go by with tale and
+legend--of the saints first of all--and stories from Scripture, quaintly
+interpreted into the costume and manners of their own time, as one
+may still hear them in the primitive corners of Italy: mingled with
+incidents of the war, of the wounded man tended in the village, and the
+victors all flushed with triumph, and the defeated with trailing arms
+and bowed heads, riding for their lives: perhaps little epics and
+tragedies of the young knight riding by to do his devoir with his
+handful of followers all spruce and gay, and the battered and diminished
+remnant that would come back. And then the Black Burgundians, the
+horrible English ogres, whose names would make the children shudder! No
+_God-den_(2) had got so far as Domremy; there was no personal knowledge
+to soften the picture of the invader. He was unspeakable as the Turk to
+the imagination of the French peasant, diabolical as every invader is.
+
+This was the earliest training of the little maid before whom so strange
+and so great a fortune lay. _Autre personne que sadite mère ne lui
+apprint_--any lore whatsoever; and she so little--yet everything that
+was wanted--her prayers, her belief, the happiness of serving God, and
+also man; for when any one was sick in the village, either a little
+child with the measles, or a wounded soldier from the wars, Isabeau's
+modest child--no doubt the mother too--was always ready to help. It
+must have been a family _de bien_, in the simple phrase of the country,
+helpful, serviceable, with charity and aid for all. An honest labourer,
+who came to speak for Jeanne at the second trial, held long after her
+death, gave his incontestable evidence to this. "I was then a child," he
+said, "and it was she who nursed me in my illness." They were all more
+or less devout in those days, when faith was without question, and the
+routine of church ceremonial was followed as a matter of course; but few
+so much as Jeanne, whose chief pleasure it was to say her prayers in the
+little dark church, where perhaps in the morning sunshine, as she made
+her early devotions, there would blaze out upon her from a window, a
+Holy Michael in shining armour, transfixing the dragon with his spear,
+or a St. Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with her cross in
+her hand. So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to find out
+some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the suggestion
+which is unpleasing. The little country church was in the gift of St.
+Remy, and some benefactor of the rural curé might well have given
+a painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people. St.
+Margaret was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her
+cross, and was thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.
+
+Sitting much of her time at or outside the cottage door with her
+needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and
+dreams, the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a
+traveller, of the calmest English temperament and sobriety of Protestant
+fancy, to whom the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a touching
+reminder--which he never neglects wherever he may be--to uncover the
+head and lift up the heart; how much more the devout peasant girl softly
+startled in the midst of her dreaming by that call to prayer. She was so
+fond of those bells that she bribed the careless bell-ringer with simple
+presents to be more attentive to his duty. From the garden where she sat
+with her work, the cloudy foliage of the _bois de chêne_, the oak
+wood, where were legends of fairies and a magic well, to which her
+imagination, better inspired, seems to have given no great heed, filled
+up the prospect on one side. At a later period, her accusers attempted
+to make out that she had been a devotee of these nameless woodland
+spirits, but in vain. No doubt she was one of the procession on the holy
+day once a year, when the curé of the parish went out through the wood
+to the Fairies' Well to say his mass, and exorcise what evil enchantment
+might be there. But Jeanne's imagination was not of the kind to require
+such stimulus. The saints were enough for her; and indeed they supplied
+to a great extent the fairy tales of the age, though it was not of love
+and fame and living happy ever after, but of sacrifice and suffering and
+valorous martyrdom that their glory was made up.
+
+We hear of the woods, the fields, the cottages, the little church and
+its bells, the garden where she sat and sewed, the mother's stories,
+the morning mass, in this quiet preface of the little maiden's life; but
+nothing of the highroad with its wayfarers, the convoys of provisions
+for the war, the fighting men that were coming and going. Yet these,
+too, must have filled a large part in the village life, and it
+is evident that a strong impression of the pity of it all, of the
+distraction of the country and all the cruelties and miseries of which
+she could not but hear, must have early begun to work in Jeanne's being,
+and that while she kept silence the fire burned in her heart. The love
+of God, and that love of country which has nothing to say to political
+patriotism but translates itself in an ardent longing and desire to do
+"some excelling thing" for the benefit and glory of that country, and
+to heal its wounds--were the two principles of her life. We have not the
+slightest indication how much or how little of this latter sentiment was
+shared by the simple community about her; unless from the fact that
+the Domremy children fought with those of Maxey, their disaffected
+neighbours, to the occasional effusion of blood. We do not know even
+of any volunteer from the village, or enthusiasm for the King.(3) The
+district was voiceless, the little clusters of cottages fully occupied
+in getting their own bread, and probably like most other village
+societies, disposed to treat any military impulse among their sons as
+mere vagabondism and love of adventure and idleness.
+
+Nothing, so far as anyone knows, came near the most unlikely volunteer
+of all, to lead her thoughts to that art of war of which she knew
+nothing, and of which her little experience could only have shown her
+the horrors and miseries, the sufferings of wounded fugitives and the
+ruin of sacked houses. Of all people in the world, the little daughter
+of a peasant was the last who could have been expected to respond to the
+appeal of the wretched country. She had three brothers who might have
+served the King, and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper
+about, of that kind which in every country is the fittest material for
+fighting, and "food for powder." But to none of these did the call come.
+Every detail goes to increase the profound impression of peacefulness
+which fills the atmosphere--the slow river floating by, the roofs
+clustered together, the church bells tinkling their continual summons,
+the girl with her work at the cottage door in the shadow of the apple
+trees. To pack the little knapsack of a brother or a lover, and to
+convoy him weeping a little way on his road to the army, coming back to
+the silent church to pray there, with the soft natural tears which the
+uses of common life must soon dry--that is all that imagination could
+have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too young for any interposition
+of the lover, too undeveloped, the French historians tell us with their
+astonishing frankness, to the end of her short life, to have been moved
+by any such thought. She might have poured forth a song, a prayer, a
+rude but sweet lament for her country, out of the still bosom of that
+rustic existence. Such things have been, the trouble of the age forcing
+an utterance from the very depths of its inarticulate life. But it was
+not for this that Jeanne d'Arc was born.
+
+     (1) Mr. Andrew Lang informs me that the real proprietor was
+     a certain "Dame d'Orgévillier." "On Jeanne's side of the
+     burn," he adds, with a picturesque touch of realism, "the
+     people were probably _free_ as attached to the Royal
+     Châtellenie of Vancouleurs, as described below."
+
+     (2) This was probably not the God-dam of later French, a
+     reflection of the supposed prevalent English oath, but most
+     likely merely the God-den or good-day, the common
+     salutation.
+
+     (3) Domremy was split, Mr. Lang says, by the burn, and
+     Jeanne's side were probably King's men. We have it on her
+     own word that there was but one Burgundian in the village,
+     but that might mean on her side.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II -- DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429.
+
+In the year 1424, the year in which, after the battle of Agincourt,
+France was delivered over to Henry V., an extraordinary event occurred
+in the life of this little French peasant. We have not the same horror
+of that treaty, naturally, as have the French. Henry V. is a favourite
+of our history, probably not so much for his own merit as because of
+that master-magician, Shakespeare, who of his supreme good pleasure, in
+the exercise of that voluntary preference, which even God himself seems
+to show to some men, has made of that monarch one of the best beloved of
+our hearts. Dear to us as he is, in Eastcheap as at Agincourt, and
+more in the former than the latter, even our sense of the disgraceful
+character of that bargain, _le traité infâme_ of Troyes, by which Queen
+Isabeau betrayed her son, and gave her daughter and her country to the
+invader, is softened a little by our high estimation of the hero. But
+this is simple national prejudice; regarded from the French side, or
+even by the impartial judgment of general humanity, it was an infamous
+treaty, and one which might well make the blood boil in French veins.
+
+We look at it at present, however, through the atmosphere of the
+nineteenth century, when France is all French, and when the royal house
+of England has no longer any French connection. If George III., much
+more George II., on the basis of his kingdom of Hanover, had attempted
+to make himself master of a large portion of Germany, the situation
+would have been more like that of Henry V. in France than anything we
+can think of now. It is true the kings of England were no longer dukes
+of Normandy--but they had been so within the memory of man: and that
+noble duchy was a hereditary appanage of the family of the Conqueror;
+while to other portions of France they had the link of temporary
+possession and inheritance through French wives and mothers; added to
+which is the fact that Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, thirsting to avenge
+his father's blood upon the Dauphin, would have been probably a more
+dangerous usurper than Henry, and that the actual sovereign, the
+unfortunate, mad Charles VI., was in no condition to maintain his own
+rights.
+
+There is little evidence, however, that this treaty, or anything so
+distinct in detail, had made much impression on the outlying borders of
+France. What was known there, was only that the English were victorious,
+that the rightful King of France was still uncrowned and unacknowledged,
+and that the country was oppressed and humiliated under the foot of the
+invader. The fact that the new King was not yet the Lord's anointed, and
+had never received the seal of God, as it were, to his commission, was
+a fact which struck the imagination of the village as of much more
+importance than many greater things--being at once more visible and
+matter-of-fact, and of more mystical and spiritual efficacy than any
+other circumstance in the dreadful tale.
+
+Jeanne was in the garden as usual, seated, as we should say in Scotland,
+at "her seam," not quite thirteen, a child in all the innocence of
+infancy, yet full of dreams, confused no doubt and vague, with those
+impulses and wonderings--impatient of trouble, yearning to give
+help--which tremble on the chaos of a young soul like the first
+lightening of dawn upon the earth. It was summer, and afternoon, the
+time of dreams. It would be easy in the employment of legitimate fancy
+to heighten the picturesqueness of that quiet scene--the little girl
+with her favourite bells, the birds picking up the crumbs of brown
+bread at her feet. She was thinking of nothing, most likely, in a vague
+suspense of musing, the wonder of youth, the awakening of thought, as
+yet come to little definite in her child's heart--looking up from her
+work to note some passing change of the sky, a something in the air
+which was new to her. All at once between her and the church there shone
+a light on the right hand, unlike anything she had ever seen before; and
+out of it came a voice equally unknown and wonderful. What did the voice
+say? Only the simplest words, words fit for a child, no maxim or mandate
+above her faculties--"_Jeanne, sois bonne et sage enfant; va souvent
+à l'église._" Jeanne, be good! What more could an archangel, what
+less could the peasant mother within doors, say? The little girl was
+frightened, but soon composed herself. The voice could be nothing
+but sacred and blessed which spoke thus. It would not appear that she
+mentioned it to anyone. It is such a secret as a child, in that wavering
+between the real and unreal, the world not realised of childhood, would
+keep, in mingled shyness and awe, uncertain, rapt in the atmosphere of
+vision, within her own heart.
+
+It is curious how often this wonderful scene has been repeated in
+France, never connected with so high a mission, but yet embracing the
+same circumstances, the same situation, the same semi-angelic nature of
+the woman-child. The little Bernadette of Lourdes is almost of our own
+day; she, too is one who puts the scorner to silence. What her visions
+and her voices were, who can say? The last historian of them is not
+a man credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is silent,
+except in a wondering impression of the sacred and the true, before the
+little Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the many sordid
+results that have followed and all that sad machinery of expected
+miracle through which even, repulsive as it must always be, a something
+breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and account
+for except in ways more incredible than miracle--so is the rest of the
+world. Why has this logical, sceptical, doubting country, so able to
+quench with an epigram, or blow away with a breath of ridicule the
+finest vision--become the special sphere and birthplace of these
+spotless infant-saints? This is one of the wonders which nobody attempts
+to account for. Yet Bernadette is as Jeanne, though there are more than
+four hundred years between.
+
+After what intervals the vision returned we are not told, nor in what
+circumstances. It seems to have come chiefly out-of-doors, in the
+silence and freedom of the fields or garden. Presently the heavenly
+radiance shaped itself into some semblance of forms and figures, one
+of which, clearer than the others, was like a man, but with wings and
+a crown on his head and the air "_d'un vrai prud' homme_"; a noble
+apparition before whom at first the little maid trembled, but whose
+majestic, honest regard soon gave her confidence. He bade her once more
+to be good, and that God would help her; then he told her the sad
+story of her own suffering country, _la pitié qui estoit au royaume de
+France_. Was it the pity of heaven that the archangel reported to the
+little trembling girl, or only that which woke with the word in her own
+childish soul? He has chosen the small things of this world to confound
+the great. Jeanne's young heart was full of pity already, and of
+yearning over the helpless mother-country which had no champion to stand
+for her. "She had great doubts at first whether it was St. Michael, but
+afterwards when he had instructed her and shown her many things, she
+believed firmly that it was he."
+
+It was this warrior-angel who opened the matter to her, and disclosed
+her mission. "Jeanne," he said, "you must go to the help of the King of
+France; and it is you who shall give him back his kingdom." Like a still
+greater Maid, trembling, casting in her mind what this might mean, she
+replied, confused, as if that simple detail were all: "Messire, I am
+only a poor girl; I cannot ride or lead armed men." The vision took
+no notice of this plea. He became minute in his directions, indicating
+exactly what she was to do. "Go to Messire de Baudricourt, captain of
+Vaucouleurs, and he will take you to the King. St. Catherine and
+St. Margaret will come and help you." Jeanne was overwhelmed by this
+exactness, by the sensation of receiving direct orders. She cried,
+weeping and helpless, terrified to the bottom of her soul--What was she
+that she should do this? a little girl, able to guide nothing but her
+needle or her distaff, to lend her simple aid in nursing a sick child.
+But behind all her fright and hesitation, her heart was filled with the
+emotion thus suggested to her--the immeasurable _pitié que estoit au
+royaume de France_. Her heart became heavy with this burden. By degrees
+it came about that she could think of nothing else; and her little
+life was confused by expectations and recollections of the celestial
+visitant, who might arrive upon her at any moment, in the midst perhaps
+of some innocent play, or when she sat sewing in the garden before her
+father's humble door.
+
+After a while the _vrai prud' homme_ came seldom; other figures more
+like herself, soft forms of women, white and shining, with golden
+circlets and ornaments, appeared to her in the great halo of the light;
+they bowed their heads, naming themselves, as to a sister spirit,
+Catherine, and the other Margaret. Their voices were sweet and soft
+with a sound that made you weep. They were both martyrs, encouraging and
+strengthening the little martyr that was to be. "A lady is there in the
+heavens who loves thee": Virgil could not say more to rouse the flagging
+strength of Dante. When these gentle figures disappeared, the little
+maid wept in an anguish of tenderness, longing if only they would take
+her with them. It is curious that though she describes in this vague
+rapture the appearance of her visitors, it is always as "_mes voix_"
+that she names them--the sight must always have been more imperfect than
+the message. Their outlines and their lovely faces might shine uncertain
+in the excess of light; but the words were always plain. The pity for
+France that was in their hearts spread itself into the silent rural
+atmosphere, touching every sensitive chord in the nature of little
+Jeanne. It was as if her mother lay dying there before her eyes.
+
+Curious to think how little anyone could have suspected such meetings as
+these, in the cottage hard by, where the weary ploughmen from the fields
+would come clamping in for their meal, and Dame Isabeau would call
+to the child, even sharply perhaps now and then, to leave that
+all-absorbing needlework and come in and help, as Martha called Mary
+fourteen hundred years before; and where the priest, mumbling his mass
+of a cold morning in the little church, would smile indulgent on the
+faithful little worshipper when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne there
+whoever might be absent. She was a shy girl, blushing and drooping her
+head when a stranger spoke to her, red and shame-faced when they laughed
+at her in the village as a _dévote_ before her time; but with nothing
+else to blush about in all her simple record.
+
+Neither to her parents, nor to the curé when she made her confession,
+does she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though
+they had lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon
+them, and could keep silence no longer. She was but thirteen when the
+revelations began and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to
+fulfil her mission. She had no guidance from her voices, she herself
+says, as to whether she should tell or not tell what had been
+communicated to her; and no doubt was kept back by her shyness, and by
+the dreamy confusion of childhood between the real and unreal. One
+would have thought that a life in which these visions were of constant
+recurrence would have been rapt altogether out of wholesome use and
+wont, and all practical service. But this does not seem for a moment to
+have been the case. Jeanne was no hysterical girl, living with her head
+in a mist, abstracted from the world. She had all the enthusiasms even
+of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding her with the intimacy of
+the village, paying her visits, staying all night, sharing her room and
+her bed. She was ready to be sent for by any poor woman that needed help
+or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle; one would love
+to know if perhaps in the _Trésor_ at Rheims there was some stole or
+maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But the _Trésor_ at
+Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be told, and the bottles
+and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that _pauvre sire_, are
+more thought of than relics of an earlier age.
+
+At length, however, one does not know how, the secret of her double life
+came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse
+with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon
+her--meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified
+tears over and wonder at--ripened her intelligence so that she came at
+last to perceive that it was practicable, a thing to be done, a
+charge to be obeyed. She had this before her, as a girl in ordinary
+circumstances has the new developments of life to think of, and how
+to be a wife and mother. And the news brought by every passer-by would
+prove doubly interesting, doubly important to Jeanne, in her daily
+growing comprehension of what she was called upon to do. As she felt the
+current more and more catching her feet, sweeping her on, overcoming all
+resistance in her own mind, she must have been more and more anxious to
+know what was going on in the distracted world, more and more touched by
+that great pity which had awakened her soul. And all these reports were
+of a nature to increase that pity till it became overwhelming. The
+tales she would hear of the English must have been tales of cruelty
+and horror; not so many years ago what tales did not we hear of German
+ferocity in the French villages, perhaps not true at all, yet making
+their impression always; and it was more probable in that age that every
+such story should be true. Then the compassion which no one can help
+feeling for a young man deprived of his rights, his inheritance taken
+from him, his very life in danger, threatened by the stranger and
+usurper, was deepened in every particular by the fact that it was the
+King, the very impersonation of France, appointed by God as the head of
+the country, who was in danger. Everything that Jeanne heard would help
+to swell the stream.
+
+Thus she must have come step by step--this extraordinary, impossible
+suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul--to perceive a kind of
+miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how
+everything pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed
+natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which promised
+a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to deliver France,
+might have affected her mind, did we not have it from her own voice
+that she had never heard that prophecy(1); but the word of the blessed
+Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife's tale; and the
+child's alarm would seem to have died away as she came to her full
+growth. And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions, but a
+robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of sense and
+determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the level of
+the crowd. We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the making of a
+great general in her untutored female soul,--which is perhaps the most
+wonderful thing in her career,--and saw with the eye of an experienced
+and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see it, the fit order
+of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at her command. This I
+honestly avow is to me the most incredible point in the story. I am not
+disturbed by the apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable
+appropriateness and fitness against which the imagination, at least,
+has not a word to say. The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such
+interpositions of heaven come, but that they come so seldom. But that
+Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only
+fault was that she went to church too often, should have the genius of a
+soldier, is too bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring
+influence leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful
+with the rude artillery of the time, divining the better way in
+strategy,--this is a wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet
+according to Alençon, Dunois, and other military authorities, it was
+true.
+
+We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long
+musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no longer,
+nor what it was which induced her at last to select the confidant she
+did. No doubt she must have been considering and weighing the matter for
+a long time before she fixed upon the man who was her relation, yet
+did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a townsman for the
+extraordinary revelations she had to make. One of her neighbours, her
+gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was godmother, had perhaps
+at one moment seemed to her a likely helper. But he belonged to the
+opposite party. "If you were not a Burgundian," she said to him once,
+"there is something I might tell you." The honest fellow took this to
+mean that she had some thought of marriage, the most likely and natural
+supposition. It was at this moment, when her heart was burning with
+her great secret, the voices urging her on day by day, and her power of
+self-constraint almost at an end, that Providence sent Durand Laxart,
+her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on some family visit. She would seem
+to have taken advantage of the opportunity with eagerness, asking him
+privately to take her home with him, and to explain to her father and
+mother that he wanted her to take care of his wife. No doubt the girl,
+devoured with so many thoughts, would have the air of requiring "a
+change" as we say, and that the mother would be very ready to accept for
+her an invitation which might bring back the brightness to her child.
+Laxart was a peasant like the rest, a _prud' homme_ well thought of
+among his people. He lived in Burey le Petit, near to Vaucouleurs, the
+chief place of the district, and Jeanne already knew that it was to the
+captain of Vaucouleurs that she was to address herself. Thus she secured
+her object in the simplest and most natural way.
+
+Yet the reader cannot but hold his breath at the thought of what that
+amazing revelation must have been to the homely, rustic soul, her
+companion, communicated as they went along the common road in the common
+daylight. "She said to the witness that she must go to France to the
+Dauphin, to make him to be crowned King." It must have been as if a
+thunderbolt had fallen at his feet when the girl whom he had known in
+every development of her little life, thus suddenly disclosed to him her
+secret purpose and determination. All her simple excellence the good
+man knew, and that she was no fantastic chatterer, but truly _une bonne
+douce fille_, bold in nothing but kindness, with nothing to blush for
+but the fault of going too often to church. "Did you never hear that
+France should be made desolate by a woman and restored by a maid?" she
+said; and this would seem to have been an unanswerable argument. He had,
+henceforth, nothing to do but to promote her purpose as best he could in
+every way.
+
+It would not seem at all unlikely to this good man that the Archangel
+Michael, if Jeanne's revelation to him went so far, should have named
+Robert de Baudricourt, the chief of the district, captain of the town
+and its forces, the principal personage in all the neighbourhood, as
+the person to whom Jeanne's purpose was to be revealed, but rather a
+guarantee of St. Michael himself, familiar with good society; and the
+Seigneur must have been more or less in good intelligence with his
+people, not too alarming to be referred to, even on so insignificant
+a subject as the vagaries of a country girl--though these by this
+time must have begun to seem something more than vagaries to the
+half-convinced peasant. And it was no doubt a great relief to his mind
+thus to put the decision of the question into the hands of a man better
+informed than himself. Laxart proceeded to Vaucouleurs upon his mission,
+shyly yet with confidence. He would seem to have had a preliminary
+interview with Baudricourt before introducing Jeanne. The stammering
+countryman, the bluff, rustic noble and soldier, cheerfully
+contemptuous, receiving, with a loud laugh into all the echoes, the
+extraordinary demand that he should send a little girl from Domremy
+to the King, to deliver France, come before us like a picture in the
+countryman's simple words. Robert de Baudricourt would scarcely hear the
+story out. "Box her ears," he said, "and send her home to her mother."
+The little fool! What did she know of the English, those brutal,
+downright fighters, against whom no _élan_ was sufficient, who stood
+their ground and set up vulgar posts around their lines, instead
+of trusting to the rush of sudden valour, and the tactics of the
+tournament! She deliver France! On a much smaller argument and to put
+down a less ambition, the half serious, half amused adviser has bidden
+a young fanatic's ears to be boxed on many an unimportant occasion,
+and has often been justified in so doing. There would be a half hour of
+gaiety after poor Laxart, crestfallen, had got his dismissal. The
+good man must have turned back to Jeanne, where she waited for him in
+courtyard or antechamber, with a heavy heart. No boxing of ears was
+possible to him. The mere thought of it was blasphemy. This was on
+Ascension Day the 13 May, 1428.
+
+Jeanne, however, was not discouraged by M. de Baudricourt's joke, and
+her interview with him changed his views completely. She appears indeed
+from the moment of setting out from her father's house to have taken a
+new attitude. These great personages of the country before whom all the
+peasants trembled, were nothing to this village maid, except, perhaps,
+instruments in the hand of God to speed her on her way if they could see
+their privileges--if not, to be swept out of it like straws by the wind.
+It had no doubt been hard for her to leave her father's house; but after
+that disruption what did anything matter? And she had gone through five
+years of gradual training of which no one knew. The tears and terror,
+the plea, "I am a poor girl; I cannot even ride," of her first childlike
+alarm had given place to a profound acquaintance with the voices and
+their meaning. They were now her familiar friends guiding her at every
+step; and what was the commonplace burly Seigneur, with his roar of
+laughter, to Jeanne? She went to her audience with none of the alarm
+of the peasant. A certain young man of Baudricourt's suite, Bertrand de
+Poulengy, another young D'Artagnan seeking his fortune, was present
+in the hall and witnessed the scene. The joke would seem to have been
+exhausted by the time Jeanne appeared, or her perfect gravity and
+simplicity, and beautiful manners--so unlike her rustic dress and
+village coif--imposed upon the Seigneur and his little court. This is
+how the story is told, twenty-five years after, by the witness, then an
+elderly knight, recalling the story of his youth.
+
+"She said that she came to Robert on the part of her Lord, that he
+should send to the Dauphin, and tell him to hold out, and have no fear,
+for the Lord would send him succour before the middle of Lent. She also
+said that France did not belong to the Dauphin but to her Lord; but her
+Lord willed that the Dauphin should be its King, and hold it in command,
+and that in spite of his enemies she herself would conduct him to be
+consecrated. Robert then asked her who was this Lord? She answered, 'The
+King of Heaven.' This being done (the witness adds) she returned to her
+father's house with her uncle, Durand Laxart of Burey le Petit."
+
+This brief and sudden preface to her career passed over and had no
+immediate effect; indeed but for Bertrand we should have been unable
+to separate it from the confused narrative to which all these witnesses
+brought what recollection they had, often without sequence or order,
+Durand himself taking no notice of any interval between this first
+visit to Vaucouleurs and the final one.(2) The episode of Ascension Day
+appears like the formal _sommation_ of French law, made as a matter of
+form before the appellant takes action on his own responsibility; but
+Baudricourt had probably more to do with it than appears to be at all
+certain from the after evidence. One of the persons present, at all
+events, young Poulengy above mentioned, bore it in mind and pondered it
+in his heart.
+
+Meantime, Jeanne returned home--the strangest home-going,--for by this
+time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and rumour
+must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern telegraph,
+to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore unaware of any
+difference between Jeanne and her companions save the greater goodness
+to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must have reached
+Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with the kind Durand,
+a changed creature, already the consecrated Maid of France, La Pucelle,
+apart from all others. The French peasant is a hard man, more fierce in
+his terror of the unconventional, of having his domestic affairs exposed
+to the public eye, or his family disgraced by an exhibition of anything
+unusual either in act or feeling, than almost any other class of beings.
+And it is evident that he took his daughter's intention according to the
+coarsest interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention
+of joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and
+dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever
+of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl,
+but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We do
+not know what passed when she returned, further than that her father had
+a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of the purpose
+that had so long been ripening in her mind. He dreamed that he saw her
+surrounded by armed men, in the midst of the troopers, the most evident
+and natural interpretation of her purpose, for who could divine that
+she meant to be their leader and general, on a level not with the common
+men-at-arms, but of princes and nobles? In the morning he told his dream
+to his wife and also to his sons. "If I could think that the thing would
+happen that I dreamed, I would wish that she should be drowned; and
+if you would not do it, I should do it with my own hands." The reader
+remembers with a shudder the Meuse flowing at the foot of the garden,
+while the fierce peasant, mad with fear lest shame should be coming to
+his family, clenched his strong fist and made this outcry of dismay.
+
+No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
+whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
+expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
+substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
+probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so good
+a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly and so
+helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too willing
+to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be egged
+up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at Toul and
+swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her childhood. So
+timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic, would simply obey
+the bishop's decision and would not be bold enough even to remonstrate,
+though it is curious that with the spectacle of her grave determination
+before them, and sorrowful sense of that necessity of her mission
+which had steeled her to dispense with their consent, they should have
+expected such an expedient to arrest her steps. The affair, we must
+suppose, had gone through all the more usual stages of entreaty on the
+lover's part, and persuasion on that of the parents, before such an
+attempt was finally made. But the shy Jeanne had by this time attained
+that courage of desperation which is not inconsistent with the most
+gentle nature; and without saying anything to anyone, she too went to
+Toul, appeared before the bishop, and easily freed herself from the
+pretended engagement, though whether with any reference to her very
+different destination we are not told.(3)
+
+These proceedings, however, and the father's dreams and the
+remonstrances of the mother, must have made troubled days in the
+cottage, and scenes of wrath and contradiction, hard to bear. The winter
+passed distracted by these contentions, and it is difficult to imagine
+how Jeanne could have borne this had it not been that the period of her
+outset had already been indicated, and that it was only in the middle of
+Lent that her succour was to reach the King. The village, no doubt, was
+almost as much distracted as her father's house to hear of these strange
+discussions and of the incredible purpose of the _bonne douce fille_,
+whose qualities everybody knew and about whom there was nothing
+eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple goodness, to distinguish
+her above her neighbours. In the meantime her voices called her
+continually to her work. They set her free from the ordinary yoke of
+obedience, always so strong in the mind of a French girl. The dreadful
+step of abandoning her home, not to be thought of under any other
+circumstances, was more and more urgently pressed upon her. Could it
+indeed be saints and angels who ordained a step which was outside of all
+the habits and first duties of nature? But we have no reason to believe
+that this nineteenth-century doubt of her visitors, and of whether their
+mandates were right, entered into the mind of a girl who was of her own
+period and not of ours. She went on steadfastly, certain of her mission
+now, and inaccessible either to remonstrance or appeal.
+
+It was towards the beginning of Lent, as Poulengy tells us, that the
+decision was made, and she left home finally, to go "to France" as is
+always said. But it seems to have been in January that she set out once
+more for Vaucouleurs, accompanied by her uncle, who took her to the
+house of some humble folk they knew, a carter and his wife, where they
+lodged. Jeanne wore her peasant dress of heavy red homespun, her rude
+heavy shoes, her village coif. She never made any pretence of ladyhood
+or superiority to her class, but was always equal to the finest society
+in which she found herself, by dint of that simple good faith, sense,
+and seriousness, without excitement or exaggeration, and radiant purity
+and straightforwardness which were apparent to all seeing eyes. By
+this time all the little world about knew something of her purpose and
+followed her every step with wonder and quickly rising curiosity: and no
+doubt the whole town was astir, women gazing at their doors, all on her
+side from the first moment, the men half interested, half insolent, as
+she went once more to the chateau to make her personal appeal. Simple as
+she was, the _bonne douce fille_ was not intimidated by the guard at the
+gates, the lounging soldiers, the no doubt impudent glances flung at
+her by these rude companions. She was inaccessible to alarms of that
+kind--which, perhaps, is one of the greatest safeguards against them
+even in more ordinary cases. We find little record of her second
+interview with Baudricourt. The _Journal du Siège d'Orleans_ and the
+_Chronique de la Pucelle_ both mention it as if it had been one of
+several, which may well have been the case, as she was for three weeks
+in Vaucouleurs. It is almost impossible to arrange the incidents of this
+interval between her arrival there and her final departure for Chinon on
+the 23d February, during which time she made a pilgrimage to a shrine
+of St. Nicolas and also a visit to the Duke of Lorraine. It is clear,
+however, that she must have repeated her demand with such stress and
+urgency that the Captain of Vaucouleurs was a much perplexed man. It was
+a very natural idea then, and in accordance with every sentiment of
+the time that he should suspect this wonderful girl, who would not be
+daunted, of being a witch and capable of bringing an evil fate on all
+who crossed her. All thought of boxing her ears must ere this have
+departed from his mind. He hastened to consult the curé, which was
+the most reasonable thing to do. The curé was as much puzzled as the
+Captain. The Church, it must be said, if always ready to take advantage
+afterwards of such revelations, has always been timid, even sceptical
+about them at first. The wisdom of the rulers, secular and ecclesiastic,
+suggested only one thing to do, which was to exorcise, and perhaps to
+overawe and frighten, the young visionary. They paid a joint and solemn
+visit to the carter's house, where no doubt their entrance together was
+spied by many eager eyes; and there the priest solemnly taking out his
+stole invested himself in his priestly robes and exorcised the evil
+spirits, bidding them come out of the girl if they were her inspiration.
+There seems a certain absurdity in this sudden assault upon the evil
+one, taking him as it were by surprise: but it was not ridiculous to
+any of the performers, though Jeanne no doubt looked on with serene and
+smiling eyes. She remarked afterwards to her hostess, that the curé had
+done wrong, as he had already heard her in confession.
+
+Outside, the populace were in no uncertainty at all as to her mission.
+A little mob hung about the door to see her come and go, chiefly to
+church, with her good hostess in attendance, as was right and seemly,
+and a crowd streaming after them who perhaps of their own accord might
+have neglected mass, but who would not, if they could help it, lose a
+look at the new wonder. One day a young gentleman of the neighbourhood
+was passing by, and amused by the commotion, came through the crowd to
+have a word with the peasant lass. "What are you doing here, _ma mie_?"
+the young man said. "Is the King to be driven out of the kingdom, and
+are we all to be made English?" There is a tone of banter in the speech,
+but he had already heard of the Maid from his friend, Bertrand, and had
+been affected by the other's enthusiasm. "Robert de Baudricourt will
+have none of me or my words," she replied, "nevertheless before Mid-Lent
+I must be with the King, if I should wear my feet up to my knees;
+for nobody in the world, be it king, duke, or the King of Scotland's
+daughter, can save the kingdom of France except me alone: though I would
+rather spin beside my poor mother, and this is not my work: but I must
+go and do it, because my Lord so wills it." "And who is your Seigneur?"
+he asked. "God," said the girl. The young man was moved, he too, by that
+wind which bloweth where it listeth. He stretched out his hands through
+the gaping crowd and took hers, holding them between his own, to give
+her his pledge: and so swore by his faith, her hands in his hands, that
+he himself would conduct her to the King. "When will you go?" he said.
+"Rather to-day than to-morrow," answered the messenger of God.
+
+This was the second convert of La Pucelle. The peasant _bonhomme_ first,
+the noble gentleman after him; not to say all the women wherever she
+went, the gazing, weeping, admiring crowd which now followed her steps,
+and watched every opening of the door which concealed her from their
+eyes. The young gentleman was Jean de Novelonpont, "surnamed Jean de
+Metz": and so moved was he by the fervour of the girl, and by her strong
+sense of the necessity of immediate operations, that he proceeded at
+once to make preparations for the journey. They would seem to have
+discussed the dress she ought to wear, and Jeanne decided for many
+obvious reasons to adopt the costume of a man--or rather boy. She must,
+one would imagine have been tall, for no remark is ever made on this
+subject, as if her dress had dwarfed her, which is generally the case
+when a woman assumes the habit of a man: and probably with her peasant
+birth and training, she was, though slim, strongly made and well knit,
+besides being at the age when the difference between boy and girl is
+sometimes but little noticeable.
+
+In the meantime Baudricourt had not been idle. He must have been moved
+by the sight of Jeanne, at least to perceive a certain gravity in the
+business for which he was not prepared; and her composure under the
+curé's exorcism would naturally deepen the effect which her own manners
+and aspect had upon all who were free of prejudice. Another singular
+event, too, added weight to her character and demand. One day after
+her return from Lorraine, February 12th, 1429, she intimated to all her
+surroundings and specially to Baudricourt, that the King had suffered a
+defeat near Orleans, which made it still more necessary that she should
+be at once conducted to him. It was found when there was time for the
+news to come, that this defeat, the Battle of the Herrings, so-called,
+had happened as she said, at the exact time; and such a strange fact
+added much to the growing enthusiasm and excitement. Baudricourt is said
+by Michelet to have sent off a secret express to the Court to ask what
+he should do; but of this there seems to be no direct evidence, though
+likelihood enough. The Court at Chinon contained a strong feminine
+element, behind the scenes. And it might be found that there were uses
+for the enthusiast, even if she did not turn out to be inspired. No
+doubt there were many comings and goings at this period which can only
+be traced confusedly through the depositions of Jeanne's companions
+twenty-five years after. She had at least two interviews with
+Baudricourt before the exorcism of the curé and his consequent change
+of procedure towards her. Then, escorted by her uncle Laxart, and
+apparently by Jean de Metz, she had made a pilgrimage to a shrine of St.
+Nicolas, as already mentioned, on which occasion, being near Nancy, she
+was sent for by the Duke of Lorraine, then lying ill at his castle
+in that city, who had a fancy to consult the young prophetess,
+sorceress--who could tell what she was?--on the subject apparently
+of his illness. He was the son of Queen Yolande of Anjou, who was
+mother-in-law to Charles VII., and it would no doubt be thought of some
+importance to secure his good opinion. Jeanne gave the exalted
+patient no light on the subject of his health, but only the (probably
+unpleasing) advice to flee from the wrath of God and to be reconciled
+with his wife, from whom he was separated. He too, however, was moved by
+the sight of her and her straightforward, undeviating purpose. He gave
+her four francs, Durand tells us,--not much of a present,--which she
+gave to her uncle, and which helped to buy her outfit. Probably he made
+a good report of her to his mother, for shortly after her return to
+Vaucouleurs (I again follow Michelet who ought to be well informed)
+a messenger from Chinon arrived to take her to the King.(4) In the
+councils of that troubled Court, perhaps, the idea of a prodigy and
+miraculous leader, though she was nothing but a peasant girl, would
+be not without attraction, a thing to conjure withal, so far as the
+multitude were concerned.
+
+Anyhow from any point of view, in the hopeless condition of affairs, it
+was expedient that nothing which gave promise of help, either real or
+visionary, should lightly be rejected. There was much anxiety no
+doubt in the careless Court still dancing and singing in the midst
+of calamity, but the reception of the ambitious peasant would form an
+exciting incident at least, if nothing more important and notable.
+
+Thus the whole anxious world of France stirred round that youthful
+figure in the little frontier town, repeating with many an alteration
+and exaggeration the sayings of Jeanne, and those popular superstitions
+about the Maid from Lorraine which might be so naturally applied to her.
+It would seem, indeed, that she had herself attached some importance to
+this prophecy, for both her uncle Laxart and her hostess at Vaucouleurs
+report that she asked them if they had heard it: which question
+"stupefied" the latter, whose mind evidently jumped at once to the
+conviction that the prophecy was fulfilled. Not in Domremy itself,
+however, were these things considered with the same awe-stricken and
+admiring faith. Nothing had softened the mood of Jacques d'Arc. It was
+a shame to the village _prud' homme_ to think of his daughter away from
+all the protection of home, living among men, encountering the young
+Seigneurs who cared for no maiden's reputation, hearing the soldiers'
+rude talk, exposed to their insults, or worse still to their kindness.
+Probably even now he thought of her as surrounded by troopers and
+men-at-arms, instead of the princes and peers with whom henceforth
+Jeanne's lot was to be cast; but in the former case there would
+have perhaps been less to fear than in the latter. Anyhow, Jeanne's
+communications with her family were more painful to her than had been
+the jeers of Baudricourt or the exorcism of the curé. They sent her
+angry orders to come back, threats of parental curses and abandonment.
+We may hope that the mother, grieved and helpless, had little to do with
+this persecution. The woman who had nourished her children upon saintly
+legend and Scripture story could scarcely have been hard upon the child,
+of whom she, better than any, knew the perfect purity and steadfast
+resolution. One of the little household at least, revolted by the stern
+father's fury, perhaps secretly encouraged by the mother, broke away and
+joined his sister at a later period. But we hear, during her lifetime,
+little or nothing of Pierre.
+
+Much time, however, was passed in these preliminaries. The final
+start was not made till the 23d February, 1429, when the permission
+is supposed to have come by the hands of Colet de Vienne, the King's
+messenger, who attended by a single archer, was to be her escort. It
+is possible that he had no mission to this effect, but he certainly
+did escort her to Chinon. The whole town gathered before the house of
+Baudricourt to see her depart. Baudricourt, however, does not seem to
+have provided any guard for her. Jean de Metz, who had so chivalrously
+pledged himself to her service, with his friend De Poulengy,
+equally ready for adventure, each with his servant, formed her sole
+protectors.(5) Jean de Metz had already sent her the clothes of one of
+his retainers, with the light breastplate and partial armour that suited
+it; and the townspeople had subscribed to buy her a further outfit, and
+a horse which seems to have cost sixteen francs--not so small a sum in
+those days as now. Laxart declares himself to have been responsible for
+this outlay, though the money was afterwards paid by Baudricourt, who
+gave Jeanne a sword, which some of her historians consider a very poor
+gift: none, however, of her equipments would seem to have been costly.
+The little party set out thus, with a sanction of authority, from the
+Captain's gate, the two gentlemen and the King's messenger at the head
+of the party with their attendants, and the Maid in the midst. "Go: and
+let what will happen," was the parting salutation of Baudricourt. The
+gazers outside set up a cry when the decisive moment came, and someone,
+struck with the feeble force which was all the safeguard she had for her
+long journey through an agitated country--perhaps a woman in the sudden
+passion of misgiving which often follows enthusiasm,--called out to
+Jeanne with an astonished outcry to ask how she could dare to go by such
+a dangerous road. "It was for that I was born," answered the fearless
+Maid. The last thing she had done had been to write a letter to her
+parents, asking their pardon if she obeyed a higher command than theirs,
+and bidding them farewell.
+
+The French historians, with that amazement which they always show when
+they find a man behaving like a gentleman towards a woman confided to
+his honour, all pause with deep-drawn breath to note that the awe of
+Jeanne's absolute purity preserved her from any unseemly overture, or
+even evil thought, on the part of her companions. We need not take
+up even the shadow of so grave a censure upon Frenchmen in general,
+although in the far distance of the fifteenth century. The two young
+men, thus starting upon a dangerous adventure, pledged by their honour
+to protect and convey her safely to the King's presence, were noble and
+generous cavaliers, and we may well believe had no evil thoughts. They
+were not, however, without an occasional chill of reflection when
+once they had taken the irrevocable step of setting out upon this wild
+errand. They travelled by night to escape the danger of meeting bands of
+Burgundians or English on the way, and sometimes had to ford a river to
+avoid the town, where they would have found a bridge. Sometimes, too,
+they had many doubts, Bertrand says, perhaps as to their reception at
+Chinon, perhaps even whether their mission might not expose them to the
+ridicule of their kind, if not to unknown dangers of magic and contact
+with the Evil One, should this wonderful girl turn out no inspired
+virgin but a pretender or sorceress. Jean de Metz informs us that she
+bade them not to fear, that she had been sent to do what she was now
+doing; that her brothers in paradise would tell her how to act, and that
+for the last four or five years her brothers in paradise and her God had
+told her that she must go to the war to save the kingdom of France. This
+phrase must have struck his ear, as he thus repeats it. Her brothers in
+paradise! She had not apparently talked of them to anyone as yet, but
+now no one could hinder her more, and she felt herself free to speak.
+A great calm seems to have been in her soul. She had at last begun her
+work. How it was all to end for her she neither foresaw nor asked;
+she knew only what she had to do. When they ventured into a town she
+insisted on stopping to hear mass, bidding them fear nothing. "God
+clears the way for me," she said; "I was born for this," and so
+proceeded safe, though threatened with many dangers. There is something
+that breathes of supreme satisfaction and content in her repetition of
+those words.
+
+     (1) She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword,
+     that France should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards
+     redeemed by a virgin, which she quoted to several persons on
+     her first setting out.
+
+     (2) I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of
+     these events quite clear to myself.
+
+     (3) Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was
+     made after she had finally left Domremy, and when she was
+     already accompanied by the escort which was to attend her to
+     Chinon.
+
+     (4) Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this. He thinks the man
+     was a mere King's messenger with news, probably charged with
+     the melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the
+     Herrings): and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her
+     little part was entirely accidental.
+
+     (5) Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the
+     party. _La Chronique de la Pucelle_ says two of her
+     brothers. Mr. Andrew Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did
+     not join his sister's party till much later--in the
+     beginning of June: and this is the statement of Jean de
+     Metz. But Quicherat is also of opinion that they both fought
+     in the relief of Orleans.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III -- BEFORE THE KING. FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+
+Jeanne and her little party were eleven days on the road, but do not
+seem to have encountered any special peril. They lodged sometimes in the
+security of a convent, sometimes in a village hostel, pursuing the long
+and tedious way across the great levels of midland France, which has
+so few features of beauty except in the picturesque towns with their
+castles and churches, which the escort avoided. At length they paused
+in the village of Fierbois not far from Chinon where the Court was, in
+order to announce their arrival and ask for an audience, which was not
+immediately accorded. Charles held his Court with incredible gaiety and
+folly, in the midst of almost every disaster that could overtake a king,
+in the castle of Chinon on the banks of the Vienne. The situation and
+aspect of this noble building, now in ruins, is wonderfully like that
+of Windsor Castle. The great walls, interrupted and strengthened by
+huge towers, stretch along a low ridge of rocky hill, with the swift and
+clear river, a little broader and swifter than the Thames, flowing at
+its foot. The red and high-pitched roofs of the houses clustered between
+the castle hill and the stream, give a point of resemblance the more.
+The large and ample dwelling, defensible, but with no thought of any
+need of defence, a midland castle surrounded by many a level league of
+wealthy country, which no hostile force should ever have power to get
+through, must have looked like the home of a well-established royalty.
+There was no sound or sight of war within its splendid enclosure.
+Noble lords and gentlemen crowded the corridors; trains of gay ladies,
+attendant upon two queens, filled the castle with fine dresses and gay
+voices. There had been but lately a dreadful and indeed shameful defeat,
+inflicted by a mere English convoy of provisions upon a large force of
+French and Scottish soldiers, the former led by such men as Dunois, La
+Hire, Xaintrailles, etc., the latter by the Constable of Scotland, John
+Stuart--which defeat might well have been enough to subdue every sound
+of revelry: yet Charles's Court was ringing with music and pleasantry,
+as if peace had reigned around.
+
+It may be believed that there were many doubts and questions how to
+receive this peasant from the fields, which prevented an immediate
+reply to her demand for an audience. From the first, de la Tremoille,
+Charles's Prime Minister and chief adviser, was strongly against any
+encouragement of the visionary, or dealings with the supernatural; but
+there would no doubt be others, hoping if not for a miraculous maid,
+yet at least for a passing wonder, who might kindle enthusiasm in the
+country and rouse the ignorant with hopes of a special blessing from
+Heaven. The gayer and younger portion of the Court probably expected
+a little amusement, above all, a new butt for their wit, or perhaps a
+soothsayer to tell their fortunes and promise good things to come. They
+had not very much to amuse them, though they made the best of it. The
+joys of Paris were very far off; they were all but imprisoned in this
+dull province of Touraine; nobody knew at what moment they might be
+forced to leave even that refuge. For the moment here was a new event,
+a little stir of interest, something to pass an hour. Jeanne had to wait
+two days in Chinon before she was granted an audience, but considering
+the carelessness of the Court and the absence of any patron that was but
+a brief delay.
+
+The chamber of audience is now in ruins. A wild rose with long, arching,
+thorny branches and pale flowers, straggles over the greensward where
+once the floor was trod by so many gay figures. From the broken wall you
+look sheer down upon the shining river; one great chimney, which at
+that season must have been still the most pleasant centre of the large,
+draughty hall, shows at the end of the room, with a curious suggestion
+of warmth and light which makes ruin more conspicuous. The room must
+have been on the ground floor almost level with the soil towards the
+interior of the castle, but raised to the height of the cliffs outside.
+It was evening, an evening of March, and fifty torches lighted up the
+ample room; many noble personages, almost as great as kings, and clothed
+in the bewildering splendour of the time, and more than three hundred
+cavaliers of the best names in France filled it to overflowing. The
+peasant girl from Domremy in the hose and doublet of a servant, a
+little travel-worn after her tedious journey, was led in by one of those
+splendid seigneurs, dazzled with the grandeur she had never seen before,
+looking about her in wonder to see which was the King--while Charles,
+perhaps with boyish pleasure in the mystification, perhaps with a little
+half-conviction stealing over him that there might be something more in
+it, stood among the smiling crowd.
+
+The young stranger looked round upon all those amused, light-minded,
+sceptical faces, and without a moment's hesitation went forward and
+knelt down before him. "Gentil Dauphin," she said, "God give you good
+life." "But it is not I that am the King; there is the King," said
+Charles. "Gentil Prince, it is you and no other," she said; then rising
+from her knee: "Gentil Dauphin, I am Jeanne the Maid. I am sent to you
+by the King of Heaven to tell you that you shall be consecrated and
+crowned at Rheims, and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who
+is King of France." The little masquerade had failed, the jest was over.
+There would be little more laughing among the courtiers, when they saw
+the face of Charles grow grave. He took the new-comer aside, perhaps to
+that deep recess of the window where in the darkening night the glimmer
+of the clear, flowing river, the great vault of sky would still be
+visible dimly, outside the circle of the blazing interior with all its
+smoky lights.
+
+Charles VII. of France was, like many of his predecessors, a _pauvre
+Sire_ enough. He had thought more of his amusements than of the troubles
+of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will sometimes spring
+from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and after all, the
+dread responsibility, the sense that in all his helplessness and
+inability to do anything he was still the man who ought to do all, would
+seem to have moved him from time to time. A secret doubt in his heart,
+divulged to no man, had added bitterness to the conviction of his own
+weakness. Was he indeed the heir of France? Had he any right to that
+sustaining confidence which would have borne up his heart in the midst
+of every discouragement? His very mother had given him up and set him
+aside. He was described as the so-called Dauphin in treaties signed by
+Charles and Isabeau his parents. If anyone knew, she knew; and was it
+possible that more powerful even than the English, more cruel than the
+Burgundians, this stain of illegitimacy was upon him, making all effort
+vain? There is no telling where the sensitive point is in any man's
+heart, and little worthy as was this King, the story we are here told
+has a thrill of truth in it. It is reported by a certain Sala, who
+declares that he had it from the lips of Charles's favourite and close
+follower, the Seigneur de Boisi, a courtier who, after the curious
+custom of the time, shared even the bed of his master. This was confided
+to Boisi by the King in the deepest confidence, in the silence of the
+wakeful night:
+
+"This was in the time of the good King Charles, when he knew not what
+step to take, and did nothing but think how to redeem his life: for as
+I have told you he was surrounded by enemies on all sides. The King in
+this extreme thought, went in one morning to his oratory all alone; and
+there he made a prayer to our Lord, in his heart, without pronouncing
+any words, in which he asked of Him devoutly that if he were indeed the
+true heir, descended from the royal House of France, and that justly the
+kingdom was his, that He would be pleased to guard and defend him, or
+at the worst to give him grace to escape into Spain or Scotland, whose
+people, from all antiquity, were brothers-in-arms, friends and allies of
+the kings of France, and that he might find a refuge there."
+
+Perhaps there is some excuse for a young man's endeavour to forget
+himself in folly or even in dissipation when his secret thoughts are so
+despairing as these.
+
+It was soon after this melancholy moment that the arrival of Jeanne
+took place. The King led her aside, touched as all were, by her look of
+perfect sincerity and good faith; but it is she herself, not Charles,
+who repeats what she said to him. "I have to tell you," said the young
+messenger of God, "on the part of my Lord (_Messire_) that you are the
+true heir of France and the son of the King; He has sent me to
+conduct you to Rheims that you may receive your consecration and
+your crown,"--perhaps here, Jeanne caught some look which she did not
+understand in his eyes, for she adds with, one cannot but think a touch
+of sternness--"if you will."
+
+Was it a direct message from God in answer to his prayer, uttered within
+his own heart, without words, so that no one could have guessed that
+secret? At least it would appear that Charles thought so: for how should
+this peasant maid know the secret fear that had gnawed at his heart?
+"When thou wast in the garden under the fig-tree I saw thee." Great
+was the difference between the Israelite without guile and the troubled
+young man, with whose fate the career of a great nation was entangled;
+but it is not difficult to imagine what the effect must have been on
+the mind of Charles when he was met by this strange, authoritative
+statement, uttered like all that Jeanne said, _de la part de Dieu_.
+
+The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was
+surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as
+they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which
+in themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be allowed, also,
+that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless young King on the
+word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to every law of reason,
+madness and folly. She would seem to have had the women on her side
+always and at every point. The Church did not stir, or else was hostile;
+the commanders and military men about, regarded with scornful disgust
+the idea that an enterprise which they considered hopeless should be
+confided to an ignorant woman--all with perfect reason we are obliged to
+allow. Probably it was to gain time--yet without losing the aid of such
+a stimulus to the superstitious among the masses--and to retard any rash
+undertaking--that it was proposed to subject Jeanne to an examination
+of doctors and learned men touching her faith and the character of
+her visions, which all this time had been of continual recurrence, yet
+charged with no further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the
+one simple, constantly repeated command.
+
+Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops,
+Jeanne was taken to Poitiers--where the university and the local
+parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which were
+on the side of the King, were assembled--to undergo this investigation.
+It is curious that the entire history of this wildest and strangest of
+all visionary occurrences is to be found in a series of processes at
+law, each part recorded and certified under oath; but so it is. The
+village maid was placed at the bar, before a number of acute legists,
+ecclesiastics, and statesmen, to submit her to a not-too-benevolent
+cross-examination. Several of these men were still alive at the time
+of the Rehabilitation and gave their recollections of this examination,
+though its formal records have not been preserved. A Dominican monk,
+Aymer, one of an order she loved, addressed her gravely with the
+severity with which that institution is always credited. "You say that
+God will deliver France; if He has so determined, He has no need of
+men-at-arms." "Ah!" cried the girl, with perhaps a note of irritation
+in her voice, "the men must fight; it is God who gives the victory." To
+another discomfited Brother, Jeanne, exasperated, answered with a little
+roughness, showing that our Maid, though gentle as a child to all gentle
+souls, was no piece of subdued perfection, but a woman of the fields,
+and lately much in the company of rough-spoken men. He was of Limoges, a
+certain Brother Seguin, "_bien aigre homme_," and disposed apparently
+to weaken the trial by questions without importance: he asked her what
+language her celestial visitors spoke? "Better than yours," answered the
+peasant girl. He could not have been, as we say in Scotland, altogether
+"an ill man," for he acknowledged that he spoke the patois of his
+district, and therefore that the blow was fair. But perhaps for
+the moment he was irritated too. He asked her, a question equally
+unnecessary, "do you believe in God?" to which with more and more
+impatience she made a similar answer: "Better than you do." There was
+nothing to be made of one so well able to defend herself. "Words are
+all very well," said the monk, "but God would not have us believe
+you, unless you show us some sign." To this Jeanne made an answer more
+dignified, though still showing signs of exasperation, "I have not come
+to Poitiers to give signs," she said; "but take me to Orleans--I will
+then show the signs I am sent to show. Give me as small a band as you
+please, but let me go."
+
+The situation of Orleans was at the time a desperate one. It was
+besieged by a strong army of English, who had built a succession of
+towers round the city, from which to assail it, after the manner of the
+times. The town lies in the midst of the plain of the Loire, with not
+so much as a hillock to offer any advantage to the besiegers. Therefore
+these great works were necessary in face of a very strenuous resistance,
+and the possibility of provisioning the besieged, which their river
+secured. The English from their high towers kept up a disastrous
+fire, which, though their artillery was of the rudest kind, did great
+execution. The siege was conducted by eminent generals. The works
+were of themselves great fortifications, the assailants numerous, and
+strengthened by the prestige of almost unbroken success; there seemed
+no human hope of the deliverance of the town unless by an overwhelming
+army, which the King's party did not possess, or by some wonderful and
+utterly unexpected event. Jeanne had always declared the destruction
+of the English and the relief of Orleans to be the first step in her
+mission.
+
+Besides the formal and official examination of her faith and character,
+held at Poitiers, private inquests of all kinds were made concerning
+of the claims of the miraculous maid. She was visited by every curious
+person, man or woman, in the neighbourhood, and plied with endless
+questions, so that her simple personal story, and that of her
+revelations--_mes voix_, as she called them--became familiarly known
+from her own report, to the whole country round about. The women pressed
+a question specially interesting--for no doubt, many a good mother half
+convinced otherwise, shook her head at Jeanne's costume--Why she wore
+the dress of a man? for which the Maid gave very good reasons: in the
+first place because it was the only dress for fighting, which, though so
+far from her desires or from the habits of her life, was henceforward to
+be her work; and also because in her strange circumstances,
+constrained as she was to live among men, she considered it safest
+for herself--statements which evidently convinced the minds of the
+questioners. It was, no doubt, good policy to make her thus widely and
+generally known, and the result was a daily growing enthusiasm for her
+and belief in her, in all classes. The result of the formal process was
+that the doctors could find nothing against her, and they reluctantly
+allowed that the King might lawfully take what advantage he could of her
+offered services.
+
+Jeanne was then brought back to Chinon, where she was lodged in one of
+the great towers still standing, though no special room is pointed
+out as hers. And there she was subjected to another process, more
+penetrating still than the interrogations of the graver tribunals. The
+Queens and their ladies and all the women of the Court took her in hand.
+They inquired into her history in every subtle and intimate feminine
+way, testing her innocence and purity; and once more she came out
+triumphant. The final judgment was given as follows: "After hearing all
+these reports, the King taking into consideration the great goodness
+that was in the Maid, and that she declared herself to be sent by
+God, it was by the said Seigneur and his council determined that from
+henceforward he should make use of her for his wars, since it was for
+this that she was sent."
+
+It was now necessary to equip Jeanne for her service. She had a
+_maison_, an _état majeur_, or staff, formed for her, the chief of
+which, Jean d'Aulon, already distinguished and worthy of such a trust
+never left her thenceforward until the end of her active career. Her
+chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, also followed her fortunes faithfully. Charles
+would have given her a sword to replace the probably indifferent weapon
+given her by Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs; but Jeanne knew where to find
+the sword destined for her. She gave orders that someone should be sent
+to Fierbois, the village at which she had paused on her way to Chinon,
+to fetch a sword which would be found there buried behind the high altar
+of the church of St. Catherine. To make this as little miraculous as
+possible, we are told by some historians that it was common for knights
+to be buried with their arms, and that Jeanne, in her visit to this
+church, where she heard three masses in succession to make up for the
+absence of constant religious services on her journey--had probably
+seen some tomb or other token that such an interment had taken place.
+However, as we are compelled to receive the far greater miracle of
+Jeanne herself and her work, without explanation, it is foolish to take
+the trouble to attempt any explanation of so small a matter as this. The
+sword in fact was found, by the clergy of the church, and was by them
+cleaned and polished and put in a scabbard of crimson velvet, scattered
+over with fleur-de-lys in gold, for her use. Her standard, which she
+considered of the greatest importance was made apparently at Tours. It
+was of white linen, fringed with silk and embroidered with a figure of
+the Saviour holding a globe in His hands, while an angel knelt at either
+side in adoration. Jhesus' Maria was inscribed at the foot. A repetition
+of this banner, which must have been re-copied from age to age is to be
+seen now at Tours. Having indicated the exact device to be emblazoned
+upon the banner, as dictated to her by her saints,--Margaret and
+Catherine--Jeanne announced her intention of carrying it herself, a
+somewhat surprising office for one who was to act as a general. But it
+was the command of her heavenly guides. "Take the standard on the part
+of God, and carry it boldly," they had said. She had, besides, a
+simple, half-childish intention of her own in this, which she explained
+shame-faced--she had no wish to use her sword though she loved it, and
+would kill no man. The banner was a more safe occupation, and saved her
+from all possibility of blood-shedding; it must however, have required
+the robust arm of a peasant to sustain the heavy weight.
+
+It will show how long a time all these examinations and preparations had
+taken when we read that Jeanne set out from Blois, where she had passed
+some time in military preparations, only on the 27th day of April;
+nearly two whole months had thus been taken up in testing her truth, and
+arranging details, trifling and unnecessary in her eyes:--a period which
+had been passed in great anxiety by the people of Orleans, with the huge
+bastilles of the English--three of which were named Paris, Rouen, and
+London--towering round them, their provisions often intercepted, all
+the business of life come to a standstill, and the overwhelming
+responsibility upon them of being almost the last barrier between the
+invader and the final subjugation of France. It is strange to add that,
+judging by ordinary rules, the garrison of Orleans ought to have been
+quite sufficient in itself in numbers and science of war, to have beaten
+and dispersed the English force which had thus succeeded in shutting
+them in; there were many notable captains among them, with Dunois,
+known as the Bastard of Orleans, one of the most celebrated and brave
+of French generals, at their head. Dunois was in no way inferior to the
+generals of the English army; he was popular, beloved by the people and
+soldiers alike, and though illegitimate, of the House of Orleans, one of
+the native seigneurs of the place. The wonder is how he and his officers
+permitted the building of these towers, and the shutting in of the town
+which they were quite strong enough to protect. But it was a losing game
+which they were playing, a part which does not suit the genius of the
+nation; and the superstition in favour of the English who had won so
+many battles with all the disadvantages on their side,--cutting the
+finest armies to pieces--was strong upon the imagination of the time. It
+seemed a fate which no valour or skill upon the side of the French could
+avert. Dunois, himself an unlikely person, one would have thought, to
+yield the honour of the fight to a woman, seems to have perceived
+that without a strong counter-motive, not within the range of ordinary
+methods, the situation was beyond hope.
+
+Accordingly, on the 27th or 28th of April, Jeanne set out at the head of
+her little army, accompanied by a great number of generals and captains.
+She had been equipped by the Queen of Sicily (with a touch of that keen
+sense of decorative effect which belonged to the age) in white armour
+inlaid with silver--all shining like her own St. Michael himself, a
+radiance of whiteness and glory under the sun--armed _de toutes pièces
+sauve la teste_, her uncovered head rising in full relief from the
+dazzling breastplate and gorget. This is the description given of her by
+an eye-witness a little later. The country is flat as the palm of one's
+hand. The white armour must have flashed back the sun for miles and
+miles of the level road, to the eyes which from the height of any
+neighbouring tower watched the party setting out. It is all fertile now,
+the richest plain, and even then, corn and wine must have been in full
+bourgeon, the great fresh greenness of the big leaves coming out upon
+such low stumps of vine as were left in the soil; but the devastated
+country was in those days covered with a wild growth like the _macchia_
+of Italian wilds, which half hid the movements of the expedition. They
+went by the Loire to Tours, where Jeanne had been assigned a dwelling of
+her own, with the estate of a general; and from thence to Blois, where
+they had to wait for some days while the convoy of provisions, which
+they were to convey to Orleans, was being prepared. And there Jeanne
+fulfilled one of the preliminary duties of her mission. She had informed
+her examiners at Poitiers that she had been commanded to write to the
+English generals before attacking them, appealing to them _de la part de
+Dieu_, to give up their conquests, and leave France to the French.
+The letter which we quote would seem to have been dictated by her at
+Poitiers, probably to the confessor who now formed part of her suite and
+who attended her wherever she went:
+
+JHESUS MARIA.
+
+King of England, and you Duke of Bedford calling yourself Regent of
+France, you, William de la Poule, Comte de Sulford, John, Lord of
+Talbot, and you Thomas, Lord of Scales, who call yourself lieutenants
+of the said Bedford, listen to the King of Heaven: Give back to the Maid
+who is here sent on the part of God the King of Heaven, the keys of all
+the good towns which you have taken by violence in His France. She is
+ready to make peace if you will hear reason and be just towards France
+and pay for what you have taken. And you archers, brothers-in-arms,
+gentles and others who are before the town of Orleans, go in peace on
+the part of God; if you do not so you will soon have news of the Maid
+who will see you shortly to your great damage. King of England, if you
+do not this, I am captain in this war, and in whatsoever place in France
+I find your people I will make them go away. I am sent here on the part
+of God the King of Heaven to push you all forth of France. If you obey I
+will be merciful. And be not strong in your own opinion, for you do not
+hold the kingdom from God the Son of the Holy Mary, but it is held by
+Charles the true heir, for God, the King of Heaven so wills, and it is
+revealed by the Maid who shall enter Paris in good company. If you will
+not believe this news on the part of God and the Maid, in whatever place
+you may find yourselves we shall make our way there, and make so great
+a commotion as has not been in France for a thousand years, if you will
+not hear reason. And believe this, that the King of Heaven will send
+more strength to the Maid than you can bring against her in all your
+assaults, to her and to her good men-at-arms. You, Duke of Bedford, the
+Maid prays and requires you to destroy no more. If you act according to
+reason you may still come in her company where the French shall do the
+greatest work that has ever been done for Christianity. Answer then if
+you will still continue against the city of Orleans. If you do so
+you will soon recall it to yourself by great misfortunes. Written the
+Saturday of Holy Week (22 March, 1429).(1)
+
+Jeanne had by this time made a wonderful moral revolution in her little
+army; most likely she had not been in the least aware what an army was,
+until this moment; but frank and fearless, she had penetrated into
+every corner, and it was not in her to permit those abuses at which an
+ordinary captain has to smile. The pernicious and shameful crowd of camp
+followers fled before her like shadows before the day. She stopped the
+big oaths and unthinking blasphemies which were so common, so that La
+Hire, one of the chief captains, a rough and ready Gascon, was reduced
+to swear by his _bâton_, no more sacred name being permitted to him.
+Perhaps this was the origin of the harmless swearing which abounds in
+France, meaning probably just as much and as little as bigger oaths in
+careless mouths; but no doubt the soldiers' language was very unfit for
+gentle ears. Jeanne moved among the wondering ranks, all radiant in her
+silver armour and with her virginal undaunted countenance, exhorting all
+those rude and noisy brothers to take thought of their duties here, and
+of the other life that awaited them. She would stop the march of the
+army that a conscience-stricken soldier might make his confession, and
+desired the priests to hear it if necessary without ceremony, or church,
+under the first tree. Her tender heart was such that she shrank from any
+man's death, and her hair rose up on her head, as she said, at the sight
+of French blood shed--although her mission was to shed it on all sides
+for a great end. But the one thing she could not bear was that
+either Frenchmen or Englishmen should die unconfessed, "unhouseled,
+disappointed, unannealed." The army went along attended by songs of
+choristers and masses of priests, the grave and solemn music of the
+Church accompanied strangely by the fanfares and bugle notes. What a
+strange procession to pass along the great Loire in its spring fulness,
+the raised banners and crosses, and that dazzling white figure, all
+effulgence, reflected in the wayward, quick flowing stream!
+
+La Hire, who is like a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as
+a model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort
+Jeanne upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town.
+There could not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to
+conduct to a great battle the country maid who was to carry the honours
+of the day from them both, and make men fight like heroes, who under
+them did nothing but run away. The candour and true courage of such
+leaders in circumstances so extraordinary, are beyond praise, for it was
+an offence both to their pride and skill in their profession, had she
+been anything less than the messenger of God which she claimed to
+be; and these rude soldiers were not men to be easily moved by devout
+imaginations. There would seem, however, even in the case of the greater
+of the two, to have arisen a strange friendship and mutual understanding
+between the famous man of war and the peasant girl. Jeanne, always
+straightforward and simple, speaks to him, not with the downcast eyes of
+her humility, but as an equal, as if the great Dunois had been a _prud'
+homme_ of her own degree. There is no appearance indeed that the Maid
+allowed herself to be overborne now by any shyness or undue humility.
+She speaks loudly, so as to be heard by those fighting men, taking
+something of their own brief and decisive tone, often even impatient, as
+one who would not be put aside either by cunning or force.
+
+Her meeting with Dunois makes this at once evident. She had been
+deceived in the manner of her approach to Orleans, her companions, among
+whom there were several field-marshals and distinguished leaders, taking
+advantage of her ignorance of the place to lead her by the opposite bank
+of the river instead of that on which the English towers were built,
+which she desired to attack at once. This was the beginning of a long
+series of deceits and hostile combinations, by which at every step
+of her way she was met and retarded; but it turned, as these devices
+generally did, to the discomfiture of the adverse captains. She crossed
+the river at Chécy above Orleans, to meet Dunois who had come so far to
+meet her. It will be seen by the conversation which she held with him
+on his first appearance, how completely Jeanne had learnt to assert
+herself, and how much she had overcome any fear of man. "Are you the
+Bastard of Orleans?" she said. "I am; and glad of your coming," he
+replied. "Is it you who have had me led to this side of the river and
+not to the bank on which Talbot is and his English?" He answered that
+he and the wisest of the leaders had thought it the best and safest
+way. "The counsel of God, our Lord, is more sure and more powerful than
+yours," she replied. The expedition, as a matter of fact, had to turn
+back, and to lose precious time, there being, it is to be presumed,
+no means of transporting so large a force across the river. The large
+convoy of provisions which Jeanne brought was embarked in boats while
+the majority of the army returned to Blois, in order to cross by the
+bridge.
+
+Jeanne, however, having freely expressed her opinion, adapted herself to
+the circumstances, though extremely averse to separate herself from her
+soldiers, good men who had confessed and prepared their souls for every
+emergency. She finally consented, however, to ride on with Dunois and La
+Hire. The wind was against the convoy, so that the heavy boats, deeply
+laden with beeves and corn, had a dangerous and slow voyage before them.
+"Have patience," cried Jeanne; "by the help of God all will go well";
+and immediately the wind changed, to the astonishment and joy of all,
+and the boats arrived in safety "in spite of the English, who offered no
+hindrance whatever," as she had predicted. The little party made their
+way along the bank, and in the twilight of the April evening, about
+eight o'clock, entered Orleans. The Deliverer, it need not be said, was
+hailed with joy indescribable. She was on a white horse, and carried,
+Dunois says, the banner in her hand, though it was carried before her
+when she entered the town. The white figure in the midst of those darkly
+gleaming mailed men, would in itself throw a certain glory through the
+dimness of the night, as she passed the gates and came into view by the
+blaze of all the torches, and the lights in the windows, over the dark
+swarming crowds of the citizens. Her white banner waving, her white
+armour shining, it was little wonder that the throng that filled the
+streets received the Maid "as if they had seen God descending among
+them." "And they had good reason," says the Chronicle, "for they had
+suffered many disturbances, labours, and pains, and, what is worse,
+great doubt whether they ever should be delivered. But now all were
+comforted, as if the siege were over, by the divine strength that was in
+this simple Maid whom they regarded most affectionately, men, women, and
+little children. There was a marvellous press around her to touch her
+or the horse on which she rode, so much so that one of the torchbearers
+approached too near and set fire to her pennon; upon which she touched
+her horse with her spurs, and turning him cleverly, extinguished the
+flame, as if she had long followed the wars."
+
+There could have been nothing she resembled so much as St. Michael, the
+warrior-angel, who, as all the world knew, was her chief counsellor and
+guide, and who, no doubt, blazed, a familiar figure, from some window in
+the cathedral to which this his living picture rode without a pause, to
+give thanks to God before she thought of refreshment or rest. She spoke
+to the people who surrounded her on every side as she went on through
+the tumultuous streets, bidding them be of good courage and that if they
+had faith they should escape from all their troubles. And it was only
+after she had said her prayers and rendered her thanksgiving, that
+she returned to the house selected for her--the house of an important
+personage, Jacques Boucher, treasurer to the Duke of Orleans, not like
+the humble places where she had formerly lodged. The houses of that age
+were beautiful, airy and light, with much graceful ornament and solid
+comfort, the arched and vaulted Gothic beginning to give place to those
+models of domestic architecture which followed the Renaissance, with
+their ample windows and pleasant space and breadth. There the table was
+spread with a joyous meal in honour of this wonderful guest, to which,
+let us hope, Dunois and La Hire and the rest did full justice. But
+Jeanne was indifferent to the feast. She mixed with water the wine
+poured for her into a silver cup, and dipped her bread in it, five
+or six small slices. The visionary peasant girl cared for none of the
+dainty meats. And then she retired to the comfort of a peaceful chamber,
+where the little daughter of the house shared her bed: strange return
+to the days when Hauvette and Mengette in Domremy lay by her side and
+talked as girls love to do, through half the silent night. Perhaps
+little Charlotte, too, lay awake with awe to wonder at that other young
+head on the pillow, a little while ago shut into the silver helmet, and
+shining like the archangel's. The _état majeur_, the Chevalier d'Aulon,
+Jean de Metz, and Bertrand de Poulengy, who had never left her, first
+friends and most faithful, and her brother Pierre d'Arc, were lodged in
+the same house. It was the last night of April, 1429.
+
+     (1) The dates must of course be reckoned by the old style.--
+     This letter was dispatched from Tours, during her pause
+     there.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV -- THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS. MAY 1-8, 1429.
+
+Next morning there was a council of war among the many leaders now
+collected within the town. It was the eager desire of Jeanne that an
+assault should be made at once, in all the enthusiasm of the moment,
+upon the English towers, without waiting even for the arrival of the
+little army which she had preceded. But the captains of the defence who
+had borne the heat and burden of the day, and who might naturally
+enough be irritated by the enthusiasm with which this stranger had been
+received, were of a different opinion. I quote here a story, for which
+I am told there is no foundation whatever, touching a personage who
+probably never existed, so that the reader may take it as he pleases,
+with indulgence for the writer's weakness, or indignation at her
+credulity. It seems to me, however, to express very naturally a
+sentiment which must have existed among the many captains who had been
+fighting unsuccessfully for months in defence of the beleaguered city.
+A certain Guillaume de Gamache felt himself insulted above all by the
+suggestion. "What," he cried, "is the advice of this hussy from the
+fields (_une péronnelle de bas lieu_) to be taken against that of a
+knight and captain! I will fold up my banner and become again a simple
+soldier. I would rather have a nobleman for my master than a woman whom
+nobody knows."
+
+Dunois, who was too wise to weaken the forces at his command by such a
+quarrel, is said to have done his best to reconcile and soothe the angry
+captain. This, however, if it was true, was only a mild instance of the
+perpetual opposition which the Maid encountered from the very beginning
+of her career and wherever she went. Notwithstanding her victories, she
+remained through all her career a _péronnelle_ to these men of war (with
+the noble exception, of course, of Alençon, Dunois, Xaintrailles, La
+Hire, and others). They were sore and wounded by her appearance and her
+claims. If they could cheat her, balk her designs, steal a march in any
+way, they did so, from first to last, always excepting the few who were
+faithful to her. Dunois could afford to be magnanimous, but the lesser
+men were jealous, envious, embittered. A _péronnelle_, a woman nobody
+knew! And they themselves were belted knights, experienced soldiers, of
+the best blood of France. It was not unnatural; but this atmosphere
+of hate, malice, and mortification forms the background of the picture
+wherever the Maid moves in her whiteness, illuminating to us the whole
+scene. The English hated her lustily as their enemy and a witch, casting
+spells and enchantments so that the strength was sucked out of a man's
+arm and the courage from his heart: but the Frenchmen, all but those
+who were devoted to her, regarded her with an ungenerous opposition, the
+hate of men shamed and mortified by every triumph she achieved.
+
+Jeanne was angry, too, and disappointed, more than she had been by all
+discouragements before. She had believed, perhaps, that once in the
+field these oppositions would be over, and that her mission would be
+rapidly accomplished. But she neither rebelled nor complained. What
+she did was to occupy herself about what she felt to be her business,
+without reference to any commander. She sent out two heralds,(1) who
+were attached to her staff, and therefore at her personal disposal, to
+summon once more Talbot and Glasdale (Classidas, as the French called
+him) _de la part de Dieu_ to evacuate their towers and return home. It
+would seem that in her miraculous soul she had a visionary hope that
+this appeal might be successful. What so noble, what so Christian, as
+that the one nation should give up, of free-will, its attempt upon the
+freedom and rights of another, if once the duty were put simply before
+it--and both together joining hands, march off, as she had already
+suggested, to do the noblest deed that had ever yet been done for
+Christianity? That same evening she rode forth with her little train;
+and placing herself on the town end of the bridge (which had been broken
+in the middle), as near as the breach would permit to the bastille, or
+fort of the Tourelles, which was built across the further end of
+the bridge, on the left side of the Loire--called out to the enemy,
+summoning them once more to withdraw while there was time. She was
+overwhelmed, as might have been expected, with a storm of abusive shouts
+and evil words, Classidas and his captains hurrying to the walls to
+carry on the fierce exchange of abuse. To be called dairy-maid and
+_péronnelle_ was a light matter, but some of the terms used were so
+cruel that, according to some accounts, she betrayed her womanhood by
+tears, not prepared apparently for the use of such foul weapons against
+her. The _Journal du Siège_ declares, however, that she was "aucunement
+yrée" (angry), but answered that they lied, and rode back to the city.
+
+The next Sunday, the 1st of May, Dunois, alarmed by the delay of his
+main body, set out for Blois to meet them, and we are told that Jeanne
+accompanied him to the special point of danger, where the English from
+their fortifications might have stopped his progress, and took up a
+position there, along with La Hire, between the expedition and the
+enemy. But in the towers not a man budged, not a shot was fired. It was
+again a miracle, and she had predicted it. The party of Dunois marched
+on in safety, and Jeanne returned to Orleans, once more receiving on
+the breeze some words of abuse from the defenders of those battlements,
+which sent forth no more dangerous missile, and replying again with
+her summons, "_Retournez de la par Dieu à Angleterre._" The townsfolk
+watched her coming and going with an excitement impossible to describe;
+they walked by the side of her charger to the cathedral, which was
+the end of every progress; they talked to her, all speaking together,
+pressing upon her--and she to them, bidding them to have no fear.
+"Messire has sent me," she said again and again. She went out again,
+Wednesday, 4th May, on the return of Dunois, to meet the army, with the
+same result, that they entered quietly, the English not firing a shot.
+
+On this same day, in the afternoon, after the early dinner, there
+happened a wonderful scene. Jeanne, it appeared, had fallen asleep after
+her meal, no doubt tired with the expedition of the morning, and her
+chief attendant, D'Aulon, who had accompanied Dunois to fetch the troops
+from Blois, being weary after his journey, had also stretched himself
+on a couch to rest. They were all tired, the entry of the troops
+having been early in the morning, a fact of which the angry captains of
+Orleans, who had not shared in that expedition, took advantage to make
+a secret sortie unknown to the new chiefs. All at once the Maid awoke in
+agitation and alarm. Her "voices" had awakened her from her sleep. "My
+council tell me to go against the English," she cried; "but if to assail
+their towers or to meet Fastolfe I cannot tell." As she came to the full
+command of her faculties her trouble grew. "The blood of our soldiers is
+flowing," she said; "why did they not tell me? My arms, my arms!" Then
+she rushed down stairs to find her page amusing himself in the tranquil
+afternoon, and called to him for her horse. All was quiet, and no doubt
+her attendants thought her mad: but D'Aulon, who knew better than to
+contradict his mistress, armed her rapidly, and Luis, the page, brought
+her horse to the door. By this time there began to rise a distant rumour
+and outcry, at which they all pricked their ears. As Jeanne put her foot
+in the stirrup she perceived that her standard was wanting, and called
+to the page, Louis de Contes, above, to hand it to her out of the
+window. Then with the heavy flag-staff in her hand she set spurs to her
+horse, her attendants one by one clattering after her, and dashed onward
+"so that the fire flashed from the pavement under the horse's feet."
+
+Jeanne's presentiment was well-founded. There had been a private
+expedition against the English fort of St. Loup carried out quietly to
+steal a march upon her--Gamache, possibly, or other malcontents of his
+temper, in the hope perhaps of making use of her prestige to gain a
+victory without her presence. But it had happened with this sally as
+with many others which had been made from Orleans; and when Jeanne
+appeared outside the gate which she and the rest of the followers
+after her had almost forced--coming down upon them at full gallop, her
+standard streaming, her white armour in a blaze of reflection, she met
+the fugitives flying back towards the shelter of the town. She does not
+seem to have paused or to have deigned to address a word to them, though
+the troop of soldiers and citizens who had snatched arms and flung
+themselves after her, arrested and turned them back. Straight to the
+foot of the tower she went, Dunois startled in his turn, thundering
+after her. It is not for a woman to describe, any more than it was for a
+woman to execute such a feat of war. It is said that she put herself at
+the head of the citizens, Dunois at the head of the soldiers. One moment
+of pity and horror and heart-sickness Jeanne had felt when she met
+several wounded men who were being carried towards the town. She had
+never seen French blood shed before, and the dreadful thought that
+they might die unconfessed, overwhelmed her soul; but this was but an
+incident of her breathless gallop to the encounter. To isolate the tower
+which was attacked was the first necessity, and then the conflict was
+furious--the English discouraged, but fighting desperately against
+a mysterious force which overwhelmed them, at the same time that it
+redoubled the ardour of every Frenchman. Lord Talbot sent forth parties
+from the other forts to help their companions, but these were met in the
+midst by the rest of the army arriving from Orleans, which stopped
+their course. It was not till evening, "the hour of Vespers," that the
+bastille was finally taken, with great slaughter, the Orleanists giving
+little quarter. During these dreadful hours the Maid was everywhere
+visible with her standard, the most marked figure, shouting to her men,
+weeping for the others, not fighting herself so far as we hear, but
+always in the front of the battle. When she went back to Orleans
+triumphant, she led a band of prisoners with her, keeping a wary eye
+upon them that they might not come to harm.
+
+The next day, May 5th, was the Feast of the Ascension, and it was spent
+by Jeanne in rest and in prayer. But the other leaders were not so
+devout. They held a crowded and anxious council of war, taking care that
+no news of it should reach the ears of the Maid. When, however, they had
+decided upon the course to pursue they sent for her, and intimated to
+her their decision to attack only the smaller forts, which she heard
+with great impatience, not sitting down, but walking about the room in
+disappointment and anger. It is difficult(2) for the present writer to
+follow the plans of this council or to understand in what way Jeanne
+felt herself contradicted and set aside. However it was, the fact seems
+certain that their plan failed at first, the English having themselves
+abandoned one of the smaller forts on the right side of the river and
+concentrated their forces in the greater ones of Les Augustins and
+Les Tourelles on the left bank. For all this, reference to the map is
+necessary, which will make it quite clear. It was Classidas, as he
+is called, Glasdale, the most furious enemy of France, and one of the
+bravest of the English captains who held the former, and for a moment
+succeeded in repulsing the attack. The fortune of war seemed about to
+turn back to its former current, and the French fell back on the boats
+which had brought them to the scene of action, carrying the Maid with
+them in their retreat. But she perceived how critical the moment was,
+and reining up her horse from the bank, down which she was being forced
+by the crowd, turned back again, closely followed by La Hire, and at
+once, no doubt, by the stouter hearts who only wanted a leader--and
+charging the English, who had regained their courage as the white
+armour of the witch disappeared, and were in full career after the
+fugitives--drove them back to their fortifications, which they gained
+with a rush, leaving the ground strewn with the wounded and dying.
+Jeanne herself did not draw bridle till she had planted her standard on
+the edge of the moat which surrounded the tower.
+
+Michelet is very brief concerning this first victory, and claims only
+that "the success was due in part to the Maid," although the crowd of
+captains and men-at-arms where by themselves quite sufficient for the
+work, had there been any heart in them. But this was true to fact in
+almost every case: and it is clear that she was simply the heart, which
+was the only thing wanted to those often beaten Frenchmen; where she
+was, where they could hear her robust young voice echoing over all the
+din, they were as men inspired; when the impetus of their flight carried
+her also away, they became once more the defeated of so many battles.
+The effect upon the English was equally strong; when the back of Jeanne
+was turned, they were again the men of Agincourt; when she turned
+upon them, her white breastplate blazing out like a star, the sunshine
+striking dazzling rays from her helmet, they trembled before the
+sorceress; an angel to her own side, she was the very spirit of magic
+and witchcraft to her opponents. Classidas, or which captain soever
+of the English side it might happen to be, blaspheming from the
+battlements, hurled all the evil names of which a trooper was capable,
+upon her, while she from below summoned them, in different tones of
+appeal and menace, calling upon them to yield, to go home, to give up
+the struggle. Her form, her voice are always evident in the midst of the
+great stone bullets, the cloth-yard shafts that were flying--they were
+so near, the one above, the other below, that they could hear each other
+speak.
+
+On the 7th of May the fort of Les Augustins on the left bank was taken.
+It will be seen by reference to the map, that this bastille, an ancient
+convent, stood at some distance from the river, in peaceful times a
+little way beyond the bridge, and no doubt a favourite Sunday walk
+from the city. The bridge was now closed up by the frowning bulk of the
+Tourelles built upon it, with a smaller tower or "boulevard" on the
+left bank communicating with it by a drawbridge. When Les Augustins was
+taken, the victorious French turned their arms against this boulevard,
+but as night had fallen by this time, they suspended the fighting,
+having driven back the English, who had made a sally in help of Les
+Augustins. Here in the dark, which suited their purpose, another council
+was held. The captains decided that they would now pursue their victory
+no further, the town being fully supplied with provisions and joyful
+with success, but that they would await the arrival of reinforcements
+before they proceeded further; probably their object was solely to get
+rid of Jeanne, to conclude the struggle without her, and secure the
+credit of it. The council was held in the camp within sight of the fort,
+by the light of torches; after she had been persuaded to withdraw, on
+account of a slight wound in her foot from a calthrop, it is said.
+This message was sent after her into Orleans. She heard it with quiet
+disdain. "You have held your council, and I have had mine," she said
+calmly to the messengers; then turning to her chaplain, "Come to me
+to-morrow at dawn," she said, "and do not leave me; I shall have much
+to do. My blood will be shed. I shall be wounded(3) to-morrow," pointing
+above her right breast. Up to this time no weapon had touched her; she
+had stood fast among all the flying arrows, the fierce play of spear and
+sword, and had taken no harm.
+
+In the morning early, at sunrise, she dashed forth from the town again,
+though the generals, her hosts, and all the authorities who were in the
+plot endeavoured to detain her. "Stay with us, Jeanne," said the people
+with whom she lodged--official people, much above the rank of the
+Maid--"stay and help us to eat this fish fresh out of the river." "Keep
+it for this evening," she said, "and I shall return by the bridge and
+bring you some Goddens to have their share." She had already brought in
+a party of the Goddens on the night before to protect them from the fury
+of the crowd. The peculiarity of this promise lay in the fact that
+the bridge was broken, and could not be passed, even without that
+difficulty, without passing through the Tourelles and the boulevard
+which blocked it at the other end. At the closed gates another great
+official stood by, to prevent her passing, but he was soon swept away
+by the flood of enthusiasts who followed the white horse and its white
+rider. The crowd flung themselves into the boats to cross the river with
+her, horse and man. Les Tourelles stood alone, black and frowning across
+the shining river in its early touch of golden sunshine, on the
+south side of the Loire, the lower tower of the boulevard on the bank
+blackened with the fire of last night's attack, and the smoking ruins
+of Les Augustins beyond. The French army, whom Orleans had been busy
+all night feeding and encouraging, lay below, not yet apparently moving
+either for action or retreat. Jeanne plunged among them like a ray of
+light, D'Aulon carrying her banner; and passing through the ranks,
+she took up her place on the border of the moat of the boulevard. Her
+followers rushed after with that _élan_ of desperate and uncalculating
+valour which was the great power of the French arms. In the midst of
+the fray the girl's clear voice, _assez voix de femme_, kept shouting
+encouragements, _de la part de Dieu_ always her war-cry. "_Bon cœur,
+bonne espérance_," she cried--"the hour is at hand." But after hours of
+desperate fighting the spirit of the assailants began to flag. Jeanne,
+who apparently did not at any time take any active part in the struggle,
+though she exposed herself to all its dangers, seized a ladder, placed
+it against the wall, and was about to mount, when an arrow struck her
+full in the breast. The Maid fell, the crowd closed round; for a moment
+it seemed as if all were lost.
+
+Here we have over again in the fable our friend Gamache. It is a pretty
+story, and though we ask no one to take it for absolute fact, there is
+no reason why some such incident might not have occurred. Gamache, the
+angry captain who rather than follow a _péronnelle_ to the field was
+prepared to fold his banner round its staff, and give up his rank, is
+supposed to have been the nearest to her when she fell. It was he who
+cleared the crowd from about her and raised her up. "Take my horse,"
+he said, "brave creature. Bear no malice. I confess that I was in the
+wrong." "It is I that should be wrong if I bore malice," cried Jeanne,
+"for never was a knight so courteous" (_chevalier si bien apprins_).
+She was surrounded immediately by her people, the chaplain whom she had
+bidden to keep near her, her page, all her special attendants, who would
+have conveyed her out of the fight had she consented. Jeanne had the
+courage to pull the arrow out of the wound with her own hand,--"it stood
+a hand breadth out" behind her shoulder--but then, being but a girl and
+this her first experience of the sort, notwithstanding her armour and
+her rank as General-in-Chief, she cried with the pain, this commander
+of seventeen. Somebody then proposed to charm the wound with an
+incantation, but the Maid indignant, cried out, "I would rather die."
+Finally a compress soaked in oil was placed upon it, and Jeanne withdrew
+a little with her chaplain, and made her confession to him, as one who
+might be about to die.
+
+But soon her mood changed. She saw the assailants waver and fall back;
+the attack grew languid, and Dunois talked of sounding the retreat. Upon
+this she got to her feet, and scrambled somehow on her horse. "Rest a
+little," she implored the generals about her, "eat something, refresh
+yourselves: and when you see my standard floating against the wall,
+forward, the place is yours." They seem to have done as she suggested,
+making a pause, while Jeanne withdrew a little into a vineyard close
+by, where there must have been a tuft of trees, to afford her a little
+shelter. There she said her prayers, and tasted that meat to eat that
+men wot not of, which restores the devout soul. Turning back she took
+her standard from her squire's hand, and planted it again on the edge of
+the moat. "Let me know," she said, "when the pennon touches the wall."
+The folds of white and gold with the benign countenance of the Saviour,
+now visible, now lost in the changes of movement, floated over their
+heads on the breeze of the May day. "Jeanne," said the squire, "it
+touches!" "On!" cried the Maid, her voice ringing through the momentary
+quiet. "On! All is yours!" The troops rose as one man; they flung
+themselves against the wall, at the foot of which that white figure
+stood, the staff of her banner in her hand, shouting, "All is yours."
+Never had the French _élan_ been so wildly inspired, so irresistible;
+they swarmed up the wall "as if it had been a stair." "Do they
+think themselves immortal?" the panic-stricken English cried among
+themselves--panic-stricken not by their old enemies, but by the white
+figure at the foot of the wall. Was she a witch, as had been thought?
+was not she indeed the messenger of God? The dazzling rays that shot
+from her armour seemed like butterflies, like doves, like angels
+floating about her head. They had thought her dead, yet here she stood
+again without a sign of injury; or was it Michael himself, the great
+archangel whom she resembled do much? Arrows flew round her on every
+side but never touched her. She struck no blow, but the folds of her
+standard blew against the wall, and her voice rose through all the
+tumult. "On! Enter! _de la part de Dieu!_ for all is yours."
+
+The Maid had other words to say, "_Renty, renty_, Classidas!" she cried,
+"you called me vile names, but I have a great pity for your soul." He
+on his side showered down blasphemies. He was at the last gasp; one
+desperate last effort he made with a handful of men to escape from the
+boulevard by the drawbridge to Les Tourelles, which crossed a narrow
+strip of the river. But the bridge had been fired by a fire-ship from
+Orleans and gave way under the rush of the heavily-armed men; and the
+fierce Classidas and his companions were plunged into the river, where a
+knight in armour, like a tower falling, went to the bottom in a moment.
+Nearly thirty of them, it is said, plunged thus into the great Loire and
+were seen no more.
+
+It was the end of the struggle. The French flag swung forth on the
+parapet, the French shout rose to heaven. Meanwhile a strange sight was
+to be seen--the St. Michael in shining armour, who had led that assault,
+shedding tears for the ferocious Classidas, who had cursed her with his
+last breath. "_J'ai grande pitié de ton âme._" Had he but had time to
+clear his soul and reconcile himself with God!
+
+This was virtually the end of the siege of Orleans. The broken bridge on
+the Loire had been rudely mended, with a great _gouttière_ and planks,
+and the people of Orleans had poured out over it to take the Tourelles
+in flank--the English being thus taken between Jeanne's army on the one
+side and the citizens on the other. The whole south bank of the river
+was cleared, not an Englishman left to threaten the richest part of
+France, the land flowing with milk and honey. And though there
+still remained several great generals on the other side with strong
+fortifications to fall back upon, they seem to have been paralysed, and
+did not strike a blow. Jeanne was not afraid of them, but her ardour
+to continue the fight dropped all at once; enough had been done. She
+awaited the conclusion with confidence. Needless to say that Orleans was
+half mad with joy, every church sounding its bells, singing its song of
+triumph and praise, the streets so crowded that it was with difficulty
+that the Maid could make her progress through them, with throngs of
+people pressing round to kiss her hand, if might be, her greaves, her
+mailed shoes, her charger, the floating folds of her banner. She had
+said she would be wounded and so she was, as might be seen, the envious
+rent of the arrow showing through the white plates of metal on her
+shoulder. She had said all should be theirs _de par Dieu:_ and all
+was theirs, thanks to our Lord and also to St. Aignan and St. Euvert,
+patrons of Orleans, and to St. Louis and St. Charlemagne in heaven who
+had so great pity of the kingdom of France: and to the Maid on
+earth, the Heaven-sent deliverer, the spotless virgin, the celestial
+warrior--happy he who could reach to kiss it, the point of her mailed
+shoe.
+
+Someone says that she rode through all this half-delirious joy like
+a creature in a dream,--fatigue, pain, the happy languor of the end
+attained, and also the profound pity that was the very inspiration of
+her spirit, for all those souls of men gone to their account without
+help of Church or comfort of priest--overwhelming her. But next day,
+which was Sunday, she was up again and eagerly watching all that went
+on. A strange sight was Orleans on that Sunday of May. On the south
+side of the Loire, all those half-ruined bastilles smoking and silenced,
+which once had threatened not the city only but all the south of France;
+on the north the remaining bands of English drawn up in order of battle.
+The excitement of the town and of the generals in it, was intense; worn
+as they were with three days of continuous fighting, should they sally
+forth again and meet that compact, silent, doubly defiant army, which
+was more or less fresh and unexhausted? Jeanne's opinion was, No;
+there had been enough of fighting, and it was Sunday, the holy day; but
+apparently the French did go out though keeping at a distance, watching
+the enemy. By orders of the Maid an altar was raised between the two
+armies in full sight of both sides, and there mass was celebrated, under
+the sunshine, by the side of the river which had swallowed Classidas
+and all his men. French and English together devoutly turned towards and
+responded to that Mass in the pause of bewildering uncertainty. "Which
+way are their heads turned?" Jeanne asked when it was over. "They are
+turned away from us, they are turned to Meung," was the reply. "Then let
+them go, _de par Dieu_," the Maid replied.
+
+The siege had lasted for seven months, but eight days of the Maid were
+enough to bring it to an end. The people of Orleans still, every year,
+on the 8th of May, make a procession round the town and give thanks to
+God for its deliverance. Henceforth, the Maid was known no longer as
+Jeanne d'Arc, the peasant of Domremy, but as _La Pucelle d'Orléans_, in
+the same manner in which one might speak of the Prince of Waterloo, or
+the Duc de Malakoff.
+
+     (1) Their special mission seems to have been a demand for
+     the return of a herald previously sent who had never come
+     back. As Dunois accompanied the demand by a threat to kill
+     the English prisoners in Orleans if the herald was not sent
+     back, the request was at once accorded, with fierce
+     defiances to the Maid, the dairy-maid as she is called,
+     bidding her go back to her cows, and threatening to burn her
+     if they caught her.
+
+     (2) I avail myself here as elsewhere of Mr. Lang's lucid
+     description. "It is really perfectly intelligible. The
+     Council wanted a feint on the left bank, Jeanne an attack on
+     the right. She knew their scheme, untold, but entered into
+     it. There was, however, no feint. She deliberately forced
+     the fighting. There was grand fighting, well worth telling,"
+     adds my martial critic, who understands it so much better
+     than I do, and who I am happy to think is himself telling
+     the tale in another way.
+
+     (3) She had made this prophecy a month before, and it was
+     recorded three weeks before the event in the Town Book of
+     Brabant.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V -- THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE. JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+
+The rescue of Orleans and the defeat of the invincible English were news
+to move France from one end to the other, and especially to raise the
+spirits and restore the courage of that part of France which had
+no sympathy with the invaders and to which the English yoke was
+unaccustomed and disgraceful. The news flew up and down the Loire from
+point to point, arousing every village, and breathing new heart and
+encouragement everywhere; while in the meantime Jeanne, partially healed
+of her wound (on May 9th she rode out in a _maillet_, a light coat of
+chain-mail), after a few days' rest in the joyful city which she had
+saved with all its treasures, set out on her return to Chinon. She found
+the King at Loches, another of the strong places on the Loire where
+there was room for a Court, and means of defence for a siege should such
+be necessary, as is the case with so many of these wonderful castles
+upon the great French river. Hot with eagerness to follow up her first
+great success and accomplish her mission, Jeanne's object was to march
+on at once with the young Prince, with or without his immense retinue,
+to Rheims where he should be crowned and anointed King as she had
+promised. Her instinctive sense of the necessities of the position, if
+we use that language--more justly, her boundless faith in the orders
+which she believed had been give her from Heaven, to accomplish this
+great act without delay, urged her on. She was straitened, if we may
+quote the most divine of words, till it should be accomplished.
+
+But the Maid, flushed with victory, with the shouts of Orleans still
+ringing in her ears, the applause of her fellow-soldiers, the sound of
+the triumphant bells, was plunged all at once into the indolence,
+the intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering
+favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into foolish
+amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and buffoons alike
+dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always counselling
+caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and drink for
+to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything that was
+enjoyable in the present moment, to subject a young sovereign to toils
+and excitement, and probable loss, for the uncertain advantage of a
+vain ceremony, when he might be enjoying himself safely and at his ease,
+throughout the summer months, on the cheerful banks of the Loire? On the
+other hand, the Chancellor, the Chamberlains, the Church, all his graver
+advisers (with the exception of Gerson, the great theologian to whom
+has been ascribed the authorship of the _Imitation of Christ_, who is
+reported to have said, "If France deserts her, and she fails, she is
+none the less inspired") shook their hands and advised that the way
+should be quite safe and free of danger before the King risked himself
+upon it. It was thus that Jeanne was received when, newly alighted from
+her charger, her shoulder still but half healed, her eyes scarcely clear
+of the dust and smoke, she found herself once more in the ante-chamber,
+wasting the days, waiting in vain behind closed doors, tormented by
+the lutes and madrigals, the light women and lighter men, useless
+and contemptible, of a foolish Court. The Maid, in all the energy
+and impulse of a success which had proved all her claims, had also a
+premonition that her own time was short, if not a direct intimation, as
+some believe, to that effect: and mingled her remonstrances and appeals
+with the cry of warning: "I shall only last a year: take the good of me
+as long as it is possible."
+
+No doubt she was a very great entertainment to the idle seigneurs and
+ladies who would try to persuade her to tell them what was to happen to
+them, she who had prophesied the death of Glasdale and her own wound and
+so many other things. The Duke of Lorraine on her first setting out had
+attempted to discover from Jeanne what course his illness would
+take, and whether he should get better; and all the demoiselles and
+demoiseaux, the flutterers of the ante-chamber, would be still more
+likely to surround with their foolish questions the stout-hearted,
+impatient girl who had acquired a little of the roughness of her soldier
+comrades, and had never been slow at any time in answering a fool
+according to his folly; for Jeanne was no meek or sentimental maiden,
+but a robust and vigorous young woman, ready with a quick response, as
+well as with a ready blow did any one touch her unadvisedly, or use any
+inappropriate freedom. At last, one day while she waited vainly outside
+the cabinet in which the King was retired with a few of his councillors,
+Jeanne's patience failed her altogether. She knocked at the door, and
+being admitted threw herself at the feet of the King. To Jeanne he
+was no king till he had received the consecration necessary for every
+sovereign of France. "Noble Dauphin," she cried, "why should you hold
+such long and tedious councils? Rather come to Rheims and receive your
+worthy crown."
+
+The Bishop of Castres, Christopher de Harcourt, who was present, asked
+her if she would not now in the presence of the King describe to them
+the manner in which her council instructed her, when they talked with
+her. Jeanne reddened and replied: "I understand that you would like to
+know, and I would gladly satisfy you." "Jeanne," said the King in his
+turn, "it would be very good if you could do what they ask, in the
+presence of those here." She answered at once and with great feeling:
+"When I am vexed to find myself disbelieved in the things I say from
+God, I retire by myself and pray to God, complaining and asking of Him
+why I am not listened to. And when I have prayed I hear a voice which
+says, 'Daughter of God, go, go, go! I will help thee, go!' And when
+I hear that voice I feel a great joy." Her face shone as she spoke,
+"lifting her eyes to heaven," like the face of Moses while still it bore
+the reflection of the glory of God, so that the men were dazzled who
+sat, speechless, looking on.
+
+The result was that Charles kindly promised to set out as soon as the
+road between him and Rheims should be free of the English, especially
+the towns on the Loire in which a great part of the army dispersed from
+Orleans had taken refuge, with the addition of the auxiliary forces of
+Sir John Fastolfe, a name so much feared by the French, but at which the
+English reader can scarcely forbear a smile. That the young King did not
+think of putting himself at the head of the troops or of taking part
+in the campaign shows sufficiently that he was indeed a _pauvre sire_,
+unworthy his gallant people. Jeanne, however, nothing better being
+possible, seems to have accepted this mission with readiness, and
+instantly began her preparations to carry it out. It is here that the
+young Seigneur Guy de Laval comes in with his description of her already
+quoted. He was no humble squire but a great personage to whom the King
+was civil and pleased to show courtesy. The young man writes to _ses
+mères_, that is, it seems, his mother and grandmother, to whom, in their
+distant château, anxiously awaiting news of the two youths gone to the
+wars, their faithful son makes his report of himself and his brother.
+The King, he says, sent for the Maid, in order, Sir Guy believes, that
+he might see her. And afterwards the young man went to Selles where she
+was just setting out on the campaign.
+
+From Selles, he writes on the 8th June, exactly a month after the
+deliverance of Orleans:
+
+"I went to her lodging to see her, and she sent for wine and told me
+we should soon drink wine in Paris. It was a miraculous thing (_toute
+divine_) to see her and hear her. She left Selles on Monday at the hour
+of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de Boussac and a great many armed
+men with her. I saw her mount her horse, all in white armour excepting
+the head, a little axe in her hand. The great black charger was very
+restive at her door and would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said,
+'to the cross which is in front of the church,' and there she mounted,
+the horse standing still as if he had been bound. Then turning towards
+the church which was close by she said in a womanly voice (_assez voix
+de femme_), 'You priests and people of the Church, make processions and
+prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road, 'Forward,' she said.
+Her unfolded standard was carried by a page; she had her little axe in
+her hand, and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight
+days before. The Maid told me in her lodging that she had sent you,
+grandmother, a small gold ring, which was indeed a very small affair,
+and that she would fain have sent you something better, considering
+your recommendation. To-day M. d'Alençon, the Bastard of Orleans, and
+Gaucourt were to leave Selles, following the Maid. And men are arriving
+from all parts every day, all with good hope in God who I believe will
+help us. But money there is none at the Court, so that for the present I
+have no hope of any help or assistance. Therefore I desire you, _Madame
+ma mère_, who have my seal, spare not the land neither in sale nor
+mortgage . . . . My much honoured ladies and mothers, I pray the blessed
+Son of God that you have a good life and long; and both of us recommend
+ourselves to our brother Louis. And we send our greetings to the reader
+of this letter. Written from Selles, Wednesday, 8th June, 1429. This
+afternoon are arrived M. de Vendôme, M. de Boussac, and others, and La
+Hire has joined the army, and we shall soon be at work (_on besognera
+bientôt_)--May God grant that it should be according to your desire."
+
+It was with difficulty that the Duc d'Alençon had been got to start, his
+wife consenting with great reluctance. He had been long a prisoner in
+England, and had lately been ransomed for a great sum of money; "Was
+not that a sufficient sacrifice?" the Duchess asked indignantly. To risk
+once more a husband so costly was naturally a painful thing to do, and
+why could not Jeanne be content and stay where she was? Jeanne comforted
+the lady, perhaps with a little good-humoured contempt. "Fear nothing,
+Madame," she said; "I will bring him back to you safe and sound."
+Probably Alençon himself had no great desire to be second in command to
+this country lass, even though she had delivered Orleans; and if he
+set out at all he would have preferred to take another direction and to
+protect his own property and province. The gathering of the army thus
+becomes visible to us; parties are continually coming in; and no doubt,
+as they marched along, many a little château--and they abound through
+the country each with its attendant hamlet--gave forth its master or
+heir, poor but noble, followed by as many men-at-arms, perhaps only two
+or three, as the little property could raise, to swell the forces with
+the best and surest of material, the trained gentlemen with hearts full
+of chivalry and pride, but with the same hardy, self-denying habits as
+the sturdy peasants who followed them, ready for any privation; with a
+proud delight to hear that _on besognera bientôt_--with that St. Michael
+at their head, and no longer any fear of the English in their hearts.
+
+The first _besogne_ on which this army entered was the siege of Jargeau,
+June 11th, into which town Suffolk had thrown himself and his troops
+when the siege of Orleans was raised. The town was strong and so was the
+garrison, experienced too in all the arts of war, and already aware of
+the wild enthusiasm by which Jeanne was surrounded. She passed through
+Orleans on the 10th of June, and had there been joined by various new
+detachments. The number of her army was now raised, we are told, to
+twelve hundred lances, which means, as each "lance" was a separate
+party, about three thousand six hundred men, though the _Journal du
+Siège_ gives a much larger number; at all events it was a small army
+with which to decide a quarrel between the two greatest nations of
+Christendom. Her associates in command were here once more seized by the
+prevailing sin of hesitation, and many arguments were used to induce her
+to postpone the assault. It would seem that this hesitation continued
+until the very moment of attack, and was only put an end to when Jeanne
+herself impatiently seized her banner from the hand of her squire, and
+planting herself at the foot of the walls let loose the fervour of the
+troops and cheered them on to the irresistible rush in which lay their
+strength. For it was with the commanders, not with the followers, that
+the weakness lay. The Maid herself was struck on the head by a stone
+from the battlements which threw her down; but she sprang up again in a
+moment unhurt. "_Sus! Sus!_ Our Lord has condemned the English--all is
+yours!" she cried. She would seem to have stood there in her place
+with her banner, a rallying-point and centre in the midst of all the
+confusion of the fight, taking this for her part in it, and though she
+is always in the thick of the combat, never, so far as we are told,
+striking a blow, exposed to all the instruments of war, but injured
+by none. The effect of her mere attitude, the steadiness of her stand,
+under the terrible rain of stone bullets and dreadful arrows, must of
+itself have been indescribable.
+
+In the midst of the fiery struggle, there is almost a comic point in
+her watch over Alençon, for whose safety she had pledged herself, now
+dragging him from a dangerous spot with a cry of warning, now pushing
+him forward with an encouraging word. On the first of these occasions
+a gentleman of Anjou, M. de Lude, who took his place in the front was
+killed, which seems hard upon the poor gentleman, who was probably quite
+as well worth caring for as Alençon. "_Avant, gentil duc_," she cried at
+another moment, "forward! Are you afraid? you know I promised your wife
+to bring you safe home." Thus her voice keeps ringing through the din,
+her white armour gleams. "_Sus! Sus!_" the bold cry is almost audible,
+sibilant, whistling amid the whistling of the arrows.
+
+Suffolk, the English Bayard, the most chivalrous of knights, was at last
+forced to yield. One story tells us that he would give up his sword only
+to Jeanne herself,(1) but there is a more authentic description of his
+selection of one youth among his assailants whom the quick perceptions
+of the leader had singled out. "Are you noble?" Suffolk asks in
+the brevity of such a crisis. "Yes; Guillame Regnault, gentleman of
+Auvergne." "Are you a knight?" "Not yet." The victor put a knee to the
+ground before his captive, the vanquished touched him lightly on the
+shoulder with the sword which he then gave over to him. Suffolk was
+always the finest gentleman, the most perfect gentle knight of his time.
+
+"Now let us go and see the English of Meung," cried Jeanne, unwearying,
+as soon as this victory was assured. That place fell easily; it
+is called the bridge of Meung, in the Chronicle, without further
+description, therefore presumably the fortress was not attacked--and
+they proceeded onward to Beaugency. These towns still shine over the
+plain, along the line of the Loire, visible as far as the eye will
+carry over the long levels, the great stream linking one to another like
+pearls on a thread. There is nothing in the landscape now to give even a
+moment's shelter to the progress of a marching army which must have been
+seen from afar, wherever it moved; or to veil the shining battlements,
+and piled up citadels rising here and there, concentrated points and
+centres of life. The great white Castle of Blois, the darker tower of
+Beaugency, still stand where they stood when Jeanne and her men drew
+near, as conspicuous in their elevation of walls and towers as if they
+had been planted on a mountain top. On more than one occasion during
+this wonderful progress from victory to victory, the triumphant leaders
+returned for a day or two to Orleans to tell their good tidings, and to
+celebrate their success.
+
+And there is but one voice as to the military skill which she displayed
+in these repeated operations. The reader sees her, with her banner,
+posted in the middle of the fight, guiding her men with a sort of
+infallible instinct which adds force to her absolute quick perception of
+every difficulty and advantage, the unhesitating promptitude, attending
+like so many servants upon the inspiration which is the soul of all.
+These are things to which a writer ignorant of war is quite unable to
+do justice. What was almost more wonderful still was the manner in which
+the Maid held her place among the captains, most of whom would have
+thwarted her if they could, with a consciousness of her own superior
+place, in which there is never the slightest token of presumption or
+self-esteem. She guarded and guided Alençon with a good-natured and
+affectionate disdain; and when there was risk of a great quarrel and
+a splitting of forces she held the balance like an old and experienced
+guide of men.
+
+This latter crisis occurred before Beaugency on the 15th of June, when
+the Comte de Richemont, Constable of France, the brother of the Duc de
+Bretagne, a great nobleman and famous leader, but in disgrace with the
+King and exiled from the Court, suddenly appeared with a considerable
+army to join himself to the royalist forces, probably with the hope of
+securing the leading place. Richemont was no friend to Jeanne; though he
+apparently asked her help and influence to reconcile him with the King.
+He seems indeed to have thought it a disgrace to France that her troops
+should be led, and victories gained by no properly appointed general,
+but by a woman, probably a witch, a creature unworthy to stand before
+armed men. It must not be forgotten that even now this was the general
+opinion of her out of the range of her immediate influence. The English
+held it like a religion. Bedford, in his description of the siege of
+Orleans and its total failure, reports to England that the discomfiture
+of the hitherto always triumphant army was "caused in great part by the
+fatal faith and vain fear that the French had, of a disciple and servant
+of the enemy of man, called the Maid, who uses many false enchantments,
+and witchcraft, by which not only is the number of our soldiers
+diminished but their courage marvellously beaten down, and the boldness
+of our enemies increased." Richemont was a sworn enemy of all such.
+"Never man hated more, all heresies, sorcerers, and sorceresses, than
+he; for he burned more in France, in Poitou, and Bretagne, than any
+other of his time." The French generals were divided as to the merits
+of Richemont and the advantages to be derived from his support.
+Alençon, the nominal commander, declared that he would leave the army
+if Richemont were permitted to join it. The letters of the King were
+equally hostile to him; but on the other hand there were some who held
+that the accession of the Constable was of more importance than all
+the Maids in France. It was a moment which demanded very wary guidance.
+Jeanne, it would seem, did not regard his arrival with much pleasure;
+probably even the increase of her forces did not please her as it would
+have pleased most commanders, holding so strongly as she did, to the
+miraculous character of her own mission and that it was not so much the
+strength of her troops as the help of God that got her the victory. But
+it was not her part to reject or alienate any champion of France. We
+have an account of their meeting given by a retainer of Richemont,
+which is picturesque enough. "The Maid alighted from her horse, and the
+Constable also. 'Jeanne,' he said, 'they tell me that you are against
+me. I know not if you are from God (_de la part de Dieu_) or not. If
+you are from God I do not fear you; if you are of the devil, I fear you
+still less.' 'Brave Constable,' said Jeanne, 'you have not come here by
+any will of mine; but since you are here you are welcome.'"
+
+Armed neutrality but suspicion on one side, dignified indifference but
+acceptance on the other, could not be better shown.
+
+These successes, however, had been attended by various _escarmouches_
+going on behind. The English, who had been driven out of one town after
+another, had now drawn together under the command of Talbot, and a party
+of troops under Fastolfe, who came to relieve them, had turned back as
+Jeanne proceeded, making various unsuccessful attempts to recover what
+had been lost. Failing in all their efforts they returned across the
+country to Genville, and were continuing their retreat to Paris when the
+two enemies came within reach of each other. An encounter in open field
+was a new experience of which Jeanne as yet had known nothing. She had
+been successful in assault, in the operations of the siege, but to meet
+the enemy hand to hand in battle was what she had never been required to
+do; and every tradition, every experience, was in favour of the English.
+From Agincourt to the Battle of the Herrings at Rouvray near Orleans,
+which had taken place in the beginning of the year (a fight so named
+because the field of battle had been covered with herrings, the
+conquerors in this case being merely the convoy in charge of provisions
+for the English, which Fastolfe commanded), such a thing had not been
+known as that the French should hold their own, much less attain any
+victory over the invaders. In these circumstances there was much talk of
+falling back upon the camp near Beaugency and of retreating or avoiding
+an engagement; anything rather than hazard one of those encounters which
+had infallibly ended in disaster. But Jeanne was of the same mind as
+always, to go forward and fear nothing. "Fall upon them! Go at them
+boldly," she cried. "If they were in the clouds we should have them. The
+gentle King will now gain the greatest victory he has ever had."
+
+It is curious to hear that in that great plain of the Beauce, so flat,
+so fertile, with nothing but vines and cornfields now against the
+horizon, the two armies at last almost stumbled upon each other by
+accident, in the midst of the brushwood by which the country was wildly
+overgrown. The story is that a stag roused by the French scouts rushed
+into the midst of the English, who were advantageously placed among
+the brushwood to arrest the enemy on their march; the wild creature
+terrified and flying before an army blundered into the midst of the
+others, was fired at and thus betrayed the vicinity of the foe. The
+English had no time to form or set up their usual defences. They were so
+taken by surprise that the rush of the French came without warning, with
+a suddenness which gave it double force. La Hire made the first attack
+as leader of the van, and there was thus emulation between the two
+parties, which should be first upon the enemy. When Alençon asked Jeanne
+what was to be the issue of the fight, she said calmly, "Have you good
+spurs?" "What! You mean we shall turn our backs on our enemies?" cried
+her questioner. "Not so," she replied. "The English will not fight,
+they will fly, and you will want good spurs to pursue them." Even this
+somewhat fantastic prophecy put heart into the men, who up to this time
+had been wont to fly and not to fight.
+
+And this was what happened, strange as it may seem. Talbot himself was
+with the English forces, and many a gallant captain beside: but the
+men and their leaders were alike broken in spirit and filled with
+superstitious terrors. Whether these were the forces of hell or those of
+heaven that came against them no one could be sure; but it was a power
+beyond that of earth. The dazzled eyes which seemed to see flights
+of white butterflies fluttering about the standard of the Maid, could
+scarcely belong to one who thought her a servant of the enemy of men.
+But she was a pernicious witch to Talbot, and strangely enough to
+Richemont also, who was on her own side. The English force was thrown
+into confusion, partly, we may suppose, from the broken ground on which
+they were discovered, the undergrowth of the wood which hid both armies
+from each other. But soon that disorder turned into the wildest panic
+and flight. It would almost seem as if between these two hereditary
+opponents one must always be forced into this miserable part. Not all
+the chivalry of France had been able to prevent it at the long string of
+battles in which they were, before the revelation of the Maid; and not
+the desperate and furious valour of Talbot could preserve his English
+force from the infection now. Fastolfe, with the philosophy of an old
+soldier, deciding that it was vain to risk his men when the field
+was already lost, rode off with all his band. Talbot fought with
+desperation, half mad with rage to be thus a second time overcome by so
+unlikely an adversary, and finally was taken prisoner; while the whole
+force behind him fled and were killed in their flight, the plain being
+scattered with their dead bodies.
+
+Jeanne herself made use of those spurs concerning which she had
+enquired, and carried away by the passion of battle, followed in the
+pursuit, we are told, until she met a Frenchman brutally ill-using
+a prisoner whom he had taken, upon which the Maid, indignant, flung
+herself from her horse, and, seating herself on the ground beside the
+unfortunate Englishman, took his bleeding head upon her lap and, sending
+for a priest, made his departure from life at least as easy as pity and
+spiritual consolation could make it on such a disastrous field. In all
+the records there is no mention of any actual fighting on her part.
+She stands in the thick of the flying arrows with her banner, exposing
+herself to every danger; in moments of alarm, when her forces seem
+flagging, she seizes and places a ladder against the wall for an
+assault, and climbs the first as some say; but we never see her strike
+a blow. On the banks of the Loire the fate of the mail-clad Glasdale,
+hopeless in the strong stream underneath the ruined bridge, brought
+tears to her eyes, and now all the excitement of the pursuit vanished
+in an instant from her mind, when she saw the English man-at-arms dying
+without the succour of the Church. Pity was always in her heart; she was
+ever on the side of the angels, though an angel of war and not of peace.
+
+It is perhaps because the numbers engaged were so few that this flight
+or "Chasse de Patay," has not taken a more important place in the
+records of French historians. In general it is only by means of Fontenoy
+that the _amour propre_ of the French nation defends itself against the
+overwhelming list of battles in which the English have had the better of
+it. But this was probably the most complete victory that has ever been
+gained over the stubborn enemy whom French tactics are so seldom able to
+touch; and the conquerors were purely French without any alloy of alien
+arms, except a few Scots, to help them. The entire campaign on the Loire
+was one of triumph for the French arms, and of disaster for the English.
+They--it is perhaps a point of national pride to admit it frankly--were
+as well beaten as heart of Frenchman could desire, beaten not only in
+the result, but in the conduct of the campaign, in heart and in courage,
+in skill and in genius. There is no reason in the world why it should
+not be admitted. But it was not the French generals, not even Dunois,
+who secured these victories. It was the young peasant woman, the
+dauntless Maid, who underneath the white mantle of her inspiration,
+miraculous indeed, but not so miraculous as this, had already developed
+the genius of a soldier, and who in her simplicity, thinking nothing
+but of her "voices" and the counsel they gave her, was already the best
+general of them all.
+
+When Talbot stood before the French generals, no less a person than
+Alençon himself is reported to have made a remark to him, of that
+ungenerous kind which we call in feminine language "spiteful," and which
+is not foreign to the habit of that great nation. "You did not think
+this morning what would have happened to you before sunset," said the
+Duc d'Alençon to the prisoner. "It is the fortune of war," replied the
+English chief.
+
+Once more, however it is like a sudden fall from the open air and
+sunshine when the victorious army and its chiefs turned back to the
+Court where the King and his councillors sat idle, waiting for news
+of what was being done for them. A battle-field is no fine sight; the
+excitement of the conflict, the great end to be served by it, the sense
+of God's special protection, even the tremendous uproar of the fight,
+the intoxication of personal action, danger, and success have, we do not
+doubt a rapture and passion in them for the moment, which carry the mind
+away; but the bravest soldier holds his breath when he remembers the
+after scene, the dead and dying, the horrible injuries inflicted, the
+loss and misery. However, not even the miserable scene of the Chasse de
+Patay is so painful as the reverse of the dismal picture, the halls of
+the royal habitation where, while men died for him almost within hearing
+of the fiddling and the dances, the young King trifled away his useless
+days among his idle favourites, and the musicians played, the assemblies
+were held, and all went on as in the Tuileries. We feel as if we had
+fallen fathoms deep into the meannesses of mankind when we come back
+from the bloodshed and the horror outside, to the King's presence
+within. The troops which had gone out in uncertainty, on an enterprise
+which might well have proved too great for them, had returned in full
+flush of triumph, having at last fully broken the spell of the English
+superiority--which was the greatest victory that could have been
+achieved: besides gaining the substantial advantage of three important
+towns brought back to the King's allegiance--only to find themselves as
+little advanced as before, coming back to the self-same struggle with
+indolent complaining, indifference, and ingratitude.
+
+Jeanne had given the signs that had been demanded from her. She had
+delivered Orleans, she cleared the King's road toward the north. She
+had filled the French forces with an enthusiasm and transport of valour
+which swept away all the traditions of ill fortune. From every point of
+view the instant march upon Rheims and the accomplishment of the great
+object of her mission had not only become practicable, but was the
+wisest and most prudent thing to do.
+
+But this was not the opinion of the Chancellor of France, the Archbishop
+of Rheims, and La Tremouille, or of the indolent young King himself, who
+was very willing to rejoice in the relief from all immediate danger, the
+restoration of the surrounding country, and even the victory itself,
+if only they would have left him in quiet where he was, sufficiently
+comfortable, amused, and happy, without forcing necessary dangers.
+Jeanne's successes and her unseasonable zeal and the commotion that she
+and her train of captains made, pouring in, in all the excitement
+of their triumph, into the midst of the madrigals--seem to have been
+anything but welcome. Go to Rheims to be crowned? yes, some time when
+it was convenient, when it was safe. But in the meantime what was more
+important was to forbid Richemont, whom the Chancellor hated and the
+King did not love, to come into the presence or to have any share either
+in warfare or in pageant. This was not only in itself an extremely
+foolish thing to do, which is always a recommendation, but it was at the
+same time an excuse for wasting a little precious time. When this was
+at last accomplished, and Richemont, though deeply wounded and offended,
+proved himself so much a man of honour and a patriot, that though
+dismissed by the King he still upheld, if languidly, his cause--there
+was yet a great deal of resistance to be overcome. Paris though so far
+off was thrown into great excitement and alarm by the flight at Patay,
+and the whole city was in commotion fearing an immediate advance and
+attack. But in Loches, or wherever Charles may have been, it was all
+taken very easily. Fastolfe, the fugitive, had his Garter taken from
+him as the greatest disgrace that could be inflicted, for his shameful
+flight, about the time when Richemont, one of the victors, was being
+sent off and disgraced on the other side for the crime of having helped
+to inflict, without the consent of the King, the greatest blow which
+had yet been given to the English domination! So the Court held on its
+ridiculous and fatal course.
+
+However the force of public feeling which must have been very frankly
+expressed by many important voices was too much for Charles and he was
+at length compelled to put himself in motion. The army had assembled at
+Gien, where he joined it, and the great wave of enthusiasm awakened by
+Jeanne, and on which he now moved forth as on the top of the wave,
+was for the time triumphant. No one dared say now that the Maid was
+a sorceress, or that it was by the aid of Beelzebub that she cast out
+devils; but a hundred jealousies and hatreds worked against her behind
+backs, among the courtiers, among the clergy, strange as that may sound,
+in sight of the absolute devotion of her mind, and the saintly life
+she led. So much was this the case still, notwithstanding the practical
+proofs she had given of her claims, that even persons of kindred mind,
+partially sharing her inspirations, such as the famous Brother Richard
+of Troyes, looked upon her with suspicion and alarm--fearing a delusion
+of Satan. It is more easy perhaps to understand why the archbishops and
+bishops should have been inclined against her, since, though perfectly
+orthodox and a good Catholic, Jeanne had been independent of all
+priestly guidance and had sought no sanction from the Church to her
+commission, which she believed to be given by Heaven. "Give God the
+praise; but we know that this woman is a sinner." This was the best they
+could find to say of her in the moment of her greatest victories; but
+indeed it is no disparagement to Jeanne or to any saint that she should
+share with her Master the opprobrium of such words as these.
+
+At last however a reluctant start was made. Jeanne with her "people,"
+her little staff, in which, now, were two of her brothers, a second
+having joined her after Orleans, left Gien on the 28th of June; and the
+next day the King very unwillingly set out. There is given a long list
+of generals who surrounded and accompanied him, three or four princes of
+the blood, the Bastard of Orleans, the Archbishop of Rheims, marshals,
+admirals, and innumerable seigneurs, among whom was our young Guy de
+Laval who wrote the letter to his "mothers" which we have already quoted
+and whose faith in the Maid we thus know; and our ever faithful La Hire,
+the big-voiced Gascon who had permission to swear by his _bâton_, the
+d'Artagnan of this history. We reckon these names as those of friends:
+Dunois the ever-brave, Alençon the _gentil Duc_ for whom Jeanne had
+a special and protecting kindness, La Hire the rough captain of Free
+Lances, and the graceful young seigneur, Sir Guy as we should have
+called him had he been English, who was so ready to sell or mortgage his
+land that he might convey his troop befittingly to the wars. This little
+group brightens the march for us with their friendly faces. We know that
+they have but one thought of the warrior maiden in whose genius they had
+begun to have a wondering confidence as well as in her divine mission.
+While they were there we feel that she had at least so many who
+understood her, and who bore her the affection of brothers. We are told
+that in the progress of the army Jeanne had no definite place. She rode
+where she pleased, sometimes in the front, sometimes in the rear. One
+imagines with pleasure that wherever her charger passed along the lines
+it would be accompanied by one or other of those valiant and faithful
+companions.
+
+The first place at which a halt was made was Auxerre, a town occupied
+chiefly by Burgundians, which closed its gates, but by means of bribes,
+partly of provisions to be supplied, partly of gifts to La Tremouille,
+secured itself from the attack which Jeanne longed to lead. Other
+smaller strongholds on the road yielded without hesitation. At last they
+came to Troyes, a large and strong place, well garrisoned and confident
+in its strength, the town distinguished in the history of the time
+by the treaty made there, by which the young King had been
+disinherited--and by the marriage of Henry of England with the Princess
+Catherine of France, in whose right he was to succeed to the throne.
+It was an ill-omened place for a French king and the camp was torn with
+dissensions. Should the army march by, taking no notice of it and so
+get all the sooner to Rheims? or should they pause first, to try their
+fortune against those solid walls? But indeed it was not the camp that
+debated this question. The camp was of Jeanne's mind whichever side she
+took, and her side was always that of the promptest action. The garrison
+made a bold sortie, the very day of the arrival of Charles and his
+forces, but had been beaten back: and the King encamped under the walls,
+wavering and uncertain whether he might not still depart on the morrow,
+but sending a repeated summons to surrender, to which no attention was
+paid.
+
+Once more there was a pause of indecision; the King was not bold enough
+either to push on and leave the city, or to attack it. Again councils of
+war succeeded each other day after day, discussing the matter over and
+over, leaving the King each time more doubtful, more timid than before.
+From these debates Jeanne was anxiously held back, while every silken
+fool gave his opinion. At last, one of the councillors was stirred by
+this strange anomaly. He declared among them all, that as it was by the
+advice of the Maid that the expedition had been undertaken, without her
+acquiescence it ought not to be abandoned. "When the King set out it was
+not because of the great puissance of the army he then had with him, or
+the great treasure he had to provide for them, nor yet because it seemed
+to him a probable thing to be accomplished; but the said expedition
+was undertaken solely at the suit of the said Jeanne, who urged him
+constantly to go forward, to be crowned at Rheims, and that he should
+find little resistance, for it was the pleasure and will of God. If
+the said Jeanne is not to be allowed to give her advice now, it is my
+opinion that we should turn back," said the Seigneur de Treves, who had
+never been a partisan of or believer in Jeanne. We are told that at this
+fortunate moment when one of her opponents had thus pronounced in her
+favour, Jeanne, impatient and restless, knocked at the door of the
+council chamber as she had done before in her rustic boldness; and then
+there occurred a brief and characteristic dialogue.
+
+"Jeanne," said the Archbishop of Rheims, taking the first word, probably
+with the ready instinct of a conspirator to excuse himself from
+having helped to shut her out, "the King and his council are in great
+perplexity to know what they should do."
+
+"Shall I be believed if I speak?" said the Maid.
+
+"I cannot tell," replied the King, interposing; "though if you say
+things that are reasonable and profitable, I shall certainly believe
+you."
+
+"Shall I be believed?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes," said the King, "according as you speak."
+
+"Noble Dauphin," she exclaimed, "order your people to assault the city
+of Troyes, to hold no more councils; for, by my God, in three days I
+will introduce you into the town of Troyes, by love or by force, and
+false Burgundy shall be dismayed."
+
+"Jeanne," said the Chancellor, "if you could do that in six days, we
+might well wait."
+
+"You shall be master of the place," said the Maid, addressing herself
+steadily to the King, "not in six days, but to-morrow."
+
+And then there occurred once more the now habitual scene. It was no
+longer the miracle it had been to see her dash forward to her post under
+the walls with her standard which was the signal for battle, to which
+the impatient troops responded, confident in her, as she in herself. But
+for the first time we hear how the young general, learning her trade of
+war day by day, made her preparations for the siege. She was a gunner
+born, according to all we hear, and was quick to perceive the advantage
+of her rude artillery though she had never seen one of these _bouches
+de feu_ till she encountered them at Orleans. The whole army was set to
+work during the night, knights and men-at-arms alike, to raise--with any
+kind of handy material, palings faggots, tables, even doors and windows,
+taken it must be feared from some neighbouring village or faubourg--a
+mound on which to place the guns. The country as we have said is as
+flat as the palm of one's hand. They worked all night under cover of
+the darkness with incredible devotion, while the alarmed townsfolk not
+knowing what was being done, but no doubt divining something from the
+unusual commotion, betook themselves to the churches to pray, and began
+to ponder whether after all it might not be better to join the King
+whose armies were led by St. Michael himself in the person of his
+representative, than to risk a siege. Once more the spell of the Maid
+fell on the defenders of the place. It was witchcraft, it was some
+vile art. They had no heart to man the battlements, to fight like their
+brothers at Orleans and Jargeau in face of all the powers of the evil
+one: the cry of "_Sus! Sus!_" was like the death-knell in their ears.
+
+While the soldiers within the walls were thus trembling and drawing
+back, the bishop and his clergy took the matter in hand; they sallied
+forth, a long procession attended by half the city, to parley with the
+King. It was in the earliest dawn, while yet the peaceful world was
+scarcely awake; but the town had been in commotion all night, every
+visionary person in it seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and a panic
+of superstition and spiritual terror taking the strength out of every
+arm. Jeanne was already at her post, a glimmering white figure in the
+faint and visionary twilight of the morning, when the gates of the city
+swung back before this tremulous procession. The King, however, received
+the envoys graciously, and readily promised to guarantee all the rights
+of Troyes, and to permit the garrison to depart in peace, if the town
+was given up to him. We are not told whether the Maid acquiesced in this
+arrangement, though it at once secured the fulfilment of her prophecy;
+but in any case she would seem to have been suspicious of the good faith
+of the departing garrison. Instead of retiring to her tent she took
+her place at the gate, watchful, to see the enemy march forth. And
+her suspicion was not without reason. The allied troops, English and
+Burgundian, poured forth from the city gates, crestfallen, unwilling to
+look the way of the white witch, who might for aught they knew lay them
+under some dreadful spell, even in the moment of passing. But in the
+midst of them came a darker band, the French prisoners whom they had
+previously taken, who were as a sort of funded capital in their hands,
+each man worth so much money as a ransom, It was for this that Jeanne
+had prepared herself. "_En nom Dieu_," she cried, "they shall not
+be carried away." The march was stopped, the alarm given, the King
+unwillingly aroused once more from his slumbers. Charles must have been
+disturbed at the most untimely hour by the ambassadors from the town,
+and it mattered little to his supreme indolence and indifference what
+might happen to his unfortunate lieges; but he was forced to bestir
+himself, and even to give something from his impoverished exchequer
+for the ransom of the prisoners, which must have been more disagreeable
+still. The feelings of these men who would have been dragged away in
+captivity under the eyes of their victorious countrymen, but for the
+vigilance of the Maid, may easily be imagined.
+
+Jeanne seems to have entered the town at once, to prepare for the
+reception of the King, and to take instant possession of the place,
+forestalling all further impediment. The people in the streets, however,
+received her in a very different way from those of Orleans, with trouble
+and alarm, staring at her as at a dangerous and malignant visitor. The
+Brother Richard, before mentioned, the great preacher and reformer, was
+the oracle of Troyes, and held the conscience of the city in his hands.
+When he suddenly appeared to confront her, every eye was turned upon
+them. But the friar himself was in no less doubt than his disciples; he
+approached her dubiously, crossing himself, making the sacred sign in
+the air, and sprinkling a shower of holy water before him to drive away
+the demon, if demon there was. Jeanne was not unused to support the
+rudest accost, and her frank voice, still _assez femme_, made itself
+heard over every clamour. "Come on, I shall not fly away," she cried,
+with, one hopes, a laugh of confident innocence and good-humour, in face
+of those significant gestures and the terrified looks of all about her.
+French art has been unkind to Jeanne, occupying itself very little about
+her till recently; but her short career is full of pictures. Here the
+simple page grows bright with the ancient houses and highly coloured
+crowd: the frightened and eager faces at every window, the white warrior
+in the midst, sending forth a thousand rays from the polished steel
+and silver of breastplate and helmet: and the brown Franciscan monk
+advancing amid a shower of water drops, a mysterious repetition of
+signs. It gives us an extraordinary epitome of the history of France at
+that period to turn from this scene to the wild enthusiasm of Orleans,
+its crowd of people thronging about her, its shouts rending the air;
+while Troyes was full of terror, doubt, and ill-will, though its nearest
+neighbour, so to speak, the next town, and so short a distance away.
+
+A little later in the same day, the next after the surrender, Jeanne,
+riding with her standard by the side of the King, conducted him to the
+cathedral where he confirmed his previous promises and received the
+homage of the town. It was a beautiful sight, the chronicle tells us, to
+see all these magnificent people, so well dressed and well mounted; "_il
+feroit très beau voir._"
+
+The fate of Troyes decided that of Chalons, the only other important
+town on the way, the gates of which were thrown open as Charles and his
+army, which grew and increased every day, proceeded on its road. Every
+promise of the Maid had been so far accomplished, both in the greater
+object and in the details: and now there was nothing between Charles the
+disinherited and almost ruined Dauphin of three months ago, trying to
+forget himself in the seclusion and the sports of Chinon--and the sacred
+ceremonial which drew with it every tradition and every assurance of an
+ancient and lawful throne.
+
+Jeanne had her little adventure, personal to herself on the way. Though
+there were neither posts nor telegraphs in those days, there has always
+been a strange swift current in the air or soil which has conveyed news,
+in a great national crisis, from one end of the country to the other. It
+was not so great a distance to Domremy on the Meuse from Troyes on the
+Loire, and it appears that a little group of peasants, bolder than the
+rest, had come forth to hang about the road when the army passed and
+see what was so fine a sight, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of their
+_payse_, their little neighbour, the _commère_ who was godmother to
+Gerard d'Epinal's child, the youthful gossip of his young wife--but who
+was now, if all tales were true, a great person, and rode by the side
+of the King. They went as far as Chalons to see if perhaps all this were
+true and not a fable; and no doubt stood astonished to see her ride by,
+to hear all the marvellous tales that were told of her, and to assure
+themselves that it was truly Jeanne upon whom, more than upon the King,
+every eye was bent. This small scene in the midst of so many great ones
+would probably have been the most interesting of all had it been told
+us at any length. The peasant travellers surrounded her with wistful
+questions, with wonder and admiration. Was she never afraid among all
+those risks of war, when the arrows hailed about her and the _bouches
+de feu_, the mouths of fire, bellowed and flung forth great stones and
+bullets upon her? "I fear nothing but treason," said the victorious
+Maid. She knew, though her humble visitors did not, how that base thing
+skulked at her heels, and infested every path. It must not be forgotten
+that this wonderful and victorious campaign, with all its lists of towns
+taken and armies discomfited, lasted six weeks only, almost every day of
+which was distinguished by some victory.
+
+     (1) The former story was written in 1429, by the Greffier of
+     Rochelle. "I will yield me only to her, the most valiant
+     woman in the world." The Greffier was writing at the moment,
+     but not, of course, as an eyewitness.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI -- THE CORONATION. JULY 17, 1429.
+
+The road was now clear, and even the most timid of counsellors could not
+longer hold back the most indolent of kings. Jeanne had kept her word
+once more and fulfilled her own prophecy, and a force of enthusiasm
+and certainty, not to be put down, pressed forward the unwilling Court
+towards the great ceremonial of the coronation, to which all except
+those most chiefly concerned attached so great an importance. Charles
+would have hesitated still, and questioned the possibility of resistance
+on the part of Rheims, if that city had not sent a deputation of
+citizens with the keys of the town, to meet him. After this it was but
+a triumphal march into the sacred place, where the great cathedral
+dominated a swarming, busy, mediæval city. King and Archbishop had a
+double triumph, for the priest like the monarch had been shut out from
+his lawful throne, and it was only in the train of the Maid that this
+great ecclesiastic was able to take possession of his dignities. The
+King alighted with the Archbishop at the Archevêché which is close
+to the cathedral, an immense, old palace in which the heads of the
+expedition were lodged. There is a magnificent old hall still remaining
+in which no doubt they all assembled, scarcely able to believe that
+their object was accomplished and that the King of France was actually
+in Rheims, and all the prophecies fulfilled. The Archbishop marched
+into the city in the morning; Charles and his Court, and all his great
+seigneurs, and the body of his army, in which there were many fighting
+men half armed, and some in their rustic clothes as they had left their
+fields to join the King in his march--poured in in the evening, after
+the ecclesiastical procession, filling the town with commotion. Jeanne
+rode beside the King, her banner in her hand. It was July, the vigil of
+the Madeleine, and every church poured forth its crowd to witness the
+entry, and the populace, half troubled, half glad, gazed its eyes out
+upon the white warrior at the side of the King. Her father and uncle
+were there to meet her at the old inn in the Place, which still proudly
+preserves the record of the peasant guests: two astonished rustics,
+no doubt, were thrust forth from some window to watch that incredible
+sight--Jacques who would rather have drowned his daughter with his own
+hands, than have seen her thus launched among men, gazing still
+aghast at the resplendent figure of the chevalière at the head of the
+procession. This was very different from what he had thought of when his
+village respectability was tortured by the idea of his girl among the
+troopers, yet probably the rigid peasant had never changed his mind.
+
+We are told by M. Blaze de Bury of an ancient custom which we do not
+find stated elsewhere. A platform was erected, he tells us, outside the
+choir of the cathedral to which the King was led the evening before the
+coronation, surrounded by his peers, who showed him to the assembled
+people with a traditional proclamation: "Here is your King whom we,
+peers of France, crown as King and sovereign lord. And if there is a
+soul here which has any objection to make, let him speak and we will
+answer him. And to-morrow he shall be consecrated by the grace of the
+Holy Spirit if you have nothing to say against it." The people replied
+by cries of "Noël, Noël!" It is not to be supposed that the veto of the
+people of Rheims would have been effectual had they opposed: but
+the scene is wonderfully picturesque. No doubt Jeanne too was there,
+watching over her King, as she seems to have done, like a mother over
+her child, at this crisis of his affairs.
+
+That night there was little sleep in Rheims, for everything had to be
+prepared in haste, the decorations of the cathedral, the provisions for
+the ceremonial. Many of the necessary articles were at Saint Denis in
+the hands of the English, and the treasury of the cathedral had to be
+ransacked to find the fitting vessels. Fortunately it was rich, more
+rich probably than it is now, when the commonplace silver of the
+beginning of this century has replaced the ancient vials. Through the
+short summer night everyone was at work in these preparations; and by
+the dawn of day visitors began to flow into the city, great personages
+and small, to attend the great ceremonial and to pay their homage. The
+greatest of all was the Duke of Lorraine, he who had consulted Jeanne
+about his health, husband of the heiress of that rich principality, and
+son of Queen Yolande who was no doubt with the Court. All France seemed
+to pour into the famous town, where so important an act was about to
+be accomplished, with money and wine flowing on all hands, and the
+enthusiasm growing along with the popular excitement and profit. Even
+great London is stirred to its limits, many miles off from the centre
+of proceedings, by such a great event; how much more the little mediæval
+city, in which every one might hope to see something of the pageant,
+as one shining group after another, with armour blazing in the sun, and
+sleek horses caracoling, arrived at the great gates of the Archevêché:
+and lesser parties scarcely less interesting poured in in need of
+lodging, of equipment and provisions; while every housewife searched
+her stores for a piece of brilliant stuff, of old silk or embroidery, to
+make her house shine like the rest.
+
+Early in the morning, a wonderful procession came out of the
+Archbishop's house. Four splendid peers of France, in full armour
+with their banners, rode through the streets to the old Abbey of Saint
+Remy--the old church which Leo IX. consecrated, in the eleventh century,
+on an equally splendid occasion, and which may still be seen to-day--to
+fetch from its shrine, where it was strictly guarded by the monks,
+the Sainte Ampoule, the holy and sacred vial in which the oil of
+consecration had been sent to Clovis out of Heaven. These noble
+messengers were the "hostages" of this sacred charge, engaging
+themselves by an oath never to lose sight of it by night or day, till it
+was restored to its appointed guardians. This vow having been made,
+the Abbot of St. Remy, in his richest robes, appeared surrounded by his
+monks, carrying the treasure in his hands; and under a splendid
+canopy, blazing in the sunshine with cloth of gold, marched towards the
+cathedral under the escort of the Knights Hostages, blazing also in the
+flashes of their armour. This procession was met half-way, before the
+Church of St. Denis, by another, that of the Archbishop and his train,
+to whom the holy oil was solemnly confided, and carried by them to the
+cathedral, already filled by a dazzled and dazzling crowd.
+
+The Maid had her occupations this July morning like the rest. We hear
+nothing of any interview with her father, or with Durand the good uncle
+who had helped her in the beginning of her career; though it was Durand
+who was sent for to the King and questioned as to Jeanne's life in her
+childhood and early youth; which we may take as proof that Jacques d'Arc
+still stood aloof, _dour_, as a Scotch peasant father might have been,
+suspicious of his daughter's intimacy with all these fine people, and
+in no way cured of his objections to the publicity which is little less
+than shame to such rugged folk. And there were his two sons who would
+take him about, and with whom probably in their easier commonplace
+he was more at home than with Jeanne. What the Maid had to do on the
+morning of the coronation day was something very different from any home
+talk with her relations. She who felt herself commissioned not only to
+lead the armies of France, but to deal with her princes and take part in
+her councils, occupied the morning in dictating a letter to the Duke of
+Burgundy. She had summoned the English by letter three times repeated,
+to withdraw peaceably from the possessions which by God's will were
+French. It was with still better reason that she summoned Philip of
+Burgundy to renounce his feud with his cousin, and thus to heal the
+breach which had torn France in two:
+
+JHESUS, MARIA.
+
+High and redoubtable Prince, Duke of Burgundy. Jeanne the Maid requires
+on the part of the King of Heaven, my most just sovereign and Lord (_mon
+droicturier souverain seigneur_), that the King of France and you make
+peace between yourselves, firm, strong and that will endure. Pardon each
+other of good heart, entirely, as loyal Christians ought to do, and if
+you desire to fight let it be against the Saracens. Prince of Burgundy,
+I pray, supplicate, and require, as humbly as may be, fight no longer
+against the holy kingdom of France: withdraw, at once and speedily,
+your people who are in any strongholds or fortresses of the said holy
+kingdom; and on the part of the gentle King of France, he is ready to
+make peace with you, having respect to his honour, and upon your life
+that you never will gain a battle against loyal Frenchmen and that all
+those who war against the said holy kingdom of France, war against
+the King Jesus, King of Heaven and of all the world and my just and
+sovereign Lord. And I pray and require with clasped hands that you
+fight not, nor make any battle against us, neither your friends nor your
+subjects; but believe always however great in number may be the men you
+lead against us, that you will never win, and it would be great pity
+for the great battle and the blood that would be shed of those who came
+against us. Three weeks ago I sent you a letter by a herald that you
+should be present at the consecration of the King, which to-day, Sunday,
+the seventeenth of the present month of July, is done in the city of
+Rheims: to which I have had no answer, nor even any news by the said
+herald. To God I commend you, and may He be your guard if it pleases
+Him, and I pray God to make good peace.
+
+Written at the aforesaid Rheims, the seventeenth day of July, 1429.
+
+When the letter was finished Jeanne put on her armour and prepared for
+the great ceremony. We are not told what part she took in it, nor is any
+more prominent position assigned to her than among the noble crowd
+of peers and generals who surrounded the altar, where her place
+would naturally be, upon the broad raised platform of the choir, so
+excellently adapted for such ceremonies. Her banner we are told was
+borne into the cathedral, in order, as she proudly explained afterwards,
+that having been foremost in the danger it should share the honour.
+
+But we have no right to suppose that the Maid took the position of the
+chief actor in the pageant and stood alone by the side of Charles,
+as the exigencies of the pictorial art have required her to do. When,
+however, the ceremony was completed, and he had received on his knees
+the anointing which separated him as king from every other class of men,
+and while the lofty vaults echoed with the cries of Noël! Noël! by which
+the people hailed the completed ceremony, Jeanne could contain herself
+no longer. The object was attained for which she had laboured and
+struggled, and overcome every opponent. She stepped forward out of
+the brilliant crowd, and threw herself at the feet of the now crowned
+monarch, embracing his knees. "Gentle King," she cried with tears, "now
+is the pleasure of God fulfilled--whose will it was that I should raise
+the siege of Orleans and lead you to this city of Rheims to receive
+your consecration. Now has He shown that you are true King, and that the
+kingdom of France truly belongs to you alone."
+
+Those broken words, her tears, the cry of that profound satisfaction
+which is almost anguish, the "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart
+in peace," which is so suitable to the lips of the old, so poignant from
+those of the young, pierced all hearts. It is added that she asked leave
+to withdraw, her work being done, and that all who saw her were filled
+with sympathy. It was no doubt the irresistible outburst of a heart too
+full; and though that fulness was all joy and triumph, yet there was in
+it a sense of completed work, a rending asunder and tearing away from
+life, the end of a wonderful and triumphant tale.
+
+There is a considerable controversy as to the precise meaning of that
+outburst of emotion. Did the Maid mean that her work was over, and her
+divine mission fulfilled? Was this all that she believed herself to be
+appointed to do? or did she expect, as she sometimes said, to _bouter_
+the English out of France altogether? In the one case she ought to
+have relinquished her work, and in not doing so she acted without the
+protection of God which had hitherto made her invulnerable. In the
+other, her "voices," her inspiration, must have failed her, for her
+course of triumph went no farther. It is impossible to decide between
+these contending theories. She did speak in both senses, sometimes
+declaring that she was to take Paris, sometimes, her intention to
+_bouter_ the English out of the kingdom. At the same time she betrayed a
+constant conviction that her office had limitations and must come to an
+end. "I will last but a year," she said to the King and to Alençon. The
+testimony of Dunois seems to be the best we can have on this point.
+He says in his deposition, made many years after her death: "Although
+Jeanne sometimes talked playfully to amuse people, of things concerning
+the war which were not afterwards accomplished, yet when she spoke
+seriously of the war, and of her own career and her vocation, she never
+affirmed anything but that she was sent to raise the siege of Orleans
+and to lead the King to Rheims to be crowned."
+
+If this were so was she wrong in continuing her warfare, and did she
+place herself in the position of one who goes on her own charges,
+finding the mission from on high unnecessary? Or in the other case did
+her inspiration fail her, or were the intrigues of Charles and his
+Court sufficient to balk the designs of Heaven? We prefer to think
+that Jeanne's commission concerned only those two things which she
+accomplished so completely; but that in continuing the war, she acted
+only as a well inspired and honourable young soldier might, though no
+longer as the direct messenger of God. She had as much right to do so
+as to return to her distaff or her needle in her native village; but
+she became subject to all the ordinary laws of war by so doing, exposed
+herself to be taken or overthrown like any man-at-arms, and accepted
+that risk. What is certain is, that every intrigue sprang up again
+afresh on the evening of that brilliant and triumphant ceremonial, and
+that from the moment of the accomplishment of her great work the failure
+of the Maid began.
+
+These intrigues had been in her way since her very first beginning, as
+has been seen. At Orleans, in the very field as well as in the council
+chamber and the presence, everything was done to balk her, and to cross
+her plans, but in vain; she triumphed over every contrivance against
+her, and broke through the plots, and overcame the plotters. But after
+Rheims the combination of dangers became ever greater and greater, and
+we may say that no merely human general would have had a chance in face
+of the many and bewildering influences of evil. Charles who was himself,
+at least at this period of his career, sufficiently indolent and
+unenterprising to have damped the energies of any commander, was, in
+addition, surrounded by advisers who had always been impatient and
+jealous of the interference of Jeanne, and would have cast her off as a
+witch, or passed her by as an impostor, had that been possible, without
+permitting her to strike a blow. They had now grudgingly made use of
+her, or rather, for this is too much to say, had permitted her action
+where they had no power to restrain it: but they were as little
+friendly, as malignant in their treatment of the Maid as ever, and more
+hopeful, now that so much had been done by her means, of being able to
+shake her off and pursue their fate in their own way.
+
+The position of Charles crowned King of France with all the traditional
+pomp, master of the Orleannais, with fresh bands of supporters coming in
+to swell his army day by day, and Paris itself almost within his reach,
+was very different from that of the discredited Dauphin at Chinon, whom
+half the world believed to have no right to the crown which his own
+mother had signed away from him, and who wasted his idle days in folly
+to the profit of the greedy councillors who schemed and trafficked
+with his enemies, and to the destruction of all his hopes. The strange
+apparition of virginal purity, energy, and faith which had taken up
+and saved him against his will and all his efforts had not ceased for a
+moment to be hateful to La Tremouille and his party; and Charles--though
+he seems to have had a certain appreciation of the Maid, and even a
+liking for her frank and fearless character, apart from any faith in
+her mission--was far too ready to accept the facts of the moment, and
+probably to believe that, after all, his own worth and favour with
+Heaven had a great deal to do with this dazzling triumph and success:
+certainly he was not the man to make any stand for his deliverer. But
+that she was an auxiliary too important to be sent away was reluctantly
+apparent to them all. To keep her as a sort of tame angel about the
+Court in order to be produced when she was wanted, to put heart into
+the soldiers and frighten the English as she certainly had the gift of
+doing, no doubt appeared to all as a thing desirable enough. And they
+dared not let her go "because of the people," nor, may we believe,
+would Alençon, Dunois, La Hire, and the rest have tolerated thus the
+abandonment of their comrade. To dismiss her even at her own word would
+have been impossible, and it is hard to believe that Jeanne, after that
+extraordinary brief career as a triumphant general and leader, could
+have gone back to her father's cottage of the village, though she
+thought she would fain have done so. If we are to believe that she felt
+her mission to be fulfilled, she was yet mistress of her fate to serve
+France and the King as seemed best.
+
+And we have no evidence that her "voices" forsook her, or discouraged
+her. They seem to have changed a little in their burden, they began to
+mingle a sadder tone in their intimations. It began to be breathed into
+her mind though not immediately, that something was to happen to her,
+some disaster not explained, yet that God was to be with her. It
+seems to me that all the circumstances are compatible with a change in
+Jeanne's consciousness, from the moment of the coronation. It might
+have been a grander thing had she retired there and then, her work being
+accomplished as she declared it to be; but it would not have been human.
+She was still a power, if no longer the direct messenger from Heaven;
+a general, with much skill and natural aptitude if not the Sent of God;
+and the ardour of a military career had got into her veins. No doubt
+she was much more good for that, now, than for sitting by the side of
+Isabeau d'Arc at Domremy, and working even into a piece of embroidery
+for the altar, her remembrances and visions of camp and siege and the
+intoxication of victory. She remained, conscious that she was no longer
+exactly as of old, to fight not only against the English, but with
+intimate enemies, far more bitter, whom now she knew, against the
+ordinary fortune of war, and against that which is a thousand times
+worse, the hatred and envy, the cruel carelessness, and the malignant
+schemes of her own countrymen for whom she had fought.
+
+This, so far as we can judge, appears to be the position of Jeanne in
+the second portion of her career; perhaps only dimly apprehended and at
+moments, by herself; not much thought of probably by those around her,
+the wisest of whom had always been sceptical of her divine commission;
+while the populace never saw any change in her, and believed that at one
+time as well as at another the Maid was the Maid, and had victory at her
+command. And no doubt that influence would have endured for some time at
+least, and her dauntless rush against every obstacle would have carried
+success with it, had she been able to carry out her plans, and fly
+forth upon Paris as she had done upon Orleans, carrying on the campaign
+swiftly, promptly, without pause or uncertainty. Bedford himself said
+that Paris "would fall at a blow," if she came on. It had been hard
+enough, however, to do that, as we have seen, when she was the only hope
+of France and had the fire of the divine enthusiasm in her veins; but
+it was still more hard now to mould a young King elated with triumph,
+beginning to feel the crown safe upon his head, and to feel that if
+there was still much to gain, there was now a great deal to be lost.
+The position was complicated and made more difficult for Jeanne by every
+advantage she had gained.
+
+In the meantime the secret negotiations, which were always being carried
+on under the surface, had come to this point, that Charles had made
+a private treaty with Philip of Burgundy by which that prince pledged
+himself to give up Paris into the King's hands within fifteen days.
+This agreement furnished a sufficient pretext for the delay in marching
+against Paris, delay which was Charles's invariable method, and which
+but for Jeanne's hardihood and determination, had all but crushed the
+expedition to Rheims itself. It was never with any will of his or of his
+adviser, La Tremouille, that any stronghold was assailed. He would fain
+have passed by Troyes, as the reader will remember, he would fain have
+delayed going to Rheims; in each case he had been forced to move by the
+impetuosity of the Maid. But a treaty which touched the honour of the
+King was a different matter. Philip of Burgundy, with whom it was made,
+seems to have held the key of the position. He was called to Paris by
+Bedford on one side to defend the city against its lawful King; he had
+pledged himself on the other to Charles to give it up. He had in his
+hands, though it is uncertain whether he ever read it, that missive of
+the sorceress, the letter of Jeanne which I have quoted, calling upon
+him on the part of God to make peace. What was he to do? There were
+reasons drawing him to both sides. He was the enemy of Charles on
+account of the murder of his father, and therefore had every interest in
+keeping Paris from him; he was angry with the English on account of the
+marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Jacqueline of Brabant, which
+interfered with his own rights and safety in Flanders, and therefore
+might have served himself by giving up the capital to the King. As for
+the appeal of Jeanne, what was the letter of that mad creature to a
+prince and statesman? The progress of affairs was arrested by this
+double problem. Jeanne had been the prominent, the only important figure
+in the history of France for some months past. Now that shining figure
+was jostled aside, and the ordinary laws of life, with all the counter
+changes of negotiation, the ineffectual comings and goings, the meaner
+half-seen persons, the fierce contending personal interests--in which
+there was no love of either God or man, or any elevated notion of
+patriotism--came again into play.
+
+Jeanne would seem to have already foreseen and felt this change even
+before she left Rheims; there is a new tone of sadness in some of her
+recorded words; or if not of sadness, at least of consciousness that an
+end was approaching to all these triumphs and splendours. The following
+tale is told in various different versions, as occurring with different
+people; but the account I give is taken from the lips of Dunois himself,
+a very competent witness. As the King, after his coronation, wended his
+way through the country, receiving submission and joyous welcome from
+every village and little town, it happened that while passing through
+the town of La Ferté, Jeanne rode between the Archbishop of Rheims and
+Dunois. The Archbishop had never been friendly to the Maid, and now it
+was clear, watched her with that half satirical, half amused look of
+the wise man, curious and cynical in presence of the incomprehensible,
+observing her ways and very ready to catch her tripping and to entangle
+her if possible in her own words. The people thronged the way, full of
+enthusiasm, acclaiming the King and shouting their joyful exclamations
+of "Noël!" though it does not appear that any part of their devotion was
+addressed to Jeanne herself. "Oh, the good people," she cried with tears
+in her eyes, "how joyful they are to see their noble King! And how happy
+should I be to end my days and be buried here among them!" The
+priest unmoved by such an exclamation from so young a mouth attempted
+instantly, like the Jewish doctors with our Lord, to catch her in her
+words and draw from her some expression that might be used against her.
+"Jeanne," he said, "in what place do you expect to die?" It was a direct
+challenge to the messenger of Heaven to take upon herself the gift
+of prophecy. But Jeanne in her simplicity shattered the snare which
+probably she did not even perceive: "When it pleases God," she said. "I
+know neither the place nor the time."
+
+It was enough, however, that she should think of death and of the
+sweetness of it, after her work accomplished, in the very moment of
+her height of triumph--to show something of a new leaven working in her
+virgin soul.
+
+One characteristic reward, however, Jeanne did receive. Her father and
+uncle were lodged at the public cost as benefactors of the kingdom, as
+may still be seen by the inscription on the old inn in the great Place
+at Rheims; and when Jacques d'Arc left the city he carried with him a
+patent--better than one of nobility which, however, came to the family
+later--of exemption for the villages of Domremy and Greux of all
+taxes and tributes; "an exemption maintained and confirmed up to the
+Revolution, in favour of the said Maid, native of that parish, in which
+are her relations." "In the register of the Exchequer," says M. Blaze de
+Bury, "at the name of the parish of Greux and Domremy, the place for
+the receipt is blank, with these words as explanation: _à cause de la
+Pucelle_, on account of the Maid." There could not have been a more
+delightful reward or one more after her own heart. It would be a
+graceful act of the France of to-day, which has so warmly revived
+the name and image of her maiden deliverer, to renew so touching a
+distinction to her native place.
+
+We are told that Jeanne parted with her father and uncle with tears,
+longing that she might return with them and go back to her mother who
+would rejoice to see her again. This was no doubt quite true, though
+it might be equally true that she could not have gone back. Did not
+the father return, a little sullen, grasping the present he had himself
+received, not sure still that it was not disreputable to have a daughter
+who wore coat armour and rode by the side of the King, a position
+certainly not proper for maidens of humble birth? The dazzled peasants
+turned their backs upon her while she was thus at the height of glory,
+and never, so far as appears, saw her face again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII -- THE SECOND PERIOD. 1429-1430.
+
+The epic so brief, so exciting, so full of wonder had now reached its
+climax. Whatever we may think on the question as to whether Jeanne had
+now reached the limit of her commission, it is at least evident that she
+had reached the highest point of her triumph, and that her short day of
+glory and success came to an end in the great act which she had always
+spoken of as her chief object. She had crowned her King; she had
+recovered for him one of the richest of his provinces, and established a
+strong base for further action on his part. She had taught Frenchmen how
+not to fly before the English, and she had filled those stout-hearted
+English, who for a time had the Frenchmen in their powerful steel-clad
+grip, with terror and panic, and taught them how to fly in their turn.
+This was, from the first, what she had said she was appointed to do,
+and not one of her promises had been broken. Her career had been a short
+one, begun in April, ending in July, one brief continuous course of
+glory. But this triumphant career had come to its conclusion. The
+messenger of God had done her work; the servant must not desire to be
+greater than his Lord. There have been heroes in this world whose career
+has continued a glorious and a happy one to the end. Our hearts follow
+them in their noble career, but when the strain and pain are over they
+come into their kingdom and reap their reward the interest fails. We
+are glad, very glad, that they should live happy ever after, but their
+happiness does not attract us like their struggle.
+
+It is different with those whose work and whose motives are not those of
+this world. When they step out of the brilliant lights of triumph into
+sorrow and suffering, all that is most human in us rises to follow the
+bleeding feet, our hearts swell with indignation, with sorrow and love,
+and that instinctive admiration for the noble and pure, which proves
+that our birthright too is of Heaven, however we may tarnish or even
+deny that highest pedigree. The chivalrous romance of that age would
+have made of Jeanne d'Arc the heroine of human story. She would have had
+a noble lover, say our young Guy de Laval, or some other generous and
+brilliant Seigneur of France, and after her achievements she would have
+laid by her sword, and clothed herself with the beautiful garments of
+the age, and would have grown to be a noble lady in some half regal
+chateau, to which her name would have given new lustre. The young reader
+will probably long that it should be so; he will feel it an injustice, a
+wrong to humanity that so generous a soul should have no reward; it will
+seem to him almost a personal injury that there should not be a noble
+chevalier at hand to snatch that devoted Maid out of the danger that
+threatened her, out of the horrible fate that befell her; and we can
+imagine a generous boy, and enthusiastic girl, ready to gnash their
+teeth at the terrible and dishonouring thought that it was by English
+hands that this noble creature was tied to the stake and perished in
+the flames. For the last it becomes us(1) to repent, for it was to our
+everlasting shame; but not more to us than to France who condemned her,
+who lifted no finger to help her, who raised not even a cry, a protest,
+against the cruelty and wrong. But for her fate in itself let us not
+mourn over-much. Had the Maid become a great and honoured lady should
+not we all have said as Satan says in the Book of Job: Did Jeanne serve
+God for nought? We should say: See what she made by it. Honour and fame
+and love and happiness. She did nobly, but nobly has she been rewarded.
+
+But that is not God's way. The highest saint is born to martyrdom. To
+serve God for nought is the greatest distinction which He reserves
+for His chosen. And this was the fate to which the Maid of France was
+consecrated from the moment she set out upon her mission. She had the
+supreme glory of accomplishing that which she believed herself to be
+sent to do, and which I also believe she was sent to do, miraculously,
+by means undreamed of, and in which no one beforehand could have
+believed. But when that was done a higher consecration awaited her. She
+had to drink of the cup of which our Lord drank, and to be baptised with
+the baptism with which He was baptised. It was involved in every step
+of the progress that it should be so. And she was herself aware of it,
+vaguely, at heart, as soon as the object of her mission was attained.
+What else could have put the thought of dying into the mind of a girl of
+eighteen in the midst of the adoring crowd, to whom to see her, to touch
+her, was a benediction? When she went forth from those gates she was
+going to her execution, though the end was not to be yet. There was
+still a long struggle before her, lingering and slow, more bitter than
+death, the preface of discouragement, of disappointment, of failure when
+she had most hoped to succeed.
+
+She was on the threshold of this second period when she rode out of
+Rheims all brilliant in the summer weather, her banner faded now,
+but glorious, her shining armour bearing signs of warfare, her end
+achieved--yet all the while her heart troubled, uncertain, and full of
+unrest. And it is impossible not to note that from this time her plans
+were less defined than before. Up to the coronation she had known
+exactly what she meant to do, and in spite of all obstructions had done
+it, keeping her genial humour and her patience, steering her simple way
+through all the intrigues of the Court, without bitterness and without
+fear. But now a vague mist seems to fall about the path which was so
+open and so clear. Paris! Yes, the best policy, the true generalship
+would have been to march straight upon Paris, to lose no time, to leave
+as little leisure as possible to the intriguers to resume their old
+plots. So the generals thought as well as Jeanne: but the courtiers were
+not of that mind. The weak and foolish notion of falling back upon what
+they had gained, and of contenting themselves with that, was all they
+thought of; and the un-French, unpatriotic temper of Paris which wanted
+no native king, but was content with the foreigner, gave them a certain
+excuse. We could not even imagine London as being ever, at any time,
+contented with an alien rule. But Paris evidently was so, and was ready
+to defend itself to the death against its lawful sovereign. Jeanne had
+never before been brought face to face with such a complication. It had
+been a straightforward struggle, each man for his own side, up to this
+time. But now other things had to be taken into consideration. Here
+was no faithful Orleans holding out eager arms to its deliverer, but a
+crafty, self-seeking city, deaf to patriotism, indifferent to freedom,
+calculating which was most to its profit--and deciding that the
+stranger, with Philip of Burgundy at his back, was the safer guide. This
+was enough of itself to make a simple mind pause in astonishment and
+dismay.
+
+There is no evidence that the supernatural leaders who had shaped the
+course of the Maid failed her now. She still heard her "voices." She
+still held communion with the three saints who, she believed devoutly,
+came out of Heaven to aid her. The whole question of this supernatural
+guidance is one which is of course open to discussion. There are many
+in these days who do not believe in it at all, who believe in the
+exaltation of Jeanne's brain, in the excitement of her nerves, in some
+strange complication of bodily conditions, which made her believe she
+saw and heard what she did not really see or hear. For our part, we
+confess frankly that these explanations are no explanation at all so far
+as we are concerned; we are far more inclined to believe that the
+Maid spoke truth, she who never told a lie, she who fulfilled all the
+promises she made in the name of her guides, than that those people are
+right who tell us on their own authority that such interpositions of
+Heaven are impossible. Nobody in Jeanne's day doubted that Heaven did
+interpose directly in human affairs. The only question was, Was it
+Heaven in this instance? Was it not rather the evil one? Was it sorcery
+and witchcraft, or was it the agency of God? The English believed firmly
+that it was witchcraft; they could not imagine that it was God, the God
+of battles, who had always been on their side, who now took the courage
+out of their hearts and taught their feet to fly for the first time. It
+was the devil, and the Maid herself was a wicked witch. Neither one side
+nor the other believed that it was from Jeanne's excited nerves that
+these great things came. There were plenty of women with excited nerves
+in France, nerves much more excited than those of Jeanne, who was always
+reasonable at the height of her inspiration; but to none of them did it
+happen to mount the breach, to take the city, to drive the enemy--up to
+that moment invincible,--flying from the field.
+
+But it would seem as if these celestial visitants had no longer a clear
+and definite message for the Maid. Their words, which she quotes, were
+now promises of support, vague warnings of trouble to come. "Fear not,
+for God will stand by you." She thought they meant that she would be
+delivered in safety as she had been hitherto, her wounds healing, her
+sacred person preserved from any profane touch. But yet such promises
+have always something enigmatical in them, and it might be, as proved to
+be the case, that they meant rather consolation and strength to endure
+than deliverance. For the first time the Maid was often sad; she feared
+nothing, but the shadow was heavy on her heart. Orleans and Rheims had
+been clear as daylight, her "voices" had said to her "Do this" and she
+had done it. Now there was no definite direction. She had to judge for
+herself what was best, and to walk in darkness, hoping that what she did
+was what she was meant to do, but with no longer any certainty. This of
+itself was a great change, and one which no doubt she felt to her heart.
+M. Fabre tells (alone among the biographers of Jeanne) that there were
+symptoms of danger to her sound and steady mind, in her words and ways
+during the moment of triumph. Her chaplain Pasquerel wrote a letter
+in her name to the Hussites, against whom the Pope was then sending
+crusades, in which "I, the Maid," threatened, if they were not
+converted, to come against them and give them the alternative of death
+or amendment. Quicherat says that to the Count d'Armagnac who had
+written to her, whether in good faith or bad, to ask which of the three
+then existent Popes was the real one, she is reported to have answered
+that she would tell him as soon as the English left her free to do so.
+But this is a perverted account of what she really did say, and M. Fabre
+seems to be, like the rest of us, a little confused in his dates: and
+the documents themselves on which he builds are not of unquestioned
+authority. These, however, would be but small speck upon the sunshine
+of her perfect humility and sobriety; if indeed they are to be depended
+upon as authentic at all.
+
+The day of Jeanne, her time of glory and success, was but a short
+one--Orleans was delivered on the 8th of May, the coronation of Charles
+took place on the 17th of July; before the earliest of these dates
+she had spent nearly two months in an anxious yet hopeful struggle of
+preparation, before she was permitted to enter upon her career. The time
+of her discouragement was longer. It was ten months from the day when
+she rode out of Rheims, the 25th of July, 1429, till the 23d of May,
+1430, when she was taken. She had said after the deliverance of Orleans
+that she had but a year in which to accomplish her work, and at a later
+period, Easter, 1430, her "voices" told her that "before the St. Jean"
+she would be in the power of her enemies. Both these statements came
+true. She rose quickly but fell more slowly, struggling along upon the
+downward course, unable to carry out what she would, hampered on every
+hand, and not apparently followed with the same fervour as of old. It is
+true that the principal cause of all seems to have been the schemes of
+the Court and the indolence of Charles; but all these hindrances had
+existed before, and the King and his treacherous advisers had been
+unwillingly dragged every mile of the way, though every step made had
+been to Charles's advantage. But now though the course is still one of
+victory the Maid no longer seems to be either the chief cause or the
+immediate leader. Perhaps this may be partly due to the fact that little
+fighting was necessary, town after town yielding to the King, which
+reduced the part of Jeanne to that of a spectator; but there is a
+change of atmosphere and tone which seems to point to something more
+fundamental than this. The historians are very unwilling to acknowledge,
+except Michelet who does so without hesitation, that she had herself
+fixed the term of her commission as ending at Rheims; it is certain
+that she said many things which bear this meaning, and every fact of
+her after career seems to us to prove it: but it is also true that her
+conviction wavered, and other sayings indicate a different belief or
+hope. She did no wrong in following the profession of arms in which she
+had made so glorious a beginning; she had many gifts and aptitudes for
+it of which she was not herself at first aware: but she was no longer
+the Envoy of God. Enough had been done to arouse the old spirit of
+France, to break the spell of the English supremacy; it was right and
+fitting that France should do the rest for herself. Perhaps Jeanne was
+not herself very clear on this point, and after her first statement of
+it, became less assured. It is not necessary that the servant should
+know the designs of the master. It did not after all affect her. Her
+business was to serve God to the best of her power, not to take the
+management out of His hands.
+
+The army went forth joyously upon its way, directing itself towards
+Paris. There was a pilgrimage to make, such as the Kings of France
+were in the habit of making after their coronation; there were pleasant
+incidents, the submission of a village, the faint resistance, instantly
+overcome, of a small town, to make the early days pleasant. Laon and
+Soissons both surrendered. Senlis and Beauvais received the King's
+envoys with joy. The independent captains of the army made little
+circles about, like parties of pleasure, bringing in another and another
+little stronghold to the allegiance of the King. When he turned aside,
+taking as he passed through, without as yet any serious deflection, the
+road rather to the Loire than to Paris, success still attended him. At
+Château-Thierry resistance was expected to give zest to the movement
+of the forces, but that too yielded at once as the others had done.
+The dates are very vague and it seems difficult to find any mode of
+reconciling them. Almost all the historians while accusing the King of
+foolish dilatoriness and confusion of plans give us a description of the
+undefended state of Paris at the moment, which a sudden stroke on the
+part of Charles might have carried with little difficulty, during the
+absence of all the chiefs from the city and the great terror of the
+inhabitants; but a comparison of dates shows that the Duke of Bedford
+re-entered Paris with strong reinforcements on the very day on which
+Charles left Rheims three days only after his coronation, so that he
+scarcely seems so much to blame as appears. But the general delay,
+inefficiency, and hesitation existing at headquarters, naturally lead to
+mistakes of this kind.
+
+The great point was that Paris itself was by no means disposed to
+receive the King. Strange as it seems to say so Paris was bitterly,
+fiercely English at that extraordinary moment, a fact which ought to be
+taken into account as the most important in the whole matter. There was
+no answering enthusiasm in the capital of France to form an auxiliary
+force behind its ramparts and encourage the besiegers outside. The
+populace perhaps might be indifferent: at the best it had no feeling on
+the subject; but there was no welcome awaiting the King. During the time
+of Bedford's absence the city felt itself to have "no lord"--_ceux de
+Paris avoit grand peur car nul seigneur n' y avoit_. It was believed
+that Charles would put all the inhabitants to the sword, and their
+desperation of feeling was rather that which leads to a wild and
+hopeless defence than to submission. The Duke of Bedford, governing in
+the name of the infant Henry VI. Of England, was their seigneur, instead
+of their natural sovereign. It is a fact which to us seems scarcely
+credible, but it was certainly true. There seems to have been no feeling
+even, on the subject, no general shame as of a national betrayal;
+nothing of the kind. Paris was English, holding by the English kings who
+had never lost a certain hold on France, and thinking no shame of its
+party. It was a hostile town, the chief of the English possessions.
+In the _Journal du Bourgeois de Paris_--who was no _bourgeois_ but a
+distinguished member of that university which held the Maid and all her
+ways in horror--Jeanne the deliverer, the incarnation of patriotism
+and of France is spoken of as "a creature in the form of a woman." How
+extraordinary is this evidence of a state of affairs in which it is
+almost impossible to believe! Paris is France nowadays to many people,
+though no doubt this is but a superficial judgment; but in the
+early part of the fifteenth century, she was frankly English, not
+by compulsion even, but by habit and policy. Perhaps the delays, the
+hesitation, the terrors of Charles and his counsellors are thus rendered
+more excusable than by any other explanation.
+
+In the meantime it is almost impossible to follow the wanderings of
+this vacillating army without a map. If the reader should trace its
+movements, he would see what a stumbling and devious course it took as
+of a man blundering in the dark. From Rheims to Soissons the way was
+clear; then there came a sudden move southward to Château-Thierry from
+which indeed there was still a straight line to Paris but which still
+more clearly indicated the highroad leading to the Orleannais, the
+faithful districts of the Loire. This retrograde movement was not made
+without a great outcry from the generals. Their opinion was that the
+King ought to press on to conquer everything while the English forces
+were still depressed and discouraged. In their mind this deflection
+towards the south was an abandonment at once of honour and safety. An
+unimportant check on the way, however, gave an argument to the leaders
+of the army, and Charles permitted himself to be dragged back. They then
+made their way by La Ferté-Milon, Crépy, and Daumartin, and on this
+road the English troops which had been led out from Paris by Bedford to
+intercept them came twice within fighting distance of the French army.
+The English, as all the French historians are eager to inform us,
+invariably entrenched themselves in their positions, surrounding their
+lines with sharp-pointed posts by which the equally invariable rush of
+the French could be broken. But the French on these occasions were too
+wise to repeat the impetuous charge which had ruined them at Crécy and
+Agincourt, and the consequence was that the two forces remained within
+sight of each other, with a few skirmishes going on at the flanks, but
+without any serious encounter.
+
+It will be more satisfactory, however, to copy the following
+_itineraire_ of Charles's movements from the Chronicle of Perceval
+de Cagny who was a member of the household of the Duc d'Alençon, and
+probably present, certainly at all events bound to have the best and
+most correct information. He informs us that the King left Rheims on
+Thursday the 21st of July, and dined, supped, and lay at the Abbey of
+St. Nanuol that night, where were brought to him the keys of the city of
+Laon. He then set out on _le voyage à venir devant Paris_.
+
+"And on Saturday the 23d of the same month the King dined, supped and
+lay at Soissons, and was there received the most honourably that the
+churchmen, burghers and other people of the town were capable of: for
+they had all great fear because of the destruction of the town which had
+been taken by the Burgundians and made to rebel against the King.
+
+"Friday the 29th day of July the King and his company were all day
+before Château-Thierry in order of battle, hoping that the Duke of
+Bedford would appear to fight. The place surrendered at the hour of
+vespers, and the King lodged there till Monday the first of August. On
+that day the King lay at Monmirail in Brie.
+
+"Tuesday the 2d of August he passed the night in the town of Provins,
+and had the best possible reception there, and remained till the Friday
+following, the 5th August. Sunday the 7th the King lay at the town
+of Coulommièrs in Brie. Wednesday the 10th he lay at La Ferté- Milon,
+Thursday at Crespy in Valois--Friday at Laigny-le-Sec. The following
+Saturday the 13th the King held the field near Dammartin-en-Gouelle, for
+the whole day looking out for the English: but they came not.
+
+"On Sunday the 14th August the Maid, the Duc d'Alençon, the Count de
+Vendosme, the Marshals and other captains accompanied by six or seven
+thousand combatants were at the hour of vespers lodged in the fields
+near Montépilloy, nearly two leagues from the town of Senlis--The
+Duke of Bedford and other English captains with between eight and ten
+thousand English lying half a league from Senlis between our people and
+the said city on a little stream, in a village called Notre Dame de la
+Victoire. That evening our people skirmished with the English near to
+their camp and in this skirmish were people taken on each side, and of
+the English Captain d'Orbec and ten or twelve others, and people wounded
+on both sides: when night fell each retired to their own quarters."
+
+The same writer records an appeal in the true tone of chivalry addressed
+to the English by Jeanne and Alençon desiring them to come out from
+their entrenchments and fight: and promising to withdraw to a sufficient
+distance to permit the enemy to place himself in the open field. The
+French troops had first "put themselves in the best state of conscience
+that could possibly be, hearing mass at an early hour and then to
+horse." But the English would not come out. Jeanne, with her standard in
+her hand rode up to the English entrenchments, and some one says (not de
+Cagny) struck the posts with her banner, challenging the force within
+to come out and fight; while they on their side waved at the French in
+defiance, a standard copied from that of Jeanne, on which was depicted
+a distaff and spindle. But neither host approached any nearer. Finally,
+Charles made his way to Compiègne.
+
+At Château-Thierry there was concluded an arrangement with Philip of
+Burgundy for a truce of fifteen days, before the end of which time the
+Duke undertook to deliver Paris peaceably to the French. That this was
+simply to gain time and that no idea of giving up Paris had ever been
+entertained is evident; perhaps Charles was not even deceived. He, no
+more than Philip, had any desire to encounter the dangers of such a
+siege. But he was able at least to silence the clamours of the army and
+the representations of the persistent Maid by this truce. To wait for
+fifteen days and receive the prize without a blow struck, would not that
+be best? The counsellors of the King held thus a strong position, though
+the delay made the hearts of the warriors sick.
+
+The figure of Jeanne appears during these marchings and
+counter-marchings like that of any other general, pursuing a skilful but
+not unusual plan of campaign. That she did well and bravely there can be
+no doubt, and there is a characteristic touch which we recognise, in the
+fact that she and all of her company "put themselves in the best
+state of conscience that could be," before they took to horse; but the
+skirmishes and repulses are such as Alençon himself might have made.
+"She made much diligence," the same chronicler tells us, "to reduce and
+place many towns in the obedience of the King," but so did many others
+with like success. We hear no more her vigorous knock at the door of the
+council chamber if the discussion there was too long or the proceedings
+too secret. Her appearances are those of a general among many other
+generals, no longer with any special certainty in her movements as of a
+person inspired. We are reminded of a story told of a previous period,
+after the fight at Patay, when blazing forth in the indignation of her
+youthful purity at the sight of one of the camp followers, a degraded
+woman with some soldiers, she struck the wanton with the flat of
+her sword, driving her forth from the camp, where was no longer that
+chastened army of awed and reverent soldiers making their confession on
+the eve of every battle, whom she had led to Orleans. The sword she used
+on this occasion, was, it is said, the miraculous sword which had been
+found under the high altar of St. Catharine at Fierbois; but at the
+touch of the unclean the maiden brand broke in two. If this was an
+allegory(2) to show that the work of that weapon was over, and the
+common sword of the soldier enough for the warfare that remained, it
+could not be more clearly realised than in the history of this campaign.
+The only touch of our real Maid in her own distinct person comes to
+us in a letter written in a field on that same wavering road to Paris,
+dated as early as the 5th of August and addressed to the good people of
+Rheims, some of whom had evidently written to her to ask what was the
+meaning of the delay, and whether she had given up the cause of
+the country. There is a terse determination in its brief, indignant
+sentences which is a relief to the reader weary of the wavering and
+purposeless campaign:
+
+"Dear and good friends, good and loyal Frenchmen of the town of Rheims.
+Jeanne, the Maid, sends you news of her. It is true that the King has
+made a truce of fifteen days with the Duke of Burgundy, who promises
+to render peaceably the city of Paris in that time. Do not, however, be
+surprised if I enter there sooner, for I like not truces so made, and
+know not whether I will keep them, but if I keep them, it will be only
+because of the honour of the King."
+
+While Jeanne and her army thus played with the unmoving English,
+advancing and retiring, attempting every means of drawing them out, the
+enemy took advantage of one of these seeming withdrawals to march out
+of their camp suddenly and return to Paris, which all this time had
+been lying comparatively defenceless, had the French made their attack
+sooner. At the same time Charles moved on to Compiègne where he gave
+himself up to fresh intrigues with Philip of Burgundy, this time for a
+truce to last till Christmas. The Maid was grievously troubled by this
+step, _moult marrie_, and by the new period of delay and negotiation on
+which the Court had entered. Paris was not given up, nor was there any
+appearance that it ever would be, and to all the generals as well as to
+the Maid it was very evident that this was the next step to be taken.
+Some of the leaders wearied with inaction had pushed on to Normandy
+where four great fortresses--greatest of all the immense and mysterious
+stronghold on the high cliffs of the Seine, that imposing Château
+Gaillard which Richard Cœur-de-lion had built, the ruins of which, white
+and mystic, still dominate, like some Titanic ghost, above the course of
+the river--had yielded to them. So great was the danger of Normandy, the
+most securely English of all French provinces, that Bedford had again
+been drawn out of Paris to defend it. Here then was another opportunity
+to seize the capital. But Charles could not be induced to move. He found
+many ways of amusing himself at Compiègne, and the new treaty was being
+hatched with Burgundy which gave an excuse for doing nothing. The pause
+which wearied them all out, both captains and soldiers, at last became
+more than flesh and blood could bear.
+
+Jeanne once more was driven to take the initiative. Already on one
+occasion she had forced the hand of the lingering Court, and resumed
+the campaign of her own accord, an impatient movement which had been
+perfectly successful. No doubt again the army itself was becoming
+demoralised, and showing symptoms of falling to pieces. One day she sent
+for Alençon in haste during the absence of the ambassadors at Arras.
+"_Beau duc_," she cried, "prepare your troops and the other captains.
+_En mon Dieu, par mon martin_,(3) I will see Paris nearer than I have
+yet seen it." She had seen the towers from afar as she wandered over the
+country in Charles's lingering train. Her sudden resolution struck like
+fire upon the impatient band. They set out at once, Alençon and the Maid
+at the head of their division of the army, and all rejoiced to get to
+horse again, to push their way through every obstacle. They started on
+the 23d August, nearly a month after the departure from Rheims, a month
+entirely lost, though full of events, lost without remedy so far as
+Paris was concerned. At Senlis they made a pause, perhaps to await the
+King, who, it was hoped, would have been constrained to follow; then
+carrying with them all the forces that could be spared from that town,
+they spurred on to St. Denis where they arrived on the 27th: St. Denis,
+the other sacred town of France, the place of the tomb, as Rheims was
+the place of the crown.
+
+The royalty of France was Jeanne's passion. I do not say the King, which
+might be capable of malinterpretation, but the kings, the monarchy, the
+anointed of the Lord, by whom France was represented, embodied and
+made into a living thing. She had loved Rheims, its associations,
+its triumphs, the rejoicing of its citizens. These had been the
+accompaniments of her own highest victory. She came to St. Denis in a
+different mood, her heart hot with disappointment and the thwarting of
+all her plans. From whatever cause it might spring, it was clear that
+she was no longer buoyed up by that certainty which only a little while
+before had carried her through every danger and over every obstacle. But
+to have reached St. Denis at least was something. It was a place doubly
+sacred, consecrated to that royal House for which she would so willingly
+have given her life. And at last she was within sight of Paris, the
+greatest prize of all. Up to this time she had known in actual warfare
+nothing but victory. If her heart for the first time wavered and feared,
+there was still no certain reason that, _de par Dieu_, she might not win
+the day again.
+
+At St. Denis there was once more a cruel delay. Nearly a fortnight
+passed and there was no news of the King. The Maid employed the time in
+skirmishes and reconnoissances, but does not seem to have ventured on
+an attack without the sanction of Charles, whom Alençon, finally, going
+back on two several occasions, succeeded in setting in motion. Charles
+had remained at Compiègne to carry out his treaty with Burgundy, and
+the last thing he desired was this attack; but when he could resist
+no longer he moved on reluctantly to St. Denis, where his arrival was
+hailed with great delight. This was not until the 5th of September, and
+the army, wrought up to a high pitch of excitement and expectation, was
+eager for the fight. "There was no one of whatever condition, who did
+not say, 'She will lead the King into Paris, if he will let her,'" says
+the chronicler.
+
+In the meantime the authorities in Paris were at work, strengthening its
+fortifications, frightening the populace with threats of the vengeance
+of Charles, persuading every citizen of the danger of submission.
+
+The _Bourgeois_ tells us that letters came from "les Arminoz," that is,
+the party of the King, sealed with the seal of the Duc d'Alençon, and
+addressed to the heads of the city guilds and municipality inviting
+their co-operation as Frenchmen. "But," adds the Parisian, "it was easy
+to see through their meaning, and an answer was returned that they need
+not throw away their paper as no attention was paid to it." There is
+no sign at all that any national feeling existed to respond to such an
+appeal. Paris--its courts of law, Parliaments (salaried by Bedford),
+University, Church--every department, was English in the first place,
+Burgundian in the second, dependent on English support and money. There
+was no French party existing. The Maid was to them an evil sorceress, a
+creature in the form of a woman, exercising the blackest arts. Perhaps
+there was even a breath of consciousness in the air that Charles himself
+had no desire for the fall of the city. He had left the Parisians
+full time to make every preparation, he had held back as long as was
+possible. His favour was all on the side of his enemies; for his own
+forces and their leaders, and especially for the Maid, he had nothing
+but discouragement, distrust, and auguries of evil.
+
+Nevertheless, these oppositions came to an end, and Jeanne, though less
+ready and eager for the assault, found herself under the walls of Paris
+at last.
+
+     (1) "The English, not US," says Mr. Andrew Lang: and it is
+     pleasant to a Scot to know that this is true. England and
+     Scotland were then twain, and the Scots fought in the ranks
+     of our auld Ally. But for the present age the distinction
+     lasts no longer, and to the writer of an English book on
+     English soil it would be ungenerous to take the advantage.
+
+     (2) It is taken as a miraculous sign by another chronicler,
+     Jean Chartier, who tells us that when this fact came to the
+     knowledge of the King the sword was given by him to the
+     workmen to be re-founded--"but they could not do it, nor put
+     the pieces together again: which is a great proof (_grant
+     approbation_) that the sword came to her divinely. And it is
+     notorious that since the breaking of that sword, the said
+     Jeanne neither prospered in arms to the profit of the King
+     nor otherwise as she had done before."
+
+     (3) "It was her oath," adds the chronicler; no one is quite
+     sure what it means, but Quicherat is of opinion that it was
+     her _baton_, her stick or staff. Perceval de Cagny puts in
+     this exclamation in almost all the speeches of the Maid. It
+     must have struck him as a curious adjuration. Perhaps it
+     explains why La Hire, unable to do without something to
+     swear by, was permitted by Jeanne in their frank and
+     humorous _camaraderie_ to swear by his stick, the same
+     rustic oath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII -- DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT. AUTUMN, 1429.
+
+It was on the 7th September that Jeanne and her immediate followers
+reached the village of La Chapelle, where they encamped for the night.
+The next day was the day of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a great
+festival of the Church. It could scarcely be a matter of choice on the
+part of so devout a Catholic as Jeanne to take this day of all others,
+when every church bell was tinkling forth a summons to the faithful, for
+the day of assault. In all probability she was not now acting on her own
+impulse but on that of the other generals and nobles. Had she refused,
+might it not have been alleged against her that after all her impatience
+it was she who was the cause of delay? The forces with Jeanne were not
+very large, a great proportion of the army remaining with Charles no one
+seems to know where, either at St. Denis or at some intermediate spot,
+possibly to form a reserve force which could be brought up when wanted.
+The best informed historian only knows that Charles was not with the
+active force. But Alençon was at the head of the troops, along with
+many other names well known to us, La Hire, and young Guy de Laval, and
+Xantrailles, all mighty men of valour and the devoted friends of Jeanne.
+There is a something, a mist, an incertitude in the beginning of the
+assault which was unlike the previous achievements of Jeanne, a certain
+want of precaution or knowledge of the difficulties which does not
+reflect honour upon the generals with her. Absolutely new to warfare as
+she was before Orleans she had ridden out at once on her arrival
+there to inspect the fortifications of the besiegers. But probably the
+continual skirmishing of which we are told made this impossible here,
+so that, though the Maid studied the situation of the town in order to
+choose the best point for attack, it was only when already engaged that
+the army discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of
+which was full of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate
+of St. Honoré and its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders
+back into the city: but their further progress was arrested by that
+discovery. It was on this occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have
+seized from a Burgundian in the mêlée, a sword, of which she boasted
+afterwards that it was a good sword capable of good blows, though we
+have no certain record that in all her battles she ever gave one blow,
+or shed blood at all.
+
+It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the
+discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other filled
+with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her standard at
+the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and cheer on her
+soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril, descending into the
+first fosse, and climbing up again on the second, the _dos d'ane_, which
+separated them, where she stood in the midst of a rain of arrows, fully
+exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers and gunners on the ramparts
+above, testing with her lance the depth of the water. We seem in the
+story to see her all alone or with her standard-bearer only by her
+side making this investigation; but that of course is only a pictorial
+suggestion, though it might for a moment be the fact. She remained
+there, however, from two in the afternoon till night, when she was
+forced away. The struggle must have raged around while she stood on the
+dark edge of the ditch probing the muddy water to see where it could
+best be crossed, shouting directions to her men in that voice _assez
+femme_, which penetrated the noise of battle, and summoning the active
+and desperate enemy overhead. "_Renty! Renty!_" she cried as she had
+done at Orleans--"_surrender to the King of France!_"
+
+We hear nothing now of the white armour; it must have been dimmed and
+worn by much fighting, and the banner torn and glorious with the chances
+of the war; but it still waved over her head, and she still stood fast,
+on the ridge between the two ditches, shouting her summons, cheering
+the men, a spot of light still, amid all the steely glimmering of the
+mail-coats and the dark downpour of that iron rain. Half a hundred
+war cries rending the air, shrieks from the walls of "Witch, Devil,
+Ribaude," and names still more insulting to her purity, could not
+silence that treble shout, the most wonderful, surely, that ever ran
+through such an infernal clamour, so prodigious, the chronicler says,
+that it was a marvel to hear it. _De par Dieu, Rendez vous, rendez vous,
+au roy de France_. If as we believe she never struck a blow, the aspect
+of that wonderful figure becomes more extraordinary still. While the
+boldest of her companions struggled across to fling themselves and what
+beams and ladders they could drag with them against the wall, she stood
+without even such shelter as close proximity to it might have given,
+cheering them on, exposed to every shot.
+
+The fight was desperate, and though there was no marked success on
+the part of the besiegers, yet there seems to have been nothing
+to discourage them, as the fight raged on. Few were wounded,
+notwithstanding the noise of the cannons and culverins, "by the grace
+of God and the good luck of the Maid." But towards the evening Jeanne
+herself suddenly swayed and fell, an arrow having pierced her thigh; she
+seems, however, to have struggled to her feet again, undismayed, when a
+still greater misfortune befell: her standard-bearer was hit, first in
+the foot, and then, as he raised his visor to pull the arrow from the
+wound, between his eyes, falling dead at her feet. What happened to
+the banner, we are not told; Jeanne most likely herself caught it as it
+fell. But at this stroke, more dreadful than her own wound, her strength
+failed her, and she crept behind a bush or heap of stones, where she
+lay, refusing to quit the place. Some say she managed to slide into the
+dry ditch where there was a little shelter, but resisted all attempts
+to carry her away, and some add that while she lay there she employed
+herself in a vain attempt to throw faggots into the ditch to make it
+passable. It is said that she kept calling out to them to persevere, to
+go on and Paris would be won. She had promised, they say, to sleep that
+night within the conquered city; but this promise comes to us with no
+seal of authority. Jeanne knew that it had taken her eight days to free
+Orleans, and she could scarcely have promised so sudden a success in
+the more formidable achievement. But she was at least determined in her
+conviction that perseverance only was needed. She must have lain for
+hours on the slope of the outer moat, urging on the troops with such
+force as her dauntless voice could give, repeating again and again
+that the place could be taken if they but held on. But when night came
+Alençon and some other of the captains overcame her resistance, and
+there being clearly no further possibility for the moment, succeeded
+in setting her upon her horse, and conveyed her back to the camp. While
+they rode with her, supporting her on her charger, she did nothing but
+repeat "_Quel dommage!_" Oh, what a misfortune, that the siege of Paris
+should fail, all for want of constancy and courage. "If they had but
+gone on till morning," she cried, "the inhabitants would have known."
+It is evident from this that she must have expected a rising within, and
+could not yet believe that no such thing was to be looked for. "_Par mon
+martin_, the place would have been taken," she said in the hearing one
+cannot but feel of the chronicler, who reports so often those homely
+words.
+
+Thus Jeanne was led back after the first day's attack. Her wound was not
+serious, and she had been repulsed during one of the day's fighting at
+Orleans without losing courage. But something had changed her spirit as
+well as the spirit of the army she led. There is a curious glimpse given
+us into her camp at this point, which indeed comes to us through the
+observation of an enemy, yet seems to have in it an unmistakable gleam
+of truth. It comes from one of the parties which had been granted a
+safe-conduct to carry away the dead of the English and Burgundian side.
+They tell us, among other circumstances,--such as that the French burnt
+their dead, a manifest falsehood, but admirably calculated to make them
+a horror to their neighbours,--that many in the ranks cursed the Maid
+who had promised that they should without any doubt sleep that night
+in Paris and plunder the wealthy city. The men with their safe-conduct
+creeping among the dead, to recover those bodies which had fallen on
+their own side, and furtively to count the fallen on the other--who were
+delighted to bring a report that the Maid was no longer the fountain
+of strength and blessing, but secretly cursed by her own forces--are
+sinister figures groping their way through the darkness of the September
+night.
+
+Next morning, however, her wound being slight, Jeanne was up early and
+in conference with Alençon, begging him to sound his trumpets and set
+forth once more. "I shall not budge from here, till Paris is taken," she
+said. No doubt her spirit was up, and a determination to recover lost
+ground strong in her mind. While the commanders consulted together,
+there came a band of joyful augury into the camp, the Seigneur of
+Montmorency with sixty gentlemen, who had left the party of Burgundy
+in order to take service under the banner of the Maid. No doubt this
+important and welcome addition to their number exhilarated the entire
+camp, in the commotion of the reveillé, while each man looked to his
+weapons, wiping off from breastplate and helmet the heavy dew of the
+September morning, greeting the new friends and brothers-in-arms who had
+come in, and arranging, with a better knowledge of the ground than that
+of yesterday, the mode of attack. Jeanne would not confess that she felt
+her wound, in her eagerness to begin the assault a second time. And all
+were in good spirits, the disappointment of the night having blown away,
+and the determination to do or die being stronger than ever. Were the
+men-at-arms perhaps less amenable? Were they whispering to each other
+that Jeanne had promised them Paris yesterday, and for the first time
+had not kept her word? It would almost require such a fact as this to
+explain what follows. For as they began to set out, the whole field
+in movement, there was suddenly seen approaching another party of
+cavaliers--perhaps another reinforcement like that of Montmorency? This
+new band, however, consisted but of two gentlemen and their immediate
+attendants, the Duc de Bar and the Comte de Clermont,(1) always a bird
+of evil omen, riding hot from St. Denis with orders from the King.
+These orders were abrupt and peremptory--to turn back. Jeanne and her
+companions were struck dumb for the moment. To turn back, and Paris
+at their feet! There must have burst forth a storm of remonstrance
+and appeal. We cannot tell how long the indignant parley lasted; the
+historians do not enlarge upon the disastrous incident. But at last
+the generals yielded to the orders of the King--Jeanne humiliated,
+miserable, and almost in despair. We cannot but feel that on no former
+occasion would she have given way so completely; she would have rushed
+to the King's presence, overwhelmed him with impetuous prayers, extorted
+somehow the permission to go on. But Charles was safe at seven miles'
+distance, and his envoys were imperious and peremptory, like men able to
+enforce obedience if it were not given. She obeyed at last, recovering
+courage a little in the hope of being able to persuade Charles to change
+his mind, and sanction another assault on Paris from the other side, by
+means of a bridge over the Seine towards St. Denis, which Alençon had
+constructed. Next morning it appears that without even asking that
+permission a portion of the army set out very early for this bridge: but
+the King had divined their project, and when they reached the river
+side the first thing they saw was their bridge in ruins. It had been
+treacherously destroyed in the night, not by their enemies, but by their
+King.
+
+It is natural that the French historians should exhaust themselves in
+explanation of this fatal change of policy. Quicherat, who was the
+first to bring to light all the most important records of this period of
+history, lays the entire blame upon La Tremoïlle, the chief adviser of
+Charles. But that Charles himself was at heart equally guilty no one
+can doubt. He was a man who proved himself in the end of his career to
+possess both sense and energy, though tardily developed. It was to him
+that Jeanne had given that private sign of the truth of her mission,
+by which he was overawed and convinced in the first moment of their
+intercourse. Within the few months which had elapsed since she appeared
+at Chinon every thing that was wonderful had been done for him by her
+means. He was then a fugitive pretender, not even very certain of his
+own claim, driven into a corner of his lawful dominions, and fully
+prepared to abandon even that small standing ground, to fly into Spain
+or Scotland, and give up the attempt to hold his place as King of
+France. Now he was the consecrated King, with the holy oil upon
+his brows, and the crown of his ancestors on his head, accepted and
+proclaimed, all France stirring to her old allegiance, new conquests
+falling into his hands every day, and the richest portion of his kingdom
+secure under his sway. To check thus peremptorily the career of the
+deliverer who had done so much for him, degrading her from her place,
+throwing more than doubt upon her inspiration, falsifying by force
+the promises which she had made--promises which had never failed
+before,--was a worse and deeper sin on the part of a young man, by right
+of his kingly office the very head of knighthood and every chivalrous
+undertaking, than it could be on the part of an old and subtle
+diplomatist who had never believed in such wild measures, and all
+through had clogged the steps and endeavoured to neutralise the mission
+of the warrior Maid. It is very clear, however, that between them it was
+the King and his chamberlain who made this assault upon Paris so evident
+and complete a failure. One day's repulse was nothing in a siege. There
+had been one great repulse and several lesser ones at Orleans. Jeanne,
+even though weakened by her wound, had sprung up that morning full of
+confidence and courage. In no way was the failure to be laid to her
+charge.
+
+But this could never, perhaps, have been explained to the whole body
+of the army, who had believed her word without a doubt and taken her
+success for granted. If they had been wavering before, which seems
+possible--for they must have been, to a considerable extent, new levies,
+the campaigners of the Loire having accomplished their period of feudal
+service,--this sudden downfall must have strengthened every doubt and
+damped every enthusiasm. The Maid of whom such wonderful tales had been
+told, she who had been the angel of triumph, the irresistible, before
+whom the English fled, and the very walls fell down--was she after
+all only a sorceress, as the others called her, a creature whose
+incantations had failed after the flash of momentary success? Such
+impressions are too apt to come like clouds over every popular
+enthusiasm, quenching the light and chilling the heart.
+
+Jeanne was thus dragged back to St. Denis against her will and every
+instinct of her being, and there ensued three days of passionate debate
+and discussion. For a moment it appeared as if she would have thrown off
+the bonds of loyal obedience and pursued her mission at all hazards. Her
+"voices," if they had previously given her uncertain sound, promising
+only the support and succour of God, but no success, now spoke more
+plainly and urged the continuance of the siege; and the Maid was torn in
+pieces between the requirements of her celestial guardians and the force
+of authority around her. If she had broken out into open rebellion who
+would have followed her? She had never yet done so; when the King was
+against her she had pleaded or forced an agreement, and received or
+snatched a consent from the malevolent chamberlain, as at Jargeau and
+Troyes. Never yet had she set herself in public opposition to the will
+of her sovereign. She had submitted to all kinds of tests and trials
+rather than this. And to have lain half a day wounded outside Paris and
+to stand there pleading her cause with her wound still unhealed were not
+likely things to strengthen her powers of resistance. "The Voices
+bade me remain at St. Denis," she said afterwards at her trial, "and I
+desired to remain; but the seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If
+I had not been wounded I should never have left." Added to the force
+of these circumstances, it was no doubt apparent to all that to resume
+operations after that forced retreat, and the betrayal it gave of
+divided counsels, would be less hopeful than ever. These arguments even
+convinced the bold La Hire, who for his part, being no better than a
+Free Lance, could move hither and thither as he would; and thus the
+first defeat of the Maid, a disaster involving all the misfortunes that
+followed in its train, was accomplished.
+
+Jeanne's last act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern
+reader gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a
+certain melancholy meaning. Before she left, dragged almost a captive
+in the train of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of the
+cathedral the armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris. It was
+not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from the wars.
+And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would have been
+easily comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind. Was it a
+movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the arms in
+which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?--or was it done
+in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that defeat, too, was a
+part of victory, and that not without that bitterness of failure could
+the fame of the soldier of Christ be perfected? I have remarked already
+that we hear no more of the white armour, inlaid with silver and
+dazzling like a mirror, in which she had begun her career; perhaps it
+was the remains of that panoply of triumph which she laid out before the
+altar of the patron saint of France, all dim now with hard work and
+the shadow of defeat. It must have marked a renunciation of one kind
+or another, the sacrifice of some hope. She was no longer Jeanne the
+invincible, the triumphant, whose very look made the enemy tremble and
+flee, and gave double force to every Frenchman's arm. Was she then and
+there abdicating, becoming to her own consciousness Jeanne the champion
+only, honest and true, but no longer the inspired Maid, the Envoy of
+God? To these questions we can give no answer; but the act is pathetic,
+and fills the mind with suggestions. She who had carried every force
+triumphantly with her, and quenched every opposition, bitter and
+determined though that had been, was now a thrall to be dragged
+almost by force in an unworthy train. It is evident that she felt the
+humiliation to the bottom of her heart. It is not for human nature to
+have the triumph alone: the humiliation, the overthrow, the chill and
+tragic shadow must follow. Jeanne had entered into that cloud when she
+offered the armour, that had been like a star in front of the battle,
+at the shrine of St. Denis.(2) Hers was now to be a sadder, a humbler,
+perhaps a still nobler part.
+
+It is enough to trace the further movements of the King to perceive
+how at every step the iron must have entered deeper and deeper into the
+heart of the Maid. He made his arrangements for the government of each
+of the towns which had acknowledged him: Beauvais, Compiègne, Senlis,
+and the rest. He appointed commissioners for the due regulation of the
+truce with Philip of Burgundy. And then the retreating army took its
+march southward towards the mild and wealthy country, all fertility and
+quiet, where a recreant prince might feel himself safe and amuse himself
+at his leisure--by Lagny, by Provins, by Bercy-sur Seine, where he had
+been checked before in his retreat and almost forced to the march on
+Paris--by Sens, and Montargis: until at last on the 29th of September,
+no doubt diminished by the withdrawal of many a local troop and knight
+whose service was over, the forces arrived at Gien, whence they had set
+forth at the end of June for a series of victories. It is to be supposed
+that the King was well enough satisfied with the conquests accomplished
+in three months. And, indeed, in ordinary circumstances they would have
+formed a triumphant list. Charles must have felt himself free to play
+after the work which he had not done; and to leave his good fortune and
+the able negotiators, who hoped to get Paris and other good things from
+Philip of Burgundy without paying anything for them, to do the rest.
+
+We can imagine nothing more dreadful for the Maid than the months that
+followed. The Court was not ungrateful to her; she received the warmest
+welcome from the Queen; she had a _maison_ arranged for her like the
+household of a noble chief, with the addition of women and maidens of
+rank to her existing staff, and everything which could serve to show
+that she was one whom the King delighted to honour. And Charles would
+have her apparelled gloriously like the king's daughter in the psalm.
+"He gave her a mantle of cloth of gold, open at both sides, to wear over
+her armour," and apparently did his best to make her, if not a noble
+lady, yet into the semblance of a noble young chevalière, one the
+glories of his Court, with all the distinction of her achievements and
+all the complacences of a carpet knight. It was said afterwards, in the
+absence of any graver possibility of accusation, that she liked her fine
+clothes. The tears rise to the eyes at such a suggestion. She was so
+natural that let us hope she did, the martyr Maid whose torture had
+already begun. If that mantle of gold gave her a moment of pleasure, it
+is something to be thankful for in the midst of the dismal shadows that
+were already closing round her. They were ready to give her any shining
+mantle, any beautiful dress, even a title and a noble name if she would;
+but what the King and his counsellors were determined on, was, that she
+should no more have the fame of individual triumph, or do anything save
+under their orders.
+
+Alençon, the gentle duke, with whom she had taken so much trouble, and
+who had grown into a true and noble comrade, made one effort to free his
+friend and leader. He planned an expedition into Normandy, where, with
+the help of Jeanne, he hoped to inflict upon the English a loss so
+tremendous, the destruction of their base of operations, that they would
+be compelled to abandon the centre of France altogether, and leave the
+way open to Paris and to the recovery of the entire kingdom; but the
+King, or La Tremoïlle, as the historians prefer to say, would not
+permit Jeanne to accompany him, and this hope came to nothing. Alençon
+disbanded his troops, everything in the form of an army was broken
+up--the short period of feudal service making this inevitable, unless
+new levies were made--and no forces were left under arms except those
+bands which formed the body-guard of the King. Nevertheless, there
+was plenty of work to be done still, and the breaking up of the French
+forces encouraged many a little garrison of English partisans, which
+would have yielded naturally and easily to a strong national party.
+
+In the midst of the winter, however, it seemed appropriate to the Court
+to launch forth an expedition against some of the unsubdued towns,
+perhaps on account of the mortal languishment of Jeanne herself, perhaps
+for some other reason of its own. The first necessity was to collect the
+necessary forces, and for this reason Jeanne came to Bourges, where she
+was lodged in one of the great houses of the city, that of Raynard de
+Bouligny, _conseiller de roi_, and his wife, Marguerite, one of the
+Queen's ladies. She was there for three weeks collecting her men,
+and the noble gentlewoman, who was her hostess, was afterwards in the
+Rehabilitation trial, one of the witnesses to the purity of her life.
+
+From this lady and others we have a clear enough view of what the Maid
+was in this second chapter of her history. She spent her time in the
+most intimate intercourse with Madam Marguerite, sharing even her room,
+so that nothing could be more complete than the knowledge of her hostess
+of every detail of her young guest's life. And wonderful as was the
+difference between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most famous
+woman in France, the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her country, is as
+the life of Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,--as simple, as devout, and
+as pure. She loved to go to church for the early matins, but as it was
+not fit that she should go out alone at that hour, she besought Madame
+Marguerite to go with her. In the evening she went to the nearest
+church, and there with all her old childish love for the church bells,
+she had them rung for half an hour, calling together the poor, the
+beggars who haunt every Catholic church, the poor friars and bedesmen,
+the penniless and forlorn from all the neighbourhood. This custom would,
+no doubt, soon become known, and not only her poor pensioners, but the
+general crowd would gather to gaze at the Maid as well as to join in
+her prayers. It was her great pleasure to sing a hymn to the Virgin,
+probably one of the litanies which the unlearned worshipper loves,
+with its choruses and constant repetitions, in company with all those
+untutored voices, in the dimness of the church, while the twilight
+sank into night, and the twinkling stars of candles on the altar made
+a radiance in the middle of the gloom. When she had money to give she
+divided it, according to the liberal custom of her time, among her poor
+fellow-worshippers. These evening services were her recreation. The
+days were full of business, of enrolling soldiers, and regulating the
+"lances," groups of retainers, headed by their lord, who came to perform
+their feudal service.
+
+The ladies of the town who had the advantage of knowing Madame
+Marguerite did not fail to avail themselves of this privilege, and
+thronged to visit her wonderful guest. They brought her their sacred
+medals and rosaries to bless, and asked her a hundred questions. Was
+she afraid of being wounded; or was she assured that she would not
+be wounded? "No more than others," she said; and she put away their
+religious ornaments with a smile, bidding Madame Marguerite touch them,
+or the visitors themselves, which would be just as good as if she did
+it. She would seem to have been always smiling, friendly, checking with
+a laugh the adulation of her visitors, many of whom wore medals with
+her own effigy (if only one had been saved for us!) as there were many
+banners made after the pattern of hers. But cheerful as she was, a
+prevailing tone of sadness now appears to run through her life. On
+several occasions she spoke to her confessor and chaplain, who attended
+her everywhere, of her death. "If it should be my fate to die soon, tell
+the King our master on my part to build chapels where prayer may be made
+to the Most High for the salvation of the souls of those who shall die
+in the wars for the defence of the kingdom." This was the one thing she
+seemed anxious for, and it returned again and again to her mind. Her
+thoughts indeed were heavy enough. Her larger enterprises had been
+cruelly put a stop to: her companions-in-arms had been dispersed: she
+had been separated from her lieutenant Alençon, and from all the friends
+between whom and herself great mutual confidence had sprung up. Even the
+commission which had at last been put in her hands was a trifling one
+and led to nothing, bringing the King no nearer to any satisfactory end:
+and the troops were under command of a new captain whom she scarcely
+knew, d'Albert, who was the son-in-law of La Tremoïlle, and probably
+little inclined to be a friend to Jeanne. In these circumstances there
+was little of an exhilarating or promising kind.
+
+Nevertheless as an episode, few things had happened to Jeanne more
+memorable than the siege of St. Pierre-le-Moutier. The first assault
+upon the town was unsuccessful; the retreat had sounded and the troops
+were streaming back from the point of attack, when Jean d'Aulon, the
+faithful friend and brave gentleman who was at the head of the Maid's
+military household, being himself wounded in the heel and unable to
+stand or walk, saw the Maid almost alone before the stronghold, four or
+five men only with her. He dragged himself up as well as he could upon
+his horse, and hastened towards her, calling out to her to ask what she
+did there, and why she did not retire with the rest. She answered him,
+taking off her helmet to speak, that she would leave only when the place
+was taken--and went on shouting for faggots and beams to make a
+bridge across the ditch. It is to be supposed that seeing she paid no
+attention, nor budged a step from that dangerous point, this brave man,
+wounded though he was, must have made an effort to rally the retiring
+besiegers: but Jeanne seems to have taken no notice of her desertion
+nor ever to have paused in her shout for planks and gabions. "All to the
+bridge," she shouted, "_aux fagots et aux claies tout le monde!_ every
+one to the bridge." "Jeanne, withdraw, withdraw! You are alone,"
+some one said to her. Bareheaded, her countenance all aglow, the Maid
+replied: "I have still with me fifty thousand of my men." Were those
+the men whom the prophet's servant saw when his eyes were opened and he
+beheld the innumerable company of angels that surrounded his master? But
+Jeanne, rapt in the trance and ecstasy of battle, gave no explanation.
+"To work, to work!" her clear voice went on, ringing over the startled
+head of the good knight who knew war, but not any rapture like this.
+History itself, awe-stricken, would almost have us believe that alone
+with her own hand the Maid took the city, so entirely does every figure
+disappear but that one, and the perplexed and terrified spectator vainly
+urging her to give up so desperate an attempt. But no doubt the shouts
+of a voice so strange to every such scene, the _vox infantile_, the
+amazing and clear voice, silvery and womanly, _assez femme_, and the
+efforts of d'Aulon to bring back the retreating troops were successful,
+and Jeanne once more, triumphantly kept her word. The place was strongly
+fortified, well provisioned, and full of people. Therefore the whole
+narrative is little less than miraculous, though very little is said of
+it. Had they but persevered, as she had said, a few hours longer before
+Paris, who could tell that the same result might not have been obtained?
+
+She was not successful, however, with La Charité, which after a siege of
+a month's duration still held out, and had to be abandoned. These
+long operations of regular warfare were not in Jeanne's way; and
+her coadjutor in command, it must be remembered, was in this case
+commissioned by her chief enemy. We are told that she was left without
+supplies, and in the depths of winter, in cold and rain and snow, with
+every movement hampered, and the ineffective government ever ready to
+send orders of retreat, or to cause bewildering and confusing delays by
+the want of every munition of war. Finally, at all events, the French
+forces withdrew, and again an unsuccessful enterprise was added to
+the record of the once victorious Maid. That she went on continually
+promising victory as in her early times, is probably the mere rumour
+spread by her detractors who were now so many, for there is no real
+evidence that she did so. Everything rather points to discouragement,
+uncertainty, and to a silent rage against the coercion which she could
+not overcome.
+
+     (1) Clermont it was who deserted the Scots at the Battle of
+     the Herrings.
+
+     (2) Jeanne's arms, offered at St. Denis, were afterwards
+     taken by the English and sent to the King of England (all
+     except the sword with its ornaments of gold) without giving
+     anything to the church in return: "qui est pur sacrilege et
+     manifeste," says Jean Chartier.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX -- COMPIÈGNE. 1430.
+
+By this time France was once more all in flames: the English and
+Burgundians had entered and then abandoned Paris--Duke Philip cynically
+leaving that city, which he had promised to give up to Charles, to
+its own protection, in order to look after his more pressing personal
+concerns: while Bedford spread fire and flame about the adjacent
+country, retaking with much slaughter many of the towns which had
+opened their gates to the King. Thus while Charles gave no attention
+to anything beyond the Loire, and kept his chief champion there, as it
+were, on the leash, permitting no return to the most important field
+of operations, almost all that had been gained was again lost upon the
+banks of the Seine. This was the state of affairs when Jeanne returned
+humbled and sad from the abandoned siege of La Charité. Her enemy's
+counsels had triumphed all round and this was the result. Individual
+fightings of no particular account and under no efficient organisation
+were taking place day by day; here a town stood out heroically, there
+another yielded to the foreign arms; the population were thrown back
+into universal misery, the spring fields trampled under foot, the
+villages burned, every evil of war in full operation, invasion
+aggravated by faction, the English always aided by one side of France
+against the other, and neither peace nor security anywhere.
+
+This was the aspect of affairs on one side. On the other appeared a
+still less satisfactory scene. Charles amusing himself, his counsellors,
+La Tremoïlle, and the Archbishop of Rheims carrying on fictitious
+negotiations with Burgundy and playing with the Maid who was in their
+power, sending her out to make a show and cast a spell, then dragging
+her back at the end of their shameful chain: while the Court, the King
+and Queen, and all their flattering attendants gilded that chain and
+tried to make her forget by fine clothes and caresses, at once her
+mission and her despair. They were not ungrateful, no: let us do them
+justice, for they might well have added this to the number of their
+sins: mantles of cloth of gold, patents of nobility were at her command,
+had these been what she wanted. The only personal wrong they did
+to Jeanne was to set up against her a sort of opposition, another
+enchantress and visionary who had "voices" and apparitions too, and who
+was admitted to all the councils and gave her advice in contradiction
+of the Maid, a certain Catherine de la Rochelle, who was ready to say
+anything that was put into her mouth, but who had done nothing to prove
+any mission for France or from God. We have little light however upon
+the state of affairs in those castles, which one after another were the
+abode of the Court during this disastrous winter. They were safe enough
+on the other side of the Loire in the fat country where the vines still
+flourished and the young corn grew. Now and then a band of armed men was
+sent forth to succour a fighting town in the suffering and struggling
+Île-de-France, always under the conflicting orders of those intrigants
+and courtiers: but within the Court, all was gay; "never man," as rough
+La Hire had said on an earlier occasion, "lost his kingdom more gaily
+or with better grace" than did Charles. Where was La Hire? Where was
+Dunois?--there is no appearance of these champions anywhere. Alençon had
+returned to his province. Only La Tremoïlle and the Archbishop holding
+all the strings in their hands, upsetting all military plans, disgusting
+every chief, met and talked and carried on their busy intrigues, and
+played their Sibyl--_Sibylle de carrefour_, says one of the historians
+indignantly--against the Maid, who, all discouraged and downcast,
+fretted by caresses, sick of inactivity, dragged out the uneasy days in
+an uncongenial world; but Jeanne has left no record of the sensations
+with which she saw these days pass, eating her heart out, gazing
+over that rapid river, on the other side of which all the devils were
+unchained and every result of her brief revolution was being lost.
+
+At length however the impatience and despair were more than she could
+bear; the Court was then at Sully and the spring had begun with its
+longer days and more passable roads. Without a word to anyone the Maid
+left the castle. The war had rolled towards these princely walls, as
+near as Melun, which was threatened by the English. A little band of
+intimate servants and associates, her two brothers, and a few faithful
+followers, were with her. So far as we know she never saw Charles or his
+courtiers again. They arrived at Melun in time to witness and to take
+part in the repulse of the English, and it was here that a communication
+was make to Jeanne by her saints of which afterwards there was frequent
+mention. Little had been said of them during her dark time of inaction,
+and their tone was no longer as of old. It was on the side of the moat
+of Melun where probably she was superintending some necessary work
+to strengthen the fortifications or to put them in better order for
+defence, that this message reached her. The "Voices" which so often had
+urged her to victory and engaged the faith of heaven for her success,
+had now a word to say, secret and personal to herself. It was that she
+should be taken prisoner; and the date was fixed, before the St. Jean.
+It was the middle of April when this communication was made and the
+Feast of St. Jean, as everybody knows, is in the end of June; two months
+only to work in, to strike another blow for France. The "Voices" bade
+her not to fear, that God would sustain her. But it would be impossible
+not to be startled by such a sudden intimation in the midst of her
+reviving plans. The Maid made one terrified prayer, that God would let
+her die when she was taken, not subject her to long imprisonment; her
+heart prophetically sprang to a sudden consciousness of the most likely,
+most terrible end that lay before her, for she had been often enough
+threatened with the stake and the fire to know what to expect. But
+the saintly voices made no reply. They bade her be strong and of good
+courage: is not that the all-sustaining, all-delusive message for every
+martyr? It was the will of God, and His support and sustaining power,
+which we often take to mean deliverance, but which is not always
+so--were promised. She asked where this terrible thing was to happen,
+but received no reply. Natural and simple as she was, she confessed
+afterwards that had she known she was to be taken on any certain day,
+she would not have gone out to meet the catastrophe unless she had
+been forced by evident duty to do so. But this was not revealed to her.
+"Before the St. Jean!" It must almost have seemed a guarantee that until
+that time or near it she was safe. She would seem to have said nothing
+immediately of this vision to sadden those about her.
+
+In the meantime, however, there were other adventures in store for her.
+From Melun to Lagny was no long journey, but it was through a country
+full of enemies in which she must have been subject to attack at every
+corner of every road or field. And she had not been long in the latter
+place which is said to have had a garrison of Scots, when news came
+of the passing of a band of Burgundians, a troop of raiders indeed,
+ravaging the country, taking advantage of the war to rob and lay waste
+churches, villages, and the growing fields wherever they passed. The
+troops was led by Franquet d'Arras, a famous "_pillard_," robber of God
+and man. Jeanne set out to encounter this bandit with a party of some
+four hundred men, and various noble companions, among whom, however, we
+find no name familiar in her previous career, a certain Hugh Kennedy, a
+Scot, who is to be met with in various records of fighting, being one of
+the most notable among them. Franquet's band fought vigorously but were
+cut to pieces, and the leader was taken prisoner. When this man was
+brought back to Lagny, a prisoner to be ransomed, and whom Jeanne
+desired to exchange for one of her own side, the law laid claim to him
+as a criminal. He was a prisoner of war: what was it the Maid's duty to
+do? The question is hotly debated by the historians and it was brought
+against her at her trial. He was a murderer, a robber, the scourge of
+the country--especially to the poor whom Jeanne protected and cared for
+everywhere, was he pitiless and cruel. She gave him up to justice, and
+he was tried, condemned, and beheaded. If it was wrong from a military
+point of view, it was her only error, and shows how little there was
+with which to reproach her.
+
+In Lagny other things passed of a more private nature. Every day and all
+day long her "voices" repeated their message in her ears. "Before the
+St. Jean." She repeated it to some of her closest comrades but left
+herself no time to dwell upon it. Still worse than the giving up of
+Franquet was the supposed resuscitation of a child, born dead, which
+its parents implored her to pray for that it might live again to be
+baptised. She explained the story to her judges afterwards. It was
+the habit of the time, nay, we believe continues to this day in some
+primitive places, to lay the dead infant on the altar in such a case, in
+hope of a miracle. "It is true," said Jeanne, "that the maidens of the
+town were all assembled in the church praying God to restore life that
+it might be baptised. It is also true that I went and prayed with them.
+The child opened its eyes, yawned three or four times, was christened
+and died. This is all I know." The miracle is not one that will find
+much credit nowadays. But the devout custom was at least simple and
+intelligible enough, though it afforded an excellent occasion to
+attribute witchcraft to the one among those maidens who was not of Lagny
+but of God.
+
+From Lagny Jeanne went on to various other places in danger, or which
+wanted encouragement and help. She made two or three hurried visits to
+Compiègne, which was threatened by both parties of the enemy; at one
+time raising the siege of Choicy, near Compiègne, in company with the
+Archbishop of Rheims, a strange brother in arms. On another of her
+visits to Compiègne there is said to have occurred an incident which, if
+true, reveals to us with very sad reality the trouble that overshadowed
+the Maid. She had gone to early mass in the Church of St. Jacques, and
+communicated, as was her custom. It must have been near Easter--perhaps
+the occasion of the first communion of some of the children who are
+so often referred to, among whom she loved to worship. She had retired
+behind a pillar on which she leaned as she stood, and a number of
+people, among whom were many children, drew near after the service to
+gaze at her. Jeanne's heart was full, and she had no one near to whom
+she could open it and relieve her soul. As she stood against the pillar
+her trouble burst forth. "Dear friends and children," she said, "I have
+to tell you that I have been sold and betrayed, and will soon be given
+up to death. I beg of you to pray for me; for soon I shall no longer
+have any power to serve the King and the kingdom." These words were told
+to the writer who records them, in the year 1498, by two very old men
+who had heard them, being children at the time. The scene was one to
+dwell in a child's recollection, and, if true, it throws a melancholy
+light upon the thoughts that filled the mind of Jeanne, though her
+actions may have seemed as energetic and her impulses as strong as in
+her best days.
+
+At last the news came speeding through the country that Compiègne was
+being invested on all sides. It had been the headquarters of Charles
+and had received him with acclamations, and therefore the alarm of the
+townsfolk for the retribution awaiting them, should they fall into the
+hands of the enemy, was great; it was besides a very important position.
+Jeanne was at Crespy en Valois when this news reached her. She set out
+immediately (May 22, 1430) to carry aid to the garrison: "_F'irai voir
+mes bons amis de Compiègne_," she said. The words are on the base of
+her statue which now stands in the Place of that town. Something of
+her early impetuosity was in this impulse, and no apparent dread of
+any fatality. She rode all night at the head of her party, and arrived
+before the dawn, a May morning, the 23d, still a month from the fatal
+"St. Jean." Though the prophecy was always in her ears, she must have
+felt that whole month still before her, with a sensation of almost
+greater safety because the dangerous moment was fixed. The town received
+her with joy, and no doubt the satisfaction and relief which hailed her
+and her reinforcements gave additional fervour to the Maid, and drove
+out of her mind for a moment the fatal knowledge which oppressed it.
+There is some difficulty in understanding the events of this day, but
+the lucid narrative of Quicherat, which we shall now quote, gives a
+very vivid picture of it. Jeanne had timed her arrival so early in the
+morning, probably with the intention of keeping the adversaries in their
+camps unaware of so important an addition to the garrison, in order that
+she might surprise them by the sortie she had determined upon; but no
+doubt the news had leaked forth somehow, if through no other means, by
+the sudden ringing of the bells and sounds of joy from the city. She
+paid her usual visits to the churches, and noted and made all her
+arrangements for the sortie with her usual care, occupying the long
+summer day in these preparations. And it was not till five o'clock in
+the evening that everything was complete, and she sallied forth. We hear
+nothing of the state of the town, or of any suspicion existing at the
+time as to the governor Flavy who was afterwards believed by some to be
+the man who sold and betrayed her. It is a question debated warmly like
+all these questions. He was a man of bad reputation, but there is no
+evidence that he was a traitor. The incidents are all natural enough,
+and seem to indicate clearly the mere fortune of war upon which no man
+can calculate. We add from Quicherat the description of the field and
+what took place there:
+
+"Compiègne is situated on the left bank of the Oise. On the other side
+extends a great meadow, nearly a mile broad, at the end of which the
+rising ground of Picardy rises suddenly like a wall, shutting in the
+horizon. The meadow is so low and so subject to floods that it is
+crossed by an ancient foot of the low hills. Three village churches mark
+the extent of the landscape visible from the walls of Compiègne;
+Margny (sometimes spelt Marigny) at the end of the road; Clairoix three
+quarters of a league higher up, at the confluence of the two rivers,
+the Aronde and the Oise, close to the spot where another tributary, the
+Aisne, also flows into the Oise; and Venette a mile and a half lower
+down. The Burgundians had one camp at Margny, another at Clairoix; the
+headquarters of the English were at Venette. As for the inhabitants
+of Compiègne, their first defence facing the enemy was one of those
+redoubts or towers which the chronicles of the fifteenth century called
+a boulevard. It was placed at the end of the bridge and commanded the
+road.
+
+"The plan of the Maid was to make a sortie towards the evening, to
+attack Margny and afterwards Clairoix, and then at the opening of the
+Aronde valley to meet the Duke of Burgundy and his forces who were
+lodged there, and who would naturally come to the aid of his other
+troops when attacked. She took no thought for the English, having
+already carefully arranged with Flavy how they should be prevented from
+cutting off her retreat. The governor provided against any chance of
+this by arming the boulevard strongly with archers to drive off any
+advancing force, and also by keeping ready on the Oise a number of
+covered boats to receive the foot-soldiers in case of a retrograde
+movement.
+
+"The action began well: the garrison of Margny yielded in the twinkling
+of an eye. That of Clairoix rushing to the support of their brothers in
+arms was repulsed, then in its turn repulsed the French; and three times
+this alternative of advance and retreat took place on the flat ground of
+the meadow without serious injury to either party. This gave time to the
+English to take part in the fray;(1) though thanks to the precautions of
+Flavy all they could do was to swell the ranks of the Burgundians.
+But unfortunately the rear of the Maid's army was struck with the
+possibility that a diversion might be attempted from behind, and their
+retreat cut off. A panic seized them; they broke their ranks, turned
+back and fled, some to the boats, some to the barrier of the boulevard.
+The English witnessing this flight rushed after them, secure now on the
+side of Compiègne, where the archers no longer ventured to shoot
+lest they should kill the fugitives instead of the enemies. They (the
+English) thus got possession of the raised road, and pushed on so hotly
+after the fugitives that their horses' heads touched the backs of the
+crowd. It thus became necessary for the safety of the town to close the
+gates until the barrier of the boulevard should be set up again."
+
+*****
+
+These disastrous accidents had taken place while Jeanne, charging in
+front with her companions and body-guard, remained quite unaware of any
+misfortune. She would hear no call to retreat, even when her companions
+were roused to the dangers of their position. "Forward, they are ours!"
+was all her cry. As at St. Pierre-le-Moutier she was ready to defeat the
+Burgundian army alone. At length the others perceiving something of
+what had happened seized her bridle and forced her to retire. She was of
+herself too remarkable a figure to be concealed amid the group of armed
+men who rode with her, encircling her, defending the rear of the flying
+party. Over her armour she wore a crimson tunic, or according to some
+authorities a short cloak, of gorgeous material embroidered with gold,
+and though by this time the twilight must have afforded a partial
+shelter, yet the knowledge that she was there gave keenness to every
+eye. Behind, the scattered Burgundians had rallied and begun to pursue,
+while the armour and spears of the English glittered in front between
+the little party and the barrier which was blocked by a terrified crowd
+of fugitives. Even then a party of horsemen might have cut their way
+through; but at the moment when Jeanne and her followers drew near, the
+barrier was sharply closed and the wild, confused, and fighting crowd,
+treading each other down, struggling for life, were forced back upon the
+English lances. Thus the retreating band riding hard along the raised
+road, in order and unbroken, found the path suddenly barred by the
+forces of the enemy, the fugitives of their own army, and the closed
+gates of the town.
+
+An attempt was then made by the Maid and her companions to turn towards
+the western gate where there still might have been a chance of safety;
+but by this time the smaller figure among all those steel-clad men, and
+the waving mantle, must have been distinguished through the dusk and the
+dust. There was a wild rush of combat and confusion, and in a moment she
+was surrounded, seized, her horse and her person, notwithstanding all
+resistance. With cries of "Rendez vous," and many an evil name, fierce
+faces and threatening weapons closed round her. One of her assailants--a
+Burgundian knight, a Picard archer, the accounts differ--caught her
+by her mantle and dragged her from her horse; no Englishman let us be
+thankful, though no doubt all were equally eager and ready. Into the
+midst of that shouting mass of men, in the blinding cloud of dust,
+in the darkening of the night, the Maid of France disappeared for one
+terrible moment, and was lost to view. And then, and not till then, came
+a clamour of bells into the night, and all the steeples of Compiègne
+trembled with the call to arms, a sally to save the deliverer. Was it
+treachery? Was it only a perception, too late, of the danger? There are
+not wanting voices to say that a prompt sally might have saved Jeanne,
+and that it was quite within the power of the Governor and city had they
+chosen. Who can answer so dreadful a suggestion? it is too much shame
+to human nature to believe it. Perhaps within Compiègne as without, they
+were too slow to perceive the supreme moment, too much overwhelmed to
+snatch any chance of rescue till it was too late.
+
+Happily we have no light upon the tumult around the prisoner, the ugly
+triumph, the shouts and exultation of the captors who had seized the
+sorceress at last; nor upon the thoughts of Jeanne, with her threatened
+doom fulfilled and unknown horrors before her, upon which imagination
+must have thrown the most dreadful light, however strongly her courage
+was sustained by the promise of succour from on high. She had not been
+sent upon this mission as of old. No heavenly voice had said to her
+"Go and deliver Compiègne." She had undertaken that warfare on her own
+charges with no promise to encourage her, only the certainty of being
+overthrown "before the St. Jean." But the St. Jean was still far off, a
+long month of summer days between her and that moment of fate! So far
+as we can see Jeanne showed no unseemly weakness in this dark hour. One
+account tells us that she held her sword high over her head declaring
+that it was given by a higher than any who could claim its surrender
+there. But she neither struggled nor wept. Not a word against her
+constancy and courage could any one, then or after, find to say. The
+Burgundian chronicler tells us one thing, the French another. "The Maid,
+easily recognised by her costume of crimson and by the standard which
+she carried in her hand, alone continued to defend herself," says one;
+but that we are sure could not have been the case as long as d'Aulon,
+who accompanied her, was still able to keep on his horse. "She yielded
+and gave her parole to Lyonnel, bâtard de Wandomme," says another; but
+Jeanne herself declares that she gave her faith to no one, reserving
+to herself the right to escape if she could. In that dark evening
+scene nothing is clear except the fact that the Maid was taken, to the
+exultation and delight of her captors and to the terror and grief of the
+unhappy town, vainly screaming with all its bells to arms,--and with its
+sons and champions by hundreds dying under the English lances and in the
+dark waves of the Oise.
+
+The archer or whoever it was who secured this prize, took Jeanne back,
+along the bloody road with its relics of the fight, to Margny, the
+Burgundian camp, where the leaders crowded together to see so important
+a prisoner. "Thither came soon after," says Monstrelet, "the Duke of
+Burgundy from his camp of Coudon, and there assembled the English, the
+said Duke and those of the other camps in great numbers, making, one
+with the other, great cries and rejoicings on the taking of the Maid:
+whom the said Duke went to see in the lodging where she was and spoke
+some words to her which I cannot call to mind, though I was there
+present; after which the said Duke and the others withdrew for the
+night, leaving the Maid in the keeping of Messer John of Luxembourg"--to
+whom she had been immediately sold by her first captor. The same night,
+Philip, this noble Duke and Prince of France, wrote a letter to convey
+the blessed information:
+
+"The great news of this capture should be spread everywhere and brought
+to the knowledge of all, that they may see the error of those who could
+believe and lend themselves to the pretensions of such a woman. We write
+this in the hope of giving you joy, comfort, and consolation, and that
+you may thank God our Creator. Pray that it may be His holy will to be
+more and more favourable to the enterprises of our royal master and to
+the restoration of his sway over all his good and faithful subjects."
+
+This royal master was Henry VI. of England, the baby king, doomed
+already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and
+reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally,
+have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on that
+of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English, which is
+hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could in no way
+be attributed to the other nation of which he was the natural enemy, or
+at least, antagonist. Very naturally the subsequent proceedings in all
+their horror and cruelty are equally put down to the English account,
+although Frenchmen took, exulted over as a prisoner, tried and condemned
+as an enemy of God and the Church, the spotless creature who was France
+incarnate, the very embodiment of her country in all that was purest and
+noblest. We shall see with what spontaneous zeal all France, except her
+own small party, set to work to accomplish this noble office.
+
+Almost before one could draw breath the University of Paris claimed her
+as a proper victim for the Inquisition. Compiègne made no sally for
+her deliverance; Charles, no attempt to ransom her. From end to end of
+France not a finger was lifted for her rescue; the women wept over her,
+the poor people still crowded around the prisoner wherever seen, but the
+France of every public document, of every practical power, the living
+nation, when it did not utter cries of hatred, kept silence. We in
+England have over and over again acknowledged with shame our guilty part
+in her murder; but still to this day the Frenchman tries to shield
+his under cover of the English influence and terror. He cannot deny La
+Tremoïlle, nor Cauchon, nor the University, nor the learned doctors
+who did the deed; individually he is ready to give them all up to the
+everlasting fires which one cannot but hope are kept alive for some
+people in spite of all modern benevolences; but he skilfully turns back
+to the English as a moving cause of everything. Nothing can be more
+untrue. The English were not better than the French, but they had the
+excuse at least of being the enemy. France saved by a happy chance her
+_blanches mains_ from the actual blood of the pure and spotless Maid;
+but with exultation she prepared the victim for the stake, sent her
+thither, played with her like a cat with a mouse and condemned her to
+the fire. This is not to free us from our share: but it is the height of
+hypocrisy to lay the blood of Jeanne, entirely to our door.
+
+Thus Jeanne's inspiration proved itself over again in blood and tears;
+it had been proved already on battle-field and city wall, with loud
+trumpets of joy and victory. But the "voices" had spoken again, sounding
+another strain; not always of glory--it is not the way of God; but of
+prison, downfall, distress. "Be not astonished at it," they said to
+her; "God will be with you." From day to day they had spoken in the same
+strain, with no joyful commands to go forth and conquer, but the one
+refrain: "Before the St. Jean." Perhaps there was a certain relief in
+her mind at first when the blow fell and the prophecy was accomplished.
+All she had to do now was to suffer, not to be surprised, to trust in
+God that He would support her. To Jeanne, no doubt, in the confidence
+and inexperience of her youth, that meant that God would deliver her.
+And so He did; but not as she expected. The sunshine of her life was
+over, and now the long shadow, the bitter storm was to come.
+
+Nothing could be more remarkable than the response of France in general
+to this extraordinary event. In Paris there were bonfires lighted to
+show their joy, the _Te Deum_ was sung at Notre Dame. At the Court
+Charles and his counsellors amused themselves with another prophet, a
+shepherd from the hills who was to rival Jeanne's best achievements, but
+never did so. Only the towns which she had delivered had still a tender
+thought for Jeanne. At Tours the entire population appeared in
+the streets with bare feet, singing the _Miserere_ in penance and
+affliction. Orleans and Blois made public prayers for her safety.
+Rheims, in which there was much independent interest in Jeanne and her
+truth, had to be specially soothed by a letter from the Archbishop, in
+which he made out with great cleverness that it was the fault of Jeanne
+alone that she was taken. "She did nothing but by her own will, without
+obeying the commandments of God," he says; "she would hear no counsel,
+but followed her own pleasure,"; and it is in this letter that we hear
+of the shepherd lad who was to replace Jeanne, and that it was his
+opinion or revelation that God had suffered the Maid to be taken because
+of her growing pride, because she loved fine clothes, and preferred her
+own will to any guidance. We do not know whether this contented the
+city of Rheims; similar reasoning however seems to have silenced France.
+Nobody uttered a protest, nor struck a blow; the mournful procession of
+Tours, where she had been first known in the outset of her career, the
+prayers of Orleans which she had delivered, are the only exceptions we
+know of. Otherwise there was lifted in France neither voice nor hand to
+avert her doom.
+
+     (1) The three camps must have formed a sort of irregular
+     triangle. The English at Venette being only half a mile from
+     the gates of Compiègne.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X -- THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+
+We have here to remark a complete suspension of all the ordinary laws
+at once of chivalry and of honest warfare. Jeanne had been captured as
+a general at the head of her forces. She was a prisoner of war. Such
+a prisoner ordinarily, even in the most cruel ages, is in no
+bodily danger. He is worth more alive than dead--a great ransom
+perhaps--perhaps the very end of the warfare, and the accomplishment
+of everything it was intended to gain: at least he is most valuable to
+exchange for other important prisoners on the opposite side. It was like
+taking away so much personal property to kill a prisoner, an outrage
+deeply resented by his captor and unjustified by any law. It was true
+that Jeanne herself had transgressed this universal custom but a little
+while before, by giving up Franquet d'Arras to his prosecutors. But
+Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted criminal, robber, and
+destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have departed from the military
+laws of right and wrong while everything in the country was under the
+hasty arbitration of war. No one, however, so far as we know, produces
+this matter of Franquet as a precedent in her own case. From the first
+moment of her seizure there was no question of the custom and privilege
+of warfare. She was taken as a wild animal might have been taken, the
+only doubt being how to make the most signal example of her. Vengeance
+in the gloomy form of the Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such
+word as ransom was breathed from her own side, none was demanded, none
+was offered. Her case is at once separated from every other.
+
+Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed to
+be the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to succour
+and help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something of the
+subtle jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger side, but
+yet always existing, in the abrogation of every law of chivalry as well
+as of warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is indeed of the highest
+strain of generosity who can bear to be beaten by a woman. And all the
+seething, agitated world of France had been beaten by this girl. The
+English and Burgundians, in the ordinary sense of the word, had been
+overcome in fair field, forced to fly before her; the French, her own
+side, had experienced an even more penetrating downfall by having the
+honours of victory taken from them, she alone winning the day where they
+had all failed. This is bitterer, perhaps, than merely to be compelled
+to raise a siege or to fail in a fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions,
+but the praise was to Jeanne who never struck a blow. Such great hearts
+as Dunois, such a courteous prince as Alençon, were too magnanimous to
+feel, or at least to resent, the grievance; they seconded her and fought
+under her with a nobility of mind and disinterestedness beyond praise;
+but it was not to be supposed that the common mass of the French
+captains were like these; she had wronged and shamed them by taking the
+glory from them, as much as she had shamed the English by making those
+universal victors fly before her. The burghers whom she had rescued, the
+poor people who were her brethren and whom she sought everywhere, might
+weep and cry out to Heaven, but they were powerless at such a moment.
+And every law that might have helped her was pushed aside.
+
+On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears
+in the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and implacable
+of all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an hour, a
+letter was addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital. Quicherat
+speaks of it as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-general of the
+Inquisition, written by the officials of the University; others tell us
+that an independent letter was sent from the University to second that
+of the Inquisitor. The University we may add was not a university
+like one of ours, or like any existing at the present day. It was an
+ecclesiastical corporation of the highest authority in every cause
+connected with the Church, while gathering law, philosophy, and
+literature under its wing. The first theologians, the most eminent
+jurists were collected there, not by any means always in alliance with
+the narrower tendencies and methods of the Inquisition. It is notable,
+however, that this great institution lost no time in claiming the
+prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was less her career as a
+warrior than her position as a sorceress. The actual facts of her life
+were of secondary importance to them. Orleans, Rheims, even her attack
+upon Paris were nothing in comparison with the black art which they
+believed to be her inspiration. The guidance of Heaven which was not the
+guidance of the Church was to them a claim which meant only rebellion
+of the direst kind. They had longed to seize her and strip her of her
+presumptuous pretensions from the first moment of her appearance. They
+could not allow a day of her overthrow to pass by without snatching at
+this much-desired victim.
+
+No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial
+for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame,
+the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly
+attractive to the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped
+for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into
+which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better
+understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it is
+the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to extremity
+and fighting for its life through all the subtleties of thought and
+fierce attacks of interrogation--or the mere love of inflicting torture,
+misery, and death, which the Church was prevented from doing in the
+common way, it is impossible to tell; but there is no doubt that a
+thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the prey, a sense of
+horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the air, whenever such a
+tribunal is thought of. The thrill, the stir, the eagerness among those
+black birds of doom is more evident than usual in the headlong haste of
+that demand. _Sous l'influence de l'Angleterre_, say the historians; the
+more shame for them if it was so; but they were clearly under influence
+wider and more infallible, the influence of that instinct, whatever it
+may be, which makes a trial for heresy ten thousand times more cruel,
+less restrained by any humanities of nature, than any other kind of
+trial which history records.
+
+That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of Jeanne,
+"called the Maid," as having "dogmatised, sown, published, and caused
+to be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued great
+scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith." "Using the
+rights of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy See
+of Rome we instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the Catholic
+faith, and under penalty of the law: and all other Catholic persons of
+whatsoever condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate, to send or to
+bring as prisoner before us with all speed and surety the said Jeanne,
+vehemently suspected of various crimes springing from heresy, that
+proceedings may be taken against her before us in the name of the Holy
+Inquisition, and with the favour and aid of the doctors and masters of
+the University of Paris, and other notable counsellors present there."
+
+It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the
+University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry. We can only reply
+again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests! But there
+was very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there is an
+eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like the
+headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of action
+suggested by a third party. Nor is there anything to lead us to believe
+that the movement was not spontaneous. It is little likely, indeed, that
+the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any inspired maid,
+any more than the enlightened Oxford would do so. But the ideas of the
+fifteenth century were widely different, and witchcraft and heresy were
+the most enthralling and exciting of subjects, as they are still to
+whosoever believes in them, learned or unlearned, great or small.
+
+It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who loved
+Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths by this
+catastrophe. We have no sympathy with those who compare the career of
+any mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and passion of
+our Lord. Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous element the
+disappointment of their hopes must have been in the misery of the first
+disciples, the Apostles, the mother, all the spectators who had watched
+with wonder and faith the mission of the Messiah. Had it failed? had all
+the signs come to nothing, all those divine words and ways, to our minds
+so much more wonderful than any miracles? Was there no meaning in
+them? Were they mere unaccountable delusions, deceptions of the senses,
+inspirations perhaps of mere genius--not from God at all except in a
+secondary way? In the three terrible days that followed the Crucifixion
+the burden of a world must have lain on the minds of those who had
+seen every hope fail: no legions of angels appearing, no overwhelming
+revelation from heaven, no change in a moment out of misery into the
+universal kingship, the triumphant march. That was but the self-delusion
+of the earth which continually travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the
+most terrible of all despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest
+nothing should be true.
+
+But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the
+deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself.
+Were her first triumphs accidents merely, were her "voices" delusions,
+had she been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the
+servant? It was a stupor which quenched every voice--a great silence
+through the country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours.
+The Compiègne people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do not
+mention Jeanne at all. We need not immediately take into account the
+baser souls always plentiful, the envious captains and the rest who
+might be secretly rejoicing. The entire country, both friends and foes,
+had come to a dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The last
+circumstance of which we must remind the reader, and which was of the
+greatest importance, is, that it was only a small part of France that
+knew anything personally of Jeanne. From Tours it is a far cry to
+Picardy. All her triumphs had taken place in the south. The captive of
+Beaulieu and Beaurevoir spent the sad months of her captivity among a
+population which could have heard of her only by flying rumours coming
+from hostile quarters. From the midland of France to the sea, near
+to which her prison was situated, is a long way, and those northern
+districts were as unlike the Orleannais as if they had been in two
+different countries. Rouen in Normandy no more resembled Rheims, than
+Edinburgh resembled London: and in the fifteenth century that was saying
+a great deal. Nothing can be more deceptive than to think of these
+separate and often hostile duchies as if they bore any resemblance to
+the France of to-day.
+
+The captor of Jeanne was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg and took her as
+we have seen to the quarters of his master at Margny, into whose hands
+she thenceforward passed. She was kept in the camp three or four days
+and then transferred to the castle of Beaulieu, which belonged to him;
+and afterwards to the more important stronghold of Beaurevoir, which
+seems to have been his principal residence. We know very few details of
+her captivity. According to one chronicler, d'Aulon, her faithful friend
+and intendant, was with her at least in the former of those prisons,
+where at first she would appear to have been hopeful and in good
+spirits, if we may trust to the brief conversation between her and
+d'Aulon, which is one of the few details which reach us of that period.
+While he lamented over the probable fate of Compiègne she was confident.
+"That poor town of Compiègne that you loved so much," he said, "by this
+time it will be in the hands of the enemies of France." "No," said
+the Maid, "the places which the king of Heaven brought back to the
+allegiance of the gentle King Charles by me, will not be retaken by his
+enemies." In this case at least the prophecy came true.
+
+And perhaps there might have been at first a certain relief in Jeanne's
+mind, such as often follows after a long threatened blow has fallen. She
+had no longer the vague tortures of suspense, and probably believed that
+she would be ransomed as was usual: and in this silence and seclusion
+her "voices" which she had not obeyed as at first, but yet which had not
+abandoned her, nor shown estrangement, were more near and audible than
+amid the noise and tumult of war. They spoke to her often, sometimes
+three times a day, as she afterwards said, in the unbroken quiet of
+her prison. And though they no longer spoke of new enterprises and
+victories, their words were full of consolation. But it was not long
+that Jeanne's young and vigorous spirit could content itself with
+inaction. She was no mystic; willingly giving herself over to dreams and
+visions is more possible to the old than to the young. Her confidence
+and hope for her good friends of Compiègne gave way before the continued
+tale of their sufferings, and the inveterate siege which was driving
+them to desperation. No doubt the worst news was told to Jeanne, and
+twice over she made a desperate attempt to escape, in hope of being able
+to succour them, but without any sanction, as she confesses, from her
+spiritual instructors. At Beaulieu the attempt was simple enough: the
+narrative seems to imply that the doorway, or some part of the wall of
+her room, had been closed with laths or planks nailed across an opening:
+and between these she succeeded in slipping, "as she was very slight,"
+with the hope of locking the door to an adjoining guard-room upon the
+men who had charge of her, and thus getting free. But alas! The porter
+of the château, who had no business there, suddenly appeared in the
+corridor, and she was discovered and taken back to her chamber. At
+Beaurevoir, which was farther off, her attempt was a much more desperate
+one, and indicates a despair and irritation of mind which had become
+unbearable. At this place her own condition was much alleviated; the
+castle was the residence of Jean de Luxembourg's wife and aunt, ladies
+who visited Jeanne continually, and soon became interested and attached
+to her; but as the master of the house was himself in the camp before
+Compiègne, they had the advantage or disadvantage, as far as the
+prisoner was concerned, of constant news, and Jeanne's trouble for her
+friends grew daily.
+
+She seems, indeed, after the assurance she had expressed at first,
+to have fallen into great doubt and even carried on within herself a
+despairing argument with her spiritual guides on this point, battling
+with these saintly influences as in the depths of the troubled heart
+many have done with the Creator Himself in similar circumstances. "How,"
+she cried, "could God let them perish who had been so good and loyal to
+their King?" St. Catherine replied gently that He would Himself care for
+these _bons amis_, and even promised that "before the St. Martin"
+relief would come. But Jeanne had probably by this time--in her great
+disappointment and loneliness, and with the sense in her of so much
+power to help were she only free--got beyond her own control. They bade
+her to be patient. One of them, amid their exhortations to accept her
+fate cheerfully, and not to be astonished at it, seems to have conveyed
+to her mind the impression that she should not be delivered till she had
+seen the King of England. "Truly I will not see him! I would rather die
+than fall into the hands of the English," cried Jeanne in her petulance.
+The King of England is spoken of always, it is curious to note, as if
+he had been a great, severe ruler like his father, never as the child he
+really was. But Jeanne in her helplessness and impotence was impatient
+even with her saints. Day by day the news came in from Compiègne,
+all that was favourable to the Burgundians received with joy and
+thanksgiving by the ladies of Luxembourg, while the captive consumed her
+heart with vain indignation. At last Jeanne would seem to have wrought
+herself up to the most desperate of expedients. Whether her room was in
+the donjon, or whether she was allowed sufficient freedom in the house
+to mount to the battlements there, we are not informed--probably the
+latter was the case: for it was from the top of the tower that the rash
+girl at last flung herself down, carried away by what sudden frenzy
+of alarm or sting of evil tidings can never be known. Probably she had
+hoped that a miracle would be wrought on her behalf, and that faith
+was all that was wanted, as on so many other occasions. Perhaps she had
+heard of the negotiations to sell her to the English, which would give a
+keener urgency to her determination to get free; all that appears in the
+story, however, is her wild anxiety about Compiègne and her _bons amis_.
+How she escaped destruction no one knows. She was rescued for a more
+tremendous and harder fate.
+
+The Maid was taken up as dead from the foot of the tower (the height is
+estimated at sixty feet); but she was not dead, nor even seriously hurt.
+Her frame, so slight that she had been able to slip between the bars put
+up to secure her, had so little solidity that the shock would seem
+to have been all that ailed her. She was stunned and unconscious and
+remained so far some time; and for three days neither ate nor drank. But
+though she was so humbled by the effects of the fall, "she was comforted
+by St. Catherine, who bade her confess and implore the mercy of God" for
+her rash disobedience--and repeated the promise that before Martinmas
+Compiègne should be relieved. Jeanne did not perhaps in her rebellion
+deserve this encouragement; but the heavenly ladies were kind and
+pitiful and did not stand upon their dignity. The wonderful thing was
+that Jeanne recovered perfectly from this tremendous leap.
+
+The earthly ladies, though so completely on the other side, were
+scarcely less kind to the Maid. They visited her daily, carried their
+news to her, were very friendly and sweet: and no doubt other visitors
+came to make the acquaintance of a prisoner so wonderful. There was one
+point on which they were very urgent, and this was about her dress. It
+shamed and troubled them to see her in the costume of a man. Jeanne had
+her good reasons for that, which perhaps she did not care to tell
+them, fearing to shock the ears of a demoiselle of Luxembourg with the
+suggestion of dangers of which she knew nothing. No doubt it was true
+that while doing the serious work of war, as she said afterwards, it was
+best that she should be dressed as a man; but Jeanne had reason to know
+besides, that it was safer, among the rough comrades and gaolers who now
+surrounded her, to wear the tight-fitting and firmly fastened dress of
+a soldier. She answered the ladies and their remonstrances with all
+the grace of a courtier. Could she have done it she would rather have
+yielded the point to them, she said, than to any one else in France,
+except the Queen. The women wherever she went were always faithful
+to this young creature, so pure-womanly in her young angel-hood and
+man-hood. The poor followed to kiss her hands or her armour, the rich
+wooed her with tender flatteries and persuasions. There is not record in
+all her career of any woman who was not her friend.
+
+For the last dreary month of that winter she was sent to the fortress
+of Crotoy on the Somme, for what reason we are not told, probably to
+be more near the English into whose hands she was about to be given
+up: again another shameful bargain in which the guilt lies with the
+Burgundians and not with the English. If Charles I. was sold as we Scots
+all indignantly deny, the shame of the sale was on our nation, not on
+England, whom nobody has ever blamed for the transaction. The sale of
+Jeanne was brutally frank. It was indeed a ransom which was paid to
+Jean of Luxembourg with a share to the first captor, the archer who had
+secured her; but it was simple blood-money as everybody knew. At Crotoy
+she had once more the solace of female society, again with much
+pressing upon her of their own heavy skirts and hanging sleeves. A
+fellow-prisoner in the dungeon of Crotoy, a priest, said mass every day
+and gave her the holy communion. And her mind seems to have been soothed
+and calmed. Compiègne was relieved; the saints had kept their word: she
+had that burden the less upon her soul: and over the country there were
+against stirrings of French valour and success. The day of the Maid was
+over, but it began to bear the fruit of a national quickening of vigour
+and life.
+
+It was at Crotoy, in December, that she was transferred to English
+hands. The eager offer of the University of Paris to see her speedy
+condemnation had not been accepted, and perhaps the Burgundians had
+been willing to wait, to see if any ransom was forthcoming from
+France. Perhaps too, Paris, which sang the _Te Deum_ when she was taken
+prisoner, began to be a little startled by its own enthusiasm and to ask
+itself the question what there was to be so thankful about?--a result
+which has happened before in the history of that impulsive city:--and
+Paris was too near the centre of France, where the balance seemed to
+be turning again in favour of the national party, to have its thoughts
+distracted by such a trial as was impending. It seemed better to the
+English leaders to conduct their prisoner to a safer place, to the
+depths of Normandy where they were most strong. They seem to have
+carried her away in the end of the year, travelling slowly along the
+coast, and reaching Rouen by way of Eu and Dieppe, as far away as
+possible from any risk of rescue. She arrived in Rouen in the beginning
+of the year 1431, having thus been already for nearly eight months in
+close custody. But there were no further ministrations of kind women for
+Jeanne. She was now distinctly in the hands of her enemies, those who
+had no sympathy or natural softening of feeling towards her.
+
+The severities inflicted upon her in her new prison at Rouen were
+terrible, almost incredible. We are told that she was kept in an iron
+cage (like the Countess of Buchan in earlier days by Edward I.), bound
+hands, and feet, and throat, to a pillar, and watched incessantly by
+English soldiers--the latter being an abominable and hideous method
+of torture which was never departed from during the rest of her life.
+Afterwards, at the beginning of her trial she was relieved from the
+cage, but never from the presence and scrutiny of this fierce and
+hateful bodyguard. Such detestable cruelties were in the manner of
+the time, which does not make us the less sicken at them with burning
+indignation and the rage of shame. For this aggravation of her
+sufferings England alone was responsible. The Burgundians at their worst
+had not used her so. It is true that she was to them a piece of
+valuable property worth so much good money; which is a powerful argument
+everywhere. But to the English she meant no money: no one offered to
+ransom Jeanne on the side of her own party, for whom she had done
+so much. Even at Tours and Orleans, so far as appears, there was no
+subscription--to speak in modern terms,--no cry among the burghers to
+gather their crowns for her redemption--not a word, not an effort, only
+a barefooted procession, a mass, a Miserere, which had no issue. France
+stood silent to see what would come of it; and her scholars and divines
+swarmed towards Rouen to make sure that nothing but harm should come
+of it to the ignorant country lass, who had set up such pretences of
+knowing better than others. The King congratulated himself that he
+had another prophetess as good as she, and a Heaven-sent boy from the
+mountains who would do as well and better than Jeanne. Where was Dunois?
+Where was La Hire,(1) a soldier bound by no conventions, a captain whose
+troop went like the wind where it listed, and whose valour was known?
+Where was young Guy de Laval, so ready to sell his lands that his men
+might be fit for service? All silent; no man drawing a sword or saying
+a word. It is evident that in this frightful pause of fate, Jeanne had
+become to France as to England, the Witch whom it was perhaps a danger
+to have had anything to do with, whose spells had turned the world
+upside down for a moment: but these spells had become ineffectual or
+worn out as is the nature of sorcery. No explanation, not even the
+well-worn and so often valid one of human baseness, could explain the
+terrible situation, if not this.
+
+     (1) La Hire was at Louvain, which we hear a little later the
+     new English levies would not march to besiege till the Maid
+     was dead, and where Dunois joined him in March of this fatal
+     year. These two at Louvain within a few leagues of Rouen and
+     not a sword drawn for Jeanne!--the wonder grows.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI -- THE JUDGES. 1431.
+
+The name of Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, appears to us at this
+long distance as arising out of the infernal mists, into which, when his
+ministry of shame was accomplished, he disappeared again, bearing with
+him nothing but hatred and ill fame. Yet in his own day and to his
+contemporaries, he was not an inconsiderable man. He was of Rheims,
+a great student, and excellent scholar, the friend of many good men,
+highly esteemed among the ranks of the learned, a good man of business,
+which is not always the attribute of a scholar, and at the same time a
+Burgundian of pronounced sentiments, holding for his Duke, against the
+King. When Beauvais was summoned by Charles, after his coronation, at
+that moment of universal triumph when all seemed open for him to march
+upon Paris if he would, the city had joyfully thrown open its doors to
+the royal army, and in doing so had driven out its Bishop, who was hot
+on the other side. He would not seem to have been wanted in Paris at
+that moment. The "triste Bedford," as Michelet calls him, had no means
+of employing an ambitious priest, no dirty work for the moment to give
+him. It is natural to suppose that a man so admirably adapted for that
+employment went in search of it to the ecclesiastical court, not
+beloved of England, which the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester held there.
+Winchester was the only one of the House of Lancaster who had money to
+carry on the government either at home or abroad. The two priests,
+as the historians are always pleased to insinuate in respect to
+ecclesiastics, soon understood each other, and Winchester became aware
+that he had in Cauchon a tool ready for any shameful enterprise. It is
+not, however, necessary to assume so much as this, for we have not the
+least reason to believe that either one or the other of them had the
+slightest doubt on the subject of Jeanne, or as to her character. She
+was a pernicious witch, filling a hitherto invincible army with that
+savage fright which is but too well understood among men, and which
+produces cruel outrages as well as cowardly panic. The air of this very
+day, while I write, is ringing with the story of a woman burnt to death
+by her own family under the influence of that same horrible panic and
+terror. Cauchon was the countryman, almost the _pays_--an untranslatable
+expression,--of Jeanne; but he did not believe in her any more than the
+loftier ecclesiastics of France believed in Bernadette of Lourdes,
+who was of the spiritual lineage of Jeanne, nor than we should believe
+to-day in a similar pretender. It seems unnecessary then to think of
+dark plots hatched between these two dark priests against the white,
+angelic apparition of the Maid.
+
+What services Cauchon had done to recommend him to the favour of
+Winchester we are not told, but he was so much in favour that the
+Cardinal had recommended him to the Pope for the vacant archbishopric
+of Rouen a few months before there was any immediate question of Jeanne.
+The appointment was opposed by the clergy of Rouen, and the Pope had not
+come to any decision as yet on the subject. But no doubt the ambition of
+Cauchon made him very eager, with such a tempting prize before him, to
+recommend himself to his English patron by every means in his power. And
+he it was who undertook the office of negotiating the ransom of Jeanne
+from the hands of Jean de Luxembourg. We doubt whether after all it
+would be just even to call this a nefarious bargain. To the careless
+seigneur it would probably be very much a matter of course. The ransom
+offered--six thousand francs--was as good as if she had been a prince.
+The ladies at home might be indignant, but what was their foolish fancy
+for a high-flown girl in comparison with these substantial crowns in his
+pocket; and to be free from the responsibility of guarding her would be
+an advantage too. And if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why
+should he? A most pertinent question. Cauchon, on the other hand, could
+assure all objectors that no summary vengeance was to be taken on
+the Maid. She was to be judged by the Church, and by the best men the
+University could provide, and if she were found innocent, no doubt would
+go free.
+
+They must have been sanguine indeed who hoped for a triumphant acquittal
+of Jeanne; but still it may have been hoped that a trial by her
+countrymen would in every case be better for her than to languish in
+prison or to be seized perhaps by the English on some after occasion,
+and to perish by their hands. Let us therefore be fair to Cauchon, if
+possible, up to the beginning of the _Procès_. He was no Frenchman,
+but a Burgundian; his allegiance was to his Duke, not to the King of
+England; but his natural sovereign did so, and many, very many men of
+note and importance were equally base, and did not esteem it base at
+all. Had the inhabitants of Rheims, his native town, or of Rouen,
+in which _his_ trial and downfall took place as well as Jeanne's,
+pronounced for the King of Prussia in the last war, and proclaimed
+themselves his subjects, the traitors would have been hung with infamy
+from their own high towers, or driven into their river headlong. But
+things were very different in the fifteenth century. There has never
+been a moment in our history when either England or Scotland has
+pronounced for a foreign sway. Scotland fought with desperation for
+centuries against the mere name of suzerainty, though of a kindred race.
+There have been terrible moments of forced subjugation at the point of
+the sword; but never any such phenomena as appeared in France, so far
+on in the world's history as was that brilliant and highly cultured
+age. Such a state of affairs is to our minds impossible to understand
+or almost to believe: but in the interests of justice it must be fully
+acknowledged and understood.
+
+Cauchon arises accordingly, not at first with any infamy, out of the
+obscurity. He had been expelled and dethroned from his See, but this
+only for political reasons. He was ecclesiastically Bishop of Beauvais
+still; it was within his diocese that the Maid had taken prisoner, and
+there also her last acts of magic, if magic there was, had taken place.
+He had therefore a legal right to claim the jurisdiction, a right which
+no one had any interest in taking from him. If Paris was disappointed
+at not having so interesting a trial carried on before its courts, there
+was compensation in the fact that many doctors of the University were
+called to assist Cauchon in his examination of the Maid, and to bring
+her, witch, sorceress, heretic, whatever she might be, to question.
+These doctors were not undistinguished or unworthy men. A number of them
+held high office in the Church; almost all were honourably connected
+with the University, the source of learning in France. "With what art
+were they chosen!" exclaims M. Blaze de Bury. "A number of theologians,
+the élite of the time, had been named to represent France at the council
+of Bâle; of these Cauchon chose the flower." This does not seem on the
+face of it to be a fact against, but rather in favour of, the tribunal,
+which the reader naturally supposes must have been the better, the more
+just, for being chosen among the flower of learning in France. They were
+not men who could be imagined to be the tools of any Bishop. Quicherat,
+in his moderate and able remarks on this subject, selects for special
+mention three men who took a very important part in it, Guillame Érard,
+Nicole Midi, and Tomas de Courcelles. They were all men who held a high
+place in the respect of their generation. Érard was a friend of Machet,
+the confessor of Charles VII., who had been a member of the tribunal
+at Poitiers which first pronounced upon the pretensions of Jeanne; yet
+after the trial of the Maid Machet still describes him as a man of the
+highest virtue and heavenly wisdom. Nicole Midi continued to hold an
+honourable place in his University for many years, and was the man
+chosen to congratulate Charles when Paris finally became again the
+residence of the King. Courcelles was considered the first theologian of
+the age. "He was an austere and eloquent young man," says Quicherat,
+"of a lucid mind, though nourished on abstractions. He was the first of
+theologians long before he had attained the age at which he could assume
+the rank of doctor, and even before he had finished his studies he was
+considered as the successor of Gerson. He was the light of the council
+of Bâle. Eneas Piccolomini (Pope Pius II.) speaks with admiration of his
+capacity and his modesty. In him we recognise the father of the freedom
+of the Gallican Church. His disinterestedness is shown by the simple
+position with which he contented himself. He died with no higher rank
+than that of Dean of the Chapter of Paris."
+
+Did this in Cæsar seem ambitious? Was this the man to be used for
+their vile ends by a savage English party thirsting for the blood of an
+innocent victim, and by the vile priest who was its tool? It does not
+seem so to our eyes across the long level of the centuries which clear
+away so many mists. And no more dreadful accusation can be brought
+against France than the suggestion that men like these, her best and
+most carefully trained, were willing to act as blood-hounds for
+the advantage and the pay of the invader. But there are many French
+historians to whom the mere fact of a black gown or at least an
+ecclesiastical robe, confounds every testimony, and to whom even the
+name of Frenchman does not make it appear possible that a priest should
+retain a shred of honour or of honesty. We should have said by the light
+of nature and probability that had every guarantee been required for the
+impartiality and justice of such a tribunal, they could not have
+been better secured than by the selection of such men to conduct its
+proceedings. They made a great and terrible mistake, as the wisest
+of men have made before now. They did much worse, they behaved to an
+unfortunate girl who was in their power with indescribable ferocity and
+cruelty; but we must hope that this was owing to the period at which
+they lived rather than to themselves.
+
+It is not perhaps indeed from the wise and learned, the Stoics and
+Pundits of a University, that we should choose judges for the divine
+simplicity of those babes and sucklings out of whose mouth praise is
+perfected. At the same time to choose the best men is not generally the
+way adopted to procure a base judgement. Cauchon might have been subject
+to this blame had he filled the benches of his court with creatures of
+his own, nameless priests and dialecticians, knowing nothing but
+their own poor science of words. He did not do so. There were but two
+Englishmen in the assembly, neither of them men of any importance or
+influence although there must have been many English priests in the
+country and in the train of Winchester. There were not even any special
+partisans of Burgundy, though some of the assessors were Burgundian by
+birth. We should have said, had we known no more than this, that every
+precaution had been taken to give the Maid the fairest trial. But at the
+same time a trial which is conducted under the name of the Inquisition
+is always suspect. The mere fact of that terrible name seems to
+establish a foregone conclusion; few are the prisoners at that bar who
+have ever escaped. This fact is almost all that can be set against the
+high character of the individuals who composed the tribunal. At all
+events it is no argument against the English that they permitted the
+best men in France to be chosen as Jeanne's judges. It is the most
+bewildering and astonishing of historical facts that they were so, and
+yet came to the conclusion they did, by the means they did, and that
+without falling under the condemnation, or scorn, or horror of their
+fellow-men.
+
+This then was the assembly which gathered in Rouen in the beginning of
+1431. Quicherat will not venture to affirm even that intimidation was
+directly employed to effect their decision. He says that the evidence
+"tends to prove" that this was the case, but honestly allows that, "it
+is well to remark that the witnesses contradict each other." "In all
+that I have said," he adds, "my intention has been to prove that the
+judges of the Maid had in no way the appearance of partisans hotly
+pursuing a political vengeance; but that, on the contrary, their known
+weight, the consideration which most of them enjoyed, and the nature
+of the tribunal for which they were assembled, were all calculated to
+produce generally an expectation full of confidence and respect."
+
+Meanwhile there is not a word to be said for the treatment to which
+Jeanne herself was subjected, she being, so far as is apparent, entirely
+in English custody. She had been treated with tolerable gentleness it
+would seem in the first part of her captivity while in the hands of Jean
+de Luxembourg, the Count de Ligny. The fact that the ladies of the house
+were for her friends must have assured this, and there is no complaint
+made anywhere of cruelty or even unkindness. When she arrived in Rouen
+she was confined in the middle chamber of the donjon, which was the best
+we may suppose, neither a dungeon under the soil, nor a room under the
+leads, but one to which there was access by a short flight of steps from
+the courtyard, and which was fully lighted and not out of reach or sight
+of life. But in this chamber was an iron cage,(1) within which she was
+bound, feet, and waist and neck, from the time of her arrival until
+the beginning of the trial, a period of about six weeks. Five English
+soldiers of the lowest class watched her night and day, three in the
+room itself, two at the door. It is enough to think for a moment of the
+probable manners and morals of these troopers to imagine what torture
+must have been inflicted by their presence upon a young woman who had
+always been sensitive above all things to the laws of personal modesty
+and reserve. Their course jests would no doubt be unintelligible to
+her, which would be an alleviation; but their coarse laughter, their
+revolting touch, their impure looks, would be an endless incessant
+misery. We are told that she indignantly bestowed a hearty buffet on the
+cheek of a tailor who approached her too closely when it was intended
+to furnish her with female dress; but she was helpless to defend herself
+when in her irons, and had to endure as she best could--the bars of
+her cage let us hope, if cage there was, affording her some little
+protection from the horror of the continual presence of these rude
+attendants, with whom it was a shame to English gentlemen and knights to
+surround a helpless woman.
+
+When her trial began Jeanne was released from her cage, but was still
+chained by one foot to a wooden beam during the day, and at night to the
+posts of her bed. Sometimes her guards would wake her to tell her that
+she had been condemned and was immediately to be led forth to execution;
+but that was a small matter. Attempts were also made to inflict the
+barest insult and outrage upon her, and on one occasion she is said to
+have been saved only by the Earl of Warwick, who heard her cries and
+went to her rescue. By night as by day she clung to her male garb,
+tightly fastened by the innumerable "points" of which Shakespeare so
+often speaks. Such were the horrible circumstances in which she awaited
+her public appearance before her judges. She was brought before them
+every day for months together, to be badgered by the keenest wits in
+France, coming back and back with artful questions upon every detail
+of every subject, to endeavour to shake her firmness or force her into
+self-contradiction. Imagine a cross-examination going on for months,
+like those--only more cruel than those--to which we sometimes see an
+unfortunate witness exposed in our own courts of law. There is nothing
+more usual than to see people break down entirely after a day or two
+of such a tremendous ordeal, in which their hearts and lives are turned
+inside out, their minds so bewildered that they know not what they are
+saying, and everything they have done in their lives exhibited in the
+worst, often in an entirely fictitious, light, to the curiosity and
+amusement of the world.
+
+But all our processes are mercy in comparison with those to which French
+prisoners at the bar are still exposed. It is unnecessary to enter into
+an account of these which are so well known; but they show that even
+such a trial as that of Jeanne was by no means so contrary to common
+usage, as it would be, and always would have been in England. In England
+we warn the accused to utter no rash word which may be used against him;
+in France the first principle is to draw from him every rash word that
+he can be made to bring forth. This was the method employed with Jeanne.
+Her judges were all Churchmen and dialecticians of the subtlest wit
+and most dexterous faculties in France; they had all, or almost all, a
+strong prepossession against her. Though we cannot believe that men of
+such quality were suborned, there was, no doubt, enough of jealous and
+indignant feeling among them to make the desire of convicting Jeanne
+more powerful with them than the desire for pure justice. She was a true
+Christian, but not perhaps the soundest of Church-women. Her visions had
+not the sanction of any priest's approval, except indeed the official
+but not warm affirmation of the Council at Poitiers. She had not
+hastened to take the Church into her confidence nor to put herself under
+its protection. Though her claims had been guaranteed by the company
+of divines at Poitiers, she herself had always appealed to her private
+instructions, through her saints, rather than to the guiding of any
+priest. The chief ecclesiastical dignitary of her own party had just
+held her up to the reprobation of the people for this cause: she was too
+independent, so proud that she would take no advice but acted according
+to her own will. The more accustomed a Churchman is to experience
+the unbounded devotion and obedience of women, the more enraged he is
+against those who judge for themselves or have other guides on whom
+they rely. Jeanne was, beside all other sins alleged against her, a
+presumptuous woman: and very few of these men had any desire to acquit
+her. They were little accustomed to researches which were solely
+intended to discover the truth: their principle rather was, as it has
+been the principle of many, to obtain proofs that their own particular
+way of thinking was the right one. It is not perhaps very good even for
+a system of doctrine when this is the principle by which it is tested.
+It is more fatal still, on this principle, to judge an individual for
+death or for life. It will be abundantly proved, however, by all that is
+to follow, that in face of this tribunal, learned, able, powerful, and
+prejudiced, the peasant girl of nineteen stood like a rock, unmoved
+by all their cleverness, undaunted by their severity, seldom or never
+losing her head, or her temper, her modest steadfastness, or her high
+spirit. If they hoped to have an easy bargain of her, never were men
+more mistaken. Not knowing a from b, as she herself said, untrained,
+unaided, she was more than a match for them all.
+
+Round about this centre of eager intelligence, curiosity, and prejudice,
+the cathedral and council chamber teeming with Churchmen, was a dark and
+silent ring of laymen and soldiers. A number of the English leaders were
+in Rouen, but they appear very little. Winchester, who had very
+lately come from England with an army, which according to some of the
+historians would not budge from Calais, where it had landed, "for fear
+of the Maid"--was the chief person in the place, but did not make any
+appearance at the trial, curiously enough; the Duke of Bedford we are
+informed was visible on one shameful occasion, but no more. But Warwick,
+who was the Governor of the town, appears frequently and various other
+lords with him. We see them in the mirror held up to us by the French
+historians, pressing round in an ever narrowing circle, closing up upon
+the tribunal in the midst, pricking the priests with perpetual sword
+points if they seem to loiter. They would have had everything pushed on,
+no delay, no possibility of escape. It is very possible that this was
+the case, for it is evident that the Witch was deeply obnoxious to the
+English, and that they were eager to have her and her endless process
+out of the way; but the evidence for their terror and fierce desire to
+expedite matters is of the feeblest. A canon of Rouen declared at the
+trial that he had heard it said by Maître Pierre Morice, and Nicolas
+l'Oyseleur, judges assessors, and by other whose names he does not
+recollect, "that the said English were so afraid of her that they did
+not dare to begin the siege of Louviers until she was dead; and that it
+was necessary if one would please them, to hasten the trial as much as
+possible and to find the means of condemning her." Very likely this was
+quite true: but it cannot at all be taken for proved by such evidence.
+Another contemporary witness allows that though some of the English
+pushed on her trial for hate, some were well disposed to her; the manner
+of Jeanne's imprisonment is the only thing which inclines the reader to
+believe every evil thing that is said against them.
+
+Such were the circumstances in which Jeanne was brought to trail. The
+population, moved to pity and to tears as any population would
+have been, before the end, would seem at the beginning to have been
+indifferent and not to have taken much interest one way or another: the
+court, a hundred men and more with all their hangers-on, the cleverest
+men in France, one more distinguished and impeccable than the others:
+the stern ring of the Englishmen outside keeping an eye upon the tedious
+suit and all its convolutions: these all appear before us, surrounding
+as with bands of iron the young lonely victim in the donjon, who
+submitting to every indignity, and deprived of every aid, feeling that
+all her friends had abandoned her, yet stood steadfast and strong in
+her absolute simplicity and honesty. It was but two years in that same
+spring weather since she had left Vaucouleurs to seek the fortune of
+France, to offer herself to the struggle which now was coming to an end.
+Not a soul had Jeanne to comfort or stand by her. She had her saints
+who--one wonders if such a thought ever entered into her young visionary
+head--had lured her to her doom, and who still comforted her with
+enigmatical words, promises which came true in so sadly different a
+sense from that in which they were understood.
+
+     (1) We are glad to add that the learned Quicherat has doubts
+     on the subject of the cage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII -- BEFORE THE TRIAL. LENT, 1431.
+
+We have not, however, sufficiently described the horror of the prison,
+and the treatment to which Jeanne was exposed, though the picture is
+already dark enough. It throws a horrible yet also a grotesque light
+upon the savage manners of the time to find that the chamber in which
+she was confined, had secret provision for an _espionnage_ of the most
+base kind, openings made in the walls through which everything that took
+place in the room, every proceeding of the unfortunate prisoner, could
+be spied upon and every word heard. The idea of such a secret watch
+has always been attractive to the vulgar mind, and no doubt it has been
+believed to exist many times when there was little or no justification
+for such an infernal thought. From the "ear" of Dionysius, down to the
+_Trou Judas_, which early tourists on the Continent were taught to fear
+in every chamber door, the idea has descended to our own times. It would
+seem, however, to be beyond doubt that this odious means of acquiring
+information was in full operation during the trial of Jeanne, and
+various spies were permitted to peep at her, and to watch for any
+unadvised word she might say in her most private moments. We are told
+that the Duke of Bedford made use of the opportunity in a still more
+revolting way, and was present, a secret spectator, at the fantastic
+scene when Jeanne was visited by a committee of matrons who examined
+her person to prove or to disprove one of the hateful insinuations which
+were made about her. The imagination, however, refuses to conceive that
+a man of serious age and of high functions should have degraded himself
+to the level of a Peeping Tom in this way; all the French historians,
+nevertheless, repeat the story though on the merest hearsay evidence.
+And they also relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery
+was committed upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing two
+secretaries at these openings, to take down her conversation with a spy
+who had been sent to her in the guise of a countryman of her own; and
+that not only Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion,
+listening, while their plot was carried out by the vile traitor inside.
+The clerks, we are glad to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but
+Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The Englishmen indeed shrank
+from no ignominy; nor did the great French savants assembled under the
+presidency of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin with that
+they were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the
+trial almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked,
+in the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the
+profoundest ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken,
+L'Oyseleur (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented to
+be sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, a _pays_,
+like herself from Lorraine, to invite her confidence: but his long
+conversations with the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by
+the secretaries, elicited nothing from her that she did not say in the
+public examination. She had no secret devices to betray to a traitor.
+She would not seem, indeed, to have suspected the man at all, not
+even when she saw him among her judges taking part against her. Jeanne
+herself suspected no falsehood, but made her confession to him, when she
+found that he was a priest, and trusted him fully. The bewildering
+and confusing fact, turning all the contrivances of her judges into
+foolishness, was, that she had nothing to confess that she was not ready
+to tell in the eye of day.
+
+The adoption of this abominable method of eliciting secrets from the
+candid soul which had none, was justified, it appears, by the manner of
+her trial, which was after the rules of the Inquisition--by which even
+more than by those which regulate an ordinary French trial the guilt of
+the accused is a foregone conclusion for which proof is sought, not a
+fair investigation of facts for abstract purposes of justice. The first
+thing to be determined by the tribunal was the counts of the indictment
+against Jeanne; was she to be tried for magical arts, for sorcery and
+witchcraft? It is very probable that the mission of L'Oyseleur was to
+obtain evidence that would clear up this question by means of recalling
+to her the stories of her childhood, of the enchanted tree, and the
+Fairies' Well; from which sources, her accusers anxiously hoped to prove
+that she derived her inspiration. But it is very clear that no such
+evidence was forthcoming, and that it seemed to them hopeless to
+attribute sorcery to her; therefore the accusation was changed to that
+of heresy alone. The following mandate from the University authorising
+her prosecution will show what the charge was; and the reader will note
+that one of its darkest items is the costume, which for so many good
+and sufficient reasons she wore. Here is the official description of the
+accused:
+
+"A woman, calling herself the Maid, leaving the dress and habit of her
+sex against the divine law, a thing abominable to God, clothed and armed
+in the habit and condition of a man, has done cruel deeds of homicide,
+and as is said has made the simple people believe, in order to abuse
+and lead them astray, that she was sent by God, and had knowledge of His
+divine secrets; along with several other doctrines (_dogmatisations_),
+very dangerous, prejudicial, and scandalous to our holy Catholic faith,
+in pursuing which abuses, and exercising hostility against us and our
+people, she has been taken in arms, before Compiègne, and brought as a
+prisoner before us."
+
+According to French law the indictment ought to have been founded upon a
+preliminary examination into the previous life of the accused, which, as
+it does not appear in the formal accusations, it was supposed had never
+been made. Recent researches, however, have proved that it was made, but
+was not of a nature to strengthen or justify any accusation. All that
+the examiners could discover was that Jeanne d'Arc was a good and honest
+maid who left a spotless reputation behind her in her native village,
+and that not a suspicion of _dogmatisations_, nor worship of fairies,
+nor any other unseemly thing was associated with her name. Other things
+less favourable, we are told, were reported of her: the statement,
+for instance, made in apparent good faith by Monstrelet the Burgundian
+chronicler, that she had been for some time a servant in an _auberge_,
+and there had learned to ride, and to consort with men--a statement
+totally without foundation, which was scarcely referred to in the trial.
+
+The skill of M. Quicherat discovered the substance of those inquiries
+among the many secondary papers, but they were not made use of in the
+formal proceedings. This also we are told, though contrary to the habit
+of French law, was justified by the methods of the Inquisition, which
+were followed throughout the trial. One breach of law and justice,
+however, is permitted by no code. It is expressly forbidden by French,
+and even by inquisitorial law, that a prisoner should be tried by
+his enemies--that is by judges avowedly hostile to him: an initial
+difficulty which it would have been impossible to get over and which
+had therefore to be ignored. One brave and honest man, Nicolas de
+Houppeville, had the courage to make this observation in one of the
+earliest sittings of the assembly:
+
+"Neither the Bishop of Beauvais" (he said) "nor the other members of the
+tribunal ought to be judges in the matter; and it did not seem to him a
+good mode of procedure that those who were of the opposite party to
+the accused should be her judges--considering also that she had been
+examined already by the clergy of Poitiers, and by the Archbishop of
+Rheims, who was the metropolitan of the said Bishop of Beauvais."
+
+Nicolas de Houppeville was a lawyer and had a right to be heard on such
+a point; but the reply of the judges was to throw him into prison, not
+without threats on the part of the civil authorities to carry the point
+further by throwing him into the Seine. This was the method by which
+every honest objection was silenced. That the examination at Poitiers,
+where the judges, as has been seen, were by no means too favourable to
+Jeanne, should never have been referred to by her present examiners,
+though there was no doubt it ought to have been one of the most
+important sources of the preliminary information--is also very
+remarkable. It was suggested indeed to Jeanne at a late period of the
+trial, that she might appeal to the Archbishop; but he was, as she well
+knew, one of her most cruel enemies.
+
+Still more important was the breach of all justice apparent in the fact
+that she had no advocate, no counsel on her side, no one to speak to
+her and conduct her defence. It was suggested to her near the end of the
+proceedings that she might choose one of her judges to fill this office;
+but even if the proposal had been a genuine one or at all likely to
+be to her advantage, it was then too late to be of any use. These
+particulars, we believe, were enough to invalidate any process in strict
+law; but the name of law seems ridiculous altogether as applied to this
+rambling and cruel cross-examination in which was neither sense nor
+decorum. The reader will understand that there were no witnesses either
+for or against her, the answers of the accused herself forming the
+entire evidence.
+
+One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at
+least more clear. The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left
+in the usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which
+the English troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and
+carrying on their noisy conversation, if nothing worse and more
+offensive--sometimes, as Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing
+(her sole solace) the soft voices of her saintly visitors--was not her
+only disturbance. Her solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive
+visitors of various kinds. L'Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who
+professed to be her countryman and who beguiled her into talk of her
+childhood and native place, was the first of these; and it is possible
+that at first his presence was a pleasure to her. One other visitor of
+whom we hear accidentally, a citizen of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems to
+have got in private interest and with a more or less good motive and no
+evil meaning. He warned her to answer with prudence the questions put
+to her, since it was a matter of life and death. She seemed to him to
+be "very simple" and still to believe that she might be ransomed. Earl
+Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on various occasions. He
+probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and thus heard her cry for
+help in her danger, executing, let us hope, summary vengeance on her
+brutal assailant; but he also evidently took advantage of his power to
+show his interesting prisoner to his friends on occasion. And it was he
+who took her original captor, Jean de Luxembourg, now Comte de Ligny,
+by whom she had been given up, to see her, along with an English lord,
+sometimes named as Lord Sheffield. The Belgian who had put so many good
+crowns in his pocket for her ransom, thought it good taste to enter with
+a jesting suggestion that he had come to buy her back.
+
+"Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear arms
+against us again," he said. The Maid was not deceived by this mocking
+suggestion. "It is well for you to jest," she said, "but I know you have
+no such power. I know that the English will kill me, believing, after I
+am dead, that they will be able to win all the kingdom of France: but
+if there were a hundred thousand more Goddens than there are, they shall
+never win the kingdom of France." The English lord drew his dagger to
+strike the helpless girl, all the stories say, but was prevented by
+Warwick. Warwick, however, we are told, though he had thus saved her
+twice, "recovered his barbarous instincts" as soon as he got outside,
+and indignantly lamented the possibility of Jeanne's escape from the
+stake.
+
+Such incidents as these alone lightened or darkened her weary days in
+prison. A traitor or spy, a prophet of evil shaking his head over her
+danger, a contemptuous party of jeering nobles; afterwards inquisitors,
+for ever repeating in private their tedious questions: these all visited
+her--but never a friend. Jeanne was not afraid of the English lord's
+dagger, or of the watchful eye of Warwick over her. Even when spying
+through a hole, if the English earl and knight, indeed permitted himself
+that strange indulgence, his presence and inspection must have been
+almost the only defence of the prisoner. Our historians all quote,
+with an admiration almost as misplaced as their horror of Warwick's
+"barbarous instincts," the _vrai galant homme_ of an Englishman who in
+the midst of the trial cried out "_Brave femme_!" (it is difficult to
+translate the words, for _brave_ means more than brave)--"why was she
+not English?" However we are not concerned to defend the English share
+of the crime. The worst feature of all is that she never seems to
+have been visited by any one favourable and friendly to her, except
+afterwards, the two or three pitying priests whose hearts were touched
+by her great sufferings, though they remained among her judges, and gave
+sentence against her. No woman seems ever to have entered that dreadful
+prison except those "matrons" who came officially as has been already
+said. The ladies de Ligny had cheered her in her first confinement,
+the kind women of Abbeville had not been shut out even from the gloomy
+fortress of Le Crotoy. But here no woman ever seems to have been
+permitted to enter, a fact which must either be taken to prove the
+hostility of the population, or the very vigorous regulations of the
+prison. Perhaps the barbarous watch set upon her, the soldiers ever
+present, may have been a reason for the absence of any female visitor.
+At all events it is a very distinct fact that during the whole period
+of her trial, five months of misery, except on the one occasion already
+referred to, no woman came to console the unfortunate Maid. She had
+never before during all her vicissitudes been without their constant
+ministrations.
+
+One woman, the only one we ever hear of who was not the partisan and
+lover of the Maid, does, however, make herself faintly seen amid the
+crowd. Catherine of La Rochelle--the woman who had laid claim to saintly
+visitors and voices like those of Jeanne, and who had been for a time
+received and fêted at the Court of Charles with vile satisfaction, as
+making the loss of the Maid no such great thing--had by this time been
+dropped as useless, on the appearance of the shepherd boy quoted by the
+Archbishop of Rheims, and had fallen into the hands of the English: was
+not she too a witch, and admirably qualified to give evidence as to the
+other witch, for whose blood all around her were thirsting? Catherine
+was ready to say anything that was evil of her sister sorceress. "Take
+care of her," she said; "if you lose sight of her for one moment, the
+devil will carry her away." Perhaps this was the cause of the guard
+in Jeanne's room, the ceaseless scrutiny to which she was exposed. The
+vulgar slanderer was allowed to escape after this valuable testimony.
+She comes into history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights
+that mean nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again
+with her false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have
+been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians.
+Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It
+is profane to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of
+a mountebank. This is the only woman in all her generation, so far
+as appears to us, who was not the partisan and devoted friend of the
+spotless Maid.
+
+The aspect of that old-world city of Rouen, still so old and picturesque
+to the visitor of to-day, though all new since that time except the
+churches, is curious and interesting to look back upon. It must have
+hummed and rustled with life through every street; not only with the
+English troops, and many a Burgundian man-at-arms, swaggering about,
+swearing big oaths and filling the air with loud voices,--but with all
+the polished bands of the doctors, men first in fame and learning of
+the famous University, and beneficed priests of all classes, canons
+and deans and bishops, with the countless array that followed them, the
+cardinal's tonsured Court in addition, standing by and taking no share
+in the business: but all French and English alike, occupied with one
+subject, talking of the trial, of the new points brought out, of the
+opinions of this doctor and that, of Maître Nicolas who had presumed on
+his lawyership to correct the bishop, and had suffered for it: of the
+bold canon who ventured to whisper a suggestion to the prisoner, and who
+ever since had had the eye of the governor upon him: of Warwick, keeping
+a rough shield of protection around the Maid but himself fiercely
+impatient of the law's delay, anxious to burn the witch and be done with
+her. And Jeanne herself, the one strange figure that nobody understood;
+was she a witch? Was she an angelic messenger? Her answers so simple,
+so bold, so full of the spirit and sentiment of truth, must have been
+reported from one to another. This is what she said; does that look like
+a deceiver? could the devils inspire that steadfastness, that constancy
+and quiet? or was it not rather the angels, the saints as she said?
+Never, we may be sure, had there been in Rouen a time of so much
+interest, such a theme for conversations, such a subject for all
+thoughts. The eager court sat with their tonsured heads together, keen
+to seize every weak point. Did you observe how she hesitated on this?
+Let us push that, we'll get an admission on that point to-morrow. It is
+impossible to believe that in such an assembly every man was a partisan,
+much less that each one of them was thinking of the fee of the English,
+the daily allowance which it was the English habit to make. That were to
+imagine a France, base indeed beyond the limits of human baseness. All
+the Norman dignitaries of the Church, all the most learned doctors
+of the University--no! that is too great a stretch of our faith. The
+greater part no doubt believed as an indisputable fact, that Jeanne was
+either a witch or an impostor, as we should all probably do now. And
+the vertigo of Inquisition gained upon them; they became day by day more
+exasperated with her seeming innocence, with what must have seemed to
+them the cunning and cleverness, impossible to her age and sex, of
+her replies. Who could have kept the girl so cool, so dauntless, so
+embarrassing in her straight-forwardness and sincerity? The saints? the
+saints were not dialecticians; far more likely the evil one himself, in
+whom the Church has always such faith. "He hath a devil and by Beelzebub
+casteth out devils." It was all like a play, only more exciting than
+any play, and going on endlessly, the excitement always getting stronger
+till it became the chief stimulus and occupation of life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII -- THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION. FEBRUARY, 1431.
+
+It was in the chapel of the Castle of Rouen, on the 21st of February,
+that the trial of Jeanne was begun. The judges present numbered about
+forty, and are carefully classed as doctors in theology, abbots, canons,
+doctors in canonical and civil law, with the Bishop of Beauvais at their
+head (the archepiscopal see of Rouen being vacant, as is added: but not
+that my lord of Beauvais hoped for that promotion). They were assembled
+there in all the solemnity of their priestly and professional robes,
+the reporters ready with their pens, the range of dark figures forming a
+semicircle round the presiding Bishop, when the officer of the court led
+in the prisoner, clothed in her worn and war-stained tunic, like a boy,
+with her hair cut close as for the helmet, and her slim figure, no doubt
+more slim than ever, after her long imprisonment. She had asked to be
+allowed to hear mass before coming to the bar, but this was refused. It
+was a privilege which she had never failed to avail herself of in her
+most triumphant days. Now the chapel--the sanctuary of God contained
+for her no sacred sacrifice, but only those dark benches of priests amid
+whom she found no responsive countenance, no look of kindness.
+
+Jeanne was addressed sternly by Cauchon, in an exhortation which it is
+sad to think was not in Latin, as it appears in the _Procès_. She was
+then required to take the oath on the Scriptures to speak the truth, and
+to answer all questions addressed to her. Jeanne had already held that
+conversation with L'Oyseleur in the prison which Cauchon and Warwick had
+listened to in secret with greedy ears, but which Manchon, the honest
+reporter, had refused to take down. Perhaps, therefore, the Bishop knew
+that the slim creature before him, half boy half girl, was not likely to
+be overawed by his presence or questions; but it cannot have been but a
+wonder to the others, all gazing at her, the first men in Normandy,
+the most learned in Paris, to hear her voice, _assez femme_, young and
+clear, arising in the midst of them, "I know not what things I may be
+asked," said Jeanne. "Perhaps you may ask me questions which I cannot
+answer." The assembly was startled by this beginning.
+
+"Will you swear to answer truly all that concerns the faith, and that
+you know?"
+
+"I will swear," said Jeanne, "about my father and mother and what I have
+done since coming to France; but concerning my revelations from God
+I will answer to no man, except only to Charles my King; I should not
+reveal them were you to cut off my head, unless by the secret counsel of
+my visions."
+
+The Bishop continued not without gentleness, enjoining her to swear at
+least that in everything that touched the faith she would speak truth;
+and Jeanne kneeling down crossed her hands upon the book of the Gospel,
+or Missal as it is called in the report, and took the required oath,
+always under the condition she stated, to answer truly on everything she
+knew concerning the faith, except in respect to her revelations.
+
+The examination then began with the usual formalities. She was asked her
+name (which she said with touching simplicity was Jeannette at home but
+Jeanne in France), the names of her father and mother, godfather and
+godmothers, the priest who baptised her, the place where she was born,
+etc., her age, almost nineteen; her education, consisting of the Pater
+Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, which her mother had taught her.
+
+Here she was asked, a curious interruption to the formal interrogatory,
+to say the Pater Noster--the reason of which sudden demand was that
+witches and sorcerers were supposed to be unable to repeat that prayer.
+As unexpected as the question was Jeanne's reply. She answered that if
+the Bishop would hear her in confession she would say it willingly. She
+had been refused all the exercises of piety, and she was speaking to a
+company of priests.
+
+There is a great dignity of implied protest against this treatment in
+such an answer. The request was made a second time with a promise of
+selecting two worthy Frenchmen to hear her: but her reply was the same.
+She would say the prayer when she made her confession but not otherwise.
+She was ready it would seem in proud humility to confess to any or
+to all of her enemies, as one whose conscience was clear, and who had
+nothing to conceal.
+
+She was then commanded not to attempt to escape from her prison, on pain
+of being condemned for heresy, but to this again she demurred at once.
+She would not accept the prohibition, but would escape if she could,
+so that no man could say that she had broken faith; although since her
+capture she had been bound in chains and her feet fastened with irons.
+To this, her examiner said that it was necessary so to secure her in
+order that she might not escape. "It is true and certain," she replied,
+"whatever others may wish, that to every prisoner it is lawful to escape
+if he can." It may be remarked, as she forcibly pointed out afterwards,
+that she had never given her faith, never surrendered, but had always
+retained her freedom of action.
+
+The tribunal thereupon called in the captain in charge of Jeanne's
+prison, a gentleman called John Gris in the record, probably John Grey,
+along with two soldiers, Bernoit and Talbot, and enjoined them to guard
+her securely and not to permit her to talk with any one without the
+permission of the court. This was all the business done on the first day
+of audience.
+
+On the 22d of February at eight o'clock in the morning, the sitting was
+resumed. In the meantime, however, the chapel had been found too small
+and too near the outer world, the proceedings being much interrupted by
+shouts and noises from without, and probably incommoded within by the
+audience which had crowded it the first day. The judges accordingly
+assembled in the great hall of the castle; they were forty-nine in
+number on the second day, the number being chiefly swelled by canons
+of Rouen. After some preliminary business the accused was once more
+introduced, and desired again to take the oath. Jeanne replied that she
+had done so on the previous day and that this was enough; upon which
+there followed a short altercation, which, however, ended by her consent
+to swear again that she would answer truly in all things that concerned
+the faith. The questioner this day was Jean Beaupère (_Pulchri patris_,
+as he is called in the Latin), a theologian, Master of Arts, Canon of
+Paris and of Besançon, "one of the greatest props of the University of
+Paris," a man holding a number of important offices, and who afterwards
+appeared at the Council of Bâle as the deputy of Normandy. He began
+by another exhortation to speak the truth, to which Jeanne replied as
+before that what she did say she would say truly, but that she would not
+answer upon all subjects. "I have done nothing but by revelation," she
+said.
+
+These preliminaries on both sides having been gone through, the
+examination was resumed. Jeanne informed the court in answer to
+Beaupère's question that she had been taught by her mother to sew and
+did not fear to compete with any woman in Rouen in these crafts; that
+she had once been absent from home when her family were driven out of
+their village by fear of the Burgundians, and that she had then lived
+for about fifteen days in the house of a woman called La Rousse, at
+Neufchâteau; that when she was at home she was occupied in the work of
+the house and did not go to the fields with the sheep and other animals;
+that she went to confession regularly to the Curé of her own village, or
+when he could not hear her, to some other priest, by permission of the
+Curé; also that two or three times she had made her confession to the
+mendicant friars--this being during her stay in Neufchâteau (where
+presumably she was not acquainted with the clergy); and that she
+received the sacrament always at Easter. Asked whether she had
+communicated at other feasts than Easter, she said briefly that this
+was enough. "Go on to the rest," _passez outre_, she added, and the
+questioner seems to have been satisfied. Then came the really vital
+part of the matter. She proceeded--no direct question on the point being
+recorded, though no doubt it was made--to tell how when she was about
+thirteen she heard voices from God bidding her to be good and obedient.
+The first time she was much afraid. The voice came about the hour of
+noon, in summer, in her father's garden. She was fasting but had not
+fasted the preceding day. The voice came from the right, towards the
+church; and came rarely without a great light. This light came always
+from the side whence the voice proceeded, and was a very bright
+radiance. When she came into France she still continued to hear the same
+voices.
+
+She was then asked how she could see the light when it was at the side;
+to which foolish question Jeanne gave no reply, but "turned to other
+matters," saying voluntarily with a soft implied reproof of the noise
+around her--that if she were in a wood, that is in a quiet place, she
+could hear the voices coming towards her. She added (going on, one could
+imagine, in a musing, forgetting the congregation of sinners about her)
+that it seemed to her a noble voice, and that she believed it came from
+God, and that when she had heard it three times she knew it was the
+voice of an angel; the voice always came quite clearly to her, and she
+understood it well.
+
+She was then asked what it said to her concerning the salvation of her
+soul.
+
+She said that it taught her to rule her life well, to go often to
+church: and told her that it was necessary that she, Jeanne, should
+go to France. The said Jeanne added that she would not be questioned
+further concerning the voice, or the manner in which it was made known
+to her, but that two or three times in a week it had said to her that
+she must go to France; but that her father knew nothing of this. The
+voice said to her that she should go to France, until she could endure
+it no longer; it said to her that she should raise the siege, which was
+set against the city of Orleans. It said also that she must go to Robert
+of Baudricourt, in the city of Vaucouleurs, who was captain of that
+place, and that he would give her people to go with her; to which she
+had answered that she was a poor girl who knew not how to ride, nor how
+to conduct war. She then said that she went to her uncle and told him
+that she wished to go with him for a little while to his house, and that
+she lived there for eight days; she then told her uncle that she must go
+to Vaucouleurs, and the said uncle took her there. Also she went on to
+say that when she came to the said city of Vaucouleurs, she recognised
+Robert of Baudricourt; though she had never seen him before she knew him
+by the voice that said to her which was he. She then told this Robert
+that it was necessary that she should go to France, but twice over he
+refused and repulsed her; the third time, however, he received her, and
+gave her certain men to go with her; the voice had told her that this
+would be so.
+
+She said also that the Duke of Lorraine sent for her to come to him, and
+that she went under a safe conduct granted by him, and told him that
+she must go to France. He asked her whether he should recover from his
+illness; but she told him that she knew nothing of that, and she talked
+very little to him of her journey. She told the Duke that he ought to
+send his son and his people with her to take her to France, and that
+she would pray God to restore his health; and then she was taken back to
+Vaucouleurs. She said also that when she left Vaucouleurs she wore the
+dress of a man, without any other arms than a sword which Robert de
+Baudricourt had given her; and that she had with her a chevalier, a
+squire, and four servants, and that they slept for the first night at
+St. Urbain, in the abbey there. She was then asked by whose advice she
+wore the dress of a man, but refused to answer. Finally she said that
+she charged no man with giving her this advice.
+
+She went on to say that the said Robert de Baudricourt exacted an oath
+from those who went with her, that they would conduct her to the end of
+her journey well and safely; and that he said, as she left him, "Go, and
+let come what will." She also said that she knew well that God loved the
+Duke of Orleans, concerning whom she had more revelations than about any
+other living man, except him whom she called her King. She added that it
+was necessary for her to wear male attire, and that whoever advised her
+to do so had given her wise counsel.
+
+She then said that she sent a letter to the English before Orleans, in
+which she required them to go away, a copy of which letter had been read
+to her in Rouen; but there were two or three mistakes, especially in
+the words which called upon them to surrender to the Maid instead of
+to surrender to the King. (There is no indication why these two latter
+statements should have been introduced into the midst of her narrative
+of the journey; it may have been in reply to some other question
+interjected by another of her examiners: _Passez outre_, as she herself
+says. She immediately resumes the simple and straightforward tale.)
+
+The said Jeanne went on to say that her further journey to him whom she
+called her King was without any impediment; and that when she arrived
+at the town of St. Catherine de Fierbois she sent news of her arrival to
+the town of Chasteau-Chinon where the said King was. She arrived there
+herself about noon and went to an inn(1); and after dinner went to him
+whom she called her King, who was in the castle. She then said that when
+she entered the chamber where he was, she knew him among all others,
+by the revelation of her "voices." She told her King that she wished to
+make war against the English.
+
+She was then asked whether when she heard the "voices" in the presence
+of the King the light was also seen in that place. She answered as
+before: _Passez outre: Transeatis ultra_. "Go on," as we might say, "to
+the other questions."
+
+She was asked if she had seen an angel hovering over her King. She
+answered: "Spare me; _passez outre_." She added afterwards, however,
+that before he put his hand to the work, the King had many beautiful
+apparitions and revelations. She was asked what these were. She
+answered: "I will not tell you; it is not I who should answer; send to
+the King and he will tell you."
+
+She was then asked if her voices had promised her that when she came to
+the King he would receive her. She answered that those of her own
+party knew that she had been sent from God and that some had heard
+and recognised the voices. Further, she said that her King and various
+others had heard and seen(2) the voices coming to her--Charles of
+Bourbon (Comte de Clermont) and two or three others with him. She then
+said that there was no day in which she did not hear that voice; but
+that she asked nothing from it except the salvation of her soul. Besides
+this, Jeanne confessed that the voice said she should be led to the town
+of St. Denis in France, where she wished to remain--that is after the
+attack on Paris--but that against her will the lords forced her to leave
+it: if she had not been wounded she would not have gone: but she was
+wounded in the moats of Paris: however she was healed in five days. She
+then said that she had made an assault, called in French _escarmouche_
+(skirmish), upon the town of Paris. She was asked if it was on a holy
+day, and said that she believed it was on a festival. She was then
+asked if she thought it well done to fight on a holy day, and answered,
+"_Passez outre_." Go on to the next question.
+
+This is a verbatim account of one day of the trial. Most of the
+translations which exist give questions as well as answers: but these
+are but occasionally given in the original document, and Jeanne's
+narrative reads like a calm, continuous statement, only interrupted now
+and then by a question, usually a cunning attempt to startle her with
+a new subject, and to hurry some admission from her. The great dignity
+with which she makes her replies, the occasional flash of high spirit,
+the calm determination with which she refuses to be led into discussion
+of the subjects which she had from the first moment reserved, are very
+remarkable. We have seen her hitherto only in conflict, in the din of
+battle and the fatigue, yet exuberant energy, of rapid journeys. Her
+circumstances were now very different. She had been shut up in prison
+for months, for six weeks at least she had been in irons, and the air
+of heaven had not blown upon this daughter of the fields; her robust yet
+sensitive maidenhood had been exposed to a hundred offences, and to the
+constant society, infecting the very air about, of the rudest of men;
+yet so far is her spirit from being broken that she meets all those
+potent, grave, and reverend doctors and ecclesiastics, with the
+simplicity and freedom of a princess, answering frankly or holding
+her peace as seems good to her, afraid of nothing, keeping her
+self-possession, all her wits about her as we say, without panic
+and without presumption. The trial of Jeanne is indeed almost more
+miraculous than her fighting; a girl not yet nineteen, forsaken of all,
+without a friend! It is less wonderful that she should have developed
+the qualities of a general, of a gunner, every gift of war--than that in
+her humiliation and distress she should thus hold head against all
+the most subtle intellects in France, and bear, with but one moment of
+faltering, a continued cross-examination of three months, without losing
+her patience, her heart, or her courage.
+
+*****
+
+The third day brought a still larger accession of judges, sixty-two of
+them taking their places on the benches round the Bishop in the great
+hall; and the day began with another and longer altercation between
+Cauchon and Jeanne on the subject of the oath again demanded of her. She
+maintained her resolution to say nothing of her voices. "We" according
+to the record "required of her that she should swear simply and
+absolutely without reservation." She would seem to have replied with
+impatience, "Let me speak freely:" adding "By my faith you may ask me
+many questions which I will not answer": then explaining, "Many things
+you may ask me, but I will tell you nothing truly that concerns my
+revelations; for you might compel me to say things which I have sworn
+not to say; and so I should perjure myself, which you ought not to
+wish." This explains several statements which she made later in respect
+to her introduction to the King. She repeated emphatically: "I warn
+you well, you who call yourselves my judges, that you take a great
+responsibility upon you, and that you burden me too much." She said also
+that it was enough to have already sworn twice. She was again asked to
+swear simply and absolutely, and answered, "It is enough to have sworn
+twice," and that all the clerks in Rouen and Paris could not condemn her
+unless lawfully; also that of her coming she would speak the truth but
+not all the truth; and that the space of eight days would not be enough
+to tell all.
+
+"We the said Bishop" (continues the report) "then said to her that she
+should ask advice from those present whether she ought to swear or
+not. She replied again that of her coming she would speak truly and not
+otherwise, nor would it be fit that she should talk at large. We then
+told her that it would throw suspicion on what she said if she did not
+swear to speak the truth. She answered as before. We repeated that she
+must swear precisely and absolutely. She answered that she would say
+what she knew, but not all, and that she had come on the part of God,
+and appealed to God from whom she came. Again requested and admonished
+to swear on pain of every punishment that could be put on her, again
+answered '_Passez outre_.' Finally she consented to swear that she would
+speak the truth in everything that concerned the trial."
+
+Her examination was then resumed by Beaupère as before, who elicited
+from her that she had fasted (he seems to have wished to make out that
+the fasting had something to do with her visions) since noon the day
+before (it was Lent); and also that she had heard her voices both on
+that day and the day before, three times on the previous day, the first
+time in the morning when she was asleep, and awakened by them. Did she
+kneel and thank them? She thanked them, sitting up in her bed (to which
+she was chained, as her questioner knew) and clasping her hands. She
+asked them what she was to do, and they told her to answer boldly.
+
+It may be remarked here that more frequently as the examination goes
+on, part of Jeanne's words are quoted in the first person, as if the
+reporters had been specially struck by them, while the bulk of her
+evidence goes on more calmly in the third person, the narrative form.
+After saying that she was bidden to answer boldly, she seems to have
+turned to the Bishop, and to have addressed him individually: "You say
+you are my judge; I warn you to take care what you are doing, for I
+am sent from God, and you are putting yourself in much peril" (_magno
+periculo: gallice_, adds the reporter, _en grant dangier_).
+
+She was then asked if her voices ever changed their meaning, and
+answered that she had never heard two speak contrary to each other; what
+they had said that day was that she should speak boldly. Asked, if the
+voice forbade her to reply to questions asked, she replied; "I will not
+answer you. I have revelations touching the King which I will not tell
+you." Asked, if the voices forbade her to reveal these revelations, she
+answered, "I have not consulted them; give me fifteen days' delay and I
+will answer you"; but being again exhorted to reply, said: "If the voice
+forbade me to speak, how many times should I tell you?" Again asked, if
+she were forbidden to speak, answered, "I believe I am not forbidden
+by men"--repeating that she would not reply, and knew not how far she
+should reply, for it had not been revealed to her; but that she believed
+firmly, as firmly as the Christian faith, and that God had redeemed us
+from the pains of hell, that this voice came from Him.
+
+Questioned concerning the voice, what it appeared to be when it spoke,
+if that of an angel, or from God Himself; or if it was the voice of a
+saint or of saints (feminine), answered: "The voice comes from God; and
+I believe that I should not tell you all I know, for I should displease
+these voices if I answered you; and as for this question I pray you
+to leave me free." Asked if she thought that to speak the truth would
+displease God, she answered, "What the voices say I am to tell to the
+King, not to you," adding that during that night they had said much to
+her for the good of the King, and that if she could but let him know
+she would willingly drink no wine up to Easter (the reader will remember
+that her frugal fare consisted of bread dipped in the wine and water,
+which is justly called _eau rougie_ in France). Asked, if she could not
+induce the voices to speak to her King directly, she answered that she
+knew not whether her voices would consent, unless it were the will of
+God, and God consented to it, adding, "They might well reveal it to the
+King; and with that I should be content." Asked, if the voices could
+not communicate with the King as they did in her presence, she answered,
+that she did not know whether this was God's will; and added, that
+unless it were the will of God she would not know how to act. Asked, if
+it was by the advice of her voices that she attempted to escape from
+her prison, she answered, "I have nothing to say to you on that point."
+Asked, if she always saw a light when the voices were heard, she
+answered: "Yes: that with the sound of the voices light came." Asked if
+she saw anything else coming with the voices, answered: "I do not tell
+you all. I am not allowed to do so, nor does my oath touch that; the
+voices are good and noble, but neither of that will I answer." She was
+then asked to give in writing the points on which she would not reply.
+Then she was asked if her voices had eyes and ears, and answered, "You
+shall not have this either," adding, that it was a saying among children
+that men were sometimes hanged for speaking the truth.
+
+She was then asked if she knew herself to be in the grace of God. She
+replied: "If I am not so, may God put me in His grace; if I am, may God
+keep me in it. I should be the most miserable in the world if I were not
+in the grace of God." She said besides, that if she were in a state of
+sin she did not believe her voices would come to her, and she wished
+that everyone could understand them as she did, adding, that she was
+about thirteen when they came to her first.
+
+She was then asked, whether in her childhood she had played with the
+other children in the fields, and various other particulars about
+Domremy, whether there were any Burgundians there? to which Jeanne
+answered boldly that there was one, and that she wished his head might
+be cut off, adding piously, "that is, if it pleased God"(3); she was
+also asked whether she had fought along with the other children against
+the children of the neighbouring Burgundian village of Maxy (Maxey sur
+Meuse): why she hated the Burgundians, and many questions of this
+kind, with a close examination about a certain tree near the village of
+Domremy, which some called the Tree of the good Ladies, and others, the
+Fairies' Tree; and also about a well there, the Fairies' Well, of which
+poor patients were said to drink and get well. Jeanne (no doubt relieved
+by the simple character of these questions) made answer freely and
+without hesitation, in no way denying that she had danced and sung with
+the other children, and made garlands for the image of the Blessed Marie
+of Domremy; but she did not remember whether she had ever done so after
+attaining years of discretion, and certainly she had never seen a fairy,
+nor worked any spell by their means. At the end, after having thus been
+put off her guard, she was suddenly asked about her dress (a capital
+point in the eyes of her judges): whether she wished to have a woman's
+dress. Probably she was, as they hoped, tired, and expecting no such
+question, for she answered quickly yet with instant recovery: "Bring
+me one to go home in and I will accept it; otherwise no. I prefer this,
+since it pleases God that I should wear it." The recollection of Domremy
+and of the pleasant fields, must have carried her back to the days when
+the little Jeanne was like the rest in her short, full petticoats of
+crimson stuff, free of any danger: what could be better to go home in?
+but she immediately remembered the obvious and excellent reasons she had
+for wearing another costume now. So ended the third day.
+
+In the meantime there had been, we are told, various interruptions
+during the examination; perhaps it was then that Nicolas de Houppeville
+protested against Bishop Cauchon as a partisan and a Burgundian, and
+therefore incapable by law of judging a member of the opposite party:
+and had been rudely silenced, and afterwards punished, as we have
+already heard. Another kind of opposition less bold had begun to be
+remarked, which was that one of the persons present, by word and sign,
+whispering suggestions to her, or warning her with his eyes, was helping
+the unfortunate prisoner in her defence. Probably this did little good,
+"for she was often troubled and hurried in her answers," we are told;
+but it was a sign of good-will, at least. When Frère Isambard, who was
+the person in question, speaks at a later period he tells us that "the
+questions put to Jeanne were too difficult, subtle, and dangerous, so
+that the great clerks and learned men who were present scarcely would
+have known how to answer them, and that many in the assembly murmured
+at them." Perhaps the good Frère Isambard might have spared himself the
+trouble; for Jeanne, however she may have suffered, was probably more
+able to hold her own than many of those great clerks, and did so with
+unfailing courage and spirit. One of the other judges, Jean Fabry, a
+bishop, declared afterwards that "her answers were so good, that for
+three weeks he believed that they were inspired." Manchon, the reporter,
+he who had refused to take down the private conversation of Jeanne in
+her prison with the vile traitor, L'Oyseleur, makes his voice heard also
+to the effect that "Monseigneur of Beauvais would have had everything
+written as pleased him, and when there was anything that displeased him
+he forbade the secretaries to report it as being of no importance for
+the trial." On another day a humbler witness still, Massieu, one of the
+officers of the court, who had the charge of taking Jeanne daily
+from her prison to the hall, and back again, met in the courtyard an
+Englishman, who seems to have been a singing man or lay clerk "of
+the King's chapel in England," probably attached to Winchester's
+ecclesiastical retinue. This man asked him: "What do you think of her
+answers? Will she be burned? What will happen?" "Up to this time," said
+Massieu, "I have heard nothing from her that was not honourable and
+good. She seems to me a good woman, but how it will all end God only
+knows!"
+
+No doubt conversations of this kind were being carried on all over
+Rouen. Would she be burned? What would happen? Could any one stand and
+answer like that hour after hour and day by day, inspired only by the
+devil? There was no popular enthusiasm for her even now. How should
+there have been in that partisan province, more English than French? But
+a chill doubt began to steal into many minds whether she was so bad as
+had been thought, whether indeed she might not after all be something
+quite different from what she had been thought? Nature had begun to work
+in the agitated place, and even in that black-robed, eager assembly. If
+there was a vile L'Oyseleur trying to get her confidence in private, and
+so betray her, there was also a kind Frère Isambard, privately plucking
+at her sleeve, imploring her to be cautious, whispering an answer
+probably not half so wise as her own natural reply, yet warming her
+heart with the suggestion of a friend at hand.
+
+On the fourth day, Jeanne was again required to swear, and replied as
+before, that so far as concerned the trial she would answer truly,
+but not all she knew. "You ought to be satisfied: I have sworn
+sufficiently," she said; and with this her judges seem to have been
+content. Beaupère then resumed his questions, but first asked her,
+perhaps with a momentary gleam of compassion and a sudden consciousness
+of the pallor and weariness of the young prisoner, how she did. She
+answered, one can imagine with what tone of indignant disdain: "You see
+how I am: I am as well as I can be." He then cross-examined her closely
+as to what voices she had heard since her last appearance in court,
+but drew from her only the same answer, "The voice tells me to answer
+boldly," and that she would tell them as much as she was permitted by
+God to tell them, but concerning her revelations for the King of France
+she would say nothing except by permission of her voices.
+
+She was then asked what kind of voices they were which she heard, were
+they voices of angels, or of saints (_sancti aut sanctæ_, male or female
+saints) or from God Himself? She answered that the voices were those of
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret, whose heads were crowned with beautiful
+crowns, very rich and precious. "So much as this God allows me to say.
+If you doubt send to Poitiers, where I was questioned before." (It may
+perhaps be permissible to suppose that the kind whisperer at her elbow
+might have suggested the repeated references to Poitiers that follow,
+but which are not to be found before: though it was most natural she
+should refer to this place where she was examined at the beginning of
+her mission.) Asked how she knew which of these two saints, she answered
+that she could quite distinguish one from the other by the manner of
+their salutation; that she had been led and guided by them for seven
+years, and that she knew them because they had named themselves to her.
+She was then asked how they were dressed? and answered: "I cannot tell
+you; I am not permitted to reveal this; if you do not believe me send to
+Poitiers." She said also that at her coming into France she had revealed
+these things, but could not now. She was asked what was the age of her
+saints, but replied that she was not permitted to tell. Asked, if both
+saints spoke at once or one after the other, she replied: "I have not
+permission to tell you: but I always consult them both together." Asked,
+which had appeared to her first, and answered: "I do not know which it
+was; I did know, but have forgotten. It is written in the register of
+Poitiers."
+
+"She then said she had much comfort from St. Michael. Again, asked,
+which had come first, she replied that it was St. Michael. Asked, if
+a long time had passed since she first heard the voice of St. Michael,
+answered: "I do not name to you the voice of St. Michael; but his
+conversation was of great comfort to me." Asked, again, what voice came
+first to her when she was thirteen, answered, that it was St. Michael
+whom she saw before her eyes, and that he was not alone, but accompanied
+by many angels of Heaven. She said also that she would not have come
+into France but by the command of God. Asked, if she saw St. Michael and
+the angels really, with her ordinary senses, she answered: "I saw them
+with my bodily eyes as I see you, and when they left me I wept, desiring
+much that they would take me with them." Asked, what was the form
+in which he appeared, she replied: "I cannot answer you; I am not
+permitted." Asked, what St. Michael said to her the first time, she
+cried, "You shall have no answer to-day." Then went on to say that her
+voices told her to reply boldly. Afterwards she said that she had told
+her King once all that had been revealed to her; said also that she was
+not permitted to say here what St. Michael had said; but that it would
+be better to send for a copy of the books which were at Poitiers than to
+question her on this subject. Asked, what sign she had that these
+were revelations of God, and that it was really St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret with whom she talked, she answered: "It is enough that I tell
+you they were St. Catherine and St. Margaret: believe me or not as you
+will."
+
+Asked how she distinguished the points on which she was allowed to
+speak from the others, she answered, that on some points she had asked
+permission to speak, and not on others, adding, that she would rather
+have been torn by wild horses than to have come to France, unless by
+the license of God. Asked how it was that she put on a man's dress, she
+answered, that dress appeared to her a small matter, that she did not
+adopt that dress by the counsel of any man, and that she neither put on
+a dress nor did anything, but according as God, or the angels, commanded
+her to do so. Asked, if she knew whether such a command to assume the
+dress of a man was lawful, she answered: "All that I did, I did by the
+precepts of our Lord; and if I were bidden to wear another dress I would
+do so, because it was at the bidding of God." Asked, if she had done
+it by the orders of Robert de Baudricourt, answered "No." Asked, if she
+thought that she had done well in assuming a man's dress, answered, that
+as all she did was by the command of the Lord, she believed that she had
+done well, and expected a good guarantee and good succour. Asked, if in
+this particular case of assuming the dress of a man she thought she had
+done well, answered, that nothing in the world had made her do it, but
+the command of God.
+
+She was then asked whether light always accompanied the voices when
+they came to her, she answered, with an evident reference to her first
+interview with Charles, that there were many lights on every side as was
+fit. "It is not only to you that light comes" (or you have not all the
+light to yourself,--a curious phrase). Asked, if there was an angel over
+the head of the King when she saw him for the first time, she answered:
+"By the Blessed Mary, if there were, I know not, I saw none." Asked, if
+there was light, she answered: "There were about three hundred soldiers,
+and fifty of them held torches, without counting any spiritual light.
+And rarely do I have the revelations without light." Asked, if her King
+had faith in what she said, she answered, that he had good signs, and
+also by his clergy. Asked, what revelations her King had, she answered:
+"You shall have nothing from me this year." Then added that for three
+weeks she was cross-examined by the clergy, both in the town of Chinon
+and at Poitiers, and that her King had signs concerning her, before he
+believed in her. And the clergy of his party had found nothing in her,
+in respect to her faith, that was not good. Asked, whether she gone to
+the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois, answered: "yes," and that she
+had there heard three masses in one day, and from thence went to Chinon;
+she added that she had sent a letter thence to the King, in which it was
+contained that she sent this to know if she might come to the town
+in which the King was; for that she had travelled a hundred and fifty
+leagues to come to him and to bring him help, for she knew much good
+concerning him. And she thought it was contained in this letter that she
+should recognise the King among all the rest.
+
+She said besides, that she had a sword which was given to her at
+Vaucouleurs; she said also that, being in Tours or at Chinon, she sent
+for a sword which was in the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois behind
+the altar, and that when it was found it was rusty. Asked, how she knew
+about this sword, she answered, that it was rusty because of being in
+the ground, and there were five crosses on it, and that she knew this
+sword by her voices, and not by any man's report. She wrote to the
+ecclesiastics of the place where it was and asked them for this sword,
+and they sent it to her. It was found not much below the ground behind
+the altar; she was not sure if it was before or behind the altar, but
+wrote that it was behind the altar. And when it was found the clergy
+cleaned it and rubbed off the rust, which came off easily; and it was an
+armourer of Tours who went to fetch it. The clergy made a scabbard for
+it before sending it to the said Jeanne, and they of Tours made another,
+so that it had two scabbards, one of crimson velvet and one of cloth of
+gold. And she herself procured another of strong leather. She said also
+that when she was captured she had not that sword. Said also that she
+continued to wear the said sword until she left St. Denis after the
+assault on Paris. Asked, what benediction she made, or if she made any
+on this sword, she answered, that she made no benediction, nor knew how
+to make one, but that she loved the sword because it had come to her
+from the Church of the blessed Catherine whom she loved much. Asked,
+if she had placed it on the altar at the village of Coulenges, Les
+Vineuses, or elsewhere, placing it there that it might bring good luck,
+she answered, that she knew nothing of this. Asked, if she did not pray
+that the sword might have good fortune: "It is good to know that I
+wish all my armour (_harnesseum meum; gallice, mon harnois_) to be very
+fortunate." Asked, where she had left the sword, answered, that she had
+deposited a sword and armour at St. Denis, but it was not this sword.
+She added that she had it in Lagny: but that she afterwards wore the
+sword which had been taken from a Burgundian, which was a good sword
+for war and gave good strokes (_gallice, de bonnes bouffes_ and _de bons
+torchons_). Said also that to tell where she left it had nothing to do
+with the trial, and she would answer nothing.
+
+She said also that her brothers had everything that belonged to her, her
+horses, swords, and everything, and that she believed they were worth
+in all about 12,000 francs. She was also asked whether when she was at
+Orleans she had a standard, and what colour it was; answered, that she
+had a standard, the field of which was sown with lilies, and on it was a
+figure of the world with angels on each side. It was white, and made
+of a stuff called boucassin, upon which was written the name _Jhesus
+Maria_, so that all might see, and it was fringed with silk. Asked, if
+the name _Jhesus Maria_ was written above or below or at the side, she
+answered, "At the side." Asked, if she loved her sword or standard best,
+she answered, that she loved her standard best. Asked, why she had that
+picture on the standard, she answered: "I have sufficiently told you
+that I did nothing but by the command of God." She added that she
+herself carried her standard when in battle that she might not hurt
+anyone, and said that she had never killed any man.
+
+Asked, how many men her King gave her when she began her work, answered,
+from ten to twelve(4) thousand men, and that she attacked first the
+bastile of St. Loup at Orleans, and afterwards that of the bridge.
+Asked, from which bastile it was that her men were driven back, she
+answered, that she did not remember; adding, that she had been sure that
+she could raise the siege at Orleans, for it had been so revealed to
+her; and that she told this to her King before it occurred. Asked,
+whether, when she made assault, she told her men that all the arrows,
+stones, cannon-balls, etc., would be intercepted by her, she answered
+no--that more than a hundred were wounded: that what she had said to her
+people was that they should have no doubts, for they should certainly
+raise the siege of Orleans. She said also that in attacking the bastile
+of the bridge she herself was wounded by an arrow in the neck, and was
+much comforted by St. Catherine, and was healed in fifteen days; but
+that she never gave up riding and working all that time. Asked, if she
+knew that she would be wounded, she answered, that she knew it well
+and had told her King, but that, notwithstanding, she went about her
+business. It was revealed to her by the voices of her two saints, the
+blessed Catherine and the blessed Margaret. She said besides, that she
+was the first to place a scaling ladder on the bastile of the bridge,
+and as she raised it she was struck in the neck.
+
+She was then asked why she did not treat with the Captain of Jargeau;
+she answered that the lords of her party had replied to the English, who
+had asked for a truce of fifteen days, that they could not have it, but
+that they might retire, they and their horses at once; she had said for
+her part that if they retired in their doublets and tunics their lives
+should be spared, otherwise the city would be taken by storm. Asked, if
+she had consulted with her counsel, that is with her voices, whether the
+truce should be granted or not, she answered, that she did not remember.
+
+It will be remarked, as the slow examination goes on day after day, that
+Jeanne, becoming at moments impatient, sometimes gives a rough answer,
+and at other times plays a little with her questioner as if in
+contempt. "By the Blessed Mary, I know not!" is evidently an outburst
+of impatience at the exhausting, exasperating folly of some of these
+questions, and this will be further visible in future sittings. It
+seems very likely that the reference to Poitiers, which was an excellent
+suggestion, commending itself to her invariable good sense, came from
+the kind priest who tried to serve her as he best could; but there are
+other answers a little incoherent, which look as if Frère Isambard,
+if it were he, had confused her in her own response without conveying
+anything better to her mind, especially on the occasions when she
+refuses to reply, and then does so, abandoning her ground at once. Her
+patience and steadiness are quite extraordinary however even in the less
+self-collected moments. Thus end the proceedings of the fourth day.
+
+*****
+
+The fifth day began with the usual dispute about the oath, Jeanne
+still retaining her reservation with the greatest firmness. She seems,
+however, at the end, to have repeated her oath to answer everything that
+had to do with the trial--"And as much as I say I will say as if I
+were before the Pope of Rome." These words must have given the Magister
+Beaupère an admirable occasion for introducing one of the things charged
+against her for which there was actual proof--her letter to the Comte
+d'Armagnac in respect to the Pope. He seized upon it evidently with
+eagerness, and asked her which she held to be the true Pope. To this she
+answered quietly, "Are there two?"--the most confusing reply.(5)
+
+She was asked if she had received letters from the Comte d'Armagnac,
+asking to know which of the three existing Popes he ought to obey; she
+answered that she had his letter, and had replied to it, saying among
+other things that when she was in Paris and at rest she would answer
+him; and added that she was on the point of mounting her horse when she
+gave that reply. The copy of the letter and the reply being read to her
+she was asked if that was what she had said; to which she replied that
+she had answered his letter in part, not in full. Asked, if she knew the
+counsels of the King of Kings so as to be able to say which the count
+should obey, she answered, that she knew nothing. Asked, if she was in
+doubt as to which the count ought to obey, she replied that she knew not
+which to bid him obey; but that she, the said Jeanne, held and believed
+that we ought to obey our Pope who was in Rome; that as for what he
+asked, that she should tell him which God desired him to obey, she had
+said she knew nothing; but she sent much to him which was not put in
+writing. And as for herself she believed in the Lord Pope of Rome.
+Asked, whether in respect to the three pontiffs she had received
+counsel, she answered, that she had neither written nor made to be
+written anything about the three pontiffs. And this she swore on her
+oath. Asked, if she were in the habit of putting on her letters the name
+_Jhesus Maria_ with a cross, answered, that she did so sometimes but not
+always, and that sometimes she put a cross to shew that these letters
+were not to be taken seriously (as likely to fall into the enemy's
+hands).
+
+Some questions were then put to her about her letters to the Duke of
+Bedford and to the English King, and copies were read to her to which
+she objected on some small points, but mistakenly it would seem, as that
+she had summoned them to surrender to the King, while the scribe had put
+"surrender to the Maid." She said, however, that they were her letters,
+and that she held by them. She added that before seven years the English
+would lose more than they had lost at Orleans,(6) and that their cause
+would be lost in France; she said also that the said English should have
+greater disasters than they had yet had in France, and that God would
+give greater victories to France. Asked, how she knew this, she replied:
+"I know it by the revelations made to me, and that it will happen in
+seven years, and I might well be angry that it is deferred so long."
+Asked, when this would happen, she said that she knew neither the day
+nor the hour.
+
+She was tormented a little further as to the dates, whether this would
+happen before the St. Jean, or before the St. Martin in winter, but made
+no answer except that before the St. Martin in winter they should see
+many things, and it might be that the English should fail; as a matter
+of fact Paris opened its gates to Charles VII. within the seven years
+specified, so that Jeanne's prophecy may be held to have been fulfilled.
+
+We then come once more to a long and profitless interrogatory upon
+her saints, in which the crowd of judges forgot their dignity and
+overwhelmed her with a flood of often very foolish, and sometimes worse
+than foolish questions.
+
+Asked, how she knew the future, she answered that she knew it by St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret; asked, if St. Gabriel was with St. Michael
+when he came to her, she answered, that she could not remember. Asked,
+if she saw them always in the same dress, answered yes, and they were
+crowned very richly. Of their other garments she could not speak; she
+knew nothing of their tunics. Asked, how she knew whether they were men
+or women, answered, that she knew well by their voices which revealed
+them to her; and that she knew nothing save by revelation and the
+precepts of God. Asked, what appearances she saw, she answered, that she
+saw faces. Asked, if these saints had hair, she answered, "It is good to
+know." Asked, if there was anything between their crowns and their hair,
+answered, no. Asked, if their hair was long and hanging down, answered,
+"I know nothing about it." She also said that their voices were
+beautiful sweet, and humble, and that she understood them well. Asked,
+how they could speak when they had no bodies, she answered, "I refer it
+to God." She repeated that the voices were beautiful, humble, and sweet,
+and that they could speak French. Asked, if St. Margaret did not speak
+English, answered: "How could she speak English when she was not on the
+English side?"
+
+This would seem to infer that the St. Margaret referred to was not the
+legendary St. Margaret of the dragon, but St. Margaret of Scotland, well
+known in France from the long connection between those two countries,
+and a popular mediæval saint. She would naturally have spoken English,
+being a Saxon, but also quite naturally would have been against the
+English, as a Scottish queen; but of these refinements it is very
+unlikely that Jeanne knew anything, and her prompt and somewhat sharp
+reply evidently cut the inquiry short. The next question was, did they
+wear gold rings in their ears or elsewhere, these crowned saints; to
+which she answered a little contemptuously, "I know nothing about it."
+She was then asked if she herself had rings: on which "turning to us the
+aforesaid Bishop, she said, 'You have one of mine; give it back to me.'
+She then said that the Burgundians had her other ring, and asked of us
+if we had the ring to shew it to her. Asked, who gave her this ring,
+answered, her father or her mother, and that the name _Jhesus Maria_
+was written upon it, but that she knew not who put it there, nor even
+whether there was a stone in the ring; it was given to her in the
+village of Domremy. She added that her brother gave her another ring
+which we had, and said that she desired that it might be given to the
+Church."
+
+A sudden change was now made in the cross-examination according to the
+methods of that operation, throwing her back without warning upon the
+village superstitions of Domremy, the magic tree and fountain. Many of
+the questions which follow are so trivial and are so evidently instinct
+with evil meaning, that it seems a wrong to Beaupère to impute the whole
+of the interrogatory to him; other questions were evidently interposed
+by the excited assembly.
+
+Asked, if St. Catherine and St. Margaret talked with her under the tree
+of which mention had been made above, she answered, "I know nothing
+about it." Asked, if the saints were seen at the fountain near the
+tree, answered yes, that she had heard them there; but what her saints
+promised to her, there or elsewhere, she answered, that nothing was
+promised except by permission from God. Asked, what promises were made
+to her, she answered, "This has nothing at all to do with your trial,"
+but added, that among other things they said to her that her King
+should be restored to his kingdom, and that his adversaries should
+be destroyed. She said also that they promised to take her, the said
+Jeanne, to Paradise, as she had asked them to do. Asked, if she had any
+other promises, she said there was one promise that had nothing to do
+with the trial, but that in three months she would tell them what that
+other promise was. Asked, if the voices told her she would be set free
+from her prison in three months, she answered: "This does not concern
+your trial; nor do I know when I shall be set free." And she added that
+those who wished to send her out of this world might well go before her.
+Asked, if her council did not tell her when she should be set free from
+her present prison, answered: "Ask me this in three months' time; I can
+promise you as much as that"--but added: "You may ask those present, on
+their oaths, if this has anything to do with the trial."
+
+Startled by this suggestion, the judges seem to have held a hurried
+consultation among themselves to see whether these matters did really
+touch the trial; the result apparently decided them to return again to
+the question of the local superstitions of Domremy, the only point on
+which there seemed a chance of breaking down the extraordinarily just
+and steadfast intelligence of the girl who stood before them. After this
+pause she resumed, apparently not in answer to any question.
+
+"I have well told you that there were things you should not know, and
+some time I must needs be set free. But I must have permission if I
+speak; therefore I will ask to have delay in this." Asked, if her voices
+forbade her to speak the truth, she said: "Do you expect me to tell you
+things that concern the King of France? There is a great deal here that
+has nothing to do with the trial." She said also that she knew that her
+King should enjoy the kingdom of France, as well as she knew that they
+were there before her in judgment. She added that she would have been
+dead but for the revelations which comforted her daily. She was then
+asked what she had done with her mandragora (mandrake)? she answered
+that she had no mandragora, nor had ever had. She had heard say that
+near her village there was one, but had never seen it. She had heard say
+that it was a dangerous thing, and that it was wicked to keep it; but
+knew nothing of its use. Asked, in what place this mandrake was, and
+what she had heard of it? she said that she had heard that it grew under
+the tree of which mention has been made, but did not know the place; she
+said also that she had heard that above the mandragora was a hazel tree.
+Asked, what she heard was done with the mandragora, answered, that she
+had heard that it brought money, but did not believe it; and added that
+her voices had never told her anything about it.
+
+Asked, what was the appearance of St. Michael when she saw him first,
+she answered, that she saw no crown, and knew nothing of his dress.
+Asked, if he was naked, she answered, "Do you think God has nothing to
+clothe him with?" Asked, if he had hair, she answered, "Why should
+it have been cut?" She said further that she had not seen the blessed
+Michael since she left the castle of Crotoy, nor did she see him often.
+At last she said that she knew not whether he had hair or not. Asked,
+whether he carried scales, she answered, "I know nothing of it," but
+added that she had much joy in seeing him, and she knew when she saw him
+that she was not in a state of sin. She also said that St. Catherine and
+St. Margaret often made her confess to them, and said that if she had
+been in a state of sin it was without knowing it. She was then asked
+whether, when she confessed, she believed herself to be in a state of
+mortal sin; she answered, that she knew not whether she had been in that
+state, but did not believe she had done the works of sin. "It would not
+have pleased God," she said, "that I should have been so; nor would it
+have pleased Him that I should have done the works of sin by which my
+soul should have been burdened."
+
+She was then asked what sign she gave to the King that she came to him
+from God; she answered: "I have told you always that nothing should draw
+this from me.(7) Ask me no more." Asked, if she had not sworn to reveal
+what was asked of her touching the trial, answered, "I have told you
+that I will tell you nothing that was for our King; and of this which
+belongs to him I will not speak." Asked, if she knew the sign which she
+gave to the King, she answered: "You shall know nothing from me." When
+it was said to her that this did concern the trial, she answered, "Of
+that which I have promised to keep secret I shall tell you nothing";
+and further she said, "I promised in that place and I could not tell you
+without perjuring myself." Asked, to whom she promised? answered, that
+she had promised to Saints Catherine and Margaret, and this was shown to
+the King. She also said she had promised it to these two saints, because
+they had required it of her. And the same Jeanne had done this at their
+request. "Too many people would have asked me concerning it, if I had
+not promised to the aforesaid saints." She was then asked, when
+she showed this sign to the King if there were others with him; she
+answered, that to her there was no one near him, even though many people
+might have been present. (As a matter of fact the sign was given to
+Charles when he talked with the Maid apart in a recess, the great hall
+being full of the Court and followers; so that this was strictly true.)
+Asked further, if she saw a crown over the head of her King when
+she showed him this sign, but replied: "I cannot answer you without
+perjury." Asked further if her King had a crown when he was at Rheims,
+answered, that in her opinion her King had a crown which he found at
+Rheims, but a very fine one was afterwards brought for him. He did this
+to hasten matters, at the desire of the city of Rheims; but if he had
+been more certain, he could have had a crown a thousand times richer.
+(All this is very obscure.)
+
+Asked, if she had seen this crown, she answered: "I could not tell you
+without perjury, but I heard that it was a very rich one." It was then
+determined to conclude for this day.
+
+On the sixth day there was again the same questions about the oath,
+ending in the usual way. And the cross-examination was at once
+continued.
+
+She was asked if she would say whether St. Michael had wings, and what
+bodies and members had St. Catherine and St. Margaret; and she answered,
+"I have told you what I know, and will make no other reply"; she said,
+moreover, that when she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret, she knew at once that they were saints of Paradise. Asked, if
+she saw anything more than their faces, she answered: "I have told you
+all I know of them: and I would rather have had my head taken off than
+tell you all I know." She then said that in whatever concerned the trial
+she would speak freely. Asked, if she believed that St. Michael and St.
+Gabriel had natural heads, she answered: "I saw them with my eyes and
+I believe that they are, as firmly as I believe that God is." Asked, if
+she believed that God made them in the form in which she saw them, she
+answered, "Yes." Asked, if she believed that God had created them in the
+same form from the beginning, answered: "You shall have no more for the
+present, except what I have already said."
+
+This subject was then dropped, and the examiner made another leap
+forward to a different part of her life. "Did you know by revelation
+that you should break prison?" he said. To this Jeanne answered
+indignantly: "This has nothing to do with your trial. Would you have me
+speak against myself?"
+
+Again questioned what her "voices" had said to her in respect to her
+attempts at escape, she again answered: "This has nothing to do with the
+trial; I go back to the trial. If all your questions were about that,
+I should tell you all." She said besides, on her faith, that she knew
+neither the day nor the hour when she should escape. She was then asked
+what the voices said to her generally, and answered: "In truth, they
+tell me I shall be freed, but neither the day nor the hour; and that I
+ought to speak boldly, and with a glad countenance." She was then asked
+whether, when first she saw her King, he asked her whether it was by
+revelation that she had assumed the dress of a man? she replied: "I have
+answered this. I cannot recollect whether he asked me. But it is written
+in the book at Poitiers." Asked, whether the doctors who examined her
+there, some for a month, some for three weeks, had asked her about her
+change of dress; she answered: "I don't remember; but I know they asked
+me when I assumed the dress of a man, and I told them it was in the town
+of Vaucouleurs." Asked, whether these doctors had inquired whether it
+was her voices which had made her take that dress, answered, "I don't
+remember." Asked if her Queen wished her to change her dress when she
+first saw her, answered, "I don't remember." Asked if her King, Queen,
+and all of her party did not ask her to lay aside the dress of a man,
+she answered, "This has nothing to do with the trial." Asked, if the
+same was not requested of her in the castle of Beaurevoir, she answered:
+"It is true. And I replied that I could not lay it aside without the
+permission of God." She said further that the demoiselle of Luxembourg
+(aunt of Jeanne's captor, and a very old woman) and the lady of
+Beaurevoir offered her a woman's dress, or stuff to make one, and begged
+her to wear it; but she replied that she had not yet the permission of
+our Lord, and that it was not yet time. Asked, if M. Jean de Pressy and
+others at Arras had offered her a woman's dress, she answered, "He and
+others have often asked it of me." Asked, if she thought she would have
+done wrong in putting on a woman's dress, she answered, that it was
+better to obey her sovereign Lord, that is, God; she said also that if
+she had done it, she would rather have done it at the request of these
+two ladies than of any other in France, except her Queen. Asked, if,
+when God revealed to her that she should change her dress, it was by the
+voice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, or St. Margaret, she answered, "You
+shall hear no more about it." Asked, when the King first employed her,
+and her standard was made, whether the men-at-arms and others who took
+part in the war did not have flags imitated from hers? she answered, "It
+is well to know that the lords retained their own arms"; she also added
+that her brothers-in-arms made such pennons as pleased them. Asked, how
+these were made, if they were of linen or cloth, answered, that they
+were of white satin, some of them with lilies; that she had but two or
+three lances in her own company--but that in the rest of the army some
+carried pennons like hers, but only to distinguish them from others.
+Asked, if the banners were often renewed, answered: "I know not; when
+the staff was broken it was renewed." Asked, if she had not said that
+the pennons copied from hers were fortunate, answered, that she had
+said, "Go in boldly among the English"; and that she had done the same
+herself. Asked, if she said that they should have good luck if they bore
+the banners well, answered, that she had told them what would happen,
+and what should still happen. Asked, if she had caused holy water to
+be sprinkled on the pennons when they were new, she answered, "That has
+nothing to do with the trial"; but added that if she did so sprinkle
+them she was not instructed to answer that question now. Asked, if
+the others put _Jhesus Maria_ upon their pennons, she answered: "By
+my faith, I know nothing about it." Asked, if she had ever carried or
+caused to be carried in a procession round a church or altar the linen
+of which the pennons were made, answered no, that she had never seen
+anything of the kind done.
+
+Asked, when she was before Jargeau, what it was that she wore behind
+her helmet, and if she had not something round it, she answered: "By my
+faith, there was nothing." Asked, if she knew a certain Brother Richard,
+she answered: "I never saw him till I was before Troyes." Asked, what
+cheer Brother Richard made to her, answered, that she thought the people
+of Troyes had sent him to her, doubting whether she had come on the part
+of God, and that as he approached her he made the sign of the cross, and
+sprinkled holy water; she said to him: "Come on boldly; I shall not fly
+away." Asked, if she had seen, or had caused to be made, any images or
+pictures of herself, she answered, that at Arras she had seen a picture
+in the hands of a Scot, where she was represented fully armed, kneeling
+on one knee, and presenting a letter to the King; but that she had never
+caused any image or picture of herself to be made. Asked concerning a
+table in the house of her host, upon which were painted three women,
+with _Justice, Peace, Union_ inscribed beneath, answered, that she knew
+nothing of it. Asked, if she knew that those of her party caused masses
+and prayers to be made in her honour, she answered, that she knew not;
+and if they did so, it was not by any command of hers; but that if they
+did so, her opinion was that they did no wrong. Asked, if those of her
+party firmly believed that she was sent from God, she answered: "I know
+not whether they believed it; but even if they did not believe it, I am
+none the less sent on the part of God." Asked, whether she thought that
+to believe that she was sent from god was a worthy faith, she answered,
+that if they believed that she was sent from God they were not mistaken.
+Asked, if she knew what her party meant by kissing her feet and hands
+and her garments, answered, that many people did it, but that her hands
+were kissed as little as she could help it. The poor people, however,
+came to her of their own free will, because she never oppressed them,
+but protected them as far as was in her power. Asked, what reverence
+the people of Troyes made to her, she answered, "None at all," and added
+that she believed Brother Richard came into Troyes with her army, but
+that she had not seen him coming in. Asked, if he had not preached at
+the gates when she came, answered, that she scarcely paused there at
+all, and knew nothing of any sermon. Asked, how long she was at Rheims,
+and answered, four or five days. Asked, whether she baptised (stood
+godmother to) children there, she answered: To one at Troyes, but did
+not remember any at Rheims or at Château-Thierry; but there were two at
+St. Denis; and willingly she called the boys "Charles," in honour of her
+King, and the girls "Jeanne," according to what their mothers wished.
+Asked, if the good women of the town did not touch with their rings the
+rings she wore, she answered, that many women touched her hands and her
+rings; but she did not know why they did it. Asked, what she did with
+the gloves in which her King was consecrated, she answered that "Gloves
+were distributed to the knights and nobles that came there"; and there
+was one who lost his; but she did not say that she would find it for
+him. Also she said that her standard was in the church at Rheims, and
+she believed near the altar, and she herself had carried it for a short
+time, but did not know whether Brother Richard had held it.
+
+She was then asked if she communicated and went to confession often
+while moving about the country, and if she received the sacrament in her
+male costume; to which she answered "yes, but without her arms"; she was
+then questioned about a horse belonging to the Bishop of Senlis,
+which had not suited her, a matter completely without importance. The
+inference intended was that it was taken from him without being paid
+for; but there was no evidence that the Maid knew anything about it. We
+then come to the incident of Lagny.
+
+She was asked how old the child was which she saw at Lagny, and
+answered, three days; it had been brought to Lagny to the Church of
+Nôtre Dame, and she was told that all the maids in Lagny were before our
+Lady praying for it, and she also wished to go and pray God and our Lady
+that its life might come back; and she went, and prayed with the rest.
+And finally life appeared; it yawned three times, and was baptised and
+buried in consecrated ground. It had given no sign of life for three
+days and was black as her coat, but when it yawned its colour began to
+come back. She was there with the other maids on her knees before our
+Lady to make her prayer.
+
+The reader must understand that this was no special appeal to Jeanne's
+miraculous power, but a custom of that intense and tender charity
+with which the Church of Rome corrects her dogmatism upon questions of
+salvation. A child unbaptised could not be buried in consecrated ground,
+and was subject to all the sorrows of the unredeemed; but who could
+doubt that the priest would be easily persuaded by some wavering of the
+tapers on the altar upon the little dead face, some flicker of his own
+compassionate eyelids, that sufficient life had come back to permit the
+holy rite to be administered? The whole little scene is affecting in the
+extreme, the young creatures all kneeling, fervently appealing to
+the Maiden-mother, the priest ready to take instant advantage of any
+possible flicker, the Maid of France, no conspicuous figure, but weeping
+and praying among the rest. There was no thought here of the raising
+of the dead--the prayer was for breath enough only to allow of the holy
+observance, the blessed water, the last possibility of human love and
+effort.
+
+Jeanne was then questioned concerning Catherine of La Rochelle, the
+supposed prophetess, who had been played against her by La Tremouille
+and his follows, and narrated how she had watched two nights to see
+the mysterious lady clothed in cloth of gold who was said to appear to
+Catherine, but had not seen her, and that she had advised the woman
+to return to her husband and children. Catherine's mission was to go
+through the "good towns" with heralds and trumpets to call upon those
+who had money or treasure of any kind to give it to the King, and she
+professed to have a supernatural knowledge where such money was hidden.
+(No doubt La Tremouille must have thought that to get money, which was
+so scarce, in such a simple way, was worth trying at least. But Jeanne's
+opinion was that it was folly, and that there was nothing in it; an
+opinion fully verified. Catherine's advice had been that Jeanne should
+go to the Duke of Burgundy to make peace; but Jeanne had answered that
+no peace could be made save at the end of the lance.)
+
+She was then asked about the siege of La Charité; she answered, that she
+had made an assault: but had not sprinkled holy water, or caused it
+to be sprinkled. Asked, why she did not enter the city as she had the
+command of God to do so, she replied: "Who told you that I was commanded
+to enter?" Asked, if she had not had the advice of her voices, she
+answered, that she had desired to go into France (meaning towards
+Paris), but the generals had told her that it was better to go first
+to La Charité. She was then asked if she had been long in the tower of
+Beaurevoir; answered, that she was there about four months, and that
+when she heard the English come she was angry and much troubled. Her
+voices forbade her several times to attempt to escape; but at last,
+in the doubt she had of the English she threw herself down, commending
+herself to God and to our Lady, and was much hurt. But after she had
+done this the voice of St. Catherine said to her not to be afraid, that
+she should be healed, and that Compiègne would be relieved.
+
+Also she said that she prayed always for the relief of Compiègne with
+her council. Asked, what she said after she had thrown herself down,
+she answered, that some said that she was dead; and as soon as the
+Burgundians saw that she was not dead, they told her that she had thrown
+herself down. Asked, if she had said that she would rather die than fall
+into the hands of the English, she answered, that she would much rather
+have rendered her soul to God than have fallen into the hands of the
+English. Asked, if she was not in a great rage, and if she did not
+blaspheme the name of God, she answered, that she never said evil of
+any saint, and that it was not her custom to swear. Asked respecting
+Soissons, when the captain had surrendered the town, whether she had
+not cursed God, and said that if she had gotten hold of the captain, she
+would have cut him into four pieces; she answered, that she never swore
+by any saint, and that those who said so had not understood her.
+
+*****
+
+At this point the public trial of Jeanne came to a sudden end. Either
+the feeling produced in the town, and even among the judges, by her
+undeviating, simple, and dignified testimony had begun to be more than
+her persecutors had calculated upon; or else they hoped to make shorter
+work with her when deprived of the free air of publicity, the sight no
+doubt of some sympathetic faces, and the consciousness of being still
+able to vindicate her cause and to maintain her faith before men. Two
+or three fierce Inquisitors within her cell, and the Bishop, that man
+without heart or pity at their head, might still tear admissions
+from her weariness, which a certain sympathetic atmosphere in a large
+auditory, swept by waves of natural feeling, would strengthen her to
+keep back. The Bishop made a proclamation that in order not to vex and
+tire his learned associates he would have the minutes of the previous
+sittings reduced into form, and submitted to them for judgment, while
+he himself carried on apart what further interrogatory was necessary.
+We are told that he was warned by a counsellor of the town that secret
+examinations without witnesses or advocate on the prisoner's side, were
+illegal; but Monseigneur de Beauvais was well aware that anything would
+be legal which effected his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed
+of, the legality or illegality of the proceedings would be of small
+importance. I have thought it right to give to the best of my power a
+literal translation of these examinations, notwithstanding their great
+length; as, except in one book, now out of print and very difficult to
+procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so far as I am aware, exists;
+and it seems to me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader
+(always capable of skipping at his pleasure), it is better to unfold the
+complete scene with all its tedium and badgering, which brings out by
+every touch the extraordinary self-command, valour, and sense of
+this wonderful Maid, the youngest, perhaps, and most ignorant of the
+assembly, yet meeting all with a modest and unabashed countenance, true,
+pure, and natural,--a far greater miracle in her simplicity and noble
+steadfastness than even in the wonders she had done.
+
+     (1) She was in reality detained two days, which fact, no
+     doubt, she judged to be an unimportant detail.
+
+     (2) Probably meaning, had been present when the voices came
+     to her and had perceived her state of listening and
+     abstraction.
+
+     (3) This was her special friend, Gerard of Epinal--her
+     _compère_ and gossip; was it jesting beguiled by some
+     childish recollection, or mock threat of youthful days that
+     she said this?
+
+     (4) An answer evidently given in the vagueness of imperfect
+     knowledge, meaning a very great number.
+
+     (5) Quicherat gives a note on this subject to point out that
+     there was really was but one Pope at this moment, the
+     question having been settled by the abdication of Clement
+     VIII., Benedict XIV. being a mere impostor. We cannot
+     believe, however, that this historical cutting of the knot
+     could be known to Jeanne. She probably felt only, with her
+     fine instinct, that there could be but one Pope, and that to
+     be deceived on such a matter ought to have been a thing
+     impossible to all those priests and learned men; as a matter
+     of fact the three claimants, on account of whom the Comte
+     d'Armagnac had appealed to her, were no longer existing at
+     the time he wrote.
+
+     (6) She meant Paris, which was lost by the English,
+     according to her prophecy within the time named.
+
+     (7) It should here be noted that Jeanne's sign to the King
+     being, as he afterwards declared, the answer to his most
+     private devotions and the final setting at rest of a doubt
+     which might have injured him much had it been known that he
+     entertained it--it would have been dishonourable on her part
+     and a great wrong to him had she revealed it.
+
+     (8) The translation of M. Fabre is now, I believe,
+     reprinted, but it is not satisfactory.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV --THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON. LENT, 1431.
+
+It must not be forgotten, in the history of this strange trial, that the
+prisoner was brought from the other side of France expressly that she
+might be among a people who were not of her own party, and who had no
+natural sympathies with her, but a hereditary connection with England,
+which engaged all its partialities on that side. For this purpose it was
+that the _venue_, the town expected the coming of the Witch, and all the
+dark revelations that might be extracted from her, her spells, and the
+details of that contract with the devil which was so entrancing to
+the popular imagination, with excitement and eagerness. Such a _Cause
+Célèbre_ had never taken place among them before; and everybody no doubt
+looked forward to the pleasure of seeing it proved that it was not by
+the will of Heaven, but by some monstrous combination of black arts,
+that such an extraordinary result as the defeat of the invincible
+English soldiers had been brought about. The litigious and logical
+Normans no doubt looked forward to it as to the most interesting
+entertainment, ending in the complete vindication of their own side and
+the exposure of the nefarious arms used by their adversaries.
+
+But when the proceedings had been opened, and in place of some
+dark-browed and termagant sorceress, with the mark of every evil passion
+in her face, there appeared before the spectators crowding into every
+available corner, the slim, youthful figure--was it boy or girl?--the
+serene and luminous countenance of the Maid, the flower of youth raising
+its whiteness and innocence in the midst of all those black-robed,
+subtle Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance must
+have given a shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may be
+called the lay spectators, those who had no especial bias more than
+common report, and whose credit or interest were not involved in
+bringing this unlikely criminal to condemnation. "A girl! Like our own
+Jeanne at home," might many a father have said, dismayed and confounded.
+She had, they all say, those eyes of innocence which it is so impossible
+not to believe, and that virginal voice, _assez femme_, which a
+sentimental Frenchman insists upon as belonging only to the spotless.
+At all events she had the bearing of honesty, purity, and truth. She was
+not afraid though all the powers of hell--or was it only of the
+Church and the Law?--were arrayed against her: no guilty mystery to be
+discovered, was in her countenance. But it must have been plain to the
+keen and not too charitable Normans that such semblances are not always
+to be trusted, and that the devil himself even, on occasion, can take
+upon himself the appearance of an angel of light; so that after the
+first shock of wonder they no doubt settled themselves to listen,
+believing that soon they would have their imaginations fed with tales
+of horror, and would discover the hoofs and the horns and unveil
+with triumph the lurking demon. The French historians never take into
+consideration the fact that it was the belief of Rouen and Normandy, as
+well as of any similar town or province in England, that the child
+Henry VI. was lawful king, and that whatever was on the other side was
+a hateful adversary, to be brought to such disaster and shame as was
+possible, without mercy and without delay.
+
+But after a few days of the examination which we have just reported,
+public opinion was greatly staggered, and knew not how to turn.
+Gradually the conviction must have been forced upon every mind which had
+any candour left, that Jeanne, at that dreadful bar, with the stake
+in sight, and all the learning of Paris--the entire power of one great
+national and half of another, all England and half France against--(many
+more than half France, for the other part had abandoned her
+cause),--showed nothing of the demon, but all--if not of the angel, yet
+of the Maid, the emblem of perfection to that rude world, though
+often so barbarously handled. It might almost be said of the age,
+notwithstanding its immorality and rampant viciousness, that in its eyes
+a true virgin could do no harm. And hers was one if ever such a thing
+existed on earth. The talk in the streets began to take a very different
+tone. Massieu the clerical sheriff's officer saw nothing in her answers
+that was not good and right. Out of the midst of the crowd of listeners
+would burst an occasional cry of "Well said!" An Englishman, even a
+knight, overcome by his feelings, cried out: "Why was not she English,
+this brave girl!" All these were ominous sounds. Still more ominous was
+the utterance of Maître Jean Lohier, a lawyer of Rouen, who declared
+loudly that the trial was not a legal trial for the reasons which
+follow:
+
+"In the first place because it was not in the form of an ordinary trial;
+secondly, because it was not held in a public court, and those present
+had not full and complete freedom to say what was their full and
+unbiassed opinion; thirdly, because there was question of the honour of
+the King of France of whose party Jeanne was, without calling him,
+or any one for him; fourthly, because neither libel nor articles were
+produced, and this woman who was only an uninstructed girl, had no
+advocate to answer for her before so many Masters and Doctors, on such
+grave matters, and especially those which touched upon the revelations
+of which she spoke; therefore it seemed to him that the trial was worth
+nothing. For these things Monseigneur de Beauvais was very indignant
+against the said Maître Lohier, saying: 'Here is Lohier who is going to
+make a fine fuss about our trial; he calumniates us all, and tells the
+world it is of no good. If one were to go by him, one would have to
+begin everything over again, and all that has been done would be of no
+use.' Monseigneur de Beauvais said besides: 'It is easy to see on which
+foot he halts (_de quel pied il cloche_). By St. John, we shall do
+nothing of the kind; we shall go on with our trial as we have begun
+it.'"
+
+A day or two later Manchon, the Clerk of the Court (he who refused to
+take down Jeanne's conversation with her Judas), met this same lawyer
+Lohier at church, and asked him, as no doubt every man asked every
+other whom he met, how did he think the trial was going? to which Lohier
+answered: "You see the manner in which they proceed; they will take her,
+if they can, in her words--that is to say, the assertions in which she
+says _I know for certain_, things that concern her apparitions. If she
+would say, 'It seems to me' instead of 'I know for certain,' I do not
+see how any man could condemn her. It appears that they proceed against
+her rather from hate than from any other cause, and for this reason I
+shall not remain here. I will have nothing to do with it." This I think
+shows very clearly that Lohier, like the bulk of the population, by no
+means thought at first that it was "from hate" that the trial proceeded,
+but honestly believed that he had been called to try Jeanne as a
+professor of the black arts; and that he had discovered from her own
+testimony that she was not so, and that the motive of the trial was
+entirely a different one from that of justice; one in fact with which an
+honest man could have nothing to do.
+
+It is very significant also that the number of judges present in
+court on the sixth day, the last of the public examination, was only
+thirty-eight, as against the sixty-two of the second day, which seems to
+prove that a general disgust and alarm was growing in the minds of those
+most closely concerned. Warwick and the soldiers, impatient of all
+such business, striding in noisily from time to time to give a careless
+glance at the proceedings, might not stay long enough to share the
+impression--or might, who can say? Their business was to get this
+pestilent woman, even if by chance she might be an innocent fanatic,
+cleared off the face of the earth and out of their way.
+
+After the sixth day, however, it would seem that the Bishop and his
+tools had taken fright at the progress of public opinion. Before
+dismissing the court on that occasion, Cauchon made an address to the
+disturbed and anxious judges, informing them that he would not tire them
+out with prolonged sittings, but that a few specially chosen assistants
+would now examine into what further details were necessary. In the
+meantime all would be put in writing; so that they might think it over
+and deliberate within themselves, so as to be able each to make a
+report either to himself, the Bishop, or to some one deputed by him.
+The assessors, thus thrown out of work, were however forbidden to leave
+Rouen without the Bishop's permission--probably because of the threat
+of Lohier. Repeated meetings were held in Cauchon's house to arrange
+the details of the proceedings to follow; and during this time it was
+perhaps hoped that any excitement outside would quiet down. The Bishop
+himself had in the meantime other work in hand. He had to receive
+certain important visitors, one of them the man who held the appointment
+of Chancellor of France on the English side, and who was well acquainted
+with the mind of his masters. We have no information whatever whether
+Cauchon ever himself wavered, or allowed the possibility of acquitting
+Jeanne to enter his mind; but he must have seen that it was of the last
+necessity to know what would satisfy the English chiefs. No doubt he was
+confirmed and strengthened in the conviction that by hook or by crook
+her condemnation must be accomplished, by the conversation of these
+illustrious visitors. To save Jeanne was impossible he must have been
+told. No English soldier would strike a blow while she lived. England
+itself, the whole country, trembled at her name. Till she was got rid of
+nothing could be done.
+
+There was of course great exaggeration in all this, for the English had
+fought desperately enough in her presence except on the one occasion
+of Patay, notwithstanding all the early prestige of Jeanne. But at all
+events it was made perfectly clear that the foregoing conclusion must
+be carried out, and that Jeanne must die: and, not only so, but she must
+die with opprobrium and disgrace as a witch, which almost everybody out
+of Rouen now believed her to be. The public examination which lasted six
+days was concluded on the third of March, 1430. On the following days,
+the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth of March, meetings
+were held, as we have said, in the Bishop's house to consider what
+it would be well to do next, at one of which a select company of
+Inquisitors was chosen to carry on the examination in private. These
+were Jean de la Fontaine, a lawyer learned in canon law; Jean Beaupère,
+already her interrogator; Nicolas Midi, a Doctor in Theology; Pierre
+Morice, Canon of Rouen and Ambassador from the English King to the
+Council of Bâle; Thomas de Courcelles, the learned and excellent young
+Doctor already described; Nicolas l'Oyseleur, the traitor, also already
+sufficiently referred to; and Manchon, the honest Clerk of the court:
+the names of Gerard Feuillet, also a distinguished man, and Jean
+Fecardo, an advocate, are likewise also mentioned. They seem to have
+served in their turn, three or four at a time. This private session
+began on the 10th of March, a week after the conclusion of the public
+trial, and was held in the prison chamber inhabited by the Maid.
+
+We shall not attempt to follow literally those private examinations,
+which would take a great deal more space than we have at our command,
+and would be fatiguing to the reader from the constant and prolonged
+repetitions; we shall therefore quote only such parts as are new or so
+greatly enlarged from Jeanne's original statements as to seem so. At the
+first day's examination in her prison she was questioned about Compiègne
+and her various proceedings before reaching that place.(1) She was
+asked, for one thing, if her voices had bidden her make the sally in
+which she was taken; to which she answered that had she known the time
+she was to be taken she would not have gone out, unless upon the express
+command of the saints. She was then asked about her standard, her
+arms, and her horses, and replied that she had no coat-of-arms, but her
+brothers had, who also had all her money, from ten to twelve thousand
+francs, which was "no great treasure to make war upon," besides five
+chargers, and about seven other horses, all from the King. The examiners
+then came to their principal object, and having lulled her mind with
+these trifles, turned suddenly to a subject on which they still hoped
+she might commit herself, the sign which had proved her good faith to
+the King. It is scarcely possible to avoid the feeling, grave as all
+the circumstances were, that a little _malice_, a glance of mischievous
+pleasure, kindled in Jeanne's eye. She had refused to enter into further
+explanations again and again. She had warned them that she would give
+them no true light on the subjects that concerned the King. Now she
+would seem to have had sudden recourse to the mystification that is dear
+to youth, to have tossed her young head and said: "_Have then your own
+way_"; and forthwith proceeded to romance, according to the indications
+given her of what was wanted, without thought of preserving any
+appearance of reality. Most probably indeed, her air and tone would make
+it apparent to her persistent questioners how complete a fable, or at
+least parable, it was.
+
+Asked, what sign she gave to the King, she replied that it was a
+beautiful and honourable sign, very creditable and very good, and rich
+above all. Asked, if it still lasted; answered, "It would be good to
+know; it will last a thousand years and more if well guarded," adding
+that it was in the treasure of the King. Asked, if it was of gold or
+silver or of precious stones, or in the form of a crown; answered: "I
+will tell you nothing more; but no man could devise a thing so rich as
+this sign; but the sign that is necessary for you is that God should
+deliver me out of your hands, and that is what He will do." She also
+said that when she had to go to the King it was said by her voices: "Go
+boldly; and when you are before the King he will have a sign which will
+make him receive and believe in you." Asked, what reverence she made
+when the sign came to the King, and if it came from God; answered, that
+she had thanked God for having delivered her from the priests of her own
+party who had argued against her, and that she had knelt down several
+times; she also said that an angel from God, and not from another,
+brought the sign to the King; and she had thanked the Lord many times;
+she added that the priests ceased to argue against when they had seen
+that sign. Asked, if the clergy of her party (_de par delà_) saw the
+above sign; answered yes, that her King if he were satisfied; and he
+answered yes. And afterwards she went to a little chapel close by, and
+heard them say that after she was gone more than three hundred people
+saw the said sign. She said besides that for love of her, and that they
+should give up questioning her, God permitted those of her party to see
+the sign. Asked, if the King and she made reverence to the angel when
+he brought the sign; answered yes, for herself, that she knelt down and
+took off her hood.
+
+What Jeanne meant by this strange romance can only, I think be explained
+by this hypothesis. She was "dazed and bewildered," say some of the
+historians, evidently not knowing how to interpret so strange
+an interruption to her narrative; but there is no other sign of
+bewilderment; her mind was always clear and her intelligence complete.
+Granting that the whole story was boldly ironical, its object is very
+apparent. Honour forbade her to betray the King's secret, and she had
+expressly said she would not do so. But her story seems to say--_since
+you will insist that there was a sign, though I have told you I could
+give you no information, have it your own way; you shall have a sign and
+one of the very best; it delivered me from the priests of my own party
+(de par delà)_. Jeanne was no milk-sop; she was bold enough to send a
+winged shaft to the confusion of the priests of the other side who had
+tormented her in the same way. One can imagine a lurking smile at the
+corner of her mouth. Let them take it since they would have it. And we
+may well believe there was that in her eye, and in the details heaped up
+so lightly to form the miraculous tale, which left little doubt in the
+minds of the questioners, of the spirit in which she spoke: though to us
+who only read the record the effect is of a more bewildering kind.
+
+Two days after, on Monday, the 12th of March, the Inquisitors began by
+several additional questions concerning the angel who brought the
+sign to the King; was it the same whom she first saw, or another? She
+answered that it was the same, and no other was wanted. Asked, if this
+angel had not deceived her since she had been taken prisoner; answered,
+that SHE BELIEVED SINCE IT SO PLEASED OUR LORD THAT IT WAS BEST THAT SHE
+SHOULD BE TAKEN. Asked, if the angel had not failed her; answered, "How
+could he have failed me, when he comforts me every day?" This comfort
+is what she understands to come through St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+Asked, whether she called them, or they came without being called, she
+answered, that they often came without being called, and if they did
+not come soon enough, she asked our Saviour to send them. Asked, if St.
+Denis had ever appeared to her; answered, not that she knew. Asked,
+if when she promised to our Lord to remain a virgin she spoke to Him;
+answered, that it ought to be enough to speak to those who were sent by
+Him that is to say, St. Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, what induced
+her to summon a man to Toul, in respect to marriage; answered, "I did
+not summon him; it was he who summoned me"; and that on that occasion
+she had sworn before the judge to speak the truth, which was that she
+had not made him any promise. She also said that the first time she had
+heard the voices she made a vow of virginity so long as it pleased God,
+being then about the age of thirteen.
+
+It was the object of the judges by these questions to prove that,
+according to a fable which had obtained some credit, Jeanne during her
+visit to La Rousse, the village inn-keeper at Neufchâteau, had acted as
+servant in the house and tarnished her good fame--so that her betrothed
+had refused to marry her: and that he had been brought before the
+Bishop's court at Toul for his breach of promise, as we should say.
+Exactly the reverse was the case, as the reader will remember.
+
+Jeanne was further asked, if she had spoken of her visions to her
+curé or to any ecclesiastic: and answered no, but only to Robert de
+Baudricourt and to her King; but added that she was not bidden by her
+voices to conceal them, but feared to reveal them lest the Burgundians
+should hear of them and prevent her going. And especially she had much
+doubt of her father, lest he should hinder her from going. Asked, if she
+thought she did well to go away without the permission of her father
+and mother, when it is certain we ought to honour our father and mother;
+answered, that in every other thing she had fully obeyed him, except
+in respect to her departure; but she had written to them, and they had
+pardoned her. Asked, if when she left her father and mother she did not
+think it was a sin; answered, that her voices were quite willing that
+she should tell them, if it were not for the pain it would have
+given them; but as for herself, she would not have told them for any
+consideration; also that her voices left her to do as she pleased, to
+tell or not.
+
+*****
+
+Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we
+hope had her piece of bread and her _eau rougie_. In the afternoon these
+indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions throw
+a fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which this
+wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.
+
+She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that
+while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her
+father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with
+the troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and held
+her in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point except that
+of her affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also said that her
+mother had told her what her father had said to her brothers: "If I
+could think that the thing would happen of which I have dreamed, I wish
+she might be drowned first; and if you would not do it, I would drown
+her with my own hands"; and that he nearly lost his senses when she went
+to Vaucouleurs.
+
+How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern, and
+unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and pure
+may not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of personal
+degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in the intensity
+of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to us in many
+lands, always one of the most impressive of human pictures, with
+no trust of love in him but an overwhelming faith in every vicious
+possibility. If there is no evidence to prove that, even at the moment
+when Jeanne was supreme, when he was induced to go to Rheims to see the
+coronation, Jacques d'Arc was still dark, unresponsive, never more sure
+than any of the Inquisitors that his daughter was not a witch, or worse,
+a shameless creature linked to the captains and the splendid personages
+about her by very different ties from those which appeared--there is at
+least not a word to prove that he had changed his mind. She does not add
+anything to soften the description here given. The sudden appearance of
+this dark remorseless figure, looking on from his village, who probably
+in all Domremy--when Domremy got to hear the news--would be the only
+person who would in his desperation almost applaud that stake and
+devouring flame, is too startling for words.
+
+The end of this day's examination was remarkable also for a sudden light
+upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke
+of Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most
+cherished hopes to deliver.
+
+Asked, how she meant to rescue the Duc d'Orléans: she answered, that by
+that time she hoped to have taken English prisoners enough to exchange
+for him: and if she had not taken enough she should have crossed the
+sea, in power, to search for him in England. Asked, if St. Catherine
+and St. Margaret had told her absolutely and without condition that she
+should take enough prisoners to exchange for the Duc d'Orléans, who was
+in England, or otherwise, that she should cross the sea to fetch him and
+bring him back within three years; she answered yes: and that she had
+told the King and had begged him to permit her to make prisoners. She
+said further that if she had lasted three years without hindrance, she
+should have delivered him. Otherwise she said she had not thought of so
+long a time as three years, although it should have been more than one;
+but she did not at present recollect exactly.
+
+There is a curious story existing, though we do not remember whence
+it comes and there is not a scrap of evidence for it, which suggests a
+rumour that Jeanne was not the child of the d'Arc family at all, but
+in fact an abandoned and illegitimate child of the Queen, Isabel of
+Bavaria, and that her real father was the murdered Duc d'Orléans. This
+suggestion might explain the ease with which she fell into the way of
+Courts, a sort of air _à la Princesse_ which certainly was about her,
+and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A
+shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared
+in history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little
+conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are
+certain fanciful suggestions in the thought.
+
+After the above, Jeanne was again questioned and at great length upon
+the sign given to the King, upon the angel who brought it, the manner of
+his coming and going, the persons who saw him, those who saw the crown
+bestowed upon the King, and so on, in the most minute detail. That the
+purpose of the sign was that "they should give up arguing and so let
+her proceed on her mission," she repeated again and again; but here is a
+curious additional note.
+
+She was asked how the King and the people with him were convinced that
+it was an angel; and answered, that the King knew it by the instruction
+of the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign of the crown.
+Asked, how the ecclesiastics (_gens d'église_) knew it was an angel she
+answered, "By their knowledge (science), and because they were priests."
+
+Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind?
+We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which
+Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the strange
+tale.
+
+She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices
+that she attacked La Charité, and afterwards Paris, her two points of
+failure; the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her that
+those voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no.
+To Paris she went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a
+skirmish, or assault of arms (_vaillance d'armes_); but she intended to
+go farther, and to pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting and
+make the skirmish into a serious assault; the same was the case before
+La Charité. She was asked whether she had no revelation concerning Pont
+l'Evêque, and said that since it was revealed to her at Melun that she
+should be taken, she had had more recourse to the will of the captains
+than to her own; but she did not tell them that it was revealed to her
+that she should be taken. Asked, if she thought it was well done
+to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity of our Lady, which was a
+festival of the Church; she answered, that it was always well to keep
+the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience it seemed to her that
+it was and always would be a good thing to keep the feasts of our Lady,
+from one end to the other.
+
+In the afternoon the examiners returned to the attempt at escape or
+suicide--they seemed to have preferred the latter explanation--made at
+Beaurevoir; and as Jeanne expresses herself with more freedom as to her
+personal motives in these prison examinations and opens her heart more
+freely, there is much here which we give in full.
+
+She was asked first what was the cause of her leap from the tower of
+Beaurevoir. She answered that she had heard that all the people of
+Compiègne, down to the age of seven, were to be put to the sword, and
+that she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good
+people; this was one of the reasons; the other was that she knew that
+she was sold to the English and that she would rather die than fall into
+the hands of the English, her enemies. Asked, if she made that leap
+by the command of her voices; answered, that St. Catherine said to her
+almost every day that she was not to leap, for that God would help her,
+and also the people of Compiègne: and she, Jeanne, said to St. Catherine
+that since God intended to help the people of Compiègne she would fain
+be there. And St. Catherine said: "You must take it in good part, but
+you will not be delivered till you have seen the King of the English."
+And she, Jeanne, answered: "Truly I do not wish to see him. I would
+rather die than fall into the hands of the English." Asked, if she had
+said to St. Catherine and St. Margaret, "Will God leave the good people
+of Compiègne to die so cruelly?" answered, that she did not say "so
+cruelly," but said it in this way: "Will God leave these good people
+of Compiègne to die, who have been and are so loyal to their lord?" She
+added that after she fell there were two or three days that she would
+not eat; and that she was so hurt by the leap that she could not eat;
+but all the time she was comforted by St. Catherine, who told her to
+confess and ask pardon of God for that act, and that without doubt the
+people of Compiègne would have succour before Martinmas. And then she
+took pains to recover and began to eat, and shortly was healed.
+
+Asked, whether, when she threw herself down, she wished to kill herself,
+she answered no; but that in throwing herself down she commended herself
+to God, and hoped by means of that leap to escape and to avoid being
+delivered to the English. Asked, if, when she recovered the power of
+speech, she had denied and blasphemed God and the saints, as had been
+reported; answered, that she remembered nothing of the kind, and that,
+as far as she knew, she had never denied and blasphemed God and His
+saints there nor anywhere else, and did not confess that she had done
+so, having no recollection of it. Asked, if she would like to see the
+information taken on the spot, answered: "I refer myself to God, and not
+another, and to a good confession." Asked, if her voices ever desired
+delay for their replies; answered, that St. Catherine always answered
+her at once, but sometimes she, Jeanne, could not hear because of
+the tumult round her (_turbacion des personnes_) and the noise of her
+guards; but that when she asked anything of St. Catherine, sometimes
+she, and sometimes St. Margaret asked of our Lord, and then by the
+command of our Lord an answer was given to her. Asked, if, when they
+came, there was always light accompanying them, and if she did not
+see that light when she heard the voice in the castle without knowing
+whether it was in her chamber or not: answered, that there was never
+a day that they did not come into the castle, and that they never came
+without light: and that time she heard the voice, but did not remember
+whether she saw the light, or whether she saw St. Catherine. Also she
+said she had asked from her voices three things: one, her release: the
+other, that God would help the French, and keep the town faithful: and
+the other the salvation of her soul. Afterwards she asked that she might
+have a copy of these questions and her answers if she were to be taken
+to Paris, that she may give them to the people in Paris, and say to
+them, "This is how I was questioned in Rouen, and here are my replies,"
+that she might not be exhausted by so many questions.
+
+Asked, what she meant when she said that Monseigneur de Beauvais put
+himself in danger by bringing her to trial, and why Monseigneur de
+Beauvais more than others, she answered, that this was and is what she
+said to Monseigneur de Beauvais: "You say that you are my judge. I know
+not whether you are so; but take care that you judge well, or you will
+put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if our Lord should
+chastise you for it, I may have done my duty in warning you." Asked,
+what was that danger? she answered, that St. Catherine had said that she
+should have succour, but that she knew not whether this meant that
+she would be delivered from prison, or that, when she was before the
+tribunal, there might come trouble by which she should be delivered;
+she thought, however, it would be the one or the other. And all the more
+that her voices told her that she would be delivered by a great victory;
+and afterwards they said to her: "Take everything cheerfully, do not
+be disturbed by this martyrdom: thou shalt thence come at last to the
+kingdom of Heaven." And this the voices said simply and absolutely--that
+is to say, without fail; she explained that she called It martyrdom
+because of all the pain and adversity that she had suffered in prison;
+and she knew not whether she might have still more to suffer, but waited
+upon our Lord. She was then asked whether, since her voices had said
+that she should go to Paradise, she felt assured that she should be
+saved and not damned in hell; she answered, that she believed firmly
+what her voices said about her being saved, as firmly as if she were
+so already. And when it was said to her that this answer was of great
+weight, she answered that she herself held it as a great treasure.
+
+We have said that Jeanne's answers to the Inquisitors in prison had a
+more familiar form than in the public examination; which seem to
+prove that they were not unkind to her, further, at least, than by the
+persistence and tediousness of their questions. The Bishop for one thing
+was seldom present; the sittings were frequently presided over by the
+Deputy Inquisitor, who had made great efforts to be free of the business
+altogether, and had but very recently been forced into it; so that we
+may at least imagine, as he was so reluctant, that he did what he could
+to soften the proceedings. Jean de la Fontaine, too, was a milder man
+than her former questioners, and in so small an assembly she could not
+be disturbed and interrupted by Frère Isambard's well-meant signs and
+whispers. She speaks at length and with a self-disclosure which seems to
+have little that was painful in it, like one matured into a kind of
+age by long weariness and trouble, who regards the panorama of her life
+passing before her with almost a pensive pleasure. And it is clear that
+Jeanne's ear, still so young and keen, notwithstanding that attitude of
+mind, was still intent upon sounds from without, and that Jeanne's
+heart still expected a sudden assault, a great victory for France, which
+should open her prison doors--or even a rising in the very judgment hall
+to deliver her. How could they keep still outside, Dunois, Alençon,
+La Hire, the mighty men of valour, while they knew that she was being
+racked and tortured within? She who could not bear to be out of the
+conflict to serve her friends at Compiègne, even when succour from on
+high had been promised, how was it possible that these gallant knights
+could live and let her die, their gentle comrade, their dauntless
+leader? In those long hours, amid the noise of the guards within and the
+garrison around, how she must have thought, over and over again, where
+were they? when were they coming? how often imagined that a louder clang
+of arms than usual, a rush of hasty feet, meant that they were here!
+
+But honour and love kept Jeanne's lips closed. Not a word did she say
+that could discredit King, or party, or friends; not a reproach to those
+who had abandoned her. She still looked for the great victory in which
+Monseigneur, if he did not take care, might run the risk of being
+roughly handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court that would
+pitch him form his guilty seat. It was but the fourteenth of March
+still, and there were six weary weeks to come. She did not know the hour
+or the day, but yet she believed that this great deliverance was on its
+way.
+
+And there was a great deliverance to come: but not of this kind. The
+voices of God--how can we deny it?--are often, though in a loftier
+sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise to the
+ear but break it to the heart. They promised her a great victory: and
+she had it, and also the fullest deliverance: but only by the stake and
+the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any other girl
+of her age. They did not speak to deceive her, but she was deceived;
+they kept their promise, but not as she understood it. "These all died
+in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar
+off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them." Jeanne too was
+persuaded of them, but was not to receive them--except in the other way.
+
+On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne fasted,
+whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely questioned
+on the subject, this time, of Franquet d'Arras, who, as has been above
+narrated, was taken by her in the course of some indiscriminate fighting
+in the north. She was asked if it was not mortal sin to take a man as
+prisoner of war and then give him up to be executed. There was evidently
+no perception of similarities in the minds of the judges, for this was
+precisely what had been done in the case of Jeanne herself; but even she
+does not seem to have been struck by the fact. Their object, apparently,
+was by proving that she was in a state of sin, to prove also that her
+voices were of no authority, as being unable to discover so simple a
+principle as this.
+
+When they spoke to her of "one named Franquet d'Arras, who was executed
+at Lagny," she answered that she consented to his death, as he deserved
+it, for he had confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and a traitor.
+She said that his trial lasted fifteen days, the Bailli de Senlis and
+the law officers of Lagny being the judges; and she added that she had
+wished to have Franquet, to exchange him for a man of Paris, Seigneur de
+Lours (corrected, innkeeper at the sign of l'Ours); but when she heard
+that this man was dead, and when the Bailli told her that she would
+go very much against justice if she set Franquet free, she said to the
+Bailli: "Since my man is dead whom I wished to deliver, do with this one
+whatever justice demands." Asked, if she took the money or allowed it to
+be taken by him who had taken Franquet, she answered, that she was not a
+money changer or a treasurer of France, to deal with money.
+
+She was then reminded that having assaulted Paris on a holy day, having
+taken the horse of Monseigneur de Senlis, having thrown herself down
+from the tower of Beaurevoir, having consented to the death of Franquet
+d'Arras, and being still dressed in the costume of a man, did she not
+think that she must be in a state of mortal sin? She answered to the
+first question about Paris: "I do not think I was guilty of mortal sin,
+and if I have sinned it is to God that I would make it known, and in
+confession to God by the priest." To the second question, concerning the
+horse of Senlis, she answered, that she believed firmly that there was
+not mortal sin in this, seeing it was valued, and the Bishop had due
+notice of it, and at all events it was sent back to the Seigneur de la
+Trémouille to give it back to Monseigneur de Senlis. The said horse was
+of no use to her; and, on the other hand, she did not wish to keep it
+because she heard that the Bishop was displeased that his horse should
+have been taken. And as for the tower of Beaurevoir: "I did it not to
+destroy myself, but in the hope of saving myself and of going to the aid
+of the good people who were in need." But after having done it, she had
+confessed her sin, and asked pardon of our Lord, and had pardon of Him.
+And she allowed that it was not right to have made that leap, but that
+she did wrong.
+
+The next day an important question was introduced, the only one as
+yet which Jeanne does not seem to have been able to answer with
+understanding. On points of fact or in respect to her visions she was
+always quite clear, but questions concerning the Church were beyond
+her knowledge. It is only indeed after some time has elapsed that we
+perceive why such a question was introduced.
+
+After admonitions made to her she was required, if she had done anything
+contrary to the faith, to submit herself to the decision of the Church.
+She replied, that her answers had all been heard and seen by clerks,
+and that they could say whether there was anything in them against the
+faith: and that if they would point out to her where any error was,
+afterwards she would tell them what was said by her counsellors. At
+all events if there was anything against the faith which our Lord had
+commanded, she would not sustain it, and would be very sorry to go
+against that. Here it was shown to her that there was a Church militant
+and a Church triumphant, and she was asked if she knew the difference
+between them. She was also required to put herself under the
+jurisdiction of the Church, in respect to what she had done, whether it
+was good or evil, but replied, "I will answer no more on this point for
+the present."
+
+Having thrown in this tentative question which she did not understand,
+they returned to the question of her dress, which holds such an
+important place in the entire interrogatory. If she were allowed to
+hear mass as she wished, having been all this time deprived of religious
+ordinances, did not she think it would be more honest and befitting that
+she should go in the dress of a woman? To this she replied vaguely, that
+she would much rather go to mass in the dress of a woman than to retain
+her male costume and not to hear mass; and that if she were certified
+that she should hear mass, she would be there in a woman's dress. "I
+certify you that you shall hear mass," the examiner replied, "but you
+must be dressed as a woman." "What would you say," she answered as with
+a momentary doubt, "if I had sworn to my King never to change?" but
+she added: "Anyhow I answer for it. Find me a dress, long, touching the
+ground, without a train, and give it to me to go to mass; but I will
+return to my present dress when I come back." She was then asked why
+she would not have all the parts of a female dress to go to mass in; she
+said, "I will take counsel upon that, and answer you," and begged again
+for the honour of God and our Lady that she might be allowed to hear
+mass in this good town. Afterwards she was again recommended to assume
+the whole dress of a woman and gave a conditional assent: "Get me
+a dress like that of a young _bourgeoise_, that is to say, a long
+_houppelande_; I will wear that and a woman's hood to go to mass." After
+having promised, however, she made an appeal to them to leave her free,
+and to think no more of her garb, but to allow her to hear mass without
+changing it. This would seem to have been refused, and all at once
+without warning the jurisdiction of the Church was suddenly introduced
+again.
+
+She was asked, whether in all she did and said she would submit herself
+to the Church, and replied: "All my deeds and works are in the hands of
+God, and I depend only on Him; and I certify that I desire to do nothing
+and say nothing against the Christian faith; and if I have done or said
+anything in the body that was against the Christian faith which our
+Lord has established, I should not defend it but cast it forth from
+me." Asked again, if she would not submit to the laws of the Church she
+replied: "I can answer no more to-day on this point; but on Saturday
+send the clerk to me, if you do not come, and I will answer by the grace
+of God, and it can be put in writing."
+
+A great many questions followed as to her visions, but chiefly what had
+been asked before. One thing only we may note, since it was one of the
+special sayings all her own, which fell from the lips of Jeanne, during
+this private and almost sympathetic examination. After being questioned
+closely as to how she knew her first visitor to be St. Michael, etc.,
+she was asked, how she would have known had he been "l'Anemy" himself
+(a Norman must surely have used this word), taking the form of an angel:
+and finally, what doctrine he taught her?
+
+She answered; above all things he said that she was to be a good child
+and that God would help her: and among other things that she was to go
+to the succour of the King of France. But the greater part of what the
+angel taught her, she continued, was already in their book; and THE
+ANGEL SHOWED HER THE GREAT PITY THERE WAS OF THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
+
+The pity of it! That which has always gone most to the tender heart: a
+country torn in pieces, brother fighting against brother, the invader
+seated at the native hearth, and blood and fire making the smiling land
+a desert: "_la pitie qui estoit au royaume de France_."
+
+Did the Inquisitor break down here? Could no one go on? or was it mere
+human incompetence to feel the divine touch? Some one broke into a
+foolish question about the height of the angel, and the sitting was
+hurriedly concluded. Monseigneur might well be on his mettle; that
+very pity, was it not stealing into the souls of his private committee
+deputed for so different a use?
+
+*****
+
+Next day the questions about St. Michael's personal appearance were
+resumed, as a little feint we can only suppose, for the great question
+of the Church was again immediately introduced; but in the meantime
+Jeanne had described her visitor in terms which it is pleasant to dwell
+on. "He was in the form of a _très vrai prud' homme_." The term is
+difficult to translate, as is the Galantuomo of Italy. The "King-Honest
+Man," we used to say in English in the days of his late Majesty Victor
+Emmanuel of Italy; but that is not all that is meant--_un vrai prud'
+homme_, a man good, honest, brave, the best man, is more like it.
+The girl's honest imagination thought of no paraphernalia of wings or
+shining plumes. It was not the theatrical angel, not even the angel of
+art whom she saw--whom it would have been so easy to invent, nay to take
+quite truthfully from the first painted window, radiating colour and
+brightness through the dim, low-roofed church. But even with such
+material handy, Jeanne was not led into the conventional. She knew
+nothing about wings or emblematic scales. He was in the form of a brave
+and gentle man. She knew not anything greater, nor would she be seduced
+into fable however sacred. Then once more the true assault began.
+
+She was asked, if she would submit all her sayings and doings, good or
+evil, to the judgment of our Holy Mother, the Church. She replied, that
+as for the Church, she loved it and would sustain it with all her might
+for our Christian faith; and that it was not she whom they ought to
+disturb and hinder from going to church or from hearing mass. As to the
+good things she had done, and that had happened, she must refer all to
+the King of Heaven, who had sent her to Charles, King of France; and it
+should be seen that the French would soon gain a great advantage which
+God would send them, so great that all the kingdom of France would
+be shaken. And this, she said, that when it came to pass, they might
+remember that she had said it. She was again asked, if she would submit
+to the jurisdiction of the Church, and answered, "I refer everything
+to our Lord who sent me, to our Lady, and to the blessed Saints of
+Paradise"; and added her opinion was that our Lord and the Church meant
+the same thing, and that difficulties should not be made concerning
+this, when there was no difficulty, and they were both one. She was then
+told that there was the Church triumphant, in which are God, the saints,
+the angels, and all saved souls. The Church militant is our Holy Father
+the Pope, vicar of God on earth, the cardinals, the prelates of the
+Church, and the clergy and all good Christians and Catholics, which
+Church properly assembled cannot err, but is guided by the Holy Spirit.
+And this being the case she was asked if she would refer her cause to
+the Church militant thus explained to her. She replied that she had
+come to the King of France on the part of God, on the part of the Virgin
+Mary, the blessed Saints of Paradise, and the Church victorious in
+Heaven, and at their commandment; and to that Church she submitted all
+her good deeds, and all that she had done and might do. And if they
+asked her whether she would submit to the Church militant, answered,
+that she would now answer no more than this.
+
+Here again the argument strayed back to the futile subject of dress,
+always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges were
+non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and shows
+that dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to mingle with
+her hopes.
+
+Asked, what she had to say about the woman's dress that had been offered
+to her, to hear mass in: she answered, that she would not take it yet,
+not until the Lord pleased; but that if it were necessary to lead her
+out to be executed, and if she should then have to be undressed, she
+required of the Lords of the Church that they would give her the grace
+to have a long chemise, and a kerchief for her head; that she would
+prefer to die rather than to alter what our Lord had directed her to do,
+and that she firmly believed our Lord would not let her descend so low,
+but that she should soon be helped by God and by a miracle. She was then
+asked, if what she did in respect to the man's costume was by command of
+God, why she asked for a woman's chemise in case of death? answered, _It
+is enough that it should be long_.
+
+The effect of these words in which so much was implied, must have made
+a supreme sensation among the handful of men gathered round the helpless
+girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror before the
+eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could have been
+suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold, the fire--and
+the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to every evil gaze,
+must have showed themselves at least for a moment against that dark
+background of prison wall. It was enough that it should be long--to hide
+her as much as was possible from those dreadful staring eyes.
+
+The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the dress
+of the saints. But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne herself,
+it was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more weighty
+thoughts. Presently they asked if the saints hated the English, to which
+she replied that they hated what God hated and loved what He loved. She
+was then asked if God hated the English. She replied that of the love or
+hate that God had for the English, or what God did for their souls,
+she knew nothing; but she knew well that they should be driven out of
+France, except those who died there; and that God would send victory
+to the French against the English. Asked, if God was for the English so
+long as they were prosperous in France: she answered, that she knew not
+whether God hated the French, but believed He had allowed them to be
+beaten because of their sins.
+
+Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great statesman
+or a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the question
+concerning John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes. "If we shall
+say: From heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him not? but if we
+shall say of men we fear the people." And she was only a peasant girl
+and the event of which they spoke had been before her little time.
+
+Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to kill
+Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT MISFORTUNE
+FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE: but that however it might be among
+themselves, God had sent her to the succour of the King.
+
+One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual
+changes of the subject: one of which called forth as follows her last
+deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
+
+Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would answer
+as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done before our
+Holy Father the Pope, although at several points in the trial she would
+have had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer more plainly than
+before Monseigneur de Beauvais--she said that she had answered as
+much as she knew, and that if anything came to her memory that she had
+forgotten to say, she would say it willingly. Asked, if it seemed to her
+that she would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope, the vicar
+of God, in all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience, she
+replied that she desired to be taken before him, and then she would
+answer all that she ought to answer.
+
+Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second
+party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly
+attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have
+conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained time,
+probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to understand
+it.
+
+This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and
+whisperer, L'Oyseleur, was working against it in the background. Jeanne
+evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not understand the
+distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant: that
+God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could decide upon the
+questions which were between her Lord and herself, was too firmly fixed
+in her mind: and again and again the men whose desire was to make her
+adopt this expedient, were driven back into the ever repeated questions
+about St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little
+interval that remained, in a series of useless questions about her
+standard. Was it true that this standard had been carried into the
+Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind?
+"It had been through the labour and the pain," she said, "there was good
+reason that it should have the honour."
+
+This last movement of a proud spirit, absolutely disinterested and
+without thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the word,
+gives a sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful wranglings
+in prison, in which, however, there is a softening of tone visible
+throughout, and evident effect of human nature bringing into immediate
+contact divers human creatures day after day. Jeanne is often at her
+best, and never so frequently as during these less formal sittings
+utters those flying words, simple and noble and of absolute truth to
+nature, which are noted everywhere, even in the most rambling records.
+
+*****
+
+The private examination, concluding with that last answer about the
+banner, came to an end on the 17th March, the day before Passion Sunday.
+Several subsequent days were occupied with repeated consultations in
+the Bishop's palace, and the reading over of the minutes of the
+examinations, to the judges first and afterwards to Jeanne, who
+acknowledged their correctness, with one or two small amendments. It is
+only now that Cauchon reappears in his own person. On the morning of the
+following Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, he and four other doctors with
+him had a conversation with Jeanne in her prison, very early in the
+morning, touching her repeated application to be allowed to hear
+mass and to communicate. The Bishop offered her his ultimatum: if she
+consented to resume her woman's dress, she might hear mass, but not
+otherwise; to which Jeanne replied, sorrowfully, that she would have
+done so before now if she could; but that it was not in her power to
+do so. Thus after the long and bitter Lent her hopes of sharing in the
+sacred feast were finally taken from her. It remains uncertain whether
+she considered that her change of dress would be direct disobedience
+to God, which her words seem often to imply; or whether it would mean
+renunciation of her mission, which she still hoped against hope to be
+able to resume; or if the fear of personal insult weighed most with
+her. The latter reason had evidently something to do with it, but, as
+evidently, not all.
+
+The background to these curious sittings, afterwards revealed to us,
+casts a hazy side-light upon them. Probably the Bishop, never present,
+must have been made aware by his spies of an intention on the part of
+those most favourable to Jeanne to support an appeal to the Pope; and
+L'Oyseleur, the traitor, who was all this time admitted to her cell by
+permission of Cauchon, and really as his tool and agent, was actively
+employed in prejudicing her mind against them, counselling her not to
+trust to those clerks, not to yield to the Church. How he managed to
+explain his own appearance on the other side, his official connection
+with the trial, and constant presence as one of her judges, it is hard
+to imagine. Probably he gave her to believe that he had sought that
+position (having got himself liberated from the imprisonment which he
+had represented himself as sharing) for her sake, to be able to help
+her.
+
+On the other hand her friends, whose hearts were touched by her candour
+and her sufferings, were not inactive. Jean de la Fontaine and the two
+monks--l'Advenu and Frère Isambard--also succeeded in gaining admission
+to her, and pressed upon her the advantage of appealing to the Church,
+to the Council of Bâle about to assemble, or to the Pope himself, which
+would have again changed the _venue_, and transferred her into less
+prejudiced hands. It is very likely that Jeanne in her ignorance and
+innocence might have held by her reference to the supreme tribunal
+of God in any case; and it is highly unlikely that of the English
+authorities, intent on removing the only thing in France of which their
+forces were afraid, should have given her up into the hands of the Pope,
+or allowed her to be transferred to any place of defence beyond their
+reach; but at least it is a relief to the mind to find that all these
+men were not base, as appears on the face of things, but that pity and
+justice and human feeling sometimes existed under the priest's gown and
+the monk's cowl, if also treachery and falsehood of the blackest kind.
+The Bishop, who remained withdrawn, we know not why, from all these
+private sittings in the prison (probably busy with his ecclesiastical
+duties as Holy Week was approaching), heard with fury of this visit and
+advice, and threatened vengeance upon the meddlers, not without effect,
+for Jean de la Fontaine, we are told--who had been deep in his councils,
+and indeed his deputy, as chief examiner--disappeared from Rouen
+immediately after, and was heard of no more.
+
+     (1) Compiègne was a strong point. Had she proclaimed a
+     promise from St. Catherine, of victory? Chastelain says so,
+     long after date and with errors in fact. Two Anglo-
+     Compiègnais were at her trial. The Rehabilitation does not
+     go into this question.--(From Mr. Lang.)
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV -- RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+
+Upon all these contentions followed the calm of Palm Sunday, a great
+and touching festival, the first break upon the gloom of Lent, and a
+forerunner of the blessedness of Easter. We have already told how--a
+semblance of charity with which the reader might easily be deceived--the
+Bishop and four of his assessors had gone to the prison to offer to the
+Maid permission to receive the sacrament if she would do so in a woman's
+dress: and how after pleading that she might be allowed that privilege
+as she was, in her male costume, and with a pathetic statement that she
+would have yielded if she could, but that it was impossible--she
+finally refused; and was so left in her prison to pass that sacred day
+unsuccoured and alone. The historian Michelet, in the wonderful sketch
+in which he rises superior to himself, and which amidst all after
+writings remains the most beautiful and touching memorial of Jeanne
+d'Arc, has made this day a central point in his tale, using with the
+skill of genius the service of the Church appropriate to the day, in
+heart-rending contrast with those doors of the prison which did not
+open, and the help of God which did not come to the young and solitary
+captive. _Le beau jour fleuri_ passed over her in darkness and
+desertion: her agony and passion lay before her like those of the
+Divine Sufferer, to whom every day of the succeeding week is specially
+consecrated. There is almost indeed a painful following of the Saviour's
+steps in these dark days, the circumstances lending themselves in a
+wonderful way to the comparison which French writers love to make, but
+which many of us must always feel, however spotless the sufferer, to
+have a certain irreverence in them. But if ever martyr were worthy of
+being called a partaker of the sufferings of Christ it was surely this
+girl, free, if ever human creature was, from self-seeking, or thought
+of reward, or ambitious hope, in whose heart there had never been any
+motive but the service of God and the deliverance of her country, who
+had neither looked before nor after, nor put her own interests into
+consideration in any way. Silently the feast passed with no holy
+privileges of religion, no blessed token of the spring, no remembrance
+of the waving palms and scattered blossoms over which her Lord rode into
+Jerusalem to die. She had not that sweet fallacious triumph; but the
+darker ordeal remained for her to follow.
+
+On Tuesday the 27th of March, her troubles began again. Before Palm
+Sunday, the report of the trial had been read to her. She had now to
+hear the formal reading of the articles founded upon it, to give a final
+response if she had any to give, or explanation, or addition, if she
+thought proper. The sitting was held in the great hall of the Castle
+of Rouen before a band of more than forty, all assembled for this final
+test. The Bishop made a prefactory speech to the prisoner, pointing out
+to her how benign and merciful were the judges now assembled, that they
+had no wish to punish, but rather to instruct and lead her in the right
+way; and requesting her at this late period in the proceedings to choose
+one or more from among them to help her. To which Jeanne replied; "In
+the first place concerning my good and our faith, I thank you and all
+the company. As for the counsellor you offer me I thank you also, but I
+have no need to depart from our Lord as my counsellor."
+
+The articles, in which the former questions put to her and answered by
+her, were now repeated in the form of accusations, were then read to her
+one by one; her sorcery, sacrilege, etc., being taken as facts. To a
+few she repeated, with various forcible and fine turns of phrase, her
+previous answers, with here and there a new explanation; but to the
+great majority she referred simply to her former replies, or denied
+the charge, as follows: "The second article concerning sortilège,
+superstitious acts and divination, she denied, and in respect to
+adoration (i.e. allowing herself to be adored) said: If any kissed her
+hands or her garments, it was not by her will, and that she kept herself
+from it as much as she could; and the rest of the article she denies."
+This is a specimen of the manner in which she responded, with a
+clear-headed and undisturbed intelligence, point after point--_ipsa
+Johanna negat_, is the usual refrain: or else she referred with dignity
+to previous replies as her sole answer. But sometimes the girl was
+moved to indignation, sometimes added a word in her own defence: "As for
+fairies she knew not what they were, and as for her education she had
+been well and duly instructed what to believe, as a good child should."
+This was her answer to the article in which all the folk-lore of
+Domremy, all the fairy tales, had been collected into a solemn statement
+of heresy. The matter of dress was once more treated in endless detail,
+with many interjected questions and reports of what she had already
+said: and at the end, answering the statement that woman's dress was
+most fit for woman's work, Jeanne added the quick _mot_: "As for the
+usual work of women, there are enough of other women to do it." On
+another occasion when the report ran that she claimed to have done all
+things by the counsel of God, she interrupted and said "that it ought
+to be, all that I have done well." To her former answer that she had
+yielded to the desire of the French knights in attacking Paris, she
+added the fine words, "It seemed to me that it was their duty to attack
+their adversaries." In respect to her visions she added to her former
+answer, "that she had not asked advice of bishop, curé, or any other
+before believing her revelations, but had many times prayed God to
+reveal them to others of her party." About calling her saints when she
+required their aid she added, that she asked God and Our Lady to send
+her council and comfort, and immediately her heavenly visitors came; and
+that this was the prayer she made:
+
+"Gentle God, in honour of Your(1) passion, I pray You, if You love me,
+that You would reveal to me how I ought to answer these people of the
+Church. I know well by what command it was that I took this dress, but
+I know not in what manner I ought to give it up. For this may it please
+You to teach me."
+
+In respect to the reproach that she had been a general in the war (_chef
+de guerre_), she explained that if she were, it was to drive out the
+English, repelling the accusation that she had assumed this title in
+pride; and to that which accused her of preferring to live among men,
+she explained that when she was in a lodging she generally had a woman
+with her; but that when engaged in war she lived in her clothes whenever
+there was not a woman present. In respect to her hope of escaping
+from prison, she was asked if her council had thrown any light on that
+question, and replied, "I have yet to tell you." Manchon, the
+clerk, makes a note upon his margin at these words, "Proudly
+answered"--_superbe responsum_.
+
+This re-examination lasted for two long days, the 27th and 28th of
+March. On several points Jeanne requested that she might be allowed to
+give an answer on Saturday, and accordingly, on Saturday, the last day
+of March, Easter Eve, she was visited in prison by the Bishop and
+seven or eight assessors. She was then asked if she would submit to
+the judgment of the Church on earth all that she had done and said,
+specially in things that concerned her trial. She answered that she
+would submit to the judgment of the Church militant, provided that it
+did not enforce anything that was impossible. She explained that
+what she called impossible was to acknowledge that the visions and
+revelations came otherwise than from God, or that what she had done was
+not on the part of God: these she would never deny or revoke for any
+power on earth: and that which our Lord had commanded or should command,
+she would not give up for any living man, and this would be impossible
+to her. And in case the Church should command her to do anything
+contrary to the command given her by God she would not do it for any
+reason whatsoever. Asked whether she would submit to the Church if the
+Church militant pronounced that her revelations were delusions or from
+the devil, or superstitious, or evil things, she answered that she would
+refer everything to our Lord, whose command she always obeyed; and that
+she knew well that everything had come to her by the commandment of God;
+and that what she had affirmed during this trial to have been done by
+the commandment of God it would be impossible for her to deny. And in
+case the Church militant commanded her to go against God, she would
+submit herself to no man in this world but to our Lord, whose good
+commandment she had always obeyed. She was asked if she did not believe
+that she was subject to the Church on earth, that is, to our Holy Father
+the Pope, the Cardinals, Bishops, and other prelates of the Church.
+She answered, "_Yes, our Lord being served first_." Asked if she had
+directions from her voices not to submit to the Church militant which
+is on earth, nor to its judgment, she replied that she does not answer
+according to what comes into her head, but that when she replies it is
+by commandment; and that she has never been told not to obey the Church,
+our Lord being served first (_noster Sire premier servi_).
+
+Other less formal particulars come to us long after, from various
+witnesses at the _procès de rehabilitation_, in which a lively picture
+is given of this scene. Frère Isambard had apparently managed, as was
+his wont, to get close to the prisoner, and to whisper to her to appeal
+to the Council of Bâle. "What is this Council of Bâle?" she asked in the
+same tone. Isambard replied that it was the "congregation of the whole
+Church, Catholic and Universal, and that there would be as many there on
+her side as on that of the English." "Ah!" she cried, "since there will
+be some of our party in that place, I will willingly yield and submit
+to the Council of Bâle, to our Holy Father the Pope, and to the sacred
+Council."(2) And immediately--continues the deposition--the Bishop of
+Beauvais cried out, "Silence, in the devil's name!" and told the notary
+to take no notice of what she said, that she would submit herself to the
+Council of Bâle; whereupon a second cry burst from the bosom of Jeanne,
+"You write what is against me, but you will not write what is for me."
+"Because of these things, the English and their officers threatened
+terribly the said Frère Isambard, warning him that if he did not hold
+his peace he would be thrown in the Seine." No notice whatever is taken
+of any such interruption in the formal record. It must have been before
+this time that Jean de la Fontaine disappeared. He left Rouen secretly
+and never returned, nor does he ever appear again. Frère Isambard is
+said to have taken temporary refuge in his convent; they scattered,
+_de par l'diable_, according to the Christian adjuration of Mgr. De
+Beauvais; though l'Advenu would seem to have held his ground, and served
+as Confessor to Jeanne in her agony, at which Frère Isambard was also
+present. We are told that the Deputy Inquisitor Lemâitre, he who had
+been got to lend the aid of his presence with such difficulty, fiercely
+warned the authorities that he would have no harm done to those two
+friars, from which we may infer that he too had leanings towards the
+Maid; and these honest and loyal men, well deserving of their country
+and of mankind, should not lose their record when the tragic story of so
+much human treachery and baseness has to be told.
+
+*****
+
+After this there came a long pause, full of much business to the judges,
+councillors, and clerks who had to reduce the seventy articles to
+twelve, in order to forward a summary of the case to the University of
+Paris for their judgment. Jeanne in the meantime had been left, but not
+neglected, in her prison. The great Feast of Easter had passed without
+any sacred consolation of the Church; but Monseigneur de Beauvais,
+in his kindness, sent her a carp to keep the feast withal, if not any
+spiritual food. It was quite congenial to the spirit of the time to
+imagine that the carp had been poisoned, and such a thought seems to
+have crossed the mind of Jeanne, who was very ill after eating of it,
+and like to die. But it was not thus, poisoned in prison, that it would
+have suited any of her persecutors to let her die. As a matter of fact,
+as soon as it was known that she was ill, the best doctors procurable
+were sent to the prison with peremptory orders to prolong her life
+and cure her at any cost. But for a little time we lose sight of
+the sick-bed on which the unfortunate Maid lay fully dressed, never
+relinquishing the garb which was her protection, with her feet chained
+to her uneasy couch. Even at the moment when her life hung in the
+balance we read of no indulgence granted in this respect, no unlocking
+of the infamous chain, nor substitution of a gentler nurse for the
+attendant _houspillers_, who were her guards night and day.
+
+When the Bishop and his court had completed their business and sent off
+to Paris the important document on which so much depended, they found
+themselves at leisure to return to Jeanne, to inquire after her health
+and to make her "a charitable admonition." It was on the 18th of April,
+after the silence of more than a fortnight, that their visit was made
+with this benevolent purpose. Seven of her judges attended the Bishop
+into the sick-chamber. They had come, he assured her, charitably and
+familiarly, to visit her in her sickness and to carry her comfort and
+consolation. Most of these men were indeed familiar enough: she had seen
+their faces already through many a dreadful day, though there were one
+or two which were new and strange, come to stare at her in the depths
+of her distress. Cauchon reminded her how much and how carefully she had
+been questioned by the most wise and learned men; and that those there
+present were ready to do anything for the salvation of her soul and
+body in every possible way, by instructing or advising her. He added,
+however, that if she still refused to accept advice, and to act
+according to the counsel of the Church, she was in the greatest
+danger--to which she replied:
+
+"It seems to me, being so ill as I am, that I am in great danger of
+death. And if it is thus that God pleases to decide for me, I ask of you
+to be allowed to confess and receive my Saviour, and to be laid in holy
+ground."
+
+"If you desire to have the rites and sacraments of the Church," said
+Cauchon, "you must do as good Catholics ought to do, submit to Holy
+Church." She answered, "I can say no other thing to you." She was then
+told that if she was in fear of death through sickness she ought all the
+more to amend her life; but that she could not have the privileges
+of the Church as a Catholic, if she did not submit to the Church. She
+answered: "If my body dies in prison, I hope that you will bury me in
+consecrated ground: yet if not, I still hope in our Lord."
+
+She was then reminded that she had said in her trial--if anything had
+been said or done by her against our Christian faith ordained by our
+Lord, that she would not stand by it. She answered, "I refer to the
+answer I made, and to our Lord."
+
+It was then asked of her, since she believed herself to have had many
+revelations from God by St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret,
+whether if there should appear some good creature (_sic_) who professed
+to have had a revelation from God in respect to her, she would believe
+that? She answered that there was no Christian in the world who could
+come to her professing to have had a revelation, of whom she should not
+know whether he spoke the truth or not: she would know it through St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+Asked, if she could not imagine that God might reveal something to a
+good creature who might be unknown to her, she answered: "Yes; but I
+would not believe either man or woman without a sign."
+
+Asked, if she believed that the Holy Scripture was revealed by God, she
+answered, "You know that I do, and it is good to know."
+
+The last answer she made in respect to submission to Holy Church was
+this, "Whatever may happen to me I will neither do nor say anything
+else, for I have answered before, during the trial."
+
+She was then "exhorted powerfully by the venerable doctors present"
+(four are mentioned by name) to submit to our Mother the Church, with
+many authorities and examples drawn from the Holy Scriptures; and
+finally, Magister Nicolas Midi made her an exhortation from Matthew
+xviii.: "If your brother trespass against you," and what follows, "If
+he will not hear the Church, let him be to you as a heathen man and
+a publican." This was expounded to Jeanne in the French tongue and,
+finally, she was told that if she would not obey and submit to the
+Church she must be given up as if she was a Saracen. To which Jeanne
+replied that she was a good Christian and well baptised, and that she
+desired to die as a Christian. She was then asked whether, since she
+begged leave of the Church to receive her Saviour, she would submit
+to the Church if it were promised to her that she should receive. She
+answered that she would say no more than she had said; that she loved
+God, served Him, and was a good Christian, and would aid and uphold the
+Holy Church with all her power. Asked if she wished that a beautiful
+procession should be made for her to restore her to health, she answered
+that she would be glad if the Church and the Catholics would pray for
+her.
+
+For another fortnight Jeanne was sent back into the silence, and to her
+own thoughts, which must have grown heavier and heavier as the weary
+days went on, and no sound of approaching deliverance came, no rumour
+of help at hand. All was quiet and safe at Rouen; amid the babble of the
+courtyard which she might hear fitfully when her guardians were quieter
+than usual, there was not one word which brought the hope of a French
+army at hand, or of any movement to rescue her. All was silent in the
+world around, not a breath of hope, not the whisper of a friend. It was
+not till the 2d of May that the dreadful blank was again broken, and she
+was called to the great hall of the castle for another interview with
+her tormentors. When she was led into the hall it was full, as in the
+first sitting, sixty-three judges in all being present. The interest
+had flagged or the pity had grown as the trial dragged its slow length
+along; but now, when every day the verdict was expected from Paris, the
+interest had risen again. On her way from her prison to the hall, it was
+necessary to pass the door of the castle chapel: and here once or twice
+Massieu, the officer of the court, had permitted her to pause and kneel
+down as she passed. This was all the celebration of the Paschal Feast
+that was permitted to Jeanne. The compassionate official, however, was
+discovered in this small service of charity, and sternly reprimanded
+and threatened. Henceforward she had to pass without even a longing look
+through the door at the altar on which was the holy sacrament.
+
+She came in on the renewed sitting of the 2d May to find the assembled
+priests settling themselves, after the address which had been made to
+them, to hear another address which John de Chasteillon, Archdeacon, had
+prepared for herself, in which he said much that was good both for body
+and soul, to which she consented. He had a list of twelve articles in
+his hands, and explained and expounded them to her, as they were the
+occasion of the sitting. He then "admonished her in charity," explaining
+that those who were faithful to Christ hold firmly and closely to the
+Christian creed, and adjuring her to consent and to amend her ways. To
+this Jeanne answered: "Read your book," meaning the schedule held by
+Monseigneur the Archdeacon, "and then I will answer you. I refer myself
+to God my master in all things; and I love Him with all my heart."
+
+To read this book, however, was precisely what Monseigneur the
+Archdeacon had no intention of doing. She was never allowed to hear the
+twelve articles upon which the verdict against her was founded; but the
+speaker gave her a long discourse by way of explanation, following more
+or less the schedule which he held. This "monition general," however,
+elicited no detailed reply from Jeanne, who answered briefly with some
+impatience, "I refer myself to my judge, who is the King of Heaven
+and earth." The "Lord Archdeacon" then proceeded to "monitions
+particulares."
+
+It was then once more explained to her that this reference to God alone
+was a refusal to submit to the Church militant, and she was instructed
+in the authority of the Church, which it was the duty of every Christian
+to believe--_unam sanctam Ecclesiam_ always guided by the Holy Spirit
+and which could not err, to the judgment of which every question should
+be referred. She answered: "I believe in the Church here below; but my
+doings and sayings, as I have already said, I refer and submit to God. I
+believe that the Church militant cannot err or fail; but as for my deeds
+and words I put them all before God, who has made me do that which
+I have done"; she also said that she submitted herself to God, her
+Creator, who had made her do everything, and referred everything to Him,
+and to Him alone.
+
+She was then asked, if she would have no judge on earth and if our
+Holy Father the Pope were not her judge; she answered: "I will tell you
+nothing more. I have a good master, that is our Lord, on whom I depend
+for everything, and not an any other."
+
+She was then told that if she would not believe the Church and the
+article _Ecclesiam sanctam Catholicam_, that she might be reckoned as
+a heretic and punished by burning: to which she answered: "I can say
+nothing else to you; and if I saw the fire before me, I should say only
+that which I say, and could do nothing else." (Once more at this point
+the clerk writes on his margin, "Proud reply"--_Superba responsio_--but
+whether in admiration or in blame it would be hard to say.)
+
+Asked, if the Council General, or the Holy Father, Cardinals, etc., were
+there--whether she would submit to them. "You shall have no other answer
+from me," she said.
+
+Asked, if she would submit to our Holy Father the Pope: she answered,
+"Take me to him and I will answer him," but would say no more.
+
+Questioned in respect to her dress, she answered, that she would
+willingly accept a long dress and a woman's hood to go to church to
+receive her Saviour, provided that, as she had already said, she were
+allowed to wear it on that occasion only, and then to take back that
+which she at present wore. Further, when it was set before her that she
+wore that dress without any need, being in prison, she answered, "When
+I have done that for which I was sent by God, I will then take back a
+woman's dress." Asked, if she thought she did well in being dressed like
+a man, she answered, "I refer every thing to our Lord."
+
+Again, after the exhortation made to her, namely, that in saying
+that she did well and did not sin in wearing that dress, and in the
+circumstances which concerned her assuming and wearing it, and in
+saying that God and the saints made her do so--she blasphemed, and as
+is contained in this schedule, erred and did evil: she answered that she
+never blasphemed God or the saints.
+
+She was then admonished to give up that dress, and no longer to think it
+was right, and to return to the garb of a woman; but answered that she
+would make no change in this respect.
+
+Concerning her revelations: she replied in regard to them, that she
+referred everything to her judge, that is God, and that her revelations
+were from God, without any other medium.
+
+Asked concerning the sign given to the King if she would refer to
+the Archbishop of Rheims, the Sire de Boussac, Charles de Bourbon, La
+Tremouille, and La Hire, to them or to any one of them, who, according
+to what she formerly said, had seen the crown, and were present when the
+angel brought it, and gave it to the Archbishop; or if she would refer
+to any others of her party who might write under their seals that it was
+so; she answered, "Send a messenger, and I will write to them about the
+whole trial": but otherwise she was not disposed to refer to them.
+
+In respect to her presumption in divining the future, etc., she
+answered, "I refer everything to my judge who is God, and to what I have
+already answered, which is written in the book."
+
+Asked, if two or three or four knights of her party were to be
+brought here under a safe conduct, whether she would refer to them her
+apparitions and other things contained in this trial; answered, "Let
+them come and then I will answer:" but otherwise she was not willing to
+refer to anyone.
+
+Asked whether, at the Church of Poitiers where she was examined, she had
+submitted to the Church, she answered, "Do you hope to catch me in this
+way, and by that draw advantage to yourselves?"
+
+In conclusion, "afresh and abundantly," she was admonished to submit
+herself to the Church, on pain of being abandoned by the Church; for if
+the Church left her she would be in great danger of body and of soul;
+and she might well put herself in peril of eternal fire for the soul, as
+well as of temporal fire for the body, by the sentence of other judges.
+"You will not do this which you say against me, without doing injury to
+your own bodies and souls," she said.
+
+Asked, whether she could give a reason why she would not submit to the
+Church: but to this she would make no additional reply.
+
+Again a week passed in busy talk and consultation without, in silence
+and desertion within. On the 9th of May the prisoner was again led, this
+time to the great tower, apparently the torture chamber of the castle,
+where she found nine of her judges awaiting her, and was once more
+adjured to speak the truth, with the threat of torture if she continued
+to refuse. Never was her attitude more calm, more dignified and lofty in
+its simplicity, than at this grim moment.
+
+"Truly," she replied, "if you tear the limbs from my body, and my soul
+out of it, I can say nothing other than what I have said; or if I said
+anything different, I should afterwards say that you had compelled me to
+do it by force." She added that on the day of the Holy Cross, the 3d of
+May past, she had been comforted by St. Gabriel. She believed that it
+was St. Gabriel: and she knew by her voices that it was St. Gabriel. She
+had asked counsel of her voices whether she should submit to the Church,
+because the priests pressed her so strongly to submit: but it had been
+said to her that if she desired our Lord to help her she must depend
+upon Him for everything. She added that she knew well that our Lord had
+always been the master of all she did, and that the Enemy had nothing
+to do with her deeds. Also she had asked her voices if she should be
+burned, and the said voices had replied to her that she was to wait for
+the Lord and He would help her.
+
+Afterwards in respect to the crown which had been handed by the angel to
+the Archbishop of Rheims, she was asked if she would refer to him. She
+answered: "Bring him here, that I may hear what he says, and then I
+shall answer you; he will not dare to say the contrary of that which I
+have said to you."
+
+The Archbishop of Rheims had been her constant enemy; all the hindrances
+that had occurred in her active life, and the constant attempts made
+to balk her even in her brief moment of triumph, came from him and his
+associate La Trémouille. He was the last person in the world to whom
+Jeanne naturally would have appealed. Perhaps that was the admirable
+reason why he was suggested in this dreadful crisis of her fate.
+
+A few days later, it was discussed among those dark inquisitors whether
+the torture should be applied or not. Finally, among thirteen there were
+but two (let not the voice of sacred vengeance be silent on their shame
+though after four centuries and more), Thomas de Courcelles, first of
+theologians, cleverest of ecclesiastical lawyers, mildest of men, and
+Nicolas L'Oyseleur, the spy and traitor, who voted for the torture. One
+man most reasonably asked why she should be put to torture when they
+had ample material for judgment without it? One cannot but feel that
+the proceedings on this occasion were either intended to beguile the
+impatience of the English authorities, eager to be done with the whole
+business, or to add a quite gratuitous pang to the sufferings of the
+heroic girl. As the men were not devils, though probably possessed by
+this time, the more cruel among them, by the horrible curiosity, innate
+alas! in human nature, of seeing how far a suffering soul could go, it
+is probable that the first motive was the true one. The English, Warwick
+especially, whose every movement was restrained by this long-pending
+affair, were exceedingly impatient, and tempted at times to take the
+matter into their own hands, and spoil the perfectness of this well
+constructed work of art, conducted according to all the rules, the
+beautiful trial which was dear to the Bishop's heart--and destined to
+be, though perhaps in a sense somewhat different to that which he hoped,
+his chief title to fame.
+
+Ten days after, the decision of the University of Paris arrived, and a
+great assembly of counsellors, fifty-one in all, besides the permanent
+presidents, collected together in the chapel of the Archbishop's
+house, to hear that document read, along with many other documents, the
+individual opinions of a host of doctors and eminent authorities.
+After an explanation of the solemn care given by the University to the
+consideration of every one of the twelve articles of the indictment,
+that learned tribunal pronounced its verdict upon each. The length of
+the proceedings makes it impossible to reproduce these. First as to the
+early revelations given to Jeanne, described in the first and second
+articles, they are denounced as "murderous, seductive, and pernicious
+fictions," the apparitions those of "malignant spirits and devils,
+Belial, Satan, and Behemoth." The third article, which concerned her
+recognition of the saints, was described more mildly as containing
+errors in faith; the fourth, as to her knowledge of future events, was
+characterised as "superstitious and presumptuous divination." The fifth,
+concerning her dress, declared her to be "blasphemous and contemptuous
+of God in His Sacraments." The sixth, by which she was accused of loving
+bloodshed, because she made war against those who did not obey the
+summons in her letters bearing the name Jhesus Maria, was declared to
+prove that she was cruel, "seeking the shedding of blood, seditious,
+and a blasphemer of God." The tenor is the same to the end: Blasphemy,
+superstition, pernicious doctrine, impiety, cruelty, presumption, lying;
+a schismatic, a heretic, an apostate, an idolator, an invoker of demons.
+These are the conclusions drawn by the most solemn and weighty tribunal
+on matters of faith in France. The precautions taken to procure a
+full and trustworthy judgment, the appeal to each section in turn, the
+Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Law, the "Nations," all separately
+and than all together passing every item in review--are set forth at
+full length. Every formality had been fulfilled, every rule followed,
+every detail was in the fullest order, signed and sealed and attested by
+solemn notaries, bristling with well-known names. A beautiful judgment,
+equal to the trial, which was beautiful too--not a rule omitted except
+those of justice, fairness, and truth! The doctors sat and listened with
+every fine professional sense satisfied.
+
+"If the beforesaid woman, charitably exhorted and admonished by
+competent judges, does not return spontaneously to the Catholic faith,
+publicly abjure her errors, and give full satisfaction to her judges,
+she is hereby given up to the secular judge to receive the reward of her
+deeds."
+
+The attendant judges, each in his place, now added their adhesion.
+Most of them simply stated their agreement with the judgment of the
+University, or with that of the Bishop of Fecamp, which was a similar
+tenor; a few wished that Jeanne should be again "charitably admonished";
+many desired that on this selfsame day the final sentence should
+be pronounced. One among them, a certain Raoul Sauvage (Radulphus
+Silvestris), suggested that she should be brought before the people in
+a public place, a suggestion afterwards carried out. Frère Isambard
+desired that she should be charitably admonished again and have another
+chance, and that her final fate should still be in the hands of "us her
+judges." The conclusion was that one more "charitable admonition" should
+be given to Jeanne, and that the law should then take its course.
+The suggestion that she should make a public appearance had only one
+supporter.
+
+This dark scene in the chapel is very notable, each man rising to
+pronounce what was in reality a sentence of death,--fifty of them almost
+unanimous, filled no doubt with a hundred different motives, to please
+this man or that, to win favour, to get into the way of promotion,--but
+all with a distinct consciousness of the great yet horrible spectacle,
+the stake, the burning:--though perhaps here and there was one with a
+hope that perpetual imprisonment, bread of sorrow and water of anguish,
+might be substituted for that terrible death. Finally, it was decided
+that--always on the side of mercy, as every act proved--the tribunal
+should once more "charitably admonish" the prisoner for the salvation
+of her soul and body, and that after all this "good deliberation and
+wholesome counsel" the case should be concluded.
+
+Again there follows a pause of four days. No doubt the Bishop and his
+assessors had other things to do, their ecclesiastical functions,
+their private business, which could not always be put aside because one
+forsaken soul was held in suspense day after day. Finally on the 24th of
+May, Jeanne again received in her prison a dignified company, some quite
+new and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the reader's mind
+that it was perhaps to show off the interesting prisoner to two new
+and powerful bishops, the first, Louis of Luxembourg, a relative of her
+first captor, that this last examination was held), nine men in all,
+crowding her chamber--_exponuntur Johannæ defectus sui_, says the
+record--to expound to Jeanne her faults. It was Magister Peter Morice to
+whom this office was confided. Once more the "schedule" was gone over,
+and an address delivered laden with all the bad words of the University.
+"Jeanne, dearest friend," said the orator at last, "it is now time, at
+the end of the trial, to think well what words these are." She would
+seem to have spoken during this address, at least once--to say that
+she held to everything she had said during the trial. When Morice had
+finished she was once more questioned personally.
+
+She was asked if she still thought and believed that it was not her duty
+to submit her deeds and words to the Church militant, or to any other
+except God, upon which she replied, "What I have always said and held to
+during the trial, I maintain to this moment"; and added that if she
+were in judgment and saw the fire lighted, the faggots burning, and the
+executioner ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the fire,
+she could say nothing else, but would sustain what she had said in her
+trial, to death.
+
+Once more the scribe has written on his margin the words _Responsio
+Johannæ superba_--the proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her
+expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation about her,
+must have moved the man, thus for the third time to send down to us his
+distinctly human impression of the worn out prisoner before her judges.
+"And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more, the cause
+was concluded," says the record, so formal, sustained within such
+purely abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb and
+reverberation of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the Inquisitor
+too all words seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid the excited
+crowd in the Temple the officers of the Pharisees approaching to lay
+hands on a greater than Jeanne, fell back, not knowing why, and could
+not do their office. This man was silenced also. Two bishops were
+present, and one a great man full of patronage; but not for the richest
+living in Normandy could Peter Morice find any more to say.
+
+These are in one sense the words of Jeanne; the last we have from her in
+her prison, the last of her consistent and unbroken life. After, there
+was a deeper horror to go through, a moment when all her forces failed.
+Here on the verge of eternity she stands heroic and unyielding, brave,
+calm, and steadfast as at the outset of her career, the Maid of France.
+Were the fires lighted and the faggots burning, and she herself within
+the fire, she had no other word to say.
+
+     (1) It is correct in French to use the second person plural
+     in addressing God, _thou_ being a more intimate and less
+     respectful form of speech. Such a difference is difficult to
+     remember, and troubles the ear. The French, even those who
+     ought to know better, sometimes speak of it as a supreme
+     profanity on the part of the profane English, that they
+     address God as _thou_.
+
+     (2) The French report goes on, "et requiert ----," but no
+     more. It is not in the Latin. The scribe was stopped by the
+     Bishop's profane outcry, and forbidden to register the fact
+     she was about to make a direct appeal to the Pope.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI -- THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431.
+
+On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the
+officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart
+still high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had been
+no doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with every
+repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the last.
+And the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very near to
+her; no doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange information
+about herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside of the Castle
+of Rouen, rose half-comprehended from the echoing courtyard outside and
+the babble of her guards within. She would hear even as she was conveyed
+along the echoing stone passages something here and there of the popular
+expectation:--a burning! the wonderful unheard of sight, which by hook
+or by crook everyone must see; and no doubt among the English talk she
+might now be able to make out something concerning this long business
+which had retarded all warlike proceedings but which would soon be over
+now, and the witch burnt. There must have been some, even among those
+rude companions, who would be sorry, who would feel that she was no
+witch, yet be helpless to do anything for her, any more than Massieu
+could, or Frère Isambard: and if it was all for the sake of certain
+words to be said, was the wench mad? would it not be better to say
+anything, to give up anything rather than be burned at the stake?
+Jeanne, notwithstanding the wonderful courage of her last speech,
+must have returned to her cell with small illusion possible to her
+intelligent spirit. The stake had indeed come very near, the flames
+already dazzled her eyes, she must have felt her slender form shrink
+together at the thought. All that long night, through the early daylight
+of the May morning did she lie and ponder, as for far less reasons
+so many of us have pondered as we lay wakeful through those morning
+watches. God's promises are great, but where is the fulfilment? We ask
+for bread and he gives us, if not a stone, yet something which we cannot
+realise to be bread till after many days. Jeanne's voices had never
+paused in their pledge to her of succour. "Speak boldly, God will help
+you--fear nothing"; there would be aid for her before three months,
+and great victory. They went on saying so, though the stake was already
+being raised. What did they mean? what did they mean? Could she still
+trust them? or was it possible----?
+
+Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced
+the fire. She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the
+heartrending ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give
+her that heroic command. Still and always, they said God will help
+you, our Lord will stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean
+deliverance, deliverance! What else could it mean? If she held her head
+high as she returned to the horrible monotony of that prison so often
+left with hope, so often re-entered in sadness, it must soon have
+dropped upon her tired bosom. Slowly the clouds had settled round her.
+Over and over again had she affirmed them to be true--these voices that
+had guided her steps and led her to victory. And they had promised her
+the aid of God if she went forward boldly, and spoke and did not fear.
+But now every way of salvation was closing; all around her were fierce
+soldiers thirsting for her blood, smooth priests who admonished her in
+charity, threatening her with eternal fire for the soul, temporal fire
+for the body. She felt that fire, already blowing towards her as if on
+the breath of the evening wind, and her girlish flesh shrank. Was that
+what the voices had called deliverance? was that the grand victory, the
+aid of the Lord?
+
+It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she
+had reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in
+bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison
+became intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough
+jests half through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the clang
+of their arms when relieved. Early next morning a party of her usual
+visitors came in upon her to give her fresh instruction and advice.
+Something new was about to happen to-day. She was to be led forth, to
+breathe the air of heaven, to confront the people, the raging sea of
+men's faces, all the unknown world about her. The crowd had never been
+unfriendly to Jeanne. It had closed about her, almost wherever she was
+visible, with sweet applause and outcries of joy. Perhaps a little hope
+stirred her heart in the thought of being surrounded once more by the
+common folk, though probably it did not occur to her to think of these
+Norman strangers as her own people. And a great day was before her, a
+day in which something might still be done, in which deliverance might
+yet come. L'Oyseleur, who was one of her visitors, adjured her now
+to change her conduct, to accept whatever means of salvation might be
+offered to her. There was no longer any mention of Pope or Council,
+but only of the Church to which she ought to yield. How it was that he
+preserved his influence over her, having been proved to be a member
+of the tribunal that judged her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a
+fellow-countryman, nor any of the things he had professed to be, no once
+can tell us; but evidently he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to
+have received him without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed
+she seems to have been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who
+professed to wish her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
+
+It would require, however, no great persuasion on L'Oyseleur's part to
+convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that
+something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be
+so determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but
+delivered from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping of
+the Church, there would be time to think of everything, even to make her
+peace with her voices who would surely understand if, for the saving of
+her life, and out of terror for the dreadful fire, she abandoned
+them for a moment. She had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and they had
+forgiven. One faltering word now, a mark of her hand upon a paper, and
+she would be safe--even if still all they said was true; and if indeed
+and in fact, after buoying her up from day to day, such a dreadful thing
+might be as that they were not true----
+
+The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment,
+of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
+
+Then there came into the prison a better man than L'Oyseleur, Jean
+Beaupère, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of all
+these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he came
+in all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to warn
+her. He came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor. "Jean
+Beaupère entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by permission,
+and advertised her that she would straightway be taken to the scaffold
+to be addressed (_pour y être preschée_), and that if she was a good
+Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and words under
+the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and specially of the
+ecclesiastical judges." "Accept the woman's dress and do all that you
+are told," her other adviser had said. When the car that was to convey
+her came to the prison doors, L'Oyseleur accompanied her, no doubt with
+a show of supporting her to the end. What a change from the confined and
+gloomy prison to the dazzling clearness of the May daylight, the air,
+the murmuring streets, the throng that gazed and shouted and followed!
+Life that had run so low in the prisoner's veins must have bounded up
+within her in response to that sunshine and open sky, and movement and
+sound of existence--summer weather too, and everything softened in the
+medium of that soft breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She
+had been three months in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along
+the roughly paved streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange
+object appeared to Jeanne's eyes in the midst of the market-place, a
+lofty scaffold with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd,
+the logs all arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four
+horses, to bring hither the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready,
+everything arranged--for whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that
+she might see the preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the
+great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?
+
+In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different scene.
+That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a great open
+space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In this were
+erected two platforms, one facing the other. On the first sat the court
+of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester having a place by
+the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president, with several other
+bishops and dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on the other platform,
+were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to which Jeanne was conducted
+by Massieu, who never left her, and L'Oyseleur, who kept as near as he
+could, the rest of the platform being immediately covered by lawyers,
+doctors, all the camp followers, so to speak, of the black army, who
+could find footing there. Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the
+doublet and hose, with her short-clipped hair--no doubt looking like a
+slim boy among all this dark crowd of men. The people swayed like a
+sea all about and around--the throng which had gathered in her progress
+through the streets pushing out the crowd already assembled with a
+movement like the waves of the sea. Every step of the trial all
+through had been attended by preaching, by discourses and reasoning and
+admonishments, charitable and otherwise. Now she was to be "preached"
+for the last time.
+
+It was Doctor Guillaume Érard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher,
+one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to hear. He
+himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set
+up there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of
+his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more
+than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential
+of men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John's Gospel:
+"A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine." The centre
+circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of
+English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the
+witch should be condemned.
+
+It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long
+and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine periods
+admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach
+upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of
+France, and the head of that House, "Charles who calls himself King."
+"He has," cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of
+Winchester upon him, "adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as
+he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of
+dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who are under his sway, and
+the nobility. This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and to thee I say that thy
+King is a schismatic and a heretic."
+
+In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by that
+clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the tumult of
+battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used to abuse
+in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this assault on her
+King. And interruption to a sermon has always a dramatic and startling
+effect, but when that voice arose now, when the startled speaker
+stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is easy to imagine what
+a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must have arisen in the midst
+of the crowd. "By my faith, sire," cried Jeanne, "saving your respect,
+I swear upon my life that my King is the most noble Christian of all
+Christians, that he is not what you say."
+
+The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally
+the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of
+animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart
+overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts. "Here," said Èrard, "are my lords
+the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to submit your
+acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in these acts and
+words there are many things which it seemed to the clergy were not good
+either to say or to sustain."
+
+To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), "I will
+answer you." And as to her submission to the Church she said: "I have
+told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said
+may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God
+first, I refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on
+the part of God." She also said that no one was to blame for her acts
+and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in
+them, the blame was hers and no other's.
+
+Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, "I
+refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope."
+
+It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy Father
+was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in his
+diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother the
+Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and officers
+of the Church had a right to determine in her case. And of this she was
+admonished three times.
+
+After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a
+great part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she would
+hold to all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in everything
+their ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the above-named
+and of the great multitude assembled she made her abjuration in the
+manner that follows:
+
+And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions
+and revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not
+sustain them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother
+the Holy Church.
+
+*****
+
+In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made.
+Manchon writes on his margin: _At the end of the sentence Jeanne,
+fearing the fire, said she would obey the Church_. Even into the bare
+legal document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding in
+the silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation of
+the previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering
+submission, _timens igneum_--in fear of the fire.
+
+The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those
+eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Èrard, from his
+pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that
+she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called
+upon Massieu to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own
+deposition), "after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if
+she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her to
+refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not. Which
+thing she did, saying to Èrard, 'I refer to the Church universal whether
+I should abjure or not.' To which Èrard answered, 'You shall abjure at
+once or you will be burnt.' Massieu gives further particulars in another
+part of the Rehabilitation process. Èrard, he says, asked what he was
+saying to the prisoner, and he answered that she would sign if the
+schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that she could not write, and
+then added that she wished it to be decided by the Church, and ought
+not to sign unless that was done: and also required that she should be
+placed in the custody of the Church, and freed from the hands of the
+English. The same Èrard answered that there had been ample delay, and
+that if she did not sign at once she should be burned, and forbade
+Massieu to say any more."
+
+Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from
+the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to have
+promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the Church.
+"Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save yourself?" was
+called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast, but her heart
+failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering. Once she called out
+over their heads, "All that I did was done for good, and it was well
+to do it:"--her last cry. Then she would seem to have recovered in
+some measure her composure. Probably her agitated brain was unable to
+understand the formula of recantation which was read to her amid all
+the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the
+condition she had herself stated, that the paper should be submitted
+to the Church, and that she should at once be transferred to an
+ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made, namely, that it was a
+very short document upon which she hastily in her despair made a cross,
+and that it was a long one, consisting of several pages, which was shown
+afterwards with _Jehanne_ scribbled underneath. "In fact," says Massieu,
+"she abjured and made a cross with the pen which the witness handed to
+her:" he, if any one must have known exactly what happened.
+
+No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform.
+But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing
+round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals,
+seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her
+young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had gone on
+reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences
+all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve
+her--which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread
+and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English were
+impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is
+evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a
+mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they
+had desired at once to get her out of their way. But the idea of her
+perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a
+prisoner was more than they chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are
+some things a churchman cannot do. When it was seen that Jeanne had
+yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished
+forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the
+Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do? There was but
+one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne's
+natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to penitence was the only
+practicable way.
+
+Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was
+that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on
+the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs
+of the crowd. The _cédule_ to which she put her sign "contained eight
+lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and
+full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration
+published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; "for
+the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite
+different." This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged
+version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined
+to the necessary points and expressed in few words--was afterwards
+published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions,
+as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an
+abjuration at all.
+
+When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been
+taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence
+must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and
+pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the
+bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all
+thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison,
+with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by
+solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all those
+crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne
+expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and
+downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There seems even
+to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials. Some of them
+congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, "You
+have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul." She herself,
+excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go.
+She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual
+imprisonment with complete faith and content. It meant to her instant
+relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her
+impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church--_gens de' Église_--lead
+me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English," she
+cried with feverish anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons
+and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her
+thought. The men about her could not answer this appeal. Some of them
+no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have
+seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to
+Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and
+the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure. But perhaps
+flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the
+victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop
+to ask where they were to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar
+of Longueville. Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing,
+perhaps in Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says
+this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a
+"fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "_this fellow was also one of them_."
+Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon
+turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence
+she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her abjuration, which by
+no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.
+
+Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she
+had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in
+reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what
+she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and
+bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms--but for what? to escape
+those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of Dionysius,
+its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going back was beyond
+words. We hear of no word that she said when she realised the hideous
+fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter waters closed over her
+head. Again the chains to be locked and double locked that bound her to
+her dreadful bed, again the presence of those men who must have been
+all the more odious to her from the momentary hope that she had got free
+from them for ever.
+
+The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard
+upon her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor,
+Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical
+persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost
+blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though
+with a word of warning that should she change her mind and return to her
+evil ways there would be no further place for repentance. As a return
+for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he required her immediately
+to put on the female dress which his attendants had brought. There is
+something almost ludicrous, could we forget the tragedy to follow, in
+the bundle of humble clothing brought by such exalted personages, with
+the solemnity which became a thing upon which hung the issues of life or
+death. Jeanne replied with the humility of a broken spirit. "I take them
+willingly," she said, "and in everything I will obey the Church." Then
+silence closed upon her, the horrible silence of the prison, full of
+hidden listeners and of watching eyes.
+
+Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It
+was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain have
+seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but Monseigneur de
+Beauvais had to hold head against the great English authorities who were
+out of all patience, fearing that the witch might still slip through
+their fingers and by her spells and incantations make the heart of the
+troops melt once more within them. If the mind of the Church had been as
+charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if all the power of Rome could
+have got the Maid now out of the English grip. They were exasperated,
+and felt that they too, as well as the prisoner, had been played with.
+But the Bishop had good hope in his mind, still to be able to content
+his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it was true, but the more he inquired
+into that act, the less secure he must have felt about it. And she might
+relapse; and if she relapsed there would be no longer any place for
+repentance. And it is evident that his confidence in the power of the
+clothes was boundless. In any case a few days more would make all clear.
+
+They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance,
+well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One
+account is given by Frère Isambard, whom she told in the presence of
+several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a _Millourt
+Anglois_, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again
+the man's dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu
+is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be released
+from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards took away her
+female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack containing the
+other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding them that these were
+forbidden to her; but got no answer except a brutal order to get up. It
+is very probable that both stories are true. Frère Isambard found her
+weeping and agitated, and nothing is more probable than this was the
+occasion on which Warwick heard her cries, and interfered to save her.
+Massieu's version, of which he is certain, was communicated to him a
+day or two after when they happened to be alone together. It was on the
+Thursday before Trinity Sunday that she put on the female dress, but it
+would seem that rumours on the subject of a relapse had begun to spread
+even before the Sunday on which that event happened: and Beaupère
+and Midi were sent by the Bishop to investigate. But they were very
+ill-received in the Castle, sworn at by the guards, and forced to go
+back without seeing Jeanne, there being as yet, it appeared, nothing
+to see. On the morning of the Monday, however, the rumours arose with
+greater force; and no doubt secret messages must have informed the
+Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself
+accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight
+of the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt
+with much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle
+was all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event
+so trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the
+visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed
+once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four
+days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her, and
+humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an outcry of
+astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes," she replied,
+"she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no triumph in what she
+said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of one who in the most
+desperate strait has taken her resolution and must abide by it, whether
+she likes it or not. She was asked why she had resumed that dress, and
+who had made her do so. There was no question of anything else at first.
+The tunic and _gippon_ were at once enough to decide her fate.
+
+She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing
+her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a
+woman.
+
+She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the dress
+of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn or had
+made any such oath.
+
+She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more lawful
+to wear a man's dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and also
+that she had taken it back because the promise made to her had not been
+kept, that she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour, and be
+delivered from her irons.
+
+She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to resume
+it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in irons; but if
+they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of her irons and put
+her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she would be good, and
+do whatever the Church pleased.
+
+She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of her
+voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them again.
+To this she answered, recovering a little courage, "Yes."
+
+She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God had
+made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity there
+was of the treason to which she had consented by making abjuration and
+revocation in order to save her life: and that she had earned damnation
+for herself to save her life. Also that before Thursday her voices had
+told her that she should do what she did that day, that on the scaffold
+they had told her to answer the preachers boldly, and that this preacher
+whom she called a false preacher had accused her of many things she
+never did. She also added that if she said God had not sent her she
+would damn herself, for true it was that God had sent her. Also that her
+voices had told her since, that she had done a great sin in confessing
+that she had sinned; but that for fear of the fire she had said that
+which she had said.
+
+She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were
+those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were
+so; and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold
+that she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret, she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she
+never intended to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of the
+fire, and she had denied nothing but what was contrary to truth; and
+she said that she would like better to make her penitence all at one
+time--that is to say, in dying, than to endure a long penitence in
+prison. Also that she had never done anything against God or the faith
+whatever they might have made her say; and that for what was in the
+schedule of the abjuration she did not know what it was. Also she said
+that she never intended to revoke anything so long as it pleased our
+Lord. At the end she said that if her judges would have her do so, she
+might put on again her female dress; but for the rest she would do no
+more.
+
+"What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his
+own mouth." Jeanne's protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and
+defence, overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it
+with questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed;
+the end of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be
+accomplished. No one could say she had not had full justice done her;
+every formality had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried out.
+Now there was but one thing before her, whose sad young voice with many
+pauses thus sighed forth its last utterance; and for her judges, one
+last spectacle to prepare, and the work to complete which it had taken
+them three long months to do.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII -- THE SACRIFICE. MAY 31, 1431.
+
+It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in certain
+circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of Beauvais had
+entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew exactly, with
+a perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least, that,
+notwithstanding the effect which his theatrical _mise en scène_ had
+produced upon the imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or earth
+would induce that young soul to content itself with a lie. He knew it,
+though lies were his daily bread; the children of this world are wiser
+in their generation than the children of light. He had bidden his
+English patrons to wait a little, and now his predictions were
+triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of any man that on such
+a certainty he could have calculated and laid his devilish plans; but
+there would seem to have existed in the mediæval churchman a certain
+horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic which was peculiar
+to their age and profession, and which no better principle in their own
+minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their delight of sensation,
+in distinction from the other appetites perhaps scarcely less cruel
+which other men indulged with no such horrified denunciation from the
+rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared with Cauchon that sharp
+sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her out; young Courcelles, so
+modest and unassuming and so learned, among the rest; not L'Oyseleur, it
+appears by the sequel. That Judas, like the greater traitor, was
+struck to the heart; but the less bad man who had only persecuted, not
+betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and only rejoiced that at last
+the victim was ready to drop into the flames which had been so carefully
+prepared.
+
+The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried
+with their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the
+Archbishop's house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily
+called together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner
+escaped had been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one each
+man rose again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of Fécamp,
+led the tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done: to give
+her up to the secular justice, "praying that she might be gently
+dealt with." Man after man added his voice "to that of Abbot of Fécamp
+aforesaid"--that she might be gently dealt with! Not one of them could
+be under any doubt what gentle meaning would be in the execution;
+but apparently the words were of some strange use in salving their
+consciences.
+
+The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In point
+of view of the law, there should have followed another trial, more
+evidence, pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to Monseigneur
+de Beauvais that he now defied law, and no longer prolonged the useless
+ceremonials of that mockery of justice. It is said that in coming out of
+the prison, through the courtyard full of Englishmen, where Warwick
+was in waiting to hear what news, the Bishop greeted them with all the
+satisfaction of success, laughing and bidding them "Make good cheer, the
+thing is done." In the same spirit of satisfaction was the rapid action
+of the further proceedings. On Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on
+Wednesday morning at eight 'clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear
+her sentence, and there, without even that formality, the penalty was at
+once carried out. No time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
+
+All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison
+where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge
+of her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful
+scene, which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty
+years after by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it had
+become the only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest colours,
+and themselves as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt that
+so remarkable an occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a deep
+impression on the minds of all those who were in any way actors in
+or spectators of that wonderful scene. And every word of all these
+different reports is on oath; but notwithstanding, a touch of
+unconscious colour, a more favourable sentiment, influenced by the
+feeling of later days, may well have crept in. With this warning we
+may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy, all the more for the
+atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no way idealised,
+which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in which Jeanne
+figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified, tormented, and
+often trembling girl.
+
+On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l'Advenu appeared in the
+cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell--first "to announce
+to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true contrition and
+penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the said l'Advenu did
+very carefully and charitably." Jeanne on her part received the news
+with no conventional resignation or calm. Was it possible that she had
+been deceived and really hoped for mercy? She began to weep and to cry
+at the sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding the solemnity of her last
+declaration, that she would rather bear her punishment all at once than
+to endure the long punishment of her prison, her heart failed before
+the imminent stake, the immediate martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and
+earth: "My body, which has never been corrupted, must it be burned to
+ashes to-day!" No one but Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her
+perfect purity; was it good for nothing but to be burned, that young
+body not nineteen years old? "Ah," she said, "I would rather be beheaded
+seven times than burned! I appeal to God against all these great wrongs
+they do me." But after a while the passion wore itself out, the child's
+outburst was stilled; calming herself, she knelt down and made her
+confession to the compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to
+"receive her Saviour" as she had so often prayed and entreated before.
+It would appear that this had not been within Friar Martin's commission.
+He sent to ask the Bishop's leave, and it was granted "anything she
+asked for"--as they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned
+convict. But the Host was brought into the prison without ceremony,
+without accompanying candles or vestment for the priest. There are
+always some things which are insupportable to a man. Brother Martin
+could bear the sight of the girl's anguish, but not to administer to
+her a diminished rite. He sent again to demand what was needful, out of
+respect for the Holy Sacrament and the present victim. And his request
+had come, it would seem, to some canon or person in authority whose
+heart had been touched by the wonderful Maid in her long martyrdom. This
+nameless sympathiser did all that a man could do. He sent the Host with
+a train of priests chanting litanies as they went through the streets,
+with torches burning in the pure early daylight; some of these exhorted
+the people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her. She must have
+heard in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the clergy, the
+pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the voices, that
+sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the city was
+touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been sympathetic to
+Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was about to die:
+she had stood bravely against the world and answered like a true
+Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets, a girl just
+nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated for the time.
+
+Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over, received
+at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that rite which
+He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not permitted
+to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the sacred
+commemoration. All the time she was still _preschée_ and admonished
+by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop and his
+followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different parts in
+that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult to say.
+The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal warrant
+for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of mind
+is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it, and
+a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope and
+strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that she
+sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation for
+which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already mentioned,
+importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring to get from
+her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and was herself
+a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil spirits, not
+good,--drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be they good spirits,
+or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act of giving her her
+last communion, Brother Martin paused with the consecrated Host in his
+hands.
+
+"Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
+answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer."
+Then this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your
+voices?" Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the voices,
+which have deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not give this
+deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus, who did not
+live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
+
+The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
+satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. "So,
+Jeanne," he said, "you have always told us that your 'voices' said you
+were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us
+the truth at last." Then Jeanne answered: "Truly I see that they have
+deceived me." The report is Cauchon's, and therefore little to be
+trusted; but the sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that,
+even in records more trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her.
+The other spectators all report another portion of this conversation.
+"Bishop, it is by you I die," are the words with which the Maid is said
+to have met him. "Oh Jeanne, have patience," he replied. "It is because
+you did not keep your promise." "If you had kept yours, and sent me to
+the prison of the Church, and put me in gentle hands, it would not
+have happened," she replied. "I appeal from you to God." Several of the
+attendants, also according to the Bishop's account, heard from her the
+same sad words: "They have deceived me"; and there seems no reason why
+we should not believe it. Her mind was weighed down under this dreadful
+unaccountable fact. She was forsaken--as a greater sufferer was; and a
+horror of darkness had closed around her. "Ah, Sieur Pierre," she said
+to Morice, "where shall I be to-night?" The man had condemned her as a
+relapsed heretic, a daughter of perdition. He had just suggested to her
+that her angels must have been devils. Nevertheless perhaps his face
+was not unkindly, he had not meant all the harm he did. He ought to have
+answered, "In Hell, with the spirits you have trusted"; that would have
+been the only logical response. What he did say was very different.
+"Have you not good faith in the Lord?" said the judge who had doomed
+her. Amazing and notable speech! They had sentenced her to be burned for
+blasphemy as an envoy of the devil; they believed in fact that she was
+the child of God, and going straight in that flame to the skies. Jeanne,
+with the sound, clear head and the "sane mind" to which all of
+them testified, did she perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the
+inconceivable contradiction? "Ah," she said, "yes, God helping me, I
+shall be in Paradise."
+
+There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to the
+mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully not
+repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed "as if
+it had been a thing of small importance," that her story of the angel
+bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither expected nor
+intended to be believed. For this we have to thank L'Oyseleur and the
+rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that dreadful morning in the
+prison.
+
+Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the
+long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre
+was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy Office.
+She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the crowded
+courtyard where her "chariot" awaited her. It was her confessor's part
+to remain by her side, and Frère Isambard and Massieu, the officer,
+both her friends, were also with her. It is said that L'Oyseleur rushed
+forward at this moment, either to accompany her also, or, as many say,
+to fling himself at her feet and implore her pardon. He was hustled
+aside by the crowd and would have been killed by the English, it is
+said, but for Warwick. The bystanders would seem to have been seized
+with a sudden disgust for all the priests about, thinking them Jeanne's
+friends, the historians insinuate--more likely in scorn and horror of
+their treachery. And then the melancholy procession set forth.
+
+The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part:
+eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortège,
+as the car rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid
+attained to the calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all the
+high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs that
+gaped and gazed upon her on every side. In the midst of the consolations
+of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears, other words, the
+plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips, "Rouen! Rouen!" she
+said; "am I to die here?" It seemed incredible to her, impossible. She
+looked about still for some sign of disturbance, some rising among the
+crowd, some cry of "France! France!" or glitter of mail. Nothing: but
+the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the soldiers roughly clearing
+the way, the rude chariot rumbling on. "Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you
+shall yet suffer because of this," she murmured in her distraction, amid
+her moanings and tears.
+
+At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered
+with three erections--one reaching up so high that the shadow of it
+seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an
+enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner
+himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure
+unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form. Two
+platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches
+for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil
+officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn.
+Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it matter? No
+sentence at all was read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which
+was illegal also. She was probably placed first on the same platform
+with her judges, where there was a pulpit from which she was to be
+_preschée_ for the last time. Of all Jeanne's sufferings this could
+scarcely be the least, that she was always _preschée_, lectured,
+addressed, sermonised through every painful step of her career.
+
+The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul
+scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance,
+when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her
+errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas
+Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text
+was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all the other
+members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut
+off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church
+might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor,
+giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence
+the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of
+invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace."
+Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop
+himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final
+repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The narrative shows
+that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in her career, paid no
+attention to the tirade levelled at her from the president's place.
+"She knelt down on the platform showing great signs and appearance of
+contrition, so that all those who looked upon her wept. She called on
+her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed glorious Virgin Mary,
+and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She called specially--was
+it with still a return towards the hoped for miracle? was it with the
+instinctive cry towards an old and faithful friend?--"St. Michael, St.
+Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would seem to have been a moment in
+which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this
+wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying,
+speaking--sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen companions
+of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her. She asked
+the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say a mass
+for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive her.
+Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry of
+"Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?" No reason is given for
+the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned
+a campaign in Normandy with Alençon. Had there been perhaps some special
+hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in
+the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?
+
+There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their
+fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to
+the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the
+deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the
+profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he
+would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That which
+her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon
+the saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of
+men. But as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop's evil voice scarcely
+silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient--the entire crowd, touched
+to its heart with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and
+lamentation, "_à chaudes larmes_" according to the graphic French
+expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow
+and fellow-feeling and impotence to help. Winchester--withdrawn high on
+his platform, ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a
+spectator merely--wept; and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was
+overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon's
+cheeks. The very world stood still to see that white form of purity, and
+valour, and faith, the Maid, not shouting triumphant on the height of
+victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature
+could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us
+here all day; must we dine here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain
+that simulated cruelty. And then the executioner stepped in and seized
+the victim.
+
+It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be no
+chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim the
+atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that the
+ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach her:
+the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel explanation.
+There was a writing set over the little platform which gave footing to
+the attendants below the stake, upon which were written the following
+words:
+
+JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER,
+BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL,
+DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
+
+This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and religion
+branded the Maid of France--one half of her countrymen: the other half,
+silent, speaking no word, looking on.
+
+Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees,
+asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no
+cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way
+seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal
+parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all
+the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of her
+disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its broken
+edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried, pressing it
+against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross to preserve as
+a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold and silver. This
+was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few remaining steps and
+mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high over all that sea of
+heads. When she was bound securely to her stake, she asked again for a
+cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church, to be held before her
+as long as her eyes could see. Frère Isambard and Massieu, following her
+closely still, sent to the nearest church, and procured probably some
+cross which was used for processional purposes on a long staff which
+could be held up before her. The friar stood upon the faggots holding
+it up, and calling out broken words of encouragement so long that Jeanne
+bade him withdraw, lest the fire should catch his robes. And so at last,
+as the flames began to rise, she was left alone, the good brother always
+at the foot of the pile, painfully holding up with uplifted arms the
+cross that she might still see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up
+with the red glow of the fire, the horrified, trembling crowd like an
+agitated sea around. The wild flames rose and fell in sinister gleams
+and flashes, the smoke blew upwards, by times enveloping that white
+Maid standing out alone against a sky still blue and sweet with
+May--Pandemonium underneath, but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came
+a great cry from among the black fumes that began to reach the clouds:
+"My voices were of God! They have not deceived me!" She had seen and
+recognised it at last. Here it was, the miracle: the great victory
+that had been promised--though not with clang of swords and triumph of
+rescuing knights, and "St. Denis for France!"--but by the sole hand
+of God, a victory and triumph for all time, for her country a crown of
+glory and ineffable shame.
+
+Thus died the Maid of France--with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips--till the
+merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat; and
+one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the fire,
+wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through the air
+in the good monk's trembling hands--from eyes which opened bright upon
+the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so long thought
+and dreamed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII -- AFTER.
+
+The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known
+in history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the
+great catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been fact
+and evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been recorded
+all the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the most
+innocent of all, sought out Frère Isambard, and confessed to him in an
+anguish of remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had done.
+An Englishman who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in which the
+witch should be burned, when he rushed forward to keep his word was
+seized with sudden compunction--believed that he saw a white dove
+flutter forth from amid the smoke over her head, and, almost fainting
+at the sight, had to be led by his comrades to the nearest tavern for
+refreshment, a life-like touch in which we recognise our countryman; but
+he too found his way that afternoon to Frère Isambard like the other. A
+horrible story is told by the _Bourgeois de Paris_, whose contemporary
+journal is one of the authorities for this period, that "the fire was
+drawn aside" in order that Jeanne's form, with all its clothing burned
+away, should be visible by one last act of shameless insult to the
+crowd. The fifteenth century believed, as we have said, everything that
+is cruel and horrible, as indeed the vulgar mind does at all ages; but
+such brutal imaginings have seldom any truth to support them, and there
+is no such suggestion in the actual record. Isambard and Massieu heard
+from one of the officials that when every other part of her body
+was destroyed the heart was found intact, but was, by the order of
+Winchester, flung into the Seine along with all the ashes of that
+sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics should be kept.
+
+Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed
+this dreadful scene. "When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried out
+for water, holy water, and called to St. Michæl; then hung her head upon
+her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently died." "Being
+in the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud voice the holy
+name of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of paradise, she
+gave up her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name of Jesus in
+sign of the fervour of her faith." One of the Canons of Rouen, standing
+sobbing in the crowd, said to another: "Would that my soul were in the
+same place where the soul of that woman is at this moment"; which indeed
+is not very different from the authorised saying of Pierre Morice in
+the prison. Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he who wrote _superba
+responsio_ on his margin, and had written down every word of her long
+examination--his occupation for three months,--says that he "never wept
+so much for anything that happened to himself, and that for a
+whole month he could not recover his calm." This man adds a very
+characteristic touch, to wit, that "with part of the pay which he had
+for the trial, he bought a missal, that he might have a reason for
+praying for her." Jean Tressat, "secretary to the King of England"
+(whatever that office may have been), went home from the execution
+crying out, "We are all lost, for we have burned a saint." A priest,
+afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, "did not believe that there was any man
+who could restrain his tears."
+
+The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none
+are visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is
+extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed
+inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be continually
+pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed to have bought
+all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges, among whom were
+the most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but of none of this
+is there any proof given. That they were anxious to procure Jeanne's
+condemnation and death, is very certain. Not one among them believed
+in her sacred mission, almost all considered her a sorceress, the most
+dangerous of evil influences, a witch who had brought shame and loss to
+England by her incantations and evil spells. On that point there
+could be no doubt whatever. She alone had stopped the progress of the
+invaders, and broken the charm of their invariable success. But all that
+she had done had been in favour of Charles, who made no attempt to serve
+or help her, and who had thwarted her plans, and hindered her work so
+long as it was possible to do so, even when she was performing miracles
+for his sake. And Alençon, Dunois, La Hire, where were they and all the
+knights? Two of them at least were at Louvins, within a day's march,
+but never made a step to rescue her. We need not ask where were the
+statesmen and clergy on the French side, for they were unfeignedly glad
+to have the burden of condemning her taken from their hands. No one
+in her own country said a word or struck a blow for Jeanne. As for
+the suborning of the University of Paris _en masse_, and all its
+best members in particular, that is a general baseness in which it is
+impossible to believe. There is no appearance even of any particular
+pressure put upon the judges. Jean de la Fontaine disappeared, we are
+told, and no one ever knew what became of him: but it was from Cauchon
+he fled. And nothing seems to have happened to the monks who attended
+the Maid to the scaffold, nor to the others who sobbed about the
+pile. On the other side, the Doctors who condemned her were in no way
+persecuted or troubled by the French authorities when the King came to
+his own. There was at the time a universal tacit consent in France to
+all that was done at Rouen on the 31st of May, 1431.
+
+One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already
+sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that
+dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It
+was two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and
+sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly allied
+to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie existing
+between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the hostile
+indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to Jeanne, who
+had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of Paris and
+the adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much against them as
+against the English, and the national sentiment to which she, a patriot
+before her age, appealed,--bidding not only the English go home, or
+fight and be vanquished, which was their only alternative--but
+the Burgundians to be converted and to live in peace with their
+brothers,--did not exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards, or Normans
+was the daughter of far Champagne a fellow countrywoman. There was
+neither sympathy nor kindness in their hearts on that score. Some were
+humane and full of pity for a simple woman in such terrible straits; but
+no more in Paris than in Rouen was the Maid of Orleans a native champion
+persecuted by the English; she was to both an enemy, a sorceress,
+putting their soldiers and themselves to shame.
+
+I have no desire to lessen our(1) guilt, whatever cruelty may have
+been practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much
+was practised--the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final
+stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and
+often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that she
+was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A prisoner of
+war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in her downfall
+was a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame is greater upon
+those who sold than upon those who bought; and greatest of all upon
+those who did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did not move a finger, to
+rescue. And indeed we have been the most penitent of all concerned; we
+have shrived ourselves by open confession and tears. We have quarrelled
+with our Shakespeare on account of the Maid, and do not know how we
+could have forgiven him, but for the notable and delightful discovery
+that it was not he after all, but another and a lesser hand that
+endeavoured to befoul her shining garments. France has never quarrelled
+with her Voltaire for a much fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
+
+The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to the
+remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the assembly
+held on the Thursday after Jeanne's death, how and when we are not told.
+It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is the place of
+meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole testimonial is
+that the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous
+records: but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom
+by responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever
+certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all
+judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison,
+stand up and give their report of what happened there--part of which
+we have quoted--their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last
+acknowledged herself to be deceived. According to their own showing it
+was exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed
+to make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, "My God,
+my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems
+no reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as
+substantially true. The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's
+part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived
+in respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart.
+It was to her the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning
+showed her the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her
+renewed conviction. The scene at the stake would lose something of its
+greatness without that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled
+soul.
+
+Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according
+to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a
+danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine
+that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and
+accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions
+of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had
+witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of
+witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a
+long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and
+a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The _procès_
+was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of
+Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman
+of coat armour--against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop
+of Beauvais, and Lemaître, the Deputy Inquisitor--with other persons
+chiefly concerned in the judgment. Some of these men were dead, some,
+wisely, not to be found. The result was such a mass of testimony as put
+every incident of the life of the Maid in the fullest light from her
+childhood to her death, and in consequence secured a triumphant and full
+acquittal of herself and her name from every reproach. This remarkable
+and indeed unique occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused
+any enthusiasm. Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the
+extraordinary calm of contemporary opinion which was still too near the
+catastrophe to see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of
+news which hindered the common knowledge of a trial--a thing too heavy
+to be blown upon the winds,--while it promulgated the legend, a thing
+so much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an
+extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many
+ages, and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory,
+in the country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots
+and champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear than
+daily bread.
+
+In the new and wonderful spring of life that succeeded the revolution
+of 1830, the martyr of the fifteenth century came to light as by a
+revelation. The episode of the Pucelle in Michelet's _History of France_
+touched the heart of the world, and remains one of the finest efforts of
+history and the most popular picture of the saint. And perhaps, though
+so much less important in point of art, the maiden work of another
+maiden of Orleans--the little statue of Jeanne, so pure, so simple, so
+spiritual, made by the Princess Marie of that house, the daughter of the
+race which the Maid held in visionary love, and which thus only has ever
+attempted any return of that devotion--had its part in reawakening
+her name and memory. It fell again, however, after the great work of
+Quicherat had finally given to the country the means of fully
+forming its opinion on the subject which Fabre's translation, though
+unfortunately not literal and adorned with modern decorations, was
+calculated to render popular. A great crop of statues and some pictures
+not of any great artistic merit have since been dedicated to the memory
+of the Maid: but yet the public enthusiasm has never risen above the
+tide mark of literary applause.
+
+There has been, however, a great movement of enthusiasm lately to gain
+for Jeanne the honour of canonisation(2); but it seems to have failed,
+or at least to have sunk again for the moment into silence. Perhaps
+these honours are out of date in our time. One of the most recent
+writers on the subject, M. Henri Blaze de Bury, suggests that one reason
+which retards this final consecration is "England, certainly not a
+negligible quantity to a Pope of our time." Let no such illusion move
+any mind, French or ecclesiastical. Canonisation means to us, I presume,
+and even to a great number of Catholics, simply the highest honour
+that can be paid to a holy and spotless name. In that sense there is
+no distinction of nation, and the English as warmly as the French, both
+being guilty towards her, and before God on her account--would welcome
+all honour that could be paid to one who, more truly than any princess
+of the blood, is Jeanne of France, the Maid, alone in her lofty humility
+and valour, and in everlasting fragrance of modesty and youth.
+
+     (1) The writer must add that personally, as a Scot, she has
+     no right to use this pronoun. Scotland is entirely guiltless
+     of this crime. The Scots were fighting on the side of France
+     through all these wars, a little perhaps for love of France,
+     but much more out of natural hostility to the English. Yet
+     at this time of day, except to state that fact, it is
+     scarcely necessary to throw off the responsibility. The
+     English side is now our side, though it was not so in the
+     fifteenth century: and a writer of the English tongue must
+     naturally desire that there should at least be fair play.
+
+     (2) I am informed, however, that she is already "Venerable,"
+     not a very appropriate title--the same, I presume, as
+     Bienheureuse, which is prettier,--and may therefore be
+     addressed by the faithful in prayer, though her rank is
+     only, as it were, brevet rank, and her elevation incomplete.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Jeanne D'Arc, Her Life and Death, by Mrs. Oliphant
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+    
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Jeanne d'Arc
+       Her Life And Death
+
+Author: Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2006 [EBook #2553]
+Last Updated: February 4, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JEANNE D'ARC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      JEANNE D'ARC, HER LIFE AND DEATH
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by Mrs. Oliphant
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      Author of "Makers of Florence," "Makers of Venice," etc.
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> JEANNE D'ARC </a><br /> <br /> <br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH
+        CENTURY. 1412-1423. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0003">
+        CHAPTER III </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; BEFORE THE KING. FEB.-APRIL, 1429. <br /><br />
+        <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE RELIEF OF
+        ORLEANS. MAY 1-8, 1429. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE. JUNE, JULY, 1429. <br /><br />
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE CORONATION.
+        JULY 17, 1429. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        THE SECOND PERIOD. 1429-1430. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0008">
+        CHAPTER VIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT. AUTUMN, 1429.
+        <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        COMPIÈGNE. 1430. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0011">
+        CHAPTER XI </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE JUDGES. 1431. <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; BEFORE THE TRIAL.
+        LENT, 1431. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION. FEBRUARY, 1431. <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE EXAMINATION IN
+        PRISON. LENT, 1431. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0016">
+        CHAPTER XVI </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431. <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE SACRIFICE. MAY
+        31, 1431. <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;
+        AFTER.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      TO COUSIN ANNIE (MRS. HARRY COGHILL)
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED IN LOVE OF OUR COMMON HEROINE <br /> AND IN
+      REMEMBRANCE OF LONG AND FAITHFUL <br /> AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     PREPARER'S NOTE
+
+     The original book for this text was published as a volume in a
+     series "Heroes of the Nations," edited by Evelyn Abbot, M.H.,
+     Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and published by G.P. Putnam's
+     Sons <i>The Knickerbocker Press</i> in 1896. The title material
+     includes the note:
+
+     FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE
+     GLORIA RERUM&mdash;OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265.
+     THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
+     FAME SHALL LIVE.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
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+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      JEANNE D'ARC
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
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+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I &mdash; FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 1412-1423.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is no small effort for the mind, even of the most well-informed, how
+      much more of those whose exact knowledge is not great (which is the case
+      with most readers, and alas! with most writers also), to transport itself
+      out of this nineteenth century which we know so thoroughly, and which has
+      trained us in all our present habits and modes of thought, into the
+      fifteenth, four hundred years back in time, and worlds apart in every
+      custom and action of life. What is there indeed the same in the two ages?
+      Nothing but the man and the woman, the living agents in spheres so
+      different; nothing but love and grief, the affections and the sufferings
+      by which humanity is ruled and of which it is capable. Everything else is
+      changed: the customs of life, and its methods, and even its motives, the
+      ruling principles of its continuance. Peace and mutual consideration, the
+      policy which even in its selfish developments is so far good that it
+      enables men to live together, making existence possible,&mdash;scarcely
+      existed in those days. The highest ideal was that of war, war no doubt
+      sometimes for good ends, to redress wrongs, to avenge injuries, to make
+      crooked things straight&mdash;but yet always war, implying a state of
+      affairs in which the last thing that men thought of was the golden rule,
+      and the highest attainment to be looked for was the position of a
+      protector, doer of justice, deliverer of the oppressed. Our aim now that
+      no one should be oppressed, that every man should have justice as by the
+      order of nature, was a thing unthought of. What individual help did feebly
+      for the sufferer then, the laws do for us now, without fear or favour:
+      which is a much greater thing to say than that the organisation of modern
+      life, the mechanical helps, the comforts, the easements of the modern
+      world, had no existence in those days. We are often told that the poorest
+      peasant in our own time has aids to existence that had not been dreamt of
+      for princes in the Middle Ages. Thirty years ago the world was mostly of
+      opinion that the balance was entirely on our side, and that in everything
+      we were so much better off than our fathers, that comparison was
+      impossible. Since then there have been many revolutions of opinion, and we
+      think it is now the general conclusion of wise men, that one period has
+      little to boast itself of against another, that one form of civilisation
+      replaces another without improving upon it, at least to the extent which
+      appears on the surface. But yet the general prevalence of peace,
+      interrupted only by occasional wars, even when we recognise a certain
+      large and terrible utility in war itself, must always make a difference
+      incalculable between the condition of the nations now, and then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is difficult, indeed, to imagine any concatenation of affairs which
+      could reduce a country now to the condition in which France was in the
+      beginning of the fifteenth century. A strong and splendid kingdom, to
+      which in early ages one great man had given the force and supremacy of a
+      united nation, had fallen into a disintegration which seems almost
+      incredible when regarded in the light of that warm flame of nationality
+      which now illumines, almost above all others, the French nation. But
+      Frenchmen were not Frenchmen, they were Burgundians, Armagnacs, Bretons,
+      Provençaux five hundred years ago. The interests of one part of the
+      kingdom were not those of the other. Unity had no existence. Princes of
+      the same family were more furious enemies to each other, at the head of
+      their respective fiefs and provinces, than the traditional foes of their
+      race; and instead of meeting an invader with a united force of patriotic
+      resistance, one or more of these subordinate rulers was sure to side with
+      the invader and to execute greater atrocities against his own flesh and
+      blood than anything the alien could do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Charles VII. of France began, nominally, his reign, his uncles and
+      cousins, his nearest kinsmen, were as determinedly his opponents, as was
+      Henry V. of England, whose frank object was to take the crown from his
+      head. The country was torn in pieces with different causes and cries. The
+      English were but little farther off from the Parisian than was the
+      Burgundian, and the English king was only a trifle less French than were
+      the members of the royal family of France. These circumstances are little
+      taken into consideration in face of the general history, in which a
+      careless reader sees nothing but the two nations pitted against each other
+      as they might be now, the French united in one strong and distinct
+      nationality, the three kingdoms of Great Britain all welded into one. In
+      the beginning of the fifteenth century the Scots fought on the French
+      side, against their intimate enemy of England, and if there had been any
+      unity in Ireland, the Irish would have done the same. The advantages and
+      disadvantages of subdivision were in full play. The Scots fought furiously
+      against the English&mdash;and when the latter won, as was usually the
+      case, the Scots contingent, whatever bounty might be shown to the French,
+      was always exterminated. On the other side the Burgundians, the Armagnacs,
+      and Royalists met each other almost more fiercely than the latter
+      encountered the English. Each country was convulsed by struggles of its
+      own, and fiercely sought its kindred foes in the ranks of its more honest
+      and natural enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we add to these strange circumstances the facts that the French King,
+      Charles VI., was mad, and incapable of any real share either in the
+      internal government of his country or in resistance to its invader: that
+      his only son, the Dauphin, was no more than a foolish boy, led by
+      incompetent councillors, and even of doubtful legitimacy, regarded with
+      hesitation and uncertainty by many, everybody being willing to believe the
+      worst of his mother, especially after the treaty of Troyes in which she
+      virtually gave him up: that the King's brothers or cousins at the head of
+      their respective fiefs were all seeking their own advantage, and that some
+      of them, especially the Duke of Burgundy, had cruel wrongs to avenge: it
+      will be more easily understood that France had reached a period of
+      depression and apparent despair which no principle of national elasticity
+      or new spring of national impulse was present to amend. The extraordinary
+      aspect of whole districts in so strong and populous a country, which
+      disowned the native monarch, and of towns and castles innumerable which
+      were held by the native nobility in the name of a foreign king, could
+      scarcely have been possible under other circumstances. Everything was out
+      of joint. It is said to be characteristic of the nation that it is unable
+      to play publicly (as we say) a losing game; but it is equally
+      characteristic of the race to forget its humiliations as if they had never
+      been, and to come out intact when the fortune of war changes, more French
+      than ever, almost unabashed and wholly uninjured, by the catastrophe which
+      had seemed fatal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we had any right to theorise on such a subject&mdash;which is a thing
+      the French themselves above all other men love to do,&mdash;we should be
+      disposed to say, that wars and revolutions, legislation and politics, are
+      things which go on over the head of France, so to speak&mdash;boilings on
+      the surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such a word
+      may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while she
+      herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually
+      obstinate, tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit of
+      a certain kind of well-being congenial to her&mdash;goes steadily on, less
+      susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less excitable
+      on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the commotion is
+      over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving, uninjured in any essential
+      particular by the most terrific of convulsions. This of course is to be
+      said more or less of every country, the strain of common life being
+      always, thank God, too strong for every temporary commotion&mdash;but it
+      is true in a special way of France:&mdash;witness the extraordinary manner
+      in which in our own time, and under our own eyes, that wonderful country
+      righted herself after the tremendous misfortunes of the Franco-German war,
+      in which for a moment not only her prestige, her honour, but her money and
+      credit seemed to be lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary tenacity
+      of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and solidity which
+      in the end always triumph over the light heart and light head, the
+      excitability and often rash and dangerous <i>élan</i>, which are popularly
+      supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France&mdash;at the
+      very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful embodiment of
+      the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc. To call it a
+      fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic revelation, a
+      vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's fancy, more
+      ethereal, more impossible than that of any man&mdash;even a poet:&mdash;for
+      the man, even in his most uncontrolled imaginations, carries with him a
+      certain practical limitation of what can be&mdash;whereas the woman at her
+      highest is absolute, and disregards all bounds of possibility. The Maid of
+      Orleans, the Virgin of France, is the sole being of her kind who has ever
+      attained full expression in this world. She can neither be classified, as
+      her countrymen love to classify, nor traced to any system of evolution as
+      we all attempt to do nowadays. She is the impossible verified and
+      attained. She is the thing in every race, in every form of humanity, which
+      the dreaming girl, the visionary maid, held in at every turn by
+      innumerable restrictions, her feet bound, her actions restrained, not only
+      by outward force, but by the law of her nature, more effectual still,&mdash;has
+      desired to be. That voiceless poet, to whom what can be is nothing, but
+      only what should be if miracle could be attained to fulfil her trance and
+      rapture of desire&mdash;is held by no conditions, modified by no
+      circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most credible, the most
+      real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne of France is the very
+      flower of this passion of the imagination. She is altogether impossible
+      from beginning to end of her, inexplicable, alone, with neither rival nor
+      even second in the one sole ineffable path: yet all true as one of the
+      oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers in her garden, simple, actual,
+      made of the flesh and blood which are common to us all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country of
+      light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to the
+      surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that has brought
+      forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations. This is of
+      itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and charm the
+      imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights. How did she
+      come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted and ignoble
+      age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain, and failure
+      of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God, by the
+      inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of nature,
+      which is over nature, can put any trust. No evolution, no system of
+      development, can explain Jeanne. There is but one of her and no more in
+      all the astonished world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and beautiful
+      name. To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary. Though she is the
+      finest emblem to the world in general of that noble, fearless, and
+      spotless Virginity which is one of the finest inspirations of the mediæval
+      mind, yet she is inherently French, though France scarcely was in her
+      time: and national, though as yet there were rather the elements of a
+      nation than any indivisible People in that great country. Was not she
+      herself one of the strongest and purest threads of gold to draw that
+      broken race together and bind it irrevocably, beneficially, into one?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of French
+      territory that this national deliverer came. It is a commonplace that a
+      Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own country against the
+      other from which but a line divides him in fact, and scarcely so much in
+      race&mdash;than the calmer inhabitant of the midland country who knows no
+      such press of constant antagonism; and Jeanne is another example of this
+      well known fact. It is even a question still languidly discussed whether
+      Jeanne and her family were actually on one side of the line or the other.
+      "Il faut opter," says M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest biographers, as
+      if the peasant household of 1412 had inhabited an Alsatian cottage in
+      1872. When the line is drawn so closely, it is difficult to determine, but
+      Jeanne herself does not ever seem to have entertained a moment's doubt on
+      the subject, and she after all is the best authority. Perhaps Villon was
+      thinking more of his rhyme than of absolute fact when he spoke of "Jeanne
+      la bonne Lorraine." She was born on the 5th of January, 1412, in the
+      village of Domremy, on the banks of the Meuse, one of those little grey
+      hamlets, with its little church tower, and remains of a little chateau on
+      the soft elevation of a mound not sufficient for the name of hill&mdash;which
+      are scattered everywhere through those level countries, like places which
+      have never been built, which have grown out of the soil, of undecipherable
+      antiquity&mdash;perhaps, one feels, only a hundred, perhaps a thousand
+      years old&mdash;yet always inhabitable in all the ages, with the same
+      names lingering about, the same surroundings, the same mild rural
+      occupations, simple plenty and bare want mingling together with as little
+      difference of level as exists in the sweeping lines of the landscape
+      round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to the
+      invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the universal
+      conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak, the adjacent
+      village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English alliance, while
+      little Domremy was for the King. And once at least when Jeanne was a girl
+      at home, the family were startled in their quiet by the swoop of an armed
+      party of Burgundians, and had to gather up babies and what portable
+      property they might have, and flee across the frontier, where the good
+      Lorrainers received and sheltered them, till they could go back to their
+      village, sacked and pillaged and devastated in the meantime by the passing
+      storm. Thus even in their humility and inoffensiveness the Domremy
+      villagers knew what war and its miseries were, and the recollection would
+      no doubt be vivid among the children, of that half terrible, half
+      exhilarating adventure, the fright and excitement of personal
+      participation in the troubles, of which, night and day, from one quarter
+      or another, they must have heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Domremy had originally belonged(1) to the Abbey of St. Remy at Rheims&mdash;the
+      ancient church of which, in its great antiquity, is still an interest and
+      a wonder even in comparison with the amazing splendour of the cathedral of
+      that place, so rich and ornate, which draws the eyes of the visitor to
+      itself, and its greater associations. It is possible that this ancient
+      connection with Rheims may have brought the great ceremony for which it is
+      ever memorable, the consecration of the kings of France, more distinctly
+      before the musing vision of the village girl; but I doubt whether such
+      chance associations are ever much to be relied upon. The village was on
+      the high-road to Germany; it must have been therefore in the way of news,
+      and of many rumours of what was going on in the centres of national life,
+      more than many towns of importance. Feudal bands, a rustic Seigneur with
+      his little troop, going out for their forty days' service, or returning
+      home after it, must have passed along the banks of the lazy Meuse many
+      days during the fighting season, and indeed throughout the year, for
+      garrison duty would be as necessary in winter as in summer; or a wandering
+      pair of friars who had seen strange sights must have passed with their
+      wallets from the neighbouring convents, collecting the day's provision,
+      and leaving news and gossip behind, such as flowed to these monastic
+      hostelries from all quarters&mdash;tales of battles, and anecdotes of the
+      Court, and dreadful stories of English atrocities, to stir the village and
+      rouse ever generous sentiment and stirring of national indignation. They
+      are said by Michelet to have been no man's vassals, these outlying hamlets
+      of Champagne; the men were not called upon to follow their lord's banner
+      at a day's notice, as were the sons of other villages. There is no
+      appearance even of a lord at all upon this piece of Church land, which
+      was, we are told, directly held under the King, and would only therefore
+      be touched by a general levy <i>en masse</i>&mdash;not even perhaps by
+      that, so far off were they, and so near the frontier, where a reluctant
+      man-at-arms could without difficulty make his escape, as the unwilling
+      conscript sometimes does now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There would seem to have been no one of more importance in Domremy than
+      Jacques d'Arc himself and his wife, respectable peasants, with a little
+      money, a considerable rural property in flocks and herds and pastures, and
+      a good reputation among their kind. He had three sons working with their
+      father in the peaceful routine of the fields; and two daughters, of whom
+      some authorities indicate Jeanne as the younger, and some as the elder.
+      The cottage interior, however, appears more clearly to us than the outward
+      aspect of the family life. The daughters were not, like the children of
+      poorer peasants, brought up to the rude outdoor labours of the little
+      farm. Painters have represented Jeanne as keeping her father's sheep, and
+      even the early witnesses say the same; but it is contradicted by herself,
+      who ought to know best&mdash;(except in taking her turn to herd them into
+      a place of safety on an alarm). If she followed the flocks to the fields,
+      it must have been, she says, in her childhood, and she has no recollection
+      of it. Hers was a more sheltered and safer lot. The girls were brought up
+      by their mother indoors in all the labours of housewifery, but also in the
+      delicate art of needlework, so much more exquisite in those days than now.
+      Perhaps Isabeau, the mistress of the house, was of convent training,
+      perhaps some ancient privilege in respect to the manufacture of ornaments
+      for the altar, and church vestments, was still retained by the tenants of
+      what had been Church lands. At all events this, and other kindred works of
+      the needle, seems to have been the chief occupation to which Jeanne was
+      brought up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The education of this humble house seems to have come entirely from the
+      mother. It was natural that the children should not know A from B, as
+      Jeanne afterward said; but no one did, probably, in the village nor even
+      on much higher levels than that occupied by the family of Jacques d'Arc.
+      But the children at their mother's knee learned the Credo, they learned
+      the simple universal prayers which are common to the wisest and simplest,
+      which no great savant or poet could improve, and no child fail to
+      understand: "Our Father, which art in Heaven," and that "Hail, Mary, full
+      of grace," which the world in that day put next. These were the alphabet
+      of life to the little Champagnards in their rough woollen frocks and
+      clattering sabots; and when the house had been set in order,&mdash;a house
+      not without comfort, with its big wooden presses full of linen, and the <i>pot
+      au feu</i> hung over the cheerful fire,&mdash;came the real work, perhaps
+      embroideries for the Church, perhaps only good stout shirts made of flax
+      spun by their own hands for the father and the boys, and the fine
+      distinctive coif of the village for the women. "Asked if she had learned
+      any art or trade, said: Yes, that her mother had taught her to sew and
+      spin, and so well, that she did not think any woman in Rouen could teach
+      her anything." When the lady in the ballad makes her conditions with the
+      peasant woman who is to bring up her boy, her "gay goss hawk," and have
+      him trained in the use of sword and lance, she undertakes to teach the
+      "turtle-doo," the woman child substituted for him, "to lay gold with her
+      hand." No doubt Isabeau's child learned this difficult and dainty art, and
+      how to do the beautiful and delicate embroidery which fills the treasuries
+      of the old churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while they sat by the table in the window, with their shining silks
+      and gold thread, the mother made the quiet hours go by with tale and
+      legend&mdash;of the saints first of all&mdash;and stories from Scripture,
+      quaintly interpreted into the costume and manners of their own time, as
+      one may still hear them in the primitive corners of Italy: mingled with
+      incidents of the war, of the wounded man tended in the village, and the
+      victors all flushed with triumph, and the defeated with trailing arms and
+      bowed heads, riding for their lives: perhaps little epics and tragedies of
+      the young knight riding by to do his devoir with his handful of followers
+      all spruce and gay, and the battered and diminished remnant that would
+      come back. And then the Black Burgundians, the horrible English ogres,
+      whose names would make the children shudder! No <i>God-den</i>(2) had got
+      so far as Domremy; there was no personal knowledge to soften the picture
+      of the invader. He was unspeakable as the Turk to the imagination of the
+      French peasant, diabolical as every invader is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the earliest training of the little maid before whom so strange
+      and so great a fortune lay. <i>Autre personne que sadite mère ne lui
+      apprint</i>&mdash;any lore whatsoever; and she so little&mdash;yet
+      everything that was wanted&mdash;her prayers, her belief, the happiness of
+      serving God, and also man; for when any one was sick in the village,
+      either a little child with the measles, or a wounded soldier from the
+      wars, Isabeau's modest child&mdash;no doubt the mother too&mdash;was
+      always ready to help. It must have been a family <i>de bien</i>, in the
+      simple phrase of the country, helpful, serviceable, with charity and aid
+      for all. An honest labourer, who came to speak for Jeanne at the second
+      trial, held long after her death, gave his incontestable evidence to this.
+      "I was then a child," he said, "and it was she who nursed me in my
+      illness." They were all more or less devout in those days, when faith was
+      without question, and the routine of church ceremonial was followed as a
+      matter of course; but few so much as Jeanne, whose chief pleasure it was
+      to say her prayers in the little dark church, where perhaps in the morning
+      sunshine, as she made her early devotions, there would blaze out upon her
+      from a window, a Holy Michael in shining armour, transfixing the dragon
+      with his spear, or a St. Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with
+      her cross in her hand. So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to
+      find out some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the
+      suggestion which is unpleasing. The little country church was in the gift
+      of St. Remy, and some benefactor of the rural curé might well have given a
+      painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people. St. Margaret
+      was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her cross, and was
+      thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting much of her time at or outside the cottage door with her
+      needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and dreams,
+      the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a traveller, of
+      the calmest English temperament and sobriety of Protestant fancy, to whom
+      the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a touching reminder&mdash;which
+      he never neglects wherever he may be&mdash;to uncover the head and lift up
+      the heart; how much more the devout peasant girl softly startled in the
+      midst of her dreaming by that call to prayer. She was so fond of those
+      bells that she bribed the careless bell-ringer with simple presents to be
+      more attentive to his duty. From the garden where she sat with her work,
+      the cloudy foliage of the <i>bois de chêne</i>, the oak wood, where were
+      legends of fairies and a magic well, to which her imagination, better
+      inspired, seems to have given no great heed, filled up the prospect on one
+      side. At a later period, her accusers attempted to make out that she had
+      been a devotee of these nameless woodland spirits, but in vain. No doubt
+      she was one of the procession on the holy day once a year, when the curé
+      of the parish went out through the wood to the Fairies' Well to say his
+      mass, and exorcise what evil enchantment might be there. But Jeanne's
+      imagination was not of the kind to require such stimulus. The saints were
+      enough for her; and indeed they supplied to a great extent the fairy tales
+      of the age, though it was not of love and fame and living happy ever
+      after, but of sacrifice and suffering and valorous martyrdom that their
+      glory was made up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hear of the woods, the fields, the cottages, the little church and its
+      bells, the garden where she sat and sewed, the mother's stories, the
+      morning mass, in this quiet preface of the little maiden's life; but
+      nothing of the highroad with its wayfarers, the convoys of provisions for
+      the war, the fighting men that were coming and going. Yet these, too, must
+      have filled a large part in the village life, and it is evident that a
+      strong impression of the pity of it all, of the distraction of the country
+      and all the cruelties and miseries of which she could not but hear, must
+      have early begun to work in Jeanne's being, and that while she kept
+      silence the fire burned in her heart. The love of God, and that love of
+      country which has nothing to say to political patriotism but translates
+      itself in an ardent longing and desire to do "some excelling thing" for
+      the benefit and glory of that country, and to heal its wounds&mdash;were
+      the two principles of her life. We have not the slightest indication how
+      much or how little of this latter sentiment was shared by the simple
+      community about her; unless from the fact that the Domremy children fought
+      with those of Maxey, their disaffected neighbours, to the occasional
+      effusion of blood. We do not know even of any volunteer from the village,
+      or enthusiasm for the King.(3) The district was voiceless, the little
+      clusters of cottages fully occupied in getting their own bread, and
+      probably like most other village societies, disposed to treat any military
+      impulse among their sons as mere vagabondism and love of adventure and
+      idleness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing, so far as anyone knows, came near the most unlikely volunteer of
+      all, to lead her thoughts to that art of war of which she knew nothing,
+      and of which her little experience could only have shown her the horrors
+      and miseries, the sufferings of wounded fugitives and the ruin of sacked
+      houses. Of all people in the world, the little daughter of a peasant was
+      the last who could have been expected to respond to the appeal of the
+      wretched country. She had three brothers who might have served the King,
+      and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper about, of that kind which
+      in every country is the fittest material for fighting, and "food for
+      powder." But to none of these did the call come. Every detail goes to
+      increase the profound impression of peacefulness which fills the
+      atmosphere&mdash;the slow river floating by, the roofs clustered together,
+      the church bells tinkling their continual summons, the girl with her work
+      at the cottage door in the shadow of the apple trees. To pack the little
+      knapsack of a brother or a lover, and to convoy him weeping a little way
+      on his road to the army, coming back to the silent church to pray there,
+      with the soft natural tears which the uses of common life must soon dry&mdash;that
+      is all that imagination could have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too
+      young for any interposition of the lover, too undeveloped, the French
+      historians tell us with their astonishing frankness, to the end of her
+      short life, to have been moved by any such thought. She might have poured
+      forth a song, a prayer, a rude but sweet lament for her country, out of
+      the still bosom of that rustic existence. Such things have been, the
+      trouble of the age forcing an utterance from the very depths of its
+      inarticulate life. But it was not for this that Jeanne d'Arc was born.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) Mr. Andrew Lang informs me that the real proprietor was
+     a certain "Dame d'Orgévillier." "On Jeanne's side of the
+     burn," he adds, with a picturesque touch of realism, "the
+     people were probably <i>free</i> as attached to the Royal
+     Châtellenie of Vancouleurs, as described below."
+
+     (2) This was probably not the God-dam of later French, a
+     reflection of the supposed prevalent English oath, but most
+     likely merely the God-den or good-day, the common
+     salutation.
+
+     (3) Domremy was split, Mr. Lang says, by the burn, and
+     Jeanne's side were probably King's men. We have it on her
+     own word that there was but one Burgundian in the village,
+     but that might mean on her side.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II &mdash; DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the year 1424, the year in which, after the battle of Agincourt, France
+      was delivered over to Henry V., an extraordinary event occurred in the
+      life of this little French peasant. We have not the same horror of that
+      treaty, naturally, as have the French. Henry V. is a favourite of our
+      history, probably not so much for his own merit as because of that
+      master-magician, Shakespeare, who of his supreme good pleasure, in the
+      exercise of that voluntary preference, which even God himself seems to
+      show to some men, has made of that monarch one of the best beloved of our
+      hearts. Dear to us as he is, in Eastcheap as at Agincourt, and more in the
+      former than the latter, even our sense of the disgraceful character of
+      that bargain, <i>le traité infâme</i> of Troyes, by which Queen Isabeau
+      betrayed her son, and gave her daughter and her country to the invader, is
+      softened a little by our high estimation of the hero. But this is simple
+      national prejudice; regarded from the French side, or even by the
+      impartial judgment of general humanity, it was an infamous treaty, and one
+      which might well make the blood boil in French veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We look at it at present, however, through the atmosphere of the
+      nineteenth century, when France is all French, and when the royal house of
+      England has no longer any French connection. If George III., much more
+      George II., on the basis of his kingdom of Hanover, had attempted to make
+      himself master of a large portion of Germany, the situation would have
+      been more like that of Henry V. in France than anything we can think of
+      now. It is true the kings of England were no longer dukes of Normandy&mdash;but
+      they had been so within the memory of man: and that noble duchy was a
+      hereditary appanage of the family of the Conqueror; while to other
+      portions of France they had the link of temporary possession and
+      inheritance through French wives and mothers; added to which is the fact
+      that Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, thirsting to avenge his father's blood
+      upon the Dauphin, would have been probably a more dangerous usurper than
+      Henry, and that the actual sovereign, the unfortunate, mad Charles VI.,
+      was in no condition to maintain his own rights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is little evidence, however, that this treaty, or anything so
+      distinct in detail, had made much impression on the outlying borders of
+      France. What was known there, was only that the English were victorious,
+      that the rightful King of France was still uncrowned and unacknowledged,
+      and that the country was oppressed and humiliated under the foot of the
+      invader. The fact that the new King was not yet the Lord's anointed, and
+      had never received the seal of God, as it were, to his commission, was a
+      fact which struck the imagination of the village as of much more
+      importance than many greater things&mdash;being at once more visible and
+      matter-of-fact, and of more mystical and spiritual efficacy than any other
+      circumstance in the dreadful tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was in the garden as usual, seated, as we should say in Scotland,
+      at "her seam," not quite thirteen, a child in all the innocence of
+      infancy, yet full of dreams, confused no doubt and vague, with those
+      impulses and wonderings&mdash;impatient of trouble, yearning to give help&mdash;which
+      tremble on the chaos of a young soul like the first lightening of dawn
+      upon the earth. It was summer, and afternoon, the time of dreams. It would
+      be easy in the employment of legitimate fancy to heighten the
+      picturesqueness of that quiet scene&mdash;the little girl with her
+      favourite bells, the birds picking up the crumbs of brown bread at her
+      feet. She was thinking of nothing, most likely, in a vague suspense of
+      musing, the wonder of youth, the awakening of thought, as yet come to
+      little definite in her child's heart&mdash;looking up from her work to
+      note some passing change of the sky, a something in the air which was new
+      to her. All at once between her and the church there shone a light on the
+      right hand, unlike anything she had ever seen before; and out of it came a
+      voice equally unknown and wonderful. What did the voice say? Only the
+      simplest words, words fit for a child, no maxim or mandate above her
+      faculties&mdash;"<i>Jeanne, sois bonne et sage enfant; va souvent à
+      l'église.</i>" Jeanne, be good! What more could an archangel, what less
+      could the peasant mother within doors, say? The little girl was
+      frightened, but soon composed herself. The voice could be nothing but
+      sacred and blessed which spoke thus. It would not appear that she
+      mentioned it to anyone. It is such a secret as a child, in that wavering
+      between the real and unreal, the world not realised of childhood, would
+      keep, in mingled shyness and awe, uncertain, rapt in the atmosphere of
+      vision, within her own heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious how often this wonderful scene has been repeated in France,
+      never connected with so high a mission, but yet embracing the same
+      circumstances, the same situation, the same semi-angelic nature of the
+      woman-child. The little Bernadette of Lourdes is almost of our own day;
+      she, too is one who puts the scorner to silence. What her visions and her
+      voices were, who can say? The last historian of them is not a man
+      credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is silent, except in
+      a wondering impression of the sacred and the true, before the little
+      Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the many sordid results that
+      have followed and all that sad machinery of expected miracle through which
+      even, repulsive as it must always be, a something breaks forth from time
+      to time which no man can define and account for except in ways more
+      incredible than miracle&mdash;so is the rest of the world. Why has this
+      logical, sceptical, doubting country, so able to quench with an epigram,
+      or blow away with a breath of ridicule the finest vision&mdash;become the
+      special sphere and birthplace of these spotless infant-saints? This is one
+      of the wonders which nobody attempts to account for. Yet Bernadette is as
+      Jeanne, though there are more than four hundred years between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After what intervals the vision returned we are not told, nor in what
+      circumstances. It seems to have come chiefly out-of-doors, in the silence
+      and freedom of the fields or garden. Presently the heavenly radiance
+      shaped itself into some semblance of forms and figures, one of which,
+      clearer than the others, was like a man, but with wings and a crown on his
+      head and the air "<i>d'un vrai prud' homme</i>"; a noble apparition before
+      whom at first the little maid trembled, but whose majestic, honest regard
+      soon gave her confidence. He bade her once more to be good, and that God
+      would help her; then he told her the sad story of her own suffering
+      country, <i>la pitié qui estoit au royaume de France</i>. Was it the pity
+      of heaven that the archangel reported to the little trembling girl, or
+      only that which woke with the word in her own childish soul? He has chosen
+      the small things of this world to confound the great. Jeanne's young heart
+      was full of pity already, and of yearning over the helpless mother-country
+      which had no champion to stand for her. "She had great doubts at first
+      whether it was St. Michael, but afterwards when he had instructed her and
+      shown her many things, she believed firmly that it was he."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was this warrior-angel who opened the matter to her, and disclosed her
+      mission. "Jeanne," he said, "you must go to the help of the King of
+      France; and it is you who shall give him back his kingdom." Like a still
+      greater Maid, trembling, casting in her mind what this might mean, she
+      replied, confused, as if that simple detail were all: "Messire, I am only
+      a poor girl; I cannot ride or lead armed men." The vision took no notice
+      of this plea. He became minute in his directions, indicating exactly what
+      she was to do. "Go to Messire de Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and
+      he will take you to the King. St. Catherine and St. Margaret will come and
+      help you." Jeanne was overwhelmed by this exactness, by the sensation of
+      receiving direct orders. She cried, weeping and helpless, terrified to the
+      bottom of her soul&mdash;What was she that she should do this? a little
+      girl, able to guide nothing but her needle or her distaff, to lend her
+      simple aid in nursing a sick child. But behind all her fright and
+      hesitation, her heart was filled with the emotion thus suggested to her&mdash;the
+      immeasurable <i>pitié que estoit au royaume de France</i>. Her heart
+      became heavy with this burden. By degrees it came about that she could
+      think of nothing else; and her little life was confused by expectations
+      and recollections of the celestial visitant, who might arrive upon her at
+      any moment, in the midst perhaps of some innocent play, or when she sat
+      sewing in the garden before her father's humble door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while the <i>vrai prud' homme</i> came seldom; other figures more
+      like herself, soft forms of women, white and shining, with golden circlets
+      and ornaments, appeared to her in the great halo of the light; they bowed
+      their heads, naming themselves, as to a sister spirit, Catherine, and the
+      other Margaret. Their voices were sweet and soft with a sound that made
+      you weep. They were both martyrs, encouraging and strengthening the little
+      martyr that was to be. "A lady is there in the heavens who loves thee":
+      Virgil could not say more to rouse the flagging strength of Dante. When
+      these gentle figures disappeared, the little maid wept in an anguish of
+      tenderness, longing if only they would take her with them. It is curious
+      that though she describes in this vague rapture the appearance of her
+      visitors, it is always as "<i>mes voix</i>" that she names them&mdash;the
+      sight must always have been more imperfect than the message. Their
+      outlines and their lovely faces might shine uncertain in the excess of
+      light; but the words were always plain. The pity for France that was in
+      their hearts spread itself into the silent rural atmosphere, touching
+      every sensitive chord in the nature of little Jeanne. It was as if her
+      mother lay dying there before her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curious to think how little anyone could have suspected such meetings as
+      these, in the cottage hard by, where the weary ploughmen from the fields
+      would come clamping in for their meal, and Dame Isabeau would call to the
+      child, even sharply perhaps now and then, to leave that all-absorbing
+      needlework and come in and help, as Martha called Mary fourteen hundred
+      years before; and where the priest, mumbling his mass of a cold morning in
+      the little church, would smile indulgent on the faithful little worshipper
+      when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne there whoever might be absent. She
+      was a shy girl, blushing and drooping her head when a stranger spoke to
+      her, red and shame-faced when they laughed at her in the village as a <i>dévote</i>
+      before her time; but with nothing else to blush about in all her simple
+      record.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither to her parents, nor to the curé when she made her confession, does
+      she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though they had
+      lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon them, and could
+      keep silence no longer. She was but thirteen when the revelations began
+      and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to fulfil her mission.
+      She had no guidance from her voices, she herself says, as to whether she
+      should tell or not tell what had been communicated to her; and no doubt
+      was kept back by her shyness, and by the dreamy confusion of childhood
+      between the real and unreal. One would have thought that a life in which
+      these visions were of constant recurrence would have been rapt altogether
+      out of wholesome use and wont, and all practical service. But this does
+      not seem for a moment to have been the case. Jeanne was no hysterical
+      girl, living with her head in a mist, abstracted from the world. She had
+      all the enthusiasms even of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding
+      her with the intimacy of the village, paying her visits, staying all
+      night, sharing her room and her bed. She was ready to be sent for by any
+      poor woman that needed help or nursing, she was always industrious at her
+      needle; one would love to know if perhaps in the <i>Trésor</i> at Rheims
+      there was some stole or maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands.
+      But the <i>Trésor</i> at Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be
+      told, and the bottles and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that
+      <i>pauvre sire</i>, are more thought of than relics of an earlier age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length, however, one does not know how, the secret of her double life
+      came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse with
+      such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon her&mdash;meaningless
+      to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified tears over and
+      wonder at&mdash;ripened her intelligence so that she came at last to
+      perceive that it was practicable, a thing to be done, a charge to be
+      obeyed. She had this before her, as a girl in ordinary circumstances has
+      the new developments of life to think of, and how to be a wife and mother.
+      And the news brought by every passer-by would prove doubly interesting,
+      doubly important to Jeanne, in her daily growing comprehension of what she
+      was called upon to do. As she felt the current more and more catching her
+      feet, sweeping her on, overcoming all resistance in her own mind, she must
+      have been more and more anxious to know what was going on in the
+      distracted world, more and more touched by that great pity which had
+      awakened her soul. And all these reports were of a nature to increase that
+      pity till it became overwhelming. The tales she would hear of the English
+      must have been tales of cruelty and horror; not so many years ago what
+      tales did not we hear of German ferocity in the French villages, perhaps
+      not true at all, yet making their impression always; and it was more
+      probable in that age that every such story should be true. Then the
+      compassion which no one can help feeling for a young man deprived of his
+      rights, his inheritance taken from him, his very life in danger,
+      threatened by the stranger and usurper, was deepened in every particular
+      by the fact that it was the King, the very impersonation of France,
+      appointed by God as the head of the country, who was in danger. Everything
+      that Jeanne heard would help to swell the stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus she must have come step by step&mdash;this extraordinary, impossible
+      suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul&mdash;to perceive a kind of
+      miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how everything
+      pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed natural to
+      believe that the prophecies of the countryside which promised a virgin
+      from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to deliver France, might have
+      affected her mind, did we not have it from her own voice that she had
+      never heard that prophecy(1); but the word of the blessed Michael, so
+      often repeated, was more than an old wife's tale; and the child's alarm
+      would seem to have died away as she came to her full growth. And Jeanne
+      was no ethereal spirit lost in visions, but a robust and capable peasant
+      girl, fearing little, and full of sense and determination, as well as of
+      an inspiration so far above the level of the crowd. We hear with wonder
+      afterwards that she had the making of a great general in her untutored
+      female soul,&mdash;which is perhaps the most wonderful thing in her
+      career,&mdash;and saw with the eye of an experienced and able soldier, as
+      even Dunois did not always see it, the fit order of an attack, the best
+      arrangement of the forces at her command. This I honestly avow is to me
+      the most incredible point in the story. I am not disturbed by the
+      apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable appropriateness
+      and fitness against which the imagination, at least, has not a word to
+      say. The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such interpositions of
+      heaven come, but that they come so seldom. But that Jacques d'Arc's
+      daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only fault was that she
+      went to church too often, should have the genius of a soldier, is too
+      bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring influence leading
+      on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful with the rude artillery
+      of the time, divining the better way in strategy,&mdash;this is a wonder
+      beyond the reach of our faculties; yet according to Alençon, Dunois, and
+      other military authorities, it was true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long musings
+      came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no longer, nor what
+      it was which induced her at last to select the confidant she did. No doubt
+      she must have been considering and weighing the matter for a long time
+      before she fixed upon the man who was her relation, yet did not belong to
+      Domremy, and was safer than a townsman for the extraordinary revelations
+      she had to make. One of her neighbours, her gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to
+      whose child she was godmother, had perhaps at one moment seemed to her a
+      likely helper. But he belonged to the opposite party. "If you were not a
+      Burgundian," she said to him once, "there is something I might tell you."
+      The honest fellow took this to mean that she had some thought of marriage,
+      the most likely and natural supposition. It was at this moment, when her
+      heart was burning with her great secret, the voices urging her on day by
+      day, and her power of self-constraint almost at an end, that Providence
+      sent Durand Laxart, her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on some family
+      visit. She would seem to have taken advantage of the opportunity with
+      eagerness, asking him privately to take her home with him, and to explain
+      to her father and mother that he wanted her to take care of his wife. No
+      doubt the girl, devoured with so many thoughts, would have the air of
+      requiring "a change" as we say, and that the mother would be very ready to
+      accept for her an invitation which might bring back the brightness to her
+      child. Laxart was a peasant like the rest, a <i>prud' homme</i> well
+      thought of among his people. He lived in Burey le Petit, near to
+      Vaucouleurs, the chief place of the district, and Jeanne already knew that
+      it was to the captain of Vaucouleurs that she was to address herself. Thus
+      she secured her object in the simplest and most natural way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the reader cannot but hold his breath at the thought of what that
+      amazing revelation must have been to the homely, rustic soul, her
+      companion, communicated as they went along the common road in the common
+      daylight. "She said to the witness that she must go to France to the
+      Dauphin, to make him to be crowned King." It must have been as if a
+      thunderbolt had fallen at his feet when the girl whom he had known in
+      every development of her little life, thus suddenly disclosed to him her
+      secret purpose and determination. All her simple excellence the good man
+      knew, and that she was no fantastic chatterer, but truly <i>une bonne
+      douce fille</i>, bold in nothing but kindness, with nothing to blush for
+      but the fault of going too often to church. "Did you never hear that
+      France should be made desolate by a woman and restored by a maid?" she
+      said; and this would seem to have been an unanswerable argument. He had,
+      henceforth, nothing to do but to promote her purpose as best he could in
+      every way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not seem at all unlikely to this good man that the Archangel
+      Michael, if Jeanne's revelation to him went so far, should have named
+      Robert de Baudricourt, the chief of the district, captain of the town and
+      its forces, the principal personage in all the neighbourhood, as the
+      person to whom Jeanne's purpose was to be revealed, but rather a guarantee
+      of St. Michael himself, familiar with good society; and the Seigneur must
+      have been more or less in good intelligence with his people, not too
+      alarming to be referred to, even on so insignificant a subject as the
+      vagaries of a country girl&mdash;though these by this time must have begun
+      to seem something more than vagaries to the half-convinced peasant. And it
+      was no doubt a great relief to his mind thus to put the decision of the
+      question into the hands of a man better informed than himself. Laxart
+      proceeded to Vaucouleurs upon his mission, shyly yet with confidence. He
+      would seem to have had a preliminary interview with Baudricourt before
+      introducing Jeanne. The stammering countryman, the bluff, rustic noble and
+      soldier, cheerfully contemptuous, receiving, with a loud laugh into all
+      the echoes, the extraordinary demand that he should send a little girl
+      from Domremy to the King, to deliver France, come before us like a picture
+      in the countryman's simple words. Robert de Baudricourt would scarcely
+      hear the story out. "Box her ears," he said, "and send her home to her
+      mother." The little fool! What did she know of the English, those brutal,
+      downright fighters, against whom no <i>élan</i> was sufficient, who stood
+      their ground and set up vulgar posts around their lines, instead of
+      trusting to the rush of sudden valour, and the tactics of the tournament!
+      She deliver France! On a much smaller argument and to put down a less
+      ambition, the half serious, half amused adviser has bidden a young
+      fanatic's ears to be boxed on many an unimportant occasion, and has often
+      been justified in so doing. There would be a half hour of gaiety after
+      poor Laxart, crestfallen, had got his dismissal. The good man must have
+      turned back to Jeanne, where she waited for him in courtyard or
+      antechamber, with a heavy heart. No boxing of ears was possible to him.
+      The mere thought of it was blasphemy. This was on Ascension Day the 13
+      May, 1428.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne, however, was not discouraged by M. de Baudricourt's joke, and her
+      interview with him changed his views completely. She appears indeed from
+      the moment of setting out from her father's house to have taken a new
+      attitude. These great personages of the country before whom all the
+      peasants trembled, were nothing to this village maid, except, perhaps,
+      instruments in the hand of God to speed her on her way if they could see
+      their privileges&mdash;if not, to be swept out of it like straws by the
+      wind. It had no doubt been hard for her to leave her father's house; but
+      after that disruption what did anything matter? And she had gone through
+      five years of gradual training of which no one knew. The tears and terror,
+      the plea, "I am a poor girl; I cannot even ride," of her first childlike
+      alarm had given place to a profound acquaintance with the voices and their
+      meaning. They were now her familiar friends guiding her at every step; and
+      what was the commonplace burly Seigneur, with his roar of laughter, to
+      Jeanne? She went to her audience with none of the alarm of the peasant. A
+      certain young man of Baudricourt's suite, Bertrand de Poulengy, another
+      young D'Artagnan seeking his fortune, was present in the hall and
+      witnessed the scene. The joke would seem to have been exhausted by the
+      time Jeanne appeared, or her perfect gravity and simplicity, and beautiful
+      manners&mdash;so unlike her rustic dress and village coif&mdash;imposed
+      upon the Seigneur and his little court. This is how the story is told,
+      twenty-five years after, by the witness, then an elderly knight, recalling
+      the story of his youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "She said that she came to Robert on the part of her Lord, that he should
+      send to the Dauphin, and tell him to hold out, and have no fear, for the
+      Lord would send him succour before the middle of Lent. She also said that
+      France did not belong to the Dauphin but to her Lord; but her Lord willed
+      that the Dauphin should be its King, and hold it in command, and that in
+      spite of his enemies she herself would conduct him to be consecrated.
+      Robert then asked her who was this Lord? She answered, 'The King of
+      Heaven.' This being done (the witness adds) she returned to her father's
+      house with her uncle, Durand Laxart of Burey le Petit."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This brief and sudden preface to her career passed over and had no
+      immediate effect; indeed but for Bertrand we should have been unable to
+      separate it from the confused narrative to which all these witnesses
+      brought what recollection they had, often without sequence or order,
+      Durand himself taking no notice of any interval between this first visit
+      to Vaucouleurs and the final one.(2) The episode of Ascension Day appears
+      like the formal <i>sommation</i> of French law, made as a matter of form
+      before the appellant takes action on his own responsibility; but
+      Baudricourt had probably more to do with it than appears to be at all
+      certain from the after evidence. One of the persons present, at all
+      events, young Poulengy above mentioned, bore it in mind and pondered it in
+      his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime, Jeanne returned home&mdash;the strangest home-going,&mdash;for
+      by this time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and
+      rumour must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern
+      telegraph, to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore unaware of
+      any difference between Jeanne and her companions save the greater goodness
+      to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must have reached Jacques
+      d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with the kind Durand, a changed
+      creature, already the consecrated Maid of France, La Pucelle, apart from
+      all others. The French peasant is a hard man, more fierce in his terror of
+      the unconventional, of having his domestic affairs exposed to the public
+      eye, or his family disgraced by an exhibition of anything unusual either
+      in act or feeling, than almost any other class of beings. And it is
+      evident that he took his daughter's intention according to the coarsest
+      interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention of joining
+      herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and dreaded in
+      rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever of
+      apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl, but the
+      fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We do not know
+      what passed when she returned, further than that her father had a dream,
+      no doubt after the first astounding explanation of the purpose that had so
+      long been ripening in her mind. He dreamed that he saw her surrounded by
+      armed men, in the midst of the troopers, the most evident and natural
+      interpretation of her purpose, for who could divine that she meant to be
+      their leader and general, on a level not with the common men-at-arms, but
+      of princes and nobles? In the morning he told his dream to his wife and
+      also to his sons. "If I could think that the thing would happen that I
+      dreamed, I would wish that she should be drowned; and if you would not do
+      it, I should do it with my own hands." The reader remembers with a shudder
+      the Meuse flowing at the foot of the garden, while the fierce peasant, mad
+      with fear lest shame should be coming to his family, clenched his strong
+      fist and made this outcry of dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
+      whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
+      expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
+      substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
+      probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so good a
+      housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly and so
+      helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too willing to
+      exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be egged up to
+      the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at Toul and swearing
+      that Jeanne had been promised to him from her childhood. So timid a girl,
+      they all thought, so devout a Catholic, would simply obey the bishop's
+      decision and would not be bold enough even to remonstrate, though it is
+      curious that with the spectacle of her grave determination before them,
+      and sorrowful sense of that necessity of her mission which had steeled her
+      to dispense with their consent, they should have expected such an
+      expedient to arrest her steps. The affair, we must suppose, had gone
+      through all the more usual stages of entreaty on the lover's part, and
+      persuasion on that of the parents, before such an attempt was finally
+      made. But the shy Jeanne had by this time attained that courage of
+      desperation which is not inconsistent with the most gentle nature; and
+      without saying anything to anyone, she too went to Toul, appeared before
+      the bishop, and easily freed herself from the pretended engagement, though
+      whether with any reference to her very different destination we are not
+      told.(3)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These proceedings, however, and the father's dreams and the remonstrances
+      of the mother, must have made troubled days in the cottage, and scenes of
+      wrath and contradiction, hard to bear. The winter passed distracted by
+      these contentions, and it is difficult to imagine how Jeanne could have
+      borne this had it not been that the period of her outset had already been
+      indicated, and that it was only in the middle of Lent that her succour was
+      to reach the King. The village, no doubt, was almost as much distracted as
+      her father's house to hear of these strange discussions and of the
+      incredible purpose of the <i>bonne douce fille</i>, whose qualities
+      everybody knew and about whom there was nothing eccentric, nothing
+      unnatural, but only simple goodness, to distinguish her above her
+      neighbours. In the meantime her voices called her continually to her work.
+      They set her free from the ordinary yoke of obedience, always so strong in
+      the mind of a French girl. The dreadful step of abandoning her home, not
+      to be thought of under any other circumstances, was more and more urgently
+      pressed upon her. Could it indeed be saints and angels who ordained a step
+      which was outside of all the habits and first duties of nature? But we
+      have no reason to believe that this nineteenth-century doubt of her
+      visitors, and of whether their mandates were right, entered into the mind
+      of a girl who was of her own period and not of ours. She went on
+      steadfastly, certain of her mission now, and inaccessible either to
+      remonstrance or appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was towards the beginning of Lent, as Poulengy tells us, that the
+      decision was made, and she left home finally, to go "to France" as is
+      always said. But it seems to have been in January that she set out once
+      more for Vaucouleurs, accompanied by her uncle, who took her to the house
+      of some humble folk they knew, a carter and his wife, where they lodged.
+      Jeanne wore her peasant dress of heavy red homespun, her rude heavy shoes,
+      her village coif. She never made any pretence of ladyhood or superiority
+      to her class, but was always equal to the finest society in which she
+      found herself, by dint of that simple good faith, sense, and seriousness,
+      without excitement or exaggeration, and radiant purity and
+      straightforwardness which were apparent to all seeing eyes. By this time
+      all the little world about knew something of her purpose and followed her
+      every step with wonder and quickly rising curiosity: and no doubt the
+      whole town was astir, women gazing at their doors, all on her side from
+      the first moment, the men half interested, half insolent, as she went once
+      more to the chateau to make her personal appeal. Simple as she was, the <i>bonne
+      douce fille</i> was not intimidated by the guard at the gates, the
+      lounging soldiers, the no doubt impudent glances flung at her by these
+      rude companions. She was inaccessible to alarms of that kind&mdash;which,
+      perhaps, is one of the greatest safeguards against them even in more
+      ordinary cases. We find little record of her second interview with
+      Baudricourt. The <i>Journal du Siège d'Orleans</i> and the <i>Chronique de
+      la Pucelle</i> both mention it as if it had been one of several, which may
+      well have been the case, as she was for three weeks in Vaucouleurs. It is
+      almost impossible to arrange the incidents of this interval between her
+      arrival there and her final departure for Chinon on the 23d February,
+      during which time she made a pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Nicolas and
+      also a visit to the Duke of Lorraine. It is clear, however, that she must
+      have repeated her demand with such stress and urgency that the Captain of
+      Vaucouleurs was a much perplexed man. It was a very natural idea then, and
+      in accordance with every sentiment of the time that he should suspect this
+      wonderful girl, who would not be daunted, of being a witch and capable of
+      bringing an evil fate on all who crossed her. All thought of boxing her
+      ears must ere this have departed from his mind. He hastened to consult the
+      curé, which was the most reasonable thing to do. The curé was as much
+      puzzled as the Captain. The Church, it must be said, if always ready to
+      take advantage afterwards of such revelations, has always been timid, even
+      sceptical about them at first. The wisdom of the rulers, secular and
+      ecclesiastic, suggested only one thing to do, which was to exorcise, and
+      perhaps to overawe and frighten, the young visionary. They paid a joint
+      and solemn visit to the carter's house, where no doubt their entrance
+      together was spied by many eager eyes; and there the priest solemnly
+      taking out his stole invested himself in his priestly robes and exorcised
+      the evil spirits, bidding them come out of the girl if they were her
+      inspiration. There seems a certain absurdity in this sudden assault upon
+      the evil one, taking him as it were by surprise: but it was not ridiculous
+      to any of the performers, though Jeanne no doubt looked on with serene and
+      smiling eyes. She remarked afterwards to her hostess, that the curé had
+      done wrong, as he had already heard her in confession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside, the populace were in no uncertainty at all as to her mission. A
+      little mob hung about the door to see her come and go, chiefly to church,
+      with her good hostess in attendance, as was right and seemly, and a crowd
+      streaming after them who perhaps of their own accord might have neglected
+      mass, but who would not, if they could help it, lose a look at the new
+      wonder. One day a young gentleman of the neighbourhood was passing by, and
+      amused by the commotion, came through the crowd to have a word with the
+      peasant lass. "What are you doing here, <i>ma mie</i>?" the young man
+      said. "Is the King to be driven out of the kingdom, and are we all to be
+      made English?" There is a tone of banter in the speech, but he had already
+      heard of the Maid from his friend, Bertrand, and had been affected by the
+      other's enthusiasm. "Robert de Baudricourt will have none of me or my
+      words," she replied, "nevertheless before Mid-Lent I must be with the
+      King, if I should wear my feet up to my knees; for nobody in the world, be
+      it king, duke, or the King of Scotland's daughter, can save the kingdom of
+      France except me alone: though I would rather spin beside my poor mother,
+      and this is not my work: but I must go and do it, because my Lord so wills
+      it." "And who is your Seigneur?" he asked. "God," said the girl. The young
+      man was moved, he too, by that wind which bloweth where it listeth. He
+      stretched out his hands through the gaping crowd and took hers, holding
+      them between his own, to give her his pledge: and so swore by his faith,
+      her hands in his hands, that he himself would conduct her to the King.
+      "When will you go?" he said. "Rather to-day than to-morrow," answered the
+      messenger of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the second convert of La Pucelle. The peasant <i>bonhomme</i>
+      first, the noble gentleman after him; not to say all the women wherever
+      she went, the gazing, weeping, admiring crowd which now followed her
+      steps, and watched every opening of the door which concealed her from
+      their eyes. The young gentleman was Jean de Novelonpont, "surnamed Jean de
+      Metz": and so moved was he by the fervour of the girl, and by her strong
+      sense of the necessity of immediate operations, that he proceeded at once
+      to make preparations for the journey. They would seem to have discussed
+      the dress she ought to wear, and Jeanne decided for many obvious reasons
+      to adopt the costume of a man&mdash;or rather boy. She must, one would
+      imagine have been tall, for no remark is ever made on this subject, as if
+      her dress had dwarfed her, which is generally the case when a woman
+      assumes the habit of a man: and probably with her peasant birth and
+      training, she was, though slim, strongly made and well knit, besides being
+      at the age when the difference between boy and girl is sometimes but
+      little noticeable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime Baudricourt had not been idle. He must have been moved by
+      the sight of Jeanne, at least to perceive a certain gravity in the
+      business for which he was not prepared; and her composure under the curé's
+      exorcism would naturally deepen the effect which her own manners and
+      aspect had upon all who were free of prejudice. Another singular event,
+      too, added weight to her character and demand. One day after her return
+      from Lorraine, February 12th, 1429, she intimated to all her surroundings
+      and specially to Baudricourt, that the King had suffered a defeat near
+      Orleans, which made it still more necessary that she should be at once
+      conducted to him. It was found when there was time for the news to come,
+      that this defeat, the Battle of the Herrings, so-called, had happened as
+      she said, at the exact time; and such a strange fact added much to the
+      growing enthusiasm and excitement. Baudricourt is said by Michelet to have
+      sent off a secret express to the Court to ask what he should do; but of
+      this there seems to be no direct evidence, though likelihood enough. The
+      Court at Chinon contained a strong feminine element, behind the scenes.
+      And it might be found that there were uses for the enthusiast, even if she
+      did not turn out to be inspired. No doubt there were many comings and
+      goings at this period which can only be traced confusedly through the
+      depositions of Jeanne's companions twenty-five years after. She had at
+      least two interviews with Baudricourt before the exorcism of the curé and
+      his consequent change of procedure towards her. Then, escorted by her
+      uncle Laxart, and apparently by Jean de Metz, she had made a pilgrimage to
+      a shrine of St. Nicolas, as already mentioned, on which occasion, being
+      near Nancy, she was sent for by the Duke of Lorraine, then lying ill at
+      his castle in that city, who had a fancy to consult the young prophetess,
+      sorceress&mdash;who could tell what she was?&mdash;on the subject
+      apparently of his illness. He was the son of Queen Yolande of Anjou, who
+      was mother-in-law to Charles VII., and it would no doubt be thought of
+      some importance to secure his good opinion. Jeanne gave the exalted
+      patient no light on the subject of his health, but only the (probably
+      unpleasing) advice to flee from the wrath of God and to be reconciled with
+      his wife, from whom he was separated. He too, however, was moved by the
+      sight of her and her straightforward, undeviating purpose. He gave her
+      four francs, Durand tells us,&mdash;not much of a present,&mdash;which she
+      gave to her uncle, and which helped to buy her outfit. Probably he made a
+      good report of her to his mother, for shortly after her return to
+      Vaucouleurs (I again follow Michelet who ought to be well informed) a
+      messenger from Chinon arrived to take her to the King.(4) In the councils
+      of that troubled Court, perhaps, the idea of a prodigy and miraculous
+      leader, though she was nothing but a peasant girl, would be not without
+      attraction, a thing to conjure withal, so far as the multitude were
+      concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anyhow from any point of view, in the hopeless condition of affairs, it
+      was expedient that nothing which gave promise of help, either real or
+      visionary, should lightly be rejected. There was much anxiety no doubt in
+      the careless Court still dancing and singing in the midst of calamity, but
+      the reception of the ambitious peasant would form an exciting incident at
+      least, if nothing more important and notable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the whole anxious world of France stirred round that youthful figure
+      in the little frontier town, repeating with many an alteration and
+      exaggeration the sayings of Jeanne, and those popular superstitions about
+      the Maid from Lorraine which might be so naturally applied to her. It
+      would seem, indeed, that she had herself attached some importance to this
+      prophecy, for both her uncle Laxart and her hostess at Vaucouleurs report
+      that she asked them if they had heard it: which question "stupefied" the
+      latter, whose mind evidently jumped at once to the conviction that the
+      prophecy was fulfilled. Not in Domremy itself, however, were these things
+      considered with the same awe-stricken and admiring faith. Nothing had
+      softened the mood of Jacques d'Arc. It was a shame to the village <i>prud'
+      homme</i> to think of his daughter away from all the protection of home,
+      living among men, encountering the young Seigneurs who cared for no
+      maiden's reputation, hearing the soldiers' rude talk, exposed to their
+      insults, or worse still to their kindness. Probably even now he thought of
+      her as surrounded by troopers and men-at-arms, instead of the princes and
+      peers with whom henceforth Jeanne's lot was to be cast; but in the former
+      case there would have perhaps been less to fear than in the latter.
+      Anyhow, Jeanne's communications with her family were more painful to her
+      than had been the jeers of Baudricourt or the exorcism of the curé. They
+      sent her angry orders to come back, threats of parental curses and
+      abandonment. We may hope that the mother, grieved and helpless, had little
+      to do with this persecution. The woman who had nourished her children upon
+      saintly legend and Scripture story could scarcely have been hard upon the
+      child, of whom she, better than any, knew the perfect purity and steadfast
+      resolution. One of the little household at least, revolted by the stern
+      father's fury, perhaps secretly encouraged by the mother, broke away and
+      joined his sister at a later period. But we hear, during her lifetime,
+      little or nothing of Pierre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much time, however, was passed in these preliminaries. The final start was
+      not made till the 23d February, 1429, when the permission is supposed to
+      have come by the hands of Colet de Vienne, the King's messenger, who
+      attended by a single archer, was to be her escort. It is possible that he
+      had no mission to this effect, but he certainly did escort her to Chinon.
+      The whole town gathered before the house of Baudricourt to see her depart.
+      Baudricourt, however, does not seem to have provided any guard for her.
+      Jean de Metz, who had so chivalrously pledged himself to her service, with
+      his friend De Poulengy, equally ready for adventure, each with his
+      servant, formed her sole protectors.(5) Jean de Metz had already sent her
+      the clothes of one of his retainers, with the light breastplate and
+      partial armour that suited it; and the townspeople had subscribed to buy
+      her a further outfit, and a horse which seems to have cost sixteen francs&mdash;not
+      so small a sum in those days as now. Laxart declares himself to have been
+      responsible for this outlay, though the money was afterwards paid by
+      Baudricourt, who gave Jeanne a sword, which some of her historians
+      consider a very poor gift: none, however, of her equipments would seem to
+      have been costly. The little party set out thus, with a sanction of
+      authority, from the Captain's gate, the two gentlemen and the King's
+      messenger at the head of the party with their attendants, and the Maid in
+      the midst. "Go: and let what will happen," was the parting salutation of
+      Baudricourt. The gazers outside set up a cry when the decisive moment
+      came, and someone, struck with the feeble force which was all the
+      safeguard she had for her long journey through an agitated country&mdash;perhaps
+      a woman in the sudden passion of misgiving which often follows enthusiasm,&mdash;called
+      out to Jeanne with an astonished outcry to ask how she could dare to go by
+      such a dangerous road. "It was for that I was born," answered the fearless
+      Maid. The last thing she had done had been to write a letter to her
+      parents, asking their pardon if she obeyed a higher command than theirs,
+      and bidding them farewell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The French historians, with that amazement which they always show when
+      they find a man behaving like a gentleman towards a woman confided to his
+      honour, all pause with deep-drawn breath to note that the awe of Jeanne's
+      absolute purity preserved her from any unseemly overture, or even evil
+      thought, on the part of her companions. We need not take up even the
+      shadow of so grave a censure upon Frenchmen in general, although in the
+      far distance of the fifteenth century. The two young men, thus starting
+      upon a dangerous adventure, pledged by their honour to protect and convey
+      her safely to the King's presence, were noble and generous cavaliers, and
+      we may well believe had no evil thoughts. They were not, however, without
+      an occasional chill of reflection when once they had taken the irrevocable
+      step of setting out upon this wild errand. They travelled by night to
+      escape the danger of meeting bands of Burgundians or English on the way,
+      and sometimes had to ford a river to avoid the town, where they would have
+      found a bridge. Sometimes, too, they had many doubts, Bertrand says,
+      perhaps as to their reception at Chinon, perhaps even whether their
+      mission might not expose them to the ridicule of their kind, if not to
+      unknown dangers of magic and contact with the Evil One, should this
+      wonderful girl turn out no inspired virgin but a pretender or sorceress.
+      Jean de Metz informs us that she bade them not to fear, that she had been
+      sent to do what she was now doing; that her brothers in paradise would
+      tell her how to act, and that for the last four or five years her brothers
+      in paradise and her God had told her that she must go to the war to save
+      the kingdom of France. This phrase must have struck his ear, as he thus
+      repeats it. Her brothers in paradise! She had not apparently talked of
+      them to anyone as yet, but now no one could hinder her more, and she felt
+      herself free to speak. A great calm seems to have been in her soul. She
+      had at last begun her work. How it was all to end for her she neither
+      foresaw nor asked; she knew only what she had to do. When they ventured
+      into a town she insisted on stopping to hear mass, bidding them fear
+      nothing. "God clears the way for me," she said; "I was born for this," and
+      so proceeded safe, though threatened with many dangers. There is something
+      that breathes of supreme satisfaction and content in her repetition of
+      those words.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword,
+     that France should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards
+     redeemed by a virgin, which she quoted to several persons on
+     her first setting out.
+
+     (2) I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of
+     these events quite clear to myself.
+
+     (3) Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was
+     made after she had finally left Domremy, and when she was
+     already accompanied by the escort which was to attend her to
+     Chinon.
+
+     (4) Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this. He thinks the man
+     was a mere King's messenger with news, probably charged with
+     the melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the
+     Herrings): and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her
+     little part was entirely accidental.
+
+     (5) Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the
+     party. <i>La Chronique de la Pucelle</i> says two of her
+     brothers. Mr. Andrew Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did
+     not join his sister's party till much later&mdash;in the
+     beginning of June: and this is the statement of Jean de
+     Metz. But Quicherat is also of opinion that they both fought
+     in the relief of Orleans.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III &mdash; BEFORE THE KING. FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne and her little party were eleven days on the road, but do not seem
+      to have encountered any special peril. They lodged sometimes in the
+      security of a convent, sometimes in a village hostel, pursuing the long
+      and tedious way across the great levels of midland France, which has so
+      few features of beauty except in the picturesque towns with their castles
+      and churches, which the escort avoided. At length they paused in the
+      village of Fierbois not far from Chinon where the Court was, in order to
+      announce their arrival and ask for an audience, which was not immediately
+      accorded. Charles held his Court with incredible gaiety and folly, in the
+      midst of almost every disaster that could overtake a king, in the castle
+      of Chinon on the banks of the Vienne. The situation and aspect of this
+      noble building, now in ruins, is wonderfully like that of Windsor Castle.
+      The great walls, interrupted and strengthened by huge towers, stretch
+      along a low ridge of rocky hill, with the swift and clear river, a little
+      broader and swifter than the Thames, flowing at its foot. The red and
+      high-pitched roofs of the houses clustered between the castle hill and the
+      stream, give a point of resemblance the more. The large and ample
+      dwelling, defensible, but with no thought of any need of defence, a
+      midland castle surrounded by many a level league of wealthy country, which
+      no hostile force should ever have power to get through, must have looked
+      like the home of a well-established royalty. There was no sound or sight
+      of war within its splendid enclosure. Noble lords and gentlemen crowded
+      the corridors; trains of gay ladies, attendant upon two queens, filled the
+      castle with fine dresses and gay voices. There had been but lately a
+      dreadful and indeed shameful defeat, inflicted by a mere English convoy of
+      provisions upon a large force of French and Scottish soldiers, the former
+      led by such men as Dunois, La Hire, Xaintrailles, etc., the latter by the
+      Constable of Scotland, John Stuart&mdash;which defeat might well have been
+      enough to subdue every sound of revelry: yet Charles's Court was ringing
+      with music and pleasantry, as if peace had reigned around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be believed that there were many doubts and questions how to
+      receive this peasant from the fields, which prevented an immediate reply
+      to her demand for an audience. From the first, de la Tremoille, Charles's
+      Prime Minister and chief adviser, was strongly against any encouragement
+      of the visionary, or dealings with the supernatural; but there would no
+      doubt be others, hoping if not for a miraculous maid, yet at least for a
+      passing wonder, who might kindle enthusiasm in the country and rouse the
+      ignorant with hopes of a special blessing from Heaven. The gayer and
+      younger portion of the Court probably expected a little amusement, above
+      all, a new butt for their wit, or perhaps a soothsayer to tell their
+      fortunes and promise good things to come. They had not very much to amuse
+      them, though they made the best of it. The joys of Paris were very far
+      off; they were all but imprisoned in this dull province of Touraine;
+      nobody knew at what moment they might be forced to leave even that refuge.
+      For the moment here was a new event, a little stir of interest, something
+      to pass an hour. Jeanne had to wait two days in Chinon before she was
+      granted an audience, but considering the carelessness of the Court and the
+      absence of any patron that was but a brief delay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chamber of audience is now in ruins. A wild rose with long, arching,
+      thorny branches and pale flowers, straggles over the greensward where once
+      the floor was trod by so many gay figures. From the broken wall you look
+      sheer down upon the shining river; one great chimney, which at that season
+      must have been still the most pleasant centre of the large, draughty hall,
+      shows at the end of the room, with a curious suggestion of warmth and
+      light which makes ruin more conspicuous. The room must have been on the
+      ground floor almost level with the soil towards the interior of the
+      castle, but raised to the height of the cliffs outside. It was evening, an
+      evening of March, and fifty torches lighted up the ample room; many noble
+      personages, almost as great as kings, and clothed in the bewildering
+      splendour of the time, and more than three hundred cavaliers of the best
+      names in France filled it to overflowing. The peasant girl from Domremy in
+      the hose and doublet of a servant, a little travel-worn after her tedious
+      journey, was led in by one of those splendid seigneurs, dazzled with the
+      grandeur she had never seen before, looking about her in wonder to see
+      which was the King&mdash;while Charles, perhaps with boyish pleasure in
+      the mystification, perhaps with a little half-conviction stealing over him
+      that there might be something more in it, stood among the smiling crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young stranger looked round upon all those amused, light-minded,
+      sceptical faces, and without a moment's hesitation went forward and knelt
+      down before him. "Gentil Dauphin," she said, "God give you good life."
+      "But it is not I that am the King; there is the King," said Charles.
+      "Gentil Prince, it is you and no other," she said; then rising from her
+      knee: "Gentil Dauphin, I am Jeanne the Maid. I am sent to you by the King
+      of Heaven to tell you that you shall be consecrated and crowned at Rheims,
+      and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of France." The
+      little masquerade had failed, the jest was over. There would be little
+      more laughing among the courtiers, when they saw the face of Charles grow
+      grave. He took the new-comer aside, perhaps to that deep recess of the
+      window where in the darkening night the glimmer of the clear, flowing
+      river, the great vault of sky would still be visible dimly, outside the
+      circle of the blazing interior with all its smoky lights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles VII. of France was, like many of his predecessors, a <i>pauvre
+      Sire</i> enough. He had thought more of his amusements than of the
+      troubles of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will sometimes
+      spring from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and after all, the
+      dread responsibility, the sense that in all his helplessness and inability
+      to do anything he was still the man who ought to do all, would seem to
+      have moved him from time to time. A secret doubt in his heart, divulged to
+      no man, had added bitterness to the conviction of his own weakness. Was he
+      indeed the heir of France? Had he any right to that sustaining confidence
+      which would have borne up his heart in the midst of every discouragement?
+      His very mother had given him up and set him aside. He was described as
+      the so-called Dauphin in treaties signed by Charles and Isabeau his
+      parents. If anyone knew, she knew; and was it possible that more powerful
+      even than the English, more cruel than the Burgundians, this stain of
+      illegitimacy was upon him, making all effort vain? There is no telling
+      where the sensitive point is in any man's heart, and little worthy as was
+      this King, the story we are here told has a thrill of truth in it. It is
+      reported by a certain Sala, who declares that he had it from the lips of
+      Charles's favourite and close follower, the Seigneur de Boisi, a courtier
+      who, after the curious custom of the time, shared even the bed of his
+      master. This was confided to Boisi by the King in the deepest confidence,
+      in the silence of the wakeful night:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This was in the time of the good King Charles, when he knew not what step
+      to take, and did nothing but think how to redeem his life: for as I have
+      told you he was surrounded by enemies on all sides. The King in this
+      extreme thought, went in one morning to his oratory all alone; and there
+      he made a prayer to our Lord, in his heart, without pronouncing any words,
+      in which he asked of Him devoutly that if he were indeed the true heir,
+      descended from the royal House of France, and that justly the kingdom was
+      his, that He would be pleased to guard and defend him, or at the worst to
+      give him grace to escape into Spain or Scotland, whose people, from all
+      antiquity, were brothers-in-arms, friends and allies of the kings of
+      France, and that he might find a refuge there."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps there is some excuse for a young man's endeavour to forget himself
+      in folly or even in dissipation when his secret thoughts are so despairing
+      as these.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was soon after this melancholy moment that the arrival of Jeanne took
+      place. The King led her aside, touched as all were, by her look of perfect
+      sincerity and good faith; but it is she herself, not Charles, who repeats
+      what she said to him. "I have to tell you," said the young messenger of
+      God, "on the part of my Lord (<i>Messire</i>) that you are the true heir
+      of France and the son of the King; He has sent me to conduct you to Rheims
+      that you may receive your consecration and your crown,"&mdash;perhaps
+      here, Jeanne caught some look which she did not understand in his eyes,
+      for she adds with, one cannot but think a touch of sternness&mdash;"if you
+      will."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it a direct message from God in answer to his prayer, uttered within
+      his own heart, without words, so that no one could have guessed that
+      secret? At least it would appear that Charles thought so: for how should
+      this peasant maid know the secret fear that had gnawed at his heart? "When
+      thou wast in the garden under the fig-tree I saw thee." Great was the
+      difference between the Israelite without guile and the troubled young man,
+      with whose fate the career of a great nation was entangled; but it is not
+      difficult to imagine what the effect must have been on the mind of Charles
+      when he was met by this strange, authoritative statement, uttered like all
+      that Jeanne said, <i>de la part de Dieu</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was
+      surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as
+      they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which in
+      themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be allowed, also, that
+      to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless young King on the word of
+      a peasant girl was in itself, according to every law of reason, madness
+      and folly. She would seem to have had the women on her side always and at
+      every point. The Church did not stir, or else was hostile; the commanders
+      and military men about, regarded with scornful disgust the idea that an
+      enterprise which they considered hopeless should be confided to an
+      ignorant woman&mdash;all with perfect reason we are obliged to allow.
+      Probably it was to gain time&mdash;yet without losing the aid of such a
+      stimulus to the superstitious among the masses&mdash;and to retard any
+      rash undertaking&mdash;that it was proposed to subject Jeanne to an
+      examination of doctors and learned men touching her faith and the
+      character of her visions, which all this time had been of continual
+      recurrence, yet charged with no further revelation, no mystic creed, but
+      only with the one simple, constantly repeated command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops,
+      Jeanne was taken to Poitiers&mdash;where the university and the local
+      parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which were on
+      the side of the King, were assembled&mdash;to undergo this investigation.
+      It is curious that the entire history of this wildest and strangest of all
+      visionary occurrences is to be found in a series of processes at law, each
+      part recorded and certified under oath; but so it is. The village maid was
+      placed at the bar, before a number of acute legists, ecclesiastics, and
+      statesmen, to submit her to a not-too-benevolent cross-examination.
+      Several of these men were still alive at the time of the Rehabilitation
+      and gave their recollections of this examination, though its formal
+      records have not been preserved. A Dominican monk, Aymer, one of an order
+      she loved, addressed her gravely with the severity with which that
+      institution is always credited. "You say that God will deliver France; if
+      He has so determined, He has no need of men-at-arms." "Ah!" cried the
+      girl, with perhaps a note of irritation in her voice, "the men must fight;
+      it is God who gives the victory." To another discomfited Brother, Jeanne,
+      exasperated, answered with a little roughness, showing that our Maid,
+      though gentle as a child to all gentle souls, was no piece of subdued
+      perfection, but a woman of the fields, and lately much in the company of
+      rough-spoken men. He was of Limoges, a certain Brother Seguin, "<i>bien
+      aigre homme</i>," and disposed apparently to weaken the trial by questions
+      without importance: he asked her what language her celestial visitors
+      spoke? "Better than yours," answered the peasant girl. He could not have
+      been, as we say in Scotland, altogether "an ill man," for he acknowledged
+      that he spoke the patois of his district, and therefore that the blow was
+      fair. But perhaps for the moment he was irritated too. He asked her, a
+      question equally unnecessary, "do you believe in God?" to which with more
+      and more impatience she made a similar answer: "Better than you do." There
+      was nothing to be made of one so well able to defend herself. "Words are
+      all very well," said the monk, "but God would not have us believe you,
+      unless you show us some sign." To this Jeanne made an answer more
+      dignified, though still showing signs of exasperation, "I have not come to
+      Poitiers to give signs," she said; "but take me to Orleans&mdash;I will
+      then show the signs I am sent to show. Give me as small a band as you
+      please, but let me go."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation of Orleans was at the time a desperate one. It was besieged
+      by a strong army of English, who had built a succession of towers round
+      the city, from which to assail it, after the manner of the times. The town
+      lies in the midst of the plain of the Loire, with not so much as a hillock
+      to offer any advantage to the besiegers. Therefore these great works were
+      necessary in face of a very strenuous resistance, and the possibility of
+      provisioning the besieged, which their river secured. The English from
+      their high towers kept up a disastrous fire, which, though their artillery
+      was of the rudest kind, did great execution. The siege was conducted by
+      eminent generals. The works were of themselves great fortifications, the
+      assailants numerous, and strengthened by the prestige of almost unbroken
+      success; there seemed no human hope of the deliverance of the town unless
+      by an overwhelming army, which the King's party did not possess, or by
+      some wonderful and utterly unexpected event. Jeanne had always declared
+      the destruction of the English and the relief of Orleans to be the first
+      step in her mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the formal and official examination of her faith and character,
+      held at Poitiers, private inquests of all kinds were made concerning of
+      the claims of the miraculous maid. She was visited by every curious
+      person, man or woman, in the neighbourhood, and plied with endless
+      questions, so that her simple personal story, and that of her revelations&mdash;<i>mes
+      voix</i>, as she called them&mdash;became familiarly known from her own
+      report, to the whole country round about. The women pressed a question
+      specially interesting&mdash;for no doubt, many a good mother half
+      convinced otherwise, shook her head at Jeanne's costume&mdash;Why she wore
+      the dress of a man? for which the Maid gave very good reasons: in the
+      first place because it was the only dress for fighting, which, though so
+      far from her desires or from the habits of her life, was henceforward to
+      be her work; and also because in her strange circumstances, constrained as
+      she was to live among men, she considered it safest for herself&mdash;statements
+      which evidently convinced the minds of the questioners. It was, no doubt,
+      good policy to make her thus widely and generally known, and the result
+      was a daily growing enthusiasm for her and belief in her, in all classes.
+      The result of the formal process was that the doctors could find nothing
+      against her, and they reluctantly allowed that the King might lawfully
+      take what advantage he could of her offered services.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was then brought back to Chinon, where she was lodged in one of the
+      great towers still standing, though no special room is pointed out as
+      hers. And there she was subjected to another process, more penetrating
+      still than the interrogations of the graver tribunals. The Queens and
+      their ladies and all the women of the Court took her in hand. They
+      inquired into her history in every subtle and intimate feminine way,
+      testing her innocence and purity; and once more she came out triumphant.
+      The final judgment was given as follows: "After hearing all these reports,
+      the King taking into consideration the great goodness that was in the
+      Maid, and that she declared herself to be sent by God, it was by the said
+      Seigneur and his council determined that from henceforward he should make
+      use of her for his wars, since it was for this that she was sent."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was now necessary to equip Jeanne for her service. She had a <i>maison</i>,
+      an <i>état majeur</i>, or staff, formed for her, the chief of which, Jean
+      d'Aulon, already distinguished and worthy of such a trust never left her
+      thenceforward until the end of her active career. Her chaplain, Jean
+      Pasquerel, also followed her fortunes faithfully. Charles would have given
+      her a sword to replace the probably indifferent weapon given her by
+      Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs; but Jeanne knew where to find the sword
+      destined for her. She gave orders that someone should be sent to Fierbois,
+      the village at which she had paused on her way to Chinon, to fetch a sword
+      which would be found there buried behind the high altar of the church of
+      St. Catherine. To make this as little miraculous as possible, we are told
+      by some historians that it was common for knights to be buried with their
+      arms, and that Jeanne, in her visit to this church, where she heard three
+      masses in succession to make up for the absence of constant religious
+      services on her journey&mdash;had probably seen some tomb or other token
+      that such an interment had taken place. However, as we are compelled to
+      receive the far greater miracle of Jeanne herself and her work, without
+      explanation, it is foolish to take the trouble to attempt any explanation
+      of so small a matter as this. The sword in fact was found, by the clergy
+      of the church, and was by them cleaned and polished and put in a scabbard
+      of crimson velvet, scattered over with fleur-de-lys in gold, for her use.
+      Her standard, which she considered of the greatest importance was made
+      apparently at Tours. It was of white linen, fringed with silk and
+      embroidered with a figure of the Saviour holding a globe in His hands,
+      while an angel knelt at either side in adoration. Jhesus' Maria was
+      inscribed at the foot. A repetition of this banner, which must have been
+      re-copied from age to age is to be seen now at Tours. Having indicated the
+      exact device to be emblazoned upon the banner, as dictated to her by her
+      saints,&mdash;Margaret and Catherine&mdash;Jeanne announced her intention
+      of carrying it herself, a somewhat surprising office for one who was to
+      act as a general. But it was the command of her heavenly guides. "Take the
+      standard on the part of God, and carry it boldly," they had said. She had,
+      besides, a simple, half-childish intention of her own in this, which she
+      explained shame-faced&mdash;she had no wish to use her sword though she
+      loved it, and would kill no man. The banner was a more safe occupation,
+      and saved her from all possibility of blood-shedding; it must however,
+      have required the robust arm of a peasant to sustain the heavy weight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will show how long a time all these examinations and preparations had
+      taken when we read that Jeanne set out from Blois, where she had passed
+      some time in military preparations, only on the 27th day of April; nearly
+      two whole months had thus been taken up in testing her truth, and
+      arranging details, trifling and unnecessary in her eyes:&mdash;a period
+      which had been passed in great anxiety by the people of Orleans, with the
+      huge bastilles of the English&mdash;three of which were named Paris,
+      Rouen, and London&mdash;towering round them, their provisions often
+      intercepted, all the business of life come to a standstill, and the
+      overwhelming responsibility upon them of being almost the last barrier
+      between the invader and the final subjugation of France. It is strange to
+      add that, judging by ordinary rules, the garrison of Orleans ought to have
+      been quite sufficient in itself in numbers and science of war, to have
+      beaten and dispersed the English force which had thus succeeded in
+      shutting them in; there were many notable captains among them, with
+      Dunois, known as the Bastard of Orleans, one of the most celebrated and
+      brave of French generals, at their head. Dunois was in no way inferior to
+      the generals of the English army; he was popular, beloved by the people
+      and soldiers alike, and though illegitimate, of the House of Orleans, one
+      of the native seigneurs of the place. The wonder is how he and his
+      officers permitted the building of these towers, and the shutting in of
+      the town which they were quite strong enough to protect. But it was a
+      losing game which they were playing, a part which does not suit the genius
+      of the nation; and the superstition in favour of the English who had won
+      so many battles with all the disadvantages on their side,&mdash;cutting
+      the finest armies to pieces&mdash;was strong upon the imagination of the
+      time. It seemed a fate which no valour or skill upon the side of the
+      French could avert. Dunois, himself an unlikely person, one would have
+      thought, to yield the honour of the fight to a woman, seems to have
+      perceived that without a strong counter-motive, not within the range of
+      ordinary methods, the situation was beyond hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, on the 27th or 28th of April, Jeanne set out at the head of
+      her little army, accompanied by a great number of generals and captains.
+      She had been equipped by the Queen of Sicily (with a touch of that keen
+      sense of decorative effect which belonged to the age) in white armour
+      inlaid with silver&mdash;all shining like her own St. Michael himself, a
+      radiance of whiteness and glory under the sun&mdash;armed <i>de toutes
+      pièces sauve la teste</i>, her uncovered head rising in full relief from
+      the dazzling breastplate and gorget. This is the description given of her
+      by an eye-witness a little later. The country is flat as the palm of one's
+      hand. The white armour must have flashed back the sun for miles and miles
+      of the level road, to the eyes which from the height of any neighbouring
+      tower watched the party setting out. It is all fertile now, the richest
+      plain, and even then, corn and wine must have been in full bourgeon, the
+      great fresh greenness of the big leaves coming out upon such low stumps of
+      vine as were left in the soil; but the devastated country was in those
+      days covered with a wild growth like the <i>macchia</i> of Italian wilds,
+      which half hid the movements of the expedition. They went by the Loire to
+      Tours, where Jeanne had been assigned a dwelling of her own, with the
+      estate of a general; and from thence to Blois, where they had to wait for
+      some days while the convoy of provisions, which they were to convey to
+      Orleans, was being prepared. And there Jeanne fulfilled one of the
+      preliminary duties of her mission. She had informed her examiners at
+      Poitiers that she had been commanded to write to the English generals
+      before attacking them, appealing to them <i>de la part de Dieu</i>, to
+      give up their conquests, and leave France to the French. The letter which
+      we quote would seem to have been dictated by her at Poitiers, probably to
+      the confessor who now formed part of her suite and who attended her
+      wherever she went:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      JHESUS MARIA.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King of England, and you Duke of Bedford calling yourself Regent of
+      France, you, William de la Poule, Comte de Sulford, John, Lord of Talbot,
+      and you Thomas, Lord of Scales, who call yourself lieutenants of the said
+      Bedford, listen to the King of Heaven: Give back to the Maid who is here
+      sent on the part of God the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns
+      which you have taken by violence in His France. She is ready to make peace
+      if you will hear reason and be just towards France and pay for what you
+      have taken. And you archers, brothers-in-arms, gentles and others who are
+      before the town of Orleans, go in peace on the part of God; if you do not
+      so you will soon have news of the Maid who will see you shortly to your
+      great damage. King of England, if you do not this, I am captain in this
+      war, and in whatsoever place in France I find your people I will make them
+      go away. I am sent here on the part of God the King of Heaven to push you
+      all forth of France. If you obey I will be merciful. And be not strong in
+      your own opinion, for you do not hold the kingdom from God the Son of the
+      Holy Mary, but it is held by Charles the true heir, for God, the King of
+      Heaven so wills, and it is revealed by the Maid who shall enter Paris in
+      good company. If you will not believe this news on the part of God and the
+      Maid, in whatever place you may find yourselves we shall make our way
+      there, and make so great a commotion as has not been in France for a
+      thousand years, if you will not hear reason. And believe this, that the
+      King of Heaven will send more strength to the Maid than you can bring
+      against her in all your assaults, to her and to her good men-at-arms. You,
+      Duke of Bedford, the Maid prays and requires you to destroy no more. If
+      you act according to reason you may still come in her company where the
+      French shall do the greatest work that has ever been done for
+      Christianity. Answer then if you will still continue against the city of
+      Orleans. If you do so you will soon recall it to yourself by great
+      misfortunes. Written the Saturday of Holy Week (22 March, 1429).(1)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne had by this time made a wonderful moral revolution in her little
+      army; most likely she had not been in the least aware what an army was,
+      until this moment; but frank and fearless, she had penetrated into every
+      corner, and it was not in her to permit those abuses at which an ordinary
+      captain has to smile. The pernicious and shameful crowd of camp followers
+      fled before her like shadows before the day. She stopped the big oaths and
+      unthinking blasphemies which were so common, so that La Hire, one of the
+      chief captains, a rough and ready Gascon, was reduced to swear by his <i>bâton</i>,
+      no more sacred name being permitted to him. Perhaps this was the origin of
+      the harmless swearing which abounds in France, meaning probably just as
+      much and as little as bigger oaths in careless mouths; but no doubt the
+      soldiers' language was very unfit for gentle ears. Jeanne moved among the
+      wondering ranks, all radiant in her silver armour and with her virginal
+      undaunted countenance, exhorting all those rude and noisy brothers to take
+      thought of their duties here, and of the other life that awaited them. She
+      would stop the march of the army that a conscience-stricken soldier might
+      make his confession, and desired the priests to hear it if necessary
+      without ceremony, or church, under the first tree. Her tender heart was
+      such that she shrank from any man's death, and her hair rose up on her
+      head, as she said, at the sight of French blood shed&mdash;although her
+      mission was to shed it on all sides for a great end. But the one thing she
+      could not bear was that either Frenchmen or Englishmen should die
+      unconfessed, "unhouseled, disappointed, unannealed." The army went along
+      attended by songs of choristers and masses of priests, the grave and
+      solemn music of the Church accompanied strangely by the fanfares and bugle
+      notes. What a strange procession to pass along the great Loire in its
+      spring fulness, the raised banners and crosses, and that dazzling white
+      figure, all effulgence, reflected in the wayward, quick flowing stream!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      La Hire, who is like a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as a
+      model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort Jeanne
+      upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town. There could
+      not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to conduct to a
+      great battle the country maid who was to carry the honours of the day from
+      them both, and make men fight like heroes, who under them did nothing but
+      run away. The candour and true courage of such leaders in circumstances so
+      extraordinary, are beyond praise, for it was an offence both to their
+      pride and skill in their profession, had she been anything less than the
+      messenger of God which she claimed to be; and these rude soldiers were not
+      men to be easily moved by devout imaginations. There would seem, however,
+      even in the case of the greater of the two, to have arisen a strange
+      friendship and mutual understanding between the famous man of war and the
+      peasant girl. Jeanne, always straightforward and simple, speaks to him,
+      not with the downcast eyes of her humility, but as an equal, as if the
+      great Dunois had been a <i>prud' homme</i> of her own degree. There is no
+      appearance indeed that the Maid allowed herself to be overborne now by any
+      shyness or undue humility. She speaks loudly, so as to be heard by those
+      fighting men, taking something of their own brief and decisive tone, often
+      even impatient, as one who would not be put aside either by cunning or
+      force.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her meeting with Dunois makes this at once evident. She had been deceived
+      in the manner of her approach to Orleans, her companions, among whom there
+      were several field-marshals and distinguished leaders, taking advantage of
+      her ignorance of the place to lead her by the opposite bank of the river
+      instead of that on which the English towers were built, which she desired
+      to attack at once. This was the beginning of a long series of deceits and
+      hostile combinations, by which at every step of her way she was met and
+      retarded; but it turned, as these devices generally did, to the
+      discomfiture of the adverse captains. She crossed the river at Chécy above
+      Orleans, to meet Dunois who had come so far to meet her. It will be seen
+      by the conversation which she held with him on his first appearance, how
+      completely Jeanne had learnt to assert herself, and how much she had
+      overcome any fear of man. "Are you the Bastard of Orleans?" she said. "I
+      am; and glad of your coming," he replied. "Is it you who have had me led
+      to this side of the river and not to the bank on which Talbot is and his
+      English?" He answered that he and the wisest of the leaders had thought it
+      the best and safest way. "The counsel of God, our Lord, is more sure and
+      more powerful than yours," she replied. The expedition, as a matter of
+      fact, had to turn back, and to lose precious time, there being, it is to
+      be presumed, no means of transporting so large a force across the river.
+      The large convoy of provisions which Jeanne brought was embarked in boats
+      while the majority of the army returned to Blois, in order to cross by the
+      bridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne, however, having freely expressed her opinion, adapted herself to
+      the circumstances, though extremely averse to separate herself from her
+      soldiers, good men who had confessed and prepared their souls for every
+      emergency. She finally consented, however, to ride on with Dunois and La
+      Hire. The wind was against the convoy, so that the heavy boats, deeply
+      laden with beeves and corn, had a dangerous and slow voyage before them.
+      "Have patience," cried Jeanne; "by the help of God all will go well"; and
+      immediately the wind changed, to the astonishment and joy of all, and the
+      boats arrived in safety "in spite of the English, who offered no hindrance
+      whatever," as she had predicted. The little party made their way along the
+      bank, and in the twilight of the April evening, about eight o'clock,
+      entered Orleans. The Deliverer, it need not be said, was hailed with joy
+      indescribable. She was on a white horse, and carried, Dunois says, the
+      banner in her hand, though it was carried before her when she entered the
+      town. The white figure in the midst of those darkly gleaming mailed men,
+      would in itself throw a certain glory through the dimness of the night, as
+      she passed the gates and came into view by the blaze of all the torches,
+      and the lights in the windows, over the dark swarming crowds of the
+      citizens. Her white banner waving, her white armour shining, it was little
+      wonder that the throng that filled the streets received the Maid "as if
+      they had seen God descending among them." "And they had good reason," says
+      the Chronicle, "for they had suffered many disturbances, labours, and
+      pains, and, what is worse, great doubt whether they ever should be
+      delivered. But now all were comforted, as if the siege were over, by the
+      divine strength that was in this simple Maid whom they regarded most
+      affectionately, men, women, and little children. There was a marvellous
+      press around her to touch her or the horse on which she rode, so much so
+      that one of the torchbearers approached too near and set fire to her
+      pennon; upon which she touched her horse with her spurs, and turning him
+      cleverly, extinguished the flame, as if she had long followed the wars."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There could have been nothing she resembled so much as St. Michael, the
+      warrior-angel, who, as all the world knew, was her chief counsellor and
+      guide, and who, no doubt, blazed, a familiar figure, from some window in
+      the cathedral to which this his living picture rode without a pause, to
+      give thanks to God before she thought of refreshment or rest. She spoke to
+      the people who surrounded her on every side as she went on through the
+      tumultuous streets, bidding them be of good courage and that if they had
+      faith they should escape from all their troubles. And it was only after
+      she had said her prayers and rendered her thanksgiving, that she returned
+      to the house selected for her&mdash;the house of an important personage,
+      Jacques Boucher, treasurer to the Duke of Orleans, not like the humble
+      places where she had formerly lodged. The houses of that age were
+      beautiful, airy and light, with much graceful ornament and solid comfort,
+      the arched and vaulted Gothic beginning to give place to those models of
+      domestic architecture which followed the Renaissance, with their ample
+      windows and pleasant space and breadth. There the table was spread with a
+      joyous meal in honour of this wonderful guest, to which, let us hope,
+      Dunois and La Hire and the rest did full justice. But Jeanne was
+      indifferent to the feast. She mixed with water the wine poured for her
+      into a silver cup, and dipped her bread in it, five or six small slices.
+      The visionary peasant girl cared for none of the dainty meats. And then
+      she retired to the comfort of a peaceful chamber, where the little
+      daughter of the house shared her bed: strange return to the days when
+      Hauvette and Mengette in Domremy lay by her side and talked as girls love
+      to do, through half the silent night. Perhaps little Charlotte, too, lay
+      awake with awe to wonder at that other young head on the pillow, a little
+      while ago shut into the silver helmet, and shining like the archangel's.
+      The <i>état majeur</i>, the Chevalier d'Aulon, Jean de Metz, and Bertrand
+      de Poulengy, who had never left her, first friends and most faithful, and
+      her brother Pierre d'Arc, were lodged in the same house. It was the last
+      night of April, 1429.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) The dates must of course be reckoned by the old style.&mdash;
+     This letter was dispatched from Tours, during her pause
+     there.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV &mdash; THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS. MAY 1-8, 1429.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next morning there was a council of war among the many leaders now
+      collected within the town. It was the eager desire of Jeanne that an
+      assault should be made at once, in all the enthusiasm of the moment, upon
+      the English towers, without waiting even for the arrival of the little
+      army which she had preceded. But the captains of the defence who had borne
+      the heat and burden of the day, and who might naturally enough be
+      irritated by the enthusiasm with which this stranger had been received,
+      were of a different opinion. I quote here a story, for which I am told
+      there is no foundation whatever, touching a personage who probably never
+      existed, so that the reader may take it as he pleases, with indulgence for
+      the writer's weakness, or indignation at her credulity. It seems to me,
+      however, to express very naturally a sentiment which must have existed
+      among the many captains who had been fighting unsuccessfully for months in
+      defence of the beleaguered city. A certain Guillaume de Gamache felt
+      himself insulted above all by the suggestion. "What," he cried, "is the
+      advice of this hussy from the fields (<i>une péronnelle de bas lieu</i>)
+      to be taken against that of a knight and captain! I will fold up my banner
+      and become again a simple soldier. I would rather have a nobleman for my
+      master than a woman whom nobody knows."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dunois, who was too wise to weaken the forces at his command by such a
+      quarrel, is said to have done his best to reconcile and soothe the angry
+      captain. This, however, if it was true, was only a mild instance of the
+      perpetual opposition which the Maid encountered from the very beginning of
+      her career and wherever she went. Notwithstanding her victories, she
+      remained through all her career a <i>péronnelle</i> to these men of war
+      (with the noble exception, of course, of Alençon, Dunois, Xaintrailles, La
+      Hire, and others). They were sore and wounded by her appearance and her
+      claims. If they could cheat her, balk her designs, steal a march in any
+      way, they did so, from first to last, always excepting the few who were
+      faithful to her. Dunois could afford to be magnanimous, but the lesser men
+      were jealous, envious, embittered. A <i>péronnelle</i>, a woman nobody
+      knew! And they themselves were belted knights, experienced soldiers, of
+      the best blood of France. It was not unnatural; but this atmosphere of
+      hate, malice, and mortification forms the background of the picture
+      wherever the Maid moves in her whiteness, illuminating to us the whole
+      scene. The English hated her lustily as their enemy and a witch, casting
+      spells and enchantments so that the strength was sucked out of a man's arm
+      and the courage from his heart: but the Frenchmen, all but those who were
+      devoted to her, regarded her with an ungenerous opposition, the hate of
+      men shamed and mortified by every triumph she achieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was angry, too, and disappointed, more than she had been by all
+      discouragements before. She had believed, perhaps, that once in the field
+      these oppositions would be over, and that her mission would be rapidly
+      accomplished. But she neither rebelled nor complained. What she did was to
+      occupy herself about what she felt to be her business, without reference
+      to any commander. She sent out two heralds,(1) who were attached to her
+      staff, and therefore at her personal disposal, to summon once more Talbot
+      and Glasdale (Classidas, as the French called him) <i>de la part de Dieu</i>
+      to evacuate their towers and return home. It would seem that in her
+      miraculous soul she had a visionary hope that this appeal might be
+      successful. What so noble, what so Christian, as that the one nation
+      should give up, of free-will, its attempt upon the freedom and rights of
+      another, if once the duty were put simply before it&mdash;and both
+      together joining hands, march off, as she had already suggested, to do the
+      noblest deed that had ever yet been done for Christianity? That same
+      evening she rode forth with her little train; and placing herself on the
+      town end of the bridge (which had been broken in the middle), as near as
+      the breach would permit to the bastille, or fort of the Tourelles, which
+      was built across the further end of the bridge, on the left side of the
+      Loire&mdash;called out to the enemy, summoning them once more to withdraw
+      while there was time. She was overwhelmed, as might have been expected,
+      with a storm of abusive shouts and evil words, Classidas and his captains
+      hurrying to the walls to carry on the fierce exchange of abuse. To be
+      called dairy-maid and <i>péronnelle</i> was a light matter, but some of
+      the terms used were so cruel that, according to some accounts, she
+      betrayed her womanhood by tears, not prepared apparently for the use of
+      such foul weapons against her. The <i>Journal du Siège</i> declares,
+      however, that she was "aucunement yrée" (angry), but answered that they
+      lied, and rode back to the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next Sunday, the 1st of May, Dunois, alarmed by the delay of his main
+      body, set out for Blois to meet them, and we are told that Jeanne
+      accompanied him to the special point of danger, where the English from
+      their fortifications might have stopped his progress, and took up a
+      position there, along with La Hire, between the expedition and the enemy.
+      But in the towers not a man budged, not a shot was fired. It was again a
+      miracle, and she had predicted it. The party of Dunois marched on in
+      safety, and Jeanne returned to Orleans, once more receiving on the breeze
+      some words of abuse from the defenders of those battlements, which sent
+      forth no more dangerous missile, and replying again with her summons, "<i>Retournez
+      de la par Dieu à Angleterre.</i>" The townsfolk watched her coming and
+      going with an excitement impossible to describe; they walked by the side
+      of her charger to the cathedral, which was the end of every progress; they
+      talked to her, all speaking together, pressing upon her&mdash;and she to
+      them, bidding them to have no fear. "Messire has sent me," she said again
+      and again. She went out again, Wednesday, 4th May, on the return of
+      Dunois, to meet the army, with the same result, that they entered quietly,
+      the English not firing a shot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this same day, in the afternoon, after the early dinner, there happened
+      a wonderful scene. Jeanne, it appeared, had fallen asleep after her meal,
+      no doubt tired with the expedition of the morning, and her chief
+      attendant, D'Aulon, who had accompanied Dunois to fetch the troops from
+      Blois, being weary after his journey, had also stretched himself on a
+      couch to rest. They were all tired, the entry of the troops having been
+      early in the morning, a fact of which the angry captains of Orleans, who
+      had not shared in that expedition, took advantage to make a secret sortie
+      unknown to the new chiefs. All at once the Maid awoke in agitation and
+      alarm. Her "voices" had awakened her from her sleep. "My council tell me
+      to go against the English," she cried; "but if to assail their towers or
+      to meet Fastolfe I cannot tell." As she came to the full command of her
+      faculties her trouble grew. "The blood of our soldiers is flowing," she
+      said; "why did they not tell me? My arms, my arms!" Then she rushed down
+      stairs to find her page amusing himself in the tranquil afternoon, and
+      called to him for her horse. All was quiet, and no doubt her attendants
+      thought her mad: but D'Aulon, who knew better than to contradict his
+      mistress, armed her rapidly, and Luis, the page, brought her horse to the
+      door. By this time there began to rise a distant rumour and outcry, at
+      which they all pricked their ears. As Jeanne put her foot in the stirrup
+      she perceived that her standard was wanting, and called to the page, Louis
+      de Contes, above, to hand it to her out of the window. Then with the heavy
+      flag-staff in her hand she set spurs to her horse, her attendants one by
+      one clattering after her, and dashed onward "so that the fire flashed from
+      the pavement under the horse's feet."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne's presentiment was well-founded. There had been a private
+      expedition against the English fort of St. Loup carried out quietly to
+      steal a march upon her&mdash;Gamache, possibly, or other malcontents of
+      his temper, in the hope perhaps of making use of her prestige to gain a
+      victory without her presence. But it had happened with this sally as with
+      many others which had been made from Orleans; and when Jeanne appeared
+      outside the gate which she and the rest of the followers after her had
+      almost forced&mdash;coming down upon them at full gallop, her standard
+      streaming, her white armour in a blaze of reflection, she met the
+      fugitives flying back towards the shelter of the town. She does not seem
+      to have paused or to have deigned to address a word to them, though the
+      troop of soldiers and citizens who had snatched arms and flung themselves
+      after her, arrested and turned them back. Straight to the foot of the
+      tower she went, Dunois startled in his turn, thundering after her. It is
+      not for a woman to describe, any more than it was for a woman to execute
+      such a feat of war. It is said that she put herself at the head of the
+      citizens, Dunois at the head of the soldiers. One moment of pity and
+      horror and heart-sickness Jeanne had felt when she met several wounded men
+      who were being carried towards the town. She had never seen French blood
+      shed before, and the dreadful thought that they might die unconfessed,
+      overwhelmed her soul; but this was but an incident of her breathless
+      gallop to the encounter. To isolate the tower which was attacked was the
+      first necessity, and then the conflict was furious&mdash;the English
+      discouraged, but fighting desperately against a mysterious force which
+      overwhelmed them, at the same time that it redoubled the ardour of every
+      Frenchman. Lord Talbot sent forth parties from the other forts to help
+      their companions, but these were met in the midst by the rest of the army
+      arriving from Orleans, which stopped their course. It was not till
+      evening, "the hour of Vespers," that the bastille was finally taken, with
+      great slaughter, the Orleanists giving little quarter. During these
+      dreadful hours the Maid was everywhere visible with her standard, the most
+      marked figure, shouting to her men, weeping for the others, not fighting
+      herself so far as we hear, but always in the front of the battle. When she
+      went back to Orleans triumphant, she led a band of prisoners with her,
+      keeping a wary eye upon them that they might not come to harm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day, May 5th, was the Feast of the Ascension, and it was spent by
+      Jeanne in rest and in prayer. But the other leaders were not so devout.
+      They held a crowded and anxious council of war, taking care that no news
+      of it should reach the ears of the Maid. When, however, they had decided
+      upon the course to pursue they sent for her, and intimated to her their
+      decision to attack only the smaller forts, which she heard with great
+      impatience, not sitting down, but walking about the room in disappointment
+      and anger. It is difficult(2) for the present writer to follow the plans
+      of this council or to understand in what way Jeanne felt herself
+      contradicted and set aside. However it was, the fact seems certain that
+      their plan failed at first, the English having themselves abandoned one of
+      the smaller forts on the right side of the river and concentrated their
+      forces in the greater ones of Les Augustins and Les Tourelles on the left
+      bank. For all this, reference to the map is necessary, which will make it
+      quite clear. It was Classidas, as he is called, Glasdale, the most furious
+      enemy of France, and one of the bravest of the English captains who held
+      the former, and for a moment succeeded in repulsing the attack. The
+      fortune of war seemed about to turn back to its former current, and the
+      French fell back on the boats which had brought them to the scene of
+      action, carrying the Maid with them in their retreat. But she perceived
+      how critical the moment was, and reining up her horse from the bank, down
+      which she was being forced by the crowd, turned back again, closely
+      followed by La Hire, and at once, no doubt, by the stouter hearts who only
+      wanted a leader&mdash;and charging the English, who had regained their
+      courage as the white armour of the witch disappeared, and were in full
+      career after the fugitives&mdash;drove them back to their fortifications,
+      which they gained with a rush, leaving the ground strewn with the wounded
+      and dying. Jeanne herself did not draw bridle till she had planted her
+      standard on the edge of the moat which surrounded the tower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michelet is very brief concerning this first victory, and claims only that
+      "the success was due in part to the Maid," although the crowd of captains
+      and men-at-arms where by themselves quite sufficient for the work, had
+      there been any heart in them. But this was true to fact in almost every
+      case: and it is clear that she was simply the heart, which was the only
+      thing wanted to those often beaten Frenchmen; where she was, where they
+      could hear her robust young voice echoing over all the din, they were as
+      men inspired; when the impetus of their flight carried her also away, they
+      became once more the defeated of so many battles. The effect upon the
+      English was equally strong; when the back of Jeanne was turned, they were
+      again the men of Agincourt; when she turned upon them, her white
+      breastplate blazing out like a star, the sunshine striking dazzling rays
+      from her helmet, they trembled before the sorceress; an angel to her own
+      side, she was the very spirit of magic and witchcraft to her opponents.
+      Classidas, or which captain soever of the English side it might happen to
+      be, blaspheming from the battlements, hurled all the evil names of which a
+      trooper was capable, upon her, while she from below summoned them, in
+      different tones of appeal and menace, calling upon them to yield, to go
+      home, to give up the struggle. Her form, her voice are always evident in
+      the midst of the great stone bullets, the cloth-yard shafts that were
+      flying&mdash;they were so near, the one above, the other below, that they
+      could hear each other speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 7th of May the fort of Les Augustins on the left bank was taken. It
+      will be seen by reference to the map, that this bastille, an ancient
+      convent, stood at some distance from the river, in peaceful times a little
+      way beyond the bridge, and no doubt a favourite Sunday walk from the city.
+      The bridge was now closed up by the frowning bulk of the Tourelles built
+      upon it, with a smaller tower or "boulevard" on the left bank
+      communicating with it by a drawbridge. When Les Augustins was taken, the
+      victorious French turned their arms against this boulevard, but as night
+      had fallen by this time, they suspended the fighting, having driven back
+      the English, who had made a sally in help of Les Augustins. Here in the
+      dark, which suited their purpose, another council was held. The captains
+      decided that they would now pursue their victory no further, the town
+      being fully supplied with provisions and joyful with success, but that
+      they would await the arrival of reinforcements before they proceeded
+      further; probably their object was solely to get rid of Jeanne, to
+      conclude the struggle without her, and secure the credit of it. The
+      council was held in the camp within sight of the fort, by the light of
+      torches; after she had been persuaded to withdraw, on account of a slight
+      wound in her foot from a calthrop, it is said. This message was sent after
+      her into Orleans. She heard it with quiet disdain. "You have held your
+      council, and I have had mine," she said calmly to the messengers; then
+      turning to her chaplain, "Come to me to-morrow at dawn," she said, "and do
+      not leave me; I shall have much to do. My blood will be shed. I shall be
+      wounded(3) to-morrow," pointing above her right breast. Up to this time no
+      weapon had touched her; she had stood fast among all the flying arrows,
+      the fierce play of spear and sword, and had taken no harm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the morning early, at sunrise, she dashed forth from the town again,
+      though the generals, her hosts, and all the authorities who were in the
+      plot endeavoured to detain her. "Stay with us, Jeanne," said the people
+      with whom she lodged&mdash;official people, much above the rank of the
+      Maid&mdash;"stay and help us to eat this fish fresh out of the river."
+      "Keep it for this evening," she said, "and I shall return by the bridge
+      and bring you some Goddens to have their share." She had already brought
+      in a party of the Goddens on the night before to protect them from the
+      fury of the crowd. The peculiarity of this promise lay in the fact that
+      the bridge was broken, and could not be passed, even without that
+      difficulty, without passing through the Tourelles and the boulevard which
+      blocked it at the other end. At the closed gates another great official
+      stood by, to prevent her passing, but he was soon swept away by the flood
+      of enthusiasts who followed the white horse and its white rider. The crowd
+      flung themselves into the boats to cross the river with her, horse and
+      man. Les Tourelles stood alone, black and frowning across the shining
+      river in its early touch of golden sunshine, on the south side of the
+      Loire, the lower tower of the boulevard on the bank blackened with the
+      fire of last night's attack, and the smoking ruins of Les Augustins
+      beyond. The French army, whom Orleans had been busy all night feeding and
+      encouraging, lay below, not yet apparently moving either for action or
+      retreat. Jeanne plunged among them like a ray of light, D'Aulon carrying
+      her banner; and passing through the ranks, she took up her place on the
+      border of the moat of the boulevard. Her followers rushed after with that
+      <i>élan</i> of desperate and uncalculating valour which was the great
+      power of the French arms. In the midst of the fray the girl's clear voice,
+      <i>assez voix de femme</i>, kept shouting encouragements, <i>de la part de
+      Dieu</i> always her war-cry. "<i>Bon coeur, bonne espérance</i>," she
+      cried&mdash;"the hour is at hand." But after hours of desperate fighting
+      the spirit of the assailants began to flag. Jeanne, who apparently did not
+      at any time take any active part in the struggle, though she exposed
+      herself to all its dangers, seized a ladder, placed it against the wall,
+      and was about to mount, when an arrow struck her full in the breast. The
+      Maid fell, the crowd closed round; for a moment it seemed as if all were
+      lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here we have over again in the fable our friend Gamache. It is a pretty
+      story, and though we ask no one to take it for absolute fact, there is no
+      reason why some such incident might not have occurred. Gamache, the angry
+      captain who rather than follow a <i>péronnelle</i> to the field was
+      prepared to fold his banner round its staff, and give up his rank, is
+      supposed to have been the nearest to her when she fell. It was he who
+      cleared the crowd from about her and raised her up. "Take my horse," he
+      said, "brave creature. Bear no malice. I confess that I was in the wrong."
+      "It is I that should be wrong if I bore malice," cried Jeanne, "for never
+      was a knight so courteous" (<i>chevalier si bien apprins</i>). She was
+      surrounded immediately by her people, the chaplain whom she had bidden to
+      keep near her, her page, all her special attendants, who would have
+      conveyed her out of the fight had she consented. Jeanne had the courage to
+      pull the arrow out of the wound with her own hand,&mdash;"it stood a hand
+      breadth out" behind her shoulder&mdash;but then, being but a girl and this
+      her first experience of the sort, notwithstanding her armour and her rank
+      as General-in-Chief, she cried with the pain, this commander of seventeen.
+      Somebody then proposed to charm the wound with an incantation, but the
+      Maid indignant, cried out, "I would rather die." Finally a compress soaked
+      in oil was placed upon it, and Jeanne withdrew a little with her chaplain,
+      and made her confession to him, as one who might be about to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But soon her mood changed. She saw the assailants waver and fall back; the
+      attack grew languid, and Dunois talked of sounding the retreat. Upon this
+      she got to her feet, and scrambled somehow on her horse. "Rest a little,"
+      she implored the generals about her, "eat something, refresh yourselves:
+      and when you see my standard floating against the wall, forward, the place
+      is yours." They seem to have done as she suggested, making a pause, while
+      Jeanne withdrew a little into a vineyard close by, where there must have
+      been a tuft of trees, to afford her a little shelter. There she said her
+      prayers, and tasted that meat to eat that men wot not of, which restores
+      the devout soul. Turning back she took her standard from her squire's
+      hand, and planted it again on the edge of the moat. "Let me know," she
+      said, "when the pennon touches the wall." The folds of white and gold with
+      the benign countenance of the Saviour, now visible, now lost in the
+      changes of movement, floated over their heads on the breeze of the May
+      day. "Jeanne," said the squire, "it touches!" "On!" cried the Maid, her
+      voice ringing through the momentary quiet. "On! All is yours!" The troops
+      rose as one man; they flung themselves against the wall, at the foot of
+      which that white figure stood, the staff of her banner in her hand,
+      shouting, "All is yours." Never had the French <i>élan</i> been so wildly
+      inspired, so irresistible; they swarmed up the wall "as if it had been a
+      stair." "Do they think themselves immortal?" the panic-stricken English
+      cried among themselves&mdash;panic-stricken not by their old enemies, but
+      by the white figure at the foot of the wall. Was she a witch, as had been
+      thought? was not she indeed the messenger of God? The dazzling rays that
+      shot from her armour seemed like butterflies, like doves, like angels
+      floating about her head. They had thought her dead, yet here she stood
+      again without a sign of injury; or was it Michael himself, the great
+      archangel whom she resembled do much? Arrows flew round her on every side
+      but never touched her. She struck no blow, but the folds of her standard
+      blew against the wall, and her voice rose through all the tumult. "On!
+      Enter! <i>de la part de Dieu!</i> for all is yours."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Maid had other words to say, "<i>Renty, renty</i>, Classidas!" she
+      cried, "you called me vile names, but I have a great pity for your soul."
+      He on his side showered down blasphemies. He was at the last gasp; one
+      desperate last effort he made with a handful of men to escape from the
+      boulevard by the drawbridge to Les Tourelles, which crossed a narrow strip
+      of the river. But the bridge had been fired by a fire-ship from Orleans
+      and gave way under the rush of the heavily-armed men; and the fierce
+      Classidas and his companions were plunged into the river, where a knight
+      in armour, like a tower falling, went to the bottom in a moment. Nearly
+      thirty of them, it is said, plunged thus into the great Loire and were
+      seen no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the end of the struggle. The French flag swung forth on the
+      parapet, the French shout rose to heaven. Meanwhile a strange sight was to
+      be seen&mdash;the St. Michael in shining armour, who had led that assault,
+      shedding tears for the ferocious Classidas, who had cursed her with his
+      last breath. "<i>J'ai grande pitié de ton âme.</i>" Had he but had time to
+      clear his soul and reconcile himself with God!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was virtually the end of the siege of Orleans. The broken bridge on
+      the Loire had been rudely mended, with a great <i>gouttière</i> and
+      planks, and the people of Orleans had poured out over it to take the
+      Tourelles in flank&mdash;the English being thus taken between Jeanne's
+      army on the one side and the citizens on the other. The whole south bank
+      of the river was cleared, not an Englishman left to threaten the richest
+      part of France, the land flowing with milk and honey. And though there
+      still remained several great generals on the other side with strong
+      fortifications to fall back upon, they seem to have been paralysed, and
+      did not strike a blow. Jeanne was not afraid of them, but her ardour to
+      continue the fight dropped all at once; enough had been done. She awaited
+      the conclusion with confidence. Needless to say that Orleans was half mad
+      with joy, every church sounding its bells, singing its song of triumph and
+      praise, the streets so crowded that it was with difficulty that the Maid
+      could make her progress through them, with throngs of people pressing
+      round to kiss her hand, if might be, her greaves, her mailed shoes, her
+      charger, the floating folds of her banner. She had said she would be
+      wounded and so she was, as might be seen, the envious rent of the arrow
+      showing through the white plates of metal on her shoulder. She had said
+      all should be theirs <i>de par Dieu:</i> and all was theirs, thanks to our
+      Lord and also to St. Aignan and St. Euvert, patrons of Orleans, and to St.
+      Louis and St. Charlemagne in heaven who had so great pity of the kingdom
+      of France: and to the Maid on earth, the Heaven-sent deliverer, the
+      spotless virgin, the celestial warrior&mdash;happy he who could reach to
+      kiss it, the point of her mailed shoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Someone says that she rode through all this half-delirious joy like a
+      creature in a dream,&mdash;fatigue, pain, the happy languor of the end
+      attained, and also the profound pity that was the very inspiration of her
+      spirit, for all those souls of men gone to their account without help of
+      Church or comfort of priest&mdash;overwhelming her. But next day, which
+      was Sunday, she was up again and eagerly watching all that went on. A
+      strange sight was Orleans on that Sunday of May. On the south side of the
+      Loire, all those half-ruined bastilles smoking and silenced, which once
+      had threatened not the city only but all the south of France; on the north
+      the remaining bands of English drawn up in order of battle. The excitement
+      of the town and of the generals in it, was intense; worn as they were with
+      three days of continuous fighting, should they sally forth again and meet
+      that compact, silent, doubly defiant army, which was more or less fresh
+      and unexhausted? Jeanne's opinion was, No; there had been enough of
+      fighting, and it was Sunday, the holy day; but apparently the French did
+      go out though keeping at a distance, watching the enemy. By orders of the
+      Maid an altar was raised between the two armies in full sight of both
+      sides, and there mass was celebrated, under the sunshine, by the side of
+      the river which had swallowed Classidas and all his men. French and
+      English together devoutly turned towards and responded to that Mass in the
+      pause of bewildering uncertainty. "Which way are their heads turned?"
+      Jeanne asked when it was over. "They are turned away from us, they are
+      turned to Meung," was the reply. "Then let them go, <i>de par Dieu</i>,"
+      the Maid replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The siege had lasted for seven months, but eight days of the Maid were
+      enough to bring it to an end. The people of Orleans still, every year, on
+      the 8th of May, make a procession round the town and give thanks to God
+      for its deliverance. Henceforth, the Maid was known no longer as Jeanne
+      d'Arc, the peasant of Domremy, but as <i>La Pucelle d'Orléans</i>, in the
+      same manner in which one might speak of the Prince of Waterloo, or the Duc
+      de Malakoff.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) Their special mission seems to have been a demand for
+     the return of a herald previously sent who had never come
+     back. As Dunois accompanied the demand by a threat to kill
+     the English prisoners in Orleans if the herald was not sent
+     back, the request was at once accorded, with fierce
+     defiances to the Maid, the dairy-maid as she is called,
+     bidding her go back to her cows, and threatening to burn her
+     if they caught her.
+
+     (2) I avail myself here as elsewhere of Mr. Lang's lucid
+     description. "It is really perfectly intelligible. The
+     Council wanted a feint on the left bank, Jeanne an attack on
+     the right. She knew their scheme, untold, but entered into
+     it. There was, however, no feint. She deliberately forced
+     the fighting. There was grand fighting, well worth telling,"
+     adds my martial critic, who understands it so much better
+     than I do, and who I am happy to think is himself telling
+     the tale in another way.
+
+     (3) She had made this prophecy a month before, and it was
+     recorded three weeks before the event in the Town Book of
+     Brabant.&mdash;A. L.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V &mdash; THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE. JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The rescue of Orleans and the defeat of the invincible English were news
+      to move France from one end to the other, and especially to raise the
+      spirits and restore the courage of that part of France which had no
+      sympathy with the invaders and to which the English yoke was unaccustomed
+      and disgraceful. The news flew up and down the Loire from point to point,
+      arousing every village, and breathing new heart and encouragement
+      everywhere; while in the meantime Jeanne, partially healed of her wound
+      (on May 9th she rode out in a <i>maillet</i>, a light coat of chain-mail),
+      after a few days' rest in the joyful city which she had saved with all its
+      treasures, set out on her return to Chinon. She found the King at Loches,
+      another of the strong places on the Loire where there was room for a
+      Court, and means of defence for a siege should such be necessary, as is
+      the case with so many of these wonderful castles upon the great French
+      river. Hot with eagerness to follow up her first great success and
+      accomplish her mission, Jeanne's object was to march on at once with the
+      young Prince, with or without his immense retinue, to Rheims where he
+      should be crowned and anointed King as she had promised. Her instinctive
+      sense of the necessities of the position, if we use that language&mdash;more
+      justly, her boundless faith in the orders which she believed had been give
+      her from Heaven, to accomplish this great act without delay, urged her on.
+      She was straitened, if we may quote the most divine of words, till it
+      should be accomplished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Maid, flushed with victory, with the shouts of Orleans still
+      ringing in her ears, the applause of her fellow-soldiers, the sound of the
+      triumphant bells, was plunged all at once into the indolence, the
+      intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering
+      favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into foolish
+      amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and buffoons alike
+      dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always counselling
+      caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and drink for
+      to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything that was
+      enjoyable in the present moment, to subject a young sovereign to toils and
+      excitement, and probable loss, for the uncertain advantage of a vain
+      ceremony, when he might be enjoying himself safely and at his ease,
+      throughout the summer months, on the cheerful banks of the Loire? On the
+      other hand, the Chancellor, the Chamberlains, the Church, all his graver
+      advisers (with the exception of Gerson, the great theologian to whom has
+      been ascribed the authorship of the <i>Imitation of Christ</i>, who is
+      reported to have said, "If France deserts her, and she fails, she is none
+      the less inspired") shook their hands and advised that the way should be
+      quite safe and free of danger before the King risked himself upon it. It
+      was thus that Jeanne was received when, newly alighted from her charger,
+      her shoulder still but half healed, her eyes scarcely clear of the dust
+      and smoke, she found herself once more in the ante-chamber, wasting the
+      days, waiting in vain behind closed doors, tormented by the lutes and
+      madrigals, the light women and lighter men, useless and contemptible, of a
+      foolish Court. The Maid, in all the energy and impulse of a success which
+      had proved all her claims, had also a premonition that her own time was
+      short, if not a direct intimation, as some believe, to that effect: and
+      mingled her remonstrances and appeals with the cry of warning: "I shall
+      only last a year: take the good of me as long as it is possible."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt she was a very great entertainment to the idle seigneurs and
+      ladies who would try to persuade her to tell them what was to happen to
+      them, she who had prophesied the death of Glasdale and her own wound and
+      so many other things. The Duke of Lorraine on her first setting out had
+      attempted to discover from Jeanne what course his illness would take, and
+      whether he should get better; and all the demoiselles and demoiseaux, the
+      flutterers of the ante-chamber, would be still more likely to surround
+      with their foolish questions the stout-hearted, impatient girl who had
+      acquired a little of the roughness of her soldier comrades, and had never
+      been slow at any time in answering a fool according to his folly; for
+      Jeanne was no meek or sentimental maiden, but a robust and vigorous young
+      woman, ready with a quick response, as well as with a ready blow did any
+      one touch her unadvisedly, or use any inappropriate freedom. At last, one
+      day while she waited vainly outside the cabinet in which the King was
+      retired with a few of his councillors, Jeanne's patience failed her
+      altogether. She knocked at the door, and being admitted threw herself at
+      the feet of the King. To Jeanne he was no king till he had received the
+      consecration necessary for every sovereign of France. "Noble Dauphin," she
+      cried, "why should you hold such long and tedious councils? Rather come to
+      Rheims and receive your worthy crown."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop of Castres, Christopher de Harcourt, who was present, asked her
+      if she would not now in the presence of the King describe to them the
+      manner in which her council instructed her, when they talked with her.
+      Jeanne reddened and replied: "I understand that you would like to know,
+      and I would gladly satisfy you." "Jeanne," said the King in his turn, "it
+      would be very good if you could do what they ask, in the presence of those
+      here." She answered at once and with great feeling: "When I am vexed to
+      find myself disbelieved in the things I say from God, I retire by myself
+      and pray to God, complaining and asking of Him why I am not listened to.
+      And when I have prayed I hear a voice which says, 'Daughter of God, go,
+      go, go! I will help thee, go!' And when I hear that voice I feel a great
+      joy." Her face shone as she spoke, "lifting her eyes to heaven," like the
+      face of Moses while still it bore the reflection of the glory of God, so
+      that the men were dazzled who sat, speechless, looking on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The result was that Charles kindly promised to set out as soon as the road
+      between him and Rheims should be free of the English, especially the towns
+      on the Loire in which a great part of the army dispersed from Orleans had
+      taken refuge, with the addition of the auxiliary forces of Sir John
+      Fastolfe, a name so much feared by the French, but at which the English
+      reader can scarcely forbear a smile. That the young King did not think of
+      putting himself at the head of the troops or of taking part in the
+      campaign shows sufficiently that he was indeed a <i>pauvre sire</i>,
+      unworthy his gallant people. Jeanne, however, nothing better being
+      possible, seems to have accepted this mission with readiness, and
+      instantly began her preparations to carry it out. It is here that the
+      young Seigneur Guy de Laval comes in with his description of her already
+      quoted. He was no humble squire but a great personage to whom the King was
+      civil and pleased to show courtesy. The young man writes to <i>ses mères</i>,
+      that is, it seems, his mother and grandmother, to whom, in their distant
+      château, anxiously awaiting news of the two youths gone to the wars, their
+      faithful son makes his report of himself and his brother. The King, he
+      says, sent for the Maid, in order, Sir Guy believes, that he might see
+      her. And afterwards the young man went to Selles where she was just
+      setting out on the campaign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Selles, he writes on the 8th June, exactly a month after the
+      deliverance of Orleans:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I went to her lodging to see her, and she sent for wine and told me we
+      should soon drink wine in Paris. It was a miraculous thing (<i>toute
+      divine</i>) to see her and hear her. She left Selles on Monday at the hour
+      of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de Boussac and a great many armed
+      men with her. I saw her mount her horse, all in white armour excepting the
+      head, a little axe in her hand. The great black charger was very restive
+      at her door and would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said, 'to the
+      cross which is in front of the church,' and there she mounted, the horse
+      standing still as if he had been bound. Then turning towards the church
+      which was close by she said in a womanly voice (<i>assez voix de femme</i>),
+      'You priests and people of the Church, make processions and prayers to God
+      for us'; then turning to the road, 'Forward,' she said. Her unfolded
+      standard was carried by a page; she had her little axe in her hand, and by
+      her side rode a brother who had joined her eight days before. The Maid
+      told me in her lodging that she had sent you, grandmother, a small gold
+      ring, which was indeed a very small affair, and that she would fain have
+      sent you something better, considering your recommendation. To-day M.
+      d'Alençon, the Bastard of Orleans, and Gaucourt were to leave Selles,
+      following the Maid. And men are arriving from all parts every day, all
+      with good hope in God who I believe will help us. But money there is none
+      at the Court, so that for the present I have no hope of any help or
+      assistance. Therefore I desire you, <i>Madame ma mère</i>, who have my
+      seal, spare not the land neither in sale nor mortgage . . . . My much
+      honoured ladies and mothers, I pray the blessed Son of God that you have a
+      good life and long; and both of us recommend ourselves to our brother
+      Louis. And we send our greetings to the reader of this letter. Written
+      from Selles, Wednesday, 8th June, 1429. This afternoon are arrived M. de
+      Vendôme, M. de Boussac, and others, and La Hire has joined the army, and
+      we shall soon be at work (<i>on besognera bientôt</i>)&mdash;May God grant
+      that it should be according to your desire."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with difficulty that the Duc d'Alençon had been got to start, his
+      wife consenting with great reluctance. He had been long a prisoner in
+      England, and had lately been ransomed for a great sum of money; "Was not
+      that a sufficient sacrifice?" the Duchess asked indignantly. To risk once
+      more a husband so costly was naturally a painful thing to do, and why
+      could not Jeanne be content and stay where she was? Jeanne comforted the
+      lady, perhaps with a little good-humoured contempt. "Fear nothing,
+      Madame," she said; "I will bring him back to you safe and sound." Probably
+      Alençon himself had no great desire to be second in command to this
+      country lass, even though she had delivered Orleans; and if he set out at
+      all he would have preferred to take another direction and to protect his
+      own property and province. The gathering of the army thus becomes visible
+      to us; parties are continually coming in; and no doubt, as they marched
+      along, many a little château&mdash;and they abound through the country
+      each with its attendant hamlet&mdash;gave forth its master or heir, poor
+      but noble, followed by as many men-at-arms, perhaps only two or three, as
+      the little property could raise, to swell the forces with the best and
+      surest of material, the trained gentlemen with hearts full of chivalry and
+      pride, but with the same hardy, self-denying habits as the sturdy peasants
+      who followed them, ready for any privation; with a proud delight to hear
+      that <i>on besognera bientôt</i>&mdash;with that St. Michael at their
+      head, and no longer any fear of the English in their hearts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first <i>besogne</i> on which this army entered was the siege of
+      Jargeau, June 11th, into which town Suffolk had thrown himself and his
+      troops when the siege of Orleans was raised. The town was strong and so
+      was the garrison, experienced too in all the arts of war, and already
+      aware of the wild enthusiasm by which Jeanne was surrounded. She passed
+      through Orleans on the 10th of June, and had there been joined by various
+      new detachments. The number of her army was now raised, we are told, to
+      twelve hundred lances, which means, as each "lance" was a separate party,
+      about three thousand six hundred men, though the <i>Journal du Siège</i>
+      gives a much larger number; at all events it was a small army with which
+      to decide a quarrel between the two greatest nations of Christendom. Her
+      associates in command were here once more seized by the prevailing sin of
+      hesitation, and many arguments were used to induce her to postpone the
+      assault. It would seem that this hesitation continued until the very
+      moment of attack, and was only put an end to when Jeanne herself
+      impatiently seized her banner from the hand of her squire, and planting
+      herself at the foot of the walls let loose the fervour of the troops and
+      cheered them on to the irresistible rush in which lay their strength. For
+      it was with the commanders, not with the followers, that the weakness lay.
+      The Maid herself was struck on the head by a stone from the battlements
+      which threw her down; but she sprang up again in a moment unhurt. "<i>Sus!
+      Sus!</i> Our Lord has condemned the English&mdash;all is yours!" she
+      cried. She would seem to have stood there in her place with her banner, a
+      rallying-point and centre in the midst of all the confusion of the fight,
+      taking this for her part in it, and though she is always in the thick of
+      the combat, never, so far as we are told, striking a blow, exposed to all
+      the instruments of war, but injured by none. The effect of her mere
+      attitude, the steadiness of her stand, under the terrible rain of stone
+      bullets and dreadful arrows, must of itself have been indescribable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the midst of the fiery struggle, there is almost a comic point in her
+      watch over Alençon, for whose safety she had pledged herself, now dragging
+      him from a dangerous spot with a cry of warning, now pushing him forward
+      with an encouraging word. On the first of these occasions a gentleman of
+      Anjou, M. de Lude, who took his place in the front was killed, which seems
+      hard upon the poor gentleman, who was probably quite as well worth caring
+      for as Alençon. "<i>Avant, gentil duc</i>," she cried at another moment,
+      "forward! Are you afraid? you know I promised your wife to bring you safe
+      home." Thus her voice keeps ringing through the din, her white armour
+      gleams. "<i>Sus! Sus!</i>" the bold cry is almost audible, sibilant,
+      whistling amid the whistling of the arrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suffolk, the English Bayard, the most chivalrous of knights, was at last
+      forced to yield. One story tells us that he would give up his sword only
+      to Jeanne herself,(1) but there is a more authentic description of his
+      selection of one youth among his assailants whom the quick perceptions of
+      the leader had singled out. "Are you noble?" Suffolk asks in the brevity
+      of such a crisis. "Yes; Guillame Regnault, gentleman of Auvergne." "Are
+      you a knight?" "Not yet." The victor put a knee to the ground before his
+      captive, the vanquished touched him lightly on the shoulder with the sword
+      which he then gave over to him. Suffolk was always the finest gentleman,
+      the most perfect gentle knight of his time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Now let us go and see the English of Meung," cried Jeanne, unwearying, as
+      soon as this victory was assured. That place fell easily; it is called the
+      bridge of Meung, in the Chronicle, without further description, therefore
+      presumably the fortress was not attacked&mdash;and they proceeded onward
+      to Beaugency. These towns still shine over the plain, along the line of
+      the Loire, visible as far as the eye will carry over the long levels, the
+      great stream linking one to another like pearls on a thread. There is
+      nothing in the landscape now to give even a moment's shelter to the
+      progress of a marching army which must have been seen from afar, wherever
+      it moved; or to veil the shining battlements, and piled up citadels rising
+      here and there, concentrated points and centres of life. The great white
+      Castle of Blois, the darker tower of Beaugency, still stand where they
+      stood when Jeanne and her men drew near, as conspicuous in their elevation
+      of walls and towers as if they had been planted on a mountain top. On more
+      than one occasion during this wonderful progress from victory to victory,
+      the triumphant leaders returned for a day or two to Orleans to tell their
+      good tidings, and to celebrate their success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there is but one voice as to the military skill which she displayed in
+      these repeated operations. The reader sees her, with her banner, posted in
+      the middle of the fight, guiding her men with a sort of infallible
+      instinct which adds force to her absolute quick perception of every
+      difficulty and advantage, the unhesitating promptitude, attending like so
+      many servants upon the inspiration which is the soul of all. These are
+      things to which a writer ignorant of war is quite unable to do justice.
+      What was almost more wonderful still was the manner in which the Maid held
+      her place among the captains, most of whom would have thwarted her if they
+      could, with a consciousness of her own superior place, in which there is
+      never the slightest token of presumption or self-esteem. She guarded and
+      guided Alençon with a good-natured and affectionate disdain; and when
+      there was risk of a great quarrel and a splitting of forces she held the
+      balance like an old and experienced guide of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This latter crisis occurred before Beaugency on the 15th of June, when the
+      Comte de Richemont, Constable of France, the brother of the Duc de
+      Bretagne, a great nobleman and famous leader, but in disgrace with the
+      King and exiled from the Court, suddenly appeared with a considerable army
+      to join himself to the royalist forces, probably with the hope of securing
+      the leading place. Richemont was no friend to Jeanne; though he apparently
+      asked her help and influence to reconcile him with the King. He seems
+      indeed to have thought it a disgrace to France that her troops should be
+      led, and victories gained by no properly appointed general, but by a
+      woman, probably a witch, a creature unworthy to stand before armed men. It
+      must not be forgotten that even now this was the general opinion of her
+      out of the range of her immediate influence. The English held it like a
+      religion. Bedford, in his description of the siege of Orleans and its
+      total failure, reports to England that the discomfiture of the hitherto
+      always triumphant army was "caused in great part by the fatal faith and
+      vain fear that the French had, of a disciple and servant of the enemy of
+      man, called the Maid, who uses many false enchantments, and witchcraft, by
+      which not only is the number of our soldiers diminished but their courage
+      marvellously beaten down, and the boldness of our enemies increased."
+      Richemont was a sworn enemy of all such. "Never man hated more, all
+      heresies, sorcerers, and sorceresses, than he; for he burned more in
+      France, in Poitou, and Bretagne, than any other of his time." The French
+      generals were divided as to the merits of Richemont and the advantages to
+      be derived from his support. Alençon, the nominal commander, declared that
+      he would leave the army if Richemont were permitted to join it. The
+      letters of the King were equally hostile to him; but on the other hand
+      there were some who held that the accession of the Constable was of more
+      importance than all the Maids in France. It was a moment which demanded
+      very wary guidance. Jeanne, it would seem, did not regard his arrival with
+      much pleasure; probably even the increase of her forces did not please her
+      as it would have pleased most commanders, holding so strongly as she did,
+      to the miraculous character of her own mission and that it was not so much
+      the strength of her troops as the help of God that got her the victory.
+      But it was not her part to reject or alienate any champion of France. We
+      have an account of their meeting given by a retainer of Richemont, which
+      is picturesque enough. "The Maid alighted from her horse, and the
+      Constable also. 'Jeanne,' he said, 'they tell me that you are against me.
+      I know not if you are from God (<i>de la part de Dieu</i>) or not. If you
+      are from God I do not fear you; if you are of the devil, I fear you still
+      less.' 'Brave Constable,' said Jeanne, 'you have not come here by any will
+      of mine; but since you are here you are welcome.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Armed neutrality but suspicion on one side, dignified indifference but
+      acceptance on the other, could not be better shown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These successes, however, had been attended by various <i>escarmouches</i>
+      going on behind. The English, who had been driven out of one town after
+      another, had now drawn together under the command of Talbot, and a party
+      of troops under Fastolfe, who came to relieve them, had turned back as
+      Jeanne proceeded, making various unsuccessful attempts to recover what had
+      been lost. Failing in all their efforts they returned across the country
+      to Genville, and were continuing their retreat to Paris when the two
+      enemies came within reach of each other. An encounter in open field was a
+      new experience of which Jeanne as yet had known nothing. She had been
+      successful in assault, in the operations of the siege, but to meet the
+      enemy hand to hand in battle was what she had never been required to do;
+      and every tradition, every experience, was in favour of the English. From
+      Agincourt to the Battle of the Herrings at Rouvray near Orleans, which had
+      taken place in the beginning of the year (a fight so named because the
+      field of battle had been covered with herrings, the conquerors in this
+      case being merely the convoy in charge of provisions for the English,
+      which Fastolfe commanded), such a thing had not been known as that the
+      French should hold their own, much less attain any victory over the
+      invaders. In these circumstances there was much talk of falling back upon
+      the camp near Beaugency and of retreating or avoiding an engagement;
+      anything rather than hazard one of those encounters which had infallibly
+      ended in disaster. But Jeanne was of the same mind as always, to go
+      forward and fear nothing. "Fall upon them! Go at them boldly," she cried.
+      "If they were in the clouds we should have them. The gentle King will now
+      gain the greatest victory he has ever had."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious to hear that in that great plain of the Beauce, so flat, so
+      fertile, with nothing but vines and cornfields now against the horizon,
+      the two armies at last almost stumbled upon each other by accident, in the
+      midst of the brushwood by which the country was wildly overgrown. The
+      story is that a stag roused by the French scouts rushed into the midst of
+      the English, who were advantageously placed among the brushwood to arrest
+      the enemy on their march; the wild creature terrified and flying before an
+      army blundered into the midst of the others, was fired at and thus
+      betrayed the vicinity of the foe. The English had no time to form or set
+      up their usual defences. They were so taken by surprise that the rush of
+      the French came without warning, with a suddenness which gave it double
+      force. La Hire made the first attack as leader of the van, and there was
+      thus emulation between the two parties, which should be first upon the
+      enemy. When Alençon asked Jeanne what was to be the issue of the fight,
+      she said calmly, "Have you good spurs?" "What! You mean we shall turn our
+      backs on our enemies?" cried her questioner. "Not so," she replied. "The
+      English will not fight, they will fly, and you will want good spurs to
+      pursue them." Even this somewhat fantastic prophecy put heart into the
+      men, who up to this time had been wont to fly and not to fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this was what happened, strange as it may seem. Talbot himself was
+      with the English forces, and many a gallant captain beside: but the men
+      and their leaders were alike broken in spirit and filled with
+      superstitious terrors. Whether these were the forces of hell or those of
+      heaven that came against them no one could be sure; but it was a power
+      beyond that of earth. The dazzled eyes which seemed to see flights of
+      white butterflies fluttering about the standard of the Maid, could
+      scarcely belong to one who thought her a servant of the enemy of men. But
+      she was a pernicious witch to Talbot, and strangely enough to Richemont
+      also, who was on her own side. The English force was thrown into
+      confusion, partly, we may suppose, from the broken ground on which they
+      were discovered, the undergrowth of the wood which hid both armies from
+      each other. But soon that disorder turned into the wildest panic and
+      flight. It would almost seem as if between these two hereditary opponents
+      one must always be forced into this miserable part. Not all the chivalry
+      of France had been able to prevent it at the long string of battles in
+      which they were, before the revelation of the Maid; and not the desperate
+      and furious valour of Talbot could preserve his English force from the
+      infection now. Fastolfe, with the philosophy of an old soldier, deciding
+      that it was vain to risk his men when the field was already lost, rode off
+      with all his band. Talbot fought with desperation, half mad with rage to
+      be thus a second time overcome by so unlikely an adversary, and finally
+      was taken prisoner; while the whole force behind him fled and were killed
+      in their flight, the plain being scattered with their dead bodies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne herself made use of those spurs concerning which she had enquired,
+      and carried away by the passion of battle, followed in the pursuit, we are
+      told, until she met a Frenchman brutally ill-using a prisoner whom he had
+      taken, upon which the Maid, indignant, flung herself from her horse, and,
+      seating herself on the ground beside the unfortunate Englishman, took his
+      bleeding head upon her lap and, sending for a priest, made his departure
+      from life at least as easy as pity and spiritual consolation could make it
+      on such a disastrous field. In all the records there is no mention of any
+      actual fighting on her part. She stands in the thick of the flying arrows
+      with her banner, exposing herself to every danger; in moments of alarm,
+      when her forces seem flagging, she seizes and places a ladder against the
+      wall for an assault, and climbs the first as some say; but we never see
+      her strike a blow. On the banks of the Loire the fate of the mail-clad
+      Glasdale, hopeless in the strong stream underneath the ruined bridge,
+      brought tears to her eyes, and now all the excitement of the pursuit
+      vanished in an instant from her mind, when she saw the English man-at-arms
+      dying without the succour of the Church. Pity was always in her heart; she
+      was ever on the side of the angels, though an angel of war and not of
+      peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is perhaps because the numbers engaged were so few that this flight or
+      "Chasse de Patay," has not taken a more important place in the records of
+      French historians. In general it is only by means of Fontenoy that the <i>amour
+      propre</i> of the French nation defends itself against the overwhelming
+      list of battles in which the English have had the better of it. But this
+      was probably the most complete victory that has ever been gained over the
+      stubborn enemy whom French tactics are so seldom able to touch; and the
+      conquerors were purely French without any alloy of alien arms, except a
+      few Scots, to help them. The entire campaign on the Loire was one of
+      triumph for the French arms, and of disaster for the English. They&mdash;it
+      is perhaps a point of national pride to admit it frankly&mdash;were as
+      well beaten as heart of Frenchman could desire, beaten not only in the
+      result, but in the conduct of the campaign, in heart and in courage, in
+      skill and in genius. There is no reason in the world why it should not be
+      admitted. But it was not the French generals, not even Dunois, who secured
+      these victories. It was the young peasant woman, the dauntless Maid, who
+      underneath the white mantle of her inspiration, miraculous indeed, but not
+      so miraculous as this, had already developed the genius of a soldier, and
+      who in her simplicity, thinking nothing but of her "voices" and the
+      counsel they gave her, was already the best general of them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Talbot stood before the French generals, no less a person than
+      Alençon himself is reported to have made a remark to him, of that
+      ungenerous kind which we call in feminine language "spiteful," and which
+      is not foreign to the habit of that great nation. "You did not think this
+      morning what would have happened to you before sunset," said the Duc
+      d'Alençon to the prisoner. "It is the fortune of war," replied the English
+      chief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more, however it is like a sudden fall from the open air and sunshine
+      when the victorious army and its chiefs turned back to the Court where the
+      King and his councillors sat idle, waiting for news of what was being done
+      for them. A battle-field is no fine sight; the excitement of the conflict,
+      the great end to be served by it, the sense of God's special protection,
+      even the tremendous uproar of the fight, the intoxication of personal
+      action, danger, and success have, we do not doubt a rapture and passion in
+      them for the moment, which carry the mind away; but the bravest soldier
+      holds his breath when he remembers the after scene, the dead and dying,
+      the horrible injuries inflicted, the loss and misery. However, not even
+      the miserable scene of the Chasse de Patay is so painful as the reverse of
+      the dismal picture, the halls of the royal habitation where, while men
+      died for him almost within hearing of the fiddling and the dances, the
+      young King trifled away his useless days among his idle favourites, and
+      the musicians played, the assemblies were held, and all went on as in the
+      Tuileries. We feel as if we had fallen fathoms deep into the meannesses of
+      mankind when we come back from the bloodshed and the horror outside, to
+      the King's presence within. The troops which had gone out in uncertainty,
+      on an enterprise which might well have proved too great for them, had
+      returned in full flush of triumph, having at last fully broken the spell
+      of the English superiority&mdash;which was the greatest victory that could
+      have been achieved: besides gaining the substantial advantage of three
+      important towns brought back to the King's allegiance&mdash;only to find
+      themselves as little advanced as before, coming back to the self-same
+      struggle with indolent complaining, indifference, and ingratitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne had given the signs that had been demanded from her. She had
+      delivered Orleans, she cleared the King's road toward the north. She had
+      filled the French forces with an enthusiasm and transport of valour which
+      swept away all the traditions of ill fortune. From every point of view the
+      instant march upon Rheims and the accomplishment of the great object of
+      her mission had not only become practicable, but was the wisest and most
+      prudent thing to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this was not the opinion of the Chancellor of France, the Archbishop
+      of Rheims, and La Tremouille, or of the indolent young King himself, who
+      was very willing to rejoice in the relief from all immediate danger, the
+      restoration of the surrounding country, and even the victory itself, if
+      only they would have left him in quiet where he was, sufficiently
+      comfortable, amused, and happy, without forcing necessary dangers.
+      Jeanne's successes and her unseasonable zeal and the commotion that she
+      and her train of captains made, pouring in, in all the excitement of their
+      triumph, into the midst of the madrigals&mdash;seem to have been anything
+      but welcome. Go to Rheims to be crowned? yes, some time when it was
+      convenient, when it was safe. But in the meantime what was more important
+      was to forbid Richemont, whom the Chancellor hated and the King did not
+      love, to come into the presence or to have any share either in warfare or
+      in pageant. This was not only in itself an extremely foolish thing to do,
+      which is always a recommendation, but it was at the same time an excuse
+      for wasting a little precious time. When this was at last accomplished,
+      and Richemont, though deeply wounded and offended, proved himself so much
+      a man of honour and a patriot, that though dismissed by the King he still
+      upheld, if languidly, his cause&mdash;there was yet a great deal of
+      resistance to be overcome. Paris though so far off was thrown into great
+      excitement and alarm by the flight at Patay, and the whole city was in
+      commotion fearing an immediate advance and attack. But in Loches, or
+      wherever Charles may have been, it was all taken very easily. Fastolfe,
+      the fugitive, had his Garter taken from him as the greatest disgrace that
+      could be inflicted, for his shameful flight, about the time when
+      Richemont, one of the victors, was being sent off and disgraced on the
+      other side for the crime of having helped to inflict, without the consent
+      of the King, the greatest blow which had yet been given to the English
+      domination! So the Court held on its ridiculous and fatal course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However the force of public feeling which must have been very frankly
+      expressed by many important voices was too much for Charles and he was at
+      length compelled to put himself in motion. The army had assembled at Gien,
+      where he joined it, and the great wave of enthusiasm awakened by Jeanne,
+      and on which he now moved forth as on the top of the wave, was for the
+      time triumphant. No one dared say now that the Maid was a sorceress, or
+      that it was by the aid of Beelzebub that she cast out devils; but a
+      hundred jealousies and hatreds worked against her behind backs, among the
+      courtiers, among the clergy, strange as that may sound, in sight of the
+      absolute devotion of her mind, and the saintly life she led. So much was
+      this the case still, notwithstanding the practical proofs she had given of
+      her claims, that even persons of kindred mind, partially sharing her
+      inspirations, such as the famous Brother Richard of Troyes, looked upon
+      her with suspicion and alarm&mdash;fearing a delusion of Satan. It is more
+      easy perhaps to understand why the archbishops and bishops should have
+      been inclined against her, since, though perfectly orthodox and a good
+      Catholic, Jeanne had been independent of all priestly guidance and had
+      sought no sanction from the Church to her commission, which she believed
+      to be given by Heaven. "Give God the praise; but we know that this woman
+      is a sinner." This was the best they could find to say of her in the
+      moment of her greatest victories; but indeed it is no disparagement to
+      Jeanne or to any saint that she should share with her Master the
+      opprobrium of such words as these.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last however a reluctant start was made. Jeanne with her "people," her
+      little staff, in which, now, were two of her brothers, a second having
+      joined her after Orleans, left Gien on the 28th of June; and the next day
+      the King very unwillingly set out. There is given a long list of generals
+      who surrounded and accompanied him, three or four princes of the blood,
+      the Bastard of Orleans, the Archbishop of Rheims, marshals, admirals, and
+      innumerable seigneurs, among whom was our young Guy de Laval who wrote the
+      letter to his "mothers" which we have already quoted and whose faith in
+      the Maid we thus know; and our ever faithful La Hire, the big-voiced
+      Gascon who had permission to swear by his <i>bâton</i>, the d'Artagnan of
+      this history. We reckon these names as those of friends: Dunois the
+      ever-brave, Alençon the <i>gentil Duc</i> for whom Jeanne had a special
+      and protecting kindness, La Hire the rough captain of Free Lances, and the
+      graceful young seigneur, Sir Guy as we should have called him had he been
+      English, who was so ready to sell or mortgage his land that he might
+      convey his troop befittingly to the wars. This little group brightens the
+      march for us with their friendly faces. We know that they have but one
+      thought of the warrior maiden in whose genius they had begun to have a
+      wondering confidence as well as in her divine mission. While they were
+      there we feel that she had at least so many who understood her, and who
+      bore her the affection of brothers. We are told that in the progress of
+      the army Jeanne had no definite place. She rode where she pleased,
+      sometimes in the front, sometimes in the rear. One imagines with pleasure
+      that wherever her charger passed along the lines it would be accompanied
+      by one or other of those valiant and faithful companions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first place at which a halt was made was Auxerre, a town occupied
+      chiefly by Burgundians, which closed its gates, but by means of bribes,
+      partly of provisions to be supplied, partly of gifts to La Tremouille,
+      secured itself from the attack which Jeanne longed to lead. Other smaller
+      strongholds on the road yielded without hesitation. At last they came to
+      Troyes, a large and strong place, well garrisoned and confident in its
+      strength, the town distinguished in the history of the time by the treaty
+      made there, by which the young King had been disinherited&mdash;and by the
+      marriage of Henry of England with the Princess Catherine of France, in
+      whose right he was to succeed to the throne. It was an ill-omened place
+      for a French king and the camp was torn with dissensions. Should the army
+      march by, taking no notice of it and so get all the sooner to Rheims? or
+      should they pause first, to try their fortune against those solid walls?
+      But indeed it was not the camp that debated this question. The camp was of
+      Jeanne's mind whichever side she took, and her side was always that of the
+      promptest action. The garrison made a bold sortie, the very day of the
+      arrival of Charles and his forces, but had been beaten back: and the King
+      encamped under the walls, wavering and uncertain whether he might not
+      still depart on the morrow, but sending a repeated summons to surrender,
+      to which no attention was paid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more there was a pause of indecision; the King was not bold enough
+      either to push on and leave the city, or to attack it. Again councils of
+      war succeeded each other day after day, discussing the matter over and
+      over, leaving the King each time more doubtful, more timid than before.
+      From these debates Jeanne was anxiously held back, while every silken fool
+      gave his opinion. At last, one of the councillors was stirred by this
+      strange anomaly. He declared among them all, that as it was by the advice
+      of the Maid that the expedition had been undertaken, without her
+      acquiescence it ought not to be abandoned. "When the King set out it was
+      not because of the great puissance of the army he then had with him, or
+      the great treasure he had to provide for them, nor yet because it seemed
+      to him a probable thing to be accomplished; but the said expedition was
+      undertaken solely at the suit of the said Jeanne, who urged him constantly
+      to go forward, to be crowned at Rheims, and that he should find little
+      resistance, for it was the pleasure and will of God. If the said Jeanne is
+      not to be allowed to give her advice now, it is my opinion that we should
+      turn back," said the Seigneur de Treves, who had never been a partisan of
+      or believer in Jeanne. We are told that at this fortunate moment when one
+      of her opponents had thus pronounced in her favour, Jeanne, impatient and
+      restless, knocked at the door of the council chamber as she had done
+      before in her rustic boldness; and then there occurred a brief and
+      characteristic dialogue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jeanne," said the Archbishop of Rheims, taking the first word, probably
+      with the ready instinct of a conspirator to excuse himself from having
+      helped to shut her out, "the King and his council are in great perplexity
+      to know what they should do."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Shall I be believed if I speak?" said the Maid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I cannot tell," replied the King, interposing; "though if you say things
+      that are reasonable and profitable, I shall certainly believe you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Shall I be believed?" she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes," said the King, "according as you speak."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Noble Dauphin," she exclaimed, "order your people to assault the city of
+      Troyes, to hold no more councils; for, by my God, in three days I will
+      introduce you into the town of Troyes, by love or by force, and false
+      Burgundy shall be dismayed."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jeanne," said the Chancellor, "if you could do that in six days, we might
+      well wait."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You shall be master of the place," said the Maid, addressing herself
+      steadily to the King, "not in six days, but to-morrow."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there occurred once more the now habitual scene. It was no longer
+      the miracle it had been to see her dash forward to her post under the
+      walls with her standard which was the signal for battle, to which the
+      impatient troops responded, confident in her, as she in herself. But for
+      the first time we hear how the young general, learning her trade of war
+      day by day, made her preparations for the siege. She was a gunner born,
+      according to all we hear, and was quick to perceive the advantage of her
+      rude artillery though she had never seen one of these <i>bouches de feu</i>
+      till she encountered them at Orleans. The whole army was set to work
+      during the night, knights and men-at-arms alike, to raise&mdash;with any
+      kind of handy material, palings faggots, tables, even doors and windows,
+      taken it must be feared from some neighbouring village or faubourg&mdash;a
+      mound on which to place the guns. The country as we have said is as flat
+      as the palm of one's hand. They worked all night under cover of the
+      darkness with incredible devotion, while the alarmed townsfolk not knowing
+      what was being done, but no doubt divining something from the unusual
+      commotion, betook themselves to the churches to pray, and began to ponder
+      whether after all it might not be better to join the King whose armies
+      were led by St. Michael himself in the person of his representative, than
+      to risk a siege. Once more the spell of the Maid fell on the defenders of
+      the place. It was witchcraft, it was some vile art. They had no heart to
+      man the battlements, to fight like their brothers at Orleans and Jargeau
+      in face of all the powers of the evil one: the cry of "<i>Sus! Sus!</i>"
+      was like the death-knell in their ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the soldiers within the walls were thus trembling and drawing back,
+      the bishop and his clergy took the matter in hand; they sallied forth, a
+      long procession attended by half the city, to parley with the King. It was
+      in the earliest dawn, while yet the peaceful world was scarcely awake; but
+      the town had been in commotion all night, every visionary person in it
+      seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and a panic of superstition and
+      spiritual terror taking the strength out of every arm. Jeanne was already
+      at her post, a glimmering white figure in the faint and visionary twilight
+      of the morning, when the gates of the city swung back before this
+      tremulous procession. The King, however, received the envoys graciously,
+      and readily promised to guarantee all the rights of Troyes, and to permit
+      the garrison to depart in peace, if the town was given up to him. We are
+      not told whether the Maid acquiesced in this arrangement, though it at
+      once secured the fulfilment of her prophecy; but in any case she would
+      seem to have been suspicious of the good faith of the departing garrison.
+      Instead of retiring to her tent she took her place at the gate, watchful,
+      to see the enemy march forth. And her suspicion was not without reason.
+      The allied troops, English and Burgundian, poured forth from the city
+      gates, crestfallen, unwilling to look the way of the white witch, who
+      might for aught they knew lay them under some dreadful spell, even in the
+      moment of passing. But in the midst of them came a darker band, the French
+      prisoners whom they had previously taken, who were as a sort of funded
+      capital in their hands, each man worth so much money as a ransom, It was
+      for this that Jeanne had prepared herself. "<i>En nom Dieu</i>," she
+      cried, "they shall not be carried away." The march was stopped, the alarm
+      given, the King unwillingly aroused once more from his slumbers. Charles
+      must have been disturbed at the most untimely hour by the ambassadors from
+      the town, and it mattered little to his supreme indolence and indifference
+      what might happen to his unfortunate lieges; but he was forced to bestir
+      himself, and even to give something from his impoverished exchequer for
+      the ransom of the prisoners, which must have been more disagreeable still.
+      The feelings of these men who would have been dragged away in captivity
+      under the eyes of their victorious countrymen, but for the vigilance of
+      the Maid, may easily be imagined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne seems to have entered the town at once, to prepare for the
+      reception of the King, and to take instant possession of the place,
+      forestalling all further impediment. The people in the streets, however,
+      received her in a very different way from those of Orleans, with trouble
+      and alarm, staring at her as at a dangerous and malignant visitor. The
+      Brother Richard, before mentioned, the great preacher and reformer, was
+      the oracle of Troyes, and held the conscience of the city in his hands.
+      When he suddenly appeared to confront her, every eye was turned upon them.
+      But the friar himself was in no less doubt than his disciples; he
+      approached her dubiously, crossing himself, making the sacred sign in the
+      air, and sprinkling a shower of holy water before him to drive away the
+      demon, if demon there was. Jeanne was not unused to support the rudest
+      accost, and her frank voice, still <i>assez femme</i>, made itself heard
+      over every clamour. "Come on, I shall not fly away," she cried, with, one
+      hopes, a laugh of confident innocence and good-humour, in face of those
+      significant gestures and the terrified looks of all about her. French art
+      has been unkind to Jeanne, occupying itself very little about her till
+      recently; but her short career is full of pictures. Here the simple page
+      grows bright with the ancient houses and highly coloured crowd: the
+      frightened and eager faces at every window, the white warrior in the
+      midst, sending forth a thousand rays from the polished steel and silver of
+      breastplate and helmet: and the brown Franciscan monk advancing amid a
+      shower of water drops, a mysterious repetition of signs. It gives us an
+      extraordinary epitome of the history of France at that period to turn from
+      this scene to the wild enthusiasm of Orleans, its crowd of people
+      thronging about her, its shouts rending the air; while Troyes was full of
+      terror, doubt, and ill-will, though its nearest neighbour, so to speak,
+      the next town, and so short a distance away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little later in the same day, the next after the surrender, Jeanne,
+      riding with her standard by the side of the King, conducted him to the
+      cathedral where he confirmed his previous promises and received the homage
+      of the town. It was a beautiful sight, the chronicle tells us, to see all
+      these magnificent people, so well dressed and well mounted; "<i>il feroit
+      très beau voir.</i>"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fate of Troyes decided that of Chalons, the only other important town
+      on the way, the gates of which were thrown open as Charles and his army,
+      which grew and increased every day, proceeded on its road. Every promise
+      of the Maid had been so far accomplished, both in the greater object and
+      in the details: and now there was nothing between Charles the disinherited
+      and almost ruined Dauphin of three months ago, trying to forget himself in
+      the seclusion and the sports of Chinon&mdash;and the sacred ceremonial
+      which drew with it every tradition and every assurance of an ancient and
+      lawful throne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne had her little adventure, personal to herself on the way. Though
+      there were neither posts nor telegraphs in those days, there has always
+      been a strange swift current in the air or soil which has conveyed news,
+      in a great national crisis, from one end of the country to the other. It
+      was not so great a distance to Domremy on the Meuse from Troyes on the
+      Loire, and it appears that a little group of peasants, bolder than the
+      rest, had come forth to hang about the road when the army passed and see
+      what was so fine a sight, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of their <i>payse</i>,
+      their little neighbour, the <i>commère</i> who was godmother to Gerard
+      d'Epinal's child, the youthful gossip of his young wife&mdash;but who was
+      now, if all tales were true, a great person, and rode by the side of the
+      King. They went as far as Chalons to see if perhaps all this were true and
+      not a fable; and no doubt stood astonished to see her ride by, to hear all
+      the marvellous tales that were told of her, and to assure themselves that
+      it was truly Jeanne upon whom, more than upon the King, every eye was
+      bent. This small scene in the midst of so many great ones would probably
+      have been the most interesting of all had it been told us at any length.
+      The peasant travellers surrounded her with wistful questions, with wonder
+      and admiration. Was she never afraid among all those risks of war, when
+      the arrows hailed about her and the <i>bouches de feu</i>, the mouths of
+      fire, bellowed and flung forth great stones and bullets upon her? "I fear
+      nothing but treason," said the victorious Maid. She knew, though her
+      humble visitors did not, how that base thing skulked at her heels, and
+      infested every path. It must not be forgotten that this wonderful and
+      victorious campaign, with all its lists of towns taken and armies
+      discomfited, lasted six weeks only, almost every day of which was
+      distinguished by some victory.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) The former story was written in 1429, by the Greffier of
+     Rochelle. "I will yield me only to her, the most valiant
+     woman in the world." The Greffier was writing at the moment,
+     but not, of course, as an eyewitness.&mdash;A. L.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI &mdash; THE CORONATION. JULY 17, 1429.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The road was now clear, and even the most timid of counsellors could not
+      longer hold back the most indolent of kings. Jeanne had kept her word once
+      more and fulfilled her own prophecy, and a force of enthusiasm and
+      certainty, not to be put down, pressed forward the unwilling Court towards
+      the great ceremonial of the coronation, to which all except those most
+      chiefly concerned attached so great an importance. Charles would have
+      hesitated still, and questioned the possibility of resistance on the part
+      of Rheims, if that city had not sent a deputation of citizens with the
+      keys of the town, to meet him. After this it was but a triumphal march
+      into the sacred place, where the great cathedral dominated a swarming,
+      busy, mediæval city. King and Archbishop had a double triumph, for the
+      priest like the monarch had been shut out from his lawful throne, and it
+      was only in the train of the Maid that this great ecclesiastic was able to
+      take possession of his dignities. The King alighted with the Archbishop at
+      the Archevêché which is close to the cathedral, an immense, old palace in
+      which the heads of the expedition were lodged. There is a magnificent old
+      hall still remaining in which no doubt they all assembled, scarcely able
+      to believe that their object was accomplished and that the King of France
+      was actually in Rheims, and all the prophecies fulfilled. The Archbishop
+      marched into the city in the morning; Charles and his Court, and all his
+      great seigneurs, and the body of his army, in which there were many
+      fighting men half armed, and some in their rustic clothes as they had left
+      their fields to join the King in his march&mdash;poured in in the evening,
+      after the ecclesiastical procession, filling the town with commotion.
+      Jeanne rode beside the King, her banner in her hand. It was July, the
+      vigil of the Madeleine, and every church poured forth its crowd to witness
+      the entry, and the populace, half troubled, half glad, gazed its eyes out
+      upon the white warrior at the side of the King. Her father and uncle were
+      there to meet her at the old inn in the Place, which still proudly
+      preserves the record of the peasant guests: two astonished rustics, no
+      doubt, were thrust forth from some window to watch that incredible sight&mdash;Jacques
+      who would rather have drowned his daughter with his own hands, than have
+      seen her thus launched among men, gazing still aghast at the resplendent
+      figure of the chevalière at the head of the procession. This was very
+      different from what he had thought of when his village respectability was
+      tortured by the idea of his girl among the troopers, yet probably the
+      rigid peasant had never changed his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are told by M. Blaze de Bury of an ancient custom which we do not find
+      stated elsewhere. A platform was erected, he tells us, outside the choir
+      of the cathedral to which the King was led the evening before the
+      coronation, surrounded by his peers, who showed him to the assembled
+      people with a traditional proclamation: "Here is your King whom we, peers
+      of France, crown as King and sovereign lord. And if there is a soul here
+      which has any objection to make, let him speak and we will answer him. And
+      to-morrow he shall be consecrated by the grace of the Holy Spirit if you
+      have nothing to say against it." The people replied by cries of "Noël,
+      Noël!" It is not to be supposed that the veto of the people of Rheims
+      would have been effectual had they opposed: but the scene is wonderfully
+      picturesque. No doubt Jeanne too was there, watching over her King, as she
+      seems to have done, like a mother over her child, at this crisis of his
+      affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night there was little sleep in Rheims, for everything had to be
+      prepared in haste, the decorations of the cathedral, the provisions for
+      the ceremonial. Many of the necessary articles were at Saint Denis in the
+      hands of the English, and the treasury of the cathedral had to be
+      ransacked to find the fitting vessels. Fortunately it was rich, more rich
+      probably than it is now, when the commonplace silver of the beginning of
+      this century has replaced the ancient vials. Through the short summer
+      night everyone was at work in these preparations; and by the dawn of day
+      visitors began to flow into the city, great personages and small, to
+      attend the great ceremonial and to pay their homage. The greatest of all
+      was the Duke of Lorraine, he who had consulted Jeanne about his health,
+      husband of the heiress of that rich principality, and son of Queen Yolande
+      who was no doubt with the Court. All France seemed to pour into the famous
+      town, where so important an act was about to be accomplished, with money
+      and wine flowing on all hands, and the enthusiasm growing along with the
+      popular excitement and profit. Even great London is stirred to its limits,
+      many miles off from the centre of proceedings, by such a great event; how
+      much more the little mediæval city, in which every one might hope to see
+      something of the pageant, as one shining group after another, with armour
+      blazing in the sun, and sleek horses caracoling, arrived at the great
+      gates of the Archevêché: and lesser parties scarcely less interesting
+      poured in in need of lodging, of equipment and provisions; while every
+      housewife searched her stores for a piece of brilliant stuff, of old silk
+      or embroidery, to make her house shine like the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early in the morning, a wonderful procession came out of the Archbishop's
+      house. Four splendid peers of France, in full armour with their banners,
+      rode through the streets to the old Abbey of Saint Remy&mdash;the old
+      church which Leo IX. consecrated, in the eleventh century, on an equally
+      splendid occasion, and which may still be seen to-day&mdash;to fetch from
+      its shrine, where it was strictly guarded by the monks, the Sainte
+      Ampoule, the holy and sacred vial in which the oil of consecration had
+      been sent to Clovis out of Heaven. These noble messengers were the
+      "hostages" of this sacred charge, engaging themselves by an oath never to
+      lose sight of it by night or day, till it was restored to its appointed
+      guardians. This vow having been made, the Abbot of St. Remy, in his
+      richest robes, appeared surrounded by his monks, carrying the treasure in
+      his hands; and under a splendid canopy, blazing in the sunshine with cloth
+      of gold, marched towards the cathedral under the escort of the Knights
+      Hostages, blazing also in the flashes of their armour. This procession was
+      met half-way, before the Church of St. Denis, by another, that of the
+      Archbishop and his train, to whom the holy oil was solemnly confided, and
+      carried by them to the cathedral, already filled by a dazzled and dazzling
+      crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Maid had her occupations this July morning like the rest. We hear
+      nothing of any interview with her father, or with Durand the good uncle
+      who had helped her in the beginning of her career; though it was Durand
+      who was sent for to the King and questioned as to Jeanne's life in her
+      childhood and early youth; which we may take as proof that Jacques d'Arc
+      still stood aloof, <i>dour</i>, as a Scotch peasant father might have
+      been, suspicious of his daughter's intimacy with all these fine people,
+      and in no way cured of his objections to the publicity which is little
+      less than shame to such rugged folk. And there were his two sons who would
+      take him about, and with whom probably in their easier commonplace he was
+      more at home than with Jeanne. What the Maid had to do on the morning of
+      the coronation day was something very different from any home talk with
+      her relations. She who felt herself commissioned not only to lead the
+      armies of France, but to deal with her princes and take part in her
+      councils, occupied the morning in dictating a letter to the Duke of
+      Burgundy. She had summoned the English by letter three times repeated, to
+      withdraw peaceably from the possessions which by God's will were French.
+      It was with still better reason that she summoned Philip of Burgundy to
+      renounce his feud with his cousin, and thus to heal the breach which had
+      torn France in two:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      JHESUS, MARIA.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      High and redoubtable Prince, Duke of Burgundy. Jeanne the Maid requires on
+      the part of the King of Heaven, my most just sovereign and Lord (<i>mon
+      droicturier souverain seigneur</i>), that the King of France and you make
+      peace between yourselves, firm, strong and that will endure. Pardon each
+      other of good heart, entirely, as loyal Christians ought to do, and if you
+      desire to fight let it be against the Saracens. Prince of Burgundy, I
+      pray, supplicate, and require, as humbly as may be, fight no longer
+      against the holy kingdom of France: withdraw, at once and speedily, your
+      people who are in any strongholds or fortresses of the said holy kingdom;
+      and on the part of the gentle King of France, he is ready to make peace
+      with you, having respect to his honour, and upon your life that you never
+      will gain a battle against loyal Frenchmen and that all those who war
+      against the said holy kingdom of France, war against the King Jesus, King
+      of Heaven and of all the world and my just and sovereign Lord. And I pray
+      and require with clasped hands that you fight not, nor make any battle
+      against us, neither your friends nor your subjects; but believe always
+      however great in number may be the men you lead against us, that you will
+      never win, and it would be great pity for the great battle and the blood
+      that would be shed of those who came against us. Three weeks ago I sent
+      you a letter by a herald that you should be present at the consecration of
+      the King, which to-day, Sunday, the seventeenth of the present month of
+      July, is done in the city of Rheims: to which I have had no answer, nor
+      even any news by the said herald. To God I commend you, and may He be your
+      guard if it pleases Him, and I pray God to make good peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Written at the aforesaid Rheims, the seventeenth day of July, 1429.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the letter was finished Jeanne put on her armour and prepared for the
+      great ceremony. We are not told what part she took in it, nor is any more
+      prominent position assigned to her than among the noble crowd of peers and
+      generals who surrounded the altar, where her place would naturally be,
+      upon the broad raised platform of the choir, so excellently adapted for
+      such ceremonies. Her banner we are told was borne into the cathedral, in
+      order, as she proudly explained afterwards, that having been foremost in
+      the danger it should share the honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we have no right to suppose that the Maid took the position of the
+      chief actor in the pageant and stood alone by the side of Charles, as the
+      exigencies of the pictorial art have required her to do. When, however,
+      the ceremony was completed, and he had received on his knees the anointing
+      which separated him as king from every other class of men, and while the
+      lofty vaults echoed with the cries of Noël! Noël! by which the people
+      hailed the completed ceremony, Jeanne could contain herself no longer. The
+      object was attained for which she had laboured and struggled, and overcome
+      every opponent. She stepped forward out of the brilliant crowd, and threw
+      herself at the feet of the now crowned monarch, embracing his knees.
+      "Gentle King," she cried with tears, "now is the pleasure of God fulfilled&mdash;whose
+      will it was that I should raise the siege of Orleans and lead you to this
+      city of Rheims to receive your consecration. Now has He shown that you are
+      true King, and that the kingdom of France truly belongs to you alone."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those broken words, her tears, the cry of that profound satisfaction which
+      is almost anguish, the "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
+      peace," which is so suitable to the lips of the old, so poignant from
+      those of the young, pierced all hearts. It is added that she asked leave
+      to withdraw, her work being done, and that all who saw her were filled
+      with sympathy. It was no doubt the irresistible outburst of a heart too
+      full; and though that fulness was all joy and triumph, yet there was in it
+      a sense of completed work, a rending asunder and tearing away from life,
+      the end of a wonderful and triumphant tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a considerable controversy as to the precise meaning of that
+      outburst of emotion. Did the Maid mean that her work was over, and her
+      divine mission fulfilled? Was this all that she believed herself to be
+      appointed to do? or did she expect, as she sometimes said, to <i>bouter</i>
+      the English out of France altogether? In the one case she ought to have
+      relinquished her work, and in not doing so she acted without the
+      protection of God which had hitherto made her invulnerable. In the other,
+      her "voices," her inspiration, must have failed her, for her course of
+      triumph went no farther. It is impossible to decide between these
+      contending theories. She did speak in both senses, sometimes declaring
+      that she was to take Paris, sometimes, her intention to <i>bouter</i> the
+      English out of the kingdom. At the same time she betrayed a constant
+      conviction that her office had limitations and must come to an end. "I
+      will last but a year," she said to the King and to Alençon. The testimony
+      of Dunois seems to be the best we can have on this point. He says in his
+      deposition, made many years after her death: "Although Jeanne sometimes
+      talked playfully to amuse people, of things concerning the war which were
+      not afterwards accomplished, yet when she spoke seriously of the war, and
+      of her own career and her vocation, she never affirmed anything but that
+      she was sent to raise the siege of Orleans and to lead the King to Rheims
+      to be crowned."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this were so was she wrong in continuing her warfare, and did she place
+      herself in the position of one who goes on her own charges, finding the
+      mission from on high unnecessary? Or in the other case did her inspiration
+      fail her, or were the intrigues of Charles and his Court sufficient to
+      balk the designs of Heaven? We prefer to think that Jeanne's commission
+      concerned only those two things which she accomplished so completely; but
+      that in continuing the war, she acted only as a well inspired and
+      honourable young soldier might, though no longer as the direct messenger
+      of God. She had as much right to do so as to return to her distaff or her
+      needle in her native village; but she became subject to all the ordinary
+      laws of war by so doing, exposed herself to be taken or overthrown like
+      any man-at-arms, and accepted that risk. What is certain is, that every
+      intrigue sprang up again afresh on the evening of that brilliant and
+      triumphant ceremonial, and that from the moment of the accomplishment of
+      her great work the failure of the Maid began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These intrigues had been in her way since her very first beginning, as has
+      been seen. At Orleans, in the very field as well as in the council chamber
+      and the presence, everything was done to balk her, and to cross her plans,
+      but in vain; she triumphed over every contrivance against her, and broke
+      through the plots, and overcame the plotters. But after Rheims the
+      combination of dangers became ever greater and greater, and we may say
+      that no merely human general would have had a chance in face of the many
+      and bewildering influences of evil. Charles who was himself, at least at
+      this period of his career, sufficiently indolent and unenterprising to
+      have damped the energies of any commander, was, in addition, surrounded by
+      advisers who had always been impatient and jealous of the interference of
+      Jeanne, and would have cast her off as a witch, or passed her by as an
+      impostor, had that been possible, without permitting her to strike a blow.
+      They had now grudgingly made use of her, or rather, for this is too much
+      to say, had permitted her action where they had no power to restrain it:
+      but they were as little friendly, as malignant in their treatment of the
+      Maid as ever, and more hopeful, now that so much had been done by her
+      means, of being able to shake her off and pursue their fate in their own
+      way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The position of Charles crowned King of France with all the traditional
+      pomp, master of the Orleannais, with fresh bands of supporters coming in
+      to swell his army day by day, and Paris itself almost within his reach,
+      was very different from that of the discredited Dauphin at Chinon, whom
+      half the world believed to have no right to the crown which his own mother
+      had signed away from him, and who wasted his idle days in folly to the
+      profit of the greedy councillors who schemed and trafficked with his
+      enemies, and to the destruction of all his hopes. The strange apparition
+      of virginal purity, energy, and faith which had taken up and saved him
+      against his will and all his efforts had not ceased for a moment to be
+      hateful to La Tremouille and his party; and Charles&mdash;though he seems
+      to have had a certain appreciation of the Maid, and even a liking for her
+      frank and fearless character, apart from any faith in her mission&mdash;was
+      far too ready to accept the facts of the moment, and probably to believe
+      that, after all, his own worth and favour with Heaven had a great deal to
+      do with this dazzling triumph and success: certainly he was not the man to
+      make any stand for his deliverer. But that she was an auxiliary too
+      important to be sent away was reluctantly apparent to them all. To keep
+      her as a sort of tame angel about the Court in order to be produced when
+      she was wanted, to put heart into the soldiers and frighten the English as
+      she certainly had the gift of doing, no doubt appeared to all as a thing
+      desirable enough. And they dared not let her go "because of the people,"
+      nor, may we believe, would Alençon, Dunois, La Hire, and the rest have
+      tolerated thus the abandonment of their comrade. To dismiss her even at
+      her own word would have been impossible, and it is hard to believe that
+      Jeanne, after that extraordinary brief career as a triumphant general and
+      leader, could have gone back to her father's cottage of the village,
+      though she thought she would fain have done so. If we are to believe that
+      she felt her mission to be fulfilled, she was yet mistress of her fate to
+      serve France and the King as seemed best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And we have no evidence that her "voices" forsook her, or discouraged her.
+      They seem to have changed a little in their burden, they began to mingle a
+      sadder tone in their intimations. It began to be breathed into her mind
+      though not immediately, that something was to happen to her, some disaster
+      not explained, yet that God was to be with her. It seems to me that all
+      the circumstances are compatible with a change in Jeanne's consciousness,
+      from the moment of the coronation. It might have been a grander thing had
+      she retired there and then, her work being accomplished as she declared it
+      to be; but it would not have been human. She was still a power, if no
+      longer the direct messenger from Heaven; a general, with much skill and
+      natural aptitude if not the Sent of God; and the ardour of a military
+      career had got into her veins. No doubt she was much more good for that,
+      now, than for sitting by the side of Isabeau d'Arc at Domremy, and working
+      even into a piece of embroidery for the altar, her remembrances and
+      visions of camp and siege and the intoxication of victory. She remained,
+      conscious that she was no longer exactly as of old, to fight not only
+      against the English, but with intimate enemies, far more bitter, whom now
+      she knew, against the ordinary fortune of war, and against that which is a
+      thousand times worse, the hatred and envy, the cruel carelessness, and the
+      malignant schemes of her own countrymen for whom she had fought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, so far as we can judge, appears to be the position of Jeanne in the
+      second portion of her career; perhaps only dimly apprehended and at
+      moments, by herself; not much thought of probably by those around her, the
+      wisest of whom had always been sceptical of her divine commission; while
+      the populace never saw any change in her, and believed that at one time as
+      well as at another the Maid was the Maid, and had victory at her command.
+      And no doubt that influence would have endured for some time at least, and
+      her dauntless rush against every obstacle would have carried success with
+      it, had she been able to carry out her plans, and fly forth upon Paris as
+      she had done upon Orleans, carrying on the campaign swiftly, promptly,
+      without pause or uncertainty. Bedford himself said that Paris "would fall
+      at a blow," if she came on. It had been hard enough, however, to do that,
+      as we have seen, when she was the only hope of France and had the fire of
+      the divine enthusiasm in her veins; but it was still more hard now to
+      mould a young King elated with triumph, beginning to feel the crown safe
+      upon his head, and to feel that if there was still much to gain, there was
+      now a great deal to be lost. The position was complicated and made more
+      difficult for Jeanne by every advantage she had gained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime the secret negotiations, which were always being carried
+      on under the surface, had come to this point, that Charles had made a
+      private treaty with Philip of Burgundy by which that prince pledged
+      himself to give up Paris into the King's hands within fifteen days. This
+      agreement furnished a sufficient pretext for the delay in marching against
+      Paris, delay which was Charles's invariable method, and which but for
+      Jeanne's hardihood and determination, had all but crushed the expedition
+      to Rheims itself. It was never with any will of his or of his adviser, La
+      Tremouille, that any stronghold was assailed. He would fain have passed by
+      Troyes, as the reader will remember, he would fain have delayed going to
+      Rheims; in each case he had been forced to move by the impetuosity of the
+      Maid. But a treaty which touched the honour of the King was a different
+      matter. Philip of Burgundy, with whom it was made, seems to have held the
+      key of the position. He was called to Paris by Bedford on one side to
+      defend the city against its lawful King; he had pledged himself on the
+      other to Charles to give it up. He had in his hands, though it is
+      uncertain whether he ever read it, that missive of the sorceress, the
+      letter of Jeanne which I have quoted, calling upon him on the part of God
+      to make peace. What was he to do? There were reasons drawing him to both
+      sides. He was the enemy of Charles on account of the murder of his father,
+      and therefore had every interest in keeping Paris from him; he was angry
+      with the English on account of the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with
+      Jacqueline of Brabant, which interfered with his own rights and safety in
+      Flanders, and therefore might have served himself by giving up the capital
+      to the King. As for the appeal of Jeanne, what was the letter of that mad
+      creature to a prince and statesman? The progress of affairs was arrested
+      by this double problem. Jeanne had been the prominent, the only important
+      figure in the history of France for some months past. Now that shining
+      figure was jostled aside, and the ordinary laws of life, with all the
+      counter changes of negotiation, the ineffectual comings and goings, the
+      meaner half-seen persons, the fierce contending personal interests&mdash;in
+      which there was no love of either God or man, or any elevated notion of
+      patriotism&mdash;came again into play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne would seem to have already foreseen and felt this change even
+      before she left Rheims; there is a new tone of sadness in some of her
+      recorded words; or if not of sadness, at least of consciousness that an
+      end was approaching to all these triumphs and splendours. The following
+      tale is told in various different versions, as occurring with different
+      people; but the account I give is taken from the lips of Dunois himself, a
+      very competent witness. As the King, after his coronation, wended his way
+      through the country, receiving submission and joyous welcome from every
+      village and little town, it happened that while passing through the town
+      of La Ferté, Jeanne rode between the Archbishop of Rheims and Dunois. The
+      Archbishop had never been friendly to the Maid, and now it was clear,
+      watched her with that half satirical, half amused look of the wise man,
+      curious and cynical in presence of the incomprehensible, observing her
+      ways and very ready to catch her tripping and to entangle her if possible
+      in her own words. The people thronged the way, full of enthusiasm,
+      acclaiming the King and shouting their joyful exclamations of "Noël!"
+      though it does not appear that any part of their devotion was addressed to
+      Jeanne herself. "Oh, the good people," she cried with tears in her eyes,
+      "how joyful they are to see their noble King! And how happy should I be to
+      end my days and be buried here among them!" The priest unmoved by such an
+      exclamation from so young a mouth attempted instantly, like the Jewish
+      doctors with our Lord, to catch her in her words and draw from her some
+      expression that might be used against her. "Jeanne," he said, "in what
+      place do you expect to die?" It was a direct challenge to the messenger of
+      Heaven to take upon herself the gift of prophecy. But Jeanne in her
+      simplicity shattered the snare which probably she did not even perceive:
+      "When it pleases God," she said. "I know neither the place nor the time."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was enough, however, that she should think of death and of the
+      sweetness of it, after her work accomplished, in the very moment of her
+      height of triumph&mdash;to show something of a new leaven working in her
+      virgin soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One characteristic reward, however, Jeanne did receive. Her father and
+      uncle were lodged at the public cost as benefactors of the kingdom, as may
+      still be seen by the inscription on the old inn in the great Place at
+      Rheims; and when Jacques d'Arc left the city he carried with him a patent&mdash;better
+      than one of nobility which, however, came to the family later&mdash;of
+      exemption for the villages of Domremy and Greux of all taxes and tributes;
+      "an exemption maintained and confirmed up to the Revolution, in favour of
+      the said Maid, native of that parish, in which are her relations." "In the
+      register of the Exchequer," says M. Blaze de Bury, "at the name of the
+      parish of Greux and Domremy, the place for the receipt is blank, with
+      these words as explanation: <i>à cause de la Pucelle</i>, on account of
+      the Maid." There could not have been a more delightful reward or one more
+      after her own heart. It would be a graceful act of the France of to-day,
+      which has so warmly revived the name and image of her maiden deliverer, to
+      renew so touching a distinction to her native place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are told that Jeanne parted with her father and uncle with tears,
+      longing that she might return with them and go back to her mother who
+      would rejoice to see her again. This was no doubt quite true, though it
+      might be equally true that she could not have gone back. Did not the
+      father return, a little sullen, grasping the present he had himself
+      received, not sure still that it was not disreputable to have a daughter
+      who wore coat armour and rode by the side of the King, a position
+      certainly not proper for maidens of humble birth? The dazzled peasants
+      turned their backs upon her while she was thus at the height of glory, and
+      never, so far as appears, saw her face again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII &mdash; THE SECOND PERIOD. 1429-1430.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The epic so brief, so exciting, so full of wonder had now reached its
+      climax. Whatever we may think on the question as to whether Jeanne had now
+      reached the limit of her commission, it is at least evident that she had
+      reached the highest point of her triumph, and that her short day of glory
+      and success came to an end in the great act which she had always spoken of
+      as her chief object. She had crowned her King; she had recovered for him
+      one of the richest of his provinces, and established a strong base for
+      further action on his part. She had taught Frenchmen how not to fly before
+      the English, and she had filled those stout-hearted English, who for a
+      time had the Frenchmen in their powerful steel-clad grip, with terror and
+      panic, and taught them how to fly in their turn. This was, from the first,
+      what she had said she was appointed to do, and not one of her promises had
+      been broken. Her career had been a short one, begun in April, ending in
+      July, one brief continuous course of glory. But this triumphant career had
+      come to its conclusion. The messenger of God had done her work; the
+      servant must not desire to be greater than his Lord. There have been
+      heroes in this world whose career has continued a glorious and a happy one
+      to the end. Our hearts follow them in their noble career, but when the
+      strain and pain are over they come into their kingdom and reap their
+      reward the interest fails. We are glad, very glad, that they should live
+      happy ever after, but their happiness does not attract us like their
+      struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is different with those whose work and whose motives are not those of
+      this world. When they step out of the brilliant lights of triumph into
+      sorrow and suffering, all that is most human in us rises to follow the
+      bleeding feet, our hearts swell with indignation, with sorrow and love,
+      and that instinctive admiration for the noble and pure, which proves that
+      our birthright too is of Heaven, however we may tarnish or even deny that
+      highest pedigree. The chivalrous romance of that age would have made of
+      Jeanne d'Arc the heroine of human story. She would have had a noble lover,
+      say our young Guy de Laval, or some other generous and brilliant Seigneur
+      of France, and after her achievements she would have laid by her sword,
+      and clothed herself with the beautiful garments of the age, and would have
+      grown to be a noble lady in some half regal chateau, to which her name
+      would have given new lustre. The young reader will probably long that it
+      should be so; he will feel it an injustice, a wrong to humanity that so
+      generous a soul should have no reward; it will seem to him almost a
+      personal injury that there should not be a noble chevalier at hand to
+      snatch that devoted Maid out of the danger that threatened her, out of the
+      horrible fate that befell her; and we can imagine a generous boy, and
+      enthusiastic girl, ready to gnash their teeth at the terrible and
+      dishonouring thought that it was by English hands that this noble creature
+      was tied to the stake and perished in the flames. For the last it becomes
+      us(1) to repent, for it was to our everlasting shame; but not more to us
+      than to France who condemned her, who lifted no finger to help her, who
+      raised not even a cry, a protest, against the cruelty and wrong. But for
+      her fate in itself let us not mourn over-much. Had the Maid become a great
+      and honoured lady should not we all have said as Satan says in the Book of
+      Job: Did Jeanne serve God for nought? We should say: See what she made by
+      it. Honour and fame and love and happiness. She did nobly, but nobly has
+      she been rewarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is not God's way. The highest saint is born to martyrdom. To
+      serve God for nought is the greatest distinction which He reserves for His
+      chosen. And this was the fate to which the Maid of France was consecrated
+      from the moment she set out upon her mission. She had the supreme glory of
+      accomplishing that which she believed herself to be sent to do, and which
+      I also believe she was sent to do, miraculously, by means undreamed of,
+      and in which no one beforehand could have believed. But when that was done
+      a higher consecration awaited her. She had to drink of the cup of which
+      our Lord drank, and to be baptised with the baptism with which He was
+      baptised. It was involved in every step of the progress that it should be
+      so. And she was herself aware of it, vaguely, at heart, as soon as the
+      object of her mission was attained. What else could have put the thought
+      of dying into the mind of a girl of eighteen in the midst of the adoring
+      crowd, to whom to see her, to touch her, was a benediction? When she went
+      forth from those gates she was going to her execution, though the end was
+      not to be yet. There was still a long struggle before her, lingering and
+      slow, more bitter than death, the preface of discouragement, of
+      disappointment, of failure when she had most hoped to succeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was on the threshold of this second period when she rode out of Rheims
+      all brilliant in the summer weather, her banner faded now, but glorious,
+      her shining armour bearing signs of warfare, her end achieved&mdash;yet
+      all the while her heart troubled, uncertain, and full of unrest. And it is
+      impossible not to note that from this time her plans were less defined
+      than before. Up to the coronation she had known exactly what she meant to
+      do, and in spite of all obstructions had done it, keeping her genial
+      humour and her patience, steering her simple way through all the intrigues
+      of the Court, without bitterness and without fear. But now a vague mist
+      seems to fall about the path which was so open and so clear. Paris! Yes,
+      the best policy, the true generalship would have been to march straight
+      upon Paris, to lose no time, to leave as little leisure as possible to the
+      intriguers to resume their old plots. So the generals thought as well as
+      Jeanne: but the courtiers were not of that mind. The weak and foolish
+      notion of falling back upon what they had gained, and of contenting
+      themselves with that, was all they thought of; and the un-French,
+      unpatriotic temper of Paris which wanted no native king, but was content
+      with the foreigner, gave them a certain excuse. We could not even imagine
+      London as being ever, at any time, contented with an alien rule. But Paris
+      evidently was so, and was ready to defend itself to the death against its
+      lawful sovereign. Jeanne had never before been brought face to face with
+      such a complication. It had been a straightforward struggle, each man for
+      his own side, up to this time. But now other things had to be taken into
+      consideration. Here was no faithful Orleans holding out eager arms to its
+      deliverer, but a crafty, self-seeking city, deaf to patriotism,
+      indifferent to freedom, calculating which was most to its profit&mdash;and
+      deciding that the stranger, with Philip of Burgundy at his back, was the
+      safer guide. This was enough of itself to make a simple mind pause in
+      astonishment and dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no evidence that the supernatural leaders who had shaped the
+      course of the Maid failed her now. She still heard her "voices." She still
+      held communion with the three saints who, she believed devoutly, came out
+      of Heaven to aid her. The whole question of this supernatural guidance is
+      one which is of course open to discussion. There are many in these days
+      who do not believe in it at all, who believe in the exaltation of Jeanne's
+      brain, in the excitement of her nerves, in some strange complication of
+      bodily conditions, which made her believe she saw and heard what she did
+      not really see or hear. For our part, we confess frankly that these
+      explanations are no explanation at all so far as we are concerned; we are
+      far more inclined to believe that the Maid spoke truth, she who never told
+      a lie, she who fulfilled all the promises she made in the name of her
+      guides, than that those people are right who tell us on their own
+      authority that such interpositions of Heaven are impossible. Nobody in
+      Jeanne's day doubted that Heaven did interpose directly in human affairs.
+      The only question was, Was it Heaven in this instance? Was it not rather
+      the evil one? Was it sorcery and witchcraft, or was it the agency of God?
+      The English believed firmly that it was witchcraft; they could not imagine
+      that it was God, the God of battles, who had always been on their side,
+      who now took the courage out of their hearts and taught their feet to fly
+      for the first time. It was the devil, and the Maid herself was a wicked
+      witch. Neither one side nor the other believed that it was from Jeanne's
+      excited nerves that these great things came. There were plenty of women
+      with excited nerves in France, nerves much more excited than those of
+      Jeanne, who was always reasonable at the height of her inspiration; but to
+      none of them did it happen to mount the breach, to take the city, to drive
+      the enemy&mdash;up to that moment invincible,&mdash;flying from the field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it would seem as if these celestial visitants had no longer a clear
+      and definite message for the Maid. Their words, which she quotes, were now
+      promises of support, vague warnings of trouble to come. "Fear not, for God
+      will stand by you." She thought they meant that she would be delivered in
+      safety as she had been hitherto, her wounds healing, her sacred person
+      preserved from any profane touch. But yet such promises have always
+      something enigmatical in them, and it might be, as proved to be the case,
+      that they meant rather consolation and strength to endure than
+      deliverance. For the first time the Maid was often sad; she feared
+      nothing, but the shadow was heavy on her heart. Orleans and Rheims had
+      been clear as daylight, her "voices" had said to her "Do this" and she had
+      done it. Now there was no definite direction. She had to judge for herself
+      what was best, and to walk in darkness, hoping that what she did was what
+      she was meant to do, but with no longer any certainty. This of itself was
+      a great change, and one which no doubt she felt to her heart. M. Fabre
+      tells (alone among the biographers of Jeanne) that there were symptoms of
+      danger to her sound and steady mind, in her words and ways during the
+      moment of triumph. Her chaplain Pasquerel wrote a letter in her name to
+      the Hussites, against whom the Pope was then sending crusades, in which
+      "I, the Maid," threatened, if they were not converted, to come against
+      them and give them the alternative of death or amendment. Quicherat says
+      that to the Count d'Armagnac who had written to her, whether in good faith
+      or bad, to ask which of the three then existent Popes was the real one,
+      she is reported to have answered that she would tell him as soon as the
+      English left her free to do so. But this is a perverted account of what
+      she really did say, and M. Fabre seems to be, like the rest of us, a
+      little confused in his dates: and the documents themselves on which he
+      builds are not of unquestioned authority. These, however, would be but
+      small speck upon the sunshine of her perfect humility and sobriety; if
+      indeed they are to be depended upon as authentic at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day of Jeanne, her time of glory and success, was but a short one&mdash;Orleans
+      was delivered on the 8th of May, the coronation of Charles took place on
+      the 17th of July; before the earliest of these dates she had spent nearly
+      two months in an anxious yet hopeful struggle of preparation, before she
+      was permitted to enter upon her career. The time of her discouragement was
+      longer. It was ten months from the day when she rode out of Rheims, the
+      25th of July, 1429, till the 23d of May, 1430, when she was taken. She had
+      said after the deliverance of Orleans that she had but a year in which to
+      accomplish her work, and at a later period, Easter, 1430, her "voices"
+      told her that "before the St. Jean" she would be in the power of her
+      enemies. Both these statements came true. She rose quickly but fell more
+      slowly, struggling along upon the downward course, unable to carry out
+      what she would, hampered on every hand, and not apparently followed with
+      the same fervour as of old. It is true that the principal cause of all
+      seems to have been the schemes of the Court and the indolence of Charles;
+      but all these hindrances had existed before, and the King and his
+      treacherous advisers had been unwillingly dragged every mile of the way,
+      though every step made had been to Charles's advantage. But now though the
+      course is still one of victory the Maid no longer seems to be either the
+      chief cause or the immediate leader. Perhaps this may be partly due to the
+      fact that little fighting was necessary, town after town yielding to the
+      King, which reduced the part of Jeanne to that of a spectator; but there
+      is a change of atmosphere and tone which seems to point to something more
+      fundamental than this. The historians are very unwilling to acknowledge,
+      except Michelet who does so without hesitation, that she had herself fixed
+      the term of her commission as ending at Rheims; it is certain that she
+      said many things which bear this meaning, and every fact of her after
+      career seems to us to prove it: but it is also true that her conviction
+      wavered, and other sayings indicate a different belief or hope. She did no
+      wrong in following the profession of arms in which she had made so
+      glorious a beginning; she had many gifts and aptitudes for it of which she
+      was not herself at first aware: but she was no longer the Envoy of God.
+      Enough had been done to arouse the old spirit of France, to break the
+      spell of the English supremacy; it was right and fitting that France
+      should do the rest for herself. Perhaps Jeanne was not herself very clear
+      on this point, and after her first statement of it, became less assured.
+      It is not necessary that the servant should know the designs of the
+      master. It did not after all affect her. Her business was to serve God to
+      the best of her power, not to take the management out of His hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The army went forth joyously upon its way, directing itself towards Paris.
+      There was a pilgrimage to make, such as the Kings of France were in the
+      habit of making after their coronation; there were pleasant incidents, the
+      submission of a village, the faint resistance, instantly overcome, of a
+      small town, to make the early days pleasant. Laon and Soissons both
+      surrendered. Senlis and Beauvais received the King's envoys with joy. The
+      independent captains of the army made little circles about, like parties
+      of pleasure, bringing in another and another little stronghold to the
+      allegiance of the King. When he turned aside, taking as he passed through,
+      without as yet any serious deflection, the road rather to the Loire than
+      to Paris, success still attended him. At Château-Thierry resistance was
+      expected to give zest to the movement of the forces, but that too yielded
+      at once as the others had done. The dates are very vague and it seems
+      difficult to find any mode of reconciling them. Almost all the historians
+      while accusing the King of foolish dilatoriness and confusion of plans
+      give us a description of the undefended state of Paris at the moment,
+      which a sudden stroke on the part of Charles might have carried with
+      little difficulty, during the absence of all the chiefs from the city and
+      the great terror of the inhabitants; but a comparison of dates shows that
+      the Duke of Bedford re-entered Paris with strong reinforcements on the
+      very day on which Charles left Rheims three days only after his
+      coronation, so that he scarcely seems so much to blame as appears. But the
+      general delay, inefficiency, and hesitation existing at headquarters,
+      naturally lead to mistakes of this kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great point was that Paris itself was by no means disposed to receive
+      the King. Strange as it seems to say so Paris was bitterly, fiercely
+      English at that extraordinary moment, a fact which ought to be taken into
+      account as the most important in the whole matter. There was no answering
+      enthusiasm in the capital of France to form an auxiliary force behind its
+      ramparts and encourage the besiegers outside. The populace perhaps might
+      be indifferent: at the best it had no feeling on the subject; but there
+      was no welcome awaiting the King. During the time of Bedford's absence the
+      city felt itself to have "no lord"&mdash;<i>ceux de Paris avoit grand peur
+      car nul seigneur n' y avoit</i>. It was believed that Charles would put
+      all the inhabitants to the sword, and their desperation of feeling was
+      rather that which leads to a wild and hopeless defence than to submission.
+      The Duke of Bedford, governing in the name of the infant Henry VI. Of
+      England, was their seigneur, instead of their natural sovereign. It is a
+      fact which to us seems scarcely credible, but it was certainly true. There
+      seems to have been no feeling even, on the subject, no general shame as of
+      a national betrayal; nothing of the kind. Paris was English, holding by
+      the English kings who had never lost a certain hold on France, and
+      thinking no shame of its party. It was a hostile town, the chief of the
+      English possessions. In the <i>Journal du Bourgeois de Paris</i>&mdash;who
+      was no <i>bourgeois</i> but a distinguished member of that university
+      which held the Maid and all her ways in horror&mdash;Jeanne the deliverer,
+      the incarnation of patriotism and of France is spoken of as "a creature in
+      the form of a woman." How extraordinary is this evidence of a state of
+      affairs in which it is almost impossible to believe! Paris is France
+      nowadays to many people, though no doubt this is but a superficial
+      judgment; but in the early part of the fifteenth century, she was frankly
+      English, not by compulsion even, but by habit and policy. Perhaps the
+      delays, the hesitation, the terrors of Charles and his counsellors are
+      thus rendered more excusable than by any other explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime it is almost impossible to follow the wanderings of this
+      vacillating army without a map. If the reader should trace its movements,
+      he would see what a stumbling and devious course it took as of a man
+      blundering in the dark. From Rheims to Soissons the way was clear; then
+      there came a sudden move southward to Château-Thierry from which indeed
+      there was still a straight line to Paris but which still more clearly
+      indicated the highroad leading to the Orleannais, the faithful districts
+      of the Loire. This retrograde movement was not made without a great outcry
+      from the generals. Their opinion was that the King ought to press on to
+      conquer everything while the English forces were still depressed and
+      discouraged. In their mind this deflection towards the south was an
+      abandonment at once of honour and safety. An unimportant check on the way,
+      however, gave an argument to the leaders of the army, and Charles
+      permitted himself to be dragged back. They then made their way by La
+      Ferté-Milon, Crépy, and Daumartin, and on this road the English troops
+      which had been led out from Paris by Bedford to intercept them came twice
+      within fighting distance of the French army. The English, as all the
+      French historians are eager to inform us, invariably entrenched themselves
+      in their positions, surrounding their lines with sharp-pointed posts by
+      which the equally invariable rush of the French could be broken. But the
+      French on these occasions were too wise to repeat the impetuous charge
+      which had ruined them at Crécy and Agincourt, and the consequence was that
+      the two forces remained within sight of each other, with a few skirmishes
+      going on at the flanks, but without any serious encounter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will be more satisfactory, however, to copy the following <i>itineraire</i>
+      of Charles's movements from the Chronicle of Perceval de Cagny who was a
+      member of the household of the Duc d'Alençon, and probably present,
+      certainly at all events bound to have the best and most correct
+      information. He informs us that the King left Rheims on Thursday the 21st
+      of July, and dined, supped, and lay at the Abbey of St. Nanuol that night,
+      where were brought to him the keys of the city of Laon. He then set out on
+      <i>le voyage à venir devant Paris</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "And on Saturday the 23d of the same month the King dined, supped and lay
+      at Soissons, and was there received the most honourably that the
+      churchmen, burghers and other people of the town were capable of: for they
+      had all great fear because of the destruction of the town which had been
+      taken by the Burgundians and made to rebel against the King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Friday the 29th day of July the King and his company were all day before
+      Château-Thierry in order of battle, hoping that the Duke of Bedford would
+      appear to fight. The place surrendered at the hour of vespers, and the
+      King lodged there till Monday the first of August. On that day the King
+      lay at Monmirail in Brie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Tuesday the 2d of August he passed the night in the town of Provins, and
+      had the best possible reception there, and remained till the Friday
+      following, the 5th August. Sunday the 7th the King lay at the town of
+      Coulommièrs in Brie. Wednesday the 10th he lay at La Ferté- Milon,
+      Thursday at Crespy in Valois&mdash;Friday at Laigny-le-Sec. The following
+      Saturday the 13th the King held the field near Dammartin-en-Gouelle, for
+      the whole day looking out for the English: but they came not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "On Sunday the 14th August the Maid, the Duc d'Alençon, the Count de
+      Vendosme, the Marshals and other captains accompanied by six or seven
+      thousand combatants were at the hour of vespers lodged in the fields near
+      Montépilloy, nearly two leagues from the town of Senlis&mdash;The Duke of
+      Bedford and other English captains with between eight and ten thousand
+      English lying half a league from Senlis between our people and the said
+      city on a little stream, in a village called Notre Dame de la Victoire.
+      That evening our people skirmished with the English near to their camp and
+      in this skirmish were people taken on each side, and of the English
+      Captain d'Orbec and ten or twelve others, and people wounded on both
+      sides: when night fell each retired to their own quarters."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same writer records an appeal in the true tone of chivalry addressed
+      to the English by Jeanne and Alençon desiring them to come out from their
+      entrenchments and fight: and promising to withdraw to a sufficient
+      distance to permit the enemy to place himself in the open field. The
+      French troops had first "put themselves in the best state of conscience
+      that could possibly be, hearing mass at an early hour and then to horse."
+      But the English would not come out. Jeanne, with her standard in her hand
+      rode up to the English entrenchments, and some one says (not de Cagny)
+      struck the posts with her banner, challenging the force within to come out
+      and fight; while they on their side waved at the French in defiance, a
+      standard copied from that of Jeanne, on which was depicted a distaff and
+      spindle. But neither host approached any nearer. Finally, Charles made his
+      way to Compiègne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Château-Thierry there was concluded an arrangement with Philip of
+      Burgundy for a truce of fifteen days, before the end of which time the
+      Duke undertook to deliver Paris peaceably to the French. That this was
+      simply to gain time and that no idea of giving up Paris had ever been
+      entertained is evident; perhaps Charles was not even deceived. He, no more
+      than Philip, had any desire to encounter the dangers of such a siege. But
+      he was able at least to silence the clamours of the army and the
+      representations of the persistent Maid by this truce. To wait for fifteen
+      days and receive the prize without a blow struck, would not that be best?
+      The counsellors of the King held thus a strong position, though the delay
+      made the hearts of the warriors sick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The figure of Jeanne appears during these marchings and counter-marchings
+      like that of any other general, pursuing a skilful but not unusual plan of
+      campaign. That she did well and bravely there can be no doubt, and there
+      is a characteristic touch which we recognise, in the fact that she and all
+      of her company "put themselves in the best state of conscience that could
+      be," before they took to horse; but the skirmishes and repulses are such
+      as Alençon himself might have made. "She made much diligence," the same
+      chronicler tells us, "to reduce and place many towns in the obedience of
+      the King," but so did many others with like success. We hear no more her
+      vigorous knock at the door of the council chamber if the discussion there
+      was too long or the proceedings too secret. Her appearances are those of a
+      general among many other generals, no longer with any special certainty in
+      her movements as of a person inspired. We are reminded of a story told of
+      a previous period, after the fight at Patay, when blazing forth in the
+      indignation of her youthful purity at the sight of one of the camp
+      followers, a degraded woman with some soldiers, she struck the wanton with
+      the flat of her sword, driving her forth from the camp, where was no
+      longer that chastened army of awed and reverent soldiers making their
+      confession on the eve of every battle, whom she had led to Orleans. The
+      sword she used on this occasion, was, it is said, the miraculous sword
+      which had been found under the high altar of St. Catharine at Fierbois;
+      but at the touch of the unclean the maiden brand broke in two. If this was
+      an allegory(2) to show that the work of that weapon was over, and the
+      common sword of the soldier enough for the warfare that remained, it could
+      not be more clearly realised than in the history of this campaign. The
+      only touch of our real Maid in her own distinct person comes to us in a
+      letter written in a field on that same wavering road to Paris, dated as
+      early as the 5th of August and addressed to the good people of Rheims,
+      some of whom had evidently written to her to ask what was the meaning of
+      the delay, and whether she had given up the cause of the country. There is
+      a terse determination in its brief, indignant sentences which is a relief
+      to the reader weary of the wavering and purposeless campaign:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dear and good friends, good and loyal Frenchmen of the town of Rheims.
+      Jeanne, the Maid, sends you news of her. It is true that the King has made
+      a truce of fifteen days with the Duke of Burgundy, who promises to render
+      peaceably the city of Paris in that time. Do not, however, be surprised if
+      I enter there sooner, for I like not truces so made, and know not whether
+      I will keep them, but if I keep them, it will be only because of the
+      honour of the King."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Jeanne and her army thus played with the unmoving English, advancing
+      and retiring, attempting every means of drawing them out, the enemy took
+      advantage of one of these seeming withdrawals to march out of their camp
+      suddenly and return to Paris, which all this time had been lying
+      comparatively defenceless, had the French made their attack sooner. At the
+      same time Charles moved on to Compiègne where he gave himself up to fresh
+      intrigues with Philip of Burgundy, this time for a truce to last till
+      Christmas. The Maid was grievously troubled by this step, <i>moult marrie</i>,
+      and by the new period of delay and negotiation on which the Court had
+      entered. Paris was not given up, nor was there any appearance that it ever
+      would be, and to all the generals as well as to the Maid it was very
+      evident that this was the next step to be taken. Some of the leaders
+      wearied with inaction had pushed on to Normandy where four great
+      fortresses&mdash;greatest of all the immense and mysterious stronghold on
+      the high cliffs of the Seine, that imposing Château Gaillard which Richard
+      Coeur-de-lion had built, the ruins of which, white and mystic, still
+      dominate, like some Titanic ghost, above the course of the river&mdash;had
+      yielded to them. So great was the danger of Normandy, the most securely
+      English of all French provinces, that Bedford had again been drawn out of
+      Paris to defend it. Here then was another opportunity to seize the
+      capital. But Charles could not be induced to move. He found many ways of
+      amusing himself at Compiègne, and the new treaty was being hatched with
+      Burgundy which gave an excuse for doing nothing. The pause which wearied
+      them all out, both captains and soldiers, at last became more than flesh
+      and blood could bear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne once more was driven to take the initiative. Already on one
+      occasion she had forced the hand of the lingering Court, and resumed the
+      campaign of her own accord, an impatient movement which had been perfectly
+      successful. No doubt again the army itself was becoming demoralised, and
+      showing symptoms of falling to pieces. One day she sent for Alençon in
+      haste during the absence of the ambassadors at Arras. "<i>Beau duc</i>,"
+      she cried, "prepare your troops and the other captains. <i>En mon Dieu,
+      par mon martin</i>,(3) I will see Paris nearer than I have yet seen it."
+      She had seen the towers from afar as she wandered over the country in
+      Charles's lingering train. Her sudden resolution struck like fire upon the
+      impatient band. They set out at once, Alençon and the Maid at the head of
+      their division of the army, and all rejoiced to get to horse again, to
+      push their way through every obstacle. They started on the 23d August,
+      nearly a month after the departure from Rheims, a month entirely lost,
+      though full of events, lost without remedy so far as Paris was concerned.
+      At Senlis they made a pause, perhaps to await the King, who, it was hoped,
+      would have been constrained to follow; then carrying with them all the
+      forces that could be spared from that town, they spurred on to St. Denis
+      where they arrived on the 27th: St. Denis, the other sacred town of
+      France, the place of the tomb, as Rheims was the place of the crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The royalty of France was Jeanne's passion. I do not say the King, which
+      might be capable of malinterpretation, but the kings, the monarchy, the
+      anointed of the Lord, by whom France was represented, embodied and made
+      into a living thing. She had loved Rheims, its associations, its triumphs,
+      the rejoicing of its citizens. These had been the accompaniments of her
+      own highest victory. She came to St. Denis in a different mood, her heart
+      hot with disappointment and the thwarting of all her plans. From whatever
+      cause it might spring, it was clear that she was no longer buoyed up by
+      that certainty which only a little while before had carried her through
+      every danger and over every obstacle. But to have reached St. Denis at
+      least was something. It was a place doubly sacred, consecrated to that
+      royal House for which she would so willingly have given her life. And at
+      last she was within sight of Paris, the greatest prize of all. Up to this
+      time she had known in actual warfare nothing but victory. If her heart for
+      the first time wavered and feared, there was still no certain reason that,
+      <i>de par Dieu</i>, she might not win the day again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At St. Denis there was once more a cruel delay. Nearly a fortnight passed
+      and there was no news of the King. The Maid employed the time in
+      skirmishes and reconnoissances, but does not seem to have ventured on an
+      attack without the sanction of Charles, whom Alençon, finally, going back
+      on two several occasions, succeeded in setting in motion. Charles had
+      remained at Compiègne to carry out his treaty with Burgundy, and the last
+      thing he desired was this attack; but when he could resist no longer he
+      moved on reluctantly to St. Denis, where his arrival was hailed with great
+      delight. This was not until the 5th of September, and the army, wrought up
+      to a high pitch of excitement and expectation, was eager for the fight.
+      "There was no one of whatever condition, who did not say, 'She will lead
+      the King into Paris, if he will let her,'" says the chronicler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime the authorities in Paris were at work, strengthening its
+      fortifications, frightening the populace with threats of the vengeance of
+      Charles, persuading every citizen of the danger of submission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Bourgeois</i> tells us that letters came from "les Arminoz," that
+      is, the party of the King, sealed with the seal of the Duc d'Alençon, and
+      addressed to the heads of the city guilds and municipality inviting their
+      co-operation as Frenchmen. "But," adds the Parisian, "it was easy to see
+      through their meaning, and an answer was returned that they need not throw
+      away their paper as no attention was paid to it." There is no sign at all
+      that any national feeling existed to respond to such an appeal. Paris&mdash;its
+      courts of law, Parliaments (salaried by Bedford), University, Church&mdash;every
+      department, was English in the first place, Burgundian in the second,
+      dependent on English support and money. There was no French party
+      existing. The Maid was to them an evil sorceress, a creature in the form
+      of a woman, exercising the blackest arts. Perhaps there was even a breath
+      of consciousness in the air that Charles himself had no desire for the
+      fall of the city. He had left the Parisians full time to make every
+      preparation, he had held back as long as was possible. His favour was all
+      on the side of his enemies; for his own forces and their leaders, and
+      especially for the Maid, he had nothing but discouragement, distrust, and
+      auguries of evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, these oppositions came to an end, and Jeanne, though less
+      ready and eager for the assault, found herself under the walls of Paris at
+      last.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) "The English, not US," says Mr. Andrew Lang: and it is
+     pleasant to a Scot to know that this is true. England and
+     Scotland were then twain, and the Scots fought in the ranks
+     of our auld Ally. But for the present age the distinction
+     lasts no longer, and to the writer of an English book on
+     English soil it would be ungenerous to take the advantage.
+
+     (2) It is taken as a miraculous sign by another chronicler,
+     Jean Chartier, who tells us that when this fact came to the
+     knowledge of the King the sword was given by him to the
+     workmen to be re-founded&mdash;"but they could not do it, nor put
+     the pieces together again: which is a great proof (<i>grant
+     approbation</i>) that the sword came to her divinely. And it is
+     notorious that since the breaking of that sword, the said
+     Jeanne neither prospered in arms to the profit of the King
+     nor otherwise as she had done before."
+
+     (3) "It was her oath," adds the chronicler; no one is quite
+     sure what it means, but Quicherat is of opinion that it was
+     her <i>baton</i>, her stick or staff. Perceval de Cagny puts in
+     this exclamation in almost all the speeches of the Maid. It
+     must have struck him as a curious adjuration. Perhaps it
+     explains why La Hire, unable to do without something to
+     swear by, was permitted by Jeanne in their frank and
+     humorous <i>camaraderie</i> to swear by his stick, the same
+     rustic oath.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII &mdash; DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT. AUTUMN, 1429.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was on the 7th September that Jeanne and her immediate followers
+      reached the village of La Chapelle, where they encamped for the night. The
+      next day was the day of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a great
+      festival of the Church. It could scarcely be a matter of choice on the
+      part of so devout a Catholic as Jeanne to take this day of all others,
+      when every church bell was tinkling forth a summons to the faithful, for
+      the day of assault. In all probability she was not now acting on her own
+      impulse but on that of the other generals and nobles. Had she refused,
+      might it not have been alleged against her that after all her impatience
+      it was she who was the cause of delay? The forces with Jeanne were not
+      very large, a great proportion of the army remaining with Charles no one
+      seems to know where, either at St. Denis or at some intermediate spot,
+      possibly to form a reserve force which could be brought up when wanted.
+      The best informed historian only knows that Charles was not with the
+      active force. But Alençon was at the head of the troops, along with many
+      other names well known to us, La Hire, and young Guy de Laval, and
+      Xantrailles, all mighty men of valour and the devoted friends of Jeanne.
+      There is a something, a mist, an incertitude in the beginning of the
+      assault which was unlike the previous achievements of Jeanne, a certain
+      want of precaution or knowledge of the difficulties which does not reflect
+      honour upon the generals with her. Absolutely new to warfare as she was
+      before Orleans she had ridden out at once on her arrival there to inspect
+      the fortifications of the besiegers. But probably the continual
+      skirmishing of which we are told made this impossible here, so that,
+      though the Maid studied the situation of the town in order to choose the
+      best point for attack, it was only when already engaged that the army
+      discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of which was full
+      of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate of St. Honoré and
+      its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders back into the city: but
+      their further progress was arrested by that discovery. It was on this
+      occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have seized from a Burgundian in the
+      mêlée, a sword, of which she boasted afterwards that it was a good sword
+      capable of good blows, though we have no certain record that in all her
+      battles she ever gave one blow, or shed blood at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the
+      discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other filled
+      with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her standard at the
+      immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and cheer on her
+      soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril, descending into the
+      first fosse, and climbing up again on the second, the <i>dos d'ane</i>,
+      which separated them, where she stood in the midst of a rain of arrows,
+      fully exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers and gunners on the
+      ramparts above, testing with her lance the depth of the water. We seem in
+      the story to see her all alone or with her standard-bearer only by her
+      side making this investigation; but that of course is only a pictorial
+      suggestion, though it might for a moment be the fact. She remained there,
+      however, from two in the afternoon till night, when she was forced away.
+      The struggle must have raged around while she stood on the dark edge of
+      the ditch probing the muddy water to see where it could best be crossed,
+      shouting directions to her men in that voice <i>assez femme</i>, which
+      penetrated the noise of battle, and summoning the active and desperate
+      enemy overhead. "<i>Renty! Renty!</i>" she cried as she had done at
+      Orleans&mdash;"<i>surrender to the King of France!</i>"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hear nothing now of the white armour; it must have been dimmed and worn
+      by much fighting, and the banner torn and glorious with the chances of the
+      war; but it still waved over her head, and she still stood fast, on the
+      ridge between the two ditches, shouting her summons, cheering the men, a
+      spot of light still, amid all the steely glimmering of the mail-coats and
+      the dark downpour of that iron rain. Half a hundred war cries rending the
+      air, shrieks from the walls of "Witch, Devil, Ribaude," and names still
+      more insulting to her purity, could not silence that treble shout, the
+      most wonderful, surely, that ever ran through such an infernal clamour, so
+      prodigious, the chronicler says, that it was a marvel to hear it. <i>De
+      par Dieu, Rendez vous, rendez vous, au roy de France</i>. If as we believe
+      she never struck a blow, the aspect of that wonderful figure becomes more
+      extraordinary still. While the boldest of her companions struggled across
+      to fling themselves and what beams and ladders they could drag with them
+      against the wall, she stood without even such shelter as close proximity
+      to it might have given, cheering them on, exposed to every shot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fight was desperate, and though there was no marked success on the
+      part of the besiegers, yet there seems to have been nothing to discourage
+      them, as the fight raged on. Few were wounded, notwithstanding the noise
+      of the cannons and culverins, "by the grace of God and the good luck of
+      the Maid." But towards the evening Jeanne herself suddenly swayed and
+      fell, an arrow having pierced her thigh; she seems, however, to have
+      struggled to her feet again, undismayed, when a still greater misfortune
+      befell: her standard-bearer was hit, first in the foot, and then, as he
+      raised his visor to pull the arrow from the wound, between his eyes,
+      falling dead at her feet. What happened to the banner, we are not told;
+      Jeanne most likely herself caught it as it fell. But at this stroke, more
+      dreadful than her own wound, her strength failed her, and she crept behind
+      a bush or heap of stones, where she lay, refusing to quit the place. Some
+      say she managed to slide into the dry ditch where there was a little
+      shelter, but resisted all attempts to carry her away, and some add that
+      while she lay there she employed herself in a vain attempt to throw
+      faggots into the ditch to make it passable. It is said that she kept
+      calling out to them to persevere, to go on and Paris would be won. She had
+      promised, they say, to sleep that night within the conquered city; but
+      this promise comes to us with no seal of authority. Jeanne knew that it
+      had taken her eight days to free Orleans, and she could scarcely have
+      promised so sudden a success in the more formidable achievement. But she
+      was at least determined in her conviction that perseverance only was
+      needed. She must have lain for hours on the slope of the outer moat,
+      urging on the troops with such force as her dauntless voice could give,
+      repeating again and again that the place could be taken if they but held
+      on. But when night came Alençon and some other of the captains overcame
+      her resistance, and there being clearly no further possibility for the
+      moment, succeeded in setting her upon her horse, and conveyed her back to
+      the camp. While they rode with her, supporting her on her charger, she did
+      nothing but repeat "<i>Quel dommage!</i>" Oh, what a misfortune, that the
+      siege of Paris should fail, all for want of constancy and courage. "If
+      they had but gone on till morning," she cried, "the inhabitants would have
+      known." It is evident from this that she must have expected a rising
+      within, and could not yet believe that no such thing was to be looked for.
+      "<i>Par mon martin</i>, the place would have been taken," she said in the
+      hearing one cannot but feel of the chronicler, who reports so often those
+      homely words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Jeanne was led back after the first day's attack. Her wound was not
+      serious, and she had been repulsed during one of the day's fighting at
+      Orleans without losing courage. But something had changed her spirit as
+      well as the spirit of the army she led. There is a curious glimpse given
+      us into her camp at this point, which indeed comes to us through the
+      observation of an enemy, yet seems to have in it an unmistakable gleam of
+      truth. It comes from one of the parties which had been granted a
+      safe-conduct to carry away the dead of the English and Burgundian side.
+      They tell us, among other circumstances,&mdash;such as that the French
+      burnt their dead, a manifest falsehood, but admirably calculated to make
+      them a horror to their neighbours,&mdash;that many in the ranks cursed the
+      Maid who had promised that they should without any doubt sleep that night
+      in Paris and plunder the wealthy city. The men with their safe-conduct
+      creeping among the dead, to recover those bodies which had fallen on their
+      own side, and furtively to count the fallen on the other&mdash;who were
+      delighted to bring a report that the Maid was no longer the fountain of
+      strength and blessing, but secretly cursed by her own forces&mdash;are
+      sinister figures groping their way through the darkness of the September
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next morning, however, her wound being slight, Jeanne was up early and in
+      conference with Alençon, begging him to sound his trumpets and set forth
+      once more. "I shall not budge from here, till Paris is taken," she said.
+      No doubt her spirit was up, and a determination to recover lost ground
+      strong in her mind. While the commanders consulted together, there came a
+      band of joyful augury into the camp, the Seigneur of Montmorency with
+      sixty gentlemen, who had left the party of Burgundy in order to take
+      service under the banner of the Maid. No doubt this important and welcome
+      addition to their number exhilarated the entire camp, in the commotion of
+      the reveillé, while each man looked to his weapons, wiping off from
+      breastplate and helmet the heavy dew of the September morning, greeting
+      the new friends and brothers-in-arms who had come in, and arranging, with
+      a better knowledge of the ground than that of yesterday, the mode of
+      attack. Jeanne would not confess that she felt her wound, in her eagerness
+      to begin the assault a second time. And all were in good spirits, the
+      disappointment of the night having blown away, and the determination to do
+      or die being stronger than ever. Were the men-at-arms perhaps less
+      amenable? Were they whispering to each other that Jeanne had promised them
+      Paris yesterday, and for the first time had not kept her word? It would
+      almost require such a fact as this to explain what follows. For as they
+      began to set out, the whole field in movement, there was suddenly seen
+      approaching another party of cavaliers&mdash;perhaps another reinforcement
+      like that of Montmorency? This new band, however, consisted but of two
+      gentlemen and their immediate attendants, the Duc de Bar and the Comte de
+      Clermont,(1) always a bird of evil omen, riding hot from St. Denis with
+      orders from the King. These orders were abrupt and peremptory&mdash;to
+      turn back. Jeanne and her companions were struck dumb for the moment. To
+      turn back, and Paris at their feet! There must have burst forth a storm of
+      remonstrance and appeal. We cannot tell how long the indignant parley
+      lasted; the historians do not enlarge upon the disastrous incident. But at
+      last the generals yielded to the orders of the King&mdash;Jeanne
+      humiliated, miserable, and almost in despair. We cannot but feel that on
+      no former occasion would she have given way so completely; she would have
+      rushed to the King's presence, overwhelmed him with impetuous prayers,
+      extorted somehow the permission to go on. But Charles was safe at seven
+      miles' distance, and his envoys were imperious and peremptory, like men
+      able to enforce obedience if it were not given. She obeyed at last,
+      recovering courage a little in the hope of being able to persuade Charles
+      to change his mind, and sanction another assault on Paris from the other
+      side, by means of a bridge over the Seine towards St. Denis, which Alençon
+      had constructed. Next morning it appears that without even asking that
+      permission a portion of the army set out very early for this bridge: but
+      the King had divined their project, and when they reached the river side
+      the first thing they saw was their bridge in ruins. It had been
+      treacherously destroyed in the night, not by their enemies, but by their
+      King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is natural that the French historians should exhaust themselves in
+      explanation of this fatal change of policy. Quicherat, who was the first
+      to bring to light all the most important records of this period of
+      history, lays the entire blame upon La Tremoïlle, the chief adviser of
+      Charles. But that Charles himself was at heart equally guilty no one can
+      doubt. He was a man who proved himself in the end of his career to possess
+      both sense and energy, though tardily developed. It was to him that Jeanne
+      had given that private sign of the truth of her mission, by which he was
+      overawed and convinced in the first moment of their intercourse. Within
+      the few months which had elapsed since she appeared at Chinon every thing
+      that was wonderful had been done for him by her means. He was then a
+      fugitive pretender, not even very certain of his own claim, driven into a
+      corner of his lawful dominions, and fully prepared to abandon even that
+      small standing ground, to fly into Spain or Scotland, and give up the
+      attempt to hold his place as King of France. Now he was the consecrated
+      King, with the holy oil upon his brows, and the crown of his ancestors on
+      his head, accepted and proclaimed, all France stirring to her old
+      allegiance, new conquests falling into his hands every day, and the
+      richest portion of his kingdom secure under his sway. To check thus
+      peremptorily the career of the deliverer who had done so much for him,
+      degrading her from her place, throwing more than doubt upon her
+      inspiration, falsifying by force the promises which she had made&mdash;promises
+      which had never failed before,&mdash;was a worse and deeper sin on the
+      part of a young man, by right of his kingly office the very head of
+      knighthood and every chivalrous undertaking, than it could be on the part
+      of an old and subtle diplomatist who had never believed in such wild
+      measures, and all through had clogged the steps and endeavoured to
+      neutralise the mission of the warrior Maid. It is very clear, however,
+      that between them it was the King and his chamberlain who made this
+      assault upon Paris so evident and complete a failure. One day's repulse
+      was nothing in a siege. There had been one great repulse and several
+      lesser ones at Orleans. Jeanne, even though weakened by her wound, had
+      sprung up that morning full of confidence and courage. In no way was the
+      failure to be laid to her charge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this could never, perhaps, have been explained to the whole body of
+      the army, who had believed her word without a doubt and taken her success
+      for granted. If they had been wavering before, which seems possible&mdash;for
+      they must have been, to a considerable extent, new levies, the campaigners
+      of the Loire having accomplished their period of feudal service,&mdash;this
+      sudden downfall must have strengthened every doubt and damped every
+      enthusiasm. The Maid of whom such wonderful tales had been told, she who
+      had been the angel of triumph, the irresistible, before whom the English
+      fled, and the very walls fell down&mdash;was she after all only a
+      sorceress, as the others called her, a creature whose incantations had
+      failed after the flash of momentary success? Such impressions are too apt
+      to come like clouds over every popular enthusiasm, quenching the light and
+      chilling the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was thus dragged back to St. Denis against her will and every
+      instinct of her being, and there ensued three days of passionate debate
+      and discussion. For a moment it appeared as if she would have thrown off
+      the bonds of loyal obedience and pursued her mission at all hazards. Her
+      "voices," if they had previously given her uncertain sound, promising only
+      the support and succour of God, but no success, now spoke more plainly and
+      urged the continuance of the siege; and the Maid was torn in pieces
+      between the requirements of her celestial guardians and the force of
+      authority around her. If she had broken out into open rebellion who would
+      have followed her? She had never yet done so; when the King was against
+      her she had pleaded or forced an agreement, and received or snatched a
+      consent from the malevolent chamberlain, as at Jargeau and Troyes. Never
+      yet had she set herself in public opposition to the will of her sovereign.
+      She had submitted to all kinds of tests and trials rather than this. And
+      to have lain half a day wounded outside Paris and to stand there pleading
+      her cause with her wound still unhealed were not likely things to
+      strengthen her powers of resistance. "The Voices bade me remain at St.
+      Denis," she said afterwards at her trial, "and I desired to remain; but
+      the seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If I had not been wounded I
+      should never have left." Added to the force of these circumstances, it was
+      no doubt apparent to all that to resume operations after that forced
+      retreat, and the betrayal it gave of divided counsels, would be less
+      hopeful than ever. These arguments even convinced the bold La Hire, who
+      for his part, being no better than a Free Lance, could move hither and
+      thither as he would; and thus the first defeat of the Maid, a disaster
+      involving all the misfortunes that followed in its train, was
+      accomplished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne's last act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern reader
+      gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a certain
+      melancholy meaning. Before she left, dragged almost a captive in the train
+      of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of the cathedral the
+      armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris. It was not an unusual
+      act for a warrior to do this on his return from the wars. And if she had
+      been about to renounce her mission it would have been easily
+      comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind. Was it a movement of
+      despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the arms in which she had
+      suffered defeat should not be borne again?&mdash;or was it done in some
+      gleam of higher revelation made to her that defeat, too, was a part of
+      victory, and that not without that bitterness of failure could the fame of
+      the soldier of Christ be perfected? I have remarked already that we hear
+      no more of the white armour, inlaid with silver and dazzling like a
+      mirror, in which she had begun her career; perhaps it was the remains of
+      that panoply of triumph which she laid out before the altar of the patron
+      saint of France, all dim now with hard work and the shadow of defeat. It
+      must have marked a renunciation of one kind or another, the sacrifice of
+      some hope. She was no longer Jeanne the invincible, the triumphant, whose
+      very look made the enemy tremble and flee, and gave double force to every
+      Frenchman's arm. Was she then and there abdicating, becoming to her own
+      consciousness Jeanne the champion only, honest and true, but no longer the
+      inspired Maid, the Envoy of God? To these questions we can give no answer;
+      but the act is pathetic, and fills the mind with suggestions. She who had
+      carried every force triumphantly with her, and quenched every opposition,
+      bitter and determined though that had been, was now a thrall to be dragged
+      almost by force in an unworthy train. It is evident that she felt the
+      humiliation to the bottom of her heart. It is not for human nature to have
+      the triumph alone: the humiliation, the overthrow, the chill and tragic
+      shadow must follow. Jeanne had entered into that cloud when she offered
+      the armour, that had been like a star in front of the battle, at the
+      shrine of St. Denis.(2) Hers was now to be a sadder, a humbler, perhaps a
+      still nobler part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is enough to trace the further movements of the King to perceive how at
+      every step the iron must have entered deeper and deeper into the heart of
+      the Maid. He made his arrangements for the government of each of the towns
+      which had acknowledged him: Beauvais, Compiègne, Senlis, and the rest. He
+      appointed commissioners for the due regulation of the truce with Philip of
+      Burgundy. And then the retreating army took its march southward towards
+      the mild and wealthy country, all fertility and quiet, where a recreant
+      prince might feel himself safe and amuse himself at his leisure&mdash;by
+      Lagny, by Provins, by Bercy-sur Seine, where he had been checked before in
+      his retreat and almost forced to the march on Paris&mdash;by Sens, and
+      Montargis: until at last on the 29th of September, no doubt diminished by
+      the withdrawal of many a local troop and knight whose service was over,
+      the forces arrived at Gien, whence they had set forth at the end of June
+      for a series of victories. It is to be supposed that the King was well
+      enough satisfied with the conquests accomplished in three months. And,
+      indeed, in ordinary circumstances they would have formed a triumphant
+      list. Charles must have felt himself free to play after the work which he
+      had not done; and to leave his good fortune and the able negotiators, who
+      hoped to get Paris and other good things from Philip of Burgundy without
+      paying anything for them, to do the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We can imagine nothing more dreadful for the Maid than the months that
+      followed. The Court was not ungrateful to her; she received the warmest
+      welcome from the Queen; she had a <i>maison</i> arranged for her like the
+      household of a noble chief, with the addition of women and maidens of rank
+      to her existing staff, and everything which could serve to show that she
+      was one whom the King delighted to honour. And Charles would have her
+      apparelled gloriously like the king's daughter in the psalm. "He gave her
+      a mantle of cloth of gold, open at both sides, to wear over her armour,"
+      and apparently did his best to make her, if not a noble lady, yet into the
+      semblance of a noble young chevalière, one the glories of his Court, with
+      all the distinction of her achievements and all the complacences of a
+      carpet knight. It was said afterwards, in the absence of any graver
+      possibility of accusation, that she liked her fine clothes. The tears rise
+      to the eyes at such a suggestion. She was so natural that let us hope she
+      did, the martyr Maid whose torture had already begun. If that mantle of
+      gold gave her a moment of pleasure, it is something to be thankful for in
+      the midst of the dismal shadows that were already closing round her. They
+      were ready to give her any shining mantle, any beautiful dress, even a
+      title and a noble name if she would; but what the King and his counsellors
+      were determined on, was, that she should no more have the fame of
+      individual triumph, or do anything save under their orders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alençon, the gentle duke, with whom she had taken so much trouble, and who
+      had grown into a true and noble comrade, made one effort to free his
+      friend and leader. He planned an expedition into Normandy, where, with the
+      help of Jeanne, he hoped to inflict upon the English a loss so tremendous,
+      the destruction of their base of operations, that they would be compelled
+      to abandon the centre of France altogether, and leave the way open to
+      Paris and to the recovery of the entire kingdom; but the King, or La
+      Tremoïlle, as the historians prefer to say, would not permit Jeanne to
+      accompany him, and this hope came to nothing. Alençon disbanded his
+      troops, everything in the form of an army was broken up&mdash;the short
+      period of feudal service making this inevitable, unless new levies were
+      made&mdash;and no forces were left under arms except those bands which
+      formed the body-guard of the King. Nevertheless, there was plenty of work
+      to be done still, and the breaking up of the French forces encouraged many
+      a little garrison of English partisans, which would have yielded naturally
+      and easily to a strong national party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the midst of the winter, however, it seemed appropriate to the Court to
+      launch forth an expedition against some of the unsubdued towns, perhaps on
+      account of the mortal languishment of Jeanne herself, perhaps for some
+      other reason of its own. The first necessity was to collect the necessary
+      forces, and for this reason Jeanne came to Bourges, where she was lodged
+      in one of the great houses of the city, that of Raynard de Bouligny, <i>conseiller
+      de roi</i>, and his wife, Marguerite, one of the Queen's ladies. She was
+      there for three weeks collecting her men, and the noble gentlewoman, who
+      was her hostess, was afterwards in the Rehabilitation trial, one of the
+      witnesses to the purity of her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this lady and others we have a clear enough view of what the Maid was
+      in this second chapter of her history. She spent her time in the most
+      intimate intercourse with Madam Marguerite, sharing even her room, so that
+      nothing could be more complete than the knowledge of her hostess of every
+      detail of her young guest's life. And wonderful as was the difference
+      between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most famous woman in France,
+      the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her country, is as the life of
+      Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,&mdash;as simple, as devout, and as pure.
+      She loved to go to church for the early matins, but as it was not fit that
+      she should go out alone at that hour, she besought Madame Marguerite to go
+      with her. In the evening she went to the nearest church, and there with
+      all her old childish love for the church bells, she had them rung for half
+      an hour, calling together the poor, the beggars who haunt every Catholic
+      church, the poor friars and bedesmen, the penniless and forlorn from all
+      the neighbourhood. This custom would, no doubt, soon become known, and not
+      only her poor pensioners, but the general crowd would gather to gaze at
+      the Maid as well as to join in her prayers. It was her great pleasure to
+      sing a hymn to the Virgin, probably one of the litanies which the
+      unlearned worshipper loves, with its choruses and constant repetitions, in
+      company with all those untutored voices, in the dimness of the church,
+      while the twilight sank into night, and the twinkling stars of candles on
+      the altar made a radiance in the middle of the gloom. When she had money
+      to give she divided it, according to the liberal custom of her time, among
+      her poor fellow-worshippers. These evening services were her recreation.
+      The days were full of business, of enrolling soldiers, and regulating the
+      "lances," groups of retainers, headed by their lord, who came to perform
+      their feudal service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladies of the town who had the advantage of knowing Madame Marguerite
+      did not fail to avail themselves of this privilege, and thronged to visit
+      her wonderful guest. They brought her their sacred medals and rosaries to
+      bless, and asked her a hundred questions. Was she afraid of being wounded;
+      or was she assured that she would not be wounded? "No more than others,"
+      she said; and she put away their religious ornaments with a smile, bidding
+      Madame Marguerite touch them, or the visitors themselves, which would be
+      just as good as if she did it. She would seem to have been always smiling,
+      friendly, checking with a laugh the adulation of her visitors, many of
+      whom wore medals with her own effigy (if only one had been saved for us!)
+      as there were many banners made after the pattern of hers. But cheerful as
+      she was, a prevailing tone of sadness now appears to run through her life.
+      On several occasions she spoke to her confessor and chaplain, who attended
+      her everywhere, of her death. "If it should be my fate to die soon, tell
+      the King our master on my part to build chapels where prayer may be made
+      to the Most High for the salvation of the souls of those who shall die in
+      the wars for the defence of the kingdom." This was the one thing she
+      seemed anxious for, and it returned again and again to her mind. Her
+      thoughts indeed were heavy enough. Her larger enterprises had been cruelly
+      put a stop to: her companions-in-arms had been dispersed: she had been
+      separated from her lieutenant Alençon, and from all the friends between
+      whom and herself great mutual confidence had sprung up. Even the
+      commission which had at last been put in her hands was a trifling one and
+      led to nothing, bringing the King no nearer to any satisfactory end: and
+      the troops were under command of a new captain whom she scarcely knew,
+      d'Albert, who was the son-in-law of La Tremoïlle, and probably little
+      inclined to be a friend to Jeanne. In these circumstances there was little
+      of an exhilarating or promising kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless as an episode, few things had happened to Jeanne more
+      memorable than the siege of St. Pierre-le-Moutier. The first assault upon
+      the town was unsuccessful; the retreat had sounded and the troops were
+      streaming back from the point of attack, when Jean d'Aulon, the faithful
+      friend and brave gentleman who was at the head of the Maid's military
+      household, being himself wounded in the heel and unable to stand or walk,
+      saw the Maid almost alone before the stronghold, four or five men only
+      with her. He dragged himself up as well as he could upon his horse, and
+      hastened towards her, calling out to her to ask what she did there, and
+      why she did not retire with the rest. She answered him, taking off her
+      helmet to speak, that she would leave only when the place was taken&mdash;and
+      went on shouting for faggots and beams to make a bridge across the ditch.
+      It is to be supposed that seeing she paid no attention, nor budged a step
+      from that dangerous point, this brave man, wounded though he was, must
+      have made an effort to rally the retiring besiegers: but Jeanne seems to
+      have taken no notice of her desertion nor ever to have paused in her shout
+      for planks and gabions. "All to the bridge," she shouted, "<i>aux fagots
+      et aux claies tout le monde!</i> every one to the bridge." "Jeanne,
+      withdraw, withdraw! You are alone," some one said to her. Bareheaded, her
+      countenance all aglow, the Maid replied: "I have still with me fifty
+      thousand of my men." Were those the men whom the prophet's servant saw
+      when his eyes were opened and he beheld the innumerable company of angels
+      that surrounded his master? But Jeanne, rapt in the trance and ecstasy of
+      battle, gave no explanation. "To work, to work!" her clear voice went on,
+      ringing over the startled head of the good knight who knew war, but not
+      any rapture like this. History itself, awe-stricken, would almost have us
+      believe that alone with her own hand the Maid took the city, so entirely
+      does every figure disappear but that one, and the perplexed and terrified
+      spectator vainly urging her to give up so desperate an attempt. But no
+      doubt the shouts of a voice so strange to every such scene, the <i>vox
+      infantile</i>, the amazing and clear voice, silvery and womanly, <i>assez
+      femme</i>, and the efforts of d'Aulon to bring back the retreating troops
+      were successful, and Jeanne once more, triumphantly kept her word. The
+      place was strongly fortified, well provisioned, and full of people.
+      Therefore the whole narrative is little less than miraculous, though very
+      little is said of it. Had they but persevered, as she had said, a few
+      hours longer before Paris, who could tell that the same result might not
+      have been obtained?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not successful, however, with La Charité, which after a siege of a
+      month's duration still held out, and had to be abandoned. These long
+      operations of regular warfare were not in Jeanne's way; and her coadjutor
+      in command, it must be remembered, was in this case commissioned by her
+      chief enemy. We are told that she was left without supplies, and in the
+      depths of winter, in cold and rain and snow, with every movement hampered,
+      and the ineffective government ever ready to send orders of retreat, or to
+      cause bewildering and confusing delays by the want of every munition of
+      war. Finally, at all events, the French forces withdrew, and again an
+      unsuccessful enterprise was added to the record of the once victorious
+      Maid. That she went on continually promising victory as in her early
+      times, is probably the mere rumour spread by her detractors who were now
+      so many, for there is no real evidence that she did so. Everything rather
+      points to discouragement, uncertainty, and to a silent rage against the
+      coercion which she could not overcome.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) Clermont it was who deserted the Scots at the Battle of
+     the Herrings.
+
+     (2) Jeanne's arms, offered at St. Denis, were afterwards
+     taken by the English and sent to the King of England (all
+     except the sword with its ornaments of gold) without giving
+     anything to the church in return: "qui est pur sacrilege et
+     manifeste," says Jean Chartier.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX &mdash; COMPIÈGNE. 1430.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      By this time France was once more all in flames: the English and
+      Burgundians had entered and then abandoned Paris&mdash;Duke Philip
+      cynically leaving that city, which he had promised to give up to Charles,
+      to its own protection, in order to look after his more pressing personal
+      concerns: while Bedford spread fire and flame about the adjacent country,
+      retaking with much slaughter many of the towns which had opened their
+      gates to the King. Thus while Charles gave no attention to anything beyond
+      the Loire, and kept his chief champion there, as it were, on the leash,
+      permitting no return to the most important field of operations, almost all
+      that had been gained was again lost upon the banks of the Seine. This was
+      the state of affairs when Jeanne returned humbled and sad from the
+      abandoned siege of La Charité. Her enemy's counsels had triumphed all
+      round and this was the result. Individual fightings of no particular
+      account and under no efficient organisation were taking place day by day;
+      here a town stood out heroically, there another yielded to the foreign
+      arms; the population were thrown back into universal misery, the spring
+      fields trampled under foot, the villages burned, every evil of war in full
+      operation, invasion aggravated by faction, the English always aided by one
+      side of France against the other, and neither peace nor security anywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the aspect of affairs on one side. On the other appeared a still
+      less satisfactory scene. Charles amusing himself, his counsellors, La
+      Tremoïlle, and the Archbishop of Rheims carrying on fictitious
+      negotiations with Burgundy and playing with the Maid who was in their
+      power, sending her out to make a show and cast a spell, then dragging her
+      back at the end of their shameful chain: while the Court, the King and
+      Queen, and all their flattering attendants gilded that chain and tried to
+      make her forget by fine clothes and caresses, at once her mission and her
+      despair. They were not ungrateful, no: let us do them justice, for they
+      might well have added this to the number of their sins: mantles of cloth
+      of gold, patents of nobility were at her command, had these been what she
+      wanted. The only personal wrong they did to Jeanne was to set up against
+      her a sort of opposition, another enchantress and visionary who had
+      "voices" and apparitions too, and who was admitted to all the councils and
+      gave her advice in contradiction of the Maid, a certain Catherine de la
+      Rochelle, who was ready to say anything that was put into her mouth, but
+      who had done nothing to prove any mission for France or from God. We have
+      little light however upon the state of affairs in those castles, which one
+      after another were the abode of the Court during this disastrous winter.
+      They were safe enough on the other side of the Loire in the fat country
+      where the vines still flourished and the young corn grew. Now and then a
+      band of armed men was sent forth to succour a fighting town in the
+      suffering and struggling Île-de-France, always under the conflicting
+      orders of those intrigants and courtiers: but within the Court, all was
+      gay; "never man," as rough La Hire had said on an earlier occasion, "lost
+      his kingdom more gaily or with better grace" than did Charles. Where was
+      La Hire? Where was Dunois?&mdash;there is no appearance of these champions
+      anywhere. Alençon had returned to his province. Only La Tremoïlle and the
+      Archbishop holding all the strings in their hands, upsetting all military
+      plans, disgusting every chief, met and talked and carried on their busy
+      intrigues, and played their Sibyl&mdash;<i>Sibylle de carrefour</i>, says
+      one of the historians indignantly&mdash;against the Maid, who, all
+      discouraged and downcast, fretted by caresses, sick of inactivity, dragged
+      out the uneasy days in an uncongenial world; but Jeanne has left no record
+      of the sensations with which she saw these days pass, eating her heart
+      out, gazing over that rapid river, on the other side of which all the
+      devils were unchained and every result of her brief revolution was being
+      lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length however the impatience and despair were more than she could
+      bear; the Court was then at Sully and the spring had begun with its longer
+      days and more passable roads. Without a word to anyone the Maid left the
+      castle. The war had rolled towards these princely walls, as near as Melun,
+      which was threatened by the English. A little band of intimate servants
+      and associates, her two brothers, and a few faithful followers, were with
+      her. So far as we know she never saw Charles or his courtiers again. They
+      arrived at Melun in time to witness and to take part in the repulse of the
+      English, and it was here that a communication was make to Jeanne by her
+      saints of which afterwards there was frequent mention. Little had been
+      said of them during her dark time of inaction, and their tone was no
+      longer as of old. It was on the side of the moat of Melun where probably
+      she was superintending some necessary work to strengthen the
+      fortifications or to put them in better order for defence, that this
+      message reached her. The "Voices" which so often had urged her to victory
+      and engaged the faith of heaven for her success, had now a word to say,
+      secret and personal to herself. It was that she should be taken prisoner;
+      and the date was fixed, before the St. Jean. It was the middle of April
+      when this communication was made and the Feast of St. Jean, as everybody
+      knows, is in the end of June; two months only to work in, to strike
+      another blow for France. The "Voices" bade her not to fear, that God would
+      sustain her. But it would be impossible not to be startled by such a
+      sudden intimation in the midst of her reviving plans. The Maid made one
+      terrified prayer, that God would let her die when she was taken, not
+      subject her to long imprisonment; her heart prophetically sprang to a
+      sudden consciousness of the most likely, most terrible end that lay before
+      her, for she had been often enough threatened with the stake and the fire
+      to know what to expect. But the saintly voices made no reply. They bade
+      her be strong and of good courage: is not that the all-sustaining,
+      all-delusive message for every martyr? It was the will of God, and His
+      support and sustaining power, which we often take to mean deliverance, but
+      which is not always so&mdash;were promised. She asked where this terrible
+      thing was to happen, but received no reply. Natural and simple as she was,
+      she confessed afterwards that had she known she was to be taken on any
+      certain day, she would not have gone out to meet the catastrophe unless
+      she had been forced by evident duty to do so. But this was not revealed to
+      her. "Before the St. Jean!" It must almost have seemed a guarantee that
+      until that time or near it she was safe. She would seem to have said
+      nothing immediately of this vision to sadden those about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime, however, there were other adventures in store for her.
+      From Melun to Lagny was no long journey, but it was through a country full
+      of enemies in which she must have been subject to attack at every corner
+      of every road or field. And she had not been long in the latter place
+      which is said to have had a garrison of Scots, when news came of the
+      passing of a band of Burgundians, a troop of raiders indeed, ravaging the
+      country, taking advantage of the war to rob and lay waste churches,
+      villages, and the growing fields wherever they passed. The troops was led
+      by Franquet d'Arras, a famous "<i>pillard</i>," robber of God and man.
+      Jeanne set out to encounter this bandit with a party of some four hundred
+      men, and various noble companions, among whom, however, we find no name
+      familiar in her previous career, a certain Hugh Kennedy, a Scot, who is to
+      be met with in various records of fighting, being one of the most notable
+      among them. Franquet's band fought vigorously but were cut to pieces, and
+      the leader was taken prisoner. When this man was brought back to Lagny, a
+      prisoner to be ransomed, and whom Jeanne desired to exchange for one of
+      her own side, the law laid claim to him as a criminal. He was a prisoner
+      of war: what was it the Maid's duty to do? The question is hotly debated
+      by the historians and it was brought against her at her trial. He was a
+      murderer, a robber, the scourge of the country&mdash;especially to the
+      poor whom Jeanne protected and cared for everywhere, was he pitiless and
+      cruel. She gave him up to justice, and he was tried, condemned, and
+      beheaded. If it was wrong from a military point of view, it was her only
+      error, and shows how little there was with which to reproach her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Lagny other things passed of a more private nature. Every day and all
+      day long her "voices" repeated their message in her ears. "Before the St.
+      Jean." She repeated it to some of her closest comrades but left herself no
+      time to dwell upon it. Still worse than the giving up of Franquet was the
+      supposed resuscitation of a child, born dead, which its parents implored
+      her to pray for that it might live again to be baptised. She explained the
+      story to her judges afterwards. It was the habit of the time, nay, we
+      believe continues to this day in some primitive places, to lay the dead
+      infant on the altar in such a case, in hope of a miracle. "It is true,"
+      said Jeanne, "that the maidens of the town were all assembled in the
+      church praying God to restore life that it might be baptised. It is also
+      true that I went and prayed with them. The child opened its eyes, yawned
+      three or four times, was christened and died. This is all I know." The
+      miracle is not one that will find much credit nowadays. But the devout
+      custom was at least simple and intelligible enough, though it afforded an
+      excellent occasion to attribute witchcraft to the one among those maidens
+      who was not of Lagny but of God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Lagny Jeanne went on to various other places in danger, or which
+      wanted encouragement and help. She made two or three hurried visits to
+      Compiègne, which was threatened by both parties of the enemy; at one time
+      raising the siege of Choicy, near Compiègne, in company with the
+      Archbishop of Rheims, a strange brother in arms. On another of her visits
+      to Compiègne there is said to have occurred an incident which, if true,
+      reveals to us with very sad reality the trouble that overshadowed the
+      Maid. She had gone to early mass in the Church of St. Jacques, and
+      communicated, as was her custom. It must have been near Easter&mdash;perhaps
+      the occasion of the first communion of some of the children who are so
+      often referred to, among whom she loved to worship. She had retired behind
+      a pillar on which she leaned as she stood, and a number of people, among
+      whom were many children, drew near after the service to gaze at her.
+      Jeanne's heart was full, and she had no one near to whom she could open it
+      and relieve her soul. As she stood against the pillar her trouble burst
+      forth. "Dear friends and children," she said, "I have to tell you that I
+      have been sold and betrayed, and will soon be given up to death. I beg of
+      you to pray for me; for soon I shall no longer have any power to serve the
+      King and the kingdom." These words were told to the writer who records
+      them, in the year 1498, by two very old men who had heard them, being
+      children at the time. The scene was one to dwell in a child's
+      recollection, and, if true, it throws a melancholy light upon the thoughts
+      that filled the mind of Jeanne, though her actions may have seemed as
+      energetic and her impulses as strong as in her best days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the news came speeding through the country that Compiègne was
+      being invested on all sides. It had been the headquarters of Charles and
+      had received him with acclamations, and therefore the alarm of the
+      townsfolk for the retribution awaiting them, should they fall into the
+      hands of the enemy, was great; it was besides a very important position.
+      Jeanne was at Crespy en Valois when this news reached her. She set out
+      immediately (May 22, 1430) to carry aid to the garrison: "<i>F'irai voir
+      mes bons amis de Compiègne</i>," she said. The words are on the base of
+      her statue which now stands in the Place of that town. Something of her
+      early impetuosity was in this impulse, and no apparent dread of any
+      fatality. She rode all night at the head of her party, and arrived before
+      the dawn, a May morning, the 23d, still a month from the fatal "St. Jean."
+      Though the prophecy was always in her ears, she must have felt that whole
+      month still before her, with a sensation of almost greater safety because
+      the dangerous moment was fixed. The town received her with joy, and no
+      doubt the satisfaction and relief which hailed her and her reinforcements
+      gave additional fervour to the Maid, and drove out of her mind for a
+      moment the fatal knowledge which oppressed it. There is some difficulty in
+      understanding the events of this day, but the lucid narrative of
+      Quicherat, which we shall now quote, gives a very vivid picture of it.
+      Jeanne had timed her arrival so early in the morning, probably with the
+      intention of keeping the adversaries in their camps unaware of so
+      important an addition to the garrison, in order that she might surprise
+      them by the sortie she had determined upon; but no doubt the news had
+      leaked forth somehow, if through no other means, by the sudden ringing of
+      the bells and sounds of joy from the city. She paid her usual visits to
+      the churches, and noted and made all her arrangements for the sortie with
+      her usual care, occupying the long summer day in these preparations. And
+      it was not till five o'clock in the evening that everything was complete,
+      and she sallied forth. We hear nothing of the state of the town, or of any
+      suspicion existing at the time as to the governor Flavy who was afterwards
+      believed by some to be the man who sold and betrayed her. It is a question
+      debated warmly like all these questions. He was a man of bad reputation,
+      but there is no evidence that he was a traitor. The incidents are all
+      natural enough, and seem to indicate clearly the mere fortune of war upon
+      which no man can calculate. We add from Quicherat the description of the
+      field and what took place there:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Compiègne is situated on the left bank of the Oise. On the other side
+      extends a great meadow, nearly a mile broad, at the end of which the
+      rising ground of Picardy rises suddenly like a wall, shutting in the
+      horizon. The meadow is so low and so subject to floods that it is crossed
+      by an ancient foot of the low hills. Three village churches mark the
+      extent of the landscape visible from the walls of Compiègne; Margny
+      (sometimes spelt Marigny) at the end of the road; Clairoix three quarters
+      of a league higher up, at the confluence of the two rivers, the Aronde and
+      the Oise, close to the spot where another tributary, the Aisne, also flows
+      into the Oise; and Venette a mile and a half lower down. The Burgundians
+      had one camp at Margny, another at Clairoix; the headquarters of the
+      English were at Venette. As for the inhabitants of Compiègne, their first
+      defence facing the enemy was one of those redoubts or towers which the
+      chronicles of the fifteenth century called a boulevard. It was placed at
+      the end of the bridge and commanded the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The plan of the Maid was to make a sortie towards the evening, to attack
+      Margny and afterwards Clairoix, and then at the opening of the Aronde
+      valley to meet the Duke of Burgundy and his forces who were lodged there,
+      and who would naturally come to the aid of his other troops when attacked.
+      She took no thought for the English, having already carefully arranged
+      with Flavy how they should be prevented from cutting off her retreat. The
+      governor provided against any chance of this by arming the boulevard
+      strongly with archers to drive off any advancing force, and also by
+      keeping ready on the Oise a number of covered boats to receive the
+      foot-soldiers in case of a retrograde movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The action began well: the garrison of Margny yielded in the twinkling of
+      an eye. That of Clairoix rushing to the support of their brothers in arms
+      was repulsed, then in its turn repulsed the French; and three times this
+      alternative of advance and retreat took place on the flat ground of the
+      meadow without serious injury to either party. This gave time to the
+      English to take part in the fray;(1) though thanks to the precautions of
+      Flavy all they could do was to swell the ranks of the Burgundians. But
+      unfortunately the rear of the Maid's army was struck with the possibility
+      that a diversion might be attempted from behind, and their retreat cut
+      off. A panic seized them; they broke their ranks, turned back and fled,
+      some to the boats, some to the barrier of the boulevard. The English
+      witnessing this flight rushed after them, secure now on the side of
+      Compiègne, where the archers no longer ventured to shoot lest they should
+      kill the fugitives instead of the enemies. They (the English) thus got
+      possession of the raised road, and pushed on so hotly after the fugitives
+      that their horses' heads touched the backs of the crowd. It thus became
+      necessary for the safety of the town to close the gates until the barrier
+      of the boulevard should be set up again."
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      These disastrous accidents had taken place while Jeanne, charging in front
+      with her companions and body-guard, remained quite unaware of any
+      misfortune. She would hear no call to retreat, even when her companions
+      were roused to the dangers of their position. "Forward, they are ours!"
+      was all her cry. As at St. Pierre-le-Moutier she was ready to defeat the
+      Burgundian army alone. At length the others perceiving something of what
+      had happened seized her bridle and forced her to retire. She was of
+      herself too remarkable a figure to be concealed amid the group of armed
+      men who rode with her, encircling her, defending the rear of the flying
+      party. Over her armour she wore a crimson tunic, or according to some
+      authorities a short cloak, of gorgeous material embroidered with gold, and
+      though by this time the twilight must have afforded a partial shelter, yet
+      the knowledge that she was there gave keenness to every eye. Behind, the
+      scattered Burgundians had rallied and begun to pursue, while the armour
+      and spears of the English glittered in front between the little party and
+      the barrier which was blocked by a terrified crowd of fugitives. Even then
+      a party of horsemen might have cut their way through; but at the moment
+      when Jeanne and her followers drew near, the barrier was sharply closed
+      and the wild, confused, and fighting crowd, treading each other down,
+      struggling for life, were forced back upon the English lances. Thus the
+      retreating band riding hard along the raised road, in order and unbroken,
+      found the path suddenly barred by the forces of the enemy, the fugitives
+      of their own army, and the closed gates of the town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An attempt was then made by the Maid and her companions to turn towards
+      the western gate where there still might have been a chance of safety; but
+      by this time the smaller figure among all those steel-clad men, and the
+      waving mantle, must have been distinguished through the dusk and the dust.
+      There was a wild rush of combat and confusion, and in a moment she was
+      surrounded, seized, her horse and her person, notwithstanding all
+      resistance. With cries of "Rendez vous," and many an evil name, fierce
+      faces and threatening weapons closed round her. One of her assailants&mdash;a
+      Burgundian knight, a Picard archer, the accounts differ&mdash;caught her
+      by her mantle and dragged her from her horse; no Englishman let us be
+      thankful, though no doubt all were equally eager and ready. Into the midst
+      of that shouting mass of men, in the blinding cloud of dust, in the
+      darkening of the night, the Maid of France disappeared for one terrible
+      moment, and was lost to view. And then, and not till then, came a clamour
+      of bells into the night, and all the steeples of Compiègne trembled with
+      the call to arms, a sally to save the deliverer. Was it treachery? Was it
+      only a perception, too late, of the danger? There are not wanting voices
+      to say that a prompt sally might have saved Jeanne, and that it was quite
+      within the power of the Governor and city had they chosen. Who can answer
+      so dreadful a suggestion? it is too much shame to human nature to believe
+      it. Perhaps within Compiègne as without, they were too slow to perceive
+      the supreme moment, too much overwhelmed to snatch any chance of rescue
+      till it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Happily we have no light upon the tumult around the prisoner, the ugly
+      triumph, the shouts and exultation of the captors who had seized the
+      sorceress at last; nor upon the thoughts of Jeanne, with her threatened
+      doom fulfilled and unknown horrors before her, upon which imagination must
+      have thrown the most dreadful light, however strongly her courage was
+      sustained by the promise of succour from on high. She had not been sent
+      upon this mission as of old. No heavenly voice had said to her "Go and
+      deliver Compiègne." She had undertaken that warfare on her own charges
+      with no promise to encourage her, only the certainty of being overthrown
+      "before the St. Jean." But the St. Jean was still far off, a long month of
+      summer days between her and that moment of fate! So far as we can see
+      Jeanne showed no unseemly weakness in this dark hour. One account tells us
+      that she held her sword high over her head declaring that it was given by
+      a higher than any who could claim its surrender there. But she neither
+      struggled nor wept. Not a word against her constancy and courage could any
+      one, then or after, find to say. The Burgundian chronicler tells us one
+      thing, the French another. "The Maid, easily recognised by her costume of
+      crimson and by the standard which she carried in her hand, alone continued
+      to defend herself," says one; but that we are sure could not have been the
+      case as long as d'Aulon, who accompanied her, was still able to keep on
+      his horse. "She yielded and gave her parole to Lyonnel, bâtard de
+      Wandomme," says another; but Jeanne herself declares that she gave her
+      faith to no one, reserving to herself the right to escape if she could. In
+      that dark evening scene nothing is clear except the fact that the Maid was
+      taken, to the exultation and delight of her captors and to the terror and
+      grief of the unhappy town, vainly screaming with all its bells to arms,&mdash;and
+      with its sons and champions by hundreds dying under the English lances and
+      in the dark waves of the Oise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The archer or whoever it was who secured this prize, took Jeanne back,
+      along the bloody road with its relics of the fight, to Margny, the
+      Burgundian camp, where the leaders crowded together to see so important a
+      prisoner. "Thither came soon after," says Monstrelet, "the Duke of
+      Burgundy from his camp of Coudon, and there assembled the English, the
+      said Duke and those of the other camps in great numbers, making, one with
+      the other, great cries and rejoicings on the taking of the Maid: whom the
+      said Duke went to see in the lodging where she was and spoke some words to
+      her which I cannot call to mind, though I was there present; after which
+      the said Duke and the others withdrew for the night, leaving the Maid in
+      the keeping of Messer John of Luxembourg"&mdash;to whom she had been
+      immediately sold by her first captor. The same night, Philip, this noble
+      Duke and Prince of France, wrote a letter to convey the blessed
+      information:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The great news of this capture should be spread everywhere and brought to
+      the knowledge of all, that they may see the error of those who could
+      believe and lend themselves to the pretensions of such a woman. We write
+      this in the hope of giving you joy, comfort, and consolation, and that you
+      may thank God our Creator. Pray that it may be His holy will to be more
+      and more favourable to the enterprises of our royal master and to the
+      restoration of his sway over all his good and faithful subjects."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This royal master was Henry VI. of England, the baby king, doomed already
+      to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and reign. The
+      French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally, have the air of
+      putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on that of his
+      contemporaries in general, to the score of the English, which is hard
+      measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could in no way be
+      attributed to the other nation of which he was the natural enemy, or at
+      least, antagonist. Very naturally the subsequent proceedings in all their
+      horror and cruelty are equally put down to the English account, although
+      Frenchmen took, exulted over as a prisoner, tried and condemned as an
+      enemy of God and the Church, the spotless creature who was France
+      incarnate, the very embodiment of her country in all that was purest and
+      noblest. We shall see with what spontaneous zeal all France, except her
+      own small party, set to work to accomplish this noble office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost before one could draw breath the University of Paris claimed her as
+      a proper victim for the Inquisition. Compiègne made no sally for her
+      deliverance; Charles, no attempt to ransom her. From end to end of France
+      not a finger was lifted for her rescue; the women wept over her, the poor
+      people still crowded around the prisoner wherever seen, but the France of
+      every public document, of every practical power, the living nation, when
+      it did not utter cries of hatred, kept silence. We in England have over
+      and over again acknowledged with shame our guilty part in her murder; but
+      still to this day the Frenchman tries to shield his under cover of the
+      English influence and terror. He cannot deny La Tremoïlle, nor Cauchon,
+      nor the University, nor the learned doctors who did the deed; individually
+      he is ready to give them all up to the everlasting fires which one cannot
+      but hope are kept alive for some people in spite of all modern
+      benevolences; but he skilfully turns back to the English as a moving cause
+      of everything. Nothing can be more untrue. The English were not better
+      than the French, but they had the excuse at least of being the enemy.
+      France saved by a happy chance her <i>blanches mains</i> from the actual
+      blood of the pure and spotless Maid; but with exultation she prepared the
+      victim for the stake, sent her thither, played with her like a cat with a
+      mouse and condemned her to the fire. This is not to free us from our
+      share: but it is the height of hypocrisy to lay the blood of Jeanne,
+      entirely to our door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Jeanne's inspiration proved itself over again in blood and tears; it
+      had been proved already on battle-field and city wall, with loud trumpets
+      of joy and victory. But the "voices" had spoken again, sounding another
+      strain; not always of glory&mdash;it is not the way of God; but of prison,
+      downfall, distress. "Be not astonished at it," they said to her; "God will
+      be with you." From day to day they had spoken in the same strain, with no
+      joyful commands to go forth and conquer, but the one refrain: "Before the
+      St. Jean." Perhaps there was a certain relief in her mind at first when
+      the blow fell and the prophecy was accomplished. All she had to do now was
+      to suffer, not to be surprised, to trust in God that He would support her.
+      To Jeanne, no doubt, in the confidence and inexperience of her youth, that
+      meant that God would deliver her. And so He did; but not as she expected.
+      The sunshine of her life was over, and now the long shadow, the bitter
+      storm was to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing could be more remarkable than the response of France in general to
+      this extraordinary event. In Paris there were bonfires lighted to show
+      their joy, the <i>Te Deum</i> was sung at Notre Dame. At the Court Charles
+      and his counsellors amused themselves with another prophet, a shepherd
+      from the hills who was to rival Jeanne's best achievements, but never did
+      so. Only the towns which she had delivered had still a tender thought for
+      Jeanne. At Tours the entire population appeared in the streets with bare
+      feet, singing the <i>Miserere</i> in penance and affliction. Orleans and
+      Blois made public prayers for her safety. Rheims, in which there was much
+      independent interest in Jeanne and her truth, had to be specially soothed
+      by a letter from the Archbishop, in which he made out with great
+      cleverness that it was the fault of Jeanne alone that she was taken. "She
+      did nothing but by her own will, without obeying the commandments of God,"
+      he says; "she would hear no counsel, but followed her own pleasure,"; and
+      it is in this letter that we hear of the shepherd lad who was to replace
+      Jeanne, and that it was his opinion or revelation that God had suffered
+      the Maid to be taken because of her growing pride, because she loved fine
+      clothes, and preferred her own will to any guidance. We do not know
+      whether this contented the city of Rheims; similar reasoning however seems
+      to have silenced France. Nobody uttered a protest, nor struck a blow; the
+      mournful procession of Tours, where she had been first known in the outset
+      of her career, the prayers of Orleans which she had delivered, are the
+      only exceptions we know of. Otherwise there was lifted in France neither
+      voice nor hand to avert her doom.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) The three camps must have formed a sort of irregular
+     triangle. The English at Venette being only half a mile from
+     the gates of Compiègne.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X &mdash; THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We have here to remark a complete suspension of all the ordinary laws at
+      once of chivalry and of honest warfare. Jeanne had been captured as a
+      general at the head of her forces. She was a prisoner of war. Such a
+      prisoner ordinarily, even in the most cruel ages, is in no bodily danger.
+      He is worth more alive than dead&mdash;a great ransom perhaps&mdash;perhaps
+      the very end of the warfare, and the accomplishment of everything it was
+      intended to gain: at least he is most valuable to exchange for other
+      important prisoners on the opposite side. It was like taking away so much
+      personal property to kill a prisoner, an outrage deeply resented by his
+      captor and unjustified by any law. It was true that Jeanne herself had
+      transgressed this universal custom but a little while before, by giving up
+      Franquet d'Arras to his prosecutors. But Franquet was beyond the
+      courtesies of war, a noted criminal, robber, and destroyer: yet she ought
+      not perhaps to have departed from the military laws of right and wrong
+      while everything in the country was under the hasty arbitration of war. No
+      one, however, so far as we know, produces this matter of Franquet as a
+      precedent in her own case. From the first moment of her seizure there was
+      no question of the custom and privilege of warfare. She was taken as a
+      wild animal might have been taken, the only doubt being how to make the
+      most signal example of her. Vengeance in the gloomy form of the
+      Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such word as ransom was breathed
+      from her own side, none was demanded, none was offered. Her case is at
+      once separated from every other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed to be
+      the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to succour and
+      help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something of the subtle
+      jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger side, but yet always
+      existing, in the abrogation of every law of chivalry as well as of
+      warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is indeed of the highest strain
+      of generosity who can bear to be beaten by a woman. And all the seething,
+      agitated world of France had been beaten by this girl. The English and
+      Burgundians, in the ordinary sense of the word, had been overcome in fair
+      field, forced to fly before her; the French, her own side, had experienced
+      an even more penetrating downfall by having the honours of victory taken
+      from them, she alone winning the day where they had all failed. This is
+      bitterer, perhaps, than merely to be compelled to raise a siege or to fail
+      in a fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions, but the praise was to Jeanne
+      who never struck a blow. Such great hearts as Dunois, such a courteous
+      prince as Alençon, were too magnanimous to feel, or at least to resent,
+      the grievance; they seconded her and fought under her with a nobility of
+      mind and disinterestedness beyond praise; but it was not to be supposed
+      that the common mass of the French captains were like these; she had
+      wronged and shamed them by taking the glory from them, as much as she had
+      shamed the English by making those universal victors fly before her. The
+      burghers whom she had rescued, the poor people who were her brethren and
+      whom she sought everywhere, might weep and cry out to Heaven, but they
+      were powerless at such a moment. And every law that might have helped her
+      was pushed aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears in
+      the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and implacable of
+      all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an hour, a letter was
+      addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital. Quicherat speaks of it
+      as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-general of the Inquisition,
+      written by the officials of the University; others tell us that an
+      independent letter was sent from the University to second that of the
+      Inquisitor. The University we may add was not a university like one of
+      ours, or like any existing at the present day. It was an ecclesiastical
+      corporation of the highest authority in every cause connected with the
+      Church, while gathering law, philosophy, and literature under its wing.
+      The first theologians, the most eminent jurists were collected there, not
+      by any means always in alliance with the narrower tendencies and methods
+      of the Inquisition. It is notable, however, that this great institution
+      lost no time in claiming the prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was
+      less her career as a warrior than her position as a sorceress. The actual
+      facts of her life were of secondary importance to them. Orleans, Rheims,
+      even her attack upon Paris were nothing in comparison with the black art
+      which they believed to be her inspiration. The guidance of Heaven which
+      was not the guidance of the Church was to them a claim which meant only
+      rebellion of the direst kind. They had longed to seize her and strip her
+      of her presumptuous pretensions from the first moment of her appearance.
+      They could not allow a day of her overthrow to pass by without snatching
+      at this much-desired victim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial for
+      heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame, the rack
+      and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly attractive to
+      the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped for, of these
+      strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into which we would all
+      fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better understanding than has
+      ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it is the strange and dreadful
+      pleasure of seeing a soul driven to extremity and fighting for its life
+      through all the subtleties of thought and fierce attacks of interrogation&mdash;or
+      the mere love of inflicting torture, misery, and death, which the Church
+      was prevented from doing in the common way, it is impossible to tell; but
+      there is no doubt that a thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the
+      prey, a sense of horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the air,
+      whenever such a tribunal is thought of. The thrill, the stir, the
+      eagerness among those black birds of doom is more evident than usual in
+      the headlong haste of that demand. <i>Sous l'influence de l'Angleterre</i>,
+      say the historians; the more shame for them if it was so; but they were
+      clearly under influence wider and more infallible, the influence of that
+      instinct, whatever it may be, which makes a trial for heresy ten thousand
+      times more cruel, less restrained by any humanities of nature, than any
+      other kind of trial which history records.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of Jeanne,
+      "called the Maid," as having "dogmatised, sown, published, and caused to
+      be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued great
+      scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith." "Using the rights
+      of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy See of Rome we
+      instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the Catholic faith, and
+      under penalty of the law: and all other Catholic persons of whatsoever
+      condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate, to send or to bring as
+      prisoner before us with all speed and surety the said Jeanne, vehemently
+      suspected of various crimes springing from heresy, that proceedings may be
+      taken against her before us in the name of the Holy Inquisition, and with
+      the favour and aid of the doctors and masters of the University of Paris,
+      and other notable counsellors present there."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the
+      University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry. We can only reply
+      again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests! But there was
+      very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there is an
+      eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like the
+      headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of action
+      suggested by a third party. Nor is there anything to lead us to believe
+      that the movement was not spontaneous. It is little likely, indeed, that
+      the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any inspired maid, any
+      more than the enlightened Oxford would do so. But the ideas of the
+      fifteenth century were widely different, and witchcraft and heresy were
+      the most enthralling and exciting of subjects, as they are still to
+      whosoever believes in them, learned or unlearned, great or small.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who loved
+      Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths by this
+      catastrophe. We have no sympathy with those who compare the career of any
+      mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and passion of our Lord.
+      Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous element the disappointment of
+      their hopes must have been in the misery of the first disciples, the
+      Apostles, the mother, all the spectators who had watched with wonder and
+      faith the mission of the Messiah. Had it failed? had all the signs come to
+      nothing, all those divine words and ways, to our minds so much more
+      wonderful than any miracles? Was there no meaning in them? Were they mere
+      unaccountable delusions, deceptions of the senses, inspirations perhaps of
+      mere genius&mdash;not from God at all except in a secondary way? In the
+      three terrible days that followed the Crucifixion the burden of a world
+      must have lain on the minds of those who had seen every hope fail: no
+      legions of angels appearing, no overwhelming revelation from heaven, no
+      change in a moment out of misery into the universal kingship, the
+      triumphant march. That was but the self-delusion of the earth which
+      continually travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the most terrible of all
+      despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest nothing should be true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the
+      deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself. Were
+      her first triumphs accidents merely, were her "voices" delusions, had she
+      been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the servant? It
+      was a stupor which quenched every voice&mdash;a great silence through the
+      country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours. The Compiègne
+      people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do not mention Jeanne
+      at all. We need not immediately take into account the baser souls always
+      plentiful, the envious captains and the rest who might be secretly
+      rejoicing. The entire country, both friends and foes, had come to a
+      dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The last circumstance of
+      which we must remind the reader, and which was of the greatest importance,
+      is, that it was only a small part of France that knew anything personally
+      of Jeanne. From Tours it is a far cry to Picardy. All her triumphs had
+      taken place in the south. The captive of Beaulieu and Beaurevoir spent the
+      sad months of her captivity among a population which could have heard of
+      her only by flying rumours coming from hostile quarters. From the midland
+      of France to the sea, near to which her prison was situated, is a long
+      way, and those northern districts were as unlike the Orleannais as if they
+      had been in two different countries. Rouen in Normandy no more resembled
+      Rheims, than Edinburgh resembled London: and in the fifteenth century that
+      was saying a great deal. Nothing can be more deceptive than to think of
+      these separate and often hostile duchies as if they bore any resemblance
+      to the France of to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captor of Jeanne was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg and took her as we
+      have seen to the quarters of his master at Margny, into whose hands she
+      thenceforward passed. She was kept in the camp three or four days and then
+      transferred to the castle of Beaulieu, which belonged to him; and
+      afterwards to the more important stronghold of Beaurevoir, which seems to
+      have been his principal residence. We know very few details of her
+      captivity. According to one chronicler, d'Aulon, her faithful friend and
+      intendant, was with her at least in the former of those prisons, where at
+      first she would appear to have been hopeful and in good spirits, if we may
+      trust to the brief conversation between her and d'Aulon, which is one of
+      the few details which reach us of that period. While he lamented over the
+      probable fate of Compiègne she was confident. "That poor town of Compiègne
+      that you loved so much," he said, "by this time it will be in the hands of
+      the enemies of France." "No," said the Maid, "the places which the king of
+      Heaven brought back to the allegiance of the gentle King Charles by me,
+      will not be retaken by his enemies." In this case at least the prophecy
+      came true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And perhaps there might have been at first a certain relief in Jeanne's
+      mind, such as often follows after a long threatened blow has fallen. She
+      had no longer the vague tortures of suspense, and probably believed that
+      she would be ransomed as was usual: and in this silence and seclusion her
+      "voices" which she had not obeyed as at first, but yet which had not
+      abandoned her, nor shown estrangement, were more near and audible than
+      amid the noise and tumult of war. They spoke to her often, sometimes three
+      times a day, as she afterwards said, in the unbroken quiet of her prison.
+      And though they no longer spoke of new enterprises and victories, their
+      words were full of consolation. But it was not long that Jeanne's young
+      and vigorous spirit could content itself with inaction. She was no mystic;
+      willingly giving herself over to dreams and visions is more possible to
+      the old than to the young. Her confidence and hope for her good friends of
+      Compiègne gave way before the continued tale of their sufferings, and the
+      inveterate siege which was driving them to desperation. No doubt the worst
+      news was told to Jeanne, and twice over she made a desperate attempt to
+      escape, in hope of being able to succour them, but without any sanction,
+      as she confesses, from her spiritual instructors. At Beaulieu the attempt
+      was simple enough: the narrative seems to imply that the doorway, or some
+      part of the wall of her room, had been closed with laths or planks nailed
+      across an opening: and between these she succeeded in slipping, "as she
+      was very slight," with the hope of locking the door to an adjoining
+      guard-room upon the men who had charge of her, and thus getting free. But
+      alas! The porter of the château, who had no business there, suddenly
+      appeared in the corridor, and she was discovered and taken back to her
+      chamber. At Beaurevoir, which was farther off, her attempt was a much more
+      desperate one, and indicates a despair and irritation of mind which had
+      become unbearable. At this place her own condition was much alleviated;
+      the castle was the residence of Jean de Luxembourg's wife and aunt, ladies
+      who visited Jeanne continually, and soon became interested and attached to
+      her; but as the master of the house was himself in the camp before
+      Compiègne, they had the advantage or disadvantage, as far as the prisoner
+      was concerned, of constant news, and Jeanne's trouble for her friends grew
+      daily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seems, indeed, after the assurance she had expressed at first, to have
+      fallen into great doubt and even carried on within herself a despairing
+      argument with her spiritual guides on this point, battling with these
+      saintly influences as in the depths of the troubled heart many have done
+      with the Creator Himself in similar circumstances. "How," she cried,
+      "could God let them perish who had been so good and loyal to their King?"
+      St. Catherine replied gently that He would Himself care for these <i>bons
+      amis</i>, and even promised that "before the St. Martin" relief would
+      come. But Jeanne had probably by this time&mdash;in her great
+      disappointment and loneliness, and with the sense in her of so much power
+      to help were she only free&mdash;got beyond her own control. They bade her
+      to be patient. One of them, amid their exhortations to accept her fate
+      cheerfully, and not to be astonished at it, seems to have conveyed to her
+      mind the impression that she should not be delivered till she had seen the
+      King of England. "Truly I will not see him! I would rather die than fall
+      into the hands of the English," cried Jeanne in her petulance. The King of
+      England is spoken of always, it is curious to note, as if he had been a
+      great, severe ruler like his father, never as the child he really was. But
+      Jeanne in her helplessness and impotence was impatient even with her
+      saints. Day by day the news came in from Compiègne, all that was
+      favourable to the Burgundians received with joy and thanksgiving by the
+      ladies of Luxembourg, while the captive consumed her heart with vain
+      indignation. At last Jeanne would seem to have wrought herself up to the
+      most desperate of expedients. Whether her room was in the donjon, or
+      whether she was allowed sufficient freedom in the house to mount to the
+      battlements there, we are not informed&mdash;probably the latter was the
+      case: for it was from the top of the tower that the rash girl at last
+      flung herself down, carried away by what sudden frenzy of alarm or sting
+      of evil tidings can never be known. Probably she had hoped that a miracle
+      would be wrought on her behalf, and that faith was all that was wanted, as
+      on so many other occasions. Perhaps she had heard of the negotiations to
+      sell her to the English, which would give a keener urgency to her
+      determination to get free; all that appears in the story, however, is her
+      wild anxiety about Compiègne and her <i>bons amis</i>. How she escaped
+      destruction no one knows. She was rescued for a more tremendous and harder
+      fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Maid was taken up as dead from the foot of the tower (the height is
+      estimated at sixty feet); but she was not dead, nor even seriously hurt.
+      Her frame, so slight that she had been able to slip between the bars put
+      up to secure her, had so little solidity that the shock would seem to have
+      been all that ailed her. She was stunned and unconscious and remained so
+      far some time; and for three days neither ate nor drank. But though she
+      was so humbled by the effects of the fall, "she was comforted by St.
+      Catherine, who bade her confess and implore the mercy of God" for her rash
+      disobedience&mdash;and repeated the promise that before Martinmas
+      Compiègne should be relieved. Jeanne did not perhaps in her rebellion
+      deserve this encouragement; but the heavenly ladies were kind and pitiful
+      and did not stand upon their dignity. The wonderful thing was that Jeanne
+      recovered perfectly from this tremendous leap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earthly ladies, though so completely on the other side, were scarcely
+      less kind to the Maid. They visited her daily, carried their news to her,
+      were very friendly and sweet: and no doubt other visitors came to make the
+      acquaintance of a prisoner so wonderful. There was one point on which they
+      were very urgent, and this was about her dress. It shamed and troubled
+      them to see her in the costume of a man. Jeanne had her good reasons for
+      that, which perhaps she did not care to tell them, fearing to shock the
+      ears of a demoiselle of Luxembourg with the suggestion of dangers of which
+      she knew nothing. No doubt it was true that while doing the serious work
+      of war, as she said afterwards, it was best that she should be dressed as
+      a man; but Jeanne had reason to know besides, that it was safer, among the
+      rough comrades and gaolers who now surrounded her, to wear the
+      tight-fitting and firmly fastened dress of a soldier. She answered the
+      ladies and their remonstrances with all the grace of a courtier. Could she
+      have done it she would rather have yielded the point to them, she said,
+      than to any one else in France, except the Queen. The women wherever she
+      went were always faithful to this young creature, so pure-womanly in her
+      young angel-hood and man-hood. The poor followed to kiss her hands or her
+      armour, the rich wooed her with tender flatteries and persuasions. There
+      is not record in all her career of any woman who was not her friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the last dreary month of that winter she was sent to the fortress of
+      Crotoy on the Somme, for what reason we are not told, probably to be more
+      near the English into whose hands she was about to be given up: again
+      another shameful bargain in which the guilt lies with the Burgundians and
+      not with the English. If Charles I. was sold as we Scots all indignantly
+      deny, the shame of the sale was on our nation, not on England, whom nobody
+      has ever blamed for the transaction. The sale of Jeanne was brutally
+      frank. It was indeed a ransom which was paid to Jean of Luxembourg with a
+      share to the first captor, the archer who had secured her; but it was
+      simple blood-money as everybody knew. At Crotoy she had once more the
+      solace of female society, again with much pressing upon her of their own
+      heavy skirts and hanging sleeves. A fellow-prisoner in the dungeon of
+      Crotoy, a priest, said mass every day and gave her the holy communion. And
+      her mind seems to have been soothed and calmed. Compiègne was relieved;
+      the saints had kept their word: she had that burden the less upon her
+      soul: and over the country there were against stirrings of French valour
+      and success. The day of the Maid was over, but it began to bear the fruit
+      of a national quickening of vigour and life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at Crotoy, in December, that she was transferred to English hands.
+      The eager offer of the University of Paris to see her speedy condemnation
+      had not been accepted, and perhaps the Burgundians had been willing to
+      wait, to see if any ransom was forthcoming from France. Perhaps too,
+      Paris, which sang the <i>Te Deum</i> when she was taken prisoner, began to
+      be a little startled by its own enthusiasm and to ask itself the question
+      what there was to be so thankful about?&mdash;a result which has happened
+      before in the history of that impulsive city:&mdash;and Paris was too near
+      the centre of France, where the balance seemed to be turning again in
+      favour of the national party, to have its thoughts distracted by such a
+      trial as was impending. It seemed better to the English leaders to conduct
+      their prisoner to a safer place, to the depths of Normandy where they were
+      most strong. They seem to have carried her away in the end of the year,
+      travelling slowly along the coast, and reaching Rouen by way of Eu and
+      Dieppe, as far away as possible from any risk of rescue. She arrived in
+      Rouen in the beginning of the year 1431, having thus been already for
+      nearly eight months in close custody. But there were no further
+      ministrations of kind women for Jeanne. She was now distinctly in the
+      hands of her enemies, those who had no sympathy or natural softening of
+      feeling towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The severities inflicted upon her in her new prison at Rouen were
+      terrible, almost incredible. We are told that she was kept in an iron cage
+      (like the Countess of Buchan in earlier days by Edward I.), bound hands,
+      and feet, and throat, to a pillar, and watched incessantly by English
+      soldiers&mdash;the latter being an abominable and hideous method of
+      torture which was never departed from during the rest of her life.
+      Afterwards, at the beginning of her trial she was relieved from the cage,
+      but never from the presence and scrutiny of this fierce and hateful
+      bodyguard. Such detestable cruelties were in the manner of the time, which
+      does not make us the less sicken at them with burning indignation and the
+      rage of shame. For this aggravation of her sufferings England alone was
+      responsible. The Burgundians at their worst had not used her so. It is
+      true that she was to them a piece of valuable property worth so much good
+      money; which is a powerful argument everywhere. But to the English she
+      meant no money: no one offered to ransom Jeanne on the side of her own
+      party, for whom she had done so much. Even at Tours and Orleans, so far as
+      appears, there was no subscription&mdash;to speak in modern terms,&mdash;no
+      cry among the burghers to gather their crowns for her redemption&mdash;not
+      a word, not an effort, only a barefooted procession, a mass, a Miserere,
+      which had no issue. France stood silent to see what would come of it; and
+      her scholars and divines swarmed towards Rouen to make sure that nothing
+      but harm should come of it to the ignorant country lass, who had set up
+      such pretences of knowing better than others. The King congratulated
+      himself that he had another prophetess as good as she, and a Heaven-sent
+      boy from the mountains who would do as well and better than Jeanne. Where
+      was Dunois? Where was La Hire,(1) a soldier bound by no conventions, a
+      captain whose troop went like the wind where it listed, and whose valour
+      was known? Where was young Guy de Laval, so ready to sell his lands that
+      his men might be fit for service? All silent; no man drawing a sword or
+      saying a word. It is evident that in this frightful pause of fate, Jeanne
+      had become to France as to England, the Witch whom it was perhaps a danger
+      to have had anything to do with, whose spells had turned the world upside
+      down for a moment: but these spells had become ineffectual or worn out as
+      is the nature of sorcery. No explanation, not even the well-worn and so
+      often valid one of human baseness, could explain the terrible situation,
+      if not this.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) La Hire was at Louvain, which we hear a little later the
+     new English levies would not march to besiege till the Maid
+     was dead, and where Dunois joined him in March of this fatal
+     year. These two at Louvain within a few leagues of Rouen and
+     not a sword drawn for Jeanne!&mdash;the wonder grows.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI &mdash; THE JUDGES. 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The name of Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, appears to us at this long
+      distance as arising out of the infernal mists, into which, when his
+      ministry of shame was accomplished, he disappeared again, bearing with him
+      nothing but hatred and ill fame. Yet in his own day and to his
+      contemporaries, he was not an inconsiderable man. He was of Rheims, a
+      great student, and excellent scholar, the friend of many good men, highly
+      esteemed among the ranks of the learned, a good man of business, which is
+      not always the attribute of a scholar, and at the same time a Burgundian
+      of pronounced sentiments, holding for his Duke, against the King. When
+      Beauvais was summoned by Charles, after his coronation, at that moment of
+      universal triumph when all seemed open for him to march upon Paris if he
+      would, the city had joyfully thrown open its doors to the royal army, and
+      in doing so had driven out its Bishop, who was hot on the other side. He
+      would not seem to have been wanted in Paris at that moment. The "triste
+      Bedford," as Michelet calls him, had no means of employing an ambitious
+      priest, no dirty work for the moment to give him. It is natural to suppose
+      that a man so admirably adapted for that employment went in search of it
+      to the ecclesiastical court, not beloved of England, which the Cardinal
+      Bishop of Winchester held there. Winchester was the only one of the House
+      of Lancaster who had money to carry on the government either at home or
+      abroad. The two priests, as the historians are always pleased to insinuate
+      in respect to ecclesiastics, soon understood each other, and Winchester
+      became aware that he had in Cauchon a tool ready for any shameful
+      enterprise. It is not, however, necessary to assume so much as this, for
+      we have not the least reason to believe that either one or the other of
+      them had the slightest doubt on the subject of Jeanne, or as to her
+      character. She was a pernicious witch, filling a hitherto invincible army
+      with that savage fright which is but too well understood among men, and
+      which produces cruel outrages as well as cowardly panic. The air of this
+      very day, while I write, is ringing with the story of a woman burnt to
+      death by her own family under the influence of that same horrible panic
+      and terror. Cauchon was the countryman, almost the <i>pays</i>&mdash;an
+      untranslatable expression,&mdash;of Jeanne; but he did not believe in her
+      any more than the loftier ecclesiastics of France believed in Bernadette
+      of Lourdes, who was of the spiritual lineage of Jeanne, nor than we should
+      believe to-day in a similar pretender. It seems unnecessary then to think
+      of dark plots hatched between these two dark priests against the white,
+      angelic apparition of the Maid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What services Cauchon had done to recommend him to the favour of
+      Winchester we are not told, but he was so much in favour that the Cardinal
+      had recommended him to the Pope for the vacant archbishopric of Rouen a
+      few months before there was any immediate question of Jeanne. The
+      appointment was opposed by the clergy of Rouen, and the Pope had not come
+      to any decision as yet on the subject. But no doubt the ambition of
+      Cauchon made him very eager, with such a tempting prize before him, to
+      recommend himself to his English patron by every means in his power. And
+      he it was who undertook the office of negotiating the ransom of Jeanne
+      from the hands of Jean de Luxembourg. We doubt whether after all it would
+      be just even to call this a nefarious bargain. To the careless seigneur it
+      would probably be very much a matter of course. The ransom offered&mdash;six
+      thousand francs&mdash;was as good as if she had been a prince. The ladies
+      at home might be indignant, but what was their foolish fancy for a
+      high-flown girl in comparison with these substantial crowns in his pocket;
+      and to be free from the responsibility of guarding her would be an
+      advantage too. And if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why should
+      he? A most pertinent question. Cauchon, on the other hand, could assure
+      all objectors that no summary vengeance was to be taken on the Maid. She
+      was to be judged by the Church, and by the best men the University could
+      provide, and if she were found innocent, no doubt would go free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They must have been sanguine indeed who hoped for a triumphant acquittal
+      of Jeanne; but still it may have been hoped that a trial by her countrymen
+      would in every case be better for her than to languish in prison or to be
+      seized perhaps by the English on some after occasion, and to perish by
+      their hands. Let us therefore be fair to Cauchon, if possible, up to the
+      beginning of the <i>Procès</i>. He was no Frenchman, but a Burgundian; his
+      allegiance was to his Duke, not to the King of England; but his natural
+      sovereign did so, and many, very many men of note and importance were
+      equally base, and did not esteem it base at all. Had the inhabitants of
+      Rheims, his native town, or of Rouen, in which <i>his</i> trial and
+      downfall took place as well as Jeanne's, pronounced for the King of
+      Prussia in the last war, and proclaimed themselves his subjects, the
+      traitors would have been hung with infamy from their own high towers, or
+      driven into their river headlong. But things were very different in the
+      fifteenth century. There has never been a moment in our history when
+      either England or Scotland has pronounced for a foreign sway. Scotland
+      fought with desperation for centuries against the mere name of suzerainty,
+      though of a kindred race. There have been terrible moments of forced
+      subjugation at the point of the sword; but never any such phenomena as
+      appeared in France, so far on in the world's history as was that brilliant
+      and highly cultured age. Such a state of affairs is to our minds
+      impossible to understand or almost to believe: but in the interests of
+      justice it must be fully acknowledged and understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cauchon arises accordingly, not at first with any infamy, out of the
+      obscurity. He had been expelled and dethroned from his See, but this only
+      for political reasons. He was ecclesiastically Bishop of Beauvais still;
+      it was within his diocese that the Maid had taken prisoner, and there also
+      her last acts of magic, if magic there was, had taken place. He had
+      therefore a legal right to claim the jurisdiction, a right which no one
+      had any interest in taking from him. If Paris was disappointed at not
+      having so interesting a trial carried on before its courts, there was
+      compensation in the fact that many doctors of the University were called
+      to assist Cauchon in his examination of the Maid, and to bring her, witch,
+      sorceress, heretic, whatever she might be, to question. These doctors were
+      not undistinguished or unworthy men. A number of them held high office in
+      the Church; almost all were honourably connected with the University, the
+      source of learning in France. "With what art were they chosen!" exclaims
+      M. Blaze de Bury. "A number of theologians, the élite of the time, had
+      been named to represent France at the council of Bâle; of these Cauchon
+      chose the flower." This does not seem on the face of it to be a fact
+      against, but rather in favour of, the tribunal, which the reader naturally
+      supposes must have been the better, the more just, for being chosen among
+      the flower of learning in France. They were not men who could be imagined
+      to be the tools of any Bishop. Quicherat, in his moderate and able remarks
+      on this subject, selects for special mention three men who took a very
+      important part in it, Guillame Érard, Nicole Midi, and Tomas de
+      Courcelles. They were all men who held a high place in the respect of
+      their generation. Érard was a friend of Machet, the confessor of Charles
+      VII., who had been a member of the tribunal at Poitiers which first
+      pronounced upon the pretensions of Jeanne; yet after the trial of the Maid
+      Machet still describes him as a man of the highest virtue and heavenly
+      wisdom. Nicole Midi continued to hold an honourable place in his
+      University for many years, and was the man chosen to congratulate Charles
+      when Paris finally became again the residence of the King. Courcelles was
+      considered the first theologian of the age. "He was an austere and
+      eloquent young man," says Quicherat, "of a lucid mind, though nourished on
+      abstractions. He was the first of theologians long before he had attained
+      the age at which he could assume the rank of doctor, and even before he
+      had finished his studies he was considered as the successor of Gerson. He
+      was the light of the council of Bâle. Eneas Piccolomini (Pope Pius II.)
+      speaks with admiration of his capacity and his modesty. In him we
+      recognise the father of the freedom of the Gallican Church. His
+      disinterestedness is shown by the simple position with which he contented
+      himself. He died with no higher rank than that of Dean of the Chapter of
+      Paris."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did this in Cæsar seem ambitious? Was this the man to be used for their
+      vile ends by a savage English party thirsting for the blood of an innocent
+      victim, and by the vile priest who was its tool? It does not seem so to
+      our eyes across the long level of the centuries which clear away so many
+      mists. And no more dreadful accusation can be brought against France than
+      the suggestion that men like these, her best and most carefully trained,
+      were willing to act as blood-hounds for the advantage and the pay of the
+      invader. But there are many French historians to whom the mere fact of a
+      black gown or at least an ecclesiastical robe, confounds every testimony,
+      and to whom even the name of Frenchman does not make it appear possible
+      that a priest should retain a shred of honour or of honesty. We should
+      have said by the light of nature and probability that had every guarantee
+      been required for the impartiality and justice of such a tribunal, they
+      could not have been better secured than by the selection of such men to
+      conduct its proceedings. They made a great and terrible mistake, as the
+      wisest of men have made before now. They did much worse, they behaved to
+      an unfortunate girl who was in their power with indescribable ferocity and
+      cruelty; but we must hope that this was owing to the period at which they
+      lived rather than to themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not perhaps indeed from the wise and learned, the Stoics and Pundits
+      of a University, that we should choose judges for the divine simplicity of
+      those babes and sucklings out of whose mouth praise is perfected. At the
+      same time to choose the best men is not generally the way adopted to
+      procure a base judgement. Cauchon might have been subject to this blame
+      had he filled the benches of his court with creatures of his own, nameless
+      priests and dialecticians, knowing nothing but their own poor science of
+      words. He did not do so. There were but two Englishmen in the assembly,
+      neither of them men of any importance or influence although there must
+      have been many English priests in the country and in the train of
+      Winchester. There were not even any special partisans of Burgundy, though
+      some of the assessors were Burgundian by birth. We should have said, had
+      we known no more than this, that every precaution had been taken to give
+      the Maid the fairest trial. But at the same time a trial which is
+      conducted under the name of the Inquisition is always suspect. The mere
+      fact of that terrible name seems to establish a foregone conclusion; few
+      are the prisoners at that bar who have ever escaped. This fact is almost
+      all that can be set against the high character of the individuals who
+      composed the tribunal. At all events it is no argument against the English
+      that they permitted the best men in France to be chosen as Jeanne's
+      judges. It is the most bewildering and astonishing of historical facts
+      that they were so, and yet came to the conclusion they did, by the means
+      they did, and that without falling under the condemnation, or scorn, or
+      horror of their fellow-men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This then was the assembly which gathered in Rouen in the beginning of
+      1431. Quicherat will not venture to affirm even that intimidation was
+      directly employed to effect their decision. He says that the evidence
+      "tends to prove" that this was the case, but honestly allows that, "it is
+      well to remark that the witnesses contradict each other." "In all that I
+      have said," he adds, "my intention has been to prove that the judges of
+      the Maid had in no way the appearance of partisans hotly pursuing a
+      political vengeance; but that, on the contrary, their known weight, the
+      consideration which most of them enjoyed, and the nature of the tribunal
+      for which they were assembled, were all calculated to produce generally an
+      expectation full of confidence and respect."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile there is not a word to be said for the treatment to which Jeanne
+      herself was subjected, she being, so far as is apparent, entirely in
+      English custody. She had been treated with tolerable gentleness it would
+      seem in the first part of her captivity while in the hands of Jean de
+      Luxembourg, the Count de Ligny. The fact that the ladies of the house were
+      for her friends must have assured this, and there is no complaint made
+      anywhere of cruelty or even unkindness. When she arrived in Rouen she was
+      confined in the middle chamber of the donjon, which was the best we may
+      suppose, neither a dungeon under the soil, nor a room under the leads, but
+      one to which there was access by a short flight of steps from the
+      courtyard, and which was fully lighted and not out of reach or sight of
+      life. But in this chamber was an iron cage,(1) within which she was bound,
+      feet, and waist and neck, from the time of her arrival until the beginning
+      of the trial, a period of about six weeks. Five English soldiers of the
+      lowest class watched her night and day, three in the room itself, two at
+      the door. It is enough to think for a moment of the probable manners and
+      morals of these troopers to imagine what torture must have been inflicted
+      by their presence upon a young woman who had always been sensitive above
+      all things to the laws of personal modesty and reserve. Their course jests
+      would no doubt be unintelligible to her, which would be an alleviation;
+      but their coarse laughter, their revolting touch, their impure looks,
+      would be an endless incessant misery. We are told that she indignantly
+      bestowed a hearty buffet on the cheek of a tailor who approached her too
+      closely when it was intended to furnish her with female dress; but she was
+      helpless to defend herself when in her irons, and had to endure as she
+      best could&mdash;the bars of her cage let us hope, if cage there was,
+      affording her some little protection from the horror of the continual
+      presence of these rude attendants, with whom it was a shame to English
+      gentlemen and knights to surround a helpless woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When her trial began Jeanne was released from her cage, but was still
+      chained by one foot to a wooden beam during the day, and at night to the
+      posts of her bed. Sometimes her guards would wake her to tell her that she
+      had been condemned and was immediately to be led forth to execution; but
+      that was a small matter. Attempts were also made to inflict the barest
+      insult and outrage upon her, and on one occasion she is said to have been
+      saved only by the Earl of Warwick, who heard her cries and went to her
+      rescue. By night as by day she clung to her male garb, tightly fastened by
+      the innumerable "points" of which Shakespeare so often speaks. Such were
+      the horrible circumstances in which she awaited her public appearance
+      before her judges. She was brought before them every day for months
+      together, to be badgered by the keenest wits in France, coming back and
+      back with artful questions upon every detail of every subject, to
+      endeavour to shake her firmness or force her into self-contradiction.
+      Imagine a cross-examination going on for months, like those&mdash;only
+      more cruel than those&mdash;to which we sometimes see an unfortunate
+      witness exposed in our own courts of law. There is nothing more usual than
+      to see people break down entirely after a day or two of such a tremendous
+      ordeal, in which their hearts and lives are turned inside out, their minds
+      so bewildered that they know not what they are saying, and everything they
+      have done in their lives exhibited in the worst, often in an entirely
+      fictitious, light, to the curiosity and amusement of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all our processes are mercy in comparison with those to which French
+      prisoners at the bar are still exposed. It is unnecessary to enter into an
+      account of these which are so well known; but they show that even such a
+      trial as that of Jeanne was by no means so contrary to common usage, as it
+      would be, and always would have been in England. In England we warn the
+      accused to utter no rash word which may be used against him; in France the
+      first principle is to draw from him every rash word that he can be made to
+      bring forth. This was the method employed with Jeanne. Her judges were all
+      Churchmen and dialecticians of the subtlest wit and most dexterous
+      faculties in France; they had all, or almost all, a strong prepossession
+      against her. Though we cannot believe that men of such quality were
+      suborned, there was, no doubt, enough of jealous and indignant feeling
+      among them to make the desire of convicting Jeanne more powerful with them
+      than the desire for pure justice. She was a true Christian, but not
+      perhaps the soundest of Church-women. Her visions had not the sanction of
+      any priest's approval, except indeed the official but not warm affirmation
+      of the Council at Poitiers. She had not hastened to take the Church into
+      her confidence nor to put herself under its protection. Though her claims
+      had been guaranteed by the company of divines at Poitiers, she herself had
+      always appealed to her private instructions, through her saints, rather
+      than to the guiding of any priest. The chief ecclesiastical dignitary of
+      her own party had just held her up to the reprobation of the people for
+      this cause: she was too independent, so proud that she would take no
+      advice but acted according to her own will. The more accustomed a
+      Churchman is to experience the unbounded devotion and obedience of women,
+      the more enraged he is against those who judge for themselves or have
+      other guides on whom they rely. Jeanne was, beside all other sins alleged
+      against her, a presumptuous woman: and very few of these men had any
+      desire to acquit her. They were little accustomed to researches which were
+      solely intended to discover the truth: their principle rather was, as it
+      has been the principle of many, to obtain proofs that their own particular
+      way of thinking was the right one. It is not perhaps very good even for a
+      system of doctrine when this is the principle by which it is tested. It is
+      more fatal still, on this principle, to judge an individual for death or
+      for life. It will be abundantly proved, however, by all that is to follow,
+      that in face of this tribunal, learned, able, powerful, and prejudiced,
+      the peasant girl of nineteen stood like a rock, unmoved by all their
+      cleverness, undaunted by their severity, seldom or never losing her head,
+      or her temper, her modest steadfastness, or her high spirit. If they hoped
+      to have an easy bargain of her, never were men more mistaken. Not knowing
+      a from b, as she herself said, untrained, unaided, she was more than a
+      match for them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Round about this centre of eager intelligence, curiosity, and prejudice,
+      the cathedral and council chamber teeming with Churchmen, was a dark and
+      silent ring of laymen and soldiers. A number of the English leaders were
+      in Rouen, but they appear very little. Winchester, who had very lately
+      come from England with an army, which according to some of the historians
+      would not budge from Calais, where it had landed, "for fear of the Maid"&mdash;was
+      the chief person in the place, but did not make any appearance at the
+      trial, curiously enough; the Duke of Bedford we are informed was visible
+      on one shameful occasion, but no more. But Warwick, who was the Governor
+      of the town, appears frequently and various other lords with him. We see
+      them in the mirror held up to us by the French historians, pressing round
+      in an ever narrowing circle, closing up upon the tribunal in the midst,
+      pricking the priests with perpetual sword points if they seem to loiter.
+      They would have had everything pushed on, no delay, no possibility of
+      escape. It is very possible that this was the case, for it is evident that
+      the Witch was deeply obnoxious to the English, and that they were eager to
+      have her and her endless process out of the way; but the evidence for
+      their terror and fierce desire to expedite matters is of the feeblest. A
+      canon of Rouen declared at the trial that he had heard it said by Maître
+      Pierre Morice, and Nicolas l'Oyseleur, judges assessors, and by other
+      whose names he does not recollect, "that the said English were so afraid
+      of her that they did not dare to begin the siege of Louviers until she was
+      dead; and that it was necessary if one would please them, to hasten the
+      trial as much as possible and to find the means of condemning her." Very
+      likely this was quite true: but it cannot at all be taken for proved by
+      such evidence. Another contemporary witness allows that though some of the
+      English pushed on her trial for hate, some were well disposed to her; the
+      manner of Jeanne's imprisonment is the only thing which inclines the
+      reader to believe every evil thing that is said against them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the circumstances in which Jeanne was brought to trail. The
+      population, moved to pity and to tears as any population would have been,
+      before the end, would seem at the beginning to have been indifferent and
+      not to have taken much interest one way or another: the court, a hundred
+      men and more with all their hangers-on, the cleverest men in France, one
+      more distinguished and impeccable than the others: the stern ring of the
+      Englishmen outside keeping an eye upon the tedious suit and all its
+      convolutions: these all appear before us, surrounding as with bands of
+      iron the young lonely victim in the donjon, who submitting to every
+      indignity, and deprived of every aid, feeling that all her friends had
+      abandoned her, yet stood steadfast and strong in her absolute simplicity
+      and honesty. It was but two years in that same spring weather since she
+      had left Vaucouleurs to seek the fortune of France, to offer herself to
+      the struggle which now was coming to an end. Not a soul had Jeanne to
+      comfort or stand by her. She had her saints who&mdash;one wonders if such
+      a thought ever entered into her young visionary head&mdash;had lured her
+      to her doom, and who still comforted her with enigmatical words, promises
+      which came true in so sadly different a sense from that in which they were
+      understood.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) We are glad to add that the learned Quicherat has doubts
+     on the subject of the cage.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII &mdash; BEFORE THE TRIAL. LENT, 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We have not, however, sufficiently described the horror of the prison, and
+      the treatment to which Jeanne was exposed, though the picture is already
+      dark enough. It throws a horrible yet also a grotesque light upon the
+      savage manners of the time to find that the chamber in which she was
+      confined, had secret provision for an <i>espionnage</i> of the most base
+      kind, openings made in the walls through which everything that took place
+      in the room, every proceeding of the unfortunate prisoner, could be spied
+      upon and every word heard. The idea of such a secret watch has always been
+      attractive to the vulgar mind, and no doubt it has been believed to exist
+      many times when there was little or no justification for such an infernal
+      thought. From the "ear" of Dionysius, down to the <i>Trou Judas</i>, which
+      early tourists on the Continent were taught to fear in every chamber door,
+      the idea has descended to our own times. It would seem, however, to be
+      beyond doubt that this odious means of acquiring information was in full
+      operation during the trial of Jeanne, and various spies were permitted to
+      peep at her, and to watch for any unadvised word she might say in her most
+      private moments. We are told that the Duke of Bedford made use of the
+      opportunity in a still more revolting way, and was present, a secret
+      spectator, at the fantastic scene when Jeanne was visited by a committee
+      of matrons who examined her person to prove or to disprove one of the
+      hateful insinuations which were made about her. The imagination, however,
+      refuses to conceive that a man of serious age and of high functions should
+      have degraded himself to the level of a Peeping Tom in this way; all the
+      French historians, nevertheless, repeat the story though on the merest
+      hearsay evidence. And they also relate, with more apparent truth, how a
+      double treachery was committed upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing
+      two secretaries at these openings, to take down her conversation with a
+      spy who had been sent to her in the guise of a countryman of her own; and
+      that not only Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion,
+      listening, while their plot was carried out by the vile traitor inside.
+      The clerks, we are glad to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but
+      Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The Englishmen indeed shrank
+      from no ignominy; nor did the great French savants assembled under the
+      presidency of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin with that they
+      were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the trial
+      almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked, in the
+      midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the profoundest
+      ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken, L'Oyseleur
+      (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented to be sent, to
+      Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, a <i>pays</i>, like herself
+      from Lorraine, to invite her confidence: but his long conversations with
+      the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by the secretaries, elicited
+      nothing from her that she did not say in the public examination. She had
+      no secret devices to betray to a traitor. She would not seem, indeed, to
+      have suspected the man at all, not even when she saw him among her judges
+      taking part against her. Jeanne herself suspected no falsehood, but made
+      her confession to him, when she found that he was a priest, and trusted
+      him fully. The bewildering and confusing fact, turning all the
+      contrivances of her judges into foolishness, was, that she had nothing to
+      confess that she was not ready to tell in the eye of day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The adoption of this abominable method of eliciting secrets from the
+      candid soul which had none, was justified, it appears, by the manner of
+      her trial, which was after the rules of the Inquisition&mdash;by which
+      even more than by those which regulate an ordinary French trial the guilt
+      of the accused is a foregone conclusion for which proof is sought, not a
+      fair investigation of facts for abstract purposes of justice. The first
+      thing to be determined by the tribunal was the counts of the indictment
+      against Jeanne; was she to be tried for magical arts, for sorcery and
+      witchcraft? It is very probable that the mission of L'Oyseleur was to
+      obtain evidence that would clear up this question by means of recalling to
+      her the stories of her childhood, of the enchanted tree, and the Fairies'
+      Well; from which sources, her accusers anxiously hoped to prove that she
+      derived her inspiration. But it is very clear that no such evidence was
+      forthcoming, and that it seemed to them hopeless to attribute sorcery to
+      her; therefore the accusation was changed to that of heresy alone. The
+      following mandate from the University authorising her prosecution will
+      show what the charge was; and the reader will note that one of its darkest
+      items is the costume, which for so many good and sufficient reasons she
+      wore. Here is the official description of the accused:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A woman, calling herself the Maid, leaving the dress and habit of her sex
+      against the divine law, a thing abominable to God, clothed and armed in
+      the habit and condition of a man, has done cruel deeds of homicide, and as
+      is said has made the simple people believe, in order to abuse and lead
+      them astray, that she was sent by God, and had knowledge of His divine
+      secrets; along with several other doctrines (<i>dogmatisations</i>), very
+      dangerous, prejudicial, and scandalous to our holy Catholic faith, in
+      pursuing which abuses, and exercising hostility against us and our people,
+      she has been taken in arms, before Compiègne, and brought as a prisoner
+      before us."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to French law the indictment ought to have been founded upon a
+      preliminary examination into the previous life of the accused, which, as
+      it does not appear in the formal accusations, it was supposed had never
+      been made. Recent researches, however, have proved that it was made, but
+      was not of a nature to strengthen or justify any accusation. All that the
+      examiners could discover was that Jeanne d'Arc was a good and honest maid
+      who left a spotless reputation behind her in her native village, and that
+      not a suspicion of <i>dogmatisations</i>, nor worship of fairies, nor any
+      other unseemly thing was associated with her name. Other things less
+      favourable, we are told, were reported of her: the statement, for
+      instance, made in apparent good faith by Monstrelet the Burgundian
+      chronicler, that she had been for some time a servant in an <i>auberge</i>,
+      and there had learned to ride, and to consort with men&mdash;a statement
+      totally without foundation, which was scarcely referred to in the trial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The skill of M. Quicherat discovered the substance of those inquiries
+      among the many secondary papers, but they were not made use of in the
+      formal proceedings. This also we are told, though contrary to the habit of
+      French law, was justified by the methods of the Inquisition, which were
+      followed throughout the trial. One breach of law and justice, however, is
+      permitted by no code. It is expressly forbidden by French, and even by
+      inquisitorial law, that a prisoner should be tried by his enemies&mdash;that
+      is by judges avowedly hostile to him: an initial difficulty which it would
+      have been impossible to get over and which had therefore to be ignored.
+      One brave and honest man, Nicolas de Houppeville, had the courage to make
+      this observation in one of the earliest sittings of the assembly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Neither the Bishop of Beauvais" (he said) "nor the other members of the
+      tribunal ought to be judges in the matter; and it did not seem to him a
+      good mode of procedure that those who were of the opposite party to the
+      accused should be her judges&mdash;considering also that she had been
+      examined already by the clergy of Poitiers, and by the Archbishop of
+      Rheims, who was the metropolitan of the said Bishop of Beauvais."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nicolas de Houppeville was a lawyer and had a right to be heard on such a
+      point; but the reply of the judges was to throw him into prison, not
+      without threats on the part of the civil authorities to carry the point
+      further by throwing him into the Seine. This was the method by which every
+      honest objection was silenced. That the examination at Poitiers, where the
+      judges, as has been seen, were by no means too favourable to Jeanne,
+      should never have been referred to by her present examiners, though there
+      was no doubt it ought to have been one of the most important sources of
+      the preliminary information&mdash;is also very remarkable. It was
+      suggested indeed to Jeanne at a late period of the trial, that she might
+      appeal to the Archbishop; but he was, as she well knew, one of her most
+      cruel enemies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still more important was the breach of all justice apparent in the fact
+      that she had no advocate, no counsel on her side, no one to speak to her
+      and conduct her defence. It was suggested to her near the end of the
+      proceedings that she might choose one of her judges to fill this office;
+      but even if the proposal had been a genuine one or at all likely to be to
+      her advantage, it was then too late to be of any use. These particulars,
+      we believe, were enough to invalidate any process in strict law; but the
+      name of law seems ridiculous altogether as applied to this rambling and
+      cruel cross-examination in which was neither sense nor decorum. The reader
+      will understand that there were no witnesses either for or against her,
+      the answers of the accused herself forming the entire evidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at least
+      more clear. The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left in the
+      usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which the English
+      troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and carrying on their noisy
+      conversation, if nothing worse and more offensive&mdash;sometimes, as
+      Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing (her sole solace) the soft
+      voices of her saintly visitors&mdash;was not her only disturbance. Her
+      solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive visitors of various kinds.
+      L'Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who professed to be her countryman
+      and who beguiled her into talk of her childhood and native place, was the
+      first of these; and it is possible that at first his presence was a
+      pleasure to her. One other visitor of whom we hear accidentally, a citizen
+      of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems to have got in private interest and with a
+      more or less good motive and no evil meaning. He warned her to answer with
+      prudence the questions put to her, since it was a matter of life and
+      death. She seemed to him to be "very simple" and still to believe that she
+      might be ransomed. Earl Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on
+      various occasions. He probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and
+      thus heard her cry for help in her danger, executing, let us hope, summary
+      vengeance on her brutal assailant; but he also evidently took advantage of
+      his power to show his interesting prisoner to his friends on occasion. And
+      it was he who took her original captor, Jean de Luxembourg, now Comte de
+      Ligny, by whom she had been given up, to see her, along with an English
+      lord, sometimes named as Lord Sheffield. The Belgian who had put so many
+      good crowns in his pocket for her ransom, thought it good taste to enter
+      with a jesting suggestion that he had come to buy her back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear arms
+      against us again," he said. The Maid was not deceived by this mocking
+      suggestion. "It is well for you to jest," she said, "but I know you have
+      no such power. I know that the English will kill me, believing, after I am
+      dead, that they will be able to win all the kingdom of France: but if
+      there were a hundred thousand more Goddens than there are, they shall
+      never win the kingdom of France." The English lord drew his dagger to
+      strike the helpless girl, all the stories say, but was prevented by
+      Warwick. Warwick, however, we are told, though he had thus saved her
+      twice, "recovered his barbarous instincts" as soon as he got outside, and
+      indignantly lamented the possibility of Jeanne's escape from the stake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such incidents as these alone lightened or darkened her weary days in
+      prison. A traitor or spy, a prophet of evil shaking his head over her
+      danger, a contemptuous party of jeering nobles; afterwards inquisitors,
+      for ever repeating in private their tedious questions: these all visited
+      her&mdash;but never a friend. Jeanne was not afraid of the English lord's
+      dagger, or of the watchful eye of Warwick over her. Even when spying
+      through a hole, if the English earl and knight, indeed permitted himself
+      that strange indulgence, his presence and inspection must have been almost
+      the only defence of the prisoner. Our historians all quote, with an
+      admiration almost as misplaced as their horror of Warwick's "barbarous
+      instincts," the <i>vrai galant homme</i> of an Englishman who in the midst
+      of the trial cried out "<i>Brave femme</i>!" (it is difficult to translate
+      the words, for <i>brave</i> means more than brave)&mdash;"why was she not
+      English?" However we are not concerned to defend the English share of the
+      crime. The worst feature of all is that she never seems to have been
+      visited by any one favourable and friendly to her, except afterwards, the
+      two or three pitying priests whose hearts were touched by her great
+      sufferings, though they remained among her judges, and gave sentence
+      against her. No woman seems ever to have entered that dreadful prison
+      except those "matrons" who came officially as has been already said. The
+      ladies de Ligny had cheered her in her first confinement, the kind women
+      of Abbeville had not been shut out even from the gloomy fortress of Le
+      Crotoy. But here no woman ever seems to have been permitted to enter, a
+      fact which must either be taken to prove the hostility of the population,
+      or the very vigorous regulations of the prison. Perhaps the barbarous
+      watch set upon her, the soldiers ever present, may have been a reason for
+      the absence of any female visitor. At all events it is a very distinct
+      fact that during the whole period of her trial, five months of misery,
+      except on the one occasion already referred to, no woman came to console
+      the unfortunate Maid. She had never before during all her vicissitudes
+      been without their constant ministrations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One woman, the only one we ever hear of who was not the partisan and lover
+      of the Maid, does, however, make herself faintly seen amid the crowd.
+      Catherine of La Rochelle&mdash;the woman who had laid claim to saintly
+      visitors and voices like those of Jeanne, and who had been for a time
+      received and fêted at the Court of Charles with vile satisfaction, as
+      making the loss of the Maid no such great thing&mdash;had by this time
+      been dropped as useless, on the appearance of the shepherd boy quoted by
+      the Archbishop of Rheims, and had fallen into the hands of the English:
+      was not she too a witch, and admirably qualified to give evidence as to
+      the other witch, for whose blood all around her were thirsting? Catherine
+      was ready to say anything that was evil of her sister sorceress. "Take
+      care of her," she said; "if you lose sight of her for one moment, the
+      devil will carry her away." Perhaps this was the cause of the guard in
+      Jeanne's room, the ceaseless scrutiny to which she was exposed. The vulgar
+      slanderer was allowed to escape after this valuable testimony. She comes
+      into history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights that mean
+      nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again with her
+      false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have been
+      treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians. Reason
+      good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It is profane
+      to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of a mountebank.
+      This is the only woman in all her generation, so far as appears to us, who
+      was not the partisan and devoted friend of the spotless Maid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The aspect of that old-world city of Rouen, still so old and picturesque
+      to the visitor of to-day, though all new since that time except the
+      churches, is curious and interesting to look back upon. It must have
+      hummed and rustled with life through every street; not only with the
+      English troops, and many a Burgundian man-at-arms, swaggering about,
+      swearing big oaths and filling the air with loud voices,&mdash;but with
+      all the polished bands of the doctors, men first in fame and learning of
+      the famous University, and beneficed priests of all classes, canons and
+      deans and bishops, with the countless array that followed them, the
+      cardinal's tonsured Court in addition, standing by and taking no share in
+      the business: but all French and English alike, occupied with one subject,
+      talking of the trial, of the new points brought out, of the opinions of
+      this doctor and that, of Maître Nicolas who had presumed on his lawyership
+      to correct the bishop, and had suffered for it: of the bold canon who
+      ventured to whisper a suggestion to the prisoner, and who ever since had
+      had the eye of the governor upon him: of Warwick, keeping a rough shield
+      of protection around the Maid but himself fiercely impatient of the law's
+      delay, anxious to burn the witch and be done with her. And Jeanne herself,
+      the one strange figure that nobody understood; was she a witch? Was she an
+      angelic messenger? Her answers so simple, so bold, so full of the spirit
+      and sentiment of truth, must have been reported from one to another. This
+      is what she said; does that look like a deceiver? could the devils inspire
+      that steadfastness, that constancy and quiet? or was it not rather the
+      angels, the saints as she said? Never, we may be sure, had there been in
+      Rouen a time of so much interest, such a theme for conversations, such a
+      subject for all thoughts. The eager court sat with their tonsured heads
+      together, keen to seize every weak point. Did you observe how she
+      hesitated on this? Let us push that, we'll get an admission on that point
+      to-morrow. It is impossible to believe that in such an assembly every man
+      was a partisan, much less that each one of them was thinking of the fee of
+      the English, the daily allowance which it was the English habit to make.
+      That were to imagine a France, base indeed beyond the limits of human
+      baseness. All the Norman dignitaries of the Church, all the most learned
+      doctors of the University&mdash;no! that is too great a stretch of our
+      faith. The greater part no doubt believed as an indisputable fact, that
+      Jeanne was either a witch or an impostor, as we should all probably do
+      now. And the vertigo of Inquisition gained upon them; they became day by
+      day more exasperated with her seeming innocence, with what must have
+      seemed to them the cunning and cleverness, impossible to her age and sex,
+      of her replies. Who could have kept the girl so cool, so dauntless, so
+      embarrassing in her straight-forwardness and sincerity? The saints? the
+      saints were not dialecticians; far more likely the evil one himself, in
+      whom the Church has always such faith. "He hath a devil and by Beelzebub
+      casteth out devils." It was all like a play, only more exciting than any
+      play, and going on endlessly, the excitement always getting stronger till
+      it became the chief stimulus and occupation of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII &mdash; THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION. FEBRUARY, 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was in the chapel of the Castle of Rouen, on the 21st of February, that
+      the trial of Jeanne was begun. The judges present numbered about forty,
+      and are carefully classed as doctors in theology, abbots, canons, doctors
+      in canonical and civil law, with the Bishop of Beauvais at their head (the
+      archepiscopal see of Rouen being vacant, as is added: but not that my lord
+      of Beauvais hoped for that promotion). They were assembled there in all
+      the solemnity of their priestly and professional robes, the reporters
+      ready with their pens, the range of dark figures forming a semicircle
+      round the presiding Bishop, when the officer of the court led in the
+      prisoner, clothed in her worn and war-stained tunic, like a boy, with her
+      hair cut close as for the helmet, and her slim figure, no doubt more slim
+      than ever, after her long imprisonment. She had asked to be allowed to
+      hear mass before coming to the bar, but this was refused. It was a
+      privilege which she had never failed to avail herself of in her most
+      triumphant days. Now the chapel&mdash;the sanctuary of God contained for
+      her no sacred sacrifice, but only those dark benches of priests amid whom
+      she found no responsive countenance, no look of kindness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was addressed sternly by Cauchon, in an exhortation which it is sad
+      to think was not in Latin, as it appears in the <i>Procès</i>. She was
+      then required to take the oath on the Scriptures to speak the truth, and
+      to answer all questions addressed to her. Jeanne had already held that
+      conversation with L'Oyseleur in the prison which Cauchon and Warwick had
+      listened to in secret with greedy ears, but which Manchon, the honest
+      reporter, had refused to take down. Perhaps, therefore, the Bishop knew
+      that the slim creature before him, half boy half girl, was not likely to
+      be overawed by his presence or questions; but it cannot have been but a
+      wonder to the others, all gazing at her, the first men in Normandy, the
+      most learned in Paris, to hear her voice, <i>assez femme</i>, young and
+      clear, arising in the midst of them, "I know not what things I may be
+      asked," said Jeanne. "Perhaps you may ask me questions which I cannot
+      answer." The assembly was startled by this beginning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Will you swear to answer truly all that concerns the faith, and that you
+      know?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I will swear," said Jeanne, "about my father and mother and what I have
+      done since coming to France; but concerning my revelations from God I will
+      answer to no man, except only to Charles my King; I should not reveal them
+      were you to cut off my head, unless by the secret counsel of my visions."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Bishop continued not without gentleness, enjoining her to swear at
+      least that in everything that touched the faith she would speak truth; and
+      Jeanne kneeling down crossed her hands upon the book of the Gospel, or
+      Missal as it is called in the report, and took the required oath, always
+      under the condition she stated, to answer truly on everything she knew
+      concerning the faith, except in respect to her revelations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The examination then began with the usual formalities. She was asked her
+      name (which she said with touching simplicity was Jeannette at home but
+      Jeanne in France), the names of her father and mother, godfather and
+      godmothers, the priest who baptised her, the place where she was born,
+      etc., her age, almost nineteen; her education, consisting of the Pater
+      Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, which her mother had taught her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here she was asked, a curious interruption to the formal interrogatory, to
+      say the Pater Noster&mdash;the reason of which sudden demand was that
+      witches and sorcerers were supposed to be unable to repeat that prayer. As
+      unexpected as the question was Jeanne's reply. She answered that if the
+      Bishop would hear her in confession she would say it willingly. She had
+      been refused all the exercises of piety, and she was speaking to a company
+      of priests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a great dignity of implied protest against this treatment in such
+      an answer. The request was made a second time with a promise of selecting
+      two worthy Frenchmen to hear her: but her reply was the same. She would
+      say the prayer when she made her confession but not otherwise. She was
+      ready it would seem in proud humility to confess to any or to all of her
+      enemies, as one whose conscience was clear, and who had nothing to
+      conceal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then commanded not to attempt to escape from her prison, on pain
+      of being condemned for heresy, but to this again she demurred at once. She
+      would not accept the prohibition, but would escape if she could, so that
+      no man could say that she had broken faith; although since her capture she
+      had been bound in chains and her feet fastened with irons. To this, her
+      examiner said that it was necessary so to secure her in order that she
+      might not escape. "It is true and certain," she replied, "whatever others
+      may wish, that to every prisoner it is lawful to escape if he can." It may
+      be remarked, as she forcibly pointed out afterwards, that she had never
+      given her faith, never surrendered, but had always retained her freedom of
+      action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tribunal thereupon called in the captain in charge of Jeanne's prison,
+      a gentleman called John Gris in the record, probably John Grey, along with
+      two soldiers, Bernoit and Talbot, and enjoined them to guard her securely
+      and not to permit her to talk with any one without the permission of the
+      court. This was all the business done on the first day of audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the 22d of February at eight o'clock in the morning, the sitting was
+      resumed. In the meantime, however, the chapel had been found too small and
+      too near the outer world, the proceedings being much interrupted by shouts
+      and noises from without, and probably incommoded within by the audience
+      which had crowded it the first day. The judges accordingly assembled in
+      the great hall of the castle; they were forty-nine in number on the second
+      day, the number being chiefly swelled by canons of Rouen. After some
+      preliminary business the accused was once more introduced, and desired
+      again to take the oath. Jeanne replied that she had done so on the
+      previous day and that this was enough; upon which there followed a short
+      altercation, which, however, ended by her consent to swear again that she
+      would answer truly in all things that concerned the faith. The questioner
+      this day was Jean Beaupère (<i>Pulchri patris</i>, as he is called in the
+      Latin), a theologian, Master of Arts, Canon of Paris and of Besançon, "one
+      of the greatest props of the University of Paris," a man holding a number
+      of important offices, and who afterwards appeared at the Council of Bâle
+      as the deputy of Normandy. He began by another exhortation to speak the
+      truth, to which Jeanne replied as before that what she did say she would
+      say truly, but that she would not answer upon all subjects. "I have done
+      nothing but by revelation," she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These preliminaries on both sides having been gone through, the
+      examination was resumed. Jeanne informed the court in answer to Beaupère's
+      question that she had been taught by her mother to sew and did not fear to
+      compete with any woman in Rouen in these crafts; that she had once been
+      absent from home when her family were driven out of their village by fear
+      of the Burgundians, and that she had then lived for about fifteen days in
+      the house of a woman called La Rousse, at Neufchâteau; that when she was
+      at home she was occupied in the work of the house and did not go to the
+      fields with the sheep and other animals; that she went to confession
+      regularly to the Curé of her own village, or when he could not hear her,
+      to some other priest, by permission of the Curé; also that two or three
+      times she had made her confession to the mendicant friars&mdash;this being
+      during her stay in Neufchâteau (where presumably she was not acquainted
+      with the clergy); and that she received the sacrament always at Easter.
+      Asked whether she had communicated at other feasts than Easter, she said
+      briefly that this was enough. "Go on to the rest," <i>passez outre</i>,
+      she added, and the questioner seems to have been satisfied. Then came the
+      really vital part of the matter. She proceeded&mdash;no direct question on
+      the point being recorded, though no doubt it was made&mdash;to tell how
+      when she was about thirteen she heard voices from God bidding her to be
+      good and obedient. The first time she was much afraid. The voice came
+      about the hour of noon, in summer, in her father's garden. She was fasting
+      but had not fasted the preceding day. The voice came from the right,
+      towards the church; and came rarely without a great light. This light came
+      always from the side whence the voice proceeded, and was a very bright
+      radiance. When she came into France she still continued to hear the same
+      voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked how she could see the light when it was at the side; to
+      which foolish question Jeanne gave no reply, but "turned to other
+      matters," saying voluntarily with a soft implied reproof of the noise
+      around her&mdash;that if she were in a wood, that is in a quiet place, she
+      could hear the voices coming towards her. She added (going on, one could
+      imagine, in a musing, forgetting the congregation of sinners about her)
+      that it seemed to her a noble voice, and that she believed it came from
+      God, and that when she had heard it three times she knew it was the voice
+      of an angel; the voice always came quite clearly to her, and she
+      understood it well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked what it said to her concerning the salvation of her
+      soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said that it taught her to rule her life well, to go often to church:
+      and told her that it was necessary that she, Jeanne, should go to France.
+      The said Jeanne added that she would not be questioned further concerning
+      the voice, or the manner in which it was made known to her, but that two
+      or three times in a week it had said to her that she must go to France;
+      but that her father knew nothing of this. The voice said to her that she
+      should go to France, until she could endure it no longer; it said to her
+      that she should raise the siege, which was set against the city of
+      Orleans. It said also that she must go to Robert of Baudricourt, in the
+      city of Vaucouleurs, who was captain of that place, and that he would give
+      her people to go with her; to which she had answered that she was a poor
+      girl who knew not how to ride, nor how to conduct war. She then said that
+      she went to her uncle and told him that she wished to go with him for a
+      little while to his house, and that she lived there for eight days; she
+      then told her uncle that she must go to Vaucouleurs, and the said uncle
+      took her there. Also she went on to say that when she came to the said
+      city of Vaucouleurs, she recognised Robert of Baudricourt; though she had
+      never seen him before she knew him by the voice that said to her which was
+      he. She then told this Robert that it was necessary that she should go to
+      France, but twice over he refused and repulsed her; the third time,
+      however, he received her, and gave her certain men to go with her; the
+      voice had told her that this would be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said also that the Duke of Lorraine sent for her to come to him, and
+      that she went under a safe conduct granted by him, and told him that she
+      must go to France. He asked her whether he should recover from his
+      illness; but she told him that she knew nothing of that, and she talked
+      very little to him of her journey. She told the Duke that he ought to send
+      his son and his people with her to take her to France, and that she would
+      pray God to restore his health; and then she was taken back to
+      Vaucouleurs. She said also that when she left Vaucouleurs she wore the
+      dress of a man, without any other arms than a sword which Robert de
+      Baudricourt had given her; and that she had with her a chevalier, a
+      squire, and four servants, and that they slept for the first night at St.
+      Urbain, in the abbey there. She was then asked by whose advice she wore
+      the dress of a man, but refused to answer. Finally she said that she
+      charged no man with giving her this advice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went on to say that the said Robert de Baudricourt exacted an oath
+      from those who went with her, that they would conduct her to the end of
+      her journey well and safely; and that he said, as she left him, "Go, and
+      let come what will." She also said that she knew well that God loved the
+      Duke of Orleans, concerning whom she had more revelations than about any
+      other living man, except him whom she called her King. She added that it
+      was necessary for her to wear male attire, and that whoever advised her to
+      do so had given her wise counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She then said that she sent a letter to the English before Orleans, in
+      which she required them to go away, a copy of which letter had been read
+      to her in Rouen; but there were two or three mistakes, especially in the
+      words which called upon them to surrender to the Maid instead of to
+      surrender to the King. (There is no indication why these two latter
+      statements should have been introduced into the midst of her narrative of
+      the journey; it may have been in reply to some other question interjected
+      by another of her examiners: <i>Passez outre</i>, as she herself says. She
+      immediately resumes the simple and straightforward tale.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The said Jeanne went on to say that her further journey to him whom she
+      called her King was without any impediment; and that when she arrived at
+      the town of St. Catherine de Fierbois she sent news of her arrival to the
+      town of Chasteau-Chinon where the said King was. She arrived there herself
+      about noon and went to an inn(1); and after dinner went to him whom she
+      called her King, who was in the castle. She then said that when she
+      entered the chamber where he was, she knew him among all others, by the
+      revelation of her "voices." She told her King that she wished to make war
+      against the English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked whether when she heard the "voices" in the presence of
+      the King the light was also seen in that place. She answered as before: <i>Passez
+      outre: Transeatis ultra</i>. "Go on," as we might say, "to the other
+      questions."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked if she had seen an angel hovering over her King. She
+      answered: "Spare me; <i>passez outre</i>." She added afterwards, however,
+      that before he put his hand to the work, the King had many beautiful
+      apparitions and revelations. She was asked what these were. She answered:
+      "I will not tell you; it is not I who should answer; send to the King and
+      he will tell you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked if her voices had promised her that when she came to
+      the King he would receive her. She answered that those of her own party
+      knew that she had been sent from God and that some had heard and
+      recognised the voices. Further, she said that her King and various others
+      had heard and seen(2) the voices coming to her&mdash;Charles of Bourbon
+      (Comte de Clermont) and two or three others with him. She then said that
+      there was no day in which she did not hear that voice; but that she asked
+      nothing from it except the salvation of her soul. Besides this, Jeanne
+      confessed that the voice said she should be led to the town of St. Denis
+      in France, where she wished to remain&mdash;that is after the attack on
+      Paris&mdash;but that against her will the lords forced her to leave it: if
+      she had not been wounded she would not have gone: but she was wounded in
+      the moats of Paris: however she was healed in five days. She then said
+      that she had made an assault, called in French <i>escarmouche</i>
+      (skirmish), upon the town of Paris. She was asked if it was on a holy day,
+      and said that she believed it was on a festival. She was then asked if she
+      thought it well done to fight on a holy day, and answered, "<i>Passez
+      outre</i>." Go on to the next question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a verbatim account of one day of the trial. Most of the
+      translations which exist give questions as well as answers: but these are
+      but occasionally given in the original document, and Jeanne's narrative
+      reads like a calm, continuous statement, only interrupted now and then by
+      a question, usually a cunning attempt to startle her with a new subject,
+      and to hurry some admission from her. The great dignity with which she
+      makes her replies, the occasional flash of high spirit, the calm
+      determination with which she refuses to be led into discussion of the
+      subjects which she had from the first moment reserved, are very
+      remarkable. We have seen her hitherto only in conflict, in the din of
+      battle and the fatigue, yet exuberant energy, of rapid journeys. Her
+      circumstances were now very different. She had been shut up in prison for
+      months, for six weeks at least she had been in irons, and the air of
+      heaven had not blown upon this daughter of the fields; her robust yet
+      sensitive maidenhood had been exposed to a hundred offences, and to the
+      constant society, infecting the very air about, of the rudest of men; yet
+      so far is her spirit from being broken that she meets all those potent,
+      grave, and reverend doctors and ecclesiastics, with the simplicity and
+      freedom of a princess, answering frankly or holding her peace as seems
+      good to her, afraid of nothing, keeping her self-possession, all her wits
+      about her as we say, without panic and without presumption. The trial of
+      Jeanne is indeed almost more miraculous than her fighting; a girl not yet
+      nineteen, forsaken of all, without a friend! It is less wonderful that she
+      should have developed the qualities of a general, of a gunner, every gift
+      of war&mdash;than that in her humiliation and distress she should thus
+      hold head against all the most subtle intellects in France, and bear, with
+      but one moment of faltering, a continued cross-examination of three
+      months, without losing her patience, her heart, or her courage.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      The third day brought a still larger accession of judges, sixty-two of
+      them taking their places on the benches round the Bishop in the great
+      hall; and the day began with another and longer altercation between
+      Cauchon and Jeanne on the subject of the oath again demanded of her. She
+      maintained her resolution to say nothing of her voices. "We" according to
+      the record "required of her that she should swear simply and absolutely
+      without reservation." She would seem to have replied with impatience, "Let
+      me speak freely:" adding "By my faith you may ask me many questions which
+      I will not answer": then explaining, "Many things you may ask me, but I
+      will tell you nothing truly that concerns my revelations; for you might
+      compel me to say things which I have sworn not to say; and so I should
+      perjure myself, which you ought not to wish." This explains several
+      statements which she made later in respect to her introduction to the
+      King. She repeated emphatically: "I warn you well, you who call yourselves
+      my judges, that you take a great responsibility upon you, and that you
+      burden me too much." She said also that it was enough to have already
+      sworn twice. She was again asked to swear simply and absolutely, and
+      answered, "It is enough to have sworn twice," and that all the clerks in
+      Rouen and Paris could not condemn her unless lawfully; also that of her
+      coming she would speak the truth but not all the truth; and that the space
+      of eight days would not be enough to tell all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We the said Bishop" (continues the report) "then said to her that she
+      should ask advice from those present whether she ought to swear or not.
+      She replied again that of her coming she would speak truly and not
+      otherwise, nor would it be fit that she should talk at large. We then told
+      her that it would throw suspicion on what she said if she did not swear to
+      speak the truth. She answered as before. We repeated that she must swear
+      precisely and absolutely. She answered that she would say what she knew,
+      but not all, and that she had come on the part of God, and appealed to God
+      from whom she came. Again requested and admonished to swear on pain of
+      every punishment that could be put on her, again answered '<i>Passez outre</i>.'
+      Finally she consented to swear that she would speak the truth in
+      everything that concerned the trial."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her examination was then resumed by Beaupère as before, who elicited from
+      her that she had fasted (he seems to have wished to make out that the
+      fasting had something to do with her visions) since noon the day before
+      (it was Lent); and also that she had heard her voices both on that day and
+      the day before, three times on the previous day, the first time in the
+      morning when she was asleep, and awakened by them. Did she kneel and thank
+      them? She thanked them, sitting up in her bed (to which she was chained,
+      as her questioner knew) and clasping her hands. She asked them what she
+      was to do, and they told her to answer boldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be remarked here that more frequently as the examination goes on,
+      part of Jeanne's words are quoted in the first person, as if the reporters
+      had been specially struck by them, while the bulk of her evidence goes on
+      more calmly in the third person, the narrative form. After saying that she
+      was bidden to answer boldly, she seems to have turned to the Bishop, and
+      to have addressed him individually: "You say you are my judge; I warn you
+      to take care what you are doing, for I am sent from God, and you are
+      putting yourself in much peril" (<i>magno periculo: gallice</i>, adds the
+      reporter, <i>en grant dangier</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked if her voices ever changed their meaning, and answered
+      that she had never heard two speak contrary to each other; what they had
+      said that day was that she should speak boldly. Asked, if the voice
+      forbade her to reply to questions asked, she replied; "I will not answer
+      you. I have revelations touching the King which I will not tell you."
+      Asked, if the voices forbade her to reveal these revelations, she
+      answered, "I have not consulted them; give me fifteen days' delay and I
+      will answer you"; but being again exhorted to reply, said: "If the voice
+      forbade me to speak, how many times should I tell you?" Again asked, if
+      she were forbidden to speak, answered, "I believe I am not forbidden by
+      men"&mdash;repeating that she would not reply, and knew not how far she
+      should reply, for it had not been revealed to her; but that she believed
+      firmly, as firmly as the Christian faith, and that God had redeemed us
+      from the pains of hell, that this voice came from Him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Questioned concerning the voice, what it appeared to be when it spoke, if
+      that of an angel, or from God Himself; or if it was the voice of a saint
+      or of saints (feminine), answered: "The voice comes from God; and I
+      believe that I should not tell you all I know, for I should displease
+      these voices if I answered you; and as for this question I pray you to
+      leave me free." Asked if she thought that to speak the truth would
+      displease God, she answered, "What the voices say I am to tell to the
+      King, not to you," adding that during that night they had said much to her
+      for the good of the King, and that if she could but let him know she would
+      willingly drink no wine up to Easter (the reader will remember that her
+      frugal fare consisted of bread dipped in the wine and water, which is
+      justly called <i>eau rougie</i> in France). Asked, if she could not induce
+      the voices to speak to her King directly, she answered that she knew not
+      whether her voices would consent, unless it were the will of God, and God
+      consented to it, adding, "They might well reveal it to the King; and with
+      that I should be content." Asked, if the voices could not communicate with
+      the King as they did in her presence, she answered, that she did not know
+      whether this was God's will; and added, that unless it were the will of
+      God she would not know how to act. Asked, if it was by the advice of her
+      voices that she attempted to escape from her prison, she answered, "I have
+      nothing to say to you on that point." Asked, if she always saw a light
+      when the voices were heard, she answered: "Yes: that with the sound of the
+      voices light came." Asked if she saw anything else coming with the voices,
+      answered: "I do not tell you all. I am not allowed to do so, nor does my
+      oath touch that; the voices are good and noble, but neither of that will I
+      answer." She was then asked to give in writing the points on which she
+      would not reply. Then she was asked if her voices had eyes and ears, and
+      answered, "You shall not have this either," adding, that it was a saying
+      among children that men were sometimes hanged for speaking the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked if she knew herself to be in the grace of God. She
+      replied: "If I am not so, may God put me in His grace; if I am, may God
+      keep me in it. I should be the most miserable in the world if I were not
+      in the grace of God." She said besides, that if she were in a state of sin
+      she did not believe her voices would come to her, and she wished that
+      everyone could understand them as she did, adding, that she was about
+      thirteen when they came to her first.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked, whether in her childhood she had played with the other
+      children in the fields, and various other particulars about Domremy,
+      whether there were any Burgundians there? to which Jeanne answered boldly
+      that there was one, and that she wished his head might be cut off, adding
+      piously, "that is, if it pleased God"(3); she was also asked whether she
+      had fought along with the other children against the children of the
+      neighbouring Burgundian village of Maxy (Maxey sur Meuse): why she hated
+      the Burgundians, and many questions of this kind, with a close examination
+      about a certain tree near the village of Domremy, which some called the
+      Tree of the good Ladies, and others, the Fairies' Tree; and also about a
+      well there, the Fairies' Well, of which poor patients were said to drink
+      and get well. Jeanne (no doubt relieved by the simple character of these
+      questions) made answer freely and without hesitation, in no way denying
+      that she had danced and sung with the other children, and made garlands
+      for the image of the Blessed Marie of Domremy; but she did not remember
+      whether she had ever done so after attaining years of discretion, and
+      certainly she had never seen a fairy, nor worked any spell by their means.
+      At the end, after having thus been put off her guard, she was suddenly
+      asked about her dress (a capital point in the eyes of her judges): whether
+      she wished to have a woman's dress. Probably she was, as they hoped,
+      tired, and expecting no such question, for she answered quickly yet with
+      instant recovery: "Bring me one to go home in and I will accept it;
+      otherwise no. I prefer this, since it pleases God that I should wear it."
+      The recollection of Domremy and of the pleasant fields, must have carried
+      her back to the days when the little Jeanne was like the rest in her
+      short, full petticoats of crimson stuff, free of any danger: what could be
+      better to go home in? but she immediately remembered the obvious and
+      excellent reasons she had for wearing another costume now. So ended the
+      third day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime there had been, we are told, various interruptions during
+      the examination; perhaps it was then that Nicolas de Houppeville protested
+      against Bishop Cauchon as a partisan and a Burgundian, and therefore
+      incapable by law of judging a member of the opposite party: and had been
+      rudely silenced, and afterwards punished, as we have already heard.
+      Another kind of opposition less bold had begun to be remarked, which was
+      that one of the persons present, by word and sign, whispering suggestions
+      to her, or warning her with his eyes, was helping the unfortunate prisoner
+      in her defence. Probably this did little good, "for she was often troubled
+      and hurried in her answers," we are told; but it was a sign of good-will,
+      at least. When Frère Isambard, who was the person in question, speaks at a
+      later period he tells us that "the questions put to Jeanne were too
+      difficult, subtle, and dangerous, so that the great clerks and learned men
+      who were present scarcely would have known how to answer them, and that
+      many in the assembly murmured at them." Perhaps the good Frère Isambard
+      might have spared himself the trouble; for Jeanne, however she may have
+      suffered, was probably more able to hold her own than many of those great
+      clerks, and did so with unfailing courage and spirit. One of the other
+      judges, Jean Fabry, a bishop, declared afterwards that "her answers were
+      so good, that for three weeks he believed that they were inspired."
+      Manchon, the reporter, he who had refused to take down the private
+      conversation of Jeanne in her prison with the vile traitor, L'Oyseleur,
+      makes his voice heard also to the effect that "Monseigneur of Beauvais
+      would have had everything written as pleased him, and when there was
+      anything that displeased him he forbade the secretaries to report it as
+      being of no importance for the trial." On another day a humbler witness
+      still, Massieu, one of the officers of the court, who had the charge of
+      taking Jeanne daily from her prison to the hall, and back again, met in
+      the courtyard an Englishman, who seems to have been a singing man or lay
+      clerk "of the King's chapel in England," probably attached to Winchester's
+      ecclesiastical retinue. This man asked him: "What do you think of her
+      answers? Will she be burned? What will happen?" "Up to this time," said
+      Massieu, "I have heard nothing from her that was not honourable and good.
+      She seems to me a good woman, but how it will all end God only knows!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt conversations of this kind were being carried on all over Rouen.
+      Would she be burned? What would happen? Could any one stand and answer
+      like that hour after hour and day by day, inspired only by the devil?
+      There was no popular enthusiasm for her even now. How should there have
+      been in that partisan province, more English than French? But a chill
+      doubt began to steal into many minds whether she was so bad as had been
+      thought, whether indeed she might not after all be something quite
+      different from what she had been thought? Nature had begun to work in the
+      agitated place, and even in that black-robed, eager assembly. If there was
+      a vile L'Oyseleur trying to get her confidence in private, and so betray
+      her, there was also a kind Frère Isambard, privately plucking at her
+      sleeve, imploring her to be cautious, whispering an answer probably not
+      half so wise as her own natural reply, yet warming her heart with the
+      suggestion of a friend at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the fourth day, Jeanne was again required to swear, and replied as
+      before, that so far as concerned the trial she would answer truly, but not
+      all she knew. "You ought to be satisfied: I have sworn sufficiently," she
+      said; and with this her judges seem to have been content. Beaupère then
+      resumed his questions, but first asked her, perhaps with a momentary gleam
+      of compassion and a sudden consciousness of the pallor and weariness of
+      the young prisoner, how she did. She answered, one can imagine with what
+      tone of indignant disdain: "You see how I am: I am as well as I can be."
+      He then cross-examined her closely as to what voices she had heard since
+      her last appearance in court, but drew from her only the same answer, "The
+      voice tells me to answer boldly," and that she would tell them as much as
+      she was permitted by God to tell them, but concerning her revelations for
+      the King of France she would say nothing except by permission of her
+      voices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked what kind of voices they were which she heard, were
+      they voices of angels, or of saints (<i>sancti aut sanctæ</i>, male or
+      female saints) or from God Himself? She answered that the voices were
+      those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, whose heads were crowned with
+      beautiful crowns, very rich and precious. "So much as this God allows me
+      to say. If you doubt send to Poitiers, where I was questioned before." (It
+      may perhaps be permissible to suppose that the kind whisperer at her elbow
+      might have suggested the repeated references to Poitiers that follow, but
+      which are not to be found before: though it was most natural she should
+      refer to this place where she was examined at the beginning of her
+      mission.) Asked how she knew which of these two saints, she answered that
+      she could quite distinguish one from the other by the manner of their
+      salutation; that she had been led and guided by them for seven years, and
+      that she knew them because they had named themselves to her. She was then
+      asked how they were dressed? and answered: "I cannot tell you; I am not
+      permitted to reveal this; if you do not believe me send to Poitiers." She
+      said also that at her coming into France she had revealed these things,
+      but could not now. She was asked what was the age of her saints, but
+      replied that she was not permitted to tell. Asked, if both saints spoke at
+      once or one after the other, she replied: "I have not permission to tell
+      you: but I always consult them both together." Asked, which had appeared
+      to her first, and answered: "I do not know which it was; I did know, but
+      have forgotten. It is written in the register of Poitiers."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "She then said she had much comfort from St. Michael. Again, asked, which
+      had come first, she replied that it was St. Michael. Asked, if a long time
+      had passed since she first heard the voice of St. Michael, answered: "I do
+      not name to you the voice of St. Michael; but his conversation was of
+      great comfort to me." Asked, again, what voice came first to her when she
+      was thirteen, answered, that it was St. Michael whom she saw before her
+      eyes, and that he was not alone, but accompanied by many angels of Heaven.
+      She said also that she would not have come into France but by the command
+      of God. Asked, if she saw St. Michael and the angels really, with her
+      ordinary senses, she answered: "I saw them with my bodily eyes as I see
+      you, and when they left me I wept, desiring much that they would take me
+      with them." Asked, what was the form in which he appeared, she replied: "I
+      cannot answer you; I am not permitted." Asked, what St. Michael said to
+      her the first time, she cried, "You shall have no answer to-day." Then
+      went on to say that her voices told her to reply boldly. Afterwards she
+      said that she had told her King once all that had been revealed to her;
+      said also that she was not permitted to say here what St. Michael had
+      said; but that it would be better to send for a copy of the books which
+      were at Poitiers than to question her on this subject. Asked, what sign
+      she had that these were revelations of God, and that it was really St.
+      Catherine and St. Margaret with whom she talked, she answered: "It is
+      enough that I tell you they were St. Catherine and St. Margaret: believe
+      me or not as you will."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked how she distinguished the points on which she was allowed to speak
+      from the others, she answered, that on some points she had asked
+      permission to speak, and not on others, adding, that she would rather have
+      been torn by wild horses than to have come to France, unless by the
+      license of God. Asked how it was that she put on a man's dress, she
+      answered, that dress appeared to her a small matter, that she did not
+      adopt that dress by the counsel of any man, and that she neither put on a
+      dress nor did anything, but according as God, or the angels, commanded her
+      to do so. Asked, if she knew whether such a command to assume the dress of
+      a man was lawful, she answered: "All that I did, I did by the precepts of
+      our Lord; and if I were bidden to wear another dress I would do so,
+      because it was at the bidding of God." Asked, if she had done it by the
+      orders of Robert de Baudricourt, answered "No." Asked, if she thought that
+      she had done well in assuming a man's dress, answered, that as all she did
+      was by the command of the Lord, she believed that she had done well, and
+      expected a good guarantee and good succour. Asked, if in this particular
+      case of assuming the dress of a man she thought she had done well,
+      answered, that nothing in the world had made her do it, but the command of
+      God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked whether light always accompanied the voices when they
+      came to her, she answered, with an evident reference to her first
+      interview with Charles, that there were many lights on every side as was
+      fit. "It is not only to you that light comes" (or you have not all the
+      light to yourself,&mdash;a curious phrase). Asked, if there was an angel
+      over the head of the King when she saw him for the first time, she
+      answered: "By the Blessed Mary, if there were, I know not, I saw none."
+      Asked, if there was light, she answered: "There were about three hundred
+      soldiers, and fifty of them held torches, without counting any spiritual
+      light. And rarely do I have the revelations without light." Asked, if her
+      King had faith in what she said, she answered, that he had good signs, and
+      also by his clergy. Asked, what revelations her King had, she answered:
+      "You shall have nothing from me this year." Then added that for three
+      weeks she was cross-examined by the clergy, both in the town of Chinon and
+      at Poitiers, and that her King had signs concerning her, before he
+      believed in her. And the clergy of his party had found nothing in her, in
+      respect to her faith, that was not good. Asked, whether she gone to the
+      church of St. Catherine of Fierbois, answered: "yes," and that she had
+      there heard three masses in one day, and from thence went to Chinon; she
+      added that she had sent a letter thence to the King, in which it was
+      contained that she sent this to know if she might come to the town in
+      which the King was; for that she had travelled a hundred and fifty leagues
+      to come to him and to bring him help, for she knew much good concerning
+      him. And she thought it was contained in this letter that she should
+      recognise the King among all the rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said besides, that she had a sword which was given to her at
+      Vaucouleurs; she said also that, being in Tours or at Chinon, she sent for
+      a sword which was in the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois behind the
+      altar, and that when it was found it was rusty. Asked, how she knew about
+      this sword, she answered, that it was rusty because of being in the
+      ground, and there were five crosses on it, and that she knew this sword by
+      her voices, and not by any man's report. She wrote to the ecclesiastics of
+      the place where it was and asked them for this sword, and they sent it to
+      her. It was found not much below the ground behind the altar; she was not
+      sure if it was before or behind the altar, but wrote that it was behind
+      the altar. And when it was found the clergy cleaned it and rubbed off the
+      rust, which came off easily; and it was an armourer of Tours who went to
+      fetch it. The clergy made a scabbard for it before sending it to the said
+      Jeanne, and they of Tours made another, so that it had two scabbards, one
+      of crimson velvet and one of cloth of gold. And she herself procured
+      another of strong leather. She said also that when she was captured she
+      had not that sword. Said also that she continued to wear the said sword
+      until she left St. Denis after the assault on Paris. Asked, what
+      benediction she made, or if she made any on this sword, she answered, that
+      she made no benediction, nor knew how to make one, but that she loved the
+      sword because it had come to her from the Church of the blessed Catherine
+      whom she loved much. Asked, if she had placed it on the altar at the
+      village of Coulenges, Les Vineuses, or elsewhere, placing it there that it
+      might bring good luck, she answered, that she knew nothing of this. Asked,
+      if she did not pray that the sword might have good fortune: "It is good to
+      know that I wish all my armour (<i>harnesseum meum; gallice, mon harnois</i>)
+      to be very fortunate." Asked, where she had left the sword, answered, that
+      she had deposited a sword and armour at St. Denis, but it was not this
+      sword. She added that she had it in Lagny: but that she afterwards wore
+      the sword which had been taken from a Burgundian, which was a good sword
+      for war and gave good strokes (<i>gallice, de bonnes bouffes</i> and <i>de
+      bons torchons</i>). Said also that to tell where she left it had nothing
+      to do with the trial, and she would answer nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said also that her brothers had everything that belonged to her, her
+      horses, swords, and everything, and that she believed they were worth in
+      all about 12,000 francs. She was also asked whether when she was at
+      Orleans she had a standard, and what colour it was; answered, that she had
+      a standard, the field of which was sown with lilies, and on it was a
+      figure of the world with angels on each side. It was white, and made of a
+      stuff called boucassin, upon which was written the name <i>Jhesus Maria</i>,
+      so that all might see, and it was fringed with silk. Asked, if the name <i>Jhesus
+      Maria</i> was written above or below or at the side, she answered, "At the
+      side." Asked, if she loved her sword or standard best, she answered, that
+      she loved her standard best. Asked, why she had that picture on the
+      standard, she answered: "I have sufficiently told you that I did nothing
+      but by the command of God." She added that she herself carried her
+      standard when in battle that she might not hurt anyone, and said that she
+      had never killed any man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, how many men her King gave her when she began her work, answered,
+      from ten to twelve(4) thousand men, and that she attacked first the
+      bastile of St. Loup at Orleans, and afterwards that of the bridge. Asked,
+      from which bastile it was that her men were driven back, she answered,
+      that she did not remember; adding, that she had been sure that she could
+      raise the siege at Orleans, for it had been so revealed to her; and that
+      she told this to her King before it occurred. Asked, whether, when she
+      made assault, she told her men that all the arrows, stones, cannon-balls,
+      etc., would be intercepted by her, she answered no&mdash;that more than a
+      hundred were wounded: that what she had said to her people was that they
+      should have no doubts, for they should certainly raise the siege of
+      Orleans. She said also that in attacking the bastile of the bridge she
+      herself was wounded by an arrow in the neck, and was much comforted by St.
+      Catherine, and was healed in fifteen days; but that she never gave up
+      riding and working all that time. Asked, if she knew that she would be
+      wounded, she answered, that she knew it well and had told her King, but
+      that, notwithstanding, she went about her business. It was revealed to her
+      by the voices of her two saints, the blessed Catherine and the blessed
+      Margaret. She said besides, that she was the first to place a scaling
+      ladder on the bastile of the bridge, and as she raised it she was struck
+      in the neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked why she did not treat with the Captain of Jargeau; she
+      answered that the lords of her party had replied to the English, who had
+      asked for a truce of fifteen days, that they could not have it, but that
+      they might retire, they and their horses at once; she had said for her
+      part that if they retired in their doublets and tunics their lives should
+      be spared, otherwise the city would be taken by storm. Asked, if she had
+      consulted with her counsel, that is with her voices, whether the truce
+      should be granted or not, she answered, that she did not remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will be remarked, as the slow examination goes on day after day, that
+      Jeanne, becoming at moments impatient, sometimes gives a rough answer, and
+      at other times plays a little with her questioner as if in contempt. "By
+      the Blessed Mary, I know not!" is evidently an outburst of impatience at
+      the exhausting, exasperating folly of some of these questions, and this
+      will be further visible in future sittings. It seems very likely that the
+      reference to Poitiers, which was an excellent suggestion, commending
+      itself to her invariable good sense, came from the kind priest who tried
+      to serve her as he best could; but there are other answers a little
+      incoherent, which look as if Frère Isambard, if it were he, had confused
+      her in her own response without conveying anything better to her mind,
+      especially on the occasions when she refuses to reply, and then does so,
+      abandoning her ground at once. Her patience and steadiness are quite
+      extraordinary however even in the less self-collected moments. Thus end
+      the proceedings of the fourth day.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      The fifth day began with the usual dispute about the oath, Jeanne still
+      retaining her reservation with the greatest firmness. She seems, however,
+      at the end, to have repeated her oath to answer everything that had to do
+      with the trial&mdash;"And as much as I say I will say as if I were before
+      the Pope of Rome." These words must have given the Magister Beaupère an
+      admirable occasion for introducing one of the things charged against her
+      for which there was actual proof&mdash;her letter to the Comte d'Armagnac
+      in respect to the Pope. He seized upon it evidently with eagerness, and
+      asked her which she held to be the true Pope. To this she answered
+      quietly, "Are there two?"&mdash;the most confusing reply.(5)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked if she had received letters from the Comte d'Armagnac,
+      asking to know which of the three existing Popes he ought to obey; she
+      answered that she had his letter, and had replied to it, saying among
+      other things that when she was in Paris and at rest she would answer him;
+      and added that she was on the point of mounting her horse when she gave
+      that reply. The copy of the letter and the reply being read to her she was
+      asked if that was what she had said; to which she replied that she had
+      answered his letter in part, not in full. Asked, if she knew the counsels
+      of the King of Kings so as to be able to say which the count should obey,
+      she answered, that she knew nothing. Asked, if she was in doubt as to
+      which the count ought to obey, she replied that she knew not which to bid
+      him obey; but that she, the said Jeanne, held and believed that we ought
+      to obey our Pope who was in Rome; that as for what he asked, that she
+      should tell him which God desired him to obey, she had said she knew
+      nothing; but she sent much to him which was not put in writing. And as for
+      herself she believed in the Lord Pope of Rome. Asked, whether in respect
+      to the three pontiffs she had received counsel, she answered, that she had
+      neither written nor made to be written anything about the three pontiffs.
+      And this she swore on her oath. Asked, if she were in the habit of putting
+      on her letters the name <i>Jhesus Maria</i> with a cross, answered, that
+      she did so sometimes but not always, and that sometimes she put a cross to
+      shew that these letters were not to be taken seriously (as likely to fall
+      into the enemy's hands).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some questions were then put to her about her letters to the Duke of
+      Bedford and to the English King, and copies were read to her to which she
+      objected on some small points, but mistakenly it would seem, as that she
+      had summoned them to surrender to the King, while the scribe had put
+      "surrender to the Maid." She said, however, that they were her letters,
+      and that she held by them. She added that before seven years the English
+      would lose more than they had lost at Orleans,(6) and that their cause
+      would be lost in France; she said also that the said English should have
+      greater disasters than they had yet had in France, and that God would give
+      greater victories to France. Asked, how she knew this, she replied: "I
+      know it by the revelations made to me, and that it will happen in seven
+      years, and I might well be angry that it is deferred so long." Asked, when
+      this would happen, she said that she knew neither the day nor the hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was tormented a little further as to the dates, whether this would
+      happen before the St. Jean, or before the St. Martin in winter, but made
+      no answer except that before the St. Martin in winter they should see many
+      things, and it might be that the English should fail; as a matter of fact
+      Paris opened its gates to Charles VII. within the seven years specified,
+      so that Jeanne's prophecy may be held to have been fulfilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We then come once more to a long and profitless interrogatory upon her
+      saints, in which the crowd of judges forgot their dignity and overwhelmed
+      her with a flood of often very foolish, and sometimes worse than foolish
+      questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, how she knew the future, she answered that she knew it by St.
+      Catherine and St. Margaret; asked, if St. Gabriel was with St. Michael
+      when he came to her, she answered, that she could not remember. Asked, if
+      she saw them always in the same dress, answered yes, and they were crowned
+      very richly. Of their other garments she could not speak; she knew nothing
+      of their tunics. Asked, how she knew whether they were men or women,
+      answered, that she knew well by their voices which revealed them to her;
+      and that she knew nothing save by revelation and the precepts of God.
+      Asked, what appearances she saw, she answered, that she saw faces. Asked,
+      if these saints had hair, she answered, "It is good to know." Asked, if
+      there was anything between their crowns and their hair, answered, no.
+      Asked, if their hair was long and hanging down, answered, "I know nothing
+      about it." She also said that their voices were beautiful sweet, and
+      humble, and that she understood them well. Asked, how they could speak
+      when they had no bodies, she answered, "I refer it to God." She repeated
+      that the voices were beautiful, humble, and sweet, and that they could
+      speak French. Asked, if St. Margaret did not speak English, answered: "How
+      could she speak English when she was not on the English side?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This would seem to infer that the St. Margaret referred to was not the
+      legendary St. Margaret of the dragon, but St. Margaret of Scotland, well
+      known in France from the long connection between those two countries, and
+      a popular mediæval saint. She would naturally have spoken English, being a
+      Saxon, but also quite naturally would have been against the English, as a
+      Scottish queen; but of these refinements it is very unlikely that Jeanne
+      knew anything, and her prompt and somewhat sharp reply evidently cut the
+      inquiry short. The next question was, did they wear gold rings in their
+      ears or elsewhere, these crowned saints; to which she answered a little
+      contemptuously, "I know nothing about it." She was then asked if she
+      herself had rings: on which "turning to us the aforesaid Bishop, she said,
+      'You have one of mine; give it back to me.' She then said that the
+      Burgundians had her other ring, and asked of us if we had the ring to shew
+      it to her. Asked, who gave her this ring, answered, her father or her
+      mother, and that the name <i>Jhesus Maria</i> was written upon it, but
+      that she knew not who put it there, nor even whether there was a stone in
+      the ring; it was given to her in the village of Domremy. She added that
+      her brother gave her another ring which we had, and said that she desired
+      that it might be given to the Church."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden change was now made in the cross-examination according to the
+      methods of that operation, throwing her back without warning upon the
+      village superstitions of Domremy, the magic tree and fountain. Many of the
+      questions which follow are so trivial and are so evidently instinct with
+      evil meaning, that it seems a wrong to Beaupère to impute the whole of the
+      interrogatory to him; other questions were evidently interposed by the
+      excited assembly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if St. Catherine and St. Margaret talked with her under the tree of
+      which mention had been made above, she answered, "I know nothing about
+      it." Asked, if the saints were seen at the fountain near the tree,
+      answered yes, that she had heard them there; but what her saints promised
+      to her, there or elsewhere, she answered, that nothing was promised except
+      by permission from God. Asked, what promises were made to her, she
+      answered, "This has nothing at all to do with your trial," but added, that
+      among other things they said to her that her King should be restored to
+      his kingdom, and that his adversaries should be destroyed. She said also
+      that they promised to take her, the said Jeanne, to Paradise, as she had
+      asked them to do. Asked, if she had any other promises, she said there was
+      one promise that had nothing to do with the trial, but that in three
+      months she would tell them what that other promise was. Asked, if the
+      voices told her she would be set free from her prison in three months, she
+      answered: "This does not concern your trial; nor do I know when I shall be
+      set free." And she added that those who wished to send her out of this
+      world might well go before her. Asked, if her council did not tell her
+      when she should be set free from her present prison, answered: "Ask me
+      this in three months' time; I can promise you as much as that"&mdash;but
+      added: "You may ask those present, on their oaths, if this has anything to
+      do with the trial."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Startled by this suggestion, the judges seem to have held a hurried
+      consultation among themselves to see whether these matters did really
+      touch the trial; the result apparently decided them to return again to the
+      question of the local superstitions of Domremy, the only point on which
+      there seemed a chance of breaking down the extraordinarily just and
+      steadfast intelligence of the girl who stood before them. After this pause
+      she resumed, apparently not in answer to any question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I have well told you that there were things you should not know, and some
+      time I must needs be set free. But I must have permission if I speak;
+      therefore I will ask to have delay in this." Asked, if her voices forbade
+      her to speak the truth, she said: "Do you expect me to tell you things
+      that concern the King of France? There is a great deal here that has
+      nothing to do with the trial." She said also that she knew that her King
+      should enjoy the kingdom of France, as well as she knew that they were
+      there before her in judgment. She added that she would have been dead but
+      for the revelations which comforted her daily. She was then asked what she
+      had done with her mandragora (mandrake)? she answered that she had no
+      mandragora, nor had ever had. She had heard say that near her village
+      there was one, but had never seen it. She had heard say that it was a
+      dangerous thing, and that it was wicked to keep it; but knew nothing of
+      its use. Asked, in what place this mandrake was, and what she had heard of
+      it? she said that she had heard that it grew under the tree of which
+      mention has been made, but did not know the place; she said also that she
+      had heard that above the mandragora was a hazel tree. Asked, what she
+      heard was done with the mandragora, answered, that she had heard that it
+      brought money, but did not believe it; and added that her voices had never
+      told her anything about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, what was the appearance of St. Michael when she saw him first, she
+      answered, that she saw no crown, and knew nothing of his dress. Asked, if
+      he was naked, she answered, "Do you think God has nothing to clothe him
+      with?" Asked, if he had hair, she answered, "Why should it have been cut?"
+      She said further that she had not seen the blessed Michael since she left
+      the castle of Crotoy, nor did she see him often. At last she said that she
+      knew not whether he had hair or not. Asked, whether he carried scales, she
+      answered, "I know nothing of it," but added that she had much joy in
+      seeing him, and she knew when she saw him that she was not in a state of
+      sin. She also said that St. Catherine and St. Margaret often made her
+      confess to them, and said that if she had been in a state of sin it was
+      without knowing it. She was then asked whether, when she confessed, she
+      believed herself to be in a state of mortal sin; she answered, that she
+      knew not whether she had been in that state, but did not believe she had
+      done the works of sin. "It would not have pleased God," she said, "that I
+      should have been so; nor would it have pleased Him that I should have done
+      the works of sin by which my soul should have been burdened."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked what sign she gave to the King that she came to him
+      from God; she answered: "I have told you always that nothing should draw
+      this from me.(7) Ask me no more." Asked, if she had not sworn to reveal
+      what was asked of her touching the trial, answered, "I have told you that
+      I will tell you nothing that was for our King; and of this which belongs
+      to him I will not speak." Asked, if she knew the sign which she gave to
+      the King, she answered: "You shall know nothing from me." When it was said
+      to her that this did concern the trial, she answered, "Of that which I
+      have promised to keep secret I shall tell you nothing"; and further she
+      said, "I promised in that place and I could not tell you without perjuring
+      myself." Asked, to whom she promised? answered, that she had promised to
+      Saints Catherine and Margaret, and this was shown to the King. She also
+      said she had promised it to these two saints, because they had required it
+      of her. And the same Jeanne had done this at their request. "Too many
+      people would have asked me concerning it, if I had not promised to the
+      aforesaid saints." She was then asked, when she showed this sign to the
+      King if there were others with him; she answered, that to her there was no
+      one near him, even though many people might have been present. (As a
+      matter of fact the sign was given to Charles when he talked with the Maid
+      apart in a recess, the great hall being full of the Court and followers;
+      so that this was strictly true.) Asked further, if she saw a crown over
+      the head of her King when she showed him this sign, but replied: "I cannot
+      answer you without perjury." Asked further if her King had a crown when he
+      was at Rheims, answered, that in her opinion her King had a crown which he
+      found at Rheims, but a very fine one was afterwards brought for him. He
+      did this to hasten matters, at the desire of the city of Rheims; but if he
+      had been more certain, he could have had a crown a thousand times richer.
+      (All this is very obscure.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she had seen this crown, she answered: "I could not tell you
+      without perjury, but I heard that it was a very rich one." It was then
+      determined to conclude for this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the sixth day there was again the same questions about the oath, ending
+      in the usual way. And the cross-examination was at once continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked if she would say whether St. Michael had wings, and what
+      bodies and members had St. Catherine and St. Margaret; and she answered,
+      "I have told you what I know, and will make no other reply"; she said,
+      moreover, that when she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine and St.
+      Margaret, she knew at once that they were saints of Paradise. Asked, if
+      she saw anything more than their faces, she answered: "I have told you all
+      I know of them: and I would rather have had my head taken off than tell
+      you all I know." She then said that in whatever concerned the trial she
+      would speak freely. Asked, if she believed that St. Michael and St.
+      Gabriel had natural heads, she answered: "I saw them with my eyes and I
+      believe that they are, as firmly as I believe that God is." Asked, if she
+      believed that God made them in the form in which she saw them, she
+      answered, "Yes." Asked, if she believed that God had created them in the
+      same form from the beginning, answered: "You shall have no more for the
+      present, except what I have already said."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This subject was then dropped, and the examiner made another leap forward
+      to a different part of her life. "Did you know by revelation that you
+      should break prison?" he said. To this Jeanne answered indignantly: "This
+      has nothing to do with your trial. Would you have me speak against
+      myself?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again questioned what her "voices" had said to her in respect to her
+      attempts at escape, she again answered: "This has nothing to do with the
+      trial; I go back to the trial. If all your questions were about that, I
+      should tell you all." She said besides, on her faith, that she knew
+      neither the day nor the hour when she should escape. She was then asked
+      what the voices said to her generally, and answered: "In truth, they tell
+      me I shall be freed, but neither the day nor the hour; and that I ought to
+      speak boldly, and with a glad countenance." She was then asked whether,
+      when first she saw her King, he asked her whether it was by revelation
+      that she had assumed the dress of a man? she replied: "I have answered
+      this. I cannot recollect whether he asked me. But it is written in the
+      book at Poitiers." Asked, whether the doctors who examined her there, some
+      for a month, some for three weeks, had asked her about her change of
+      dress; she answered: "I don't remember; but I know they asked me when I
+      assumed the dress of a man, and I told them it was in the town of
+      Vaucouleurs." Asked, whether these doctors had inquired whether it was her
+      voices which had made her take that dress, answered, "I don't remember."
+      Asked if her Queen wished her to change her dress when she first saw her,
+      answered, "I don't remember." Asked if her King, Queen, and all of her
+      party did not ask her to lay aside the dress of a man, she answered, "This
+      has nothing to do with the trial." Asked, if the same was not requested of
+      her in the castle of Beaurevoir, she answered: "It is true. And I replied
+      that I could not lay it aside without the permission of God." She said
+      further that the demoiselle of Luxembourg (aunt of Jeanne's captor, and a
+      very old woman) and the lady of Beaurevoir offered her a woman's dress, or
+      stuff to make one, and begged her to wear it; but she replied that she had
+      not yet the permission of our Lord, and that it was not yet time. Asked,
+      if M. Jean de Pressy and others at Arras had offered her a woman's dress,
+      she answered, "He and others have often asked it of me." Asked, if she
+      thought she would have done wrong in putting on a woman's dress, she
+      answered, that it was better to obey her sovereign Lord, that is, God; she
+      said also that if she had done it, she would rather have done it at the
+      request of these two ladies than of any other in France, except her Queen.
+      Asked, if, when God revealed to her that she should change her dress, it
+      was by the voice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, or St. Margaret, she
+      answered, "You shall hear no more about it." Asked, when the King first
+      employed her, and her standard was made, whether the men-at-arms and
+      others who took part in the war did not have flags imitated from hers? she
+      answered, "It is well to know that the lords retained their own arms"; she
+      also added that her brothers-in-arms made such pennons as pleased them.
+      Asked, how these were made, if they were of linen or cloth, answered, that
+      they were of white satin, some of them with lilies; that she had but two
+      or three lances in her own company&mdash;but that in the rest of the army
+      some carried pennons like hers, but only to distinguish them from others.
+      Asked, if the banners were often renewed, answered: "I know not; when the
+      staff was broken it was renewed." Asked, if she had not said that the
+      pennons copied from hers were fortunate, answered, that she had said, "Go
+      in boldly among the English"; and that she had done the same herself.
+      Asked, if she said that they should have good luck if they bore the
+      banners well, answered, that she had told them what would happen, and what
+      should still happen. Asked, if she had caused holy water to be sprinkled
+      on the pennons when they were new, she answered, "That has nothing to do
+      with the trial"; but added that if she did so sprinkle them she was not
+      instructed to answer that question now. Asked, if the others put <i>Jhesus
+      Maria</i> upon their pennons, she answered: "By my faith, I know nothing
+      about it." Asked, if she had ever carried or caused to be carried in a
+      procession round a church or altar the linen of which the pennons were
+      made, answered no, that she had never seen anything of the kind done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, when she was before Jargeau, what it was that she wore behind her
+      helmet, and if she had not something round it, she answered: "By my faith,
+      there was nothing." Asked, if she knew a certain Brother Richard, she
+      answered: "I never saw him till I was before Troyes." Asked, what cheer
+      Brother Richard made to her, answered, that she thought the people of
+      Troyes had sent him to her, doubting whether she had come on the part of
+      God, and that as he approached her he made the sign of the cross, and
+      sprinkled holy water; she said to him: "Come on boldly; I shall not fly
+      away." Asked, if she had seen, or had caused to be made, any images or
+      pictures of herself, she answered, that at Arras she had seen a picture in
+      the hands of a Scot, where she was represented fully armed, kneeling on
+      one knee, and presenting a letter to the King; but that she had never
+      caused any image or picture of herself to be made. Asked concerning a
+      table in the house of her host, upon which were painted three women, with
+      <i>Justice, Peace, Union</i> inscribed beneath, answered, that she knew
+      nothing of it. Asked, if she knew that those of her party caused masses
+      and prayers to be made in her honour, she answered, that she knew not; and
+      if they did so, it was not by any command of hers; but that if they did
+      so, her opinion was that they did no wrong. Asked, if those of her party
+      firmly believed that she was sent from God, she answered: "I know not
+      whether they believed it; but even if they did not believe it, I am none
+      the less sent on the part of God." Asked, whether she thought that to
+      believe that she was sent from god was a worthy faith, she answered, that
+      if they believed that she was sent from God they were not mistaken. Asked,
+      if she knew what her party meant by kissing her feet and hands and her
+      garments, answered, that many people did it, but that her hands were
+      kissed as little as she could help it. The poor people, however, came to
+      her of their own free will, because she never oppressed them, but
+      protected them as far as was in her power. Asked, what reverence the
+      people of Troyes made to her, she answered, "None at all," and added that
+      she believed Brother Richard came into Troyes with her army, but that she
+      had not seen him coming in. Asked, if he had not preached at the gates
+      when she came, answered, that she scarcely paused there at all, and knew
+      nothing of any sermon. Asked, how long she was at Rheims, and answered,
+      four or five days. Asked, whether she baptised (stood godmother to)
+      children there, she answered: To one at Troyes, but did not remember any
+      at Rheims or at Château-Thierry; but there were two at St. Denis; and
+      willingly she called the boys "Charles," in honour of her King, and the
+      girls "Jeanne," according to what their mothers wished. Asked, if the good
+      women of the town did not touch with their rings the rings she wore, she
+      answered, that many women touched her hands and her rings; but she did not
+      know why they did it. Asked, what she did with the gloves in which her
+      King was consecrated, she answered that "Gloves were distributed to the
+      knights and nobles that came there"; and there was one who lost his; but
+      she did not say that she would find it for him. Also she said that her
+      standard was in the church at Rheims, and she believed near the altar, and
+      she herself had carried it for a short time, but did not know whether
+      Brother Richard had held it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked if she communicated and went to confession often while
+      moving about the country, and if she received the sacrament in her male
+      costume; to which she answered "yes, but without her arms"; she was then
+      questioned about a horse belonging to the Bishop of Senlis, which had not
+      suited her, a matter completely without importance. The inference intended
+      was that it was taken from him without being paid for; but there was no
+      evidence that the Maid knew anything about it. We then come to the
+      incident of Lagny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked how old the child was which she saw at Lagny, and answered,
+      three days; it had been brought to Lagny to the Church of Nôtre Dame, and
+      she was told that all the maids in Lagny were before our Lady praying for
+      it, and she also wished to go and pray God and our Lady that its life
+      might come back; and she went, and prayed with the rest. And finally life
+      appeared; it yawned three times, and was baptised and buried in
+      consecrated ground. It had given no sign of life for three days and was
+      black as her coat, but when it yawned its colour began to come back. She
+      was there with the other maids on her knees before our Lady to make her
+      prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader must understand that this was no special appeal to Jeanne's
+      miraculous power, but a custom of that intense and tender charity with
+      which the Church of Rome corrects her dogmatism upon questions of
+      salvation. A child unbaptised could not be buried in consecrated ground,
+      and was subject to all the sorrows of the unredeemed; but who could doubt
+      that the priest would be easily persuaded by some wavering of the tapers
+      on the altar upon the little dead face, some flicker of his own
+      compassionate eyelids, that sufficient life had come back to permit the
+      holy rite to be administered? The whole little scene is affecting in the
+      extreme, the young creatures all kneeling, fervently appealing to the
+      Maiden-mother, the priest ready to take instant advantage of any possible
+      flicker, the Maid of France, no conspicuous figure, but weeping and
+      praying among the rest. There was no thought here of the raising of the
+      dead&mdash;the prayer was for breath enough only to allow of the holy
+      observance, the blessed water, the last possibility of human love and
+      effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was then questioned concerning Catherine of La Rochelle, the
+      supposed prophetess, who had been played against her by La Tremouille and
+      his follows, and narrated how she had watched two nights to see the
+      mysterious lady clothed in cloth of gold who was said to appear to
+      Catherine, but had not seen her, and that she had advised the woman to
+      return to her husband and children. Catherine's mission was to go through
+      the "good towns" with heralds and trumpets to call upon those who had
+      money or treasure of any kind to give it to the King, and she professed to
+      have a supernatural knowledge where such money was hidden. (No doubt La
+      Tremouille must have thought that to get money, which was so scarce, in
+      such a simple way, was worth trying at least. But Jeanne's opinion was
+      that it was folly, and that there was nothing in it; an opinion fully
+      verified. Catherine's advice had been that Jeanne should go to the Duke of
+      Burgundy to make peace; but Jeanne had answered that no peace could be
+      made save at the end of the lance.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked about the siege of La Charité; she answered, that she
+      had made an assault: but had not sprinkled holy water, or caused it to be
+      sprinkled. Asked, why she did not enter the city as she had the command of
+      God to do so, she replied: "Who told you that I was commanded to enter?"
+      Asked, if she had not had the advice of her voices, she answered, that she
+      had desired to go into France (meaning towards Paris), but the generals
+      had told her that it was better to go first to La Charité. She was then
+      asked if she had been long in the tower of Beaurevoir; answered, that she
+      was there about four months, and that when she heard the English come she
+      was angry and much troubled. Her voices forbade her several times to
+      attempt to escape; but at last, in the doubt she had of the English she
+      threw herself down, commending herself to God and to our Lady, and was
+      much hurt. But after she had done this the voice of St. Catherine said to
+      her not to be afraid, that she should be healed, and that Compiègne would
+      be relieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Also she said that she prayed always for the relief of Compiègne with her
+      council. Asked, what she said after she had thrown herself down, she
+      answered, that some said that she was dead; and as soon as the Burgundians
+      saw that she was not dead, they told her that she had thrown herself down.
+      Asked, if she had said that she would rather die than fall into the hands
+      of the English, she answered, that she would much rather have rendered her
+      soul to God than have fallen into the hands of the English. Asked, if she
+      was not in a great rage, and if she did not blaspheme the name of God, she
+      answered, that she never said evil of any saint, and that it was not her
+      custom to swear. Asked respecting Soissons, when the captain had
+      surrendered the town, whether she had not cursed God, and said that if she
+      had gotten hold of the captain, she would have cut him into four pieces;
+      she answered, that she never swore by any saint, and that those who said
+      so had not understood her.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      At this point the public trial of Jeanne came to a sudden end. Either the
+      feeling produced in the town, and even among the judges, by her
+      undeviating, simple, and dignified testimony had begun to be more than her
+      persecutors had calculated upon; or else they hoped to make shorter work
+      with her when deprived of the free air of publicity, the sight no doubt of
+      some sympathetic faces, and the consciousness of being still able to
+      vindicate her cause and to maintain her faith before men. Two or three
+      fierce Inquisitors within her cell, and the Bishop, that man without heart
+      or pity at their head, might still tear admissions from her weariness,
+      which a certain sympathetic atmosphere in a large auditory, swept by waves
+      of natural feeling, would strengthen her to keep back. The Bishop made a
+      proclamation that in order not to vex and tire his learned associates he
+      would have the minutes of the previous sittings reduced into form, and
+      submitted to them for judgment, while he himself carried on apart what
+      further interrogatory was necessary. We are told that he was warned by a
+      counsellor of the town that secret examinations without witnesses or
+      advocate on the prisoner's side, were illegal; but Monseigneur de Beauvais
+      was well aware that anything would be legal which effected his purpose,
+      and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or illegality of the
+      proceedings would be of small importance. I have thought it right to give
+      to the best of my power a literal translation of these examinations,
+      notwithstanding their great length; as, except in one book, now out of
+      print and very difficult to procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so
+      far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to me that, even at the risk of
+      fatiguing the reader (always capable of skipping at his pleasure), it is
+      better to unfold the complete scene with all its tedium and badgering,
+      which brings out by every touch the extraordinary self-command, valour,
+      and sense of this wonderful Maid, the youngest, perhaps, and most ignorant
+      of the assembly, yet meeting all with a modest and unabashed countenance,
+      true, pure, and natural,&mdash;a far greater miracle in her simplicity and
+      noble steadfastness than even in the wonders she had done.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) She was in reality detained two days, which fact, no
+     doubt, she judged to be an unimportant detail.
+
+     (2) Probably meaning, had been present when the voices came
+     to her and had perceived her state of listening and
+     abstraction.
+
+     (3) This was her special friend, Gerard of Epinal&mdash;her
+     <i>compère</i> and gossip; was it jesting beguiled by some
+     childish recollection, or mock threat of youthful days that
+     she said this?
+
+     (4) An answer evidently given in the vagueness of imperfect
+     knowledge, meaning a very great number.
+
+     (5) Quicherat gives a note on this subject to point out that
+     there was really was but one Pope at this moment, the
+     question having been settled by the abdication of Clement
+     VIII., Benedict XIV. being a mere impostor. We cannot
+     believe, however, that this historical cutting of the knot
+     could be known to Jeanne. She probably felt only, with her
+     fine instinct, that there could be but one Pope, and that to
+     be deceived on such a matter ought to have been a thing
+     impossible to all those priests and learned men; as a matter
+     of fact the three claimants, on account of whom the Comte
+     d'Armagnac had appealed to her, were no longer existing at
+     the time he wrote.
+
+     (6) She meant Paris, which was lost by the English,
+     according to her prophecy within the time named.
+
+     (7) It should here be noted that Jeanne's sign to the King
+     being, as he afterwards declared, the answer to his most
+     private devotions and the final setting at rest of a doubt
+     which might have injured him much had it been known that he
+     entertained it&mdash;it would have been dishonourable on her part
+     and a great wrong to him had she revealed it.
+
+     (8) The translation of M. Fabre is now, I believe,
+     reprinted, but it is not satisfactory.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV &mdash;THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON. LENT, 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It must not be forgotten, in the history of this strange trial, that the
+      prisoner was brought from the other side of France expressly that she
+      might be among a people who were not of her own party, and who had no
+      natural sympathies with her, but a hereditary connection with England,
+      which engaged all its partialities on that side. For this purpose it was
+      that the <i>venue</i>, the town expected the coming of the Witch, and all
+      the dark revelations that might be extracted from her, her spells, and the
+      details of that contract with the devil which was so entrancing to the
+      popular imagination, with excitement and eagerness. Such a <i>Cause
+      Célèbre</i> had never taken place among them before; and everybody no
+      doubt looked forward to the pleasure of seeing it proved that it was not
+      by the will of Heaven, but by some monstrous combination of black arts,
+      that such an extraordinary result as the defeat of the invincible English
+      soldiers had been brought about. The litigious and logical Normans no
+      doubt looked forward to it as to the most interesting entertainment,
+      ending in the complete vindication of their own side and the exposure of
+      the nefarious arms used by their adversaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when the proceedings had been opened, and in place of some dark-browed
+      and termagant sorceress, with the mark of every evil passion in her face,
+      there appeared before the spectators crowding into every available corner,
+      the slim, youthful figure&mdash;was it boy or girl?&mdash;the serene and
+      luminous countenance of the Maid, the flower of youth raising its
+      whiteness and innocence in the midst of all those black-robed, subtle
+      Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance must have given a
+      shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may be called the lay
+      spectators, those who had no especial bias more than common report, and
+      whose credit or interest were not involved in bringing this unlikely
+      criminal to condemnation. "A girl! Like our own Jeanne at home," might
+      many a father have said, dismayed and confounded. She had, they all say,
+      those eyes of innocence which it is so impossible not to believe, and that
+      virginal voice, <i>assez femme</i>, which a sentimental Frenchman insists
+      upon as belonging only to the spotless. At all events she had the bearing
+      of honesty, purity, and truth. She was not afraid though all the powers of
+      hell&mdash;or was it only of the Church and the Law?&mdash;were arrayed
+      against her: no guilty mystery to be discovered, was in her countenance.
+      But it must have been plain to the keen and not too charitable Normans
+      that such semblances are not always to be trusted, and that the devil
+      himself even, on occasion, can take upon himself the appearance of an
+      angel of light; so that after the first shock of wonder they no doubt
+      settled themselves to listen, believing that soon they would have their
+      imaginations fed with tales of horror, and would discover the hoofs and
+      the horns and unveil with triumph the lurking demon. The French historians
+      never take into consideration the fact that it was the belief of Rouen and
+      Normandy, as well as of any similar town or province in England, that the
+      child Henry VI. was lawful king, and that whatever was on the other side
+      was a hateful adversary, to be brought to such disaster and shame as was
+      possible, without mercy and without delay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after a few days of the examination which we have just reported,
+      public opinion was greatly staggered, and knew not how to turn. Gradually
+      the conviction must have been forced upon every mind which had any candour
+      left, that Jeanne, at that dreadful bar, with the stake in sight, and all
+      the learning of Paris&mdash;the entire power of one great national and
+      half of another, all England and half France against&mdash;(many more than
+      half France, for the other part had abandoned her cause),&mdash;showed
+      nothing of the demon, but all&mdash;if not of the angel, yet of the Maid,
+      the emblem of perfection to that rude world, though often so barbarously
+      handled. It might almost be said of the age, notwithstanding its
+      immorality and rampant viciousness, that in its eyes a true virgin could
+      do no harm. And hers was one if ever such a thing existed on earth. The
+      talk in the streets began to take a very different tone. Massieu the
+      clerical sheriff's officer saw nothing in her answers that was not good
+      and right. Out of the midst of the crowd of listeners would burst an
+      occasional cry of "Well said!" An Englishman, even a knight, overcome by
+      his feelings, cried out: "Why was not she English, this brave girl!" All
+      these were ominous sounds. Still more ominous was the utterance of Maître
+      Jean Lohier, a lawyer of Rouen, who declared loudly that the trial was not
+      a legal trial for the reasons which follow:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In the first place because it was not in the form of an ordinary trial;
+      secondly, because it was not held in a public court, and those present had
+      not full and complete freedom to say what was their full and unbiassed
+      opinion; thirdly, because there was question of the honour of the King of
+      France of whose party Jeanne was, without calling him, or any one for him;
+      fourthly, because neither libel nor articles were produced, and this woman
+      who was only an uninstructed girl, had no advocate to answer for her
+      before so many Masters and Doctors, on such grave matters, and especially
+      those which touched upon the revelations of which she spoke; therefore it
+      seemed to him that the trial was worth nothing. For these things
+      Monseigneur de Beauvais was very indignant against the said Maître Lohier,
+      saying: 'Here is Lohier who is going to make a fine fuss about our trial;
+      he calumniates us all, and tells the world it is of no good. If one were
+      to go by him, one would have to begin everything over again, and all that
+      has been done would be of no use.' Monseigneur de Beauvais said besides:
+      'It is easy to see on which foot he halts (<i>de quel pied il cloche</i>).
+      By St. John, we shall do nothing of the kind; we shall go on with our
+      trial as we have begun it.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A day or two later Manchon, the Clerk of the Court (he who refused to take
+      down Jeanne's conversation with her Judas), met this same lawyer Lohier at
+      church, and asked him, as no doubt every man asked every other whom he
+      met, how did he think the trial was going? to which Lohier answered: "You
+      see the manner in which they proceed; they will take her, if they can, in
+      her words&mdash;that is to say, the assertions in which she says <i>I know
+      for certain</i>, things that concern her apparitions. If she would say,
+      'It seems to me' instead of 'I know for certain,' I do not see how any man
+      could condemn her. It appears that they proceed against her rather from
+      hate than from any other cause, and for this reason I shall not remain
+      here. I will have nothing to do with it." This I think shows very clearly
+      that Lohier, like the bulk of the population, by no means thought at first
+      that it was "from hate" that the trial proceeded, but honestly believed
+      that he had been called to try Jeanne as a professor of the black arts;
+      and that he had discovered from her own testimony that she was not so, and
+      that the motive of the trial was entirely a different one from that of
+      justice; one in fact with which an honest man could have nothing to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very significant also that the number of judges present in court on
+      the sixth day, the last of the public examination, was only thirty-eight,
+      as against the sixty-two of the second day, which seems to prove that a
+      general disgust and alarm was growing in the minds of those most closely
+      concerned. Warwick and the soldiers, impatient of all such business,
+      striding in noisily from time to time to give a careless glance at the
+      proceedings, might not stay long enough to share the impression&mdash;or
+      might, who can say? Their business was to get this pestilent woman, even
+      if by chance she might be an innocent fanatic, cleared off the face of the
+      earth and out of their way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the sixth day, however, it would seem that the Bishop and his tools
+      had taken fright at the progress of public opinion. Before dismissing the
+      court on that occasion, Cauchon made an address to the disturbed and
+      anxious judges, informing them that he would not tire them out with
+      prolonged sittings, but that a few specially chosen assistants would now
+      examine into what further details were necessary. In the meantime all
+      would be put in writing; so that they might think it over and deliberate
+      within themselves, so as to be able each to make a report either to
+      himself, the Bishop, or to some one deputed by him. The assessors, thus
+      thrown out of work, were however forbidden to leave Rouen without the
+      Bishop's permission&mdash;probably because of the threat of Lohier.
+      Repeated meetings were held in Cauchon's house to arrange the details of
+      the proceedings to follow; and during this time it was perhaps hoped that
+      any excitement outside would quiet down. The Bishop himself had in the
+      meantime other work in hand. He had to receive certain important visitors,
+      one of them the man who held the appointment of Chancellor of France on
+      the English side, and who was well acquainted with the mind of his
+      masters. We have no information whatever whether Cauchon ever himself
+      wavered, or allowed the possibility of acquitting Jeanne to enter his
+      mind; but he must have seen that it was of the last necessity to know what
+      would satisfy the English chiefs. No doubt he was confirmed and
+      strengthened in the conviction that by hook or by crook her condemnation
+      must be accomplished, by the conversation of these illustrious visitors.
+      To save Jeanne was impossible he must have been told. No English soldier
+      would strike a blow while she lived. England itself, the whole country,
+      trembled at her name. Till she was got rid of nothing could be done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was of course great exaggeration in all this, for the English had
+      fought desperately enough in her presence except on the one occasion of
+      Patay, notwithstanding all the early prestige of Jeanne. But at all events
+      it was made perfectly clear that the foregoing conclusion must be carried
+      out, and that Jeanne must die: and, not only so, but she must die with
+      opprobrium and disgrace as a witch, which almost everybody out of Rouen
+      now believed her to be. The public examination which lasted six days was
+      concluded on the third of March, 1430. On the following days, the fourth,
+      fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth of March, meetings were held, as
+      we have said, in the Bishop's house to consider what it would be well to
+      do next, at one of which a select company of Inquisitors was chosen to
+      carry on the examination in private. These were Jean de la Fontaine, a
+      lawyer learned in canon law; Jean Beaupère, already her interrogator;
+      Nicolas Midi, a Doctor in Theology; Pierre Morice, Canon of Rouen and
+      Ambassador from the English King to the Council of Bâle; Thomas de
+      Courcelles, the learned and excellent young Doctor already described;
+      Nicolas l'Oyseleur, the traitor, also already sufficiently referred to;
+      and Manchon, the honest Clerk of the court: the names of Gerard Feuillet,
+      also a distinguished man, and Jean Fecardo, an advocate, are likewise also
+      mentioned. They seem to have served in their turn, three or four at a
+      time. This private session began on the 10th of March, a week after the
+      conclusion of the public trial, and was held in the prison chamber
+      inhabited by the Maid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We shall not attempt to follow literally those private examinations, which
+      would take a great deal more space than we have at our command, and would
+      be fatiguing to the reader from the constant and prolonged repetitions; we
+      shall therefore quote only such parts as are new or so greatly enlarged
+      from Jeanne's original statements as to seem so. At the first day's
+      examination in her prison she was questioned about Compiègne and her
+      various proceedings before reaching that place.(1) She was asked, for one
+      thing, if her voices had bidden her make the sally in which she was taken;
+      to which she answered that had she known the time she was to be taken she
+      would not have gone out, unless upon the express command of the saints.
+      She was then asked about her standard, her arms, and her horses, and
+      replied that she had no coat-of-arms, but her brothers had, who also had
+      all her money, from ten to twelve thousand francs, which was "no great
+      treasure to make war upon," besides five chargers, and about seven other
+      horses, all from the King. The examiners then came to their principal
+      object, and having lulled her mind with these trifles, turned suddenly to
+      a subject on which they still hoped she might commit herself, the sign
+      which had proved her good faith to the King. It is scarcely possible to
+      avoid the feeling, grave as all the circumstances were, that a little <i>malice</i>,
+      a glance of mischievous pleasure, kindled in Jeanne's eye. She had refused
+      to enter into further explanations again and again. She had warned them
+      that she would give them no true light on the subjects that concerned the
+      King. Now she would seem to have had sudden recourse to the mystification
+      that is dear to youth, to have tossed her young head and said: "<i>Have
+      then your own way</i>"; and forthwith proceeded to romance, according to
+      the indications given her of what was wanted, without thought of
+      preserving any appearance of reality. Most probably indeed, her air and
+      tone would make it apparent to her persistent questioners how complete a
+      fable, or at least parable, it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, what sign she gave to the King, she replied that it was a beautiful
+      and honourable sign, very creditable and very good, and rich above all.
+      Asked, if it still lasted; answered, "It would be good to know; it will
+      last a thousand years and more if well guarded," adding that it was in the
+      treasure of the King. Asked, if it was of gold or silver or of precious
+      stones, or in the form of a crown; answered: "I will tell you nothing
+      more; but no man could devise a thing so rich as this sign; but the sign
+      that is necessary for you is that God should deliver me out of your hands,
+      and that is what He will do." She also said that when she had to go to the
+      King it was said by her voices: "Go boldly; and when you are before the
+      King he will have a sign which will make him receive and believe in you."
+      Asked, what reverence she made when the sign came to the King, and if it
+      came from God; answered, that she had thanked God for having delivered her
+      from the priests of her own party who had argued against her, and that she
+      had knelt down several times; she also said that an angel from God, and
+      not from another, brought the sign to the King; and she had thanked the
+      Lord many times; she added that the priests ceased to argue against when
+      they had seen that sign. Asked, if the clergy of her party (<i>de par delà</i>)
+      saw the above sign; answered yes, that her King if he were satisfied; and
+      he answered yes. And afterwards she went to a little chapel close by, and
+      heard them say that after she was gone more than three hundred people saw
+      the said sign. She said besides that for love of her, and that they should
+      give up questioning her, God permitted those of her party to see the sign.
+      Asked, if the King and she made reverence to the angel when he brought the
+      sign; answered yes, for herself, that she knelt down and took off her
+      hood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Jeanne meant by this strange romance can only, I think be explained
+      by this hypothesis. She was "dazed and bewildered," say some of the
+      historians, evidently not knowing how to interpret so strange an
+      interruption to her narrative; but there is no other sign of bewilderment;
+      her mind was always clear and her intelligence complete. Granting that the
+      whole story was boldly ironical, its object is very apparent. Honour
+      forbade her to betray the King's secret, and she had expressly said she
+      would not do so. But her story seems to say&mdash;<i>since you will insist
+      that there was a sign, though I have told you I could give you no
+      information, have it your own way; you shall have a sign and one of the
+      very best; it delivered me from the priests of my own party (de par delà)</i>.
+      Jeanne was no milk-sop; she was bold enough to send a winged shaft to the
+      confusion of the priests of the other side who had tormented her in the
+      same way. One can imagine a lurking smile at the corner of her mouth. Let
+      them take it since they would have it. And we may well believe there was
+      that in her eye, and in the details heaped up so lightly to form the
+      miraculous tale, which left little doubt in the minds of the questioners,
+      of the spirit in which she spoke: though to us who only read the record
+      the effect is of a more bewildering kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days after, on Monday, the 12th of March, the Inquisitors began by
+      several additional questions concerning the angel who brought the sign to
+      the King; was it the same whom she first saw, or another? She answered
+      that it was the same, and no other was wanted. Asked, if this angel had
+      not deceived her since she had been taken prisoner; answered, that SHE
+      BELIEVED SINCE IT SO PLEASED OUR LORD THAT IT WAS BEST THAT SHE SHOULD BE
+      TAKEN. Asked, if the angel had not failed her; answered, "How could he
+      have failed me, when he comforts me every day?" This comfort is what she
+      understands to come through St. Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, whether
+      she called them, or they came without being called, she answered, that
+      they often came without being called, and if they did not come soon
+      enough, she asked our Saviour to send them. Asked, if St. Denis had ever
+      appeared to her; answered, not that she knew. Asked, if when she promised
+      to our Lord to remain a virgin she spoke to Him; answered, that it ought
+      to be enough to speak to those who were sent by Him that is to say, St.
+      Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, what induced her to summon a man to
+      Toul, in respect to marriage; answered, "I did not summon him; it was he
+      who summoned me"; and that on that occasion she had sworn before the judge
+      to speak the truth, which was that she had not made him any promise. She
+      also said that the first time she had heard the voices she made a vow of
+      virginity so long as it pleased God, being then about the age of thirteen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the object of the judges by these questions to prove that,
+      according to a fable which had obtained some credit, Jeanne during her
+      visit to La Rousse, the village inn-keeper at Neufchâteau, had acted as
+      servant in the house and tarnished her good fame&mdash;so that her
+      betrothed had refused to marry her: and that he had been brought before
+      the Bishop's court at Toul for his breach of promise, as we should say.
+      Exactly the reverse was the case, as the reader will remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was further asked, if she had spoken of her visions to her curé or
+      to any ecclesiastic: and answered no, but only to Robert de Baudricourt
+      and to her King; but added that she was not bidden by her voices to
+      conceal them, but feared to reveal them lest the Burgundians should hear
+      of them and prevent her going. And especially she had much doubt of her
+      father, lest he should hinder her from going. Asked, if she thought she
+      did well to go away without the permission of her father and mother, when
+      it is certain we ought to honour our father and mother; answered, that in
+      every other thing she had fully obeyed him, except in respect to her
+      departure; but she had written to them, and they had pardoned her. Asked,
+      if when she left her father and mother she did not think it was a sin;
+      answered, that her voices were quite willing that she should tell them, if
+      it were not for the pain it would have given them; but as for herself, she
+      would not have told them for any consideration; also that her voices left
+      her to do as she pleased, to tell or not.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we hope
+      had her piece of bread and her <i>eau rougie</i>. In the afternoon these
+      indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions throw a
+      fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which this
+      wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that
+      while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her
+      father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with the
+      troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and held her
+      in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point except that of her
+      affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also said that her mother had
+      told her what her father had said to her brothers: "If I could think that
+      the thing would happen of which I have dreamed, I wish she might be
+      drowned first; and if you would not do it, I would drown her with my own
+      hands"; and that he nearly lost his senses when she went to Vaucouleurs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern, and
+      unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and pure may
+      not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of personal
+      degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in the intensity
+      of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to us in many lands,
+      always one of the most impressive of human pictures, with no trust of love
+      in him but an overwhelming faith in every vicious possibility. If there is
+      no evidence to prove that, even at the moment when Jeanne was supreme,
+      when he was induced to go to Rheims to see the coronation, Jacques d'Arc
+      was still dark, unresponsive, never more sure than any of the Inquisitors
+      that his daughter was not a witch, or worse, a shameless creature linked
+      to the captains and the splendid personages about her by very different
+      ties from those which appeared&mdash;there is at least not a word to prove
+      that he had changed his mind. She does not add anything to soften the
+      description here given. The sudden appearance of this dark remorseless
+      figure, looking on from his village, who probably in all Domremy&mdash;when
+      Domremy got to hear the news&mdash;would be the only person who would in
+      his desperation almost applaud that stake and devouring flame, is too
+      startling for words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of this day's examination was remarkable also for a sudden light
+      upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke of
+      Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most cherished
+      hopes to deliver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, how she meant to rescue the Duc d'Orléans: she answered, that by
+      that time she hoped to have taken English prisoners enough to exchange for
+      him: and if she had not taken enough she should have crossed the sea, in
+      power, to search for him in England. Asked, if St. Catherine and St.
+      Margaret had told her absolutely and without condition that she should
+      take enough prisoners to exchange for the Duc d'Orléans, who was in
+      England, or otherwise, that she should cross the sea to fetch him and
+      bring him back within three years; she answered yes: and that she had told
+      the King and had begged him to permit her to make prisoners. She said
+      further that if she had lasted three years without hindrance, she should
+      have delivered him. Otherwise she said she had not thought of so long a
+      time as three years, although it should have been more than one; but she
+      did not at present recollect exactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a curious story existing, though we do not remember whence it
+      comes and there is not a scrap of evidence for it, which suggests a rumour
+      that Jeanne was not the child of the d'Arc family at all, but in fact an
+      abandoned and illegitimate child of the Queen, Isabel of Bavaria, and that
+      her real father was the murdered Duc d'Orléans. This suggestion might
+      explain the ease with which she fell into the way of Courts, a sort of air
+      <i>à la Princesse</i> which certainly was about her, and her especial
+      devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A shadow of a supposed
+      child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared in history, quite without
+      warrant or likelihood. It is a little conventional and well worn even in
+      the way of romance, yet there are certain fanciful suggestions in the
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the above, Jeanne was again questioned and at great length upon the
+      sign given to the King, upon the angel who brought it, the manner of his
+      coming and going, the persons who saw him, those who saw the crown
+      bestowed upon the King, and so on, in the most minute detail. That the
+      purpose of the sign was that "they should give up arguing and so let her
+      proceed on her mission," she repeated again and again; but here is a
+      curious additional note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked how the King and the people with him were convinced that it
+      was an angel; and answered, that the King knew it by the instruction of
+      the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign of the crown.
+      Asked, how the ecclesiastics (<i>gens d'église</i>) knew it was an angel
+      she answered, "By their knowledge (science), and because they were
+      priests."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind? We
+      cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which Jeanne's
+      mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the strange tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices that
+      she attacked La Charité, and afterwards Paris, her two points of failure;
+      the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her that those
+      voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no. To Paris she
+      went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a skirmish, or assault
+      of arms (<i>vaillance d'armes</i>); but she intended to go farther, and to
+      pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting and make the skirmish into
+      a serious assault; the same was the case before La Charité. She was asked
+      whether she had no revelation concerning Pont l'Evêque, and said that
+      since it was revealed to her at Melun that she should be taken, she had
+      had more recourse to the will of the captains than to her own; but she did
+      not tell them that it was revealed to her that she should be taken. Asked,
+      if she thought it was well done to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity
+      of our Lady, which was a festival of the Church; she answered, that it was
+      always well to keep the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience it
+      seemed to her that it was and always would be a good thing to keep the
+      feasts of our Lady, from one end to the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the afternoon the examiners returned to the attempt at escape or
+      suicide&mdash;they seemed to have preferred the latter explanation&mdash;made
+      at Beaurevoir; and as Jeanne expresses herself with more freedom as to her
+      personal motives in these prison examinations and opens her heart more
+      freely, there is much here which we give in full.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked first what was the cause of her leap from the tower of
+      Beaurevoir. She answered that she had heard that all the people of
+      Compiègne, down to the age of seven, were to be put to the sword, and that
+      she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good people;
+      this was one of the reasons; the other was that she knew that she was sold
+      to the English and that she would rather die than fall into the hands of
+      the English, her enemies. Asked, if she made that leap by the command of
+      her voices; answered, that St. Catherine said to her almost every day that
+      she was not to leap, for that God would help her, and also the people of
+      Compiègne: and she, Jeanne, said to St. Catherine that since God intended
+      to help the people of Compiègne she would fain be there. And St. Catherine
+      said: "You must take it in good part, but you will not be delivered till
+      you have seen the King of the English." And she, Jeanne, answered: "Truly
+      I do not wish to see him. I would rather die than fall into the hands of
+      the English." Asked, if she had said to St. Catherine and St. Margaret,
+      "Will God leave the good people of Compiègne to die so cruelly?" answered,
+      that she did not say "so cruelly," but said it in this way: "Will God
+      leave these good people of Compiègne to die, who have been and are so
+      loyal to their lord?" She added that after she fell there were two or
+      three days that she would not eat; and that she was so hurt by the leap
+      that she could not eat; but all the time she was comforted by St.
+      Catherine, who told her to confess and ask pardon of God for that act, and
+      that without doubt the people of Compiègne would have succour before
+      Martinmas. And then she took pains to recover and began to eat, and
+      shortly was healed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, whether, when she threw herself down, she wished to kill herself,
+      she answered no; but that in throwing herself down she commended herself
+      to God, and hoped by means of that leap to escape and to avoid being
+      delivered to the English. Asked, if, when she recovered the power of
+      speech, she had denied and blasphemed God and the saints, as had been
+      reported; answered, that she remembered nothing of the kind, and that, as
+      far as she knew, she had never denied and blasphemed God and His saints
+      there nor anywhere else, and did not confess that she had done so, having
+      no recollection of it. Asked, if she would like to see the information
+      taken on the spot, answered: "I refer myself to God, and not another, and
+      to a good confession." Asked, if her voices ever desired delay for their
+      replies; answered, that St. Catherine always answered her at once, but
+      sometimes she, Jeanne, could not hear because of the tumult round her (<i>turbacion
+      des personnes</i>) and the noise of her guards; but that when she asked
+      anything of St. Catherine, sometimes she, and sometimes St. Margaret asked
+      of our Lord, and then by the command of our Lord an answer was given to
+      her. Asked, if, when they came, there was always light accompanying them,
+      and if she did not see that light when she heard the voice in the castle
+      without knowing whether it was in her chamber or not: answered, that there
+      was never a day that they did not come into the castle, and that they
+      never came without light: and that time she heard the voice, but did not
+      remember whether she saw the light, or whether she saw St. Catherine. Also
+      she said she had asked from her voices three things: one, her release: the
+      other, that God would help the French, and keep the town faithful: and the
+      other the salvation of her soul. Afterwards she asked that she might have
+      a copy of these questions and her answers if she were to be taken to
+      Paris, that she may give them to the people in Paris, and say to them,
+      "This is how I was questioned in Rouen, and here are my replies," that she
+      might not be exhausted by so many questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, what she meant when she said that Monseigneur de Beauvais put
+      himself in danger by bringing her to trial, and why Monseigneur de
+      Beauvais more than others, she answered, that this was and is what she
+      said to Monseigneur de Beauvais: "You say that you are my judge. I know
+      not whether you are so; but take care that you judge well, or you will put
+      yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if our Lord should chastise
+      you for it, I may have done my duty in warning you." Asked, what was that
+      danger? she answered, that St. Catherine had said that she should have
+      succour, but that she knew not whether this meant that she would be
+      delivered from prison, or that, when she was before the tribunal, there
+      might come trouble by which she should be delivered; she thought, however,
+      it would be the one or the other. And all the more that her voices told
+      her that she would be delivered by a great victory; and afterwards they
+      said to her: "Take everything cheerfully, do not be disturbed by this
+      martyrdom: thou shalt thence come at last to the kingdom of Heaven." And
+      this the voices said simply and absolutely&mdash;that is to say, without
+      fail; she explained that she called It martyrdom because of all the pain
+      and adversity that she had suffered in prison; and she knew not whether
+      she might have still more to suffer, but waited upon our Lord. She was
+      then asked whether, since her voices had said that she should go to
+      Paradise, she felt assured that she should be saved and not damned in
+      hell; she answered, that she believed firmly what her voices said about
+      her being saved, as firmly as if she were so already. And when it was said
+      to her that this answer was of great weight, she answered that she herself
+      held it as a great treasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have said that Jeanne's answers to the Inquisitors in prison had a more
+      familiar form than in the public examination; which seem to prove that
+      they were not unkind to her, further, at least, than by the persistence
+      and tediousness of their questions. The Bishop for one thing was seldom
+      present; the sittings were frequently presided over by the Deputy
+      Inquisitor, who had made great efforts to be free of the business
+      altogether, and had but very recently been forced into it; so that we may
+      at least imagine, as he was so reluctant, that he did what he could to
+      soften the proceedings. Jean de la Fontaine, too, was a milder man than
+      her former questioners, and in so small an assembly she could not be
+      disturbed and interrupted by Frère Isambard's well-meant signs and
+      whispers. She speaks at length and with a self-disclosure which seems to
+      have little that was painful in it, like one matured into a kind of age by
+      long weariness and trouble, who regards the panorama of her life passing
+      before her with almost a pensive pleasure. And it is clear that Jeanne's
+      ear, still so young and keen, notwithstanding that attitude of mind, was
+      still intent upon sounds from without, and that Jeanne's heart still
+      expected a sudden assault, a great victory for France, which should open
+      her prison doors&mdash;or even a rising in the very judgment hall to
+      deliver her. How could they keep still outside, Dunois, Alençon, La Hire,
+      the mighty men of valour, while they knew that she was being racked and
+      tortured within? She who could not bear to be out of the conflict to serve
+      her friends at Compiègne, even when succour from on high had been
+      promised, how was it possible that these gallant knights could live and
+      let her die, their gentle comrade, their dauntless leader? In those long
+      hours, amid the noise of the guards within and the garrison around, how
+      she must have thought, over and over again, where were they? when were
+      they coming? how often imagined that a louder clang of arms than usual, a
+      rush of hasty feet, meant that they were here!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But honour and love kept Jeanne's lips closed. Not a word did she say that
+      could discredit King, or party, or friends; not a reproach to those who
+      had abandoned her. She still looked for the great victory in which
+      Monseigneur, if he did not take care, might run the risk of being roughly
+      handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court that would pitch him
+      form his guilty seat. It was but the fourteenth of March still, and there
+      were six weary weeks to come. She did not know the hour or the day, but
+      yet she believed that this great deliverance was on its way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was a great deliverance to come: but not of this kind. The
+      voices of God&mdash;how can we deny it?&mdash;are often, though in a
+      loftier sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise
+      to the ear but break it to the heart. They promised her a great victory:
+      and she had it, and also the fullest deliverance: but only by the stake
+      and the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any other
+      girl of her age. They did not speak to deceive her, but she was deceived;
+      they kept their promise, but not as she understood it. "These all died in
+      faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off,
+      and were persuaded of them, and embraced them." Jeanne too was persuaded
+      of them, but was not to receive them&mdash;except in the other way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne fasted,
+      whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely questioned on
+      the subject, this time, of Franquet d'Arras, who, as has been above
+      narrated, was taken by her in the course of some indiscriminate fighting
+      in the north. She was asked if it was not mortal sin to take a man as
+      prisoner of war and then give him up to be executed. There was evidently
+      no perception of similarities in the minds of the judges, for this was
+      precisely what had been done in the case of Jeanne herself; but even she
+      does not seem to have been struck by the fact. Their object, apparently,
+      was by proving that she was in a state of sin, to prove also that her
+      voices were of no authority, as being unable to discover so simple a
+      principle as this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they spoke to her of "one named Franquet d'Arras, who was executed at
+      Lagny," she answered that she consented to his death, as he deserved it,
+      for he had confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and a traitor. She said
+      that his trial lasted fifteen days, the Bailli de Senlis and the law
+      officers of Lagny being the judges; and she added that she had wished to
+      have Franquet, to exchange him for a man of Paris, Seigneur de Lours
+      (corrected, innkeeper at the sign of l'Ours); but when she heard that this
+      man was dead, and when the Bailli told her that she would go very much
+      against justice if she set Franquet free, she said to the Bailli: "Since
+      my man is dead whom I wished to deliver, do with this one whatever justice
+      demands." Asked, if she took the money or allowed it to be taken by him
+      who had taken Franquet, she answered, that she was not a money changer or
+      a treasurer of France, to deal with money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then reminded that having assaulted Paris on a holy day, having
+      taken the horse of Monseigneur de Senlis, having thrown herself down from
+      the tower of Beaurevoir, having consented to the death of Franquet
+      d'Arras, and being still dressed in the costume of a man, did she not
+      think that she must be in a state of mortal sin? She answered to the first
+      question about Paris: "I do not think I was guilty of mortal sin, and if I
+      have sinned it is to God that I would make it known, and in confession to
+      God by the priest." To the second question, concerning the horse of
+      Senlis, she answered, that she believed firmly that there was not mortal
+      sin in this, seeing it was valued, and the Bishop had due notice of it,
+      and at all events it was sent back to the Seigneur de la Trémouille to
+      give it back to Monseigneur de Senlis. The said horse was of no use to
+      her; and, on the other hand, she did not wish to keep it because she heard
+      that the Bishop was displeased that his horse should have been taken. And
+      as for the tower of Beaurevoir: "I did it not to destroy myself, but in
+      the hope of saving myself and of going to the aid of the good people who
+      were in need." But after having done it, she had confessed her sin, and
+      asked pardon of our Lord, and had pardon of Him. And she allowed that it
+      was not right to have made that leap, but that she did wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day an important question was introduced, the only one as yet
+      which Jeanne does not seem to have been able to answer with understanding.
+      On points of fact or in respect to her visions she was always quite clear,
+      but questions concerning the Church were beyond her knowledge. It is only
+      indeed after some time has elapsed that we perceive why such a question
+      was introduced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After admonitions made to her she was required, if she had done anything
+      contrary to the faith, to submit herself to the decision of the Church.
+      She replied, that her answers had all been heard and seen by clerks, and
+      that they could say whether there was anything in them against the faith:
+      and that if they would point out to her where any error was, afterwards
+      she would tell them what was said by her counsellors. At all events if
+      there was anything against the faith which our Lord had commanded, she
+      would not sustain it, and would be very sorry to go against that. Here it
+      was shown to her that there was a Church militant and a Church triumphant,
+      and she was asked if she knew the difference between them. She was also
+      required to put herself under the jurisdiction of the Church, in respect
+      to what she had done, whether it was good or evil, but replied, "I will
+      answer no more on this point for the present."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having thrown in this tentative question which she did not understand,
+      they returned to the question of her dress, which holds such an important
+      place in the entire interrogatory. If she were allowed to hear mass as she
+      wished, having been all this time deprived of religious ordinances, did
+      not she think it would be more honest and befitting that she should go in
+      the dress of a woman? To this she replied vaguely, that she would much
+      rather go to mass in the dress of a woman than to retain her male costume
+      and not to hear mass; and that if she were certified that she should hear
+      mass, she would be there in a woman's dress. "I certify you that you shall
+      hear mass," the examiner replied, "but you must be dressed as a woman."
+      "What would you say," she answered as with a momentary doubt, "if I had
+      sworn to my King never to change?" but she added: "Anyhow I answer for it.
+      Find me a dress, long, touching the ground, without a train, and give it
+      to me to go to mass; but I will return to my present dress when I come
+      back." She was then asked why she would not have all the parts of a female
+      dress to go to mass in; she said, "I will take counsel upon that, and
+      answer you," and begged again for the honour of God and our Lady that she
+      might be allowed to hear mass in this good town. Afterwards she was again
+      recommended to assume the whole dress of a woman and gave a conditional
+      assent: "Get me a dress like that of a young <i>bourgeoise</i>, that is to
+      say, a long <i>houppelande</i>; I will wear that and a woman's hood to go
+      to mass." After having promised, however, she made an appeal to them to
+      leave her free, and to think no more of her garb, but to allow her to hear
+      mass without changing it. This would seem to have been refused, and all at
+      once without warning the jurisdiction of the Church was suddenly
+      introduced again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked, whether in all she did and said she would submit herself to
+      the Church, and replied: "All my deeds and works are in the hands of God,
+      and I depend only on Him; and I certify that I desire to do nothing and
+      say nothing against the Christian faith; and if I have done or said
+      anything in the body that was against the Christian faith which our Lord
+      has established, I should not defend it but cast it forth from me." Asked
+      again, if she would not submit to the laws of the Church she replied: "I
+      can answer no more to-day on this point; but on Saturday send the clerk to
+      me, if you do not come, and I will answer by the grace of God, and it can
+      be put in writing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great many questions followed as to her visions, but chiefly what had
+      been asked before. One thing only we may note, since it was one of the
+      special sayings all her own, which fell from the lips of Jeanne, during
+      this private and almost sympathetic examination. After being questioned
+      closely as to how she knew her first visitor to be St. Michael, etc., she
+      was asked, how she would have known had he been "l'Anemy" himself (a
+      Norman must surely have used this word), taking the form of an angel: and
+      finally, what doctrine he taught her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered; above all things he said that she was to be a good child and
+      that God would help her: and among other things that she was to go to the
+      succour of the King of France. But the greater part of what the angel
+      taught her, she continued, was already in their book; and THE ANGEL SHOWED
+      HER THE GREAT PITY THERE WAS OF THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The pity of it! That which has always gone most to the tender heart: a
+      country torn in pieces, brother fighting against brother, the invader
+      seated at the native hearth, and blood and fire making the smiling land a
+      desert: "<i>la pitie qui estoit au royaume de France</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did the Inquisitor break down here? Could no one go on? or was it mere
+      human incompetence to feel the divine touch? Some one broke into a foolish
+      question about the height of the angel, and the sitting was hurriedly
+      concluded. Monseigneur might well be on his mettle; that very pity, was it
+      not stealing into the souls of his private committee deputed for so
+      different a use?
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      Next day the questions about St. Michael's personal appearance were
+      resumed, as a little feint we can only suppose, for the great question of
+      the Church was again immediately introduced; but in the meantime Jeanne
+      had described her visitor in terms which it is pleasant to dwell on. "He
+      was in the form of a <i>très vrai prud' homme</i>." The term is difficult
+      to translate, as is the Galantuomo of Italy. The "King-Honest Man," we
+      used to say in English in the days of his late Majesty Victor Emmanuel of
+      Italy; but that is not all that is meant&mdash;<i>un vrai prud' homme</i>,
+      a man good, honest, brave, the best man, is more like it. The girl's
+      honest imagination thought of no paraphernalia of wings or shining plumes.
+      It was not the theatrical angel, not even the angel of art whom she saw&mdash;whom
+      it would have been so easy to invent, nay to take quite truthfully from
+      the first painted window, radiating colour and brightness through the dim,
+      low-roofed church. But even with such material handy, Jeanne was not led
+      into the conventional. She knew nothing about wings or emblematic scales.
+      He was in the form of a brave and gentle man. She knew not anything
+      greater, nor would she be seduced into fable however sacred. Then once
+      more the true assault began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked, if she would submit all her sayings and doings, good or
+      evil, to the judgment of our Holy Mother, the Church. She replied, that as
+      for the Church, she loved it and would sustain it with all her might for
+      our Christian faith; and that it was not she whom they ought to disturb
+      and hinder from going to church or from hearing mass. As to the good
+      things she had done, and that had happened, she must refer all to the King
+      of Heaven, who had sent her to Charles, King of France; and it should be
+      seen that the French would soon gain a great advantage which God would
+      send them, so great that all the kingdom of France would be shaken. And
+      this, she said, that when it came to pass, they might remember that she
+      had said it. She was again asked, if she would submit to the jurisdiction
+      of the Church, and answered, "I refer everything to our Lord who sent me,
+      to our Lady, and to the blessed Saints of Paradise"; and added her opinion
+      was that our Lord and the Church meant the same thing, and that
+      difficulties should not be made concerning this, when there was no
+      difficulty, and they were both one. She was then told that there was the
+      Church triumphant, in which are God, the saints, the angels, and all saved
+      souls. The Church militant is our Holy Father the Pope, vicar of God on
+      earth, the cardinals, the prelates of the Church, and the clergy and all
+      good Christians and Catholics, which Church properly assembled cannot err,
+      but is guided by the Holy Spirit. And this being the case she was asked if
+      she would refer her cause to the Church militant thus explained to her.
+      She replied that she had come to the King of France on the part of God, on
+      the part of the Virgin Mary, the blessed Saints of Paradise, and the
+      Church victorious in Heaven, and at their commandment; and to that Church
+      she submitted all her good deeds, and all that she had done and might do.
+      And if they asked her whether she would submit to the Church militant,
+      answered, that she would now answer no more than this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here again the argument strayed back to the futile subject of dress,
+      always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges were
+      non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and shows that
+      dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to mingle with her
+      hopes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, what she had to say about the woman's dress that had been offered
+      to her, to hear mass in: she answered, that she would not take it yet, not
+      until the Lord pleased; but that if it were necessary to lead her out to
+      be executed, and if she should then have to be undressed, she required of
+      the Lords of the Church that they would give her the grace to have a long
+      chemise, and a kerchief for her head; that she would prefer to die rather
+      than to alter what our Lord had directed her to do, and that she firmly
+      believed our Lord would not let her descend so low, but that she should
+      soon be helped by God and by a miracle. She was then asked, if what she
+      did in respect to the man's costume was by command of God, why she asked
+      for a woman's chemise in case of death? answered, <i>It is enough that it
+      should be long</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of these words in which so much was implied, must have made a
+      supreme sensation among the handful of men gathered round the helpless
+      girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror before the eyes
+      of the judges as before her own. No other thing could have been suggested
+      by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold, the fire&mdash;and the
+      shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to every evil gaze, must
+      have showed themselves at least for a moment against that dark background
+      of prison wall. It was enough that it should be long&mdash;to hide her as
+      much as was possible from those dreadful staring eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the dress of
+      the saints. But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne herself, it
+      was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more weighty thoughts.
+      Presently they asked if the saints hated the English, to which she replied
+      that they hated what God hated and loved what He loved. She was then asked
+      if God hated the English. She replied that of the love or hate that God
+      had for the English, or what God did for their souls, she knew nothing;
+      but she knew well that they should be driven out of France, except those
+      who died there; and that God would send victory to the French against the
+      English. Asked, if God was for the English so long as they were prosperous
+      in France: she answered, that she knew not whether God hated the French,
+      but believed He had allowed them to be beaten because of their sins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great statesman or
+      a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the question concerning
+      John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes. "If we shall say: From
+      heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him not? but if we shall say of
+      men we fear the people." And she was only a peasant girl and the event of
+      which they spoke had been before her little time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to kill
+      Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT MISFORTUNE FOR
+      THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE: but that however it might be among themselves, God
+      had sent her to the succour of the King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual
+      changes of the subject: one of which called forth as follows her last
+      deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would answer as
+      exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done before our Holy
+      Father the Pope, although at several points in the trial she would have
+      had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer more plainly than before
+      Monseigneur de Beauvais&mdash;she said that she had answered as much as
+      she knew, and that if anything came to her memory that she had forgotten
+      to say, she would say it willingly. Asked, if it seemed to her that she
+      would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope, the vicar of God, in
+      all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience, she replied that
+      she desired to be taken before him, and then she would answer all that she
+      ought to answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second
+      party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly
+      attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have
+      conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained time,
+      probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to understand
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and
+      whisperer, L'Oyseleur, was working against it in the background. Jeanne
+      evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not understand the
+      distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant: that
+      God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could decide upon the
+      questions which were between her Lord and herself, was too firmly fixed in
+      her mind: and again and again the men whose desire was to make her adopt
+      this expedient, were driven back into the ever repeated questions about
+      St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little interval
+      that remained, in a series of useless questions about her standard. Was it
+      true that this standard had been carried into the Cathedral at Rheims when
+      those of the other captains were left behind? "It had been through the
+      labour and the pain," she said, "there was good reason that it should have
+      the honour."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This last movement of a proud spirit, absolutely disinterested and without
+      thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the word, gives a
+      sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful wranglings in prison,
+      in which, however, there is a softening of tone visible throughout, and
+      evident effect of human nature bringing into immediate contact divers
+      human creatures day after day. Jeanne is often at her best, and never so
+      frequently as during these less formal sittings utters those flying words,
+      simple and noble and of absolute truth to nature, which are noted
+      everywhere, even in the most rambling records.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      The private examination, concluding with that last answer about the
+      banner, came to an end on the 17th March, the day before Passion Sunday.
+      Several subsequent days were occupied with repeated consultations in the
+      Bishop's palace, and the reading over of the minutes of the examinations,
+      to the judges first and afterwards to Jeanne, who acknowledged their
+      correctness, with one or two small amendments. It is only now that Cauchon
+      reappears in his own person. On the morning of the following Sunday, which
+      was Palm Sunday, he and four other doctors with him had a conversation
+      with Jeanne in her prison, very early in the morning, touching her
+      repeated application to be allowed to hear mass and to communicate. The
+      Bishop offered her his ultimatum: if she consented to resume her woman's
+      dress, she might hear mass, but not otherwise; to which Jeanne replied,
+      sorrowfully, that she would have done so before now if she could; but that
+      it was not in her power to do so. Thus after the long and bitter Lent her
+      hopes of sharing in the sacred feast were finally taken from her. It
+      remains uncertain whether she considered that her change of dress would be
+      direct disobedience to God, which her words seem often to imply; or
+      whether it would mean renunciation of her mission, which she still hoped
+      against hope to be able to resume; or if the fear of personal insult
+      weighed most with her. The latter reason had evidently something to do
+      with it, but, as evidently, not all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The background to these curious sittings, afterwards revealed to us, casts
+      a hazy side-light upon them. Probably the Bishop, never present, must have
+      been made aware by his spies of an intention on the part of those most
+      favourable to Jeanne to support an appeal to the Pope; and L'Oyseleur, the
+      traitor, who was all this time admitted to her cell by permission of
+      Cauchon, and really as his tool and agent, was actively employed in
+      prejudicing her mind against them, counselling her not to trust to those
+      clerks, not to yield to the Church. How he managed to explain his own
+      appearance on the other side, his official connection with the trial, and
+      constant presence as one of her judges, it is hard to imagine. Probably he
+      gave her to believe that he had sought that position (having got himself
+      liberated from the imprisonment which he had represented himself as
+      sharing) for her sake, to be able to help her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the other hand her friends, whose hearts were touched by her candour
+      and her sufferings, were not inactive. Jean de la Fontaine and the two
+      monks&mdash;l'Advenu and Frère Isambard&mdash;also succeeded in gaining
+      admission to her, and pressed upon her the advantage of appealing to the
+      Church, to the Council of Bâle about to assemble, or to the Pope himself,
+      which would have again changed the <i>venue</i>, and transferred her into
+      less prejudiced hands. It is very likely that Jeanne in her ignorance and
+      innocence might have held by her reference to the supreme tribunal of God
+      in any case; and it is highly unlikely that of the English authorities,
+      intent on removing the only thing in France of which their forces were
+      afraid, should have given her up into the hands of the Pope, or allowed
+      her to be transferred to any place of defence beyond their reach; but at
+      least it is a relief to the mind to find that all these men were not base,
+      as appears on the face of things, but that pity and justice and human
+      feeling sometimes existed under the priest's gown and the monk's cowl, if
+      also treachery and falsehood of the blackest kind. The Bishop, who
+      remained withdrawn, we know not why, from all these private sittings in
+      the prison (probably busy with his ecclesiastical duties as Holy Week was
+      approaching), heard with fury of this visit and advice, and threatened
+      vengeance upon the meddlers, not without effect, for Jean de la Fontaine,
+      we are told&mdash;who had been deep in his councils, and indeed his
+      deputy, as chief examiner&mdash;disappeared from Rouen immediately after,
+      and was heard of no more.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) Compiègne was a strong point. Had she proclaimed a
+     promise from St. Catherine, of victory? Chastelain says so,
+     long after date and with errors in fact. Two Anglo-
+     Compiègnais were at her trial. The Rehabilitation does not
+     go into this question.&mdash;(From Mr. Lang.)
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV &mdash; RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Upon all these contentions followed the calm of Palm Sunday, a great and
+      touching festival, the first break upon the gloom of Lent, and a
+      forerunner of the blessedness of Easter. We have already told how&mdash;a
+      semblance of charity with which the reader might easily be deceived&mdash;the
+      Bishop and four of his assessors had gone to the prison to offer to the
+      Maid permission to receive the sacrament if she would do so in a woman's
+      dress: and how after pleading that she might be allowed that privilege as
+      she was, in her male costume, and with a pathetic statement that she would
+      have yielded if she could, but that it was impossible&mdash;she finally
+      refused; and was so left in her prison to pass that sacred day unsuccoured
+      and alone. The historian Michelet, in the wonderful sketch in which he
+      rises superior to himself, and which amidst all after writings remains the
+      most beautiful and touching memorial of Jeanne d'Arc, has made this day a
+      central point in his tale, using with the skill of genius the service of
+      the Church appropriate to the day, in heart-rending contrast with those
+      doors of the prison which did not open, and the help of God which did not
+      come to the young and solitary captive. <i>Le beau jour fleuri</i> passed
+      over her in darkness and desertion: her agony and passion lay before her
+      like those of the Divine Sufferer, to whom every day of the succeeding
+      week is specially consecrated. There is almost indeed a painful following
+      of the Saviour's steps in these dark days, the circumstances lending
+      themselves in a wonderful way to the comparison which French writers love
+      to make, but which many of us must always feel, however spotless the
+      sufferer, to have a certain irreverence in them. But if ever martyr were
+      worthy of being called a partaker of the sufferings of Christ it was
+      surely this girl, free, if ever human creature was, from self-seeking, or
+      thought of reward, or ambitious hope, in whose heart there had never been
+      any motive but the service of God and the deliverance of her country, who
+      had neither looked before nor after, nor put her own interests into
+      consideration in any way. Silently the feast passed with no holy
+      privileges of religion, no blessed token of the spring, no remembrance of
+      the waving palms and scattered blossoms over which her Lord rode into
+      Jerusalem to die. She had not that sweet fallacious triumph; but the
+      darker ordeal remained for her to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Tuesday the 27th of March, her troubles began again. Before Palm
+      Sunday, the report of the trial had been read to her. She had now to hear
+      the formal reading of the articles founded upon it, to give a final
+      response if she had any to give, or explanation, or addition, if she
+      thought proper. The sitting was held in the great hall of the Castle of
+      Rouen before a band of more than forty, all assembled for this final test.
+      The Bishop made a prefactory speech to the prisoner, pointing out to her
+      how benign and merciful were the judges now assembled, that they had no
+      wish to punish, but rather to instruct and lead her in the right way; and
+      requesting her at this late period in the proceedings to choose one or
+      more from among them to help her. To which Jeanne replied; "In the first
+      place concerning my good and our faith, I thank you and all the company.
+      As for the counsellor you offer me I thank you also, but I have no need to
+      depart from our Lord as my counsellor."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The articles, in which the former questions put to her and answered by
+      her, were now repeated in the form of accusations, were then read to her
+      one by one; her sorcery, sacrilege, etc., being taken as facts. To a few
+      she repeated, with various forcible and fine turns of phrase, her previous
+      answers, with here and there a new explanation; but to the great majority
+      she referred simply to her former replies, or denied the charge, as
+      follows: "The second article concerning sortilège, superstitious acts and
+      divination, she denied, and in respect to adoration (i.e. allowing herself
+      to be adored) said: If any kissed her hands or her garments, it was not by
+      her will, and that she kept herself from it as much as she could; and the
+      rest of the article she denies." This is a specimen of the manner in which
+      she responded, with a clear-headed and undisturbed intelligence, point
+      after point&mdash;<i>ipsa Johanna negat</i>, is the usual refrain: or else
+      she referred with dignity to previous replies as her sole answer. But
+      sometimes the girl was moved to indignation, sometimes added a word in her
+      own defence: "As for fairies she knew not what they were, and as for her
+      education she had been well and duly instructed what to believe, as a good
+      child should." This was her answer to the article in which all the
+      folk-lore of Domremy, all the fairy tales, had been collected into a
+      solemn statement of heresy. The matter of dress was once more treated in
+      endless detail, with many interjected questions and reports of what she
+      had already said: and at the end, answering the statement that woman's
+      dress was most fit for woman's work, Jeanne added the quick <i>mot</i>:
+      "As for the usual work of women, there are enough of other women to do
+      it." On another occasion when the report ran that she claimed to have done
+      all things by the counsel of God, she interrupted and said "that it ought
+      to be, all that I have done well." To her former answer that she had
+      yielded to the desire of the French knights in attacking Paris, she added
+      the fine words, "It seemed to me that it was their duty to attack their
+      adversaries." In respect to her visions she added to her former answer,
+      "that she had not asked advice of bishop, curé, or any other before
+      believing her revelations, but had many times prayed God to reveal them to
+      others of her party." About calling her saints when she required their aid
+      she added, that she asked God and Our Lady to send her council and
+      comfort, and immediately her heavenly visitors came; and that this was the
+      prayer she made:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Gentle God, in honour of Your(1) passion, I pray You, if You love me,
+      that You would reveal to me how I ought to answer these people of the
+      Church. I know well by what command it was that I took this dress, but I
+      know not in what manner I ought to give it up. For this may it please You
+      to teach me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In respect to the reproach that she had been a general in the war (<i>chef
+      de guerre</i>), she explained that if she were, it was to drive out the
+      English, repelling the accusation that she had assumed this title in
+      pride; and to that which accused her of preferring to live among men, she
+      explained that when she was in a lodging she generally had a woman with
+      her; but that when engaged in war she lived in her clothes whenever there
+      was not a woman present. In respect to her hope of escaping from prison,
+      she was asked if her council had thrown any light on that question, and
+      replied, "I have yet to tell you." Manchon, the clerk, makes a note upon
+      his margin at these words, "Proudly answered"&mdash;<i>superbe responsum</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This re-examination lasted for two long days, the 27th and 28th of March.
+      On several points Jeanne requested that she might be allowed to give an
+      answer on Saturday, and accordingly, on Saturday, the last day of March,
+      Easter Eve, she was visited in prison by the Bishop and seven or eight
+      assessors. She was then asked if she would submit to the judgment of the
+      Church on earth all that she had done and said, specially in things that
+      concerned her trial. She answered that she would submit to the judgment of
+      the Church militant, provided that it did not enforce anything that was
+      impossible. She explained that what she called impossible was to
+      acknowledge that the visions and revelations came otherwise than from God,
+      or that what she had done was not on the part of God: these she would
+      never deny or revoke for any power on earth: and that which our Lord had
+      commanded or should command, she would not give up for any living man, and
+      this would be impossible to her. And in case the Church should command her
+      to do anything contrary to the command given her by God she would not do
+      it for any reason whatsoever. Asked whether she would submit to the Church
+      if the Church militant pronounced that her revelations were delusions or
+      from the devil, or superstitious, or evil things, she answered that she
+      would refer everything to our Lord, whose command she always obeyed; and
+      that she knew well that everything had come to her by the commandment of
+      God; and that what she had affirmed during this trial to have been done by
+      the commandment of God it would be impossible for her to deny. And in case
+      the Church militant commanded her to go against God, she would submit
+      herself to no man in this world but to our Lord, whose good commandment
+      she had always obeyed. She was asked if she did not believe that she was
+      subject to the Church on earth, that is, to our Holy Father the Pope, the
+      Cardinals, Bishops, and other prelates of the Church. She answered, "<i>Yes,
+      our Lord being served first</i>." Asked if she had directions from her
+      voices not to submit to the Church militant which is on earth, nor to its
+      judgment, she replied that she does not answer according to what comes
+      into her head, but that when she replies it is by commandment; and that
+      she has never been told not to obey the Church, our Lord being served
+      first (<i>noster Sire premier servi</i>).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Other less formal particulars come to us long after, from various
+      witnesses at the <i>procès de rehabilitation</i>, in which a lively
+      picture is given of this scene. Frère Isambard had apparently managed, as
+      was his wont, to get close to the prisoner, and to whisper to her to
+      appeal to the Council of Bâle. "What is this Council of Bâle?" she asked
+      in the same tone. Isambard replied that it was the "congregation of the
+      whole Church, Catholic and Universal, and that there would be as many
+      there on her side as on that of the English." "Ah!" she cried, "since
+      there will be some of our party in that place, I will willingly yield and
+      submit to the Council of Bâle, to our Holy Father the Pope, and to the
+      sacred Council."(2) And immediately&mdash;continues the deposition&mdash;the
+      Bishop of Beauvais cried out, "Silence, in the devil's name!" and told the
+      notary to take no notice of what she said, that she would submit herself
+      to the Council of Bâle; whereupon a second cry burst from the bosom of
+      Jeanne, "You write what is against me, but you will not write what is for
+      me." "Because of these things, the English and their officers threatened
+      terribly the said Frère Isambard, warning him that if he did not hold his
+      peace he would be thrown in the Seine." No notice whatever is taken of any
+      such interruption in the formal record. It must have been before this time
+      that Jean de la Fontaine disappeared. He left Rouen secretly and never
+      returned, nor does he ever appear again. Frère Isambard is said to have
+      taken temporary refuge in his convent; they scattered, <i>de par l'diable</i>,
+      according to the Christian adjuration of Mgr. De Beauvais; though l'Advenu
+      would seem to have held his ground, and served as Confessor to Jeanne in
+      her agony, at which Frère Isambard was also present. We are told that the
+      Deputy Inquisitor Lemâitre, he who had been got to lend the aid of his
+      presence with such difficulty, fiercely warned the authorities that he
+      would have no harm done to those two friars, from which we may infer that
+      he too had leanings towards the Maid; and these honest and loyal men, well
+      deserving of their country and of mankind, should not lose their record
+      when the tragic story of so much human treachery and baseness has to be
+      told.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      After this there came a long pause, full of much business to the judges,
+      councillors, and clerks who had to reduce the seventy articles to twelve,
+      in order to forward a summary of the case to the University of Paris for
+      their judgment. Jeanne in the meantime had been left, but not neglected,
+      in her prison. The great Feast of Easter had passed without any sacred
+      consolation of the Church; but Monseigneur de Beauvais, in his kindness,
+      sent her a carp to keep the feast withal, if not any spiritual food. It
+      was quite congenial to the spirit of the time to imagine that the carp had
+      been poisoned, and such a thought seems to have crossed the mind of
+      Jeanne, who was very ill after eating of it, and like to die. But it was
+      not thus, poisoned in prison, that it would have suited any of her
+      persecutors to let her die. As a matter of fact, as soon as it was known
+      that she was ill, the best doctors procurable were sent to the prison with
+      peremptory orders to prolong her life and cure her at any cost. But for a
+      little time we lose sight of the sick-bed on which the unfortunate Maid
+      lay fully dressed, never relinquishing the garb which was her protection,
+      with her feet chained to her uneasy couch. Even at the moment when her
+      life hung in the balance we read of no indulgence granted in this respect,
+      no unlocking of the infamous chain, nor substitution of a gentler nurse
+      for the attendant <i>houspillers</i>, who were her guards night and day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Bishop and his court had completed their business and sent off to
+      Paris the important document on which so much depended, they found
+      themselves at leisure to return to Jeanne, to inquire after her health and
+      to make her "a charitable admonition." It was on the 18th of April, after
+      the silence of more than a fortnight, that their visit was made with this
+      benevolent purpose. Seven of her judges attended the Bishop into the
+      sick-chamber. They had come, he assured her, charitably and familiarly, to
+      visit her in her sickness and to carry her comfort and consolation. Most
+      of these men were indeed familiar enough: she had seen their faces already
+      through many a dreadful day, though there were one or two which were new
+      and strange, come to stare at her in the depths of her distress. Cauchon
+      reminded her how much and how carefully she had been questioned by the
+      most wise and learned men; and that those there present were ready to do
+      anything for the salvation of her soul and body in every possible way, by
+      instructing or advising her. He added, however, that if she still refused
+      to accept advice, and to act according to the counsel of the Church, she
+      was in the greatest danger&mdash;to which she replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It seems to me, being so ill as I am, that I am in great danger of death.
+      And if it is thus that God pleases to decide for me, I ask of you to be
+      allowed to confess and receive my Saviour, and to be laid in holy ground."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If you desire to have the rites and sacraments of the Church," said
+      Cauchon, "you must do as good Catholics ought to do, submit to Holy
+      Church." She answered, "I can say no other thing to you." She was then
+      told that if she was in fear of death through sickness she ought all the
+      more to amend her life; but that she could not have the privileges of the
+      Church as a Catholic, if she did not submit to the Church. She answered:
+      "If my body dies in prison, I hope that you will bury me in consecrated
+      ground: yet if not, I still hope in our Lord."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then reminded that she had said in her trial&mdash;if anything had
+      been said or done by her against our Christian faith ordained by our Lord,
+      that she would not stand by it. She answered, "I refer to the answer I
+      made, and to our Lord."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then asked of her, since she believed herself to have had many
+      revelations from God by St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret,
+      whether if there should appear some good creature (<i>sic</i>) who
+      professed to have had a revelation from God in respect to her, she would
+      believe that? She answered that there was no Christian in the world who
+      could come to her professing to have had a revelation, of whom she should
+      not know whether he spoke the truth or not: she would know it through St.
+      Catherine and St. Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she could not imagine that God might reveal something to a good
+      creature who might be unknown to her, she answered: "Yes; but I would not
+      believe either man or woman without a sign."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she believed that the Holy Scripture was revealed by God, she
+      answered, "You know that I do, and it is good to know."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last answer she made in respect to submission to Holy Church was this,
+      "Whatever may happen to me I will neither do nor say anything else, for I
+      have answered before, during the trial."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then "exhorted powerfully by the venerable doctors present" (four
+      are mentioned by name) to submit to our Mother the Church, with many
+      authorities and examples drawn from the Holy Scriptures; and finally,
+      Magister Nicolas Midi made her an exhortation from Matthew xviii.: "If
+      your brother trespass against you," and what follows, "If he will not hear
+      the Church, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican." This was
+      expounded to Jeanne in the French tongue and, finally, she was told that
+      if she would not obey and submit to the Church she must be given up as if
+      she was a Saracen. To which Jeanne replied that she was a good Christian
+      and well baptised, and that she desired to die as a Christian. She was
+      then asked whether, since she begged leave of the Church to receive her
+      Saviour, she would submit to the Church if it were promised to her that
+      she should receive. She answered that she would say no more than she had
+      said; that she loved God, served Him, and was a good Christian, and would
+      aid and uphold the Holy Church with all her power. Asked if she wished
+      that a beautiful procession should be made for her to restore her to
+      health, she answered that she would be glad if the Church and the
+      Catholics would pray for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For another fortnight Jeanne was sent back into the silence, and to her
+      own thoughts, which must have grown heavier and heavier as the weary days
+      went on, and no sound of approaching deliverance came, no rumour of help
+      at hand. All was quiet and safe at Rouen; amid the babble of the courtyard
+      which she might hear fitfully when her guardians were quieter than usual,
+      there was not one word which brought the hope of a French army at hand, or
+      of any movement to rescue her. All was silent in the world around, not a
+      breath of hope, not the whisper of a friend. It was not till the 2d of May
+      that the dreadful blank was again broken, and she was called to the great
+      hall of the castle for another interview with her tormentors. When she was
+      led into the hall it was full, as in the first sitting, sixty-three judges
+      in all being present. The interest had flagged or the pity had grown as
+      the trial dragged its slow length along; but now, when every day the
+      verdict was expected from Paris, the interest had risen again. On her way
+      from her prison to the hall, it was necessary to pass the door of the
+      castle chapel: and here once or twice Massieu, the officer of the court,
+      had permitted her to pause and kneel down as she passed. This was all the
+      celebration of the Paschal Feast that was permitted to Jeanne. The
+      compassionate official, however, was discovered in this small service of
+      charity, and sternly reprimanded and threatened. Henceforward she had to
+      pass without even a longing look through the door at the altar on which
+      was the holy sacrament.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came in on the renewed sitting of the 2d May to find the assembled
+      priests settling themselves, after the address which had been made to
+      them, to hear another address which John de Chasteillon, Archdeacon, had
+      prepared for herself, in which he said much that was good both for body
+      and soul, to which she consented. He had a list of twelve articles in his
+      hands, and explained and expounded them to her, as they were the occasion
+      of the sitting. He then "admonished her in charity," explaining that those
+      who were faithful to Christ hold firmly and closely to the Christian
+      creed, and adjuring her to consent and to amend her ways. To this Jeanne
+      answered: "Read your book," meaning the schedule held by Monseigneur the
+      Archdeacon, "and then I will answer you. I refer myself to God my master
+      in all things; and I love Him with all my heart."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To read this book, however, was precisely what Monseigneur the Archdeacon
+      had no intention of doing. She was never allowed to hear the twelve
+      articles upon which the verdict against her was founded; but the speaker
+      gave her a long discourse by way of explanation, following more or less
+      the schedule which he held. This "monition general," however, elicited no
+      detailed reply from Jeanne, who answered briefly with some impatience, "I
+      refer myself to my judge, who is the King of Heaven and earth." The "Lord
+      Archdeacon" then proceeded to "monitions particulares."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then once more explained to her that this reference to God alone
+      was a refusal to submit to the Church militant, and she was instructed in
+      the authority of the Church, which it was the duty of every Christian to
+      believe&mdash;<i>unam sanctam Ecclesiam</i> always guided by the Holy
+      Spirit and which could not err, to the judgment of which every question
+      should be referred. She answered: "I believe in the Church here below; but
+      my doings and sayings, as I have already said, I refer and submit to God.
+      I believe that the Church militant cannot err or fail; but as for my deeds
+      and words I put them all before God, who has made me do that which I have
+      done"; she also said that she submitted herself to God, her Creator, who
+      had made her do everything, and referred everything to Him, and to Him
+      alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked, if she would have no judge on earth and if our Holy
+      Father the Pope were not her judge; she answered: "I will tell you nothing
+      more. I have a good master, that is our Lord, on whom I depend for
+      everything, and not an any other."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then told that if she would not believe the Church and the article
+      <i>Ecclesiam sanctam Catholicam</i>, that she might be reckoned as a
+      heretic and punished by burning: to which she answered: "I can say nothing
+      else to you; and if I saw the fire before me, I should say only that which
+      I say, and could do nothing else." (Once more at this point the clerk
+      writes on his margin, "Proud reply"&mdash;<i>Superba responsio</i>&mdash;but
+      whether in admiration or in blame it would be hard to say.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if the Council General, or the Holy Father, Cardinals, etc., were
+      there&mdash;whether she would submit to them. "You shall have no other
+      answer from me," she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she would submit to our Holy Father the Pope: she answered,
+      "Take me to him and I will answer him," but would say no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Questioned in respect to her dress, she answered, that she would willingly
+      accept a long dress and a woman's hood to go to church to receive her
+      Saviour, provided that, as she had already said, she were allowed to wear
+      it on that occasion only, and then to take back that which she at present
+      wore. Further, when it was set before her that she wore that dress without
+      any need, being in prison, she answered, "When I have done that for which
+      I was sent by God, I will then take back a woman's dress." Asked, if she
+      thought she did well in being dressed like a man, she answered, "I refer
+      every thing to our Lord."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, after the exhortation made to her, namely, that in saying that she
+      did well and did not sin in wearing that dress, and in the circumstances
+      which concerned her assuming and wearing it, and in saying that God and
+      the saints made her do so&mdash;she blasphemed, and as is contained in
+      this schedule, erred and did evil: she answered that she never blasphemed
+      God or the saints.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then admonished to give up that dress, and no longer to think it
+      was right, and to return to the garb of a woman; but answered that she
+      would make no change in this respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning her revelations: she replied in regard to them, that she
+      referred everything to her judge, that is God, and that her revelations
+      were from God, without any other medium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked concerning the sign given to the King if she would refer to the
+      Archbishop of Rheims, the Sire de Boussac, Charles de Bourbon, La
+      Tremouille, and La Hire, to them or to any one of them, who, according to
+      what she formerly said, had seen the crown, and were present when the
+      angel brought it, and gave it to the Archbishop; or if she would refer to
+      any others of her party who might write under their seals that it was so;
+      she answered, "Send a messenger, and I will write to them about the whole
+      trial": but otherwise she was not disposed to refer to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In respect to her presumption in divining the future, etc., she answered,
+      "I refer everything to my judge who is God, and to what I have already
+      answered, which is written in the book."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if two or three or four knights of her party were to be brought
+      here under a safe conduct, whether she would refer to them her apparitions
+      and other things contained in this trial; answered, "Let them come and
+      then I will answer:" but otherwise she was not willing to refer to anyone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked whether, at the Church of Poitiers where she was examined, she had
+      submitted to the Church, she answered, "Do you hope to catch me in this
+      way, and by that draw advantage to yourselves?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In conclusion, "afresh and abundantly," she was admonished to submit
+      herself to the Church, on pain of being abandoned by the Church; for if
+      the Church left her she would be in great danger of body and of soul; and
+      she might well put herself in peril of eternal fire for the soul, as well
+      as of temporal fire for the body, by the sentence of other judges. "You
+      will not do this which you say against me, without doing injury to your
+      own bodies and souls," she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, whether she could give a reason why she would not submit to the
+      Church: but to this she would make no additional reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again a week passed in busy talk and consultation without, in silence and
+      desertion within. On the 9th of May the prisoner was again led, this time
+      to the great tower, apparently the torture chamber of the castle, where
+      she found nine of her judges awaiting her, and was once more adjured to
+      speak the truth, with the threat of torture if she continued to refuse.
+      Never was her attitude more calm, more dignified and lofty in its
+      simplicity, than at this grim moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Truly," she replied, "if you tear the limbs from my body, and my soul out
+      of it, I can say nothing other than what I have said; or if I said
+      anything different, I should afterwards say that you had compelled me to
+      do it by force." She added that on the day of the Holy Cross, the 3d of
+      May past, she had been comforted by St. Gabriel. She believed that it was
+      St. Gabriel: and she knew by her voices that it was St. Gabriel. She had
+      asked counsel of her voices whether she should submit to the Church,
+      because the priests pressed her so strongly to submit: but it had been
+      said to her that if she desired our Lord to help her she must depend upon
+      Him for everything. She added that she knew well that our Lord had always
+      been the master of all she did, and that the Enemy had nothing to do with
+      her deeds. Also she had asked her voices if she should be burned, and the
+      said voices had replied to her that she was to wait for the Lord and He
+      would help her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards in respect to the crown which had been handed by the angel to
+      the Archbishop of Rheims, she was asked if she would refer to him. She
+      answered: "Bring him here, that I may hear what he says, and then I shall
+      answer you; he will not dare to say the contrary of that which I have said
+      to you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Archbishop of Rheims had been her constant enemy; all the hindrances
+      that had occurred in her active life, and the constant attempts made to
+      balk her even in her brief moment of triumph, came from him and his
+      associate La Trémouille. He was the last person in the world to whom
+      Jeanne naturally would have appealed. Perhaps that was the admirable
+      reason why he was suggested in this dreadful crisis of her fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days later, it was discussed among those dark inquisitors whether
+      the torture should be applied or not. Finally, among thirteen there were
+      but two (let not the voice of sacred vengeance be silent on their shame
+      though after four centuries and more), Thomas de Courcelles, first of
+      theologians, cleverest of ecclesiastical lawyers, mildest of men, and
+      Nicolas L'Oyseleur, the spy and traitor, who voted for the torture. One
+      man most reasonably asked why she should be put to torture when they had
+      ample material for judgment without it? One cannot but feel that the
+      proceedings on this occasion were either intended to beguile the
+      impatience of the English authorities, eager to be done with the whole
+      business, or to add a quite gratuitous pang to the sufferings of the
+      heroic girl. As the men were not devils, though probably possessed by this
+      time, the more cruel among them, by the horrible curiosity, innate alas!
+      in human nature, of seeing how far a suffering soul could go, it is
+      probable that the first motive was the true one. The English, Warwick
+      especially, whose every movement was restrained by this long-pending
+      affair, were exceedingly impatient, and tempted at times to take the
+      matter into their own hands, and spoil the perfectness of this well
+      constructed work of art, conducted according to all the rules, the
+      beautiful trial which was dear to the Bishop's heart&mdash;and destined to
+      be, though perhaps in a sense somewhat different to that which he hoped,
+      his chief title to fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ten days after, the decision of the University of Paris arrived, and a
+      great assembly of counsellors, fifty-one in all, besides the permanent
+      presidents, collected together in the chapel of the Archbishop's house, to
+      hear that document read, along with many other documents, the individual
+      opinions of a host of doctors and eminent authorities. After an
+      explanation of the solemn care given by the University to the
+      consideration of every one of the twelve articles of the indictment, that
+      learned tribunal pronounced its verdict upon each. The length of the
+      proceedings makes it impossible to reproduce these. First as to the early
+      revelations given to Jeanne, described in the first and second articles,
+      they are denounced as "murderous, seductive, and pernicious fictions," the
+      apparitions those of "malignant spirits and devils, Belial, Satan, and
+      Behemoth." The third article, which concerned her recognition of the
+      saints, was described more mildly as containing errors in faith; the
+      fourth, as to her knowledge of future events, was characterised as
+      "superstitious and presumptuous divination." The fifth, concerning her
+      dress, declared her to be "blasphemous and contemptuous of God in His
+      Sacraments." The sixth, by which she was accused of loving bloodshed,
+      because she made war against those who did not obey the summons in her
+      letters bearing the name Jhesus Maria, was declared to prove that she was
+      cruel, "seeking the shedding of blood, seditious, and a blasphemer of
+      God." The tenor is the same to the end: Blasphemy, superstition,
+      pernicious doctrine, impiety, cruelty, presumption, lying; a schismatic, a
+      heretic, an apostate, an idolator, an invoker of demons. These are the
+      conclusions drawn by the most solemn and weighty tribunal on matters of
+      faith in France. The precautions taken to procure a full and trustworthy
+      judgment, the appeal to each section in turn, the Faculty of Theology, the
+      Faculty of Law, the "Nations," all separately and than all together
+      passing every item in review&mdash;are set forth at full length. Every
+      formality had been fulfilled, every rule followed, every detail was in the
+      fullest order, signed and sealed and attested by solemn notaries,
+      bristling with well-known names. A beautiful judgment, equal to the trial,
+      which was beautiful too&mdash;not a rule omitted except those of justice,
+      fairness, and truth! The doctors sat and listened with every fine
+      professional sense satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If the beforesaid woman, charitably exhorted and admonished by competent
+      judges, does not return spontaneously to the Catholic faith, publicly
+      abjure her errors, and give full satisfaction to her judges, she is hereby
+      given up to the secular judge to receive the reward of her deeds."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attendant judges, each in his place, now added their adhesion. Most of
+      them simply stated their agreement with the judgment of the University, or
+      with that of the Bishop of Fecamp, which was a similar tenor; a few wished
+      that Jeanne should be again "charitably admonished"; many desired that on
+      this selfsame day the final sentence should be pronounced. One among them,
+      a certain Raoul Sauvage (Radulphus Silvestris), suggested that she should
+      be brought before the people in a public place, a suggestion afterwards
+      carried out. Frère Isambard desired that she should be charitably
+      admonished again and have another chance, and that her final fate should
+      still be in the hands of "us her judges." The conclusion was that one more
+      "charitable admonition" should be given to Jeanne, and that the law should
+      then take its course. The suggestion that she should make a public
+      appearance had only one supporter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This dark scene in the chapel is very notable, each man rising to
+      pronounce what was in reality a sentence of death,&mdash;fifty of them
+      almost unanimous, filled no doubt with a hundred different motives, to
+      please this man or that, to win favour, to get into the way of promotion,&mdash;but
+      all with a distinct consciousness of the great yet horrible spectacle, the
+      stake, the burning:&mdash;though perhaps here and there was one with a
+      hope that perpetual imprisonment, bread of sorrow and water of anguish,
+      might be substituted for that terrible death. Finally, it was decided that&mdash;always
+      on the side of mercy, as every act proved&mdash;the tribunal should once
+      more "charitably admonish" the prisoner for the salvation of her soul and
+      body, and that after all this "good deliberation and wholesome counsel"
+      the case should be concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there follows a pause of four days. No doubt the Bishop and his
+      assessors had other things to do, their ecclesiastical functions, their
+      private business, which could not always be put aside because one forsaken
+      soul was held in suspense day after day. Finally on the 24th of May,
+      Jeanne again received in her prison a dignified company, some quite new
+      and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the reader's mind that it
+      was perhaps to show off the interesting prisoner to two new and powerful
+      bishops, the first, Louis of Luxembourg, a relative of her first captor,
+      that this last examination was held), nine men in all, crowding her
+      chamber&mdash;<i>exponuntur Johannæ defectus sui</i>, says the record&mdash;to
+      expound to Jeanne her faults. It was Magister Peter Morice to whom this
+      office was confided. Once more the "schedule" was gone over, and an
+      address delivered laden with all the bad words of the University. "Jeanne,
+      dearest friend," said the orator at last, "it is now time, at the end of
+      the trial, to think well what words these are." She would seem to have
+      spoken during this address, at least once&mdash;to say that she held to
+      everything she had said during the trial. When Morice had finished she was
+      once more questioned personally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked if she still thought and believed that it was not her duty
+      to submit her deeds and words to the Church militant, or to any other
+      except God, upon which she replied, "What I have always said and held to
+      during the trial, I maintain to this moment"; and added that if she were
+      in judgment and saw the fire lighted, the faggots burning, and the
+      executioner ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the fire, she
+      could say nothing else, but would sustain what she had said in her trial,
+      to death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more the scribe has written on his margin the words <i>Responsio
+      Johannæ superba</i>&mdash;the proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her
+      expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation about her, must
+      have moved the man, thus for the third time to send down to us his
+      distinctly human impression of the worn out prisoner before her judges.
+      "And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more, the cause was
+      concluded," says the record, so formal, sustained within such purely
+      abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb and reverberation
+      of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the Inquisitor too all words
+      seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid the excited crowd in the
+      Temple the officers of the Pharisees approaching to lay hands on a greater
+      than Jeanne, fell back, not knowing why, and could not do their office.
+      This man was silenced also. Two bishops were present, and one a great man
+      full of patronage; but not for the richest living in Normandy could Peter
+      Morice find any more to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are in one sense the words of Jeanne; the last we have from her in
+      her prison, the last of her consistent and unbroken life. After, there was
+      a deeper horror to go through, a moment when all her forces failed. Here
+      on the verge of eternity she stands heroic and unyielding, brave, calm,
+      and steadfast as at the outset of her career, the Maid of France. Were the
+      fires lighted and the faggots burning, and she herself within the fire,
+      she had no other word to say.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) It is correct in French to use the second person plural
+     in addressing God, <i>thou</i> being a more intimate and less
+     respectful form of speech. Such a difference is difficult to
+     remember, and troubles the ear. The French, even those who
+     ought to know better, sometimes speak of it as a supreme
+     profanity on the part of the profane English, that they
+     address God as <i>thou</i>.
+
+     (2) The French report goes on, "et requiert &mdash;&mdash;," but no
+     more. It is not in the Latin. The scribe was stopped by the
+     Bishop's profane outcry, and forbidden to register the fact
+     she was about to make a direct appeal to the Pope.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI &mdash; THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the
+      officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart still
+      high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had been no
+      doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with every
+      repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the last. And
+      the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very near to her; no
+      doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange information about
+      herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside of the Castle of Rouen,
+      rose half-comprehended from the echoing courtyard outside and the babble
+      of her guards within. She would hear even as she was conveyed along the
+      echoing stone passages something here and there of the popular
+      expectation:&mdash;a burning! the wonderful unheard of sight, which by
+      hook or by crook everyone must see; and no doubt among the English talk
+      she might now be able to make out something concerning this long business
+      which had retarded all warlike proceedings but which would soon be over
+      now, and the witch burnt. There must have been some, even among those rude
+      companions, who would be sorry, who would feel that she was no witch, yet
+      be helpless to do anything for her, any more than Massieu could, or Frère
+      Isambard: and if it was all for the sake of certain words to be said, was
+      the wench mad? would it not be better to say anything, to give up anything
+      rather than be burned at the stake? Jeanne, notwithstanding the wonderful
+      courage of her last speech, must have returned to her cell with small
+      illusion possible to her intelligent spirit. The stake had indeed come
+      very near, the flames already dazzled her eyes, she must have felt her
+      slender form shrink together at the thought. All that long night, through
+      the early daylight of the May morning did she lie and ponder, as for far
+      less reasons so many of us have pondered as we lay wakeful through those
+      morning watches. God's promises are great, but where is the fulfilment? We
+      ask for bread and he gives us, if not a stone, yet something which we
+      cannot realise to be bread till after many days. Jeanne's voices had never
+      paused in their pledge to her of succour. "Speak boldly, God will help you&mdash;fear
+      nothing"; there would be aid for her before three months, and great
+      victory. They went on saying so, though the stake was already being
+      raised. What did they mean? what did they mean? Could she still trust
+      them? or was it possible&mdash;&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced the fire.
+      She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the heartrending
+      ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give her that heroic
+      command. Still and always, they said God will help you, our Lord will
+      stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean deliverance, deliverance!
+      What else could it mean? If she held her head high as she returned to the
+      horrible monotony of that prison so often left with hope, so often
+      re-entered in sadness, it must soon have dropped upon her tired bosom.
+      Slowly the clouds had settled round her. Over and over again had she
+      affirmed them to be true&mdash;these voices that had guided her steps and
+      led her to victory. And they had promised her the aid of God if she went
+      forward boldly, and spoke and did not fear. But now every way of salvation
+      was closing; all around her were fierce soldiers thirsting for her blood,
+      smooth priests who admonished her in charity, threatening her with eternal
+      fire for the soul, temporal fire for the body. She felt that fire, already
+      blowing towards her as if on the breath of the evening wind, and her
+      girlish flesh shrank. Was that what the voices had called deliverance? was
+      that the grand victory, the aid of the Lord?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she had
+      reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in
+      bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison became
+      intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough jests half
+      through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the clang of their arms
+      when relieved. Early next morning a party of her usual visitors came in
+      upon her to give her fresh instruction and advice. Something new was about
+      to happen to-day. She was to be led forth, to breathe the air of heaven,
+      to confront the people, the raging sea of men's faces, all the unknown
+      world about her. The crowd had never been unfriendly to Jeanne. It had
+      closed about her, almost wherever she was visible, with sweet applause and
+      outcries of joy. Perhaps a little hope stirred her heart in the thought of
+      being surrounded once more by the common folk, though probably it did not
+      occur to her to think of these Norman strangers as her own people. And a
+      great day was before her, a day in which something might still be done, in
+      which deliverance might yet come. L'Oyseleur, who was one of her visitors,
+      adjured her now to change her conduct, to accept whatever means of
+      salvation might be offered to her. There was no longer any mention of Pope
+      or Council, but only of the Church to which she ought to yield. How it was
+      that he preserved his influence over her, having been proved to be a
+      member of the tribunal that judged her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a
+      fellow-countryman, nor any of the things he had professed to be, no once
+      can tell us; but evidently he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to
+      have received him without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed she
+      seems to have been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who professed
+      to wish her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would require, however, no great persuasion on L'Oyseleur's part to
+      convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that
+      something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be so
+      determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but delivered
+      from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping of the Church,
+      there would be time to think of everything, even to make her peace with
+      her voices who would surely understand if, for the saving of her life, and
+      out of terror for the dreadful fire, she abandoned them for a moment. She
+      had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and they had forgiven. One faltering word
+      now, a mark of her hand upon a paper, and she would be safe&mdash;even if
+      still all they said was true; and if indeed and in fact, after buoying her
+      up from day to day, such a dreadful thing might be as that they were not
+      true&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment,
+      of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there came into the prison a better man than L'Oyseleur, Jean
+      Beaupère, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of all
+      these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he came in
+      all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to warn her. He
+      came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor. "Jean Beaupère
+      entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by permission, and
+      advertised her that she would straightway be taken to the scaffold to be
+      addressed (<i>pour y être preschée</i>), and that if she was a good
+      Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and words under
+      the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and specially of the
+      ecclesiastical judges." "Accept the woman's dress and do all that you are
+      told," her other adviser had said. When the car that was to convey her
+      came to the prison doors, L'Oyseleur accompanied her, no doubt with a show
+      of supporting her to the end. What a change from the confined and gloomy
+      prison to the dazzling clearness of the May daylight, the air, the
+      murmuring streets, the throng that gazed and shouted and followed! Life
+      that had run so low in the prisoner's veins must have bounded up within
+      her in response to that sunshine and open sky, and movement and sound of
+      existence&mdash;summer weather too, and everything softened in the medium
+      of that soft breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She had been
+      three months in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along the roughly
+      paved streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange object appeared
+      to Jeanne's eyes in the midst of the market-place, a lofty scaffold with a
+      stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd, the logs all arranged
+      ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four horses, to bring hither
+      the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready, everything arranged&mdash;for
+      whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that she might see the
+      preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the great victory, the
+      deliverance in which she had believed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different scene.
+      That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a great open
+      space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In this were erected
+      two platforms, one facing the other. On the first sat the court of judges
+      in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester having a place by the side of
+      Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president, with several other bishops and
+      dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on the other platform, were a pulpit
+      and a place for the accused, to which Jeanne was conducted by Massieu, who
+      never left her, and L'Oyseleur, who kept as near as he could, the rest of
+      the platform being immediately covered by lawyers, doctors, all the camp
+      followers, so to speak, of the black army, who could find footing there.
+      Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the doublet and hose, with her
+      short-clipped hair&mdash;no doubt looking like a slim boy among all this
+      dark crowd of men. The people swayed like a sea all about and around&mdash;the
+      throng which had gathered in her progress through the streets pushing out
+      the crowd already assembled with a movement like the waves of the sea.
+      Every step of the trial all through had been attended by preaching, by
+      discourses and reasoning and admonishments, charitable and otherwise. Now
+      she was to be "preached" for the last time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Doctor Guillaume Érard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher,
+      one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to hear. He
+      himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set up
+      there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of his
+      own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more than
+      king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential of
+      men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John's Gospel: "A
+      branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine." The centre circle
+      containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of English
+      soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the witch should
+      be condemned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long
+      and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine periods
+      admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach upon
+      the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of France,
+      and the head of that House, "Charles who calls himself King." "He has,"
+      cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of Winchester upon him,
+      "adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as he is, to the words
+      and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of dishonour; and not he
+      only, but the clergy who are under his sway, and the nobility. This guilt
+      is thine, Jeanne, and to thee I say that thy King is a schismatic and a
+      heretic."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by that
+      clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the tumult of
+      battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used to abuse in her
+      own person, but all her spirit came back at this assault on her King. And
+      interruption to a sermon has always a dramatic and startling effect, but
+      when that voice arose now, when the startled speaker stopped, and every
+      dulled attention revived, it is easy to imagine what a stir, what a
+      wonderful, sudden sensation must have arisen in the midst of the crowd.
+      "By my faith, sire," cried Jeanne, "saving your respect, I swear upon my
+      life that my King is the most noble Christian of all Christians, that he
+      is not what you say."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally the
+      preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of animation,
+      and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart overwhelmed with
+      many heavy thoughts. "Here," said Èrard, "are my lords the judges who have
+      so often summoned and required of you to submit your acts and words to our
+      Holy Mother the Church; because in these acts and words there are many
+      things which it seemed to the clergy were not good either to say or to
+      sustain."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), "I will
+      answer you." And as to her submission to the Church she said: "I have told
+      them on that point that all the works which I have done and said may be
+      sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God first, I
+      refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on the part of
+      God." She also said that no one was to blame for her acts and words,
+      neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in them, the
+      blame was hers and no other's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, "I
+      refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy Father
+      was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in his diocese,
+      and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother the Holy Church,
+      and that she should confess that the clergy and officers of the Church had
+      a right to determine in her case. And of this she was admonished three
+      times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a great
+      part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she would hold to
+      all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in everything their
+      ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the above-named and of
+      the great multitude assembled she made her abjuration in the manner that
+      follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions and
+      revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not sustain
+      them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother the Holy
+      Church.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made. Manchon
+      writes on his margin: <i>At the end of the sentence Jeanne, fearing the
+      fire, said she would obey the Church</i>. Even into the bare legal
+      document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding in the
+      silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation of the
+      previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering submission,
+      <i>timens igneum</i>&mdash;in fear of the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those
+      eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Èrard, from his
+      pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that she
+      did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called upon Massieu
+      to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own deposition), "after
+      excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if she opposed the said
+      articles she would be burnt; but he advised her to refer it to the Church
+      universal whether she should abjure or not. Which thing she did, saying to
+      Èrard, 'I refer to the Church universal whether I should abjure or not.'
+      To which Èrard answered, 'You shall abjure at once or you will be burnt.'
+      Massieu gives further particulars in another part of the Rehabilitation
+      process. Èrard, he says, asked what he was saying to the prisoner, and he
+      answered that she would sign if the schedule was read to her; but Jeanne
+      said that she could not write, and then added that she wished it to be
+      decided by the Church, and ought not to sign unless that was done: and
+      also required that she should be placed in the custody of the Church, and
+      freed from the hands of the English. The same Èrard answered that there
+      had been ample delay, and that if she did not sign at once she should be
+      burned, and forbade Massieu to say any more."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from the
+      crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to have
+      promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the Church.
+      "Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save yourself?" was called
+      to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast, but her heart failed her
+      in this terrible climax of her suffering. Once she called out over their
+      heads, "All that I did was done for good, and it was well to do it:"&mdash;her
+      last cry. Then she would seem to have recovered in some measure her
+      composure. Probably her agitated brain was unable to understand the
+      formula of recantation which was read to her amid all the increasing
+      noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the condition she had
+      herself stated, that the paper should be submitted to the Church, and that
+      she should at once be transferred to an ecclesiastical prison. Other
+      suggestions are made, namely, that it was a very short document upon which
+      she hastily in her despair made a cross, and that it was a long one,
+      consisting of several pages, which was shown afterwards with <i>Jehanne</i>
+      scribbled underneath. "In fact," says Massieu, "she abjured and made a
+      cross with the pen which the witness handed to her:" he, if any one must
+      have known exactly what happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform. But
+      the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing round
+      the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals, seconded by
+      many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her young life for!
+      "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had gone on reading the
+      sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences all ready, two
+      courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve her&mdash;which meant
+      condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread and water: or to carry
+      her off at once to the stake. The English were impatient for the last. It
+      is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is evidently true. They had
+      never wished to play with her as a cat with a mouse, as her learned
+      countrymen had done those three months past; they had desired at once to
+      get her out of their way. But the idea of her perpetual imprisonment did
+      not please them at all; the risk of such a prisoner was more than they
+      chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are some things a churchman cannot
+      do. When it was seen that Jeanne had yielded, that she had put her mark to
+      something on a paper flourished forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine,
+      the Bishop turned to the Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was
+      to do? There was but one answer possible to Winchester, had he been
+      English and Jeanne's natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to
+      penitence was the only practicable way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was that
+      Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on the
+      document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs of the
+      crowd. The <i>cédule</i> to which she put her sign "contained eight
+      lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and full
+      of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration published)
+      was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; "for the one read
+      by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite different." This
+      would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged version of an act of
+      abjuration, in its original form strictly confined to the necessary points
+      and expressed in few words&mdash;was afterwards published as that bearing
+      the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions, as will be seen, are of the
+      scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an abjuration at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been taken,
+      and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence must be
+      accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and pronounced the
+      prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the bosom of the
+      Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all thy errors,
+      we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison, with the bread
+      of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by solitary penitence."
+      Whether the words reached her over all those crowding heads, or whether
+      they were reported to her, or what Jeanne expected to follow standing
+      there upon her platform, more shamed and downcast than through all her
+      trial, no one can tell. There seems even to have been a moment of
+      uncertainty among the officials. Some of them congratulated Jeanne,
+      L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, "You have done a good day's
+      work, you have saved your soul." She herself, excited and anxious, desired
+      eagerly to know where she was not to go. She would seem for the moment to
+      have accepted the fact of her perpetual imprisonment with complete faith
+      and content. It meant to her instant relief from her hideous prison-house,
+      and she could not contain her impatience and eagerness. "People of the
+      Church&mdash;<i>gens de' Église</i>&mdash;lead me to your prison; let me
+      be no longer in the hands of the English," she cried with feverish
+      anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons and the dreadful durance
+      which she had suffered so long, was all her thought. The men about her
+      could not answer this appeal. Some of them no doubt knew very well what
+      the answer must be, and some must have seen the angry looks and stern
+      exclamation which Warwick addressed to Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by
+      this unsatisfactory conclusion, and the stir among the soldiers at sight
+      of his displeasure. But perhaps flurried by all that had happened, perhaps
+      hoping to strengthen the victim in her moment of hope, some of them
+      hurried across to the Bishop to ask where they were to take her. One of
+      these was Pierre Miger, friar of Longueville. Where was she to be taken?
+      In Winchester's hearing, perhaps in Warwick's, what a question to put! An
+      English bishop, says this witness turned to him angrily and said to
+      Cauchon that this was a "fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "<i>this fellow was
+      also one of them</i>." Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did
+      before him, and Cauchon turning upon him commanded grimly that she should
+      be taken back whence she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her
+      abjuration, which by no just title could be called an abjuration, had been
+      in vain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she had
+      perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in reality,
+      and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what she had done,
+      except that it had failed. At the end of so long and bitter a struggle she
+      had thrown down her arms&mdash;but for what? to escape those horrible
+      gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of Dionysius, its Judas hole
+      in the wall. The bitterness of the going back was beyond words. We hear of
+      no word that she said when she realised the hideous fact that nothing was
+      changed for her; the bitter waters closed over her head. Again the chains
+      to be locked and double locked that bound her to her dreadful bed, again
+      the presence of those men who must have been all the more odious to her
+      from the momentary hope that she had got free from them for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard upon her,
+      accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor, Courcelles, and
+      L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical persons, visited her
+      prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost blessed her, sermonising
+      as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though with a word of warning that
+      should she change her mind and return to her evil ways there would be no
+      further place for repentance. As a return for the mercy and clemency of
+      the Church, he required her immediately to put on the female dress which
+      his attendants had brought. There is something almost ludicrous, could we
+      forget the tragedy to follow, in the bundle of humble clothing brought by
+      such exalted personages, with the solemnity which became a thing upon
+      which hung the issues of life or death. Jeanne replied with the humility
+      of a broken spirit. "I take them willingly," she said, "and in everything
+      I will obey the Church." Then silence closed upon her, the horrible
+      silence of the prison, full of hidden listeners and of watching eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It was
+      said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain have seen
+      Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but Monseigneur de Beauvais
+      had to hold head against the great English authorities who were out of all
+      patience, fearing that the witch might still slip through their fingers
+      and by her spells and incantations make the heart of the troops melt once
+      more within them. If the mind of the Church had been as charitable as it
+      professed to be, I doubt if all the power of Rome could have got the Maid
+      now out of the English grip. They were exasperated, and felt that they
+      too, as well as the prisoner, had been played with. But the Bishop had
+      good hope in his mind, still to be able to content his patrons. Jeanne had
+      abjured, it was true, but the more he inquired into that act, the less
+      secure he must have felt about it. And she might relapse; and if she
+      relapsed there would be no longer any place for repentance. And it is
+      evident that his confidence in the power of the clothes was boundless. In
+      any case a few days more would make all clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance,
+      well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One account
+      is given by Frère Isambard, whom she told in the presence of several
+      others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a <i>Millourt Anglois</i>,
+      and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again the man's
+      dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu is different:
+      To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be released from her bed on
+      the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards took away her female dress which
+      she was wearing, and emptied the sack containing the other upon her bed.
+      She appealed to them, reminding them that these were forbidden to her; but
+      got no answer except a brutal order to get up. It is very probable that
+      both stories are true. Frère Isambard found her weeping and agitated, and
+      nothing is more probable than this was the occasion on which Warwick heard
+      her cries, and interfered to save her. Massieu's version, of which he is
+      certain, was communicated to him a day or two after when they happened to
+      be alone together. It was on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday that she
+      put on the female dress, but it would seem that rumours on the subject of
+      a relapse had begun to spread even before the Sunday on which that event
+      happened: and Beaupère and Midi were sent by the Bishop to investigate.
+      But they were very ill-received in the Castle, sworn at by the guards, and
+      forced to go back without seeing Jeanne, there being as yet, it appeared,
+      nothing to see. On the morning of the Monday, however, the rumours arose
+      with greater force; and no doubt secret messages must have informed the
+      Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself
+      accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight of
+      the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt with
+      much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle was
+      all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event so
+      trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the
+      visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed once
+      more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four days
+      before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her, and humbly
+      promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an outcry of
+      astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes," she replied,
+      "she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no triumph in what she
+      said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of one who in the most
+      desperate strait has taken her resolution and must abide by it, whether
+      she likes it or not. She was asked why she had resumed that dress, and who
+      had made her do so. There was no question of anything else at first. The
+      tunic and <i>gippon</i> were at once enough to decide her fate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing her
+      to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the dress
+      of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn or had
+      made any such oath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more lawful to
+      wear a man's dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and also that she
+      had taken it back because the promise made to her had not been kept, that
+      she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour, and be delivered from
+      her irons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to resume
+      it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in irons; but if
+      they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of her irons and put
+      her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she would be good, and do
+      whatever the Church pleased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of her
+      voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them again.
+      To this she answered, recovering a little courage, "Yes."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God had
+      made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity there
+      was of the treason to which she had consented by making abjuration and
+      revocation in order to save her life: and that she had earned damnation
+      for herself to save her life. Also that before Thursday her voices had
+      told her that she should do what she did that day, that on the scaffold
+      they had told her to answer the preachers boldly, and that this preacher
+      whom she called a false preacher had accused her of many things she never
+      did. She also added that if she said God had not sent her she would damn
+      herself, for true it was that God had sent her. Also that her voices had
+      told her since, that she had done a great sin in confessing that she had
+      sinned; but that for fear of the fire she had said that which she had
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were
+      those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were so;
+      and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold that
+      she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St. Margaret,
+      she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she never intended
+      to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not St. Catherine and
+      St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of the fire, and she had
+      denied nothing but what was contrary to truth; and she said that she would
+      like better to make her penitence all at one time&mdash;that is to say, in
+      dying, than to endure a long penitence in prison. Also that she had never
+      done anything against God or the faith whatever they might have made her
+      say; and that for what was in the schedule of the abjuration she did not
+      know what it was. Also she said that she never intended to revoke anything
+      so long as it pleased our Lord. At the end she said that if her judges
+      would have her do so, she might put on again her female dress; but for the
+      rest she would do no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his own
+      mouth." Jeanne's protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and defence,
+      overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it with
+      questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed; the end
+      of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be accomplished.
+      No one could say she had not had full justice done her; every formality
+      had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried out. Now there was but
+      one thing before her, whose sad young voice with many pauses thus sighed
+      forth its last utterance; and for her judges, one last spectacle to
+      prepare, and the work to complete which it had taken them three long
+      months to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII &mdash; THE SACRIFICE. MAY 31, 1431.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in certain
+      circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of Beauvais had
+      entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew exactly, with a
+      perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least, that, notwithstanding
+      the effect which his theatrical <i>mise en scène</i> had produced upon the
+      imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or earth would induce that young
+      soul to content itself with a lie. He knew it, though lies were his daily
+      bread; the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
+      children of light. He had bidden his English patrons to wait a little, and
+      now his predictions were triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of
+      any man that on such a certainty he could have calculated and laid his
+      devilish plans; but there would seem to have existed in the mediæval
+      churchman a certain horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic
+      which was peculiar to their age and profession, and which no better
+      principle in their own minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their
+      delight of sensation, in distinction from the other appetites perhaps
+      scarcely less cruel which other men indulged with no such horrified
+      denunciation from the rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared
+      with Cauchon that sharp sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her out;
+      young Courcelles, so modest and unassuming and so learned, among the rest;
+      not L'Oyseleur, it appears by the sequel. That Judas, like the greater
+      traitor, was struck to the heart; but the less bad man who had only
+      persecuted, not betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and only rejoiced
+      that at last the victim was ready to drop into the flames which had been
+      so carefully prepared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried with
+      their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the
+      Archbishop's house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily called
+      together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner escaped had
+      been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one each man rose
+      again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of Fécamp, led the
+      tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done: to give her up to the
+      secular justice, "praying that she might be gently dealt with." Man after
+      man added his voice "to that of Abbot of Fécamp aforesaid"&mdash;that she
+      might be gently dealt with! Not one of them could be under any doubt what
+      gentle meaning would be in the execution; but apparently the words were of
+      some strange use in salving their consciences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In point of
+      view of the law, there should have followed another trial, more evidence,
+      pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to Monseigneur de Beauvais
+      that he now defied law, and no longer prolonged the useless ceremonials of
+      that mockery of justice. It is said that in coming out of the prison,
+      through the courtyard full of Englishmen, where Warwick was in waiting to
+      hear what news, the Bishop greeted them with all the satisfaction of
+      success, laughing and bidding them "Make good cheer, the thing is done."
+      In the same spirit of satisfaction was the rapid action of the further
+      proceedings. On Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on Wednesday morning
+      at eight 'clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear her sentence, and
+      there, without even that formality, the penalty was at once carried out.
+      No time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison
+      where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge of
+      her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful scene,
+      which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty years after
+      by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it had become the
+      only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest colours, and themselves
+      as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt that so remarkable an
+      occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a deep impression on the minds
+      of all those who were in any way actors in or spectators of that wonderful
+      scene. And every word of all these different reports is on oath; but
+      notwithstanding, a touch of unconscious colour, a more favourable
+      sentiment, influenced by the feeling of later days, may well have crept
+      in. With this warning we may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy,
+      all the more for the atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no
+      way idealised, which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in
+      which Jeanne figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified,
+      tormented, and often trembling girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l'Advenu appeared in the
+      cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell&mdash;first "to announce
+      to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true contrition and
+      penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the said l'Advenu did
+      very carefully and charitably." Jeanne on her part received the news with
+      no conventional resignation or calm. Was it possible that she had been
+      deceived and really hoped for mercy? She began to weep and to cry at the
+      sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding the solemnity of her last
+      declaration, that she would rather bear her punishment all at once than to
+      endure the long punishment of her prison, her heart failed before the
+      imminent stake, the immediate martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and
+      earth: "My body, which has never been corrupted, must it be burned to
+      ashes to-day!" No one but Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her
+      perfect purity; was it good for nothing but to be burned, that young body
+      not nineteen years old? "Ah," she said, "I would rather be beheaded seven
+      times than burned! I appeal to God against all these great wrongs they do
+      me." But after a while the passion wore itself out, the child's outburst
+      was stilled; calming herself, she knelt down and made her confession to
+      the compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to "receive her
+      Saviour" as she had so often prayed and entreated before. It would appear
+      that this had not been within Friar Martin's commission. He sent to ask
+      the Bishop's leave, and it was granted "anything she asked for"&mdash;as
+      they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned convict. But the Host
+      was brought into the prison without ceremony, without accompanying candles
+      or vestment for the priest. There are always some things which are
+      insupportable to a man. Brother Martin could bear the sight of the girl's
+      anguish, but not to administer to her a diminished rite. He sent again to
+      demand what was needful, out of respect for the Holy Sacrament and the
+      present victim. And his request had come, it would seem, to some canon or
+      person in authority whose heart had been touched by the wonderful Maid in
+      her long martyrdom. This nameless sympathiser did all that a man could do.
+      He sent the Host with a train of priests chanting litanies as they went
+      through the streets, with torches burning in the pure early daylight; some
+      of these exhorted the people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her.
+      She must have heard in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the
+      clergy, the pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the
+      voices, that sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last
+      the city was touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been
+      sympathetic to Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was
+      about to die: she had stood bravely against the world and answered like a
+      true Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets, a girl
+      just nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated for the
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over, received
+      at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that rite which He
+      himself had instituted before He died. But she was not permitted to
+      receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the sacred commemoration.
+      All the time she was still <i>preschée</i> and admonished by the men about
+      her. A few days after her death the Bishop and his followers assembled,
+      and set down in evidence their different parts in that scene. How far it
+      is to be relied upon, it is difficult to say. The speakers did not testify
+      under oath; there is no formal warrant for their truth, and an anxious
+      attempt to prove her change of mind is evident throughout; still there
+      seem elements of truth in it, and a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne
+      in the depths, when hope and strength were gone. The general burden of
+      their testimony is that she sadly allowed herself to have been deceived,
+      as to the liberation for which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice,
+      often already mentioned, importuning her on the subject of the spirits,
+      endeavouring to get from her an admission that she had not seen them at
+      all, and was herself a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were
+      evil spirits, not good,&mdash;drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be
+      they good spirits, or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act
+      of giving her her last communion, Brother Martin paused with the
+      consecrated Host in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
+      answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer." Then
+      this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your voices?"
+      Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the voices, which have
+      deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not give this deposition,
+      but another of the persons present, Le Camus, who did not live to revise
+      his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
+      satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. "So,
+      Jeanne," he said, "you have always told us that your 'voices' said you
+      were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us the
+      truth at last." Then Jeanne answered: "Truly I see that they have deceived
+      me." The report is Cauchon's, and therefore little to be trusted; but the
+      sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that, even in records more
+      trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her. The other spectators all
+      report another portion of this conversation. "Bishop, it is by you I die,"
+      are the words with which the Maid is said to have met him. "Oh Jeanne,
+      have patience," he replied. "It is because you did not keep your promise."
+      "If you had kept yours, and sent me to the prison of the Church, and put
+      me in gentle hands, it would not have happened," she replied. "I appeal
+      from you to God." Several of the attendants, also according to the
+      Bishop's account, heard from her the same sad words: "They have deceived
+      me"; and there seems no reason why we should not believe it. Her mind was
+      weighed down under this dreadful unaccountable fact. She was forsaken&mdash;as
+      a greater sufferer was; and a horror of darkness had closed around her.
+      "Ah, Sieur Pierre," she said to Morice, "where shall I be to-night?" The
+      man had condemned her as a relapsed heretic, a daughter of perdition. He
+      had just suggested to her that her angels must have been devils.
+      Nevertheless perhaps his face was not unkindly, he had not meant all the
+      harm he did. He ought to have answered, "In Hell, with the spirits you
+      have trusted"; that would have been the only logical response. What he did
+      say was very different. "Have you not good faith in the Lord?" said the
+      judge who had doomed her. Amazing and notable speech! They had sentenced
+      her to be burned for blasphemy as an envoy of the devil; they believed in
+      fact that she was the child of God, and going straight in that flame to
+      the skies. Jeanne, with the sound, clear head and the "sane mind" to which
+      all of them testified, did she perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the
+      inconceivable contradiction? "Ah," she said, "yes, God helping me, I shall
+      be in Paradise."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to the
+      mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully not
+      repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed "as if it
+      had been a thing of small importance," that her story of the angel bearing
+      the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither expected nor intended
+      to be believed. For this we have to thank L'Oyseleur and the rest of the
+      reverend ghouls assembled on that dreadful morning in the prison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the
+      long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre was
+      placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy Office. She
+      was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the crowded courtyard
+      where her "chariot" awaited her. It was her confessor's part to remain by
+      her side, and Frère Isambard and Massieu, the officer, both her friends,
+      were also with her. It is said that L'Oyseleur rushed forward at this
+      moment, either to accompany her also, or, as many say, to fling himself at
+      her feet and implore her pardon. He was hustled aside by the crowd and
+      would have been killed by the English, it is said, but for Warwick. The
+      bystanders would seem to have been seized with a sudden disgust for all
+      the priests about, thinking them Jeanne's friends, the historians
+      insinuate&mdash;more likely in scorn and horror of their treachery. And
+      then the melancholy procession set forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part: eight
+      hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortège, as the car
+      rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid attained to the
+      calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all the high houses and
+      windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs that gaped and gazed upon
+      her on every side. In the midst of the consolations of the confessor who
+      poured pious words in her ears, other words, the plaints of a wondering
+      despair fell from her lips, "Rouen! Rouen!" she said; "am I to die here?"
+      It seemed incredible to her, impossible. She looked about still for some
+      sign of disturbance, some rising among the crowd, some cry of "France!
+      France!" or glitter of mail. Nothing: but the crowds ever gazing,
+      murmuring at her, the soldiers roughly clearing the way, the rude chariot
+      rumbling on. "Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you shall yet suffer because of
+      this," she murmured in her distraction, amid her moanings and tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered
+      with three erections&mdash;one reaching up so high that the shadow of it
+      seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an
+      enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner
+      himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure
+      unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form. Two
+      platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches for
+      Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil officers
+      of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn. Without this
+      form the execution was illegal: what did it matter? No sentence at all was
+      read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which was illegal also. She
+      was probably placed first on the same platform with her judges, where
+      there was a pulpit from which she was to be <i>preschée</i> for the last
+      time. Of all Jeanne's sufferings this could scarcely be the least, that
+      she was always <i>preschée</i>, lectured, addressed, sermonised through
+      every painful step of her career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul
+      scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance, when
+      the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her errors,
+      again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas Midi, one
+      of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text was in St.
+      Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all the other members suffer
+      with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut off from the
+      Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church might not suffer
+      by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor, giving forth false
+      fables at one time, and making a false penitence the next. It is very
+      unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of invective. At the end of
+      the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace." Even then, however, the
+      fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by
+      way of exhorting her to a final repentance, heaped ill names upon her
+      helpless head. The narrative shows that the prisoner, now arrived at the
+      last point in her career, paid no attention to the tirade levelled at her
+      from the president's place. "She knelt down on the platform showing great
+      signs and appearance of contrition, so that all those who looked upon her
+      wept. She called on her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed
+      glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She called
+      specially&mdash;was it with still a return towards the hoped for miracle?
+      was it with the instinctive cry towards an old and faithful friend?&mdash;"St.
+      Michael, St. Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would seem to have been a
+      moment in which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this
+      wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying,
+      speaking&mdash;sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen
+      companions of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her.
+      She asked the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say
+      a mass for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive
+      her. Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry
+      of "Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?" No reason is given
+      for the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once
+      planned a campaign in Normandy with Alençon. Had there been perhaps some
+      special hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up
+      in the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their fate
+      than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to the depth
+      of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the deep
+      distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the
+      profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he
+      would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That which
+      her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon the
+      saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of men. But
+      as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop's evil voice scarcely silenced, the
+      soldiers waiting impatient&mdash;the entire crowd, touched to its heart
+      with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and lamentation, "<i>à
+      chaudes larmes</i>" according to the graphic French expression. They wept
+      hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow and fellow-feeling and
+      impotence to help. Winchester&mdash;withdrawn high on his platform,
+      ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a spectator merely&mdash;wept;
+      and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was overwhelmed with emotion,
+      iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon's cheeks. The very world stood
+      still to see that white form of purity, and valour, and faith, the Maid,
+      not shouting triumphant on the height of victory, but kneeling, weeping,
+      on the verge of torture. Human nature could not bear this long. A hoarse
+      cry burst forth: "Will you keep us here all day; must we dine here?" a
+      voice perhaps of unendurable pain that simulated cruelty. And then the
+      executioner stepped in and seized the victim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be no
+      chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim the
+      atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that the
+      ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach her: the
+      fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel explanation. There
+      was a writing set over the little platform which gave footing to the
+      attendants below the stake, upon which were written the following words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER, BLASPHEMER
+      OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL, DISSOLUTE, INVOKER
+      OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and religion
+      branded the Maid of France&mdash;one half of her countrymen: the other
+      half, silent, speaking no word, looking on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees, asked
+      for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no cross was to
+      be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way seized a stick from
+      some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal parts, and bound them
+      hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all the pictures, when Mary
+      of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of her disappointed suitors
+      broke his wand. The cross was rough with its broken edges which Jeanne
+      accepted from her enemy, and carried, pressing it against her bosom. One
+      would rather have that rude cross to preserve as a sacred thing, than the
+      highest effort of art in gold and silver. This was her ornament and
+      consolation as she trod the few remaining steps and mounted the pile of
+      the faggots to her place high over all that sea of heads. When she was
+      bound securely to her stake, she asked again for a cross, a cross blessed
+      and sacred from a church, to be held before her as long as her eyes could
+      see. Frère Isambard and Massieu, following her closely still, sent to the
+      nearest church, and procured probably some cross which was used for
+      processional purposes on a long staff which could be held up before her.
+      The friar stood upon the faggots holding it up, and calling out broken
+      words of encouragement so long that Jeanne bade him withdraw, lest the
+      fire should catch his robes. And so at last, as the flames began to rise,
+      she was left alone, the good brother always at the foot of the pile,
+      painfully holding up with uplifted arms the cross that she might still see
+      it, the soldiers crowding, lit up with the red glow of the fire, the
+      horrified, trembling crowd like an agitated sea around. The wild flames
+      rose and fell in sinister gleams and flashes, the smoke blew upwards, by
+      times enveloping that white Maid standing out alone against a sky still
+      blue and sweet with May&mdash;Pandemonium underneath, but Heaven above.
+      Then suddenly there came a great cry from among the black fumes that began
+      to reach the clouds: "My voices were of God! They have not deceived me!"
+      She had seen and recognised it at last. Here it was, the miracle: the
+      great victory that had been promised&mdash;though not with clang of swords
+      and triumph of rescuing knights, and "St. Denis for France!"&mdash;but by
+      the sole hand of God, a victory and triumph for all time, for her country
+      a crown of glory and ineffable shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus died the Maid of France&mdash;with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips&mdash;till
+      the merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat; and
+      one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the fire, wiped
+      all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through the air in the
+      good monk's trembling hands&mdash;from eyes which opened bright upon the
+      light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so long thought and
+      dreamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII &mdash; AFTER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known in
+      history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the great
+      catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been fact and
+      evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been recorded all
+      the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the most innocent of
+      all, sought out Frère Isambard, and confessed to him in an anguish of
+      remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had done. An Englishman
+      who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in which the witch should be
+      burned, when he rushed forward to keep his word was seized with sudden
+      compunction&mdash;believed that he saw a white dove flutter forth from
+      amid the smoke over her head, and, almost fainting at the sight, had to be
+      led by his comrades to the nearest tavern for refreshment, a life-like
+      touch in which we recognise our countryman; but he too found his way that
+      afternoon to Frère Isambard like the other. A horrible story is told by
+      the <i>Bourgeois de Paris</i>, whose contemporary journal is one of the
+      authorities for this period, that "the fire was drawn aside" in order that
+      Jeanne's form, with all its clothing burned away, should be visible by one
+      last act of shameless insult to the crowd. The fifteenth century believed,
+      as we have said, everything that is cruel and horrible, as indeed the
+      vulgar mind does at all ages; but such brutal imaginings have seldom any
+      truth to support them, and there is no such suggestion in the actual
+      record. Isambard and Massieu heard from one of the officials that when
+      every other part of her body was destroyed the heart was found intact, but
+      was, by the order of Winchester, flung into the Seine along with all the
+      ashes of that sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics should be
+      kept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed
+      this dreadful scene. "When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried out
+      for water, holy water, and called to St. Michæl; then hung her head upon
+      her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently died." "Being in
+      the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud voice the holy name
+      of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of paradise, she gave up
+      her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name of Jesus in sign of the
+      fervour of her faith." One of the Canons of Rouen, standing sobbing in the
+      crowd, said to another: "Would that my soul were in the same place where
+      the soul of that woman is at this moment"; which indeed is not very
+      different from the authorised saying of Pierre Morice in the prison.
+      Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he who wrote <i>superba responsio</i> on
+      his margin, and had written down every word of her long examination&mdash;his
+      occupation for three months,&mdash;says that he "never wept so much for
+      anything that happened to himself, and that for a whole month he could not
+      recover his calm." This man adds a very characteristic touch, to wit, that
+      "with part of the pay which he had for the trial, he bought a missal, that
+      he might have a reason for praying for her." Jean Tressat, "secretary to
+      the King of England" (whatever that office may have been), went home from
+      the execution crying out, "We are all lost, for we have burned a saint." A
+      priest, afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, "did not believe that there was any
+      man who could restrain his tears."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none are
+      visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is
+      extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed
+      inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be continually
+      pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed to have bought
+      all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges, among whom were the
+      most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but of none of this is there
+      any proof given. That they were anxious to procure Jeanne's condemnation
+      and death, is very certain. Not one among them believed in her sacred
+      mission, almost all considered her a sorceress, the most dangerous of evil
+      influences, a witch who had brought shame and loss to England by her
+      incantations and evil spells. On that point there could be no doubt
+      whatever. She alone had stopped the progress of the invaders, and broken
+      the charm of their invariable success. But all that she had done had been
+      in favour of Charles, who made no attempt to serve or help her, and who
+      had thwarted her plans, and hindered her work so long as it was possible
+      to do so, even when she was performing miracles for his sake. And Alençon,
+      Dunois, La Hire, where were they and all the knights? Two of them at least
+      were at Louvins, within a day's march, but never made a step to rescue
+      her. We need not ask where were the statesmen and clergy on the French
+      side, for they were unfeignedly glad to have the burden of condemning her
+      taken from their hands. No one in her own country said a word or struck a
+      blow for Jeanne. As for the suborning of the University of Paris <i>en
+      masse</i>, and all its best members in particular, that is a general
+      baseness in which it is impossible to believe. There is no appearance even
+      of any particular pressure put upon the judges. Jean de la Fontaine
+      disappeared, we are told, and no one ever knew what became of him: but it
+      was from Cauchon he fled. And nothing seems to have happened to the monks
+      who attended the Maid to the scaffold, nor to the others who sobbed about
+      the pile. On the other side, the Doctors who condemned her were in no way
+      persecuted or troubled by the French authorities when the King came to his
+      own. There was at the time a universal tacit consent in France to all that
+      was done at Rouen on the 31st of May, 1431.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already
+      sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that
+      dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It was
+      two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and
+      sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly allied
+      to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie existing
+      between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the hostile
+      indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to Jeanne, who
+      had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of Paris and the
+      adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much against them as against
+      the English, and the national sentiment to which she, a patriot before her
+      age, appealed,&mdash;bidding not only the English go home, or fight and be
+      vanquished, which was their only alternative&mdash;but the Burgundians to
+      be converted and to live in peace with their brothers,&mdash;did not
+      exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards, or Normans was the daughter of far
+      Champagne a fellow countrywoman. There was neither sympathy nor kindness
+      in their hearts on that score. Some were humane and full of pity for a
+      simple woman in such terrible straits; but no more in Paris than in Rouen
+      was the Maid of Orleans a native champion persecuted by the English; she
+      was to both an enemy, a sorceress, putting their soldiers and themselves
+      to shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have no desire to lessen our(1) guilt, whatever cruelty may have been
+      practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much was
+      practised&mdash;the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final
+      stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and
+      often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that she
+      was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A prisoner of
+      war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in her downfall was
+      a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame is greater upon those
+      who sold than upon those who bought; and greatest of all upon those who
+      did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did not move a finger, to rescue. And
+      indeed we have been the most penitent of all concerned; we have shrived
+      ourselves by open confession and tears. We have quarrelled with our
+      Shakespeare on account of the Maid, and do not know how we could have
+      forgiven him, but for the notable and delightful discovery that it was not
+      he after all, but another and a lesser hand that endeavoured to befoul her
+      shining garments. France has never quarrelled with her Voltaire for a much
+      fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to the
+      remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the assembly
+      held on the Thursday after Jeanne's death, how and when we are not told.
+      It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is the place of
+      meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole testimonial is that
+      the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous records:
+      but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom by
+      responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever
+      certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all
+      judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison, stand
+      up and give their report of what happened there&mdash;part of which we
+      have quoted&mdash;their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last
+      acknowledged herself to be deceived. According to their own showing it was
+      exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed to
+      make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, "My God, my
+      God, why hast thou forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems no
+      reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as
+      substantially true. The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's
+      part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived in
+      respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart. It was
+      to her the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning showed her
+      the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her renewed conviction.
+      The scene at the stake would lose something of its greatness without that
+      momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according
+      to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a
+      danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine that
+      his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and
+      accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions of the
+      old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had witnessed so
+      many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of witnesses
+      collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a long time to
+      gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and a full and
+      complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The <i>procès</i> was a
+      civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of Jeanne,
+      one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman of coat
+      armour&mdash;against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop of
+      Beauvais, and Lemaître, the Deputy Inquisitor&mdash;with other persons
+      chiefly concerned in the judgment. Some of these men were dead, some,
+      wisely, not to be found. The result was such a mass of testimony as put
+      every incident of the life of the Maid in the fullest light from her
+      childhood to her death, and in consequence secured a triumphant and full
+      acquittal of herself and her name from every reproach. This remarkable and
+      indeed unique occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused any
+      enthusiasm. Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the
+      extraordinary calm of contemporary opinion which was still too near the
+      catastrophe to see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of
+      news which hindered the common knowledge of a trial&mdash;a thing too
+      heavy to be blown upon the winds,&mdash;while it promulgated the legend, a
+      thing so much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an
+      extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many ages,
+      and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory, in the
+      country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots and
+      champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear than daily
+      bread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the new and wonderful spring of life that succeeded the revolution of
+      1830, the martyr of the fifteenth century came to light as by a
+      revelation. The episode of the Pucelle in Michelet's <i>History of France</i>
+      touched the heart of the world, and remains one of the finest efforts of
+      history and the most popular picture of the saint. And perhaps, though so
+      much less important in point of art, the maiden work of another maiden of
+      Orleans&mdash;the little statue of Jeanne, so pure, so simple, so
+      spiritual, made by the Princess Marie of that house, the daughter of the
+      race which the Maid held in visionary love, and which thus only has ever
+      attempted any return of that devotion&mdash;had its part in reawakening
+      her name and memory. It fell again, however, after the great work of
+      Quicherat had finally given to the country the means of fully forming its
+      opinion on the subject which Fabre's translation, though unfortunately not
+      literal and adorned with modern decorations, was calculated to render
+      popular. A great crop of statues and some pictures not of any great
+      artistic merit have since been dedicated to the memory of the Maid: but
+      yet the public enthusiasm has never risen above the tide mark of literary
+      applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There has been, however, a great movement of enthusiasm lately to gain for
+      Jeanne the honour of canonisation(2); but it seems to have failed, or at
+      least to have sunk again for the moment into silence. Perhaps these
+      honours are out of date in our time. One of the most recent writers on the
+      subject, M. Henri Blaze de Bury, suggests that one reason which retards
+      this final consecration is "England, certainly not a negligible quantity
+      to a Pope of our time." Let no such illusion move any mind, French or
+      ecclesiastical. Canonisation means to us, I presume, and even to a great
+      number of Catholics, simply the highest honour that can be paid to a holy
+      and spotless name. In that sense there is no distinction of nation, and
+      the English as warmly as the French, both being guilty towards her, and
+      before God on her account&mdash;would welcome all honour that could be
+      paid to one who, more truly than any princess of the blood, is Jeanne of
+      France, the Maid, alone in her lofty humility and valour, and in
+      everlasting fragrance of modesty and youth.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     (1) The writer must add that personally, as a Scot, she has
+     no right to use this pronoun. Scotland is entirely guiltless
+     of this crime. The Scots were fighting on the side of France
+     through all these wars, a little perhaps for love of France,
+     but much more out of natural hostility to the English. Yet
+     at this time of day, except to state that fact, it is
+     scarcely necessary to throw off the responsibility. The
+     English side is now our side, though it was not so in the
+     fifteenth century: and a writer of the English tongue must
+     naturally desire that there should at least be fair play.
+
+     (2) I am informed, however, that she is already "Venerable,"
+     not a very appropriate title&mdash;the same, I presume, as
+     Bienheureuse, which is prettier,&mdash;and may therefore be
+     addressed by the faithful in prayer, though her rank is
+     only, as it were, brevet rank, and her elevation incomplete.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/2553.txt b/2553.txt
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+++ b/2553.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Jeanne d'Arc
+       Her Life And Death
+
+Author: Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2006 [EBook #2553]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JEANNE D'ARC ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers
+
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC, HER LIFE AND DEATH
+
+
+by Mrs. Oliphant
+
+
+Author of "Makers of Florence," "Makers of Venice," etc.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+COUSIN ANNIE (MRS. HARRY COGHILL)
+
+THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED IN LOVE OF OUR COMMON HEROINE AND IN REMEMBRANCE
+OF LONG AND FAITHFUL AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
+
+
+     PREPARER'S NOTE
+
+     The original book for this text was published as a volume in a
+     series "Heroes of the Nations," edited by Evelyn Abbot, M.H.,
+     Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and published by G.P. Putnam's
+     Sons _The Knickerbocker Press_ in 1896. The title material
+     includes the note:
+
+     FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE
+     GLORIA RERUM--OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265.
+     THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
+     FAME SHALL LIVE.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+CHAPTER I -- FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 1412-1423.
+
+CHAPTER II -- DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429.
+
+CHAPTER III -- BEFORE THE KING. FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER IV -- THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS. MAY 1-8, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER V -- THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE. JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER VI -- THE CORONATION. JULY 17, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER VII -- THE SECOND PERIOD. 1429-1430.
+
+CHAPTER VIII -- DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT. AUTUMN, 1429.
+
+CHAPTER IX -- COMPIEGNE. 1430.
+
+CHAPTER X -- THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XI -- THE JUDGES. 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XII -- BEFORE THE TRIAL. LENT, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XIII -- THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION. FEBRUARY, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XIV --THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON. LENT, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XV -- RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XVI -- THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XVIII -- THE SACRIFICE. MAY 31, 1431.
+
+CHAPTER XVIII -- AFTER.
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I -- FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 1412-1423.
+
+It is no small effort for the mind, even of the most well-informed, how
+much more of those whose exact knowledge is not great (which is the
+case with most readers, and alas! with most writers also), to transport
+itself out of this nineteenth century which we know so thoroughly, and
+which has trained us in all our present habits and modes of thought,
+into the fifteenth, four hundred years back in time, and worlds apart
+in every custom and action of life. What is there indeed the same in
+the two ages? Nothing but the man and the woman, the living agents in
+spheres so different; nothing but love and grief, the affections and
+the sufferings by which humanity is ruled and of which it is capable.
+Everything else is changed: the customs of life, and its methods, and
+even its motives, the ruling principles of its continuance. Peace and
+mutual consideration, the policy which even in its selfish developments
+is so far good that it enables men to live together, making existence
+possible,--scarcely existed in those days. The highest ideal was that of
+war, war no doubt sometimes for good ends, to redress wrongs, to avenge
+injuries, to make crooked things straight--but yet always war, implying
+a state of affairs in which the last thing that men thought of was
+the golden rule, and the highest attainment to be looked for was the
+position of a protector, doer of justice, deliverer of the oppressed.
+Our aim now that no one should be oppressed, that every man should
+have justice as by the order of nature, was a thing unthought of. What
+individual help did feebly for the sufferer then, the laws do for us
+now, without fear or favour: which is a much greater thing to say
+than that the organisation of modern life, the mechanical helps, the
+comforts, the easements of the modern world, had no existence in those
+days. We are often told that the poorest peasant in our own time has
+aids to existence that had not been dreamt of for princes in the Middle
+Ages. Thirty years ago the world was mostly of opinion that the balance
+was entirely on our side, and that in everything we were so much better
+off than our fathers, that comparison was impossible. Since then there
+have been many revolutions of opinion, and we think it is now the
+general conclusion of wise men, that one period has little to boast
+itself of against another, that one form of civilisation replaces
+another without improving upon it, at least to the extent which appears
+on the surface. But yet the general prevalence of peace, interrupted
+only by occasional wars, even when we recognise a certain large
+and terrible utility in war itself, must always make a difference
+incalculable between the condition of the nations now, and then.
+
+It is difficult, indeed, to imagine any concatenation of affairs which
+could reduce a country now to the condition in which France was in the
+beginning of the fifteenth century. A strong and splendid kingdom, to
+which in early ages one great man had given the force and supremacy of
+a united nation, had fallen into a disintegration which seems almost
+incredible when regarded in the light of that warm flame of nationality
+which now illumines, almost above all others, the French nation. But
+Frenchmen were not Frenchmen, they were Burgundians, Armagnacs, Bretons,
+Provencaux five hundred years ago. The interests of one part of the
+kingdom were not those of the other. Unity had no existence. Princes of
+the same family were more furious enemies to each other, at the head of
+their respective fiefs and provinces, than the traditional foes of their
+race; and instead of meeting an invader with a united force of patriotic
+resistance, one or more of these subordinate rulers was sure to side
+with the invader and to execute greater atrocities against his own flesh
+and blood than anything the alien could do.
+
+When Charles VII. of France began, nominally, his reign, his uncles and
+cousins, his nearest kinsmen, were as determinedly his opponents, as was
+Henry V. of England, whose frank object was to take the crown from his
+head. The country was torn in pieces with different causes and cries.
+The English were but little farther off from the Parisian than was the
+Burgundian, and the English king was only a trifle less French than
+were the members of the royal family of France. These circumstances are
+little taken into consideration in face of the general history, in which
+a careless reader sees nothing but the two nations pitted against each
+other as they might be now, the French united in one strong and distinct
+nationality, the three kingdoms of Great Britain all welded into one.
+In the beginning of the fifteenth century the Scots fought on the French
+side, against their intimate enemy of England, and if there had been any
+unity in Ireland, the Irish would have done the same. The advantages
+and disadvantages of subdivision were in full play. The Scots fought
+furiously against the English--and when the latter won, as was usually
+the case, the Scots contingent, whatever bounty might be shown to the
+French, was always exterminated. On the other side the Burgundians, the
+Armagnacs, and Royalists met each other almost more fiercely than the
+latter encountered the English. Each country was convulsed by struggles
+of its own, and fiercely sought its kindred foes in the ranks of its
+more honest and natural enemy.
+
+When we add to these strange circumstances the facts that the French
+King, Charles VI., was mad, and incapable of any real share either in
+the internal government of his country or in resistance to its invader:
+that his only son, the Dauphin, was no more than a foolish boy, led by
+incompetent councillors, and even of doubtful legitimacy, regarded with
+hesitation and uncertainty by many, everybody being willing to believe
+the worst of his mother, especially after the treaty of Troyes in which
+she virtually gave him up: that the King's brothers or cousins at the
+head of their respective fiefs were all seeking their own advantage, and
+that some of them, especially the Duke of Burgundy, had cruel wrongs
+to avenge: it will be more easily understood that France had reached a
+period of depression and apparent despair which no principle of national
+elasticity or new spring of national impulse was present to amend. The
+extraordinary aspect of whole districts in so strong and populous a
+country, which disowned the native monarch, and of towns and castles
+innumerable which were held by the native nobility in the name of
+a foreign king, could scarcely have been possible under other
+circumstances. Everything was out of joint. It is said to be
+characteristic of the nation that it is unable to play publicly (as
+we say) a losing game; but it is equally characteristic of the race
+to forget its humiliations as if they had never been, and to come out
+intact when the fortune of war changes, more French than ever, almost
+unabashed and wholly uninjured, by the catastrophe which had seemed
+fatal.
+
+If we had any right to theorise on such a subject--which is a thing the
+French themselves above all other men love to do,--we should be disposed
+to say, that wars and revolutions, legislation and politics, are things
+which go on over the head of France, so to speak--boilings on the
+surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such a word
+may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while she
+herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually
+obstinate, tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit
+of a certain kind of well-being congenial to her--goes steadily on,
+less susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less
+excitable on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the
+commotion is over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving, uninjured
+in any essential particular by the most terrific of convulsions. This of
+course is to be said more or less of every country, the strain of
+common life being always, thank God, too strong for every temporary
+commotion--but it is true in a special way of France:--witness the
+extraordinary manner in which in our own time, and under our own eyes,
+that wonderful country righted herself after the tremendous misfortunes
+of the Franco-German war, in which for a moment not only her prestige,
+her honour, but her money and credit seemed to be lost.
+
+It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary
+tenacity of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and
+solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and light
+head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous _elan_, which are
+popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features of France--at
+the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a wonderful
+embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of Jeanne d'Arc.
+To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it is an angelic
+revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the dream of a woman's
+fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of any man--even a
+poet:--for the man, even in his most uncontrolled imaginations, carries
+with him a certain practical limitation of what can be--whereas
+the woman at her highest is absolute, and disregards all bounds of
+possibility. The Maid of Orleans, the Virgin of France, is the sole
+being of her kind who has ever attained full expression in this world.
+She can neither be classified, as her countrymen love to classify, nor
+traced to any system of evolution as we all attempt to do nowadays. She
+is the impossible verified and attained. She is the thing in every race,
+in every form of humanity, which the dreaming girl, the visionary maid,
+held in at every turn by innumerable restrictions, her feet bound, her
+actions restrained, not only by outward force, but by the law of her
+nature, more effectual still,--has desired to be. That voiceless poet,
+to whom what can be is nothing, but only what should be if miracle could
+be attained to fulfil her trance and rapture of desire--is held by no
+conditions, modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her,
+the most credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers.
+Jeanne of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination.
+She is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable,
+alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable
+path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the flowers
+in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood which are
+common to us all.
+
+And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country
+of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes to
+the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that has
+brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations.
+This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and
+charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights.
+How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted
+and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain,
+and failure of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God,
+by the inspiration of heaven, the only origins in which the student of
+nature, which is over nature, can put any trust. No evolution, no system
+of development, can explain Jeanne. There is but one of her and no more
+in all the astonished world.
+
+With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and
+beautiful name. To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary.
+Though she is the finest emblem to the world in general of that noble,
+fearless, and spotless Virginity which is one of the finest inspirations
+of the mediaeval mind, yet she is inherently French, though France
+scarcely was in her time: and national, though as yet there were rather
+the elements of a nation than any indivisible People in that great
+country. Was not she herself one of the strongest and purest threads
+of gold to draw that broken race together and bind it irrevocably,
+beneficially, into one?
+
+It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of French
+territory that this national deliverer came. It is a commonplace that
+a Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own country against the
+other from which but a line divides him in fact, and scarcely so much
+in race--than the calmer inhabitant of the midland country who knows no
+such press of constant antagonism; and Jeanne is another example of this
+well known fact. It is even a question still languidly discussed whether
+Jeanne and her family were actually on one side of the line or the
+other. "Il faut opter," says M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest
+biographers, as if the peasant household of 1412 had inhabited an
+Alsatian cottage in 1872. When the line is drawn so closely, it is
+difficult to determine, but Jeanne herself does not ever seem to have
+entertained a moment's doubt on the subject, and she after all is the
+best authority. Perhaps Villon was thinking more of his rhyme than of
+absolute fact when he spoke of "Jeanne la bonne Lorraine." She was born
+on the 5th of January, 1412, in the village of Domremy, on the banks
+of the Meuse, one of those little grey hamlets, with its little church
+tower, and remains of a little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound
+not sufficient for the name of hill--which are scattered everywhere
+through those level countries, like places which have never been built,
+which have grown out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity--perhaps,
+one feels, only a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old--yet always
+inhabitable in all the ages, with the same names lingering about, the
+same surroundings, the same mild rural occupations, simple plenty and
+bare want mingling together with as little difference of level as exists
+in the sweeping lines of the landscape round.
+
+The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to
+the invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the
+universal conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak,
+the adjacent village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English
+alliance, while little Domremy was for the King. And once at least when
+Jeanne was a girl at home, the family were startled in their quiet by
+the swoop of an armed party of Burgundians, and had to gather up
+babies and what portable property they might have, and flee across the
+frontier, where the good Lorrainers received and sheltered them, till
+they could go back to their village, sacked and pillaged and devastated
+in the meantime by the passing storm. Thus even in their humility and
+inoffensiveness the Domremy villagers knew what war and its miseries
+were, and the recollection would no doubt be vivid among the children,
+of that half terrible, half exhilarating adventure, the fright and
+excitement of personal participation in the troubles, of which, night
+and day, from one quarter or another, they must have heard.
+
+Domremy had originally belonged(1) to the Abbey of St. Remy at
+Rheims--the ancient church of which, in its great antiquity, is still an
+interest and a wonder even in comparison with the amazing splendour of
+the cathedral of that place, so rich and ornate, which draws the eyes of
+the visitor to itself, and its greater associations. It is possible that
+this ancient connection with Rheims may have brought the great ceremony
+for which it is ever memorable, the consecration of the kings of France,
+more distinctly before the musing vision of the village girl; but I
+doubt whether such chance associations are ever much to be relied upon.
+The village was on the high-road to Germany; it must have been therefore
+in the way of news, and of many rumours of what was going on in the
+centres of national life, more than many towns of importance. Feudal
+bands, a rustic Seigneur with his little troop, going out for their
+forty days' service, or returning home after it, must have passed along
+the banks of the lazy Meuse many days during the fighting season, and
+indeed throughout the year, for garrison duty would be as necessary in
+winter as in summer; or a wandering pair of friars who had seen strange
+sights must have passed with their wallets from the neighbouring
+convents, collecting the day's provision, and leaving news and
+gossip behind, such as flowed to these monastic hostelries from all
+quarters--tales of battles, and anecdotes of the Court, and dreadful
+stories of English atrocities, to stir the village and rouse ever
+generous sentiment and stirring of national indignation. They are said
+by Michelet to have been no man's vassals, these outlying hamlets of
+Champagne; the men were not called upon to follow their lord's banner
+at a day's notice, as were the sons of other villages. There is no
+appearance even of a lord at all upon this piece of Church land, which
+was, we are told, directly held under the King, and would only therefore
+be touched by a general levy _en masse_--not even perhaps by that,
+so far off were they, and so near the frontier, where a reluctant
+man-at-arms could without difficulty make his escape, as the unwilling
+conscript sometimes does now.
+
+There would seem to have been no one of more importance in Domremy than
+Jacques d'Arc himself and his wife, respectable peasants, with a little
+money, a considerable rural property in flocks and herds and pastures,
+and a good reputation among their kind. He had three sons working with
+their father in the peaceful routine of the fields; and two daughters,
+of whom some authorities indicate Jeanne as the younger, and some as the
+elder. The cottage interior, however, appears more clearly to us than
+the outward aspect of the family life. The daughters were not, like the
+children of poorer peasants, brought up to the rude outdoor labours
+of the little farm. Painters have represented Jeanne as keeping her
+father's sheep, and even the early witnesses say the same; but it is
+contradicted by herself, who ought to know best--(except in taking her
+turn to herd them into a place of safety on an alarm). If she followed
+the flocks to the fields, it must have been, she says, in her childhood,
+and she has no recollection of it. Hers was a more sheltered and safer
+lot. The girls were brought up by their mother indoors in all the
+labours of housewifery, but also in the delicate art of needlework,
+so much more exquisite in those days than now. Perhaps Isabeau, the
+mistress of the house, was of convent training, perhaps some ancient
+privilege in respect to the manufacture of ornaments for the altar, and
+church vestments, was still retained by the tenants of what had been
+Church lands. At all events this, and other kindred works of the needle,
+seems to have been the chief occupation to which Jeanne was brought up.
+
+The education of this humble house seems to have come entirely from the
+mother. It was natural that the children should not know A from B, as
+Jeanne afterward said; but no one did, probably, in the village nor even
+on much higher levels than that occupied by the family of Jacques d'Arc.
+But the children at their mother's knee learned the Credo, they
+learned the simple universal prayers which are common to the wisest and
+simplest, which no great savant or poet could improve, and no child fail
+to understand: "Our Father, which art in Heaven," and that "Hail, Mary,
+full of grace," which the world in that day put next. These were the
+alphabet of life to the little Champagnards in their rough woollen
+frocks and clattering sabots; and when the house had been set in
+order,--a house not without comfort, with its big wooden presses full of
+linen, and the _pot au feu_ hung over the cheerful fire,--came the
+real work, perhaps embroideries for the Church, perhaps only good stout
+shirts made of flax spun by their own hands for the father and the boys,
+and the fine distinctive coif of the village for the women. "Asked if
+she had learned any art or trade, said: Yes, that her mother had taught
+her to sew and spin, and so well, that she did not think any woman in
+Rouen could teach her anything." When the lady in the ballad makes her
+conditions with the peasant woman who is to bring up her boy, her "gay
+goss hawk," and have him trained in the use of sword and lance, she
+undertakes to teach the "turtle-doo," the woman child substituted for
+him, "to lay gold with her hand." No doubt Isabeau's child learned
+this difficult and dainty art, and how to do the beautiful and delicate
+embroidery which fills the treasuries of the old churches.
+
+And while they sat by the table in the window, with their shining silks
+and gold thread, the mother made the quiet hours go by with tale and
+legend--of the saints first of all--and stories from Scripture, quaintly
+interpreted into the costume and manners of their own time, as one
+may still hear them in the primitive corners of Italy: mingled with
+incidents of the war, of the wounded man tended in the village, and the
+victors all flushed with triumph, and the defeated with trailing arms
+and bowed heads, riding for their lives: perhaps little epics and
+tragedies of the young knight riding by to do his devoir with his
+handful of followers all spruce and gay, and the battered and diminished
+remnant that would come back. And then the Black Burgundians, the
+horrible English ogres, whose names would make the children shudder! No
+_God-den_(2) had got so far as Domremy; there was no personal knowledge
+to soften the picture of the invader. He was unspeakable as the Turk to
+the imagination of the French peasant, diabolical as every invader is.
+
+This was the earliest training of the little maid before whom so strange
+and so great a fortune lay. _Autre personne que sadite mere ne lui
+apprint_--any lore whatsoever; and she so little--yet everything that
+was wanted--her prayers, her belief, the happiness of serving God, and
+also man; for when any one was sick in the village, either a little
+child with the measles, or a wounded soldier from the wars, Isabeau's
+modest child--no doubt the mother too--was always ready to help. It
+must have been a family _de bien_, in the simple phrase of the country,
+helpful, serviceable, with charity and aid for all. An honest labourer,
+who came to speak for Jeanne at the second trial, held long after her
+death, gave his incontestable evidence to this. "I was then a child," he
+said, "and it was she who nursed me in my illness." They were all more
+or less devout in those days, when faith was without question, and the
+routine of church ceremonial was followed as a matter of course; but few
+so much as Jeanne, whose chief pleasure it was to say her prayers in the
+little dark church, where perhaps in the morning sunshine, as she made
+her early devotions, there would blaze out upon her from a window, a
+Holy Michael in shining armour, transfixing the dragon with his spear,
+or a St. Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with her cross in
+her hand. So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to find out
+some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the suggestion
+which is unpleasing. The little country church was in the gift of St.
+Remy, and some benefactor of the rural cure might well have given
+a painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people. St.
+Margaret was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her
+cross, and was thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.
+
+Sitting much of her time at or outside the cottage door with her
+needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and
+dreams, the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a
+traveller, of the calmest English temperament and sobriety of Protestant
+fancy, to whom the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a touching
+reminder--which he never neglects wherever he may be--to uncover the
+head and lift up the heart; how much more the devout peasant girl softly
+startled in the midst of her dreaming by that call to prayer. She was so
+fond of those bells that she bribed the careless bell-ringer with simple
+presents to be more attentive to his duty. From the garden where she sat
+with her work, the cloudy foliage of the _bois de chene_, the oak
+wood, where were legends of fairies and a magic well, to which her
+imagination, better inspired, seems to have given no great heed, filled
+up the prospect on one side. At a later period, her accusers attempted
+to make out that she had been a devotee of these nameless woodland
+spirits, but in vain. No doubt she was one of the procession on the holy
+day once a year, when the cure of the parish went out through the wood
+to the Fairies' Well to say his mass, and exorcise what evil enchantment
+might be there. But Jeanne's imagination was not of the kind to require
+such stimulus. The saints were enough for her; and indeed they supplied
+to a great extent the fairy tales of the age, though it was not of love
+and fame and living happy ever after, but of sacrifice and suffering and
+valorous martyrdom that their glory was made up.
+
+We hear of the woods, the fields, the cottages, the little church and
+its bells, the garden where she sat and sewed, the mother's stories,
+the morning mass, in this quiet preface of the little maiden's life; but
+nothing of the highroad with its wayfarers, the convoys of provisions
+for the war, the fighting men that were coming and going. Yet these,
+too, must have filled a large part in the village life, and it
+is evident that a strong impression of the pity of it all, of the
+distraction of the country and all the cruelties and miseries of which
+she could not but hear, must have early begun to work in Jeanne's being,
+and that while she kept silence the fire burned in her heart. The love
+of God, and that love of country which has nothing to say to political
+patriotism but translates itself in an ardent longing and desire to do
+"some excelling thing" for the benefit and glory of that country, and
+to heal its wounds--were the two principles of her life. We have not the
+slightest indication how much or how little of this latter sentiment was
+shared by the simple community about her; unless from the fact that
+the Domremy children fought with those of Maxey, their disaffected
+neighbours, to the occasional effusion of blood. We do not know even
+of any volunteer from the village, or enthusiasm for the King.(3) The
+district was voiceless, the little clusters of cottages fully occupied
+in getting their own bread, and probably like most other village
+societies, disposed to treat any military impulse among their sons as
+mere vagabondism and love of adventure and idleness.
+
+Nothing, so far as anyone knows, came near the most unlikely volunteer
+of all, to lead her thoughts to that art of war of which she knew
+nothing, and of which her little experience could only have shown her
+the horrors and miseries, the sufferings of wounded fugitives and the
+ruin of sacked houses. Of all people in the world, the little daughter
+of a peasant was the last who could have been expected to respond to the
+appeal of the wretched country. She had three brothers who might have
+served the King, and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper
+about, of that kind which in every country is the fittest material for
+fighting, and "food for powder." But to none of these did the call come.
+Every detail goes to increase the profound impression of peacefulness
+which fills the atmosphere--the slow river floating by, the roofs
+clustered together, the church bells tinkling their continual summons,
+the girl with her work at the cottage door in the shadow of the apple
+trees. To pack the little knapsack of a brother or a lover, and to
+convoy him weeping a little way on his road to the army, coming back to
+the silent church to pray there, with the soft natural tears which the
+uses of common life must soon dry--that is all that imagination could
+have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too young for any interposition
+of the lover, too undeveloped, the French historians tell us with their
+astonishing frankness, to the end of her short life, to have been moved
+by any such thought. She might have poured forth a song, a prayer, a
+rude but sweet lament for her country, out of the still bosom of that
+rustic existence. Such things have been, the trouble of the age forcing
+an utterance from the very depths of its inarticulate life. But it was
+not for this that Jeanne d'Arc was born.
+
+     (1) Mr. Andrew Lang informs me that the real proprietor was
+     a certain "Dame d'Orgevillier." "On Jeanne's side of the
+     burn," he adds, with a picturesque touch of realism, "the
+     people were probably _free_ as attached to the Royal
+     Chatellenie of Vancouleurs, as described below."
+
+     (2) This was probably not the God-dam of later French, a
+     reflection of the supposed prevalent English oath, but most
+     likely merely the God-den or good-day, the common
+     salutation.
+
+     (3) Domremy was split, Mr. Lang says, by the burn, and
+     Jeanne's side were probably King's men. We have it on her
+     own word that there was but one Burgundian in the village,
+     but that might mean on her side.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II -- DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS. 1424-1429.
+
+In the year 1424, the year in which, after the battle of Agincourt,
+France was delivered over to Henry V., an extraordinary event occurred
+in the life of this little French peasant. We have not the same horror
+of that treaty, naturally, as have the French. Henry V. is a favourite
+of our history, probably not so much for his own merit as because of
+that master-magician, Shakespeare, who of his supreme good pleasure, in
+the exercise of that voluntary preference, which even God himself seems
+to show to some men, has made of that monarch one of the best beloved of
+our hearts. Dear to us as he is, in Eastcheap as at Agincourt, and
+more in the former than the latter, even our sense of the disgraceful
+character of that bargain, _le traite infame_ of Troyes, by which Queen
+Isabeau betrayed her son, and gave her daughter and her country to the
+invader, is softened a little by our high estimation of the hero. But
+this is simple national prejudice; regarded from the French side, or
+even by the impartial judgment of general humanity, it was an infamous
+treaty, and one which might well make the blood boil in French veins.
+
+We look at it at present, however, through the atmosphere of the
+nineteenth century, when France is all French, and when the royal house
+of England has no longer any French connection. If George III., much
+more George II., on the basis of his kingdom of Hanover, had attempted
+to make himself master of a large portion of Germany, the situation
+would have been more like that of Henry V. in France than anything we
+can think of now. It is true the kings of England were no longer dukes
+of Normandy--but they had been so within the memory of man: and that
+noble duchy was a hereditary appanage of the family of the Conqueror;
+while to other portions of France they had the link of temporary
+possession and inheritance through French wives and mothers; added to
+which is the fact that Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, thirsting to avenge
+his father's blood upon the Dauphin, would have been probably a more
+dangerous usurper than Henry, and that the actual sovereign, the
+unfortunate, mad Charles VI., was in no condition to maintain his own
+rights.
+
+There is little evidence, however, that this treaty, or anything so
+distinct in detail, had made much impression on the outlying borders of
+France. What was known there, was only that the English were victorious,
+that the rightful King of France was still uncrowned and unacknowledged,
+and that the country was oppressed and humiliated under the foot of the
+invader. The fact that the new King was not yet the Lord's anointed, and
+had never received the seal of God, as it were, to his commission, was
+a fact which struck the imagination of the village as of much more
+importance than many greater things--being at once more visible and
+matter-of-fact, and of more mystical and spiritual efficacy than any
+other circumstance in the dreadful tale.
+
+Jeanne was in the garden as usual, seated, as we should say in Scotland,
+at "her seam," not quite thirteen, a child in all the innocence of
+infancy, yet full of dreams, confused no doubt and vague, with those
+impulses and wonderings--impatient of trouble, yearning to give
+help--which tremble on the chaos of a young soul like the first
+lightening of dawn upon the earth. It was summer, and afternoon, the
+time of dreams. It would be easy in the employment of legitimate fancy
+to heighten the picturesqueness of that quiet scene--the little girl
+with her favourite bells, the birds picking up the crumbs of brown
+bread at her feet. She was thinking of nothing, most likely, in a vague
+suspense of musing, the wonder of youth, the awakening of thought, as
+yet come to little definite in her child's heart--looking up from her
+work to note some passing change of the sky, a something in the air
+which was new to her. All at once between her and the church there shone
+a light on the right hand, unlike anything she had ever seen before; and
+out of it came a voice equally unknown and wonderful. What did the voice
+say? Only the simplest words, words fit for a child, no maxim or mandate
+above her faculties--"_Jeanne, sois bonne et sage enfant; va souvent
+a l'eglise._" Jeanne, be good! What more could an archangel, what
+less could the peasant mother within doors, say? The little girl was
+frightened, but soon composed herself. The voice could be nothing
+but sacred and blessed which spoke thus. It would not appear that she
+mentioned it to anyone. It is such a secret as a child, in that wavering
+between the real and unreal, the world not realised of childhood, would
+keep, in mingled shyness and awe, uncertain, rapt in the atmosphere of
+vision, within her own heart.
+
+It is curious how often this wonderful scene has been repeated in
+France, never connected with so high a mission, but yet embracing the
+same circumstances, the same situation, the same semi-angelic nature of
+the woman-child. The little Bernadette of Lourdes is almost of our own
+day; she, too is one who puts the scorner to silence. What her visions
+and her voices were, who can say? The last historian of them is not
+a man credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is silent,
+except in a wondering impression of the sacred and the true, before the
+little Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the many sordid
+results that have followed and all that sad machinery of expected
+miracle through which even, repulsive as it must always be, a something
+breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and account
+for except in ways more incredible than miracle--so is the rest of the
+world. Why has this logical, sceptical, doubting country, so able to
+quench with an epigram, or blow away with a breath of ridicule the
+finest vision--become the special sphere and birthplace of these
+spotless infant-saints? This is one of the wonders which nobody attempts
+to account for. Yet Bernadette is as Jeanne, though there are more than
+four hundred years between.
+
+After what intervals the vision returned we are not told, nor in what
+circumstances. It seems to have come chiefly out-of-doors, in the
+silence and freedom of the fields or garden. Presently the heavenly
+radiance shaped itself into some semblance of forms and figures, one
+of which, clearer than the others, was like a man, but with wings and
+a crown on his head and the air "_d'un vrai prud' homme_"; a noble
+apparition before whom at first the little maid trembled, but whose
+majestic, honest regard soon gave her confidence. He bade her once more
+to be good, and that God would help her; then he told her the sad
+story of her own suffering country, _la pitie qui estoit au royaume de
+France_. Was it the pity of heaven that the archangel reported to the
+little trembling girl, or only that which woke with the word in her own
+childish soul? He has chosen the small things of this world to confound
+the great. Jeanne's young heart was full of pity already, and of
+yearning over the helpless mother-country which had no champion to stand
+for her. "She had great doubts at first whether it was St. Michael, but
+afterwards when he had instructed her and shown her many things, she
+believed firmly that it was he."
+
+It was this warrior-angel who opened the matter to her, and disclosed
+her mission. "Jeanne," he said, "you must go to the help of the King of
+France; and it is you who shall give him back his kingdom." Like a still
+greater Maid, trembling, casting in her mind what this might mean, she
+replied, confused, as if that simple detail were all: "Messire, I am
+only a poor girl; I cannot ride or lead armed men." The vision took
+no notice of this plea. He became minute in his directions, indicating
+exactly what she was to do. "Go to Messire de Baudricourt, captain of
+Vaucouleurs, and he will take you to the King. St. Catherine and
+St. Margaret will come and help you." Jeanne was overwhelmed by this
+exactness, by the sensation of receiving direct orders. She cried,
+weeping and helpless, terrified to the bottom of her soul--What was she
+that she should do this? a little girl, able to guide nothing but her
+needle or her distaff, to lend her simple aid in nursing a sick child.
+But behind all her fright and hesitation, her heart was filled with the
+emotion thus suggested to her--the immeasurable _pitie que estoit au
+royaume de France_. Her heart became heavy with this burden. By degrees
+it came about that she could think of nothing else; and her little
+life was confused by expectations and recollections of the celestial
+visitant, who might arrive upon her at any moment, in the midst perhaps
+of some innocent play, or when she sat sewing in the garden before her
+father's humble door.
+
+After a while the _vrai prud' homme_ came seldom; other figures more
+like herself, soft forms of women, white and shining, with golden
+circlets and ornaments, appeared to her in the great halo of the light;
+they bowed their heads, naming themselves, as to a sister spirit,
+Catherine, and the other Margaret. Their voices were sweet and soft
+with a sound that made you weep. They were both martyrs, encouraging and
+strengthening the little martyr that was to be. "A lady is there in the
+heavens who loves thee": Virgil could not say more to rouse the flagging
+strength of Dante. When these gentle figures disappeared, the little
+maid wept in an anguish of tenderness, longing if only they would take
+her with them. It is curious that though she describes in this vague
+rapture the appearance of her visitors, it is always as "_mes voix_"
+that she names them--the sight must always have been more imperfect than
+the message. Their outlines and their lovely faces might shine uncertain
+in the excess of light; but the words were always plain. The pity for
+France that was in their hearts spread itself into the silent rural
+atmosphere, touching every sensitive chord in the nature of little
+Jeanne. It was as if her mother lay dying there before her eyes.
+
+Curious to think how little anyone could have suspected such meetings as
+these, in the cottage hard by, where the weary ploughmen from the fields
+would come clamping in for their meal, and Dame Isabeau would call
+to the child, even sharply perhaps now and then, to leave that
+all-absorbing needlework and come in and help, as Martha called Mary
+fourteen hundred years before; and where the priest, mumbling his mass
+of a cold morning in the little church, would smile indulgent on the
+faithful little worshipper when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne there
+whoever might be absent. She was a shy girl, blushing and drooping her
+head when a stranger spoke to her, red and shame-faced when they laughed
+at her in the village as a _devote_ before her time; but with nothing
+else to blush about in all her simple record.
+
+Neither to her parents, nor to the cure when she made her confession,
+does she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though
+they had lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon
+them, and could keep silence no longer. She was but thirteen when the
+revelations began and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to
+fulfil her mission. She had no guidance from her voices, she herself
+says, as to whether she should tell or not tell what had been
+communicated to her; and no doubt was kept back by her shyness, and by
+the dreamy confusion of childhood between the real and unreal. One
+would have thought that a life in which these visions were of constant
+recurrence would have been rapt altogether out of wholesome use and
+wont, and all practical service. But this does not seem for a moment to
+have been the case. Jeanne was no hysterical girl, living with her head
+in a mist, abstracted from the world. She had all the enthusiasms even
+of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding her with the intimacy of
+the village, paying her visits, staying all night, sharing her room and
+her bed. She was ready to be sent for by any poor woman that needed help
+or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle; one would love
+to know if perhaps in the _Tresor_ at Rheims there was some stole or
+maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But the _Tresor_ at
+Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be told, and the bottles
+and vases for the consecration of Charles X., that _pauvre sire_, are
+more thought of than relics of an earlier age.
+
+At length, however, one does not know how, the secret of her double life
+came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long intercourse
+with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually pressed upon
+her--meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to shed terrified
+tears over and wonder at--ripened her intelligence so that she came at
+last to perceive that it was practicable, a thing to be done, a
+charge to be obeyed. She had this before her, as a girl in ordinary
+circumstances has the new developments of life to think of, and how
+to be a wife and mother. And the news brought by every passer-by would
+prove doubly interesting, doubly important to Jeanne, in her daily
+growing comprehension of what she was called upon to do. As she felt the
+current more and more catching her feet, sweeping her on, overcoming all
+resistance in her own mind, she must have been more and more anxious to
+know what was going on in the distracted world, more and more touched by
+that great pity which had awakened her soul. And all these reports were
+of a nature to increase that pity till it became overwhelming. The
+tales she would hear of the English must have been tales of cruelty
+and horror; not so many years ago what tales did not we hear of German
+ferocity in the French villages, perhaps not true at all, yet making
+their impression always; and it was more probable in that age that every
+such story should be true. Then the compassion which no one can help
+feeling for a young man deprived of his rights, his inheritance taken
+from him, his very life in danger, threatened by the stranger and
+usurper, was deepened in every particular by the fact that it was the
+King, the very impersonation of France, appointed by God as the head of
+the country, who was in danger. Everything that Jeanne heard would help
+to swell the stream.
+
+Thus she must have come step by step--this extraordinary, impossible
+suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul--to perceive a kind of
+miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how
+everything pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed
+natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which promised
+a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to deliver France,
+might have affected her mind, did we not have it from her own voice
+that she had never heard that prophecy(1); but the word of the blessed
+Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife's tale; and the
+child's alarm would seem to have died away as she came to her full
+growth. And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions, but a
+robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of sense and
+determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the level of
+the crowd. We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the making of a
+great general in her untutored female soul,--which is perhaps the most
+wonderful thing in her career,--and saw with the eye of an experienced
+and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see it, the fit order
+of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at her command. This I
+honestly avow is to me the most incredible point in the story. I am not
+disturbed by the apparition of the saints; there is in them an ineffable
+appropriateness and fitness against which the imagination, at least,
+has not a word to say. The wonder is not, to the natural mind, that such
+interpositions of heaven come, but that they come so seldom. But that
+Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the little girl over her sewing, whose only
+fault was that she went to church too often, should have the genius of a
+soldier, is too bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring
+influence leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful
+with the rude artillery of the time, divining the better way in
+strategy,--this is a wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet
+according to Alencon, Dunois, and other military authorities, it was
+true.
+
+We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long
+musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no longer,
+nor what it was which induced her at last to select the confidant she
+did. No doubt she must have been considering and weighing the matter for
+a long time before she fixed upon the man who was her relation, yet
+did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a townsman for the
+extraordinary revelations she had to make. One of her neighbours, her
+gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was godmother, had perhaps
+at one moment seemed to her a likely helper. But he belonged to the
+opposite party. "If you were not a Burgundian," she said to him once,
+"there is something I might tell you." The honest fellow took this to
+mean that she had some thought of marriage, the most likely and natural
+supposition. It was at this moment, when her heart was burning with
+her great secret, the voices urging her on day by day, and her power of
+self-constraint almost at an end, that Providence sent Durand Laxart,
+her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on some family visit. She would seem
+to have taken advantage of the opportunity with eagerness, asking him
+privately to take her home with him, and to explain to her father and
+mother that he wanted her to take care of his wife. No doubt the girl,
+devoured with so many thoughts, would have the air of requiring "a
+change" as we say, and that the mother would be very ready to accept for
+her an invitation which might bring back the brightness to her child.
+Laxart was a peasant like the rest, a _prud' homme_ well thought of
+among his people. He lived in Burey le Petit, near to Vaucouleurs, the
+chief place of the district, and Jeanne already knew that it was to the
+captain of Vaucouleurs that she was to address herself. Thus she secured
+her object in the simplest and most natural way.
+
+Yet the reader cannot but hold his breath at the thought of what that
+amazing revelation must have been to the homely, rustic soul, her
+companion, communicated as they went along the common road in the common
+daylight. "She said to the witness that she must go to France to the
+Dauphin, to make him to be crowned King." It must have been as if a
+thunderbolt had fallen at his feet when the girl whom he had known in
+every development of her little life, thus suddenly disclosed to him her
+secret purpose and determination. All her simple excellence the good
+man knew, and that she was no fantastic chatterer, but truly _une bonne
+douce fille_, bold in nothing but kindness, with nothing to blush for
+but the fault of going too often to church. "Did you never hear that
+France should be made desolate by a woman and restored by a maid?" she
+said; and this would seem to have been an unanswerable argument. He had,
+henceforth, nothing to do but to promote her purpose as best he could in
+every way.
+
+It would not seem at all unlikely to this good man that the Archangel
+Michael, if Jeanne's revelation to him went so far, should have named
+Robert de Baudricourt, the chief of the district, captain of the town
+and its forces, the principal personage in all the neighbourhood, as
+the person to whom Jeanne's purpose was to be revealed, but rather a
+guarantee of St. Michael himself, familiar with good society; and the
+Seigneur must have been more or less in good intelligence with his
+people, not too alarming to be referred to, even on so insignificant
+a subject as the vagaries of a country girl--though these by this
+time must have begun to seem something more than vagaries to the
+half-convinced peasant. And it was no doubt a great relief to his mind
+thus to put the decision of the question into the hands of a man better
+informed than himself. Laxart proceeded to Vaucouleurs upon his mission,
+shyly yet with confidence. He would seem to have had a preliminary
+interview with Baudricourt before introducing Jeanne. The stammering
+countryman, the bluff, rustic noble and soldier, cheerfully
+contemptuous, receiving, with a loud laugh into all the echoes, the
+extraordinary demand that he should send a little girl from Domremy
+to the King, to deliver France, come before us like a picture in the
+countryman's simple words. Robert de Baudricourt would scarcely hear the
+story out. "Box her ears," he said, "and send her home to her mother."
+The little fool! What did she know of the English, those brutal,
+downright fighters, against whom no _elan_ was sufficient, who stood
+their ground and set up vulgar posts around their lines, instead
+of trusting to the rush of sudden valour, and the tactics of the
+tournament! She deliver France! On a much smaller argument and to put
+down a less ambition, the half serious, half amused adviser has bidden
+a young fanatic's ears to be boxed on many an unimportant occasion,
+and has often been justified in so doing. There would be a half hour of
+gaiety after poor Laxart, crestfallen, had got his dismissal. The
+good man must have turned back to Jeanne, where she waited for him in
+courtyard or antechamber, with a heavy heart. No boxing of ears was
+possible to him. The mere thought of it was blasphemy. This was on
+Ascension Day the 13 May, 1428.
+
+Jeanne, however, was not discouraged by M. de Baudricourt's joke, and
+her interview with him changed his views completely. She appears indeed
+from the moment of setting out from her father's house to have taken a
+new attitude. These great personages of the country before whom all the
+peasants trembled, were nothing to this village maid, except, perhaps,
+instruments in the hand of God to speed her on her way if they could see
+their privileges--if not, to be swept out of it like straws by the wind.
+It had no doubt been hard for her to leave her father's house; but after
+that disruption what did anything matter? And she had gone through five
+years of gradual training of which no one knew. The tears and terror,
+the plea, "I am a poor girl; I cannot even ride," of her first childlike
+alarm had given place to a profound acquaintance with the voices and
+their meaning. They were now her familiar friends guiding her at every
+step; and what was the commonplace burly Seigneur, with his roar of
+laughter, to Jeanne? She went to her audience with none of the alarm
+of the peasant. A certain young man of Baudricourt's suite, Bertrand de
+Poulengy, another young D'Artagnan seeking his fortune, was present
+in the hall and witnessed the scene. The joke would seem to have been
+exhausted by the time Jeanne appeared, or her perfect gravity and
+simplicity, and beautiful manners--so unlike her rustic dress and
+village coif--imposed upon the Seigneur and his little court. This is
+how the story is told, twenty-five years after, by the witness, then an
+elderly knight, recalling the story of his youth.
+
+"She said that she came to Robert on the part of her Lord, that he
+should send to the Dauphin, and tell him to hold out, and have no fear,
+for the Lord would send him succour before the middle of Lent. She also
+said that France did not belong to the Dauphin but to her Lord; but her
+Lord willed that the Dauphin should be its King, and hold it in command,
+and that in spite of his enemies she herself would conduct him to be
+consecrated. Robert then asked her who was this Lord? She answered, 'The
+King of Heaven.' This being done (the witness adds) she returned to her
+father's house with her uncle, Durand Laxart of Burey le Petit."
+
+This brief and sudden preface to her career passed over and had no
+immediate effect; indeed but for Bertrand we should have been unable
+to separate it from the confused narrative to which all these witnesses
+brought what recollection they had, often without sequence or order,
+Durand himself taking no notice of any interval between this first
+visit to Vaucouleurs and the final one.(2) The episode of Ascension Day
+appears like the formal _sommation_ of French law, made as a matter of
+form before the appellant takes action on his own responsibility; but
+Baudricourt had probably more to do with it than appears to be at all
+certain from the after evidence. One of the persons present, at all
+events, young Poulengy above mentioned, bore it in mind and pondered it
+in his heart.
+
+Meantime, Jeanne returned home--the strangest home-going,--for by this
+time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and rumour
+must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern telegraph,
+to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore unaware of any
+difference between Jeanne and her companions save the greater goodness
+to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must have reached
+Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with the kind Durand,
+a changed creature, already the consecrated Maid of France, La Pucelle,
+apart from all others. The French peasant is a hard man, more fierce in
+his terror of the unconventional, of having his domestic affairs exposed
+to the public eye, or his family disgraced by an exhibition of anything
+unusual either in act or feeling, than almost any other class of beings.
+And it is evident that he took his daughter's intention according to the
+coarsest interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention
+of joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and
+dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever
+of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl,
+but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We do
+not know what passed when she returned, further than that her father had
+a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of the purpose
+that had so long been ripening in her mind. He dreamed that he saw her
+surrounded by armed men, in the midst of the troopers, the most evident
+and natural interpretation of her purpose, for who could divine that
+she meant to be their leader and general, on a level not with the common
+men-at-arms, but of princes and nobles? In the morning he told his dream
+to his wife and also to his sons. "If I could think that the thing would
+happen that I dreamed, I would wish that she should be drowned; and
+if you would not do it, I should do it with my own hands." The reader
+remembers with a shudder the Meuse flowing at the foot of the garden,
+while the fierce peasant, mad with fear lest shame should be coming to
+his family, clenched his strong fist and made this outcry of dismay.
+
+No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
+whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
+expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
+substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
+probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so good
+a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly and so
+helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too willing
+to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be egged
+up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at Toul and
+swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her childhood. So
+timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic, would simply obey
+the bishop's decision and would not be bold enough even to remonstrate,
+though it is curious that with the spectacle of her grave determination
+before them, and sorrowful sense of that necessity of her mission
+which had steeled her to dispense with their consent, they should have
+expected such an expedient to arrest her steps. The affair, we must
+suppose, had gone through all the more usual stages of entreaty on the
+lover's part, and persuasion on that of the parents, before such an
+attempt was finally made. But the shy Jeanne had by this time attained
+that courage of desperation which is not inconsistent with the most
+gentle nature; and without saying anything to anyone, she too went to
+Toul, appeared before the bishop, and easily freed herself from the
+pretended engagement, though whether with any reference to her very
+different destination we are not told.(3)
+
+These proceedings, however, and the father's dreams and the
+remonstrances of the mother, must have made troubled days in the
+cottage, and scenes of wrath and contradiction, hard to bear. The winter
+passed distracted by these contentions, and it is difficult to imagine
+how Jeanne could have borne this had it not been that the period of her
+outset had already been indicated, and that it was only in the middle of
+Lent that her succour was to reach the King. The village, no doubt, was
+almost as much distracted as her father's house to hear of these strange
+discussions and of the incredible purpose of the _bonne douce fille_,
+whose qualities everybody knew and about whom there was nothing
+eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple goodness, to distinguish
+her above her neighbours. In the meantime her voices called her
+continually to her work. They set her free from the ordinary yoke of
+obedience, always so strong in the mind of a French girl. The dreadful
+step of abandoning her home, not to be thought of under any other
+circumstances, was more and more urgently pressed upon her. Could it
+indeed be saints and angels who ordained a step which was outside of all
+the habits and first duties of nature? But we have no reason to believe
+that this nineteenth-century doubt of her visitors, and of whether their
+mandates were right, entered into the mind of a girl who was of her own
+period and not of ours. She went on steadfastly, certain of her mission
+now, and inaccessible either to remonstrance or appeal.
+
+It was towards the beginning of Lent, as Poulengy tells us, that the
+decision was made, and she left home finally, to go "to France" as is
+always said. But it seems to have been in January that she set out once
+more for Vaucouleurs, accompanied by her uncle, who took her to the
+house of some humble folk they knew, a carter and his wife, where they
+lodged. Jeanne wore her peasant dress of heavy red homespun, her rude
+heavy shoes, her village coif. She never made any pretence of ladyhood
+or superiority to her class, but was always equal to the finest society
+in which she found herself, by dint of that simple good faith, sense,
+and seriousness, without excitement or exaggeration, and radiant purity
+and straightforwardness which were apparent to all seeing eyes. By
+this time all the little world about knew something of her purpose and
+followed her every step with wonder and quickly rising curiosity: and no
+doubt the whole town was astir, women gazing at their doors, all on her
+side from the first moment, the men half interested, half insolent, as
+she went once more to the chateau to make her personal appeal. Simple as
+she was, the _bonne douce fille_ was not intimidated by the guard at the
+gates, the lounging soldiers, the no doubt impudent glances flung at
+her by these rude companions. She was inaccessible to alarms of that
+kind--which, perhaps, is one of the greatest safeguards against them
+even in more ordinary cases. We find little record of her second
+interview with Baudricourt. The _Journal du Siege d'Orleans_ and the
+_Chronique de la Pucelle_ both mention it as if it had been one of
+several, which may well have been the case, as she was for three weeks
+in Vaucouleurs. It is almost impossible to arrange the incidents of this
+interval between her arrival there and her final departure for Chinon on
+the 23d February, during which time she made a pilgrimage to a shrine
+of St. Nicolas and also a visit to the Duke of Lorraine. It is clear,
+however, that she must have repeated her demand with such stress and
+urgency that the Captain of Vaucouleurs was a much perplexed man. It was
+a very natural idea then, and in accordance with every sentiment of
+the time that he should suspect this wonderful girl, who would not be
+daunted, of being a witch and capable of bringing an evil fate on all
+who crossed her. All thought of boxing her ears must ere this have
+departed from his mind. He hastened to consult the cure, which was
+the most reasonable thing to do. The cure was as much puzzled as the
+Captain. The Church, it must be said, if always ready to take advantage
+afterwards of such revelations, has always been timid, even sceptical
+about them at first. The wisdom of the rulers, secular and ecclesiastic,
+suggested only one thing to do, which was to exorcise, and perhaps to
+overawe and frighten, the young visionary. They paid a joint and solemn
+visit to the carter's house, where no doubt their entrance together was
+spied by many eager eyes; and there the priest solemnly taking out his
+stole invested himself in his priestly robes and exorcised the evil
+spirits, bidding them come out of the girl if they were her inspiration.
+There seems a certain absurdity in this sudden assault upon the evil
+one, taking him as it were by surprise: but it was not ridiculous to
+any of the performers, though Jeanne no doubt looked on with serene and
+smiling eyes. She remarked afterwards to her hostess, that the cure had
+done wrong, as he had already heard her in confession.
+
+Outside, the populace were in no uncertainty at all as to her mission.
+A little mob hung about the door to see her come and go, chiefly to
+church, with her good hostess in attendance, as was right and seemly,
+and a crowd streaming after them who perhaps of their own accord might
+have neglected mass, but who would not, if they could help it, lose a
+look at the new wonder. One day a young gentleman of the neighbourhood
+was passing by, and amused by the commotion, came through the crowd to
+have a word with the peasant lass. "What are you doing here, _ma mie_?"
+the young man said. "Is the King to be driven out of the kingdom, and
+are we all to be made English?" There is a tone of banter in the speech,
+but he had already heard of the Maid from his friend, Bertrand, and had
+been affected by the other's enthusiasm. "Robert de Baudricourt will
+have none of me or my words," she replied, "nevertheless before Mid-Lent
+I must be with the King, if I should wear my feet up to my knees;
+for nobody in the world, be it king, duke, or the King of Scotland's
+daughter, can save the kingdom of France except me alone: though I would
+rather spin beside my poor mother, and this is not my work: but I must
+go and do it, because my Lord so wills it." "And who is your Seigneur?"
+he asked. "God," said the girl. The young man was moved, he too, by that
+wind which bloweth where it listeth. He stretched out his hands through
+the gaping crowd and took hers, holding them between his own, to give
+her his pledge: and so swore by his faith, her hands in his hands, that
+he himself would conduct her to the King. "When will you go?" he said.
+"Rather to-day than to-morrow," answered the messenger of God.
+
+This was the second convert of La Pucelle. The peasant _bonhomme_ first,
+the noble gentleman after him; not to say all the women wherever she
+went, the gazing, weeping, admiring crowd which now followed her steps,
+and watched every opening of the door which concealed her from their
+eyes. The young gentleman was Jean de Novelonpont, "surnamed Jean de
+Metz": and so moved was he by the fervour of the girl, and by her strong
+sense of the necessity of immediate operations, that he proceeded at
+once to make preparations for the journey. They would seem to have
+discussed the dress she ought to wear, and Jeanne decided for many
+obvious reasons to adopt the costume of a man--or rather boy. She must,
+one would imagine have been tall, for no remark is ever made on this
+subject, as if her dress had dwarfed her, which is generally the case
+when a woman assumes the habit of a man: and probably with her peasant
+birth and training, she was, though slim, strongly made and well knit,
+besides being at the age when the difference between boy and girl is
+sometimes but little noticeable.
+
+In the meantime Baudricourt had not been idle. He must have been moved
+by the sight of Jeanne, at least to perceive a certain gravity in the
+business for which he was not prepared; and her composure under the
+cure's exorcism would naturally deepen the effect which her own manners
+and aspect had upon all who were free of prejudice. Another singular
+event, too, added weight to her character and demand. One day after
+her return from Lorraine, February 12th, 1429, she intimated to all her
+surroundings and specially to Baudricourt, that the King had suffered a
+defeat near Orleans, which made it still more necessary that she should
+be at once conducted to him. It was found when there was time for the
+news to come, that this defeat, the Battle of the Herrings, so-called,
+had happened as she said, at the exact time; and such a strange fact
+added much to the growing enthusiasm and excitement. Baudricourt is said
+by Michelet to have sent off a secret express to the Court to ask what
+he should do; but of this there seems to be no direct evidence, though
+likelihood enough. The Court at Chinon contained a strong feminine
+element, behind the scenes. And it might be found that there were uses
+for the enthusiast, even if she did not turn out to be inspired. No
+doubt there were many comings and goings at this period which can only
+be traced confusedly through the depositions of Jeanne's companions
+twenty-five years after. She had at least two interviews with
+Baudricourt before the exorcism of the cure and his consequent change
+of procedure towards her. Then, escorted by her uncle Laxart, and
+apparently by Jean de Metz, she had made a pilgrimage to a shrine of St.
+Nicolas, as already mentioned, on which occasion, being near Nancy, she
+was sent for by the Duke of Lorraine, then lying ill at his castle
+in that city, who had a fancy to consult the young prophetess,
+sorceress--who could tell what she was?--on the subject apparently
+of his illness. He was the son of Queen Yolande of Anjou, who was
+mother-in-law to Charles VII., and it would no doubt be thought of some
+importance to secure his good opinion. Jeanne gave the exalted
+patient no light on the subject of his health, but only the (probably
+unpleasing) advice to flee from the wrath of God and to be reconciled
+with his wife, from whom he was separated. He too, however, was moved by
+the sight of her and her straightforward, undeviating purpose. He gave
+her four francs, Durand tells us,--not much of a present,--which she
+gave to her uncle, and which helped to buy her outfit. Probably he made
+a good report of her to his mother, for shortly after her return to
+Vaucouleurs (I again follow Michelet who ought to be well informed)
+a messenger from Chinon arrived to take her to the King.(4) In the
+councils of that troubled Court, perhaps, the idea of a prodigy and
+miraculous leader, though she was nothing but a peasant girl, would
+be not without attraction, a thing to conjure withal, so far as the
+multitude were concerned.
+
+Anyhow from any point of view, in the hopeless condition of affairs, it
+was expedient that nothing which gave promise of help, either real or
+visionary, should lightly be rejected. There was much anxiety no
+doubt in the careless Court still dancing and singing in the midst
+of calamity, but the reception of the ambitious peasant would form an
+exciting incident at least, if nothing more important and notable.
+
+Thus the whole anxious world of France stirred round that youthful
+figure in the little frontier town, repeating with many an alteration
+and exaggeration the sayings of Jeanne, and those popular superstitions
+about the Maid from Lorraine which might be so naturally applied to her.
+It would seem, indeed, that she had herself attached some importance to
+this prophecy, for both her uncle Laxart and her hostess at Vaucouleurs
+report that she asked them if they had heard it: which question
+"stupefied" the latter, whose mind evidently jumped at once to the
+conviction that the prophecy was fulfilled. Not in Domremy itself,
+however, were these things considered with the same awe-stricken and
+admiring faith. Nothing had softened the mood of Jacques d'Arc. It was
+a shame to the village _prud' homme_ to think of his daughter away from
+all the protection of home, living among men, encountering the young
+Seigneurs who cared for no maiden's reputation, hearing the soldiers'
+rude talk, exposed to their insults, or worse still to their kindness.
+Probably even now he thought of her as surrounded by troopers and
+men-at-arms, instead of the princes and peers with whom henceforth
+Jeanne's lot was to be cast; but in the former case there would
+have perhaps been less to fear than in the latter. Anyhow, Jeanne's
+communications with her family were more painful to her than had been
+the jeers of Baudricourt or the exorcism of the cure. They sent her
+angry orders to come back, threats of parental curses and abandonment.
+We may hope that the mother, grieved and helpless, had little to do with
+this persecution. The woman who had nourished her children upon saintly
+legend and Scripture story could scarcely have been hard upon the child,
+of whom she, better than any, knew the perfect purity and steadfast
+resolution. One of the little household at least, revolted by the stern
+father's fury, perhaps secretly encouraged by the mother, broke away and
+joined his sister at a later period. But we hear, during her lifetime,
+little or nothing of Pierre.
+
+Much time, however, was passed in these preliminaries. The final
+start was not made till the 23d February, 1429, when the permission
+is supposed to have come by the hands of Colet de Vienne, the King's
+messenger, who attended by a single archer, was to be her escort. It
+is possible that he had no mission to this effect, but he certainly
+did escort her to Chinon. The whole town gathered before the house of
+Baudricourt to see her depart. Baudricourt, however, does not seem to
+have provided any guard for her. Jean de Metz, who had so chivalrously
+pledged himself to her service, with his friend De Poulengy,
+equally ready for adventure, each with his servant, formed her sole
+protectors.(5) Jean de Metz had already sent her the clothes of one of
+his retainers, with the light breastplate and partial armour that suited
+it; and the townspeople had subscribed to buy her a further outfit, and
+a horse which seems to have cost sixteen francs--not so small a sum in
+those days as now. Laxart declares himself to have been responsible for
+this outlay, though the money was afterwards paid by Baudricourt, who
+gave Jeanne a sword, which some of her historians consider a very poor
+gift: none, however, of her equipments would seem to have been costly.
+The little party set out thus, with a sanction of authority, from the
+Captain's gate, the two gentlemen and the King's messenger at the head
+of the party with their attendants, and the Maid in the midst. "Go: and
+let what will happen," was the parting salutation of Baudricourt. The
+gazers outside set up a cry when the decisive moment came, and someone,
+struck with the feeble force which was all the safeguard she had for her
+long journey through an agitated country--perhaps a woman in the sudden
+passion of misgiving which often follows enthusiasm,--called out to
+Jeanne with an astonished outcry to ask how she could dare to go by such
+a dangerous road. "It was for that I was born," answered the fearless
+Maid. The last thing she had done had been to write a letter to her
+parents, asking their pardon if she obeyed a higher command than theirs,
+and bidding them farewell.
+
+The French historians, with that amazement which they always show when
+they find a man behaving like a gentleman towards a woman confided to
+his honour, all pause with deep-drawn breath to note that the awe of
+Jeanne's absolute purity preserved her from any unseemly overture, or
+even evil thought, on the part of her companions. We need not take
+up even the shadow of so grave a censure upon Frenchmen in general,
+although in the far distance of the fifteenth century. The two young
+men, thus starting upon a dangerous adventure, pledged by their honour
+to protect and convey her safely to the King's presence, were noble and
+generous cavaliers, and we may well believe had no evil thoughts. They
+were not, however, without an occasional chill of reflection when
+once they had taken the irrevocable step of setting out upon this wild
+errand. They travelled by night to escape the danger of meeting bands of
+Burgundians or English on the way, and sometimes had to ford a river to
+avoid the town, where they would have found a bridge. Sometimes, too,
+they had many doubts, Bertrand says, perhaps as to their reception at
+Chinon, perhaps even whether their mission might not expose them to the
+ridicule of their kind, if not to unknown dangers of magic and contact
+with the Evil One, should this wonderful girl turn out no inspired
+virgin but a pretender or sorceress. Jean de Metz informs us that she
+bade them not to fear, that she had been sent to do what she was now
+doing; that her brothers in paradise would tell her how to act, and that
+for the last four or five years her brothers in paradise and her God had
+told her that she must go to the war to save the kingdom of France. This
+phrase must have struck his ear, as he thus repeats it. Her brothers in
+paradise! She had not apparently talked of them to anyone as yet, but
+now no one could hinder her more, and she felt herself free to speak.
+A great calm seems to have been in her soul. She had at last begun her
+work. How it was all to end for her she neither foresaw nor asked;
+she knew only what she had to do. When they ventured into a town she
+insisted on stopping to hear mass, bidding them fear nothing. "God
+clears the way for me," she said; "I was born for this," and so
+proceeded safe, though threatened with many dangers. There is something
+that breathes of supreme satisfaction and content in her repetition of
+those words.
+
+     (1) She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword,
+     that France should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards
+     redeemed by a virgin, which she quoted to several persons on
+     her first setting out.
+
+     (2) I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of
+     these events quite clear to myself.
+
+     (3) Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was
+     made after she had finally left Domremy, and when she was
+     already accompanied by the escort which was to attend her to
+     Chinon.
+
+     (4) Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this. He thinks the man
+     was a mere King's messenger with news, probably charged with
+     the melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the
+     Herrings): and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her
+     little part was entirely accidental.
+
+     (5) Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the
+     party. _La Chronique de la Pucelle_ says two of her
+     brothers. Mr. Andrew Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did
+     not join his sister's party till much later--in the
+     beginning of June: and this is the statement of Jean de
+     Metz. But Quicherat is also of opinion that they both fought
+     in the relief of Orleans.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III -- BEFORE THE KING. FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+
+Jeanne and her little party were eleven days on the road, but do not
+seem to have encountered any special peril. They lodged sometimes in the
+security of a convent, sometimes in a village hostel, pursuing the long
+and tedious way across the great levels of midland France, which has
+so few features of beauty except in the picturesque towns with their
+castles and churches, which the escort avoided. At length they paused
+in the village of Fierbois not far from Chinon where the Court was, in
+order to announce their arrival and ask for an audience, which was not
+immediately accorded. Charles held his Court with incredible gaiety and
+folly, in the midst of almost every disaster that could overtake a king,
+in the castle of Chinon on the banks of the Vienne. The situation and
+aspect of this noble building, now in ruins, is wonderfully like that
+of Windsor Castle. The great walls, interrupted and strengthened by
+huge towers, stretch along a low ridge of rocky hill, with the swift and
+clear river, a little broader and swifter than the Thames, flowing at
+its foot. The red and high-pitched roofs of the houses clustered between
+the castle hill and the stream, give a point of resemblance the more.
+The large and ample dwelling, defensible, but with no thought of any
+need of defence, a midland castle surrounded by many a level league of
+wealthy country, which no hostile force should ever have power to get
+through, must have looked like the home of a well-established royalty.
+There was no sound or sight of war within its splendid enclosure.
+Noble lords and gentlemen crowded the corridors; trains of gay ladies,
+attendant upon two queens, filled the castle with fine dresses and gay
+voices. There had been but lately a dreadful and indeed shameful defeat,
+inflicted by a mere English convoy of provisions upon a large force of
+French and Scottish soldiers, the former led by such men as Dunois, La
+Hire, Xaintrailles, etc., the latter by the Constable of Scotland, John
+Stuart--which defeat might well have been enough to subdue every sound
+of revelry: yet Charles's Court was ringing with music and pleasantry,
+as if peace had reigned around.
+
+It may be believed that there were many doubts and questions how to
+receive this peasant from the fields, which prevented an immediate
+reply to her demand for an audience. From the first, de la Tremoille,
+Charles's Prime Minister and chief adviser, was strongly against any
+encouragement of the visionary, or dealings with the supernatural; but
+there would no doubt be others, hoping if not for a miraculous maid,
+yet at least for a passing wonder, who might kindle enthusiasm in the
+country and rouse the ignorant with hopes of a special blessing from
+Heaven. The gayer and younger portion of the Court probably expected
+a little amusement, above all, a new butt for their wit, or perhaps a
+soothsayer to tell their fortunes and promise good things to come. They
+had not very much to amuse them, though they made the best of it. The
+joys of Paris were very far off; they were all but imprisoned in this
+dull province of Touraine; nobody knew at what moment they might be
+forced to leave even that refuge. For the moment here was a new event,
+a little stir of interest, something to pass an hour. Jeanne had to wait
+two days in Chinon before she was granted an audience, but considering
+the carelessness of the Court and the absence of any patron that was but
+a brief delay.
+
+The chamber of audience is now in ruins. A wild rose with long, arching,
+thorny branches and pale flowers, straggles over the greensward where
+once the floor was trod by so many gay figures. From the broken wall you
+look sheer down upon the shining river; one great chimney, which at
+that season must have been still the most pleasant centre of the large,
+draughty hall, shows at the end of the room, with a curious suggestion
+of warmth and light which makes ruin more conspicuous. The room must
+have been on the ground floor almost level with the soil towards the
+interior of the castle, but raised to the height of the cliffs outside.
+It was evening, an evening of March, and fifty torches lighted up the
+ample room; many noble personages, almost as great as kings, and clothed
+in the bewildering splendour of the time, and more than three hundred
+cavaliers of the best names in France filled it to overflowing. The
+peasant girl from Domremy in the hose and doublet of a servant, a
+little travel-worn after her tedious journey, was led in by one of those
+splendid seigneurs, dazzled with the grandeur she had never seen before,
+looking about her in wonder to see which was the King--while Charles,
+perhaps with boyish pleasure in the mystification, perhaps with a little
+half-conviction stealing over him that there might be something more in
+it, stood among the smiling crowd.
+
+The young stranger looked round upon all those amused, light-minded,
+sceptical faces, and without a moment's hesitation went forward and
+knelt down before him. "Gentil Dauphin," she said, "God give you good
+life." "But it is not I that am the King; there is the King," said
+Charles. "Gentil Prince, it is you and no other," she said; then rising
+from her knee: "Gentil Dauphin, I am Jeanne the Maid. I am sent to you
+by the King of Heaven to tell you that you shall be consecrated and
+crowned at Rheims, and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who
+is King of France." The little masquerade had failed, the jest was over.
+There would be little more laughing among the courtiers, when they saw
+the face of Charles grow grave. He took the new-comer aside, perhaps to
+that deep recess of the window where in the darkening night the glimmer
+of the clear, flowing river, the great vault of sky would still be
+visible dimly, outside the circle of the blazing interior with all its
+smoky lights.
+
+Charles VII. of France was, like many of his predecessors, a _pauvre
+Sire_ enough. He had thought more of his amusements than of the troubles
+of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will sometimes spring
+from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and after all, the
+dread responsibility, the sense that in all his helplessness and
+inability to do anything he was still the man who ought to do all, would
+seem to have moved him from time to time. A secret doubt in his heart,
+divulged to no man, had added bitterness to the conviction of his own
+weakness. Was he indeed the heir of France? Had he any right to that
+sustaining confidence which would have borne up his heart in the midst
+of every discouragement? His very mother had given him up and set him
+aside. He was described as the so-called Dauphin in treaties signed by
+Charles and Isabeau his parents. If anyone knew, she knew; and was it
+possible that more powerful even than the English, more cruel than the
+Burgundians, this stain of illegitimacy was upon him, making all effort
+vain? There is no telling where the sensitive point is in any man's
+heart, and little worthy as was this King, the story we are here told
+has a thrill of truth in it. It is reported by a certain Sala, who
+declares that he had it from the lips of Charles's favourite and close
+follower, the Seigneur de Boisi, a courtier who, after the curious
+custom of the time, shared even the bed of his master. This was confided
+to Boisi by the King in the deepest confidence, in the silence of the
+wakeful night:
+
+"This was in the time of the good King Charles, when he knew not what
+step to take, and did nothing but think how to redeem his life: for as
+I have told you he was surrounded by enemies on all sides. The King in
+this extreme thought, went in one morning to his oratory all alone; and
+there he made a prayer to our Lord, in his heart, without pronouncing
+any words, in which he asked of Him devoutly that if he were indeed the
+true heir, descended from the royal House of France, and that justly the
+kingdom was his, that He would be pleased to guard and defend him, or
+at the worst to give him grace to escape into Spain or Scotland, whose
+people, from all antiquity, were brothers-in-arms, friends and allies of
+the kings of France, and that he might find a refuge there."
+
+Perhaps there is some excuse for a young man's endeavour to forget
+himself in folly or even in dissipation when his secret thoughts are so
+despairing as these.
+
+It was soon after this melancholy moment that the arrival of Jeanne
+took place. The King led her aside, touched as all were, by her look of
+perfect sincerity and good faith; but it is she herself, not Charles,
+who repeats what she said to him. "I have to tell you," said the young
+messenger of God, "on the part of my Lord (_Messire_) that you are the
+true heir of France and the son of the King; He has sent me to
+conduct you to Rheims that you may receive your consecration and
+your crown,"--perhaps here, Jeanne caught some look which she did not
+understand in his eyes, for she adds with, one cannot but think a touch
+of sternness--"if you will."
+
+Was it a direct message from God in answer to his prayer, uttered within
+his own heart, without words, so that no one could have guessed that
+secret? At least it would appear that Charles thought so: for how should
+this peasant maid know the secret fear that had gnawed at his heart?
+"When thou wast in the garden under the fig-tree I saw thee." Great
+was the difference between the Israelite without guile and the troubled
+young man, with whose fate the career of a great nation was entangled;
+but it is not difficult to imagine what the effect must have been on
+the mind of Charles when he was met by this strange, authoritative
+statement, uttered like all that Jeanne said, _de la part de Dieu_.
+
+The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was
+surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious as
+they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with which
+in themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be allowed, also,
+that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless young King on the
+word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to every law of reason,
+madness and folly. She would seem to have had the women on her side
+always and at every point. The Church did not stir, or else was hostile;
+the commanders and military men about, regarded with scornful disgust
+the idea that an enterprise which they considered hopeless should be
+confided to an ignorant woman--all with perfect reason we are obliged to
+allow. Probably it was to gain time--yet without losing the aid of such
+a stimulus to the superstitious among the masses--and to retard any rash
+undertaking--that it was proposed to subject Jeanne to an examination
+of doctors and learned men touching her faith and the character of
+her visions, which all this time had been of continual recurrence, yet
+charged with no further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the
+one simple, constantly repeated command.
+
+Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops,
+Jeanne was taken to Poitiers--where the university and the local
+parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which were
+on the side of the King, were assembled--to undergo this investigation.
+It is curious that the entire history of this wildest and strangest of
+all visionary occurrences is to be found in a series of processes at
+law, each part recorded and certified under oath; but so it is. The
+village maid was placed at the bar, before a number of acute legists,
+ecclesiastics, and statesmen, to submit her to a not-too-benevolent
+cross-examination. Several of these men were still alive at the time
+of the Rehabilitation and gave their recollections of this examination,
+though its formal records have not been preserved. A Dominican monk,
+Aymer, one of an order she loved, addressed her gravely with the
+severity with which that institution is always credited. "You say that
+God will deliver France; if He has so determined, He has no need of
+men-at-arms." "Ah!" cried the girl, with perhaps a note of irritation
+in her voice, "the men must fight; it is God who gives the victory." To
+another discomfited Brother, Jeanne, exasperated, answered with a little
+roughness, showing that our Maid, though gentle as a child to all gentle
+souls, was no piece of subdued perfection, but a woman of the fields,
+and lately much in the company of rough-spoken men. He was of Limoges, a
+certain Brother Seguin, "_bien aigre homme_," and disposed apparently
+to weaken the trial by questions without importance: he asked her what
+language her celestial visitors spoke? "Better than yours," answered the
+peasant girl. He could not have been, as we say in Scotland, altogether
+"an ill man," for he acknowledged that he spoke the patois of his
+district, and therefore that the blow was fair. But perhaps for
+the moment he was irritated too. He asked her, a question equally
+unnecessary, "do you believe in God?" to which with more and more
+impatience she made a similar answer: "Better than you do." There was
+nothing to be made of one so well able to defend herself. "Words are
+all very well," said the monk, "but God would not have us believe
+you, unless you show us some sign." To this Jeanne made an answer more
+dignified, though still showing signs of exasperation, "I have not come
+to Poitiers to give signs," she said; "but take me to Orleans--I will
+then show the signs I am sent to show. Give me as small a band as you
+please, but let me go."
+
+The situation of Orleans was at the time a desperate one. It was
+besieged by a strong army of English, who had built a succession of
+towers round the city, from which to assail it, after the manner of the
+times. The town lies in the midst of the plain of the Loire, with not
+so much as a hillock to offer any advantage to the besiegers. Therefore
+these great works were necessary in face of a very strenuous resistance,
+and the possibility of provisioning the besieged, which their river
+secured. The English from their high towers kept up a disastrous
+fire, which, though their artillery was of the rudest kind, did great
+execution. The siege was conducted by eminent generals. The works
+were of themselves great fortifications, the assailants numerous, and
+strengthened by the prestige of almost unbroken success; there seemed
+no human hope of the deliverance of the town unless by an overwhelming
+army, which the King's party did not possess, or by some wonderful and
+utterly unexpected event. Jeanne had always declared the destruction
+of the English and the relief of Orleans to be the first step in her
+mission.
+
+Besides the formal and official examination of her faith and character,
+held at Poitiers, private inquests of all kinds were made concerning
+of the claims of the miraculous maid. She was visited by every curious
+person, man or woman, in the neighbourhood, and plied with endless
+questions, so that her simple personal story, and that of her
+revelations--_mes voix_, as she called them--became familiarly known
+from her own report, to the whole country round about. The women pressed
+a question specially interesting--for no doubt, many a good mother half
+convinced otherwise, shook her head at Jeanne's costume--Why she wore
+the dress of a man? for which the Maid gave very good reasons: in the
+first place because it was the only dress for fighting, which, though so
+far from her desires or from the habits of her life, was henceforward to
+be her work; and also because in her strange circumstances,
+constrained as she was to live among men, she considered it safest
+for herself--statements which evidently convinced the minds of the
+questioners. It was, no doubt, good policy to make her thus widely and
+generally known, and the result was a daily growing enthusiasm for her
+and belief in her, in all classes. The result of the formal process was
+that the doctors could find nothing against her, and they reluctantly
+allowed that the King might lawfully take what advantage he could of her
+offered services.
+
+Jeanne was then brought back to Chinon, where she was lodged in one of
+the great towers still standing, though no special room is pointed
+out as hers. And there she was subjected to another process, more
+penetrating still than the interrogations of the graver tribunals. The
+Queens and their ladies and all the women of the Court took her in hand.
+They inquired into her history in every subtle and intimate feminine
+way, testing her innocence and purity; and once more she came out
+triumphant. The final judgment was given as follows: "After hearing all
+these reports, the King taking into consideration the great goodness
+that was in the Maid, and that she declared herself to be sent by
+God, it was by the said Seigneur and his council determined that from
+henceforward he should make use of her for his wars, since it was for
+this that she was sent."
+
+It was now necessary to equip Jeanne for her service. She had a
+_maison_, an _etat majeur_, or staff, formed for her, the chief of
+which, Jean d'Aulon, already distinguished and worthy of such a trust
+never left her thenceforward until the end of her active career. Her
+chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, also followed her fortunes faithfully. Charles
+would have given her a sword to replace the probably indifferent weapon
+given her by Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs; but Jeanne knew where to find
+the sword destined for her. She gave orders that someone should be sent
+to Fierbois, the village at which she had paused on her way to Chinon,
+to fetch a sword which would be found there buried behind the high altar
+of the church of St. Catherine. To make this as little miraculous as
+possible, we are told by some historians that it was common for knights
+to be buried with their arms, and that Jeanne, in her visit to this
+church, where she heard three masses in succession to make up for the
+absence of constant religious services on her journey--had probably
+seen some tomb or other token that such an interment had taken place.
+However, as we are compelled to receive the far greater miracle of
+Jeanne herself and her work, without explanation, it is foolish to take
+the trouble to attempt any explanation of so small a matter as this. The
+sword in fact was found, by the clergy of the church, and was by them
+cleaned and polished and put in a scabbard of crimson velvet, scattered
+over with fleur-de-lys in gold, for her use. Her standard, which she
+considered of the greatest importance was made apparently at Tours. It
+was of white linen, fringed with silk and embroidered with a figure of
+the Saviour holding a globe in His hands, while an angel knelt at either
+side in adoration. Jhesus' Maria was inscribed at the foot. A repetition
+of this banner, which must have been re-copied from age to age is to be
+seen now at Tours. Having indicated the exact device to be emblazoned
+upon the banner, as dictated to her by her saints,--Margaret and
+Catherine--Jeanne announced her intention of carrying it herself, a
+somewhat surprising office for one who was to act as a general. But it
+was the command of her heavenly guides. "Take the standard on the part
+of God, and carry it boldly," they had said. She had, besides, a
+simple, half-childish intention of her own in this, which she explained
+shame-faced--she had no wish to use her sword though she loved it, and
+would kill no man. The banner was a more safe occupation, and saved her
+from all possibility of blood-shedding; it must however, have required
+the robust arm of a peasant to sustain the heavy weight.
+
+It will show how long a time all these examinations and preparations had
+taken when we read that Jeanne set out from Blois, where she had passed
+some time in military preparations, only on the 27th day of April;
+nearly two whole months had thus been taken up in testing her truth, and
+arranging details, trifling and unnecessary in her eyes:--a period which
+had been passed in great anxiety by the people of Orleans, with the huge
+bastilles of the English--three of which were named Paris, Rouen, and
+London--towering round them, their provisions often intercepted, all
+the business of life come to a standstill, and the overwhelming
+responsibility upon them of being almost the last barrier between the
+invader and the final subjugation of France. It is strange to add that,
+judging by ordinary rules, the garrison of Orleans ought to have been
+quite sufficient in itself in numbers and science of war, to have beaten
+and dispersed the English force which had thus succeeded in shutting
+them in; there were many notable captains among them, with Dunois,
+known as the Bastard of Orleans, one of the most celebrated and brave
+of French generals, at their head. Dunois was in no way inferior to the
+generals of the English army; he was popular, beloved by the people and
+soldiers alike, and though illegitimate, of the House of Orleans, one of
+the native seigneurs of the place. The wonder is how he and his officers
+permitted the building of these towers, and the shutting in of the town
+which they were quite strong enough to protect. But it was a losing game
+which they were playing, a part which does not suit the genius of the
+nation; and the superstition in favour of the English who had won so
+many battles with all the disadvantages on their side,--cutting the
+finest armies to pieces--was strong upon the imagination of the time. It
+seemed a fate which no valour or skill upon the side of the French could
+avert. Dunois, himself an unlikely person, one would have thought, to
+yield the honour of the fight to a woman, seems to have perceived
+that without a strong counter-motive, not within the range of ordinary
+methods, the situation was beyond hope.
+
+Accordingly, on the 27th or 28th of April, Jeanne set out at the head of
+her little army, accompanied by a great number of generals and captains.
+She had been equipped by the Queen of Sicily (with a touch of that keen
+sense of decorative effect which belonged to the age) in white armour
+inlaid with silver--all shining like her own St. Michael himself, a
+radiance of whiteness and glory under the sun--armed _de toutes pieces
+sauve la teste_, her uncovered head rising in full relief from the
+dazzling breastplate and gorget. This is the description given of her by
+an eye-witness a little later. The country is flat as the palm of one's
+hand. The white armour must have flashed back the sun for miles and
+miles of the level road, to the eyes which from the height of any
+neighbouring tower watched the party setting out. It is all fertile now,
+the richest plain, and even then, corn and wine must have been in full
+bourgeon, the great fresh greenness of the big leaves coming out upon
+such low stumps of vine as were left in the soil; but the devastated
+country was in those days covered with a wild growth like the _macchia_
+of Italian wilds, which half hid the movements of the expedition. They
+went by the Loire to Tours, where Jeanne had been assigned a dwelling of
+her own, with the estate of a general; and from thence to Blois, where
+they had to wait for some days while the convoy of provisions, which
+they were to convey to Orleans, was being prepared. And there Jeanne
+fulfilled one of the preliminary duties of her mission. She had informed
+her examiners at Poitiers that she had been commanded to write to the
+English generals before attacking them, appealing to them _de la part de
+Dieu_, to give up their conquests, and leave France to the French.
+The letter which we quote would seem to have been dictated by her at
+Poitiers, probably to the confessor who now formed part of her suite and
+who attended her wherever she went:
+
+JHESUS MARIA.
+
+King of England, and you Duke of Bedford calling yourself Regent of
+France, you, William de la Poule, Comte de Sulford, John, Lord of
+Talbot, and you Thomas, Lord of Scales, who call yourself lieutenants
+of the said Bedford, listen to the King of Heaven: Give back to the Maid
+who is here sent on the part of God the King of Heaven, the keys of all
+the good towns which you have taken by violence in His France. She is
+ready to make peace if you will hear reason and be just towards France
+and pay for what you have taken. And you archers, brothers-in-arms,
+gentles and others who are before the town of Orleans, go in peace on
+the part of God; if you do not so you will soon have news of the Maid
+who will see you shortly to your great damage. King of England, if you
+do not this, I am captain in this war, and in whatsoever place in France
+I find your people I will make them go away. I am sent here on the part
+of God the King of Heaven to push you all forth of France. If you obey I
+will be merciful. And be not strong in your own opinion, for you do not
+hold the kingdom from God the Son of the Holy Mary, but it is held by
+Charles the true heir, for God, the King of Heaven so wills, and it is
+revealed by the Maid who shall enter Paris in good company. If you will
+not believe this news on the part of God and the Maid, in whatever place
+you may find yourselves we shall make our way there, and make so great
+a commotion as has not been in France for a thousand years, if you will
+not hear reason. And believe this, that the King of Heaven will send
+more strength to the Maid than you can bring against her in all your
+assaults, to her and to her good men-at-arms. You, Duke of Bedford, the
+Maid prays and requires you to destroy no more. If you act according to
+reason you may still come in her company where the French shall do the
+greatest work that has ever been done for Christianity. Answer then if
+you will still continue against the city of Orleans. If you do so
+you will soon recall it to yourself by great misfortunes. Written the
+Saturday of Holy Week (22 March, 1429).(1)
+
+Jeanne had by this time made a wonderful moral revolution in her little
+army; most likely she had not been in the least aware what an army was,
+until this moment; but frank and fearless, she had penetrated into
+every corner, and it was not in her to permit those abuses at which an
+ordinary captain has to smile. The pernicious and shameful crowd of camp
+followers fled before her like shadows before the day. She stopped the
+big oaths and unthinking blasphemies which were so common, so that La
+Hire, one of the chief captains, a rough and ready Gascon, was reduced
+to swear by his _baton_, no more sacred name being permitted to him.
+Perhaps this was the origin of the harmless swearing which abounds in
+France, meaning probably just as much and as little as bigger oaths in
+careless mouths; but no doubt the soldiers' language was very unfit for
+gentle ears. Jeanne moved among the wondering ranks, all radiant in her
+silver armour and with her virginal undaunted countenance, exhorting all
+those rude and noisy brothers to take thought of their duties here, and
+of the other life that awaited them. She would stop the march of the
+army that a conscience-stricken soldier might make his confession, and
+desired the priests to hear it if necessary without ceremony, or church,
+under the first tree. Her tender heart was such that she shrank from any
+man's death, and her hair rose up on her head, as she said, at the sight
+of French blood shed--although her mission was to shed it on all sides
+for a great end. But the one thing she could not bear was that
+either Frenchmen or Englishmen should die unconfessed, "unhouseled,
+disappointed, unannealed." The army went along attended by songs of
+choristers and masses of priests, the grave and solemn music of the
+Church accompanied strangely by the fanfares and bugle notes. What a
+strange procession to pass along the great Loire in its spring fulness,
+the raised banners and crosses, and that dazzling white figure, all
+effulgence, reflected in the wayward, quick flowing stream!
+
+La Hire, who is like a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as
+a model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort
+Jeanne upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town.
+There could not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to
+conduct to a great battle the country maid who was to carry the honours
+of the day from them both, and make men fight like heroes, who under
+them did nothing but run away. The candour and true courage of such
+leaders in circumstances so extraordinary, are beyond praise, for it was
+an offence both to their pride and skill in their profession, had she
+been anything less than the messenger of God which she claimed to
+be; and these rude soldiers were not men to be easily moved by devout
+imaginations. There would seem, however, even in the case of the greater
+of the two, to have arisen a strange friendship and mutual understanding
+between the famous man of war and the peasant girl. Jeanne, always
+straightforward and simple, speaks to him, not with the downcast eyes of
+her humility, but as an equal, as if the great Dunois had been a _prud'
+homme_ of her own degree. There is no appearance indeed that the Maid
+allowed herself to be overborne now by any shyness or undue humility.
+She speaks loudly, so as to be heard by those fighting men, taking
+something of their own brief and decisive tone, often even impatient, as
+one who would not be put aside either by cunning or force.
+
+Her meeting with Dunois makes this at once evident. She had been
+deceived in the manner of her approach to Orleans, her companions, among
+whom there were several field-marshals and distinguished leaders, taking
+advantage of her ignorance of the place to lead her by the opposite bank
+of the river instead of that on which the English towers were built,
+which she desired to attack at once. This was the beginning of a long
+series of deceits and hostile combinations, by which at every step
+of her way she was met and retarded; but it turned, as these devices
+generally did, to the discomfiture of the adverse captains. She crossed
+the river at Checy above Orleans, to meet Dunois who had come so far to
+meet her. It will be seen by the conversation which she held with him
+on his first appearance, how completely Jeanne had learnt to assert
+herself, and how much she had overcome any fear of man. "Are you the
+Bastard of Orleans?" she said. "I am; and glad of your coming," he
+replied. "Is it you who have had me led to this side of the river and
+not to the bank on which Talbot is and his English?" He answered that
+he and the wisest of the leaders had thought it the best and safest
+way. "The counsel of God, our Lord, is more sure and more powerful than
+yours," she replied. The expedition, as a matter of fact, had to turn
+back, and to lose precious time, there being, it is to be presumed,
+no means of transporting so large a force across the river. The large
+convoy of provisions which Jeanne brought was embarked in boats while
+the majority of the army returned to Blois, in order to cross by the
+bridge.
+
+Jeanne, however, having freely expressed her opinion, adapted herself to
+the circumstances, though extremely averse to separate herself from her
+soldiers, good men who had confessed and prepared their souls for every
+emergency. She finally consented, however, to ride on with Dunois and La
+Hire. The wind was against the convoy, so that the heavy boats, deeply
+laden with beeves and corn, had a dangerous and slow voyage before them.
+"Have patience," cried Jeanne; "by the help of God all will go well";
+and immediately the wind changed, to the astonishment and joy of all,
+and the boats arrived in safety "in spite of the English, who offered no
+hindrance whatever," as she had predicted. The little party made their
+way along the bank, and in the twilight of the April evening, about
+eight o'clock, entered Orleans. The Deliverer, it need not be said, was
+hailed with joy indescribable. She was on a white horse, and carried,
+Dunois says, the banner in her hand, though it was carried before her
+when she entered the town. The white figure in the midst of those darkly
+gleaming mailed men, would in itself throw a certain glory through the
+dimness of the night, as she passed the gates and came into view by the
+blaze of all the torches, and the lights in the windows, over the dark
+swarming crowds of the citizens. Her white banner waving, her white
+armour shining, it was little wonder that the throng that filled the
+streets received the Maid "as if they had seen God descending among
+them." "And they had good reason," says the Chronicle, "for they had
+suffered many disturbances, labours, and pains, and, what is worse,
+great doubt whether they ever should be delivered. But now all were
+comforted, as if the siege were over, by the divine strength that was in
+this simple Maid whom they regarded most affectionately, men, women, and
+little children. There was a marvellous press around her to touch her
+or the horse on which she rode, so much so that one of the torchbearers
+approached too near and set fire to her pennon; upon which she touched
+her horse with her spurs, and turning him cleverly, extinguished the
+flame, as if she had long followed the wars."
+
+There could have been nothing she resembled so much as St. Michael, the
+warrior-angel, who, as all the world knew, was her chief counsellor and
+guide, and who, no doubt, blazed, a familiar figure, from some window in
+the cathedral to which this his living picture rode without a pause, to
+give thanks to God before she thought of refreshment or rest. She spoke
+to the people who surrounded her on every side as she went on through
+the tumultuous streets, bidding them be of good courage and that if they
+had faith they should escape from all their troubles. And it was only
+after she had said her prayers and rendered her thanksgiving, that
+she returned to the house selected for her--the house of an important
+personage, Jacques Boucher, treasurer to the Duke of Orleans, not like
+the humble places where she had formerly lodged. The houses of that age
+were beautiful, airy and light, with much graceful ornament and solid
+comfort, the arched and vaulted Gothic beginning to give place to those
+models of domestic architecture which followed the Renaissance, with
+their ample windows and pleasant space and breadth. There the table was
+spread with a joyous meal in honour of this wonderful guest, to which,
+let us hope, Dunois and La Hire and the rest did full justice. But
+Jeanne was indifferent to the feast. She mixed with water the wine
+poured for her into a silver cup, and dipped her bread in it, five
+or six small slices. The visionary peasant girl cared for none of the
+dainty meats. And then she retired to the comfort of a peaceful chamber,
+where the little daughter of the house shared her bed: strange return
+to the days when Hauvette and Mengette in Domremy lay by her side and
+talked as girls love to do, through half the silent night. Perhaps
+little Charlotte, too, lay awake with awe to wonder at that other young
+head on the pillow, a little while ago shut into the silver helmet, and
+shining like the archangel's. The _etat majeur_, the Chevalier d'Aulon,
+Jean de Metz, and Bertrand de Poulengy, who had never left her, first
+friends and most faithful, and her brother Pierre d'Arc, were lodged in
+the same house. It was the last night of April, 1429.
+
+     (1) The dates must of course be reckoned by the old style.--
+     This letter was dispatched from Tours, during her pause
+     there.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV -- THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS. MAY 1-8, 1429.
+
+Next morning there was a council of war among the many leaders now
+collected within the town. It was the eager desire of Jeanne that an
+assault should be made at once, in all the enthusiasm of the moment,
+upon the English towers, without waiting even for the arrival of the
+little army which she had preceded. But the captains of the defence who
+had borne the heat and burden of the day, and who might naturally
+enough be irritated by the enthusiasm with which this stranger had been
+received, were of a different opinion. I quote here a story, for which
+I am told there is no foundation whatever, touching a personage who
+probably never existed, so that the reader may take it as he pleases,
+with indulgence for the writer's weakness, or indignation at her
+credulity. It seems to me, however, to express very naturally a
+sentiment which must have existed among the many captains who had been
+fighting unsuccessfully for months in defence of the beleaguered city.
+A certain Guillaume de Gamache felt himself insulted above all by the
+suggestion. "What," he cried, "is the advice of this hussy from the
+fields (_une peronnelle de bas lieu_) to be taken against that of a
+knight and captain! I will fold up my banner and become again a simple
+soldier. I would rather have a nobleman for my master than a woman whom
+nobody knows."
+
+Dunois, who was too wise to weaken the forces at his command by such a
+quarrel, is said to have done his best to reconcile and soothe the angry
+captain. This, however, if it was true, was only a mild instance of the
+perpetual opposition which the Maid encountered from the very beginning
+of her career and wherever she went. Notwithstanding her victories, she
+remained through all her career a _peronnelle_ to these men of war (with
+the noble exception, of course, of Alencon, Dunois, Xaintrailles, La
+Hire, and others). They were sore and wounded by her appearance and her
+claims. If they could cheat her, balk her designs, steal a march in any
+way, they did so, from first to last, always excepting the few who were
+faithful to her. Dunois could afford to be magnanimous, but the lesser
+men were jealous, envious, embittered. A _peronnelle_, a woman nobody
+knew! And they themselves were belted knights, experienced soldiers, of
+the best blood of France. It was not unnatural; but this atmosphere
+of hate, malice, and mortification forms the background of the picture
+wherever the Maid moves in her whiteness, illuminating to us the whole
+scene. The English hated her lustily as their enemy and a witch, casting
+spells and enchantments so that the strength was sucked out of a man's
+arm and the courage from his heart: but the Frenchmen, all but those
+who were devoted to her, regarded her with an ungenerous opposition, the
+hate of men shamed and mortified by every triumph she achieved.
+
+Jeanne was angry, too, and disappointed, more than she had been by all
+discouragements before. She had believed, perhaps, that once in the
+field these oppositions would be over, and that her mission would be
+rapidly accomplished. But she neither rebelled nor complained. What
+she did was to occupy herself about what she felt to be her business,
+without reference to any commander. She sent out two heralds,(1) who
+were attached to her staff, and therefore at her personal disposal, to
+summon once more Talbot and Glasdale (Classidas, as the French called
+him) _de la part de Dieu_ to evacuate their towers and return home. It
+would seem that in her miraculous soul she had a visionary hope that
+this appeal might be successful. What so noble, what so Christian, as
+that the one nation should give up, of free-will, its attempt upon the
+freedom and rights of another, if once the duty were put simply before
+it--and both together joining hands, march off, as she had already
+suggested, to do the noblest deed that had ever yet been done for
+Christianity? That same evening she rode forth with her little train;
+and placing herself on the town end of the bridge (which had been broken
+in the middle), as near as the breach would permit to the bastille, or
+fort of the Tourelles, which was built across the further end of
+the bridge, on the left side of the Loire--called out to the enemy,
+summoning them once more to withdraw while there was time. She was
+overwhelmed, as might have been expected, with a storm of abusive shouts
+and evil words, Classidas and his captains hurrying to the walls to
+carry on the fierce exchange of abuse. To be called dairy-maid and
+_peronnelle_ was a light matter, but some of the terms used were so
+cruel that, according to some accounts, she betrayed her womanhood by
+tears, not prepared apparently for the use of such foul weapons against
+her. The _Journal du Siege_ declares, however, that she was "aucunement
+yree" (angry), but answered that they lied, and rode back to the city.
+
+The next Sunday, the 1st of May, Dunois, alarmed by the delay of his
+main body, set out for Blois to meet them, and we are told that Jeanne
+accompanied him to the special point of danger, where the English from
+their fortifications might have stopped his progress, and took up a
+position there, along with La Hire, between the expedition and the
+enemy. But in the towers not a man budged, not a shot was fired. It was
+again a miracle, and she had predicted it. The party of Dunois marched
+on in safety, and Jeanne returned to Orleans, once more receiving on
+the breeze some words of abuse from the defenders of those battlements,
+which sent forth no more dangerous missile, and replying again with
+her summons, "_Retournez de la par Dieu a Angleterre._" The townsfolk
+watched her coming and going with an excitement impossible to describe;
+they walked by the side of her charger to the cathedral, which was
+the end of every progress; they talked to her, all speaking together,
+pressing upon her--and she to them, bidding them to have no fear.
+"Messire has sent me," she said again and again. She went out again,
+Wednesday, 4th May, on the return of Dunois, to meet the army, with the
+same result, that they entered quietly, the English not firing a shot.
+
+On this same day, in the afternoon, after the early dinner, there
+happened a wonderful scene. Jeanne, it appeared, had fallen asleep after
+her meal, no doubt tired with the expedition of the morning, and her
+chief attendant, D'Aulon, who had accompanied Dunois to fetch the troops
+from Blois, being weary after his journey, had also stretched himself
+on a couch to rest. They were all tired, the entry of the troops
+having been early in the morning, a fact of which the angry captains of
+Orleans, who had not shared in that expedition, took advantage to make
+a secret sortie unknown to the new chiefs. All at once the Maid awoke in
+agitation and alarm. Her "voices" had awakened her from her sleep. "My
+council tell me to go against the English," she cried; "but if to assail
+their towers or to meet Fastolfe I cannot tell." As she came to the full
+command of her faculties her trouble grew. "The blood of our soldiers is
+flowing," she said; "why did they not tell me? My arms, my arms!" Then
+she rushed down stairs to find her page amusing himself in the tranquil
+afternoon, and called to him for her horse. All was quiet, and no doubt
+her attendants thought her mad: but D'Aulon, who knew better than to
+contradict his mistress, armed her rapidly, and Luis, the page, brought
+her horse to the door. By this time there began to rise a distant rumour
+and outcry, at which they all pricked their ears. As Jeanne put her foot
+in the stirrup she perceived that her standard was wanting, and called
+to the page, Louis de Contes, above, to hand it to her out of the
+window. Then with the heavy flag-staff in her hand she set spurs to her
+horse, her attendants one by one clattering after her, and dashed onward
+"so that the fire flashed from the pavement under the horse's feet."
+
+Jeanne's presentiment was well-founded. There had been a private
+expedition against the English fort of St. Loup carried out quietly to
+steal a march upon her--Gamache, possibly, or other malcontents of his
+temper, in the hope perhaps of making use of her prestige to gain a
+victory without her presence. But it had happened with this sally as
+with many others which had been made from Orleans; and when Jeanne
+appeared outside the gate which she and the rest of the followers
+after her had almost forced--coming down upon them at full gallop, her
+standard streaming, her white armour in a blaze of reflection, she met
+the fugitives flying back towards the shelter of the town. She does not
+seem to have paused or to have deigned to address a word to them, though
+the troop of soldiers and citizens who had snatched arms and flung
+themselves after her, arrested and turned them back. Straight to the
+foot of the tower she went, Dunois startled in his turn, thundering
+after her. It is not for a woman to describe, any more than it was for a
+woman to execute such a feat of war. It is said that she put herself at
+the head of the citizens, Dunois at the head of the soldiers. One moment
+of pity and horror and heart-sickness Jeanne had felt when she met
+several wounded men who were being carried towards the town. She had
+never seen French blood shed before, and the dreadful thought that
+they might die unconfessed, overwhelmed her soul; but this was but an
+incident of her breathless gallop to the encounter. To isolate the tower
+which was attacked was the first necessity, and then the conflict was
+furious--the English discouraged, but fighting desperately against
+a mysterious force which overwhelmed them, at the same time that it
+redoubled the ardour of every Frenchman. Lord Talbot sent forth parties
+from the other forts to help their companions, but these were met in the
+midst by the rest of the army arriving from Orleans, which stopped
+their course. It was not till evening, "the hour of Vespers," that the
+bastille was finally taken, with great slaughter, the Orleanists giving
+little quarter. During these dreadful hours the Maid was everywhere
+visible with her standard, the most marked figure, shouting to her men,
+weeping for the others, not fighting herself so far as we hear, but
+always in the front of the battle. When she went back to Orleans
+triumphant, she led a band of prisoners with her, keeping a wary eye
+upon them that they might not come to harm.
+
+The next day, May 5th, was the Feast of the Ascension, and it was spent
+by Jeanne in rest and in prayer. But the other leaders were not so
+devout. They held a crowded and anxious council of war, taking care that
+no news of it should reach the ears of the Maid. When, however, they had
+decided upon the course to pursue they sent for her, and intimated to
+her their decision to attack only the smaller forts, which she heard
+with great impatience, not sitting down, but walking about the room in
+disappointment and anger. It is difficult(2) for the present writer to
+follow the plans of this council or to understand in what way Jeanne
+felt herself contradicted and set aside. However it was, the fact seems
+certain that their plan failed at first, the English having themselves
+abandoned one of the smaller forts on the right side of the river and
+concentrated their forces in the greater ones of Les Augustins and
+Les Tourelles on the left bank. For all this, reference to the map is
+necessary, which will make it quite clear. It was Classidas, as he
+is called, Glasdale, the most furious enemy of France, and one of the
+bravest of the English captains who held the former, and for a moment
+succeeded in repulsing the attack. The fortune of war seemed about to
+turn back to its former current, and the French fell back on the boats
+which had brought them to the scene of action, carrying the Maid with
+them in their retreat. But she perceived how critical the moment was,
+and reining up her horse from the bank, down which she was being forced
+by the crowd, turned back again, closely followed by La Hire, and at
+once, no doubt, by the stouter hearts who only wanted a leader--and
+charging the English, who had regained their courage as the white
+armour of the witch disappeared, and were in full career after the
+fugitives--drove them back to their fortifications, which they gained
+with a rush, leaving the ground strewn with the wounded and dying.
+Jeanne herself did not draw bridle till she had planted her standard on
+the edge of the moat which surrounded the tower.
+
+Michelet is very brief concerning this first victory, and claims only
+that "the success was due in part to the Maid," although the crowd of
+captains and men-at-arms where by themselves quite sufficient for the
+work, had there been any heart in them. But this was true to fact in
+almost every case: and it is clear that she was simply the heart, which
+was the only thing wanted to those often beaten Frenchmen; where she
+was, where they could hear her robust young voice echoing over all the
+din, they were as men inspired; when the impetus of their flight carried
+her also away, they became once more the defeated of so many battles.
+The effect upon the English was equally strong; when the back of Jeanne
+was turned, they were again the men of Agincourt; when she turned
+upon them, her white breastplate blazing out like a star, the sunshine
+striking dazzling rays from her helmet, they trembled before the
+sorceress; an angel to her own side, she was the very spirit of magic
+and witchcraft to her opponents. Classidas, or which captain soever
+of the English side it might happen to be, blaspheming from the
+battlements, hurled all the evil names of which a trooper was capable,
+upon her, while she from below summoned them, in different tones of
+appeal and menace, calling upon them to yield, to go home, to give up
+the struggle. Her form, her voice are always evident in the midst of the
+great stone bullets, the cloth-yard shafts that were flying--they were
+so near, the one above, the other below, that they could hear each other
+speak.
+
+On the 7th of May the fort of Les Augustins on the left bank was taken.
+It will be seen by reference to the map, that this bastille, an ancient
+convent, stood at some distance from the river, in peaceful times a
+little way beyond the bridge, and no doubt a favourite Sunday walk
+from the city. The bridge was now closed up by the frowning bulk of the
+Tourelles built upon it, with a smaller tower or "boulevard" on the
+left bank communicating with it by a drawbridge. When Les Augustins was
+taken, the victorious French turned their arms against this boulevard,
+but as night had fallen by this time, they suspended the fighting,
+having driven back the English, who had made a sally in help of Les
+Augustins. Here in the dark, which suited their purpose, another council
+was held. The captains decided that they would now pursue their victory
+no further, the town being fully supplied with provisions and joyful
+with success, but that they would await the arrival of reinforcements
+before they proceeded further; probably their object was solely to get
+rid of Jeanne, to conclude the struggle without her, and secure the
+credit of it. The council was held in the camp within sight of the fort,
+by the light of torches; after she had been persuaded to withdraw, on
+account of a slight wound in her foot from a calthrop, it is said.
+This message was sent after her into Orleans. She heard it with quiet
+disdain. "You have held your council, and I have had mine," she said
+calmly to the messengers; then turning to her chaplain, "Come to me
+to-morrow at dawn," she said, "and do not leave me; I shall have much
+to do. My blood will be shed. I shall be wounded(3) to-morrow," pointing
+above her right breast. Up to this time no weapon had touched her; she
+had stood fast among all the flying arrows, the fierce play of spear and
+sword, and had taken no harm.
+
+In the morning early, at sunrise, she dashed forth from the town again,
+though the generals, her hosts, and all the authorities who were in the
+plot endeavoured to detain her. "Stay with us, Jeanne," said the people
+with whom she lodged--official people, much above the rank of the
+Maid--"stay and help us to eat this fish fresh out of the river." "Keep
+it for this evening," she said, "and I shall return by the bridge and
+bring you some Goddens to have their share." She had already brought in
+a party of the Goddens on the night before to protect them from the fury
+of the crowd. The peculiarity of this promise lay in the fact that
+the bridge was broken, and could not be passed, even without that
+difficulty, without passing through the Tourelles and the boulevard
+which blocked it at the other end. At the closed gates another great
+official stood by, to prevent her passing, but he was soon swept away
+by the flood of enthusiasts who followed the white horse and its white
+rider. The crowd flung themselves into the boats to cross the river with
+her, horse and man. Les Tourelles stood alone, black and frowning across
+the shining river in its early touch of golden sunshine, on the
+south side of the Loire, the lower tower of the boulevard on the bank
+blackened with the fire of last night's attack, and the smoking ruins
+of Les Augustins beyond. The French army, whom Orleans had been busy
+all night feeding and encouraging, lay below, not yet apparently moving
+either for action or retreat. Jeanne plunged among them like a ray of
+light, D'Aulon carrying her banner; and passing through the ranks,
+she took up her place on the border of the moat of the boulevard. Her
+followers rushed after with that _elan_ of desperate and uncalculating
+valour which was the great power of the French arms. In the midst of
+the fray the girl's clear voice, _assez voix de femme_, kept shouting
+encouragements, _de la part de Dieu_ always her war-cry. "_Bon coeur,
+bonne esperance_," she cried--"the hour is at hand." But after hours of
+desperate fighting the spirit of the assailants began to flag. Jeanne,
+who apparently did not at any time take any active part in the struggle,
+though she exposed herself to all its dangers, seized a ladder, placed
+it against the wall, and was about to mount, when an arrow struck her
+full in the breast. The Maid fell, the crowd closed round; for a moment
+it seemed as if all were lost.
+
+Here we have over again in the fable our friend Gamache. It is a pretty
+story, and though we ask no one to take it for absolute fact, there is
+no reason why some such incident might not have occurred. Gamache, the
+angry captain who rather than follow a _peronnelle_ to the field was
+prepared to fold his banner round its staff, and give up his rank, is
+supposed to have been the nearest to her when she fell. It was he who
+cleared the crowd from about her and raised her up. "Take my horse,"
+he said, "brave creature. Bear no malice. I confess that I was in the
+wrong." "It is I that should be wrong if I bore malice," cried Jeanne,
+"for never was a knight so courteous" (_chevalier si bien apprins_).
+She was surrounded immediately by her people, the chaplain whom she had
+bidden to keep near her, her page, all her special attendants, who would
+have conveyed her out of the fight had she consented. Jeanne had the
+courage to pull the arrow out of the wound with her own hand,--"it stood
+a hand breadth out" behind her shoulder--but then, being but a girl and
+this her first experience of the sort, notwithstanding her armour and
+her rank as General-in-Chief, she cried with the pain, this commander
+of seventeen. Somebody then proposed to charm the wound with an
+incantation, but the Maid indignant, cried out, "I would rather die."
+Finally a compress soaked in oil was placed upon it, and Jeanne withdrew
+a little with her chaplain, and made her confession to him, as one who
+might be about to die.
+
+But soon her mood changed. She saw the assailants waver and fall back;
+the attack grew languid, and Dunois talked of sounding the retreat. Upon
+this she got to her feet, and scrambled somehow on her horse. "Rest a
+little," she implored the generals about her, "eat something, refresh
+yourselves: and when you see my standard floating against the wall,
+forward, the place is yours." They seem to have done as she suggested,
+making a pause, while Jeanne withdrew a little into a vineyard close
+by, where there must have been a tuft of trees, to afford her a little
+shelter. There she said her prayers, and tasted that meat to eat that
+men wot not of, which restores the devout soul. Turning back she took
+her standard from her squire's hand, and planted it again on the edge of
+the moat. "Let me know," she said, "when the pennon touches the wall."
+The folds of white and gold with the benign countenance of the Saviour,
+now visible, now lost in the changes of movement, floated over their
+heads on the breeze of the May day. "Jeanne," said the squire, "it
+touches!" "On!" cried the Maid, her voice ringing through the momentary
+quiet. "On! All is yours!" The troops rose as one man; they flung
+themselves against the wall, at the foot of which that white figure
+stood, the staff of her banner in her hand, shouting, "All is yours."
+Never had the French _elan_ been so wildly inspired, so irresistible;
+they swarmed up the wall "as if it had been a stair." "Do they
+think themselves immortal?" the panic-stricken English cried among
+themselves--panic-stricken not by their old enemies, but by the white
+figure at the foot of the wall. Was she a witch, as had been thought?
+was not she indeed the messenger of God? The dazzling rays that shot
+from her armour seemed like butterflies, like doves, like angels
+floating about her head. They had thought her dead, yet here she stood
+again without a sign of injury; or was it Michael himself, the great
+archangel whom she resembled do much? Arrows flew round her on every
+side but never touched her. She struck no blow, but the folds of her
+standard blew against the wall, and her voice rose through all the
+tumult. "On! Enter! _de la part de Dieu!_ for all is yours."
+
+The Maid had other words to say, "_Renty, renty_, Classidas!" she cried,
+"you called me vile names, but I have a great pity for your soul." He
+on his side showered down blasphemies. He was at the last gasp; one
+desperate last effort he made with a handful of men to escape from the
+boulevard by the drawbridge to Les Tourelles, which crossed a narrow
+strip of the river. But the bridge had been fired by a fire-ship from
+Orleans and gave way under the rush of the heavily-armed men; and the
+fierce Classidas and his companions were plunged into the river, where a
+knight in armour, like a tower falling, went to the bottom in a moment.
+Nearly thirty of them, it is said, plunged thus into the great Loire and
+were seen no more.
+
+It was the end of the struggle. The French flag swung forth on the
+parapet, the French shout rose to heaven. Meanwhile a strange sight was
+to be seen--the St. Michael in shining armour, who had led that assault,
+shedding tears for the ferocious Classidas, who had cursed her with his
+last breath. "_J'ai grande pitie de ton ame._" Had he but had time to
+clear his soul and reconcile himself with God!
+
+This was virtually the end of the siege of Orleans. The broken bridge on
+the Loire had been rudely mended, with a great _gouttiere_ and planks,
+and the people of Orleans had poured out over it to take the Tourelles
+in flank--the English being thus taken between Jeanne's army on the one
+side and the citizens on the other. The whole south bank of the river
+was cleared, not an Englishman left to threaten the richest part of
+France, the land flowing with milk and honey. And though there
+still remained several great generals on the other side with strong
+fortifications to fall back upon, they seem to have been paralysed, and
+did not strike a blow. Jeanne was not afraid of them, but her ardour
+to continue the fight dropped all at once; enough had been done. She
+awaited the conclusion with confidence. Needless to say that Orleans was
+half mad with joy, every church sounding its bells, singing its song of
+triumph and praise, the streets so crowded that it was with difficulty
+that the Maid could make her progress through them, with throngs of
+people pressing round to kiss her hand, if might be, her greaves, her
+mailed shoes, her charger, the floating folds of her banner. She had
+said she would be wounded and so she was, as might be seen, the envious
+rent of the arrow showing through the white plates of metal on her
+shoulder. She had said all should be theirs _de par Dieu:_ and all
+was theirs, thanks to our Lord and also to St. Aignan and St. Euvert,
+patrons of Orleans, and to St. Louis and St. Charlemagne in heaven who
+had so great pity of the kingdom of France: and to the Maid on
+earth, the Heaven-sent deliverer, the spotless virgin, the celestial
+warrior--happy he who could reach to kiss it, the point of her mailed
+shoe.
+
+Someone says that she rode through all this half-delirious joy like
+a creature in a dream,--fatigue, pain, the happy languor of the end
+attained, and also the profound pity that was the very inspiration of
+her spirit, for all those souls of men gone to their account without
+help of Church or comfort of priest--overwhelming her. But next day,
+which was Sunday, she was up again and eagerly watching all that went
+on. A strange sight was Orleans on that Sunday of May. On the south
+side of the Loire, all those half-ruined bastilles smoking and silenced,
+which once had threatened not the city only but all the south of France;
+on the north the remaining bands of English drawn up in order of battle.
+The excitement of the town and of the generals in it, was intense; worn
+as they were with three days of continuous fighting, should they sally
+forth again and meet that compact, silent, doubly defiant army, which
+was more or less fresh and unexhausted? Jeanne's opinion was, No;
+there had been enough of fighting, and it was Sunday, the holy day; but
+apparently the French did go out though keeping at a distance, watching
+the enemy. By orders of the Maid an altar was raised between the two
+armies in full sight of both sides, and there mass was celebrated, under
+the sunshine, by the side of the river which had swallowed Classidas
+and all his men. French and English together devoutly turned towards and
+responded to that Mass in the pause of bewildering uncertainty. "Which
+way are their heads turned?" Jeanne asked when it was over. "They are
+turned away from us, they are turned to Meung," was the reply. "Then let
+them go, _de par Dieu_," the Maid replied.
+
+The siege had lasted for seven months, but eight days of the Maid were
+enough to bring it to an end. The people of Orleans still, every year,
+on the 8th of May, make a procession round the town and give thanks to
+God for its deliverance. Henceforth, the Maid was known no longer as
+Jeanne d'Arc, the peasant of Domremy, but as _La Pucelle d'Orleans_, in
+the same manner in which one might speak of the Prince of Waterloo, or
+the Duc de Malakoff.
+
+     (1) Their special mission seems to have been a demand for
+     the return of a herald previously sent who had never come
+     back. As Dunois accompanied the demand by a threat to kill
+     the English prisoners in Orleans if the herald was not sent
+     back, the request was at once accorded, with fierce
+     defiances to the Maid, the dairy-maid as she is called,
+     bidding her go back to her cows, and threatening to burn her
+     if they caught her.
+
+     (2) I avail myself here as elsewhere of Mr. Lang's lucid
+     description. "It is really perfectly intelligible. The
+     Council wanted a feint on the left bank, Jeanne an attack on
+     the right. She knew their scheme, untold, but entered into
+     it. There was, however, no feint. She deliberately forced
+     the fighting. There was grand fighting, well worth telling,"
+     adds my martial critic, who understands it so much better
+     than I do, and who I am happy to think is himself telling
+     the tale in another way.
+
+     (3) She had made this prophecy a month before, and it was
+     recorded three weeks before the event in the Town Book of
+     Brabant.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V -- THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE. JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+
+The rescue of Orleans and the defeat of the invincible English were news
+to move France from one end to the other, and especially to raise the
+spirits and restore the courage of that part of France which had
+no sympathy with the invaders and to which the English yoke was
+unaccustomed and disgraceful. The news flew up and down the Loire from
+point to point, arousing every village, and breathing new heart and
+encouragement everywhere; while in the meantime Jeanne, partially healed
+of her wound (on May 9th she rode out in a _maillet_, a light coat of
+chain-mail), after a few days' rest in the joyful city which she had
+saved with all its treasures, set out on her return to Chinon. She found
+the King at Loches, another of the strong places on the Loire where
+there was room for a Court, and means of defence for a siege should such
+be necessary, as is the case with so many of these wonderful castles
+upon the great French river. Hot with eagerness to follow up her first
+great success and accomplish her mission, Jeanne's object was to march
+on at once with the young Prince, with or without his immense retinue,
+to Rheims where he should be crowned and anointed King as she had
+promised. Her instinctive sense of the necessities of the position, if
+we use that language--more justly, her boundless faith in the orders
+which she believed had been give her from Heaven, to accomplish this
+great act without delay, urged her on. She was straitened, if we may
+quote the most divine of words, till it should be accomplished.
+
+But the Maid, flushed with victory, with the shouts of Orleans still
+ringing in her ears, the applause of her fellow-soldiers, the sound of
+the triumphant bells, was plunged all at once into the indolence,
+the intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering
+favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into foolish
+amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and buffoons alike
+dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always counselling
+caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and drink for
+to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything that was
+enjoyable in the present moment, to subject a young sovereign to toils
+and excitement, and probable loss, for the uncertain advantage of a
+vain ceremony, when he might be enjoying himself safely and at his ease,
+throughout the summer months, on the cheerful banks of the Loire? On the
+other hand, the Chancellor, the Chamberlains, the Church, all his graver
+advisers (with the exception of Gerson, the great theologian to whom
+has been ascribed the authorship of the _Imitation of Christ_, who is
+reported to have said, "If France deserts her, and she fails, she is
+none the less inspired") shook their hands and advised that the way
+should be quite safe and free of danger before the King risked himself
+upon it. It was thus that Jeanne was received when, newly alighted from
+her charger, her shoulder still but half healed, her eyes scarcely clear
+of the dust and smoke, she found herself once more in the ante-chamber,
+wasting the days, waiting in vain behind closed doors, tormented by
+the lutes and madrigals, the light women and lighter men, useless
+and contemptible, of a foolish Court. The Maid, in all the energy
+and impulse of a success which had proved all her claims, had also a
+premonition that her own time was short, if not a direct intimation, as
+some believe, to that effect: and mingled her remonstrances and appeals
+with the cry of warning: "I shall only last a year: take the good of me
+as long as it is possible."
+
+No doubt she was a very great entertainment to the idle seigneurs and
+ladies who would try to persuade her to tell them what was to happen to
+them, she who had prophesied the death of Glasdale and her own wound and
+so many other things. The Duke of Lorraine on her first setting out had
+attempted to discover from Jeanne what course his illness would
+take, and whether he should get better; and all the demoiselles and
+demoiseaux, the flutterers of the ante-chamber, would be still more
+likely to surround with their foolish questions the stout-hearted,
+impatient girl who had acquired a little of the roughness of her soldier
+comrades, and had never been slow at any time in answering a fool
+according to his folly; for Jeanne was no meek or sentimental maiden,
+but a robust and vigorous young woman, ready with a quick response, as
+well as with a ready blow did any one touch her unadvisedly, or use any
+inappropriate freedom. At last, one day while she waited vainly outside
+the cabinet in which the King was retired with a few of his councillors,
+Jeanne's patience failed her altogether. She knocked at the door, and
+being admitted threw herself at the feet of the King. To Jeanne he
+was no king till he had received the consecration necessary for every
+sovereign of France. "Noble Dauphin," she cried, "why should you hold
+such long and tedious councils? Rather come to Rheims and receive your
+worthy crown."
+
+The Bishop of Castres, Christopher de Harcourt, who was present, asked
+her if she would not now in the presence of the King describe to them
+the manner in which her council instructed her, when they talked with
+her. Jeanne reddened and replied: "I understand that you would like to
+know, and I would gladly satisfy you." "Jeanne," said the King in his
+turn, "it would be very good if you could do what they ask, in the
+presence of those here." She answered at once and with great feeling:
+"When I am vexed to find myself disbelieved in the things I say from
+God, I retire by myself and pray to God, complaining and asking of Him
+why I am not listened to. And when I have prayed I hear a voice which
+says, 'Daughter of God, go, go, go! I will help thee, go!' And when
+I hear that voice I feel a great joy." Her face shone as she spoke,
+"lifting her eyes to heaven," like the face of Moses while still it bore
+the reflection of the glory of God, so that the men were dazzled who
+sat, speechless, looking on.
+
+The result was that Charles kindly promised to set out as soon as the
+road between him and Rheims should be free of the English, especially
+the towns on the Loire in which a great part of the army dispersed from
+Orleans had taken refuge, with the addition of the auxiliary forces of
+Sir John Fastolfe, a name so much feared by the French, but at which the
+English reader can scarcely forbear a smile. That the young King did not
+think of putting himself at the head of the troops or of taking part
+in the campaign shows sufficiently that he was indeed a _pauvre sire_,
+unworthy his gallant people. Jeanne, however, nothing better being
+possible, seems to have accepted this mission with readiness, and
+instantly began her preparations to carry it out. It is here that the
+young Seigneur Guy de Laval comes in with his description of her already
+quoted. He was no humble squire but a great personage to whom the King
+was civil and pleased to show courtesy. The young man writes to _ses
+meres_, that is, it seems, his mother and grandmother, to whom, in their
+distant chateau, anxiously awaiting news of the two youths gone to the
+wars, their faithful son makes his report of himself and his brother.
+The King, he says, sent for the Maid, in order, Sir Guy believes, that
+he might see her. And afterwards the young man went to Selles where she
+was just setting out on the campaign.
+
+From Selles, he writes on the 8th June, exactly a month after the
+deliverance of Orleans:
+
+"I went to her lodging to see her, and she sent for wine and told me
+we should soon drink wine in Paris. It was a miraculous thing (_toute
+divine_) to see her and hear her. She left Selles on Monday at the hour
+of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de Boussac and a great many armed
+men with her. I saw her mount her horse, all in white armour excepting
+the head, a little axe in her hand. The great black charger was very
+restive at her door and would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said,
+'to the cross which is in front of the church,' and there she mounted,
+the horse standing still as if he had been bound. Then turning towards
+the church which was close by she said in a womanly voice (_assez voix
+de femme_), 'You priests and people of the Church, make processions and
+prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road, 'Forward,' she said.
+Her unfolded standard was carried by a page; she had her little axe in
+her hand, and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight
+days before. The Maid told me in her lodging that she had sent you,
+grandmother, a small gold ring, which was indeed a very small affair,
+and that she would fain have sent you something better, considering
+your recommendation. To-day M. d'Alencon, the Bastard of Orleans, and
+Gaucourt were to leave Selles, following the Maid. And men are arriving
+from all parts every day, all with good hope in God who I believe will
+help us. But money there is none at the Court, so that for the present I
+have no hope of any help or assistance. Therefore I desire you, _Madame
+ma mere_, who have my seal, spare not the land neither in sale nor
+mortgage . . . . My much honoured ladies and mothers, I pray the blessed
+Son of God that you have a good life and long; and both of us recommend
+ourselves to our brother Louis. And we send our greetings to the reader
+of this letter. Written from Selles, Wednesday, 8th June, 1429. This
+afternoon are arrived M. de Vendome, M. de Boussac, and others, and La
+Hire has joined the army, and we shall soon be at work (_on besognera
+bientot_)--May God grant that it should be according to your desire."
+
+It was with difficulty that the Duc d'Alencon had been got to start, his
+wife consenting with great reluctance. He had been long a prisoner in
+England, and had lately been ransomed for a great sum of money; "Was
+not that a sufficient sacrifice?" the Duchess asked indignantly. To risk
+once more a husband so costly was naturally a painful thing to do, and
+why could not Jeanne be content and stay where she was? Jeanne comforted
+the lady, perhaps with a little good-humoured contempt. "Fear nothing,
+Madame," she said; "I will bring him back to you safe and sound."
+Probably Alencon himself had no great desire to be second in command to
+this country lass, even though she had delivered Orleans; and if he
+set out at all he would have preferred to take another direction and to
+protect his own property and province. The gathering of the army thus
+becomes visible to us; parties are continually coming in; and no doubt,
+as they marched along, many a little chateau--and they abound through
+the country each with its attendant hamlet--gave forth its master or
+heir, poor but noble, followed by as many men-at-arms, perhaps only two
+or three, as the little property could raise, to swell the forces with
+the best and surest of material, the trained gentlemen with hearts full
+of chivalry and pride, but with the same hardy, self-denying habits as
+the sturdy peasants who followed them, ready for any privation; with a
+proud delight to hear that _on besognera bientot_--with that St. Michael
+at their head, and no longer any fear of the English in their hearts.
+
+The first _besogne_ on which this army entered was the siege of Jargeau,
+June 11th, into which town Suffolk had thrown himself and his troops
+when the siege of Orleans was raised. The town was strong and so was the
+garrison, experienced too in all the arts of war, and already aware of
+the wild enthusiasm by which Jeanne was surrounded. She passed through
+Orleans on the 10th of June, and had there been joined by various new
+detachments. The number of her army was now raised, we are told, to
+twelve hundred lances, which means, as each "lance" was a separate
+party, about three thousand six hundred men, though the _Journal du
+Siege_ gives a much larger number; at all events it was a small army
+with which to decide a quarrel between the two greatest nations of
+Christendom. Her associates in command were here once more seized by the
+prevailing sin of hesitation, and many arguments were used to induce her
+to postpone the assault. It would seem that this hesitation continued
+until the very moment of attack, and was only put an end to when Jeanne
+herself impatiently seized her banner from the hand of her squire, and
+planting herself at the foot of the walls let loose the fervour of the
+troops and cheered them on to the irresistible rush in which lay their
+strength. For it was with the commanders, not with the followers, that
+the weakness lay. The Maid herself was struck on the head by a stone
+from the battlements which threw her down; but she sprang up again in a
+moment unhurt. "_Sus! Sus!_ Our Lord has condemned the English--all is
+yours!" she cried. She would seem to have stood there in her place
+with her banner, a rallying-point and centre in the midst of all the
+confusion of the fight, taking this for her part in it, and though she
+is always in the thick of the combat, never, so far as we are told,
+striking a blow, exposed to all the instruments of war, but injured
+by none. The effect of her mere attitude, the steadiness of her stand,
+under the terrible rain of stone bullets and dreadful arrows, must of
+itself have been indescribable.
+
+In the midst of the fiery struggle, there is almost a comic point in
+her watch over Alencon, for whose safety she had pledged herself, now
+dragging him from a dangerous spot with a cry of warning, now pushing
+him forward with an encouraging word. On the first of these occasions
+a gentleman of Anjou, M. de Lude, who took his place in the front was
+killed, which seems hard upon the poor gentleman, who was probably quite
+as well worth caring for as Alencon. "_Avant, gentil duc_," she cried at
+another moment, "forward! Are you afraid? you know I promised your wife
+to bring you safe home." Thus her voice keeps ringing through the din,
+her white armour gleams. "_Sus! Sus!_" the bold cry is almost audible,
+sibilant, whistling amid the whistling of the arrows.
+
+Suffolk, the English Bayard, the most chivalrous of knights, was at last
+forced to yield. One story tells us that he would give up his sword only
+to Jeanne herself,(1) but there is a more authentic description of his
+selection of one youth among his assailants whom the quick perceptions
+of the leader had singled out. "Are you noble?" Suffolk asks in
+the brevity of such a crisis. "Yes; Guillame Regnault, gentleman of
+Auvergne." "Are you a knight?" "Not yet." The victor put a knee to the
+ground before his captive, the vanquished touched him lightly on the
+shoulder with the sword which he then gave over to him. Suffolk was
+always the finest gentleman, the most perfect gentle knight of his time.
+
+"Now let us go and see the English of Meung," cried Jeanne, unwearying,
+as soon as this victory was assured. That place fell easily; it
+is called the bridge of Meung, in the Chronicle, without further
+description, therefore presumably the fortress was not attacked--and
+they proceeded onward to Beaugency. These towns still shine over the
+plain, along the line of the Loire, visible as far as the eye will
+carry over the long levels, the great stream linking one to another like
+pearls on a thread. There is nothing in the landscape now to give even a
+moment's shelter to the progress of a marching army which must have been
+seen from afar, wherever it moved; or to veil the shining battlements,
+and piled up citadels rising here and there, concentrated points and
+centres of life. The great white Castle of Blois, the darker tower of
+Beaugency, still stand where they stood when Jeanne and her men drew
+near, as conspicuous in their elevation of walls and towers as if they
+had been planted on a mountain top. On more than one occasion during
+this wonderful progress from victory to victory, the triumphant leaders
+returned for a day or two to Orleans to tell their good tidings, and to
+celebrate their success.
+
+And there is but one voice as to the military skill which she displayed
+in these repeated operations. The reader sees her, with her banner,
+posted in the middle of the fight, guiding her men with a sort of
+infallible instinct which adds force to her absolute quick perception of
+every difficulty and advantage, the unhesitating promptitude, attending
+like so many servants upon the inspiration which is the soul of all.
+These are things to which a writer ignorant of war is quite unable to
+do justice. What was almost more wonderful still was the manner in which
+the Maid held her place among the captains, most of whom would have
+thwarted her if they could, with a consciousness of her own superior
+place, in which there is never the slightest token of presumption or
+self-esteem. She guarded and guided Alencon with a good-natured and
+affectionate disdain; and when there was risk of a great quarrel and
+a splitting of forces she held the balance like an old and experienced
+guide of men.
+
+This latter crisis occurred before Beaugency on the 15th of June, when
+the Comte de Richemont, Constable of France, the brother of the Duc de
+Bretagne, a great nobleman and famous leader, but in disgrace with the
+King and exiled from the Court, suddenly appeared with a considerable
+army to join himself to the royalist forces, probably with the hope of
+securing the leading place. Richemont was no friend to Jeanne; though he
+apparently asked her help and influence to reconcile him with the King.
+He seems indeed to have thought it a disgrace to France that her troops
+should be led, and victories gained by no properly appointed general,
+but by a woman, probably a witch, a creature unworthy to stand before
+armed men. It must not be forgotten that even now this was the general
+opinion of her out of the range of her immediate influence. The English
+held it like a religion. Bedford, in his description of the siege of
+Orleans and its total failure, reports to England that the discomfiture
+of the hitherto always triumphant army was "caused in great part by the
+fatal faith and vain fear that the French had, of a disciple and servant
+of the enemy of man, called the Maid, who uses many false enchantments,
+and witchcraft, by which not only is the number of our soldiers
+diminished but their courage marvellously beaten down, and the boldness
+of our enemies increased." Richemont was a sworn enemy of all such.
+"Never man hated more, all heresies, sorcerers, and sorceresses, than
+he; for he burned more in France, in Poitou, and Bretagne, than any
+other of his time." The French generals were divided as to the merits
+of Richemont and the advantages to be derived from his support.
+Alencon, the nominal commander, declared that he would leave the army
+if Richemont were permitted to join it. The letters of the King were
+equally hostile to him; but on the other hand there were some who held
+that the accession of the Constable was of more importance than all
+the Maids in France. It was a moment which demanded very wary guidance.
+Jeanne, it would seem, did not regard his arrival with much pleasure;
+probably even the increase of her forces did not please her as it would
+have pleased most commanders, holding so strongly as she did, to the
+miraculous character of her own mission and that it was not so much the
+strength of her troops as the help of God that got her the victory. But
+it was not her part to reject or alienate any champion of France. We
+have an account of their meeting given by a retainer of Richemont,
+which is picturesque enough. "The Maid alighted from her horse, and the
+Constable also. 'Jeanne,' he said, 'they tell me that you are against
+me. I know not if you are from God (_de la part de Dieu_) or not. If
+you are from God I do not fear you; if you are of the devil, I fear you
+still less.' 'Brave Constable,' said Jeanne, 'you have not come here by
+any will of mine; but since you are here you are welcome.'"
+
+Armed neutrality but suspicion on one side, dignified indifference but
+acceptance on the other, could not be better shown.
+
+These successes, however, had been attended by various _escarmouches_
+going on behind. The English, who had been driven out of one town after
+another, had now drawn together under the command of Talbot, and a party
+of troops under Fastolfe, who came to relieve them, had turned back as
+Jeanne proceeded, making various unsuccessful attempts to recover what
+had been lost. Failing in all their efforts they returned across the
+country to Genville, and were continuing their retreat to Paris when the
+two enemies came within reach of each other. An encounter in open field
+was a new experience of which Jeanne as yet had known nothing. She had
+been successful in assault, in the operations of the siege, but to meet
+the enemy hand to hand in battle was what she had never been required to
+do; and every tradition, every experience, was in favour of the English.
+From Agincourt to the Battle of the Herrings at Rouvray near Orleans,
+which had taken place in the beginning of the year (a fight so named
+because the field of battle had been covered with herrings, the
+conquerors in this case being merely the convoy in charge of provisions
+for the English, which Fastolfe commanded), such a thing had not been
+known as that the French should hold their own, much less attain any
+victory over the invaders. In these circumstances there was much talk of
+falling back upon the camp near Beaugency and of retreating or avoiding
+an engagement; anything rather than hazard one of those encounters which
+had infallibly ended in disaster. But Jeanne was of the same mind as
+always, to go forward and fear nothing. "Fall upon them! Go at them
+boldly," she cried. "If they were in the clouds we should have them. The
+gentle King will now gain the greatest victory he has ever had."
+
+It is curious to hear that in that great plain of the Beauce, so flat,
+so fertile, with nothing but vines and cornfields now against the
+horizon, the two armies at last almost stumbled upon each other by
+accident, in the midst of the brushwood by which the country was wildly
+overgrown. The story is that a stag roused by the French scouts rushed
+into the midst of the English, who were advantageously placed among
+the brushwood to arrest the enemy on their march; the wild creature
+terrified and flying before an army blundered into the midst of the
+others, was fired at and thus betrayed the vicinity of the foe. The
+English had no time to form or set up their usual defences. They were so
+taken by surprise that the rush of the French came without warning, with
+a suddenness which gave it double force. La Hire made the first attack
+as leader of the van, and there was thus emulation between the two
+parties, which should be first upon the enemy. When Alencon asked Jeanne
+what was to be the issue of the fight, she said calmly, "Have you good
+spurs?" "What! You mean we shall turn our backs on our enemies?" cried
+her questioner. "Not so," she replied. "The English will not fight,
+they will fly, and you will want good spurs to pursue them." Even this
+somewhat fantastic prophecy put heart into the men, who up to this time
+had been wont to fly and not to fight.
+
+And this was what happened, strange as it may seem. Talbot himself was
+with the English forces, and many a gallant captain beside: but the
+men and their leaders were alike broken in spirit and filled with
+superstitious terrors. Whether these were the forces of hell or those of
+heaven that came against them no one could be sure; but it was a power
+beyond that of earth. The dazzled eyes which seemed to see flights
+of white butterflies fluttering about the standard of the Maid, could
+scarcely belong to one who thought her a servant of the enemy of men.
+But she was a pernicious witch to Talbot, and strangely enough to
+Richemont also, who was on her own side. The English force was thrown
+into confusion, partly, we may suppose, from the broken ground on which
+they were discovered, the undergrowth of the wood which hid both armies
+from each other. But soon that disorder turned into the wildest panic
+and flight. It would almost seem as if between these two hereditary
+opponents one must always be forced into this miserable part. Not all
+the chivalry of France had been able to prevent it at the long string of
+battles in which they were, before the revelation of the Maid; and not
+the desperate and furious valour of Talbot could preserve his English
+force from the infection now. Fastolfe, with the philosophy of an old
+soldier, deciding that it was vain to risk his men when the field
+was already lost, rode off with all his band. Talbot fought with
+desperation, half mad with rage to be thus a second time overcome by so
+unlikely an adversary, and finally was taken prisoner; while the whole
+force behind him fled and were killed in their flight, the plain being
+scattered with their dead bodies.
+
+Jeanne herself made use of those spurs concerning which she had
+enquired, and carried away by the passion of battle, followed in the
+pursuit, we are told, until she met a Frenchman brutally ill-using
+a prisoner whom he had taken, upon which the Maid, indignant, flung
+herself from her horse, and, seating herself on the ground beside the
+unfortunate Englishman, took his bleeding head upon her lap and, sending
+for a priest, made his departure from life at least as easy as pity and
+spiritual consolation could make it on such a disastrous field. In all
+the records there is no mention of any actual fighting on her part.
+She stands in the thick of the flying arrows with her banner, exposing
+herself to every danger; in moments of alarm, when her forces seem
+flagging, she seizes and places a ladder against the wall for an
+assault, and climbs the first as some say; but we never see her strike
+a blow. On the banks of the Loire the fate of the mail-clad Glasdale,
+hopeless in the strong stream underneath the ruined bridge, brought
+tears to her eyes, and now all the excitement of the pursuit vanished
+in an instant from her mind, when she saw the English man-at-arms dying
+without the succour of the Church. Pity was always in her heart; she was
+ever on the side of the angels, though an angel of war and not of peace.
+
+It is perhaps because the numbers engaged were so few that this flight
+or "Chasse de Patay," has not taken a more important place in the
+records of French historians. In general it is only by means of Fontenoy
+that the _amour propre_ of the French nation defends itself against the
+overwhelming list of battles in which the English have had the better of
+it. But this was probably the most complete victory that has ever been
+gained over the stubborn enemy whom French tactics are so seldom able to
+touch; and the conquerors were purely French without any alloy of alien
+arms, except a few Scots, to help them. The entire campaign on the Loire
+was one of triumph for the French arms, and of disaster for the English.
+They--it is perhaps a point of national pride to admit it frankly--were
+as well beaten as heart of Frenchman could desire, beaten not only in
+the result, but in the conduct of the campaign, in heart and in courage,
+in skill and in genius. There is no reason in the world why it should
+not be admitted. But it was not the French generals, not even Dunois,
+who secured these victories. It was the young peasant woman, the
+dauntless Maid, who underneath the white mantle of her inspiration,
+miraculous indeed, but not so miraculous as this, had already developed
+the genius of a soldier, and who in her simplicity, thinking nothing
+but of her "voices" and the counsel they gave her, was already the best
+general of them all.
+
+When Talbot stood before the French generals, no less a person than
+Alencon himself is reported to have made a remark to him, of that
+ungenerous kind which we call in feminine language "spiteful," and which
+is not foreign to the habit of that great nation. "You did not think
+this morning what would have happened to you before sunset," said the
+Duc d'Alencon to the prisoner. "It is the fortune of war," replied the
+English chief.
+
+Once more, however it is like a sudden fall from the open air and
+sunshine when the victorious army and its chiefs turned back to the
+Court where the King and his councillors sat idle, waiting for news
+of what was being done for them. A battle-field is no fine sight; the
+excitement of the conflict, the great end to be served by it, the sense
+of God's special protection, even the tremendous uproar of the fight,
+the intoxication of personal action, danger, and success have, we do not
+doubt a rapture and passion in them for the moment, which carry the mind
+away; but the bravest soldier holds his breath when he remembers the
+after scene, the dead and dying, the horrible injuries inflicted, the
+loss and misery. However, not even the miserable scene of the Chasse de
+Patay is so painful as the reverse of the dismal picture, the halls of
+the royal habitation where, while men died for him almost within hearing
+of the fiddling and the dances, the young King trifled away his useless
+days among his idle favourites, and the musicians played, the assemblies
+were held, and all went on as in the Tuileries. We feel as if we had
+fallen fathoms deep into the meannesses of mankind when we come back
+from the bloodshed and the horror outside, to the King's presence
+within. The troops which had gone out in uncertainty, on an enterprise
+which might well have proved too great for them, had returned in full
+flush of triumph, having at last fully broken the spell of the English
+superiority--which was the greatest victory that could have been
+achieved: besides gaining the substantial advantage of three important
+towns brought back to the King's allegiance--only to find themselves as
+little advanced as before, coming back to the self-same struggle with
+indolent complaining, indifference, and ingratitude.
+
+Jeanne had given the signs that had been demanded from her. She had
+delivered Orleans, she cleared the King's road toward the north. She
+had filled the French forces with an enthusiasm and transport of valour
+which swept away all the traditions of ill fortune. From every point of
+view the instant march upon Rheims and the accomplishment of the great
+object of her mission had not only become practicable, but was the
+wisest and most prudent thing to do.
+
+But this was not the opinion of the Chancellor of France, the Archbishop
+of Rheims, and La Tremouille, or of the indolent young King himself, who
+was very willing to rejoice in the relief from all immediate danger, the
+restoration of the surrounding country, and even the victory itself,
+if only they would have left him in quiet where he was, sufficiently
+comfortable, amused, and happy, without forcing necessary dangers.
+Jeanne's successes and her unseasonable zeal and the commotion that she
+and her train of captains made, pouring in, in all the excitement
+of their triumph, into the midst of the madrigals--seem to have been
+anything but welcome. Go to Rheims to be crowned? yes, some time when
+it was convenient, when it was safe. But in the meantime what was more
+important was to forbid Richemont, whom the Chancellor hated and the
+King did not love, to come into the presence or to have any share either
+in warfare or in pageant. This was not only in itself an extremely
+foolish thing to do, which is always a recommendation, but it was at the
+same time an excuse for wasting a little precious time. When this was
+at last accomplished, and Richemont, though deeply wounded and offended,
+proved himself so much a man of honour and a patriot, that though
+dismissed by the King he still upheld, if languidly, his cause--there
+was yet a great deal of resistance to be overcome. Paris though so far
+off was thrown into great excitement and alarm by the flight at Patay,
+and the whole city was in commotion fearing an immediate advance and
+attack. But in Loches, or wherever Charles may have been, it was all
+taken very easily. Fastolfe, the fugitive, had his Garter taken from
+him as the greatest disgrace that could be inflicted, for his shameful
+flight, about the time when Richemont, one of the victors, was being
+sent off and disgraced on the other side for the crime of having helped
+to inflict, without the consent of the King, the greatest blow which
+had yet been given to the English domination! So the Court held on its
+ridiculous and fatal course.
+
+However the force of public feeling which must have been very frankly
+expressed by many important voices was too much for Charles and he was
+at length compelled to put himself in motion. The army had assembled at
+Gien, where he joined it, and the great wave of enthusiasm awakened by
+Jeanne, and on which he now moved forth as on the top of the wave,
+was for the time triumphant. No one dared say now that the Maid was
+a sorceress, or that it was by the aid of Beelzebub that she cast out
+devils; but a hundred jealousies and hatreds worked against her behind
+backs, among the courtiers, among the clergy, strange as that may sound,
+in sight of the absolute devotion of her mind, and the saintly life
+she led. So much was this the case still, notwithstanding the practical
+proofs she had given of her claims, that even persons of kindred mind,
+partially sharing her inspirations, such as the famous Brother Richard
+of Troyes, looked upon her with suspicion and alarm--fearing a delusion
+of Satan. It is more easy perhaps to understand why the archbishops and
+bishops should have been inclined against her, since, though perfectly
+orthodox and a good Catholic, Jeanne had been independent of all
+priestly guidance and had sought no sanction from the Church to her
+commission, which she believed to be given by Heaven. "Give God the
+praise; but we know that this woman is a sinner." This was the best they
+could find to say of her in the moment of her greatest victories; but
+indeed it is no disparagement to Jeanne or to any saint that she should
+share with her Master the opprobrium of such words as these.
+
+At last however a reluctant start was made. Jeanne with her "people,"
+her little staff, in which, now, were two of her brothers, a second
+having joined her after Orleans, left Gien on the 28th of June; and the
+next day the King very unwillingly set out. There is given a long list
+of generals who surrounded and accompanied him, three or four princes of
+the blood, the Bastard of Orleans, the Archbishop of Rheims, marshals,
+admirals, and innumerable seigneurs, among whom was our young Guy de
+Laval who wrote the letter to his "mothers" which we have already quoted
+and whose faith in the Maid we thus know; and our ever faithful La Hire,
+the big-voiced Gascon who had permission to swear by his _baton_, the
+d'Artagnan of this history. We reckon these names as those of friends:
+Dunois the ever-brave, Alencon the _gentil Duc_ for whom Jeanne had
+a special and protecting kindness, La Hire the rough captain of Free
+Lances, and the graceful young seigneur, Sir Guy as we should have
+called him had he been English, who was so ready to sell or mortgage his
+land that he might convey his troop befittingly to the wars. This little
+group brightens the march for us with their friendly faces. We know that
+they have but one thought of the warrior maiden in whose genius they had
+begun to have a wondering confidence as well as in her divine mission.
+While they were there we feel that she had at least so many who
+understood her, and who bore her the affection of brothers. We are told
+that in the progress of the army Jeanne had no definite place. She rode
+where she pleased, sometimes in the front, sometimes in the rear. One
+imagines with pleasure that wherever her charger passed along the lines
+it would be accompanied by one or other of those valiant and faithful
+companions.
+
+The first place at which a halt was made was Auxerre, a town occupied
+chiefly by Burgundians, which closed its gates, but by means of bribes,
+partly of provisions to be supplied, partly of gifts to La Tremouille,
+secured itself from the attack which Jeanne longed to lead. Other
+smaller strongholds on the road yielded without hesitation. At last they
+came to Troyes, a large and strong place, well garrisoned and confident
+in its strength, the town distinguished in the history of the time
+by the treaty made there, by which the young King had been
+disinherited--and by the marriage of Henry of England with the Princess
+Catherine of France, in whose right he was to succeed to the throne.
+It was an ill-omened place for a French king and the camp was torn with
+dissensions. Should the army march by, taking no notice of it and so
+get all the sooner to Rheims? or should they pause first, to try their
+fortune against those solid walls? But indeed it was not the camp that
+debated this question. The camp was of Jeanne's mind whichever side she
+took, and her side was always that of the promptest action. The garrison
+made a bold sortie, the very day of the arrival of Charles and his
+forces, but had been beaten back: and the King encamped under the walls,
+wavering and uncertain whether he might not still depart on the morrow,
+but sending a repeated summons to surrender, to which no attention was
+paid.
+
+Once more there was a pause of indecision; the King was not bold enough
+either to push on and leave the city, or to attack it. Again councils of
+war succeeded each other day after day, discussing the matter over and
+over, leaving the King each time more doubtful, more timid than before.
+From these debates Jeanne was anxiously held back, while every silken
+fool gave his opinion. At last, one of the councillors was stirred by
+this strange anomaly. He declared among them all, that as it was by the
+advice of the Maid that the expedition had been undertaken, without her
+acquiescence it ought not to be abandoned. "When the King set out it was
+not because of the great puissance of the army he then had with him, or
+the great treasure he had to provide for them, nor yet because it seemed
+to him a probable thing to be accomplished; but the said expedition
+was undertaken solely at the suit of the said Jeanne, who urged him
+constantly to go forward, to be crowned at Rheims, and that he should
+find little resistance, for it was the pleasure and will of God. If
+the said Jeanne is not to be allowed to give her advice now, it is my
+opinion that we should turn back," said the Seigneur de Treves, who had
+never been a partisan of or believer in Jeanne. We are told that at this
+fortunate moment when one of her opponents had thus pronounced in her
+favour, Jeanne, impatient and restless, knocked at the door of the
+council chamber as she had done before in her rustic boldness; and then
+there occurred a brief and characteristic dialogue.
+
+"Jeanne," said the Archbishop of Rheims, taking the first word, probably
+with the ready instinct of a conspirator to excuse himself from
+having helped to shut her out, "the King and his council are in great
+perplexity to know what they should do."
+
+"Shall I be believed if I speak?" said the Maid.
+
+"I cannot tell," replied the King, interposing; "though if you say
+things that are reasonable and profitable, I shall certainly believe
+you."
+
+"Shall I be believed?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes," said the King, "according as you speak."
+
+"Noble Dauphin," she exclaimed, "order your people to assault the city
+of Troyes, to hold no more councils; for, by my God, in three days I
+will introduce you into the town of Troyes, by love or by force, and
+false Burgundy shall be dismayed."
+
+"Jeanne," said the Chancellor, "if you could do that in six days, we
+might well wait."
+
+"You shall be master of the place," said the Maid, addressing herself
+steadily to the King, "not in six days, but to-morrow."
+
+And then there occurred once more the now habitual scene. It was no
+longer the miracle it had been to see her dash forward to her post under
+the walls with her standard which was the signal for battle, to which
+the impatient troops responded, confident in her, as she in herself. But
+for the first time we hear how the young general, learning her trade of
+war day by day, made her preparations for the siege. She was a gunner
+born, according to all we hear, and was quick to perceive the advantage
+of her rude artillery though she had never seen one of these _bouches
+de feu_ till she encountered them at Orleans. The whole army was set to
+work during the night, knights and men-at-arms alike, to raise--with any
+kind of handy material, palings faggots, tables, even doors and windows,
+taken it must be feared from some neighbouring village or faubourg--a
+mound on which to place the guns. The country as we have said is as
+flat as the palm of one's hand. They worked all night under cover of
+the darkness with incredible devotion, while the alarmed townsfolk not
+knowing what was being done, but no doubt divining something from the
+unusual commotion, betook themselves to the churches to pray, and began
+to ponder whether after all it might not be better to join the King
+whose armies were led by St. Michael himself in the person of his
+representative, than to risk a siege. Once more the spell of the Maid
+fell on the defenders of the place. It was witchcraft, it was some
+vile art. They had no heart to man the battlements, to fight like their
+brothers at Orleans and Jargeau in face of all the powers of the evil
+one: the cry of "_Sus! Sus!_" was like the death-knell in their ears.
+
+While the soldiers within the walls were thus trembling and drawing
+back, the bishop and his clergy took the matter in hand; they sallied
+forth, a long procession attended by half the city, to parley with the
+King. It was in the earliest dawn, while yet the peaceful world was
+scarcely awake; but the town had been in commotion all night, every
+visionary person in it seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and a panic
+of superstition and spiritual terror taking the strength out of every
+arm. Jeanne was already at her post, a glimmering white figure in the
+faint and visionary twilight of the morning, when the gates of the city
+swung back before this tremulous procession. The King, however, received
+the envoys graciously, and readily promised to guarantee all the rights
+of Troyes, and to permit the garrison to depart in peace, if the town
+was given up to him. We are not told whether the Maid acquiesced in this
+arrangement, though it at once secured the fulfilment of her prophecy;
+but in any case she would seem to have been suspicious of the good faith
+of the departing garrison. Instead of retiring to her tent she took
+her place at the gate, watchful, to see the enemy march forth. And
+her suspicion was not without reason. The allied troops, English and
+Burgundian, poured forth from the city gates, crestfallen, unwilling to
+look the way of the white witch, who might for aught they knew lay them
+under some dreadful spell, even in the moment of passing. But in the
+midst of them came a darker band, the French prisoners whom they had
+previously taken, who were as a sort of funded capital in their hands,
+each man worth so much money as a ransom, It was for this that Jeanne
+had prepared herself. "_En nom Dieu_," she cried, "they shall not
+be carried away." The march was stopped, the alarm given, the King
+unwillingly aroused once more from his slumbers. Charles must have been
+disturbed at the most untimely hour by the ambassadors from the town,
+and it mattered little to his supreme indolence and indifference what
+might happen to his unfortunate lieges; but he was forced to bestir
+himself, and even to give something from his impoverished exchequer
+for the ransom of the prisoners, which must have been more disagreeable
+still. The feelings of these men who would have been dragged away in
+captivity under the eyes of their victorious countrymen, but for the
+vigilance of the Maid, may easily be imagined.
+
+Jeanne seems to have entered the town at once, to prepare for the
+reception of the King, and to take instant possession of the place,
+forestalling all further impediment. The people in the streets, however,
+received her in a very different way from those of Orleans, with trouble
+and alarm, staring at her as at a dangerous and malignant visitor. The
+Brother Richard, before mentioned, the great preacher and reformer, was
+the oracle of Troyes, and held the conscience of the city in his hands.
+When he suddenly appeared to confront her, every eye was turned upon
+them. But the friar himself was in no less doubt than his disciples; he
+approached her dubiously, crossing himself, making the sacred sign in
+the air, and sprinkling a shower of holy water before him to drive away
+the demon, if demon there was. Jeanne was not unused to support the
+rudest accost, and her frank voice, still _assez femme_, made itself
+heard over every clamour. "Come on, I shall not fly away," she cried,
+with, one hopes, a laugh of confident innocence and good-humour, in face
+of those significant gestures and the terrified looks of all about her.
+French art has been unkind to Jeanne, occupying itself very little about
+her till recently; but her short career is full of pictures. Here the
+simple page grows bright with the ancient houses and highly coloured
+crowd: the frightened and eager faces at every window, the white warrior
+in the midst, sending forth a thousand rays from the polished steel
+and silver of breastplate and helmet: and the brown Franciscan monk
+advancing amid a shower of water drops, a mysterious repetition of
+signs. It gives us an extraordinary epitome of the history of France at
+that period to turn from this scene to the wild enthusiasm of Orleans,
+its crowd of people thronging about her, its shouts rending the air;
+while Troyes was full of terror, doubt, and ill-will, though its nearest
+neighbour, so to speak, the next town, and so short a distance away.
+
+A little later in the same day, the next after the surrender, Jeanne,
+riding with her standard by the side of the King, conducted him to the
+cathedral where he confirmed his previous promises and received the
+homage of the town. It was a beautiful sight, the chronicle tells us, to
+see all these magnificent people, so well dressed and well mounted; "_il
+feroit tres beau voir._"
+
+The fate of Troyes decided that of Chalons, the only other important
+town on the way, the gates of which were thrown open as Charles and his
+army, which grew and increased every day, proceeded on its road. Every
+promise of the Maid had been so far accomplished, both in the greater
+object and in the details: and now there was nothing between Charles the
+disinherited and almost ruined Dauphin of three months ago, trying to
+forget himself in the seclusion and the sports of Chinon--and the sacred
+ceremonial which drew with it every tradition and every assurance of an
+ancient and lawful throne.
+
+Jeanne had her little adventure, personal to herself on the way. Though
+there were neither posts nor telegraphs in those days, there has always
+been a strange swift current in the air or soil which has conveyed news,
+in a great national crisis, from one end of the country to the other. It
+was not so great a distance to Domremy on the Meuse from Troyes on the
+Loire, and it appears that a little group of peasants, bolder than the
+rest, had come forth to hang about the road when the army passed and
+see what was so fine a sight, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of their
+_payse_, their little neighbour, the _commere_ who was godmother to
+Gerard d'Epinal's child, the youthful gossip of his young wife--but who
+was now, if all tales were true, a great person, and rode by the side
+of the King. They went as far as Chalons to see if perhaps all this were
+true and not a fable; and no doubt stood astonished to see her ride by,
+to hear all the marvellous tales that were told of her, and to assure
+themselves that it was truly Jeanne upon whom, more than upon the King,
+every eye was bent. This small scene in the midst of so many great ones
+would probably have been the most interesting of all had it been told
+us at any length. The peasant travellers surrounded her with wistful
+questions, with wonder and admiration. Was she never afraid among all
+those risks of war, when the arrows hailed about her and the _bouches
+de feu_, the mouths of fire, bellowed and flung forth great stones and
+bullets upon her? "I fear nothing but treason," said the victorious
+Maid. She knew, though her humble visitors did not, how that base thing
+skulked at her heels, and infested every path. It must not be forgotten
+that this wonderful and victorious campaign, with all its lists of towns
+taken and armies discomfited, lasted six weeks only, almost every day of
+which was distinguished by some victory.
+
+     (1) The former story was written in 1429, by the Greffier of
+     Rochelle. "I will yield me only to her, the most valiant
+     woman in the world." The Greffier was writing at the moment,
+     but not, of course, as an eyewitness.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI -- THE CORONATION. JULY 17, 1429.
+
+The road was now clear, and even the most timid of counsellors could not
+longer hold back the most indolent of kings. Jeanne had kept her word
+once more and fulfilled her own prophecy, and a force of enthusiasm
+and certainty, not to be put down, pressed forward the unwilling Court
+towards the great ceremonial of the coronation, to which all except
+those most chiefly concerned attached so great an importance. Charles
+would have hesitated still, and questioned the possibility of resistance
+on the part of Rheims, if that city had not sent a deputation of
+citizens with the keys of the town, to meet him. After this it was but
+a triumphal march into the sacred place, where the great cathedral
+dominated a swarming, busy, mediaeval city. King and Archbishop had a
+double triumph, for the priest like the monarch had been shut out from
+his lawful throne, and it was only in the train of the Maid that this
+great ecclesiastic was able to take possession of his dignities. The
+King alighted with the Archbishop at the Archeveche which is close
+to the cathedral, an immense, old palace in which the heads of the
+expedition were lodged. There is a magnificent old hall still remaining
+in which no doubt they all assembled, scarcely able to believe that
+their object was accomplished and that the King of France was actually
+in Rheims, and all the prophecies fulfilled. The Archbishop marched
+into the city in the morning; Charles and his Court, and all his great
+seigneurs, and the body of his army, in which there were many fighting
+men half armed, and some in their rustic clothes as they had left their
+fields to join the King in his march--poured in in the evening, after
+the ecclesiastical procession, filling the town with commotion. Jeanne
+rode beside the King, her banner in her hand. It was July, the vigil of
+the Madeleine, and every church poured forth its crowd to witness the
+entry, and the populace, half troubled, half glad, gazed its eyes out
+upon the white warrior at the side of the King. Her father and uncle
+were there to meet her at the old inn in the Place, which still proudly
+preserves the record of the peasant guests: two astonished rustics,
+no doubt, were thrust forth from some window to watch that incredible
+sight--Jacques who would rather have drowned his daughter with his own
+hands, than have seen her thus launched among men, gazing still
+aghast at the resplendent figure of the chevaliere at the head of the
+procession. This was very different from what he had thought of when his
+village respectability was tortured by the idea of his girl among the
+troopers, yet probably the rigid peasant had never changed his mind.
+
+We are told by M. Blaze de Bury of an ancient custom which we do not
+find stated elsewhere. A platform was erected, he tells us, outside the
+choir of the cathedral to which the King was led the evening before the
+coronation, surrounded by his peers, who showed him to the assembled
+people with a traditional proclamation: "Here is your King whom we,
+peers of France, crown as King and sovereign lord. And if there is a
+soul here which has any objection to make, let him speak and we will
+answer him. And to-morrow he shall be consecrated by the grace of the
+Holy Spirit if you have nothing to say against it." The people replied
+by cries of "Noel, Noel!" It is not to be supposed that the veto of the
+people of Rheims would have been effectual had they opposed: but
+the scene is wonderfully picturesque. No doubt Jeanne too was there,
+watching over her King, as she seems to have done, like a mother over
+her child, at this crisis of his affairs.
+
+That night there was little sleep in Rheims, for everything had to be
+prepared in haste, the decorations of the cathedral, the provisions for
+the ceremonial. Many of the necessary articles were at Saint Denis in
+the hands of the English, and the treasury of the cathedral had to be
+ransacked to find the fitting vessels. Fortunately it was rich, more
+rich probably than it is now, when the commonplace silver of the
+beginning of this century has replaced the ancient vials. Through the
+short summer night everyone was at work in these preparations; and by
+the dawn of day visitors began to flow into the city, great personages
+and small, to attend the great ceremonial and to pay their homage. The
+greatest of all was the Duke of Lorraine, he who had consulted Jeanne
+about his health, husband of the heiress of that rich principality, and
+son of Queen Yolande who was no doubt with the Court. All France seemed
+to pour into the famous town, where so important an act was about to
+be accomplished, with money and wine flowing on all hands, and the
+enthusiasm growing along with the popular excitement and profit. Even
+great London is stirred to its limits, many miles off from the centre
+of proceedings, by such a great event; how much more the little mediaeval
+city, in which every one might hope to see something of the pageant,
+as one shining group after another, with armour blazing in the sun, and
+sleek horses caracoling, arrived at the great gates of the Archeveche:
+and lesser parties scarcely less interesting poured in in need of
+lodging, of equipment and provisions; while every housewife searched
+her stores for a piece of brilliant stuff, of old silk or embroidery, to
+make her house shine like the rest.
+
+Early in the morning, a wonderful procession came out of the
+Archbishop's house. Four splendid peers of France, in full armour
+with their banners, rode through the streets to the old Abbey of Saint
+Remy--the old church which Leo IX. consecrated, in the eleventh century,
+on an equally splendid occasion, and which may still be seen to-day--to
+fetch from its shrine, where it was strictly guarded by the monks,
+the Sainte Ampoule, the holy and sacred vial in which the oil of
+consecration had been sent to Clovis out of Heaven. These noble
+messengers were the "hostages" of this sacred charge, engaging
+themselves by an oath never to lose sight of it by night or day, till it
+was restored to its appointed guardians. This vow having been made,
+the Abbot of St. Remy, in his richest robes, appeared surrounded by his
+monks, carrying the treasure in his hands; and under a splendid
+canopy, blazing in the sunshine with cloth of gold, marched towards the
+cathedral under the escort of the Knights Hostages, blazing also in the
+flashes of their armour. This procession was met half-way, before the
+Church of St. Denis, by another, that of the Archbishop and his train,
+to whom the holy oil was solemnly confided, and carried by them to the
+cathedral, already filled by a dazzled and dazzling crowd.
+
+The Maid had her occupations this July morning like the rest. We hear
+nothing of any interview with her father, or with Durand the good uncle
+who had helped her in the beginning of her career; though it was Durand
+who was sent for to the King and questioned as to Jeanne's life in her
+childhood and early youth; which we may take as proof that Jacques d'Arc
+still stood aloof, _dour_, as a Scotch peasant father might have been,
+suspicious of his daughter's intimacy with all these fine people, and
+in no way cured of his objections to the publicity which is little less
+than shame to such rugged folk. And there were his two sons who would
+take him about, and with whom probably in their easier commonplace
+he was more at home than with Jeanne. What the Maid had to do on the
+morning of the coronation day was something very different from any home
+talk with her relations. She who felt herself commissioned not only to
+lead the armies of France, but to deal with her princes and take part in
+her councils, occupied the morning in dictating a letter to the Duke of
+Burgundy. She had summoned the English by letter three times repeated,
+to withdraw peaceably from the possessions which by God's will were
+French. It was with still better reason that she summoned Philip of
+Burgundy to renounce his feud with his cousin, and thus to heal the
+breach which had torn France in two:
+
+JHESUS, MARIA.
+
+High and redoubtable Prince, Duke of Burgundy. Jeanne the Maid requires
+on the part of the King of Heaven, my most just sovereign and Lord (_mon
+droicturier souverain seigneur_), that the King of France and you make
+peace between yourselves, firm, strong and that will endure. Pardon each
+other of good heart, entirely, as loyal Christians ought to do, and if
+you desire to fight let it be against the Saracens. Prince of Burgundy,
+I pray, supplicate, and require, as humbly as may be, fight no longer
+against the holy kingdom of France: withdraw, at once and speedily,
+your people who are in any strongholds or fortresses of the said holy
+kingdom; and on the part of the gentle King of France, he is ready to
+make peace with you, having respect to his honour, and upon your life
+that you never will gain a battle against loyal Frenchmen and that all
+those who war against the said holy kingdom of France, war against
+the King Jesus, King of Heaven and of all the world and my just and
+sovereign Lord. And I pray and require with clasped hands that you
+fight not, nor make any battle against us, neither your friends nor your
+subjects; but believe always however great in number may be the men you
+lead against us, that you will never win, and it would be great pity
+for the great battle and the blood that would be shed of those who came
+against us. Three weeks ago I sent you a letter by a herald that you
+should be present at the consecration of the King, which to-day, Sunday,
+the seventeenth of the present month of July, is done in the city of
+Rheims: to which I have had no answer, nor even any news by the said
+herald. To God I commend you, and may He be your guard if it pleases
+Him, and I pray God to make good peace.
+
+Written at the aforesaid Rheims, the seventeenth day of July, 1429.
+
+When the letter was finished Jeanne put on her armour and prepared for
+the great ceremony. We are not told what part she took in it, nor is any
+more prominent position assigned to her than among the noble crowd
+of peers and generals who surrounded the altar, where her place
+would naturally be, upon the broad raised platform of the choir, so
+excellently adapted for such ceremonies. Her banner we are told was
+borne into the cathedral, in order, as she proudly explained afterwards,
+that having been foremost in the danger it should share the honour.
+
+But we have no right to suppose that the Maid took the position of the
+chief actor in the pageant and stood alone by the side of Charles,
+as the exigencies of the pictorial art have required her to do. When,
+however, the ceremony was completed, and he had received on his knees
+the anointing which separated him as king from every other class of men,
+and while the lofty vaults echoed with the cries of Noel! Noel! by which
+the people hailed the completed ceremony, Jeanne could contain herself
+no longer. The object was attained for which she had laboured and
+struggled, and overcome every opponent. She stepped forward out of
+the brilliant crowd, and threw herself at the feet of the now crowned
+monarch, embracing his knees. "Gentle King," she cried with tears, "now
+is the pleasure of God fulfilled--whose will it was that I should raise
+the siege of Orleans and lead you to this city of Rheims to receive
+your consecration. Now has He shown that you are true King, and that the
+kingdom of France truly belongs to you alone."
+
+Those broken words, her tears, the cry of that profound satisfaction
+which is almost anguish, the "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart
+in peace," which is so suitable to the lips of the old, so poignant from
+those of the young, pierced all hearts. It is added that she asked leave
+to withdraw, her work being done, and that all who saw her were filled
+with sympathy. It was no doubt the irresistible outburst of a heart too
+full; and though that fulness was all joy and triumph, yet there was in
+it a sense of completed work, a rending asunder and tearing away from
+life, the end of a wonderful and triumphant tale.
+
+There is a considerable controversy as to the precise meaning of that
+outburst of emotion. Did the Maid mean that her work was over, and her
+divine mission fulfilled? Was this all that she believed herself to be
+appointed to do? or did she expect, as she sometimes said, to _bouter_
+the English out of France altogether? In the one case she ought to
+have relinquished her work, and in not doing so she acted without the
+protection of God which had hitherto made her invulnerable. In the
+other, her "voices," her inspiration, must have failed her, for her
+course of triumph went no farther. It is impossible to decide between
+these contending theories. She did speak in both senses, sometimes
+declaring that she was to take Paris, sometimes, her intention to
+_bouter_ the English out of the kingdom. At the same time she betrayed a
+constant conviction that her office had limitations and must come to an
+end. "I will last but a year," she said to the King and to Alencon. The
+testimony of Dunois seems to be the best we can have on this point.
+He says in his deposition, made many years after her death: "Although
+Jeanne sometimes talked playfully to amuse people, of things concerning
+the war which were not afterwards accomplished, yet when she spoke
+seriously of the war, and of her own career and her vocation, she never
+affirmed anything but that she was sent to raise the siege of Orleans
+and to lead the King to Rheims to be crowned."
+
+If this were so was she wrong in continuing her warfare, and did she
+place herself in the position of one who goes on her own charges,
+finding the mission from on high unnecessary? Or in the other case did
+her inspiration fail her, or were the intrigues of Charles and his
+Court sufficient to balk the designs of Heaven? We prefer to think
+that Jeanne's commission concerned only those two things which she
+accomplished so completely; but that in continuing the war, she acted
+only as a well inspired and honourable young soldier might, though no
+longer as the direct messenger of God. She had as much right to do so
+as to return to her distaff or her needle in her native village; but
+she became subject to all the ordinary laws of war by so doing, exposed
+herself to be taken or overthrown like any man-at-arms, and accepted
+that risk. What is certain is, that every intrigue sprang up again
+afresh on the evening of that brilliant and triumphant ceremonial, and
+that from the moment of the accomplishment of her great work the failure
+of the Maid began.
+
+These intrigues had been in her way since her very first beginning, as
+has been seen. At Orleans, in the very field as well as in the council
+chamber and the presence, everything was done to balk her, and to cross
+her plans, but in vain; she triumphed over every contrivance against
+her, and broke through the plots, and overcame the plotters. But after
+Rheims the combination of dangers became ever greater and greater, and
+we may say that no merely human general would have had a chance in face
+of the many and bewildering influences of evil. Charles who was himself,
+at least at this period of his career, sufficiently indolent and
+unenterprising to have damped the energies of any commander, was, in
+addition, surrounded by advisers who had always been impatient and
+jealous of the interference of Jeanne, and would have cast her off as a
+witch, or passed her by as an impostor, had that been possible, without
+permitting her to strike a blow. They had now grudgingly made use of
+her, or rather, for this is too much to say, had permitted her action
+where they had no power to restrain it: but they were as little
+friendly, as malignant in their treatment of the Maid as ever, and more
+hopeful, now that so much had been done by her means, of being able to
+shake her off and pursue their fate in their own way.
+
+The position of Charles crowned King of France with all the traditional
+pomp, master of the Orleannais, with fresh bands of supporters coming in
+to swell his army day by day, and Paris itself almost within his reach,
+was very different from that of the discredited Dauphin at Chinon, whom
+half the world believed to have no right to the crown which his own
+mother had signed away from him, and who wasted his idle days in folly
+to the profit of the greedy councillors who schemed and trafficked
+with his enemies, and to the destruction of all his hopes. The strange
+apparition of virginal purity, energy, and faith which had taken up
+and saved him against his will and all his efforts had not ceased for a
+moment to be hateful to La Tremouille and his party; and Charles--though
+he seems to have had a certain appreciation of the Maid, and even a
+liking for her frank and fearless character, apart from any faith in
+her mission--was far too ready to accept the facts of the moment, and
+probably to believe that, after all, his own worth and favour with
+Heaven had a great deal to do with this dazzling triumph and success:
+certainly he was not the man to make any stand for his deliverer. But
+that she was an auxiliary too important to be sent away was reluctantly
+apparent to them all. To keep her as a sort of tame angel about the
+Court in order to be produced when she was wanted, to put heart into
+the soldiers and frighten the English as she certainly had the gift of
+doing, no doubt appeared to all as a thing desirable enough. And they
+dared not let her go "because of the people," nor, may we believe,
+would Alencon, Dunois, La Hire, and the rest have tolerated thus the
+abandonment of their comrade. To dismiss her even at her own word would
+have been impossible, and it is hard to believe that Jeanne, after that
+extraordinary brief career as a triumphant general and leader, could
+have gone back to her father's cottage of the village, though she
+thought she would fain have done so. If we are to believe that she felt
+her mission to be fulfilled, she was yet mistress of her fate to serve
+France and the King as seemed best.
+
+And we have no evidence that her "voices" forsook her, or discouraged
+her. They seem to have changed a little in their burden, they began to
+mingle a sadder tone in their intimations. It began to be breathed into
+her mind though not immediately, that something was to happen to her,
+some disaster not explained, yet that God was to be with her. It
+seems to me that all the circumstances are compatible with a change in
+Jeanne's consciousness, from the moment of the coronation. It might
+have been a grander thing had she retired there and then, her work being
+accomplished as she declared it to be; but it would not have been human.
+She was still a power, if no longer the direct messenger from Heaven;
+a general, with much skill and natural aptitude if not the Sent of God;
+and the ardour of a military career had got into her veins. No doubt
+she was much more good for that, now, than for sitting by the side of
+Isabeau d'Arc at Domremy, and working even into a piece of embroidery
+for the altar, her remembrances and visions of camp and siege and the
+intoxication of victory. She remained, conscious that she was no longer
+exactly as of old, to fight not only against the English, but with
+intimate enemies, far more bitter, whom now she knew, against the
+ordinary fortune of war, and against that which is a thousand times
+worse, the hatred and envy, the cruel carelessness, and the malignant
+schemes of her own countrymen for whom she had fought.
+
+This, so far as we can judge, appears to be the position of Jeanne in
+the second portion of her career; perhaps only dimly apprehended and at
+moments, by herself; not much thought of probably by those around her,
+the wisest of whom had always been sceptical of her divine commission;
+while the populace never saw any change in her, and believed that at one
+time as well as at another the Maid was the Maid, and had victory at her
+command. And no doubt that influence would have endured for some time at
+least, and her dauntless rush against every obstacle would have carried
+success with it, had she been able to carry out her plans, and fly
+forth upon Paris as she had done upon Orleans, carrying on the campaign
+swiftly, promptly, without pause or uncertainty. Bedford himself said
+that Paris "would fall at a blow," if she came on. It had been hard
+enough, however, to do that, as we have seen, when she was the only hope
+of France and had the fire of the divine enthusiasm in her veins; but
+it was still more hard now to mould a young King elated with triumph,
+beginning to feel the crown safe upon his head, and to feel that if
+there was still much to gain, there was now a great deal to be lost.
+The position was complicated and made more difficult for Jeanne by every
+advantage she had gained.
+
+In the meantime the secret negotiations, which were always being carried
+on under the surface, had come to this point, that Charles had made
+a private treaty with Philip of Burgundy by which that prince pledged
+himself to give up Paris into the King's hands within fifteen days.
+This agreement furnished a sufficient pretext for the delay in marching
+against Paris, delay which was Charles's invariable method, and which
+but for Jeanne's hardihood and determination, had all but crushed the
+expedition to Rheims itself. It was never with any will of his or of his
+adviser, La Tremouille, that any stronghold was assailed. He would fain
+have passed by Troyes, as the reader will remember, he would fain have
+delayed going to Rheims; in each case he had been forced to move by the
+impetuosity of the Maid. But a treaty which touched the honour of the
+King was a different matter. Philip of Burgundy, with whom it was made,
+seems to have held the key of the position. He was called to Paris by
+Bedford on one side to defend the city against its lawful King; he had
+pledged himself on the other to Charles to give it up. He had in his
+hands, though it is uncertain whether he ever read it, that missive of
+the sorceress, the letter of Jeanne which I have quoted, calling upon
+him on the part of God to make peace. What was he to do? There were
+reasons drawing him to both sides. He was the enemy of Charles on
+account of the murder of his father, and therefore had every interest in
+keeping Paris from him; he was angry with the English on account of the
+marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Jacqueline of Brabant, which
+interfered with his own rights and safety in Flanders, and therefore
+might have served himself by giving up the capital to the King. As for
+the appeal of Jeanne, what was the letter of that mad creature to a
+prince and statesman? The progress of affairs was arrested by this
+double problem. Jeanne had been the prominent, the only important figure
+in the history of France for some months past. Now that shining figure
+was jostled aside, and the ordinary laws of life, with all the counter
+changes of negotiation, the ineffectual comings and goings, the meaner
+half-seen persons, the fierce contending personal interests--in which
+there was no love of either God or man, or any elevated notion of
+patriotism--came again into play.
+
+Jeanne would seem to have already foreseen and felt this change even
+before she left Rheims; there is a new tone of sadness in some of her
+recorded words; or if not of sadness, at least of consciousness that an
+end was approaching to all these triumphs and splendours. The following
+tale is told in various different versions, as occurring with different
+people; but the account I give is taken from the lips of Dunois himself,
+a very competent witness. As the King, after his coronation, wended his
+way through the country, receiving submission and joyous welcome from
+every village and little town, it happened that while passing through
+the town of La Ferte, Jeanne rode between the Archbishop of Rheims and
+Dunois. The Archbishop had never been friendly to the Maid, and now it
+was clear, watched her with that half satirical, half amused look of
+the wise man, curious and cynical in presence of the incomprehensible,
+observing her ways and very ready to catch her tripping and to entangle
+her if possible in her own words. The people thronged the way, full of
+enthusiasm, acclaiming the King and shouting their joyful exclamations
+of "Noel!" though it does not appear that any part of their devotion was
+addressed to Jeanne herself. "Oh, the good people," she cried with tears
+in her eyes, "how joyful they are to see their noble King! And how happy
+should I be to end my days and be buried here among them!" The
+priest unmoved by such an exclamation from so young a mouth attempted
+instantly, like the Jewish doctors with our Lord, to catch her in her
+words and draw from her some expression that might be used against her.
+"Jeanne," he said, "in what place do you expect to die?" It was a direct
+challenge to the messenger of Heaven to take upon herself the gift
+of prophecy. But Jeanne in her simplicity shattered the snare which
+probably she did not even perceive: "When it pleases God," she said. "I
+know neither the place nor the time."
+
+It was enough, however, that she should think of death and of the
+sweetness of it, after her work accomplished, in the very moment of
+her height of triumph--to show something of a new leaven working in her
+virgin soul.
+
+One characteristic reward, however, Jeanne did receive. Her father and
+uncle were lodged at the public cost as benefactors of the kingdom, as
+may still be seen by the inscription on the old inn in the great Place
+at Rheims; and when Jacques d'Arc left the city he carried with him a
+patent--better than one of nobility which, however, came to the family
+later--of exemption for the villages of Domremy and Greux of all
+taxes and tributes; "an exemption maintained and confirmed up to the
+Revolution, in favour of the said Maid, native of that parish, in which
+are her relations." "In the register of the Exchequer," says M. Blaze de
+Bury, "at the name of the parish of Greux and Domremy, the place for
+the receipt is blank, with these words as explanation: _a cause de la
+Pucelle_, on account of the Maid." There could not have been a more
+delightful reward or one more after her own heart. It would be a
+graceful act of the France of to-day, which has so warmly revived
+the name and image of her maiden deliverer, to renew so touching a
+distinction to her native place.
+
+We are told that Jeanne parted with her father and uncle with tears,
+longing that she might return with them and go back to her mother who
+would rejoice to see her again. This was no doubt quite true, though
+it might be equally true that she could not have gone back. Did not
+the father return, a little sullen, grasping the present he had himself
+received, not sure still that it was not disreputable to have a daughter
+who wore coat armour and rode by the side of the King, a position
+certainly not proper for maidens of humble birth? The dazzled peasants
+turned their backs upon her while she was thus at the height of glory,
+and never, so far as appears, saw her face again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII -- THE SECOND PERIOD. 1429-1430.
+
+The epic so brief, so exciting, so full of wonder had now reached its
+climax. Whatever we may think on the question as to whether Jeanne had
+now reached the limit of her commission, it is at least evident that she
+had reached the highest point of her triumph, and that her short day of
+glory and success came to an end in the great act which she had always
+spoken of as her chief object. She had crowned her King; she had
+recovered for him one of the richest of his provinces, and established a
+strong base for further action on his part. She had taught Frenchmen how
+not to fly before the English, and she had filled those stout-hearted
+English, who for a time had the Frenchmen in their powerful steel-clad
+grip, with terror and panic, and taught them how to fly in their turn.
+This was, from the first, what she had said she was appointed to do,
+and not one of her promises had been broken. Her career had been a short
+one, begun in April, ending in July, one brief continuous course of
+glory. But this triumphant career had come to its conclusion. The
+messenger of God had done her work; the servant must not desire to be
+greater than his Lord. There have been heroes in this world whose career
+has continued a glorious and a happy one to the end. Our hearts follow
+them in their noble career, but when the strain and pain are over they
+come into their kingdom and reap their reward the interest fails. We
+are glad, very glad, that they should live happy ever after, but their
+happiness does not attract us like their struggle.
+
+It is different with those whose work and whose motives are not those of
+this world. When they step out of the brilliant lights of triumph into
+sorrow and suffering, all that is most human in us rises to follow the
+bleeding feet, our hearts swell with indignation, with sorrow and love,
+and that instinctive admiration for the noble and pure, which proves
+that our birthright too is of Heaven, however we may tarnish or even
+deny that highest pedigree. The chivalrous romance of that age would
+have made of Jeanne d'Arc the heroine of human story. She would have had
+a noble lover, say our young Guy de Laval, or some other generous and
+brilliant Seigneur of France, and after her achievements she would have
+laid by her sword, and clothed herself with the beautiful garments of
+the age, and would have grown to be a noble lady in some half regal
+chateau, to which her name would have given new lustre. The young reader
+will probably long that it should be so; he will feel it an injustice, a
+wrong to humanity that so generous a soul should have no reward; it will
+seem to him almost a personal injury that there should not be a noble
+chevalier at hand to snatch that devoted Maid out of the danger that
+threatened her, out of the horrible fate that befell her; and we can
+imagine a generous boy, and enthusiastic girl, ready to gnash their
+teeth at the terrible and dishonouring thought that it was by English
+hands that this noble creature was tied to the stake and perished in
+the flames. For the last it becomes us(1) to repent, for it was to our
+everlasting shame; but not more to us than to France who condemned her,
+who lifted no finger to help her, who raised not even a cry, a protest,
+against the cruelty and wrong. But for her fate in itself let us not
+mourn over-much. Had the Maid become a great and honoured lady should
+not we all have said as Satan says in the Book of Job: Did Jeanne serve
+God for nought? We should say: See what she made by it. Honour and fame
+and love and happiness. She did nobly, but nobly has she been rewarded.
+
+But that is not God's way. The highest saint is born to martyrdom. To
+serve God for nought is the greatest distinction which He reserves
+for His chosen. And this was the fate to which the Maid of France was
+consecrated from the moment she set out upon her mission. She had the
+supreme glory of accomplishing that which she believed herself to be
+sent to do, and which I also believe she was sent to do, miraculously,
+by means undreamed of, and in which no one beforehand could have
+believed. But when that was done a higher consecration awaited her. She
+had to drink of the cup of which our Lord drank, and to be baptised with
+the baptism with which He was baptised. It was involved in every step
+of the progress that it should be so. And she was herself aware of it,
+vaguely, at heart, as soon as the object of her mission was attained.
+What else could have put the thought of dying into the mind of a girl of
+eighteen in the midst of the adoring crowd, to whom to see her, to touch
+her, was a benediction? When she went forth from those gates she was
+going to her execution, though the end was not to be yet. There was
+still a long struggle before her, lingering and slow, more bitter than
+death, the preface of discouragement, of disappointment, of failure when
+she had most hoped to succeed.
+
+She was on the threshold of this second period when she rode out of
+Rheims all brilliant in the summer weather, her banner faded now,
+but glorious, her shining armour bearing signs of warfare, her end
+achieved--yet all the while her heart troubled, uncertain, and full of
+unrest. And it is impossible not to note that from this time her plans
+were less defined than before. Up to the coronation she had known
+exactly what she meant to do, and in spite of all obstructions had done
+it, keeping her genial humour and her patience, steering her simple way
+through all the intrigues of the Court, without bitterness and without
+fear. But now a vague mist seems to fall about the path which was so
+open and so clear. Paris! Yes, the best policy, the true generalship
+would have been to march straight upon Paris, to lose no time, to leave
+as little leisure as possible to the intriguers to resume their old
+plots. So the generals thought as well as Jeanne: but the courtiers were
+not of that mind. The weak and foolish notion of falling back upon what
+they had gained, and of contenting themselves with that, was all they
+thought of; and the un-French, unpatriotic temper of Paris which wanted
+no native king, but was content with the foreigner, gave them a certain
+excuse. We could not even imagine London as being ever, at any time,
+contented with an alien rule. But Paris evidently was so, and was ready
+to defend itself to the death against its lawful sovereign. Jeanne had
+never before been brought face to face with such a complication. It had
+been a straightforward struggle, each man for his own side, up to this
+time. But now other things had to be taken into consideration. Here
+was no faithful Orleans holding out eager arms to its deliverer, but a
+crafty, self-seeking city, deaf to patriotism, indifferent to freedom,
+calculating which was most to its profit--and deciding that the
+stranger, with Philip of Burgundy at his back, was the safer guide. This
+was enough of itself to make a simple mind pause in astonishment and
+dismay.
+
+There is no evidence that the supernatural leaders who had shaped the
+course of the Maid failed her now. She still heard her "voices." She
+still held communion with the three saints who, she believed devoutly,
+came out of Heaven to aid her. The whole question of this supernatural
+guidance is one which is of course open to discussion. There are many
+in these days who do not believe in it at all, who believe in the
+exaltation of Jeanne's brain, in the excitement of her nerves, in some
+strange complication of bodily conditions, which made her believe she
+saw and heard what she did not really see or hear. For our part, we
+confess frankly that these explanations are no explanation at all so far
+as we are concerned; we are far more inclined to believe that the
+Maid spoke truth, she who never told a lie, she who fulfilled all the
+promises she made in the name of her guides, than that those people are
+right who tell us on their own authority that such interpositions of
+Heaven are impossible. Nobody in Jeanne's day doubted that Heaven did
+interpose directly in human affairs. The only question was, Was it
+Heaven in this instance? Was it not rather the evil one? Was it sorcery
+and witchcraft, or was it the agency of God? The English believed firmly
+that it was witchcraft; they could not imagine that it was God, the God
+of battles, who had always been on their side, who now took the courage
+out of their hearts and taught their feet to fly for the first time. It
+was the devil, and the Maid herself was a wicked witch. Neither one side
+nor the other believed that it was from Jeanne's excited nerves that
+these great things came. There were plenty of women with excited nerves
+in France, nerves much more excited than those of Jeanne, who was always
+reasonable at the height of her inspiration; but to none of them did it
+happen to mount the breach, to take the city, to drive the enemy--up to
+that moment invincible,--flying from the field.
+
+But it would seem as if these celestial visitants had no longer a clear
+and definite message for the Maid. Their words, which she quotes, were
+now promises of support, vague warnings of trouble to come. "Fear not,
+for God will stand by you." She thought they meant that she would be
+delivered in safety as she had been hitherto, her wounds healing, her
+sacred person preserved from any profane touch. But yet such promises
+have always something enigmatical in them, and it might be, as proved to
+be the case, that they meant rather consolation and strength to endure
+than deliverance. For the first time the Maid was often sad; she feared
+nothing, but the shadow was heavy on her heart. Orleans and Rheims had
+been clear as daylight, her "voices" had said to her "Do this" and she
+had done it. Now there was no definite direction. She had to judge for
+herself what was best, and to walk in darkness, hoping that what she did
+was what she was meant to do, but with no longer any certainty. This of
+itself was a great change, and one which no doubt she felt to her heart.
+M. Fabre tells (alone among the biographers of Jeanne) that there were
+symptoms of danger to her sound and steady mind, in her words and ways
+during the moment of triumph. Her chaplain Pasquerel wrote a letter
+in her name to the Hussites, against whom the Pope was then sending
+crusades, in which "I, the Maid," threatened, if they were not
+converted, to come against them and give them the alternative of death
+or amendment. Quicherat says that to the Count d'Armagnac who had
+written to her, whether in good faith or bad, to ask which of the three
+then existent Popes was the real one, she is reported to have answered
+that she would tell him as soon as the English left her free to do so.
+But this is a perverted account of what she really did say, and M. Fabre
+seems to be, like the rest of us, a little confused in his dates: and
+the documents themselves on which he builds are not of unquestioned
+authority. These, however, would be but small speck upon the sunshine
+of her perfect humility and sobriety; if indeed they are to be depended
+upon as authentic at all.
+
+The day of Jeanne, her time of glory and success, was but a short
+one--Orleans was delivered on the 8th of May, the coronation of Charles
+took place on the 17th of July; before the earliest of these dates
+she had spent nearly two months in an anxious yet hopeful struggle of
+preparation, before she was permitted to enter upon her career. The time
+of her discouragement was longer. It was ten months from the day when
+she rode out of Rheims, the 25th of July, 1429, till the 23d of May,
+1430, when she was taken. She had said after the deliverance of Orleans
+that she had but a year in which to accomplish her work, and at a later
+period, Easter, 1430, her "voices" told her that "before the St. Jean"
+she would be in the power of her enemies. Both these statements came
+true. She rose quickly but fell more slowly, struggling along upon the
+downward course, unable to carry out what she would, hampered on every
+hand, and not apparently followed with the same fervour as of old. It is
+true that the principal cause of all seems to have been the schemes of
+the Court and the indolence of Charles; but all these hindrances had
+existed before, and the King and his treacherous advisers had been
+unwillingly dragged every mile of the way, though every step made had
+been to Charles's advantage. But now though the course is still one of
+victory the Maid no longer seems to be either the chief cause or the
+immediate leader. Perhaps this may be partly due to the fact that little
+fighting was necessary, town after town yielding to the King, which
+reduced the part of Jeanne to that of a spectator; but there is a
+change of atmosphere and tone which seems to point to something more
+fundamental than this. The historians are very unwilling to acknowledge,
+except Michelet who does so without hesitation, that she had herself
+fixed the term of her commission as ending at Rheims; it is certain
+that she said many things which bear this meaning, and every fact of
+her after career seems to us to prove it: but it is also true that her
+conviction wavered, and other sayings indicate a different belief or
+hope. She did no wrong in following the profession of arms in which she
+had made so glorious a beginning; she had many gifts and aptitudes for
+it of which she was not herself at first aware: but she was no longer
+the Envoy of God. Enough had been done to arouse the old spirit of
+France, to break the spell of the English supremacy; it was right and
+fitting that France should do the rest for herself. Perhaps Jeanne was
+not herself very clear on this point, and after her first statement of
+it, became less assured. It is not necessary that the servant should
+know the designs of the master. It did not after all affect her. Her
+business was to serve God to the best of her power, not to take the
+management out of His hands.
+
+The army went forth joyously upon its way, directing itself towards
+Paris. There was a pilgrimage to make, such as the Kings of France
+were in the habit of making after their coronation; there were pleasant
+incidents, the submission of a village, the faint resistance, instantly
+overcome, of a small town, to make the early days pleasant. Laon and
+Soissons both surrendered. Senlis and Beauvais received the King's
+envoys with joy. The independent captains of the army made little
+circles about, like parties of pleasure, bringing in another and another
+little stronghold to the allegiance of the King. When he turned aside,
+taking as he passed through, without as yet any serious deflection, the
+road rather to the Loire than to Paris, success still attended him. At
+Chateau-Thierry resistance was expected to give zest to the movement
+of the forces, but that too yielded at once as the others had done.
+The dates are very vague and it seems difficult to find any mode of
+reconciling them. Almost all the historians while accusing the King of
+foolish dilatoriness and confusion of plans give us a description of the
+undefended state of Paris at the moment, which a sudden stroke on the
+part of Charles might have carried with little difficulty, during the
+absence of all the chiefs from the city and the great terror of the
+inhabitants; but a comparison of dates shows that the Duke of Bedford
+re-entered Paris with strong reinforcements on the very day on which
+Charles left Rheims three days only after his coronation, so that he
+scarcely seems so much to blame as appears. But the general delay,
+inefficiency, and hesitation existing at headquarters, naturally lead to
+mistakes of this kind.
+
+The great point was that Paris itself was by no means disposed to
+receive the King. Strange as it seems to say so Paris was bitterly,
+fiercely English at that extraordinary moment, a fact which ought to be
+taken into account as the most important in the whole matter. There was
+no answering enthusiasm in the capital of France to form an auxiliary
+force behind its ramparts and encourage the besiegers outside. The
+populace perhaps might be indifferent: at the best it had no feeling on
+the subject; but there was no welcome awaiting the King. During the time
+of Bedford's absence the city felt itself to have "no lord"--_ceux de
+Paris avoit grand peur car nul seigneur n' y avoit_. It was believed
+that Charles would put all the inhabitants to the sword, and their
+desperation of feeling was rather that which leads to a wild and
+hopeless defence than to submission. The Duke of Bedford, governing in
+the name of the infant Henry VI. Of England, was their seigneur, instead
+of their natural sovereign. It is a fact which to us seems scarcely
+credible, but it was certainly true. There seems to have been no feeling
+even, on the subject, no general shame as of a national betrayal;
+nothing of the kind. Paris was English, holding by the English kings who
+had never lost a certain hold on France, and thinking no shame of its
+party. It was a hostile town, the chief of the English possessions.
+In the _Journal du Bourgeois de Paris_--who was no _bourgeois_ but a
+distinguished member of that university which held the Maid and all her
+ways in horror--Jeanne the deliverer, the incarnation of patriotism
+and of France is spoken of as "a creature in the form of a woman." How
+extraordinary is this evidence of a state of affairs in which it is
+almost impossible to believe! Paris is France nowadays to many people,
+though no doubt this is but a superficial judgment; but in the
+early part of the fifteenth century, she was frankly English, not
+by compulsion even, but by habit and policy. Perhaps the delays, the
+hesitation, the terrors of Charles and his counsellors are thus rendered
+more excusable than by any other explanation.
+
+In the meantime it is almost impossible to follow the wanderings of
+this vacillating army without a map. If the reader should trace its
+movements, he would see what a stumbling and devious course it took as
+of a man blundering in the dark. From Rheims to Soissons the way was
+clear; then there came a sudden move southward to Chateau-Thierry from
+which indeed there was still a straight line to Paris but which still
+more clearly indicated the highroad leading to the Orleannais, the
+faithful districts of the Loire. This retrograde movement was not made
+without a great outcry from the generals. Their opinion was that the
+King ought to press on to conquer everything while the English forces
+were still depressed and discouraged. In their mind this deflection
+towards the south was an abandonment at once of honour and safety. An
+unimportant check on the way, however, gave an argument to the leaders
+of the army, and Charles permitted himself to be dragged back. They then
+made their way by La Ferte-Milon, Crepy, and Daumartin, and on this
+road the English troops which had been led out from Paris by Bedford to
+intercept them came twice within fighting distance of the French army.
+The English, as all the French historians are eager to inform us,
+invariably entrenched themselves in their positions, surrounding their
+lines with sharp-pointed posts by which the equally invariable rush of
+the French could be broken. But the French on these occasions were too
+wise to repeat the impetuous charge which had ruined them at Crecy and
+Agincourt, and the consequence was that the two forces remained within
+sight of each other, with a few skirmishes going on at the flanks, but
+without any serious encounter.
+
+It will be more satisfactory, however, to copy the following
+_itineraire_ of Charles's movements from the Chronicle of Perceval
+de Cagny who was a member of the household of the Duc d'Alencon, and
+probably present, certainly at all events bound to have the best and
+most correct information. He informs us that the King left Rheims on
+Thursday the 21st of July, and dined, supped, and lay at the Abbey of
+St. Nanuol that night, where were brought to him the keys of the city of
+Laon. He then set out on _le voyage a venir devant Paris_.
+
+"And on Saturday the 23d of the same month the King dined, supped and
+lay at Soissons, and was there received the most honourably that the
+churchmen, burghers and other people of the town were capable of: for
+they had all great fear because of the destruction of the town which had
+been taken by the Burgundians and made to rebel against the King.
+
+"Friday the 29th day of July the King and his company were all day
+before Chateau-Thierry in order of battle, hoping that the Duke of
+Bedford would appear to fight. The place surrendered at the hour of
+vespers, and the King lodged there till Monday the first of August. On
+that day the King lay at Monmirail in Brie.
+
+"Tuesday the 2d of August he passed the night in the town of Provins,
+and had the best possible reception there, and remained till the Friday
+following, the 5th August. Sunday the 7th the King lay at the town
+of Coulommiers in Brie. Wednesday the 10th he lay at La Ferte- Milon,
+Thursday at Crespy in Valois--Friday at Laigny-le-Sec. The following
+Saturday the 13th the King held the field near Dammartin-en-Gouelle, for
+the whole day looking out for the English: but they came not.
+
+"On Sunday the 14th August the Maid, the Duc d'Alencon, the Count de
+Vendosme, the Marshals and other captains accompanied by six or seven
+thousand combatants were at the hour of vespers lodged in the fields
+near Montepilloy, nearly two leagues from the town of Senlis--The
+Duke of Bedford and other English captains with between eight and ten
+thousand English lying half a league from Senlis between our people and
+the said city on a little stream, in a village called Notre Dame de la
+Victoire. That evening our people skirmished with the English near to
+their camp and in this skirmish were people taken on each side, and of
+the English Captain d'Orbec and ten or twelve others, and people wounded
+on both sides: when night fell each retired to their own quarters."
+
+The same writer records an appeal in the true tone of chivalry addressed
+to the English by Jeanne and Alencon desiring them to come out from
+their entrenchments and fight: and promising to withdraw to a sufficient
+distance to permit the enemy to place himself in the open field. The
+French troops had first "put themselves in the best state of conscience
+that could possibly be, hearing mass at an early hour and then to
+horse." But the English would not come out. Jeanne, with her standard in
+her hand rode up to the English entrenchments, and some one says (not de
+Cagny) struck the posts with her banner, challenging the force within
+to come out and fight; while they on their side waved at the French in
+defiance, a standard copied from that of Jeanne, on which was depicted
+a distaff and spindle. But neither host approached any nearer. Finally,
+Charles made his way to Compiegne.
+
+At Chateau-Thierry there was concluded an arrangement with Philip of
+Burgundy for a truce of fifteen days, before the end of which time the
+Duke undertook to deliver Paris peaceably to the French. That this was
+simply to gain time and that no idea of giving up Paris had ever been
+entertained is evident; perhaps Charles was not even deceived. He, no
+more than Philip, had any desire to encounter the dangers of such a
+siege. But he was able at least to silence the clamours of the army and
+the representations of the persistent Maid by this truce. To wait for
+fifteen days and receive the prize without a blow struck, would not that
+be best? The counsellors of the King held thus a strong position, though
+the delay made the hearts of the warriors sick.
+
+The figure of Jeanne appears during these marchings and
+counter-marchings like that of any other general, pursuing a skilful but
+not unusual plan of campaign. That she did well and bravely there can be
+no doubt, and there is a characteristic touch which we recognise, in the
+fact that she and all of her company "put themselves in the best
+state of conscience that could be," before they took to horse; but the
+skirmishes and repulses are such as Alencon himself might have made.
+"She made much diligence," the same chronicler tells us, "to reduce and
+place many towns in the obedience of the King," but so did many others
+with like success. We hear no more her vigorous knock at the door of the
+council chamber if the discussion there was too long or the proceedings
+too secret. Her appearances are those of a general among many other
+generals, no longer with any special certainty in her movements as of a
+person inspired. We are reminded of a story told of a previous period,
+after the fight at Patay, when blazing forth in the indignation of her
+youthful purity at the sight of one of the camp followers, a degraded
+woman with some soldiers, she struck the wanton with the flat of
+her sword, driving her forth from the camp, where was no longer that
+chastened army of awed and reverent soldiers making their confession on
+the eve of every battle, whom she had led to Orleans. The sword she used
+on this occasion, was, it is said, the miraculous sword which had been
+found under the high altar of St. Catharine at Fierbois; but at the
+touch of the unclean the maiden brand broke in two. If this was an
+allegory(2) to show that the work of that weapon was over, and the
+common sword of the soldier enough for the warfare that remained, it
+could not be more clearly realised than in the history of this campaign.
+The only touch of our real Maid in her own distinct person comes to
+us in a letter written in a field on that same wavering road to Paris,
+dated as early as the 5th of August and addressed to the good people of
+Rheims, some of whom had evidently written to her to ask what was the
+meaning of the delay, and whether she had given up the cause of
+the country. There is a terse determination in its brief, indignant
+sentences which is a relief to the reader weary of the wavering and
+purposeless campaign:
+
+"Dear and good friends, good and loyal Frenchmen of the town of Rheims.
+Jeanne, the Maid, sends you news of her. It is true that the King has
+made a truce of fifteen days with the Duke of Burgundy, who promises
+to render peaceably the city of Paris in that time. Do not, however, be
+surprised if I enter there sooner, for I like not truces so made, and
+know not whether I will keep them, but if I keep them, it will be only
+because of the honour of the King."
+
+While Jeanne and her army thus played with the unmoving English,
+advancing and retiring, attempting every means of drawing them out, the
+enemy took advantage of one of these seeming withdrawals to march out
+of their camp suddenly and return to Paris, which all this time had
+been lying comparatively defenceless, had the French made their attack
+sooner. At the same time Charles moved on to Compiegne where he gave
+himself up to fresh intrigues with Philip of Burgundy, this time for a
+truce to last till Christmas. The Maid was grievously troubled by this
+step, _moult marrie_, and by the new period of delay and negotiation on
+which the Court had entered. Paris was not given up, nor was there any
+appearance that it ever would be, and to all the generals as well as to
+the Maid it was very evident that this was the next step to be taken.
+Some of the leaders wearied with inaction had pushed on to Normandy
+where four great fortresses--greatest of all the immense and mysterious
+stronghold on the high cliffs of the Seine, that imposing Chateau
+Gaillard which Richard Coeur-de-lion had built, the ruins of which, white
+and mystic, still dominate, like some Titanic ghost, above the course of
+the river--had yielded to them. So great was the danger of Normandy, the
+most securely English of all French provinces, that Bedford had again
+been drawn out of Paris to defend it. Here then was another opportunity
+to seize the capital. But Charles could not be induced to move. He found
+many ways of amusing himself at Compiegne, and the new treaty was being
+hatched with Burgundy which gave an excuse for doing nothing. The pause
+which wearied them all out, both captains and soldiers, at last became
+more than flesh and blood could bear.
+
+Jeanne once more was driven to take the initiative. Already on one
+occasion she had forced the hand of the lingering Court, and resumed
+the campaign of her own accord, an impatient movement which had been
+perfectly successful. No doubt again the army itself was becoming
+demoralised, and showing symptoms of falling to pieces. One day she sent
+for Alencon in haste during the absence of the ambassadors at Arras.
+"_Beau duc_," she cried, "prepare your troops and the other captains.
+_En mon Dieu, par mon martin_,(3) I will see Paris nearer than I have
+yet seen it." She had seen the towers from afar as she wandered over the
+country in Charles's lingering train. Her sudden resolution struck like
+fire upon the impatient band. They set out at once, Alencon and the Maid
+at the head of their division of the army, and all rejoiced to get to
+horse again, to push their way through every obstacle. They started on
+the 23d August, nearly a month after the departure from Rheims, a month
+entirely lost, though full of events, lost without remedy so far as
+Paris was concerned. At Senlis they made a pause, perhaps to await the
+King, who, it was hoped, would have been constrained to follow; then
+carrying with them all the forces that could be spared from that town,
+they spurred on to St. Denis where they arrived on the 27th: St. Denis,
+the other sacred town of France, the place of the tomb, as Rheims was
+the place of the crown.
+
+The royalty of France was Jeanne's passion. I do not say the King, which
+might be capable of malinterpretation, but the kings, the monarchy, the
+anointed of the Lord, by whom France was represented, embodied and
+made into a living thing. She had loved Rheims, its associations,
+its triumphs, the rejoicing of its citizens. These had been the
+accompaniments of her own highest victory. She came to St. Denis in a
+different mood, her heart hot with disappointment and the thwarting of
+all her plans. From whatever cause it might spring, it was clear that
+she was no longer buoyed up by that certainty which only a little while
+before had carried her through every danger and over every obstacle. But
+to have reached St. Denis at least was something. It was a place doubly
+sacred, consecrated to that royal House for which she would so willingly
+have given her life. And at last she was within sight of Paris, the
+greatest prize of all. Up to this time she had known in actual warfare
+nothing but victory. If her heart for the first time wavered and feared,
+there was still no certain reason that, _de par Dieu_, she might not win
+the day again.
+
+At St. Denis there was once more a cruel delay. Nearly a fortnight
+passed and there was no news of the King. The Maid employed the time in
+skirmishes and reconnoissances, but does not seem to have ventured on
+an attack without the sanction of Charles, whom Alencon, finally, going
+back on two several occasions, succeeded in setting in motion. Charles
+had remained at Compiegne to carry out his treaty with Burgundy, and
+the last thing he desired was this attack; but when he could resist
+no longer he moved on reluctantly to St. Denis, where his arrival was
+hailed with great delight. This was not until the 5th of September, and
+the army, wrought up to a high pitch of excitement and expectation, was
+eager for the fight. "There was no one of whatever condition, who did
+not say, 'She will lead the King into Paris, if he will let her,'" says
+the chronicler.
+
+In the meantime the authorities in Paris were at work, strengthening its
+fortifications, frightening the populace with threats of the vengeance
+of Charles, persuading every citizen of the danger of submission.
+
+The _Bourgeois_ tells us that letters came from "les Arminoz," that is,
+the party of the King, sealed with the seal of the Duc d'Alencon, and
+addressed to the heads of the city guilds and municipality inviting
+their co-operation as Frenchmen. "But," adds the Parisian, "it was easy
+to see through their meaning, and an answer was returned that they need
+not throw away their paper as no attention was paid to it." There is
+no sign at all that any national feeling existed to respond to such an
+appeal. Paris--its courts of law, Parliaments (salaried by Bedford),
+University, Church--every department, was English in the first place,
+Burgundian in the second, dependent on English support and money. There
+was no French party existing. The Maid was to them an evil sorceress, a
+creature in the form of a woman, exercising the blackest arts. Perhaps
+there was even a breath of consciousness in the air that Charles himself
+had no desire for the fall of the city. He had left the Parisians
+full time to make every preparation, he had held back as long as was
+possible. His favour was all on the side of his enemies; for his own
+forces and their leaders, and especially for the Maid, he had nothing
+but discouragement, distrust, and auguries of evil.
+
+Nevertheless, these oppositions came to an end, and Jeanne, though less
+ready and eager for the assault, found herself under the walls of Paris
+at last.
+
+     (1) "The English, not US," says Mr. Andrew Lang: and it is
+     pleasant to a Scot to know that this is true. England and
+     Scotland were then twain, and the Scots fought in the ranks
+     of our auld Ally. But for the present age the distinction
+     lasts no longer, and to the writer of an English book on
+     English soil it would be ungenerous to take the advantage.
+
+     (2) It is taken as a miraculous sign by another chronicler,
+     Jean Chartier, who tells us that when this fact came to the
+     knowledge of the King the sword was given by him to the
+     workmen to be re-founded--"but they could not do it, nor put
+     the pieces together again: which is a great proof (_grant
+     approbation_) that the sword came to her divinely. And it is
+     notorious that since the breaking of that sword, the said
+     Jeanne neither prospered in arms to the profit of the King
+     nor otherwise as she had done before."
+
+     (3) "It was her oath," adds the chronicler; no one is quite
+     sure what it means, but Quicherat is of opinion that it was
+     her _baton_, her stick or staff. Perceval de Cagny puts in
+     this exclamation in almost all the speeches of the Maid. It
+     must have struck him as a curious adjuration. Perhaps it
+     explains why La Hire, unable to do without something to
+     swear by, was permitted by Jeanne in their frank and
+     humorous _camaraderie_ to swear by his stick, the same
+     rustic oath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII -- DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT. AUTUMN, 1429.
+
+It was on the 7th September that Jeanne and her immediate followers
+reached the village of La Chapelle, where they encamped for the night.
+The next day was the day of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a great
+festival of the Church. It could scarcely be a matter of choice on the
+part of so devout a Catholic as Jeanne to take this day of all others,
+when every church bell was tinkling forth a summons to the faithful, for
+the day of assault. In all probability she was not now acting on her own
+impulse but on that of the other generals and nobles. Had she refused,
+might it not have been alleged against her that after all her impatience
+it was she who was the cause of delay? The forces with Jeanne were not
+very large, a great proportion of the army remaining with Charles no one
+seems to know where, either at St. Denis or at some intermediate spot,
+possibly to form a reserve force which could be brought up when wanted.
+The best informed historian only knows that Charles was not with the
+active force. But Alencon was at the head of the troops, along with
+many other names well known to us, La Hire, and young Guy de Laval, and
+Xantrailles, all mighty men of valour and the devoted friends of Jeanne.
+There is a something, a mist, an incertitude in the beginning of the
+assault which was unlike the previous achievements of Jeanne, a certain
+want of precaution or knowledge of the difficulties which does not
+reflect honour upon the generals with her. Absolutely new to warfare as
+she was before Orleans she had ridden out at once on her arrival
+there to inspect the fortifications of the besiegers. But probably the
+continual skirmishing of which we are told made this impossible here,
+so that, though the Maid studied the situation of the town in order to
+choose the best point for attack, it was only when already engaged that
+the army discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of
+which was full of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate
+of St. Honore and its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders
+back into the city: but their further progress was arrested by that
+discovery. It was on this occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have
+seized from a Burgundian in the melee, a sword, of which she boasted
+afterwards that it was a good sword capable of good blows, though we
+have no certain record that in all her battles she ever gave one blow,
+or shed blood at all.
+
+It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the
+discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other filled
+with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her standard at
+the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and cheer on her
+soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril, descending into the
+first fosse, and climbing up again on the second, the _dos d'ane_, which
+separated them, where she stood in the midst of a rain of arrows, fully
+exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers and gunners on the ramparts
+above, testing with her lance the depth of the water. We seem in the
+story to see her all alone or with her standard-bearer only by her
+side making this investigation; but that of course is only a pictorial
+suggestion, though it might for a moment be the fact. She remained
+there, however, from two in the afternoon till night, when she was
+forced away. The struggle must have raged around while she stood on the
+dark edge of the ditch probing the muddy water to see where it could
+best be crossed, shouting directions to her men in that voice _assez
+femme_, which penetrated the noise of battle, and summoning the active
+and desperate enemy overhead. "_Renty! Renty!_" she cried as she had
+done at Orleans--"_surrender to the King of France!_"
+
+We hear nothing now of the white armour; it must have been dimmed and
+worn by much fighting, and the banner torn and glorious with the chances
+of the war; but it still waved over her head, and she still stood fast,
+on the ridge between the two ditches, shouting her summons, cheering
+the men, a spot of light still, amid all the steely glimmering of the
+mail-coats and the dark downpour of that iron rain. Half a hundred
+war cries rending the air, shrieks from the walls of "Witch, Devil,
+Ribaude," and names still more insulting to her purity, could not
+silence that treble shout, the most wonderful, surely, that ever ran
+through such an infernal clamour, so prodigious, the chronicler says,
+that it was a marvel to hear it. _De par Dieu, Rendez vous, rendez vous,
+au roy de France_. If as we believe she never struck a blow, the aspect
+of that wonderful figure becomes more extraordinary still. While the
+boldest of her companions struggled across to fling themselves and what
+beams and ladders they could drag with them against the wall, she stood
+without even such shelter as close proximity to it might have given,
+cheering them on, exposed to every shot.
+
+The fight was desperate, and though there was no marked success on
+the part of the besiegers, yet there seems to have been nothing
+to discourage them, as the fight raged on. Few were wounded,
+notwithstanding the noise of the cannons and culverins, "by the grace
+of God and the good luck of the Maid." But towards the evening Jeanne
+herself suddenly swayed and fell, an arrow having pierced her thigh; she
+seems, however, to have struggled to her feet again, undismayed, when a
+still greater misfortune befell: her standard-bearer was hit, first in
+the foot, and then, as he raised his visor to pull the arrow from the
+wound, between his eyes, falling dead at her feet. What happened to
+the banner, we are not told; Jeanne most likely herself caught it as it
+fell. But at this stroke, more dreadful than her own wound, her strength
+failed her, and she crept behind a bush or heap of stones, where she
+lay, refusing to quit the place. Some say she managed to slide into the
+dry ditch where there was a little shelter, but resisted all attempts
+to carry her away, and some add that while she lay there she employed
+herself in a vain attempt to throw faggots into the ditch to make it
+passable. It is said that she kept calling out to them to persevere, to
+go on and Paris would be won. She had promised, they say, to sleep that
+night within the conquered city; but this promise comes to us with no
+seal of authority. Jeanne knew that it had taken her eight days to free
+Orleans, and she could scarcely have promised so sudden a success in
+the more formidable achievement. But she was at least determined in her
+conviction that perseverance only was needed. She must have lain for
+hours on the slope of the outer moat, urging on the troops with such
+force as her dauntless voice could give, repeating again and again
+that the place could be taken if they but held on. But when night came
+Alencon and some other of the captains overcame her resistance, and
+there being clearly no further possibility for the moment, succeeded
+in setting her upon her horse, and conveyed her back to the camp. While
+they rode with her, supporting her on her charger, she did nothing but
+repeat "_Quel dommage!_" Oh, what a misfortune, that the siege of Paris
+should fail, all for want of constancy and courage. "If they had but
+gone on till morning," she cried, "the inhabitants would have known."
+It is evident from this that she must have expected a rising within, and
+could not yet believe that no such thing was to be looked for. "_Par mon
+martin_, the place would have been taken," she said in the hearing one
+cannot but feel of the chronicler, who reports so often those homely
+words.
+
+Thus Jeanne was led back after the first day's attack. Her wound was not
+serious, and she had been repulsed during one of the day's fighting at
+Orleans without losing courage. But something had changed her spirit as
+well as the spirit of the army she led. There is a curious glimpse given
+us into her camp at this point, which indeed comes to us through the
+observation of an enemy, yet seems to have in it an unmistakable gleam
+of truth. It comes from one of the parties which had been granted a
+safe-conduct to carry away the dead of the English and Burgundian side.
+They tell us, among other circumstances,--such as that the French burnt
+their dead, a manifest falsehood, but admirably calculated to make them
+a horror to their neighbours,--that many in the ranks cursed the Maid
+who had promised that they should without any doubt sleep that night
+in Paris and plunder the wealthy city. The men with their safe-conduct
+creeping among the dead, to recover those bodies which had fallen on
+their own side, and furtively to count the fallen on the other--who were
+delighted to bring a report that the Maid was no longer the fountain
+of strength and blessing, but secretly cursed by her own forces--are
+sinister figures groping their way through the darkness of the September
+night.
+
+Next morning, however, her wound being slight, Jeanne was up early and
+in conference with Alencon, begging him to sound his trumpets and set
+forth once more. "I shall not budge from here, till Paris is taken," she
+said. No doubt her spirit was up, and a determination to recover lost
+ground strong in her mind. While the commanders consulted together,
+there came a band of joyful augury into the camp, the Seigneur of
+Montmorency with sixty gentlemen, who had left the party of Burgundy
+in order to take service under the banner of the Maid. No doubt this
+important and welcome addition to their number exhilarated the entire
+camp, in the commotion of the reveille, while each man looked to his
+weapons, wiping off from breastplate and helmet the heavy dew of the
+September morning, greeting the new friends and brothers-in-arms who had
+come in, and arranging, with a better knowledge of the ground than that
+of yesterday, the mode of attack. Jeanne would not confess that she felt
+her wound, in her eagerness to begin the assault a second time. And all
+were in good spirits, the disappointment of the night having blown away,
+and the determination to do or die being stronger than ever. Were the
+men-at-arms perhaps less amenable? Were they whispering to each other
+that Jeanne had promised them Paris yesterday, and for the first time
+had not kept her word? It would almost require such a fact as this to
+explain what follows. For as they began to set out, the whole field
+in movement, there was suddenly seen approaching another party of
+cavaliers--perhaps another reinforcement like that of Montmorency? This
+new band, however, consisted but of two gentlemen and their immediate
+attendants, the Duc de Bar and the Comte de Clermont,(1) always a bird
+of evil omen, riding hot from St. Denis with orders from the King.
+These orders were abrupt and peremptory--to turn back. Jeanne and her
+companions were struck dumb for the moment. To turn back, and Paris
+at their feet! There must have burst forth a storm of remonstrance
+and appeal. We cannot tell how long the indignant parley lasted; the
+historians do not enlarge upon the disastrous incident. But at last
+the generals yielded to the orders of the King--Jeanne humiliated,
+miserable, and almost in despair. We cannot but feel that on no former
+occasion would she have given way so completely; she would have rushed
+to the King's presence, overwhelmed him with impetuous prayers, extorted
+somehow the permission to go on. But Charles was safe at seven miles'
+distance, and his envoys were imperious and peremptory, like men able to
+enforce obedience if it were not given. She obeyed at last, recovering
+courage a little in the hope of being able to persuade Charles to change
+his mind, and sanction another assault on Paris from the other side, by
+means of a bridge over the Seine towards St. Denis, which Alencon had
+constructed. Next morning it appears that without even asking that
+permission a portion of the army set out very early for this bridge: but
+the King had divined their project, and when they reached the river
+side the first thing they saw was their bridge in ruins. It had been
+treacherously destroyed in the night, not by their enemies, but by their
+King.
+
+It is natural that the French historians should exhaust themselves in
+explanation of this fatal change of policy. Quicherat, who was the
+first to bring to light all the most important records of this period of
+history, lays the entire blame upon La Tremoille, the chief adviser of
+Charles. But that Charles himself was at heart equally guilty no one
+can doubt. He was a man who proved himself in the end of his career to
+possess both sense and energy, though tardily developed. It was to him
+that Jeanne had given that private sign of the truth of her mission,
+by which he was overawed and convinced in the first moment of their
+intercourse. Within the few months which had elapsed since she appeared
+at Chinon every thing that was wonderful had been done for him by her
+means. He was then a fugitive pretender, not even very certain of his
+own claim, driven into a corner of his lawful dominions, and fully
+prepared to abandon even that small standing ground, to fly into Spain
+or Scotland, and give up the attempt to hold his place as King of
+France. Now he was the consecrated King, with the holy oil upon
+his brows, and the crown of his ancestors on his head, accepted and
+proclaimed, all France stirring to her old allegiance, new conquests
+falling into his hands every day, and the richest portion of his kingdom
+secure under his sway. To check thus peremptorily the career of the
+deliverer who had done so much for him, degrading her from her place,
+throwing more than doubt upon her inspiration, falsifying by force
+the promises which she had made--promises which had never failed
+before,--was a worse and deeper sin on the part of a young man, by right
+of his kingly office the very head of knighthood and every chivalrous
+undertaking, than it could be on the part of an old and subtle
+diplomatist who had never believed in such wild measures, and all
+through had clogged the steps and endeavoured to neutralise the mission
+of the warrior Maid. It is very clear, however, that between them it was
+the King and his chamberlain who made this assault upon Paris so evident
+and complete a failure. One day's repulse was nothing in a siege. There
+had been one great repulse and several lesser ones at Orleans. Jeanne,
+even though weakened by her wound, had sprung up that morning full of
+confidence and courage. In no way was the failure to be laid to her
+charge.
+
+But this could never, perhaps, have been explained to the whole body
+of the army, who had believed her word without a doubt and taken her
+success for granted. If they had been wavering before, which seems
+possible--for they must have been, to a considerable extent, new levies,
+the campaigners of the Loire having accomplished their period of feudal
+service,--this sudden downfall must have strengthened every doubt and
+damped every enthusiasm. The Maid of whom such wonderful tales had been
+told, she who had been the angel of triumph, the irresistible, before
+whom the English fled, and the very walls fell down--was she after
+all only a sorceress, as the others called her, a creature whose
+incantations had failed after the flash of momentary success? Such
+impressions are too apt to come like clouds over every popular
+enthusiasm, quenching the light and chilling the heart.
+
+Jeanne was thus dragged back to St. Denis against her will and every
+instinct of her being, and there ensued three days of passionate debate
+and discussion. For a moment it appeared as if she would have thrown off
+the bonds of loyal obedience and pursued her mission at all hazards. Her
+"voices," if they had previously given her uncertain sound, promising
+only the support and succour of God, but no success, now spoke more
+plainly and urged the continuance of the siege; and the Maid was torn in
+pieces between the requirements of her celestial guardians and the force
+of authority around her. If she had broken out into open rebellion who
+would have followed her? She had never yet done so; when the King was
+against her she had pleaded or forced an agreement, and received or
+snatched a consent from the malevolent chamberlain, as at Jargeau and
+Troyes. Never yet had she set herself in public opposition to the will
+of her sovereign. She had submitted to all kinds of tests and trials
+rather than this. And to have lain half a day wounded outside Paris and
+to stand there pleading her cause with her wound still unhealed were not
+likely things to strengthen her powers of resistance. "The Voices
+bade me remain at St. Denis," she said afterwards at her trial, "and I
+desired to remain; but the seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If
+I had not been wounded I should never have left." Added to the force
+of these circumstances, it was no doubt apparent to all that to resume
+operations after that forced retreat, and the betrayal it gave of
+divided counsels, would be less hopeful than ever. These arguments even
+convinced the bold La Hire, who for his part, being no better than a
+Free Lance, could move hither and thither as he would; and thus the
+first defeat of the Maid, a disaster involving all the misfortunes that
+followed in its train, was accomplished.
+
+Jeanne's last act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern
+reader gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a
+certain melancholy meaning. Before she left, dragged almost a captive
+in the train of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of the
+cathedral the armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris. It was
+not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from the wars.
+And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would have been
+easily comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind. Was it a
+movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the arms in
+which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?--or was it done
+in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that defeat, too, was a
+part of victory, and that not without that bitterness of failure could
+the fame of the soldier of Christ be perfected? I have remarked already
+that we hear no more of the white armour, inlaid with silver and
+dazzling like a mirror, in which she had begun her career; perhaps it
+was the remains of that panoply of triumph which she laid out before the
+altar of the patron saint of France, all dim now with hard work and
+the shadow of defeat. It must have marked a renunciation of one kind
+or another, the sacrifice of some hope. She was no longer Jeanne the
+invincible, the triumphant, whose very look made the enemy tremble and
+flee, and gave double force to every Frenchman's arm. Was she then and
+there abdicating, becoming to her own consciousness Jeanne the champion
+only, honest and true, but no longer the inspired Maid, the Envoy of
+God? To these questions we can give no answer; but the act is pathetic,
+and fills the mind with suggestions. She who had carried every force
+triumphantly with her, and quenched every opposition, bitter and
+determined though that had been, was now a thrall to be dragged
+almost by force in an unworthy train. It is evident that she felt the
+humiliation to the bottom of her heart. It is not for human nature to
+have the triumph alone: the humiliation, the overthrow, the chill and
+tragic shadow must follow. Jeanne had entered into that cloud when she
+offered the armour, that had been like a star in front of the battle,
+at the shrine of St. Denis.(2) Hers was now to be a sadder, a humbler,
+perhaps a still nobler part.
+
+It is enough to trace the further movements of the King to perceive
+how at every step the iron must have entered deeper and deeper into the
+heart of the Maid. He made his arrangements for the government of each
+of the towns which had acknowledged him: Beauvais, Compiegne, Senlis,
+and the rest. He appointed commissioners for the due regulation of the
+truce with Philip of Burgundy. And then the retreating army took its
+march southward towards the mild and wealthy country, all fertility and
+quiet, where a recreant prince might feel himself safe and amuse himself
+at his leisure--by Lagny, by Provins, by Bercy-sur Seine, where he had
+been checked before in his retreat and almost forced to the march on
+Paris--by Sens, and Montargis: until at last on the 29th of September,
+no doubt diminished by the withdrawal of many a local troop and knight
+whose service was over, the forces arrived at Gien, whence they had set
+forth at the end of June for a series of victories. It is to be supposed
+that the King was well enough satisfied with the conquests accomplished
+in three months. And, indeed, in ordinary circumstances they would have
+formed a triumphant list. Charles must have felt himself free to play
+after the work which he had not done; and to leave his good fortune and
+the able negotiators, who hoped to get Paris and other good things from
+Philip of Burgundy without paying anything for them, to do the rest.
+
+We can imagine nothing more dreadful for the Maid than the months that
+followed. The Court was not ungrateful to her; she received the warmest
+welcome from the Queen; she had a _maison_ arranged for her like the
+household of a noble chief, with the addition of women and maidens of
+rank to her existing staff, and everything which could serve to show
+that she was one whom the King delighted to honour. And Charles would
+have her apparelled gloriously like the king's daughter in the psalm.
+"He gave her a mantle of cloth of gold, open at both sides, to wear over
+her armour," and apparently did his best to make her, if not a noble
+lady, yet into the semblance of a noble young chevaliere, one the
+glories of his Court, with all the distinction of her achievements and
+all the complacences of a carpet knight. It was said afterwards, in the
+absence of any graver possibility of accusation, that she liked her fine
+clothes. The tears rise to the eyes at such a suggestion. She was so
+natural that let us hope she did, the martyr Maid whose torture had
+already begun. If that mantle of gold gave her a moment of pleasure, it
+is something to be thankful for in the midst of the dismal shadows that
+were already closing round her. They were ready to give her any shining
+mantle, any beautiful dress, even a title and a noble name if she would;
+but what the King and his counsellors were determined on, was, that she
+should no more have the fame of individual triumph, or do anything save
+under their orders.
+
+Alencon, the gentle duke, with whom she had taken so much trouble, and
+who had grown into a true and noble comrade, made one effort to free his
+friend and leader. He planned an expedition into Normandy, where, with
+the help of Jeanne, he hoped to inflict upon the English a loss so
+tremendous, the destruction of their base of operations, that they would
+be compelled to abandon the centre of France altogether, and leave the
+way open to Paris and to the recovery of the entire kingdom; but the
+King, or La Tremoille, as the historians prefer to say, would not
+permit Jeanne to accompany him, and this hope came to nothing. Alencon
+disbanded his troops, everything in the form of an army was broken
+up--the short period of feudal service making this inevitable, unless
+new levies were made--and no forces were left under arms except those
+bands which formed the body-guard of the King. Nevertheless, there
+was plenty of work to be done still, and the breaking up of the French
+forces encouraged many a little garrison of English partisans, which
+would have yielded naturally and easily to a strong national party.
+
+In the midst of the winter, however, it seemed appropriate to the Court
+to launch forth an expedition against some of the unsubdued towns,
+perhaps on account of the mortal languishment of Jeanne herself, perhaps
+for some other reason of its own. The first necessity was to collect the
+necessary forces, and for this reason Jeanne came to Bourges, where she
+was lodged in one of the great houses of the city, that of Raynard de
+Bouligny, _conseiller de roi_, and his wife, Marguerite, one of the
+Queen's ladies. She was there for three weeks collecting her men,
+and the noble gentlewoman, who was her hostess, was afterwards in the
+Rehabilitation trial, one of the witnesses to the purity of her life.
+
+From this lady and others we have a clear enough view of what the Maid
+was in this second chapter of her history. She spent her time in the
+most intimate intercourse with Madam Marguerite, sharing even her room,
+so that nothing could be more complete than the knowledge of her hostess
+of every detail of her young guest's life. And wonderful as was the
+difference between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most famous
+woman in France, the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her country, is as
+the life of Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,--as simple, as devout, and
+as pure. She loved to go to church for the early matins, but as it was
+not fit that she should go out alone at that hour, she besought Madame
+Marguerite to go with her. In the evening she went to the nearest
+church, and there with all her old childish love for the church bells,
+she had them rung for half an hour, calling together the poor, the
+beggars who haunt every Catholic church, the poor friars and bedesmen,
+the penniless and forlorn from all the neighbourhood. This custom would,
+no doubt, soon become known, and not only her poor pensioners, but the
+general crowd would gather to gaze at the Maid as well as to join in
+her prayers. It was her great pleasure to sing a hymn to the Virgin,
+probably one of the litanies which the unlearned worshipper loves,
+with its choruses and constant repetitions, in company with all those
+untutored voices, in the dimness of the church, while the twilight
+sank into night, and the twinkling stars of candles on the altar made
+a radiance in the middle of the gloom. When she had money to give she
+divided it, according to the liberal custom of her time, among her poor
+fellow-worshippers. These evening services were her recreation. The
+days were full of business, of enrolling soldiers, and regulating the
+"lances," groups of retainers, headed by their lord, who came to perform
+their feudal service.
+
+The ladies of the town who had the advantage of knowing Madame
+Marguerite did not fail to avail themselves of this privilege, and
+thronged to visit her wonderful guest. They brought her their sacred
+medals and rosaries to bless, and asked her a hundred questions. Was
+she afraid of being wounded; or was she assured that she would not
+be wounded? "No more than others," she said; and she put away their
+religious ornaments with a smile, bidding Madame Marguerite touch them,
+or the visitors themselves, which would be just as good as if she did
+it. She would seem to have been always smiling, friendly, checking with
+a laugh the adulation of her visitors, many of whom wore medals with
+her own effigy (if only one had been saved for us!) as there were many
+banners made after the pattern of hers. But cheerful as she was, a
+prevailing tone of sadness now appears to run through her life. On
+several occasions she spoke to her confessor and chaplain, who attended
+her everywhere, of her death. "If it should be my fate to die soon, tell
+the King our master on my part to build chapels where prayer may be made
+to the Most High for the salvation of the souls of those who shall die
+in the wars for the defence of the kingdom." This was the one thing she
+seemed anxious for, and it returned again and again to her mind. Her
+thoughts indeed were heavy enough. Her larger enterprises had been
+cruelly put a stop to: her companions-in-arms had been dispersed: she
+had been separated from her lieutenant Alencon, and from all the friends
+between whom and herself great mutual confidence had sprung up. Even the
+commission which had at last been put in her hands was a trifling one
+and led to nothing, bringing the King no nearer to any satisfactory end:
+and the troops were under command of a new captain whom she scarcely
+knew, d'Albert, who was the son-in-law of La Tremoille, and probably
+little inclined to be a friend to Jeanne. In these circumstances there
+was little of an exhilarating or promising kind.
+
+Nevertheless as an episode, few things had happened to Jeanne more
+memorable than the siege of St. Pierre-le-Moutier. The first assault
+upon the town was unsuccessful; the retreat had sounded and the troops
+were streaming back from the point of attack, when Jean d'Aulon, the
+faithful friend and brave gentleman who was at the head of the Maid's
+military household, being himself wounded in the heel and unable to
+stand or walk, saw the Maid almost alone before the stronghold, four or
+five men only with her. He dragged himself up as well as he could upon
+his horse, and hastened towards her, calling out to her to ask what she
+did there, and why she did not retire with the rest. She answered him,
+taking off her helmet to speak, that she would leave only when the place
+was taken--and went on shouting for faggots and beams to make a
+bridge across the ditch. It is to be supposed that seeing she paid no
+attention, nor budged a step from that dangerous point, this brave man,
+wounded though he was, must have made an effort to rally the retiring
+besiegers: but Jeanne seems to have taken no notice of her desertion
+nor ever to have paused in her shout for planks and gabions. "All to the
+bridge," she shouted, "_aux fagots et aux claies tout le monde!_ every
+one to the bridge." "Jeanne, withdraw, withdraw! You are alone,"
+some one said to her. Bareheaded, her countenance all aglow, the Maid
+replied: "I have still with me fifty thousand of my men." Were those
+the men whom the prophet's servant saw when his eyes were opened and he
+beheld the innumerable company of angels that surrounded his master? But
+Jeanne, rapt in the trance and ecstasy of battle, gave no explanation.
+"To work, to work!" her clear voice went on, ringing over the startled
+head of the good knight who knew war, but not any rapture like this.
+History itself, awe-stricken, would almost have us believe that alone
+with her own hand the Maid took the city, so entirely does every figure
+disappear but that one, and the perplexed and terrified spectator vainly
+urging her to give up so desperate an attempt. But no doubt the shouts
+of a voice so strange to every such scene, the _vox infantile_, the
+amazing and clear voice, silvery and womanly, _assez femme_, and the
+efforts of d'Aulon to bring back the retreating troops were successful,
+and Jeanne once more, triumphantly kept her word. The place was strongly
+fortified, well provisioned, and full of people. Therefore the whole
+narrative is little less than miraculous, though very little is said of
+it. Had they but persevered, as she had said, a few hours longer before
+Paris, who could tell that the same result might not have been obtained?
+
+She was not successful, however, with La Charite, which after a siege of
+a month's duration still held out, and had to be abandoned. These
+long operations of regular warfare were not in Jeanne's way; and
+her coadjutor in command, it must be remembered, was in this case
+commissioned by her chief enemy. We are told that she was left without
+supplies, and in the depths of winter, in cold and rain and snow, with
+every movement hampered, and the ineffective government ever ready to
+send orders of retreat, or to cause bewildering and confusing delays by
+the want of every munition of war. Finally, at all events, the French
+forces withdrew, and again an unsuccessful enterprise was added to
+the record of the once victorious Maid. That she went on continually
+promising victory as in her early times, is probably the mere rumour
+spread by her detractors who were now so many, for there is no real
+evidence that she did so. Everything rather points to discouragement,
+uncertainty, and to a silent rage against the coercion which she could
+not overcome.
+
+     (1) Clermont it was who deserted the Scots at the Battle of
+     the Herrings.
+
+     (2) Jeanne's arms, offered at St. Denis, were afterwards
+     taken by the English and sent to the King of England (all
+     except the sword with its ornaments of gold) without giving
+     anything to the church in return: "qui est pur sacrilege et
+     manifeste," says Jean Chartier.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX -- COMPIEGNE. 1430.
+
+By this time France was once more all in flames: the English and
+Burgundians had entered and then abandoned Paris--Duke Philip cynically
+leaving that city, which he had promised to give up to Charles, to
+its own protection, in order to look after his more pressing personal
+concerns: while Bedford spread fire and flame about the adjacent
+country, retaking with much slaughter many of the towns which had
+opened their gates to the King. Thus while Charles gave no attention
+to anything beyond the Loire, and kept his chief champion there, as it
+were, on the leash, permitting no return to the most important field
+of operations, almost all that had been gained was again lost upon the
+banks of the Seine. This was the state of affairs when Jeanne returned
+humbled and sad from the abandoned siege of La Charite. Her enemy's
+counsels had triumphed all round and this was the result. Individual
+fightings of no particular account and under no efficient organisation
+were taking place day by day; here a town stood out heroically, there
+another yielded to the foreign arms; the population were thrown back
+into universal misery, the spring fields trampled under foot, the
+villages burned, every evil of war in full operation, invasion
+aggravated by faction, the English always aided by one side of France
+against the other, and neither peace nor security anywhere.
+
+This was the aspect of affairs on one side. On the other appeared a
+still less satisfactory scene. Charles amusing himself, his counsellors,
+La Tremoille, and the Archbishop of Rheims carrying on fictitious
+negotiations with Burgundy and playing with the Maid who was in their
+power, sending her out to make a show and cast a spell, then dragging
+her back at the end of their shameful chain: while the Court, the King
+and Queen, and all their flattering attendants gilded that chain and
+tried to make her forget by fine clothes and caresses, at once her
+mission and her despair. They were not ungrateful, no: let us do them
+justice, for they might well have added this to the number of their
+sins: mantles of cloth of gold, patents of nobility were at her command,
+had these been what she wanted. The only personal wrong they did
+to Jeanne was to set up against her a sort of opposition, another
+enchantress and visionary who had "voices" and apparitions too, and who
+was admitted to all the councils and gave her advice in contradiction
+of the Maid, a certain Catherine de la Rochelle, who was ready to say
+anything that was put into her mouth, but who had done nothing to prove
+any mission for France or from God. We have little light however upon
+the state of affairs in those castles, which one after another were the
+abode of the Court during this disastrous winter. They were safe enough
+on the other side of the Loire in the fat country where the vines still
+flourished and the young corn grew. Now and then a band of armed men was
+sent forth to succour a fighting town in the suffering and struggling
+Ile-de-France, always under the conflicting orders of those intrigants
+and courtiers: but within the Court, all was gay; "never man," as rough
+La Hire had said on an earlier occasion, "lost his kingdom more gaily
+or with better grace" than did Charles. Where was La Hire? Where was
+Dunois?--there is no appearance of these champions anywhere. Alencon had
+returned to his province. Only La Tremoille and the Archbishop holding
+all the strings in their hands, upsetting all military plans, disgusting
+every chief, met and talked and carried on their busy intrigues, and
+played their Sibyl--_Sibylle de carrefour_, says one of the historians
+indignantly--against the Maid, who, all discouraged and downcast,
+fretted by caresses, sick of inactivity, dragged out the uneasy days in
+an uncongenial world; but Jeanne has left no record of the sensations
+with which she saw these days pass, eating her heart out, gazing
+over that rapid river, on the other side of which all the devils were
+unchained and every result of her brief revolution was being lost.
+
+At length however the impatience and despair were more than she could
+bear; the Court was then at Sully and the spring had begun with its
+longer days and more passable roads. Without a word to anyone the Maid
+left the castle. The war had rolled towards these princely walls, as
+near as Melun, which was threatened by the English. A little band of
+intimate servants and associates, her two brothers, and a few faithful
+followers, were with her. So far as we know she never saw Charles or his
+courtiers again. They arrived at Melun in time to witness and to take
+part in the repulse of the English, and it was here that a communication
+was make to Jeanne by her saints of which afterwards there was frequent
+mention. Little had been said of them during her dark time of inaction,
+and their tone was no longer as of old. It was on the side of the moat
+of Melun where probably she was superintending some necessary work
+to strengthen the fortifications or to put them in better order for
+defence, that this message reached her. The "Voices" which so often had
+urged her to victory and engaged the faith of heaven for her success,
+had now a word to say, secret and personal to herself. It was that she
+should be taken prisoner; and the date was fixed, before the St. Jean.
+It was the middle of April when this communication was made and the
+Feast of St. Jean, as everybody knows, is in the end of June; two months
+only to work in, to strike another blow for France. The "Voices" bade
+her not to fear, that God would sustain her. But it would be impossible
+not to be startled by such a sudden intimation in the midst of her
+reviving plans. The Maid made one terrified prayer, that God would let
+her die when she was taken, not subject her to long imprisonment; her
+heart prophetically sprang to a sudden consciousness of the most likely,
+most terrible end that lay before her, for she had been often enough
+threatened with the stake and the fire to know what to expect. But
+the saintly voices made no reply. They bade her be strong and of good
+courage: is not that the all-sustaining, all-delusive message for every
+martyr? It was the will of God, and His support and sustaining power,
+which we often take to mean deliverance, but which is not always
+so--were promised. She asked where this terrible thing was to happen,
+but received no reply. Natural and simple as she was, she confessed
+afterwards that had she known she was to be taken on any certain day,
+she would not have gone out to meet the catastrophe unless she had
+been forced by evident duty to do so. But this was not revealed to her.
+"Before the St. Jean!" It must almost have seemed a guarantee that until
+that time or near it she was safe. She would seem to have said nothing
+immediately of this vision to sadden those about her.
+
+In the meantime, however, there were other adventures in store for her.
+From Melun to Lagny was no long journey, but it was through a country
+full of enemies in which she must have been subject to attack at every
+corner of every road or field. And she had not been long in the latter
+place which is said to have had a garrison of Scots, when news came
+of the passing of a band of Burgundians, a troop of raiders indeed,
+ravaging the country, taking advantage of the war to rob and lay waste
+churches, villages, and the growing fields wherever they passed. The
+troops was led by Franquet d'Arras, a famous "_pillard_," robber of God
+and man. Jeanne set out to encounter this bandit with a party of some
+four hundred men, and various noble companions, among whom, however, we
+find no name familiar in her previous career, a certain Hugh Kennedy, a
+Scot, who is to be met with in various records of fighting, being one of
+the most notable among them. Franquet's band fought vigorously but were
+cut to pieces, and the leader was taken prisoner. When this man was
+brought back to Lagny, a prisoner to be ransomed, and whom Jeanne
+desired to exchange for one of her own side, the law laid claim to him
+as a criminal. He was a prisoner of war: what was it the Maid's duty to
+do? The question is hotly debated by the historians and it was brought
+against her at her trial. He was a murderer, a robber, the scourge of
+the country--especially to the poor whom Jeanne protected and cared for
+everywhere, was he pitiless and cruel. She gave him up to justice, and
+he was tried, condemned, and beheaded. If it was wrong from a military
+point of view, it was her only error, and shows how little there was
+with which to reproach her.
+
+In Lagny other things passed of a more private nature. Every day and all
+day long her "voices" repeated their message in her ears. "Before the
+St. Jean." She repeated it to some of her closest comrades but left
+herself no time to dwell upon it. Still worse than the giving up of
+Franquet was the supposed resuscitation of a child, born dead, which
+its parents implored her to pray for that it might live again to be
+baptised. She explained the story to her judges afterwards. It was
+the habit of the time, nay, we believe continues to this day in some
+primitive places, to lay the dead infant on the altar in such a case, in
+hope of a miracle. "It is true," said Jeanne, "that the maidens of the
+town were all assembled in the church praying God to restore life that
+it might be baptised. It is also true that I went and prayed with them.
+The child opened its eyes, yawned three or four times, was christened
+and died. This is all I know." The miracle is not one that will find
+much credit nowadays. But the devout custom was at least simple and
+intelligible enough, though it afforded an excellent occasion to
+attribute witchcraft to the one among those maidens who was not of Lagny
+but of God.
+
+From Lagny Jeanne went on to various other places in danger, or which
+wanted encouragement and help. She made two or three hurried visits to
+Compiegne, which was threatened by both parties of the enemy; at one
+time raising the siege of Choicy, near Compiegne, in company with the
+Archbishop of Rheims, a strange brother in arms. On another of her
+visits to Compiegne there is said to have occurred an incident which, if
+true, reveals to us with very sad reality the trouble that overshadowed
+the Maid. She had gone to early mass in the Church of St. Jacques, and
+communicated, as was her custom. It must have been near Easter--perhaps
+the occasion of the first communion of some of the children who are
+so often referred to, among whom she loved to worship. She had retired
+behind a pillar on which she leaned as she stood, and a number of
+people, among whom were many children, drew near after the service to
+gaze at her. Jeanne's heart was full, and she had no one near to whom
+she could open it and relieve her soul. As she stood against the pillar
+her trouble burst forth. "Dear friends and children," she said, "I have
+to tell you that I have been sold and betrayed, and will soon be given
+up to death. I beg of you to pray for me; for soon I shall no longer
+have any power to serve the King and the kingdom." These words were told
+to the writer who records them, in the year 1498, by two very old men
+who had heard them, being children at the time. The scene was one to
+dwell in a child's recollection, and, if true, it throws a melancholy
+light upon the thoughts that filled the mind of Jeanne, though her
+actions may have seemed as energetic and her impulses as strong as in
+her best days.
+
+At last the news came speeding through the country that Compiegne was
+being invested on all sides. It had been the headquarters of Charles
+and had received him with acclamations, and therefore the alarm of the
+townsfolk for the retribution awaiting them, should they fall into the
+hands of the enemy, was great; it was besides a very important position.
+Jeanne was at Crespy en Valois when this news reached her. She set out
+immediately (May 22, 1430) to carry aid to the garrison: "_F'irai voir
+mes bons amis de Compiegne_," she said. The words are on the base of
+her statue which now stands in the Place of that town. Something of
+her early impetuosity was in this impulse, and no apparent dread of
+any fatality. She rode all night at the head of her party, and arrived
+before the dawn, a May morning, the 23d, still a month from the fatal
+"St. Jean." Though the prophecy was always in her ears, she must have
+felt that whole month still before her, with a sensation of almost
+greater safety because the dangerous moment was fixed. The town received
+her with joy, and no doubt the satisfaction and relief which hailed her
+and her reinforcements gave additional fervour to the Maid, and drove
+out of her mind for a moment the fatal knowledge which oppressed it.
+There is some difficulty in understanding the events of this day, but
+the lucid narrative of Quicherat, which we shall now quote, gives a
+very vivid picture of it. Jeanne had timed her arrival so early in the
+morning, probably with the intention of keeping the adversaries in their
+camps unaware of so important an addition to the garrison, in order that
+she might surprise them by the sortie she had determined upon; but no
+doubt the news had leaked forth somehow, if through no other means, by
+the sudden ringing of the bells and sounds of joy from the city. She
+paid her usual visits to the churches, and noted and made all her
+arrangements for the sortie with her usual care, occupying the long
+summer day in these preparations. And it was not till five o'clock in
+the evening that everything was complete, and she sallied forth. We hear
+nothing of the state of the town, or of any suspicion existing at the
+time as to the governor Flavy who was afterwards believed by some to be
+the man who sold and betrayed her. It is a question debated warmly like
+all these questions. He was a man of bad reputation, but there is no
+evidence that he was a traitor. The incidents are all natural enough,
+and seem to indicate clearly the mere fortune of war upon which no man
+can calculate. We add from Quicherat the description of the field and
+what took place there:
+
+"Compiegne is situated on the left bank of the Oise. On the other side
+extends a great meadow, nearly a mile broad, at the end of which the
+rising ground of Picardy rises suddenly like a wall, shutting in the
+horizon. The meadow is so low and so subject to floods that it is
+crossed by an ancient foot of the low hills. Three village churches mark
+the extent of the landscape visible from the walls of Compiegne;
+Margny (sometimes spelt Marigny) at the end of the road; Clairoix three
+quarters of a league higher up, at the confluence of the two rivers,
+the Aronde and the Oise, close to the spot where another tributary, the
+Aisne, also flows into the Oise; and Venette a mile and a half lower
+down. The Burgundians had one camp at Margny, another at Clairoix; the
+headquarters of the English were at Venette. As for the inhabitants
+of Compiegne, their first defence facing the enemy was one of those
+redoubts or towers which the chronicles of the fifteenth century called
+a boulevard. It was placed at the end of the bridge and commanded the
+road.
+
+"The plan of the Maid was to make a sortie towards the evening, to
+attack Margny and afterwards Clairoix, and then at the opening of the
+Aronde valley to meet the Duke of Burgundy and his forces who were
+lodged there, and who would naturally come to the aid of his other
+troops when attacked. She took no thought for the English, having
+already carefully arranged with Flavy how they should be prevented from
+cutting off her retreat. The governor provided against any chance of
+this by arming the boulevard strongly with archers to drive off any
+advancing force, and also by keeping ready on the Oise a number of
+covered boats to receive the foot-soldiers in case of a retrograde
+movement.
+
+"The action began well: the garrison of Margny yielded in the twinkling
+of an eye. That of Clairoix rushing to the support of their brothers in
+arms was repulsed, then in its turn repulsed the French; and three times
+this alternative of advance and retreat took place on the flat ground of
+the meadow without serious injury to either party. This gave time to the
+English to take part in the fray;(1) though thanks to the precautions of
+Flavy all they could do was to swell the ranks of the Burgundians.
+But unfortunately the rear of the Maid's army was struck with the
+possibility that a diversion might be attempted from behind, and their
+retreat cut off. A panic seized them; they broke their ranks, turned
+back and fled, some to the boats, some to the barrier of the boulevard.
+The English witnessing this flight rushed after them, secure now on the
+side of Compiegne, where the archers no longer ventured to shoot
+lest they should kill the fugitives instead of the enemies. They (the
+English) thus got possession of the raised road, and pushed on so hotly
+after the fugitives that their horses' heads touched the backs of the
+crowd. It thus became necessary for the safety of the town to close the
+gates until the barrier of the boulevard should be set up again."
+
+*****
+
+These disastrous accidents had taken place while Jeanne, charging in
+front with her companions and body-guard, remained quite unaware of any
+misfortune. She would hear no call to retreat, even when her companions
+were roused to the dangers of their position. "Forward, they are ours!"
+was all her cry. As at St. Pierre-le-Moutier she was ready to defeat the
+Burgundian army alone. At length the others perceiving something of
+what had happened seized her bridle and forced her to retire. She was of
+herself too remarkable a figure to be concealed amid the group of armed
+men who rode with her, encircling her, defending the rear of the flying
+party. Over her armour she wore a crimson tunic, or according to some
+authorities a short cloak, of gorgeous material embroidered with gold,
+and though by this time the twilight must have afforded a partial
+shelter, yet the knowledge that she was there gave keenness to every
+eye. Behind, the scattered Burgundians had rallied and begun to pursue,
+while the armour and spears of the English glittered in front between
+the little party and the barrier which was blocked by a terrified crowd
+of fugitives. Even then a party of horsemen might have cut their way
+through; but at the moment when Jeanne and her followers drew near, the
+barrier was sharply closed and the wild, confused, and fighting crowd,
+treading each other down, struggling for life, were forced back upon the
+English lances. Thus the retreating band riding hard along the raised
+road, in order and unbroken, found the path suddenly barred by the
+forces of the enemy, the fugitives of their own army, and the closed
+gates of the town.
+
+An attempt was then made by the Maid and her companions to turn towards
+the western gate where there still might have been a chance of safety;
+but by this time the smaller figure among all those steel-clad men, and
+the waving mantle, must have been distinguished through the dusk and the
+dust. There was a wild rush of combat and confusion, and in a moment she
+was surrounded, seized, her horse and her person, notwithstanding all
+resistance. With cries of "Rendez vous," and many an evil name, fierce
+faces and threatening weapons closed round her. One of her assailants--a
+Burgundian knight, a Picard archer, the accounts differ--caught her
+by her mantle and dragged her from her horse; no Englishman let us be
+thankful, though no doubt all were equally eager and ready. Into the
+midst of that shouting mass of men, in the blinding cloud of dust,
+in the darkening of the night, the Maid of France disappeared for one
+terrible moment, and was lost to view. And then, and not till then, came
+a clamour of bells into the night, and all the steeples of Compiegne
+trembled with the call to arms, a sally to save the deliverer. Was it
+treachery? Was it only a perception, too late, of the danger? There are
+not wanting voices to say that a prompt sally might have saved Jeanne,
+and that it was quite within the power of the Governor and city had they
+chosen. Who can answer so dreadful a suggestion? it is too much shame
+to human nature to believe it. Perhaps within Compiegne as without, they
+were too slow to perceive the supreme moment, too much overwhelmed to
+snatch any chance of rescue till it was too late.
+
+Happily we have no light upon the tumult around the prisoner, the ugly
+triumph, the shouts and exultation of the captors who had seized the
+sorceress at last; nor upon the thoughts of Jeanne, with her threatened
+doom fulfilled and unknown horrors before her, upon which imagination
+must have thrown the most dreadful light, however strongly her courage
+was sustained by the promise of succour from on high. She had not been
+sent upon this mission as of old. No heavenly voice had said to her
+"Go and deliver Compiegne." She had undertaken that warfare on her own
+charges with no promise to encourage her, only the certainty of being
+overthrown "before the St. Jean." But the St. Jean was still far off, a
+long month of summer days between her and that moment of fate! So far
+as we can see Jeanne showed no unseemly weakness in this dark hour. One
+account tells us that she held her sword high over her head declaring
+that it was given by a higher than any who could claim its surrender
+there. But she neither struggled nor wept. Not a word against her
+constancy and courage could any one, then or after, find to say. The
+Burgundian chronicler tells us one thing, the French another. "The Maid,
+easily recognised by her costume of crimson and by the standard which
+she carried in her hand, alone continued to defend herself," says one;
+but that we are sure could not have been the case as long as d'Aulon,
+who accompanied her, was still able to keep on his horse. "She yielded
+and gave her parole to Lyonnel, batard de Wandomme," says another; but
+Jeanne herself declares that she gave her faith to no one, reserving
+to herself the right to escape if she could. In that dark evening
+scene nothing is clear except the fact that the Maid was taken, to the
+exultation and delight of her captors and to the terror and grief of the
+unhappy town, vainly screaming with all its bells to arms,--and with its
+sons and champions by hundreds dying under the English lances and in the
+dark waves of the Oise.
+
+The archer or whoever it was who secured this prize, took Jeanne back,
+along the bloody road with its relics of the fight, to Margny, the
+Burgundian camp, where the leaders crowded together to see so important
+a prisoner. "Thither came soon after," says Monstrelet, "the Duke of
+Burgundy from his camp of Coudon, and there assembled the English, the
+said Duke and those of the other camps in great numbers, making, one
+with the other, great cries and rejoicings on the taking of the Maid:
+whom the said Duke went to see in the lodging where she was and spoke
+some words to her which I cannot call to mind, though I was there
+present; after which the said Duke and the others withdrew for the
+night, leaving the Maid in the keeping of Messer John of Luxembourg"--to
+whom she had been immediately sold by her first captor. The same night,
+Philip, this noble Duke and Prince of France, wrote a letter to convey
+the blessed information:
+
+"The great news of this capture should be spread everywhere and brought
+to the knowledge of all, that they may see the error of those who could
+believe and lend themselves to the pretensions of such a woman. We write
+this in the hope of giving you joy, comfort, and consolation, and that
+you may thank God our Creator. Pray that it may be His holy will to be
+more and more favourable to the enterprises of our royal master and to
+the restoration of his sway over all his good and faithful subjects."
+
+This royal master was Henry VI. of England, the baby king, doomed
+already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and
+reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally,
+have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on that
+of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English, which is
+hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could in no way
+be attributed to the other nation of which he was the natural enemy, or
+at least, antagonist. Very naturally the subsequent proceedings in all
+their horror and cruelty are equally put down to the English account,
+although Frenchmen took, exulted over as a prisoner, tried and condemned
+as an enemy of God and the Church, the spotless creature who was France
+incarnate, the very embodiment of her country in all that was purest and
+noblest. We shall see with what spontaneous zeal all France, except her
+own small party, set to work to accomplish this noble office.
+
+Almost before one could draw breath the University of Paris claimed her
+as a proper victim for the Inquisition. Compiegne made no sally for
+her deliverance; Charles, no attempt to ransom her. From end to end of
+France not a finger was lifted for her rescue; the women wept over her,
+the poor people still crowded around the prisoner wherever seen, but the
+France of every public document, of every practical power, the living
+nation, when it did not utter cries of hatred, kept silence. We in
+England have over and over again acknowledged with shame our guilty part
+in her murder; but still to this day the Frenchman tries to shield
+his under cover of the English influence and terror. He cannot deny La
+Tremoille, nor Cauchon, nor the University, nor the learned doctors
+who did the deed; individually he is ready to give them all up to the
+everlasting fires which one cannot but hope are kept alive for some
+people in spite of all modern benevolences; but he skilfully turns back
+to the English as a moving cause of everything. Nothing can be more
+untrue. The English were not better than the French, but they had the
+excuse at least of being the enemy. France saved by a happy chance her
+_blanches mains_ from the actual blood of the pure and spotless Maid;
+but with exultation she prepared the victim for the stake, sent her
+thither, played with her like a cat with a mouse and condemned her to
+the fire. This is not to free us from our share: but it is the height of
+hypocrisy to lay the blood of Jeanne, entirely to our door.
+
+Thus Jeanne's inspiration proved itself over again in blood and tears;
+it had been proved already on battle-field and city wall, with loud
+trumpets of joy and victory. But the "voices" had spoken again, sounding
+another strain; not always of glory--it is not the way of God; but of
+prison, downfall, distress. "Be not astonished at it," they said to
+her; "God will be with you." From day to day they had spoken in the same
+strain, with no joyful commands to go forth and conquer, but the one
+refrain: "Before the St. Jean." Perhaps there was a certain relief in
+her mind at first when the blow fell and the prophecy was accomplished.
+All she had to do now was to suffer, not to be surprised, to trust in
+God that He would support her. To Jeanne, no doubt, in the confidence
+and inexperience of her youth, that meant that God would deliver her.
+And so He did; but not as she expected. The sunshine of her life was
+over, and now the long shadow, the bitter storm was to come.
+
+Nothing could be more remarkable than the response of France in general
+to this extraordinary event. In Paris there were bonfires lighted to
+show their joy, the _Te Deum_ was sung at Notre Dame. At the Court
+Charles and his counsellors amused themselves with another prophet, a
+shepherd from the hills who was to rival Jeanne's best achievements, but
+never did so. Only the towns which she had delivered had still a tender
+thought for Jeanne. At Tours the entire population appeared in
+the streets with bare feet, singing the _Miserere_ in penance and
+affliction. Orleans and Blois made public prayers for her safety.
+Rheims, in which there was much independent interest in Jeanne and her
+truth, had to be specially soothed by a letter from the Archbishop, in
+which he made out with great cleverness that it was the fault of Jeanne
+alone that she was taken. "She did nothing but by her own will, without
+obeying the commandments of God," he says; "she would hear no counsel,
+but followed her own pleasure,"; and it is in this letter that we hear
+of the shepherd lad who was to replace Jeanne, and that it was his
+opinion or revelation that God had suffered the Maid to be taken because
+of her growing pride, because she loved fine clothes, and preferred her
+own will to any guidance. We do not know whether this contented the
+city of Rheims; similar reasoning however seems to have silenced France.
+Nobody uttered a protest, nor struck a blow; the mournful procession of
+Tours, where she had been first known in the outset of her career, the
+prayers of Orleans which she had delivered, are the only exceptions we
+know of. Otherwise there was lifted in France neither voice nor hand to
+avert her doom.
+
+     (1) The three camps must have formed a sort of irregular
+     triangle. The English at Venette being only half a mile from
+     the gates of Compiegne.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X -- THE CAPTIVE. MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+
+We have here to remark a complete suspension of all the ordinary laws
+at once of chivalry and of honest warfare. Jeanne had been captured as
+a general at the head of her forces. She was a prisoner of war. Such
+a prisoner ordinarily, even in the most cruel ages, is in no
+bodily danger. He is worth more alive than dead--a great ransom
+perhaps--perhaps the very end of the warfare, and the accomplishment
+of everything it was intended to gain: at least he is most valuable to
+exchange for other important prisoners on the opposite side. It was like
+taking away so much personal property to kill a prisoner, an outrage
+deeply resented by his captor and unjustified by any law. It was true
+that Jeanne herself had transgressed this universal custom but a little
+while before, by giving up Franquet d'Arras to his prosecutors. But
+Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted criminal, robber, and
+destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have departed from the military
+laws of right and wrong while everything in the country was under the
+hasty arbitration of war. No one, however, so far as we know, produces
+this matter of Franquet as a precedent in her own case. From the first
+moment of her seizure there was no question of the custom and privilege
+of warfare. She was taken as a wild animal might have been taken, the
+only doubt being how to make the most signal example of her. Vengeance
+in the gloomy form of the Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such
+word as ransom was breathed from her own side, none was demanded, none
+was offered. Her case is at once separated from every other.
+
+Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed to
+be the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to succour
+and help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something of the
+subtle jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger side, but
+yet always existing, in the abrogation of every law of chivalry as well
+as of warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is indeed of the highest
+strain of generosity who can bear to be beaten by a woman. And all the
+seething, agitated world of France had been beaten by this girl. The
+English and Burgundians, in the ordinary sense of the word, had been
+overcome in fair field, forced to fly before her; the French, her own
+side, had experienced an even more penetrating downfall by having the
+honours of victory taken from them, she alone winning the day where they
+had all failed. This is bitterer, perhaps, than merely to be compelled
+to raise a siege or to fail in a fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions,
+but the praise was to Jeanne who never struck a blow. Such great hearts
+as Dunois, such a courteous prince as Alencon, were too magnanimous to
+feel, or at least to resent, the grievance; they seconded her and fought
+under her with a nobility of mind and disinterestedness beyond praise;
+but it was not to be supposed that the common mass of the French
+captains were like these; she had wronged and shamed them by taking the
+glory from them, as much as she had shamed the English by making those
+universal victors fly before her. The burghers whom she had rescued, the
+poor people who were her brethren and whom she sought everywhere, might
+weep and cry out to Heaven, but they were powerless at such a moment.
+And every law that might have helped her was pushed aside.
+
+On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears
+in the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and implacable
+of all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an hour, a
+letter was addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital. Quicherat
+speaks of it as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-general of the
+Inquisition, written by the officials of the University; others tell us
+that an independent letter was sent from the University to second that
+of the Inquisitor. The University we may add was not a university
+like one of ours, or like any existing at the present day. It was an
+ecclesiastical corporation of the highest authority in every cause
+connected with the Church, while gathering law, philosophy, and
+literature under its wing. The first theologians, the most eminent
+jurists were collected there, not by any means always in alliance with
+the narrower tendencies and methods of the Inquisition. It is notable,
+however, that this great institution lost no time in claiming the
+prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was less her career as a
+warrior than her position as a sorceress. The actual facts of her life
+were of secondary importance to them. Orleans, Rheims, even her attack
+upon Paris were nothing in comparison with the black art which they
+believed to be her inspiration. The guidance of Heaven which was not the
+guidance of the Church was to them a claim which meant only rebellion
+of the direst kind. They had longed to seize her and strip her of her
+presumptuous pretensions from the first moment of her appearance. They
+could not allow a day of her overthrow to pass by without snatching at
+this much-desired victim.
+
+No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial
+for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame,
+the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly
+attractive to the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped
+for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into
+which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better
+understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it is
+the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to extremity
+and fighting for its life through all the subtleties of thought and
+fierce attacks of interrogation--or the mere love of inflicting torture,
+misery, and death, which the Church was prevented from doing in the
+common way, it is impossible to tell; but there is no doubt that a
+thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the prey, a sense of
+horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the air, whenever such a
+tribunal is thought of. The thrill, the stir, the eagerness among those
+black birds of doom is more evident than usual in the headlong haste of
+that demand. _Sous l'influence de l'Angleterre_, say the historians; the
+more shame for them if it was so; but they were clearly under influence
+wider and more infallible, the influence of that instinct, whatever it
+may be, which makes a trial for heresy ten thousand times more cruel,
+less restrained by any humanities of nature, than any other kind of
+trial which history records.
+
+That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of Jeanne,
+"called the Maid," as having "dogmatised, sown, published, and caused
+to be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued great
+scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith." "Using the
+rights of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy See
+of Rome we instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the Catholic
+faith, and under penalty of the law: and all other Catholic persons of
+whatsoever condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate, to send or to
+bring as prisoner before us with all speed and surety the said Jeanne,
+vehemently suspected of various crimes springing from heresy, that
+proceedings may be taken against her before us in the name of the Holy
+Inquisition, and with the favour and aid of the doctors and masters of
+the University of Paris, and other notable counsellors present there."
+
+It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the
+University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry. We can only reply
+again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests! But there
+was very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there is an
+eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like the
+headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of action
+suggested by a third party. Nor is there anything to lead us to believe
+that the movement was not spontaneous. It is little likely, indeed, that
+the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any inspired maid,
+any more than the enlightened Oxford would do so. But the ideas of the
+fifteenth century were widely different, and witchcraft and heresy were
+the most enthralling and exciting of subjects, as they are still to
+whosoever believes in them, learned or unlearned, great or small.
+
+It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who loved
+Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths by this
+catastrophe. We have no sympathy with those who compare the career of
+any mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and passion of
+our Lord. Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous element the
+disappointment of their hopes must have been in the misery of the first
+disciples, the Apostles, the mother, all the spectators who had watched
+with wonder and faith the mission of the Messiah. Had it failed? had all
+the signs come to nothing, all those divine words and ways, to our minds
+so much more wonderful than any miracles? Was there no meaning in
+them? Were they mere unaccountable delusions, deceptions of the senses,
+inspirations perhaps of mere genius--not from God at all except in a
+secondary way? In the three terrible days that followed the Crucifixion
+the burden of a world must have lain on the minds of those who had
+seen every hope fail: no legions of angels appearing, no overwhelming
+revelation from heaven, no change in a moment out of misery into the
+universal kingship, the triumphant march. That was but the self-delusion
+of the earth which continually travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the
+most terrible of all despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest
+nothing should be true.
+
+But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the
+deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself.
+Were her first triumphs accidents merely, were her "voices" delusions,
+had she been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the
+servant? It was a stupor which quenched every voice--a great silence
+through the country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours.
+The Compiegne people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do not
+mention Jeanne at all. We need not immediately take into account the
+baser souls always plentiful, the envious captains and the rest who
+might be secretly rejoicing. The entire country, both friends and foes,
+had come to a dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The last
+circumstance of which we must remind the reader, and which was of the
+greatest importance, is, that it was only a small part of France that
+knew anything personally of Jeanne. From Tours it is a far cry to
+Picardy. All her triumphs had taken place in the south. The captive of
+Beaulieu and Beaurevoir spent the sad months of her captivity among a
+population which could have heard of her only by flying rumours coming
+from hostile quarters. From the midland of France to the sea, near
+to which her prison was situated, is a long way, and those northern
+districts were as unlike the Orleannais as if they had been in two
+different countries. Rouen in Normandy no more resembled Rheims, than
+Edinburgh resembled London: and in the fifteenth century that was saying
+a great deal. Nothing can be more deceptive than to think of these
+separate and often hostile duchies as if they bore any resemblance to
+the France of to-day.
+
+The captor of Jeanne was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg and took her as
+we have seen to the quarters of his master at Margny, into whose hands
+she thenceforward passed. She was kept in the camp three or four days
+and then transferred to the castle of Beaulieu, which belonged to him;
+and afterwards to the more important stronghold of Beaurevoir, which
+seems to have been his principal residence. We know very few details of
+her captivity. According to one chronicler, d'Aulon, her faithful friend
+and intendant, was with her at least in the former of those prisons,
+where at first she would appear to have been hopeful and in good
+spirits, if we may trust to the brief conversation between her and
+d'Aulon, which is one of the few details which reach us of that period.
+While he lamented over the probable fate of Compiegne she was confident.
+"That poor town of Compiegne that you loved so much," he said, "by this
+time it will be in the hands of the enemies of France." "No," said
+the Maid, "the places which the king of Heaven brought back to the
+allegiance of the gentle King Charles by me, will not be retaken by his
+enemies." In this case at least the prophecy came true.
+
+And perhaps there might have been at first a certain relief in Jeanne's
+mind, such as often follows after a long threatened blow has fallen. She
+had no longer the vague tortures of suspense, and probably believed that
+she would be ransomed as was usual: and in this silence and seclusion
+her "voices" which she had not obeyed as at first, but yet which had not
+abandoned her, nor shown estrangement, were more near and audible than
+amid the noise and tumult of war. They spoke to her often, sometimes
+three times a day, as she afterwards said, in the unbroken quiet of
+her prison. And though they no longer spoke of new enterprises and
+victories, their words were full of consolation. But it was not long
+that Jeanne's young and vigorous spirit could content itself with
+inaction. She was no mystic; willingly giving herself over to dreams and
+visions is more possible to the old than to the young. Her confidence
+and hope for her good friends of Compiegne gave way before the continued
+tale of their sufferings, and the inveterate siege which was driving
+them to desperation. No doubt the worst news was told to Jeanne, and
+twice over she made a desperate attempt to escape, in hope of being able
+to succour them, but without any sanction, as she confesses, from her
+spiritual instructors. At Beaulieu the attempt was simple enough: the
+narrative seems to imply that the doorway, or some part of the wall of
+her room, had been closed with laths or planks nailed across an opening:
+and between these she succeeded in slipping, "as she was very slight,"
+with the hope of locking the door to an adjoining guard-room upon the
+men who had charge of her, and thus getting free. But alas! The porter
+of the chateau, who had no business there, suddenly appeared in the
+corridor, and she was discovered and taken back to her chamber. At
+Beaurevoir, which was farther off, her attempt was a much more desperate
+one, and indicates a despair and irritation of mind which had become
+unbearable. At this place her own condition was much alleviated; the
+castle was the residence of Jean de Luxembourg's wife and aunt, ladies
+who visited Jeanne continually, and soon became interested and attached
+to her; but as the master of the house was himself in the camp before
+Compiegne, they had the advantage or disadvantage, as far as the
+prisoner was concerned, of constant news, and Jeanne's trouble for her
+friends grew daily.
+
+She seems, indeed, after the assurance she had expressed at first,
+to have fallen into great doubt and even carried on within herself a
+despairing argument with her spiritual guides on this point, battling
+with these saintly influences as in the depths of the troubled heart
+many have done with the Creator Himself in similar circumstances. "How,"
+she cried, "could God let them perish who had been so good and loyal to
+their King?" St. Catherine replied gently that He would Himself care for
+these _bons amis_, and even promised that "before the St. Martin"
+relief would come. But Jeanne had probably by this time--in her great
+disappointment and loneliness, and with the sense in her of so much
+power to help were she only free--got beyond her own control. They bade
+her to be patient. One of them, amid their exhortations to accept her
+fate cheerfully, and not to be astonished at it, seems to have conveyed
+to her mind the impression that she should not be delivered till she had
+seen the King of England. "Truly I will not see him! I would rather die
+than fall into the hands of the English," cried Jeanne in her petulance.
+The King of England is spoken of always, it is curious to note, as if
+he had been a great, severe ruler like his father, never as the child he
+really was. But Jeanne in her helplessness and impotence was impatient
+even with her saints. Day by day the news came in from Compiegne,
+all that was favourable to the Burgundians received with joy and
+thanksgiving by the ladies of Luxembourg, while the captive consumed her
+heart with vain indignation. At last Jeanne would seem to have wrought
+herself up to the most desperate of expedients. Whether her room was in
+the donjon, or whether she was allowed sufficient freedom in the house
+to mount to the battlements there, we are not informed--probably the
+latter was the case: for it was from the top of the tower that the rash
+girl at last flung herself down, carried away by what sudden frenzy
+of alarm or sting of evil tidings can never be known. Probably she had
+hoped that a miracle would be wrought on her behalf, and that faith
+was all that was wanted, as on so many other occasions. Perhaps she had
+heard of the negotiations to sell her to the English, which would give a
+keener urgency to her determination to get free; all that appears in the
+story, however, is her wild anxiety about Compiegne and her _bons amis_.
+How she escaped destruction no one knows. She was rescued for a more
+tremendous and harder fate.
+
+The Maid was taken up as dead from the foot of the tower (the height is
+estimated at sixty feet); but she was not dead, nor even seriously hurt.
+Her frame, so slight that she had been able to slip between the bars put
+up to secure her, had so little solidity that the shock would seem
+to have been all that ailed her. She was stunned and unconscious and
+remained so far some time; and for three days neither ate nor drank. But
+though she was so humbled by the effects of the fall, "she was comforted
+by St. Catherine, who bade her confess and implore the mercy of God" for
+her rash disobedience--and repeated the promise that before Martinmas
+Compiegne should be relieved. Jeanne did not perhaps in her rebellion
+deserve this encouragement; but the heavenly ladies were kind and
+pitiful and did not stand upon their dignity. The wonderful thing was
+that Jeanne recovered perfectly from this tremendous leap.
+
+The earthly ladies, though so completely on the other side, were
+scarcely less kind to the Maid. They visited her daily, carried their
+news to her, were very friendly and sweet: and no doubt other visitors
+came to make the acquaintance of a prisoner so wonderful. There was one
+point on which they were very urgent, and this was about her dress. It
+shamed and troubled them to see her in the costume of a man. Jeanne had
+her good reasons for that, which perhaps she did not care to tell
+them, fearing to shock the ears of a demoiselle of Luxembourg with the
+suggestion of dangers of which she knew nothing. No doubt it was true
+that while doing the serious work of war, as she said afterwards, it was
+best that she should be dressed as a man; but Jeanne had reason to know
+besides, that it was safer, among the rough comrades and gaolers who now
+surrounded her, to wear the tight-fitting and firmly fastened dress of
+a soldier. She answered the ladies and their remonstrances with all
+the grace of a courtier. Could she have done it she would rather have
+yielded the point to them, she said, than to any one else in France,
+except the Queen. The women wherever she went were always faithful
+to this young creature, so pure-womanly in her young angel-hood and
+man-hood. The poor followed to kiss her hands or her armour, the rich
+wooed her with tender flatteries and persuasions. There is not record in
+all her career of any woman who was not her friend.
+
+For the last dreary month of that winter she was sent to the fortress
+of Crotoy on the Somme, for what reason we are not told, probably to
+be more near the English into whose hands she was about to be given
+up: again another shameful bargain in which the guilt lies with the
+Burgundians and not with the English. If Charles I. was sold as we Scots
+all indignantly deny, the shame of the sale was on our nation, not on
+England, whom nobody has ever blamed for the transaction. The sale of
+Jeanne was brutally frank. It was indeed a ransom which was paid to
+Jean of Luxembourg with a share to the first captor, the archer who had
+secured her; but it was simple blood-money as everybody knew. At Crotoy
+she had once more the solace of female society, again with much
+pressing upon her of their own heavy skirts and hanging sleeves. A
+fellow-prisoner in the dungeon of Crotoy, a priest, said mass every day
+and gave her the holy communion. And her mind seems to have been soothed
+and calmed. Compiegne was relieved; the saints had kept their word: she
+had that burden the less upon her soul: and over the country there were
+against stirrings of French valour and success. The day of the Maid was
+over, but it began to bear the fruit of a national quickening of vigour
+and life.
+
+It was at Crotoy, in December, that she was transferred to English
+hands. The eager offer of the University of Paris to see her speedy
+condemnation had not been accepted, and perhaps the Burgundians had
+been willing to wait, to see if any ransom was forthcoming from
+France. Perhaps too, Paris, which sang the _Te Deum_ when she was taken
+prisoner, began to be a little startled by its own enthusiasm and to ask
+itself the question what there was to be so thankful about?--a result
+which has happened before in the history of that impulsive city:--and
+Paris was too near the centre of France, where the balance seemed to
+be turning again in favour of the national party, to have its thoughts
+distracted by such a trial as was impending. It seemed better to the
+English leaders to conduct their prisoner to a safer place, to the
+depths of Normandy where they were most strong. They seem to have
+carried her away in the end of the year, travelling slowly along the
+coast, and reaching Rouen by way of Eu and Dieppe, as far away as
+possible from any risk of rescue. She arrived in Rouen in the beginning
+of the year 1431, having thus been already for nearly eight months in
+close custody. But there were no further ministrations of kind women for
+Jeanne. She was now distinctly in the hands of her enemies, those who
+had no sympathy or natural softening of feeling towards her.
+
+The severities inflicted upon her in her new prison at Rouen were
+terrible, almost incredible. We are told that she was kept in an iron
+cage (like the Countess of Buchan in earlier days by Edward I.), bound
+hands, and feet, and throat, to a pillar, and watched incessantly by
+English soldiers--the latter being an abominable and hideous method
+of torture which was never departed from during the rest of her life.
+Afterwards, at the beginning of her trial she was relieved from the
+cage, but never from the presence and scrutiny of this fierce and
+hateful bodyguard. Such detestable cruelties were in the manner of
+the time, which does not make us the less sicken at them with burning
+indignation and the rage of shame. For this aggravation of her
+sufferings England alone was responsible. The Burgundians at their worst
+had not used her so. It is true that she was to them a piece of
+valuable property worth so much good money; which is a powerful argument
+everywhere. But to the English she meant no money: no one offered to
+ransom Jeanne on the side of her own party, for whom she had done
+so much. Even at Tours and Orleans, so far as appears, there was no
+subscription--to speak in modern terms,--no cry among the burghers to
+gather their crowns for her redemption--not a word, not an effort, only
+a barefooted procession, a mass, a Miserere, which had no issue. France
+stood silent to see what would come of it; and her scholars and divines
+swarmed towards Rouen to make sure that nothing but harm should come
+of it to the ignorant country lass, who had set up such pretences of
+knowing better than others. The King congratulated himself that he
+had another prophetess as good as she, and a Heaven-sent boy from the
+mountains who would do as well and better than Jeanne. Where was Dunois?
+Where was La Hire,(1) a soldier bound by no conventions, a captain whose
+troop went like the wind where it listed, and whose valour was known?
+Where was young Guy de Laval, so ready to sell his lands that his men
+might be fit for service? All silent; no man drawing a sword or saying
+a word. It is evident that in this frightful pause of fate, Jeanne had
+become to France as to England, the Witch whom it was perhaps a danger
+to have had anything to do with, whose spells had turned the world
+upside down for a moment: but these spells had become ineffectual or
+worn out as is the nature of sorcery. No explanation, not even the
+well-worn and so often valid one of human baseness, could explain the
+terrible situation, if not this.
+
+     (1) La Hire was at Louvain, which we hear a little later the
+     new English levies would not march to besiege till the Maid
+     was dead, and where Dunois joined him in March of this fatal
+     year. These two at Louvain within a few leagues of Rouen and
+     not a sword drawn for Jeanne!--the wonder grows.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI -- THE JUDGES. 1431.
+
+The name of Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, appears to us at this
+long distance as arising out of the infernal mists, into which, when his
+ministry of shame was accomplished, he disappeared again, bearing with
+him nothing but hatred and ill fame. Yet in his own day and to his
+contemporaries, he was not an inconsiderable man. He was of Rheims,
+a great student, and excellent scholar, the friend of many good men,
+highly esteemed among the ranks of the learned, a good man of business,
+which is not always the attribute of a scholar, and at the same time a
+Burgundian of pronounced sentiments, holding for his Duke, against the
+King. When Beauvais was summoned by Charles, after his coronation, at
+that moment of universal triumph when all seemed open for him to march
+upon Paris if he would, the city had joyfully thrown open its doors to
+the royal army, and in doing so had driven out its Bishop, who was hot
+on the other side. He would not seem to have been wanted in Paris at
+that moment. The "triste Bedford," as Michelet calls him, had no means
+of employing an ambitious priest, no dirty work for the moment to give
+him. It is natural to suppose that a man so admirably adapted for that
+employment went in search of it to the ecclesiastical court, not
+beloved of England, which the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester held there.
+Winchester was the only one of the House of Lancaster who had money to
+carry on the government either at home or abroad. The two priests,
+as the historians are always pleased to insinuate in respect to
+ecclesiastics, soon understood each other, and Winchester became aware
+that he had in Cauchon a tool ready for any shameful enterprise. It is
+not, however, necessary to assume so much as this, for we have not the
+least reason to believe that either one or the other of them had the
+slightest doubt on the subject of Jeanne, or as to her character. She
+was a pernicious witch, filling a hitherto invincible army with that
+savage fright which is but too well understood among men, and which
+produces cruel outrages as well as cowardly panic. The air of this very
+day, while I write, is ringing with the story of a woman burnt to death
+by her own family under the influence of that same horrible panic and
+terror. Cauchon was the countryman, almost the _pays_--an untranslatable
+expression,--of Jeanne; but he did not believe in her any more than the
+loftier ecclesiastics of France believed in Bernadette of Lourdes,
+who was of the spiritual lineage of Jeanne, nor than we should believe
+to-day in a similar pretender. It seems unnecessary then to think of
+dark plots hatched between these two dark priests against the white,
+angelic apparition of the Maid.
+
+What services Cauchon had done to recommend him to the favour of
+Winchester we are not told, but he was so much in favour that the
+Cardinal had recommended him to the Pope for the vacant archbishopric
+of Rouen a few months before there was any immediate question of Jeanne.
+The appointment was opposed by the clergy of Rouen, and the Pope had not
+come to any decision as yet on the subject. But no doubt the ambition of
+Cauchon made him very eager, with such a tempting prize before him, to
+recommend himself to his English patron by every means in his power. And
+he it was who undertook the office of negotiating the ransom of Jeanne
+from the hands of Jean de Luxembourg. We doubt whether after all it
+would be just even to call this a nefarious bargain. To the careless
+seigneur it would probably be very much a matter of course. The ransom
+offered--six thousand francs--was as good as if she had been a prince.
+The ladies at home might be indignant, but what was their foolish fancy
+for a high-flown girl in comparison with these substantial crowns in his
+pocket; and to be free from the responsibility of guarding her would be
+an advantage too. And if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why
+should he? A most pertinent question. Cauchon, on the other hand, could
+assure all objectors that no summary vengeance was to be taken on
+the Maid. She was to be judged by the Church, and by the best men the
+University could provide, and if she were found innocent, no doubt would
+go free.
+
+They must have been sanguine indeed who hoped for a triumphant acquittal
+of Jeanne; but still it may have been hoped that a trial by her
+countrymen would in every case be better for her than to languish in
+prison or to be seized perhaps by the English on some after occasion,
+and to perish by their hands. Let us therefore be fair to Cauchon, if
+possible, up to the beginning of the _Proces_. He was no Frenchman,
+but a Burgundian; his allegiance was to his Duke, not to the King of
+England; but his natural sovereign did so, and many, very many men of
+note and importance were equally base, and did not esteem it base at
+all. Had the inhabitants of Rheims, his native town, or of Rouen,
+in which _his_ trial and downfall took place as well as Jeanne's,
+pronounced for the King of Prussia in the last war, and proclaimed
+themselves his subjects, the traitors would have been hung with infamy
+from their own high towers, or driven into their river headlong. But
+things were very different in the fifteenth century. There has never
+been a moment in our history when either England or Scotland has
+pronounced for a foreign sway. Scotland fought with desperation for
+centuries against the mere name of suzerainty, though of a kindred race.
+There have been terrible moments of forced subjugation at the point of
+the sword; but never any such phenomena as appeared in France, so far
+on in the world's history as was that brilliant and highly cultured
+age. Such a state of affairs is to our minds impossible to understand
+or almost to believe: but in the interests of justice it must be fully
+acknowledged and understood.
+
+Cauchon arises accordingly, not at first with any infamy, out of the
+obscurity. He had been expelled and dethroned from his See, but this
+only for political reasons. He was ecclesiastically Bishop of Beauvais
+still; it was within his diocese that the Maid had taken prisoner, and
+there also her last acts of magic, if magic there was, had taken place.
+He had therefore a legal right to claim the jurisdiction, a right which
+no one had any interest in taking from him. If Paris was disappointed
+at not having so interesting a trial carried on before its courts, there
+was compensation in the fact that many doctors of the University were
+called to assist Cauchon in his examination of the Maid, and to bring
+her, witch, sorceress, heretic, whatever she might be, to question.
+These doctors were not undistinguished or unworthy men. A number of them
+held high office in the Church; almost all were honourably connected
+with the University, the source of learning in France. "With what art
+were they chosen!" exclaims M. Blaze de Bury. "A number of theologians,
+the elite of the time, had been named to represent France at the council
+of Bale; of these Cauchon chose the flower." This does not seem on the
+face of it to be a fact against, but rather in favour of, the tribunal,
+which the reader naturally supposes must have been the better, the more
+just, for being chosen among the flower of learning in France. They were
+not men who could be imagined to be the tools of any Bishop. Quicherat,
+in his moderate and able remarks on this subject, selects for special
+mention three men who took a very important part in it, Guillame Erard,
+Nicole Midi, and Tomas de Courcelles. They were all men who held a high
+place in the respect of their generation. Erard was a friend of Machet,
+the confessor of Charles VII., who had been a member of the tribunal
+at Poitiers which first pronounced upon the pretensions of Jeanne; yet
+after the trial of the Maid Machet still describes him as a man of the
+highest virtue and heavenly wisdom. Nicole Midi continued to hold an
+honourable place in his University for many years, and was the man
+chosen to congratulate Charles when Paris finally became again the
+residence of the King. Courcelles was considered the first theologian of
+the age. "He was an austere and eloquent young man," says Quicherat,
+"of a lucid mind, though nourished on abstractions. He was the first of
+theologians long before he had attained the age at which he could assume
+the rank of doctor, and even before he had finished his studies he was
+considered as the successor of Gerson. He was the light of the council
+of Bale. Eneas Piccolomini (Pope Pius II.) speaks with admiration of his
+capacity and his modesty. In him we recognise the father of the freedom
+of the Gallican Church. His disinterestedness is shown by the simple
+position with which he contented himself. He died with no higher rank
+than that of Dean of the Chapter of Paris."
+
+Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? Was this the man to be used for
+their vile ends by a savage English party thirsting for the blood of an
+innocent victim, and by the vile priest who was its tool? It does not
+seem so to our eyes across the long level of the centuries which clear
+away so many mists. And no more dreadful accusation can be brought
+against France than the suggestion that men like these, her best and
+most carefully trained, were willing to act as blood-hounds for
+the advantage and the pay of the invader. But there are many French
+historians to whom the mere fact of a black gown or at least an
+ecclesiastical robe, confounds every testimony, and to whom even the
+name of Frenchman does not make it appear possible that a priest should
+retain a shred of honour or of honesty. We should have said by the light
+of nature and probability that had every guarantee been required for the
+impartiality and justice of such a tribunal, they could not have
+been better secured than by the selection of such men to conduct its
+proceedings. They made a great and terrible mistake, as the wisest
+of men have made before now. They did much worse, they behaved to an
+unfortunate girl who was in their power with indescribable ferocity and
+cruelty; but we must hope that this was owing to the period at which
+they lived rather than to themselves.
+
+It is not perhaps indeed from the wise and learned, the Stoics and
+Pundits of a University, that we should choose judges for the divine
+simplicity of those babes and sucklings out of whose mouth praise is
+perfected. At the same time to choose the best men is not generally the
+way adopted to procure a base judgement. Cauchon might have been subject
+to this blame had he filled the benches of his court with creatures of
+his own, nameless priests and dialecticians, knowing nothing but
+their own poor science of words. He did not do so. There were but two
+Englishmen in the assembly, neither of them men of any importance or
+influence although there must have been many English priests in the
+country and in the train of Winchester. There were not even any special
+partisans of Burgundy, though some of the assessors were Burgundian by
+birth. We should have said, had we known no more than this, that every
+precaution had been taken to give the Maid the fairest trial. But at the
+same time a trial which is conducted under the name of the Inquisition
+is always suspect. The mere fact of that terrible name seems to
+establish a foregone conclusion; few are the prisoners at that bar who
+have ever escaped. This fact is almost all that can be set against the
+high character of the individuals who composed the tribunal. At all
+events it is no argument against the English that they permitted the
+best men in France to be chosen as Jeanne's judges. It is the most
+bewildering and astonishing of historical facts that they were so, and
+yet came to the conclusion they did, by the means they did, and that
+without falling under the condemnation, or scorn, or horror of their
+fellow-men.
+
+This then was the assembly which gathered in Rouen in the beginning of
+1431. Quicherat will not venture to affirm even that intimidation was
+directly employed to effect their decision. He says that the evidence
+"tends to prove" that this was the case, but honestly allows that, "it
+is well to remark that the witnesses contradict each other." "In all
+that I have said," he adds, "my intention has been to prove that the
+judges of the Maid had in no way the appearance of partisans hotly
+pursuing a political vengeance; but that, on the contrary, their known
+weight, the consideration which most of them enjoyed, and the nature
+of the tribunal for which they were assembled, were all calculated to
+produce generally an expectation full of confidence and respect."
+
+Meanwhile there is not a word to be said for the treatment to which
+Jeanne herself was subjected, she being, so far as is apparent, entirely
+in English custody. She had been treated with tolerable gentleness it
+would seem in the first part of her captivity while in the hands of Jean
+de Luxembourg, the Count de Ligny. The fact that the ladies of the house
+were for her friends must have assured this, and there is no complaint
+made anywhere of cruelty or even unkindness. When she arrived in Rouen
+she was confined in the middle chamber of the donjon, which was the best
+we may suppose, neither a dungeon under the soil, nor a room under the
+leads, but one to which there was access by a short flight of steps from
+the courtyard, and which was fully lighted and not out of reach or sight
+of life. But in this chamber was an iron cage,(1) within which she was
+bound, feet, and waist and neck, from the time of her arrival until
+the beginning of the trial, a period of about six weeks. Five English
+soldiers of the lowest class watched her night and day, three in the
+room itself, two at the door. It is enough to think for a moment of the
+probable manners and morals of these troopers to imagine what torture
+must have been inflicted by their presence upon a young woman who had
+always been sensitive above all things to the laws of personal modesty
+and reserve. Their course jests would no doubt be unintelligible to
+her, which would be an alleviation; but their coarse laughter, their
+revolting touch, their impure looks, would be an endless incessant
+misery. We are told that she indignantly bestowed a hearty buffet on the
+cheek of a tailor who approached her too closely when it was intended
+to furnish her with female dress; but she was helpless to defend herself
+when in her irons, and had to endure as she best could--the bars of
+her cage let us hope, if cage there was, affording her some little
+protection from the horror of the continual presence of these rude
+attendants, with whom it was a shame to English gentlemen and knights to
+surround a helpless woman.
+
+When her trial began Jeanne was released from her cage, but was still
+chained by one foot to a wooden beam during the day, and at night to the
+posts of her bed. Sometimes her guards would wake her to tell her that
+she had been condemned and was immediately to be led forth to execution;
+but that was a small matter. Attempts were also made to inflict the
+barest insult and outrage upon her, and on one occasion she is said to
+have been saved only by the Earl of Warwick, who heard her cries and
+went to her rescue. By night as by day she clung to her male garb,
+tightly fastened by the innumerable "points" of which Shakespeare so
+often speaks. Such were the horrible circumstances in which she awaited
+her public appearance before her judges. She was brought before them
+every day for months together, to be badgered by the keenest wits in
+France, coming back and back with artful questions upon every detail
+of every subject, to endeavour to shake her firmness or force her into
+self-contradiction. Imagine a cross-examination going on for months,
+like those--only more cruel than those--to which we sometimes see an
+unfortunate witness exposed in our own courts of law. There is nothing
+more usual than to see people break down entirely after a day or two
+of such a tremendous ordeal, in which their hearts and lives are turned
+inside out, their minds so bewildered that they know not what they are
+saying, and everything they have done in their lives exhibited in the
+worst, often in an entirely fictitious, light, to the curiosity and
+amusement of the world.
+
+But all our processes are mercy in comparison with those to which French
+prisoners at the bar are still exposed. It is unnecessary to enter into
+an account of these which are so well known; but they show that even
+such a trial as that of Jeanne was by no means so contrary to common
+usage, as it would be, and always would have been in England. In England
+we warn the accused to utter no rash word which may be used against him;
+in France the first principle is to draw from him every rash word that
+he can be made to bring forth. This was the method employed with Jeanne.
+Her judges were all Churchmen and dialecticians of the subtlest wit
+and most dexterous faculties in France; they had all, or almost all, a
+strong prepossession against her. Though we cannot believe that men of
+such quality were suborned, there was, no doubt, enough of jealous and
+indignant feeling among them to make the desire of convicting Jeanne
+more powerful with them than the desire for pure justice. She was a true
+Christian, but not perhaps the soundest of Church-women. Her visions had
+not the sanction of any priest's approval, except indeed the official
+but not warm affirmation of the Council at Poitiers. She had not
+hastened to take the Church into her confidence nor to put herself under
+its protection. Though her claims had been guaranteed by the company
+of divines at Poitiers, she herself had always appealed to her private
+instructions, through her saints, rather than to the guiding of any
+priest. The chief ecclesiastical dignitary of her own party had just
+held her up to the reprobation of the people for this cause: she was too
+independent, so proud that she would take no advice but acted according
+to her own will. The more accustomed a Churchman is to experience
+the unbounded devotion and obedience of women, the more enraged he is
+against those who judge for themselves or have other guides on whom
+they rely. Jeanne was, beside all other sins alleged against her, a
+presumptuous woman: and very few of these men had any desire to acquit
+her. They were little accustomed to researches which were solely
+intended to discover the truth: their principle rather was, as it has
+been the principle of many, to obtain proofs that their own particular
+way of thinking was the right one. It is not perhaps very good even for
+a system of doctrine when this is the principle by which it is tested.
+It is more fatal still, on this principle, to judge an individual for
+death or for life. It will be abundantly proved, however, by all that is
+to follow, that in face of this tribunal, learned, able, powerful, and
+prejudiced, the peasant girl of nineteen stood like a rock, unmoved
+by all their cleverness, undaunted by their severity, seldom or never
+losing her head, or her temper, her modest steadfastness, or her high
+spirit. If they hoped to have an easy bargain of her, never were men
+more mistaken. Not knowing a from b, as she herself said, untrained,
+unaided, she was more than a match for them all.
+
+Round about this centre of eager intelligence, curiosity, and prejudice,
+the cathedral and council chamber teeming with Churchmen, was a dark and
+silent ring of laymen and soldiers. A number of the English leaders were
+in Rouen, but they appear very little. Winchester, who had very
+lately come from England with an army, which according to some of the
+historians would not budge from Calais, where it had landed, "for fear
+of the Maid"--was the chief person in the place, but did not make any
+appearance at the trial, curiously enough; the Duke of Bedford we are
+informed was visible on one shameful occasion, but no more. But Warwick,
+who was the Governor of the town, appears frequently and various other
+lords with him. We see them in the mirror held up to us by the French
+historians, pressing round in an ever narrowing circle, closing up upon
+the tribunal in the midst, pricking the priests with perpetual sword
+points if they seem to loiter. They would have had everything pushed on,
+no delay, no possibility of escape. It is very possible that this was
+the case, for it is evident that the Witch was deeply obnoxious to the
+English, and that they were eager to have her and her endless process
+out of the way; but the evidence for their terror and fierce desire to
+expedite matters is of the feeblest. A canon of Rouen declared at the
+trial that he had heard it said by Maitre Pierre Morice, and Nicolas
+l'Oyseleur, judges assessors, and by other whose names he does not
+recollect, "that the said English were so afraid of her that they did
+not dare to begin the siege of Louviers until she was dead; and that it
+was necessary if one would please them, to hasten the trial as much as
+possible and to find the means of condemning her." Very likely this was
+quite true: but it cannot at all be taken for proved by such evidence.
+Another contemporary witness allows that though some of the English
+pushed on her trial for hate, some were well disposed to her; the manner
+of Jeanne's imprisonment is the only thing which inclines the reader to
+believe every evil thing that is said against them.
+
+Such were the circumstances in which Jeanne was brought to trail. The
+population, moved to pity and to tears as any population would
+have been, before the end, would seem at the beginning to have been
+indifferent and not to have taken much interest one way or another: the
+court, a hundred men and more with all their hangers-on, the cleverest
+men in France, one more distinguished and impeccable than the others:
+the stern ring of the Englishmen outside keeping an eye upon the tedious
+suit and all its convolutions: these all appear before us, surrounding
+as with bands of iron the young lonely victim in the donjon, who
+submitting to every indignity, and deprived of every aid, feeling that
+all her friends had abandoned her, yet stood steadfast and strong in
+her absolute simplicity and honesty. It was but two years in that same
+spring weather since she had left Vaucouleurs to seek the fortune of
+France, to offer herself to the struggle which now was coming to an end.
+Not a soul had Jeanne to comfort or stand by her. She had her saints
+who--one wonders if such a thought ever entered into her young visionary
+head--had lured her to her doom, and who still comforted her with
+enigmatical words, promises which came true in so sadly different a
+sense from that in which they were understood.
+
+     (1) We are glad to add that the learned Quicherat has doubts
+     on the subject of the cage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII -- BEFORE THE TRIAL. LENT, 1431.
+
+We have not, however, sufficiently described the horror of the prison,
+and the treatment to which Jeanne was exposed, though the picture is
+already dark enough. It throws a horrible yet also a grotesque light
+upon the savage manners of the time to find that the chamber in which
+she was confined, had secret provision for an _espionnage_ of the most
+base kind, openings made in the walls through which everything that took
+place in the room, every proceeding of the unfortunate prisoner, could
+be spied upon and every word heard. The idea of such a secret watch
+has always been attractive to the vulgar mind, and no doubt it has been
+believed to exist many times when there was little or no justification
+for such an infernal thought. From the "ear" of Dionysius, down to the
+_Trou Judas_, which early tourists on the Continent were taught to fear
+in every chamber door, the idea has descended to our own times. It would
+seem, however, to be beyond doubt that this odious means of acquiring
+information was in full operation during the trial of Jeanne, and
+various spies were permitted to peep at her, and to watch for any
+unadvised word she might say in her most private moments. We are told
+that the Duke of Bedford made use of the opportunity in a still more
+revolting way, and was present, a secret spectator, at the fantastic
+scene when Jeanne was visited by a committee of matrons who examined
+her person to prove or to disprove one of the hateful insinuations which
+were made about her. The imagination, however, refuses to conceive that
+a man of serious age and of high functions should have degraded himself
+to the level of a Peeping Tom in this way; all the French historians,
+nevertheless, repeat the story though on the merest hearsay evidence.
+And they also relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery
+was committed upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing two
+secretaries at these openings, to take down her conversation with a spy
+who had been sent to her in the guise of a countryman of her own; and
+that not only Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion,
+listening, while their plot was carried out by the vile traitor inside.
+The clerks, we are glad to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but
+Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The Englishmen indeed shrank
+from no ignominy; nor did the great French savants assembled under the
+presidency of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin with that
+they were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the
+trial almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked,
+in the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the
+profoundest ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken,
+L'Oyseleur (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented to
+be sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, a _pays_,
+like herself from Lorraine, to invite her confidence: but his long
+conversations with the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by
+the secretaries, elicited nothing from her that she did not say in the
+public examination. She had no secret devices to betray to a traitor.
+She would not seem, indeed, to have suspected the man at all, not
+even when she saw him among her judges taking part against her. Jeanne
+herself suspected no falsehood, but made her confession to him, when she
+found that he was a priest, and trusted him fully. The bewildering
+and confusing fact, turning all the contrivances of her judges into
+foolishness, was, that she had nothing to confess that she was not ready
+to tell in the eye of day.
+
+The adoption of this abominable method of eliciting secrets from the
+candid soul which had none, was justified, it appears, by the manner of
+her trial, which was after the rules of the Inquisition--by which even
+more than by those which regulate an ordinary French trial the guilt of
+the accused is a foregone conclusion for which proof is sought, not a
+fair investigation of facts for abstract purposes of justice. The first
+thing to be determined by the tribunal was the counts of the indictment
+against Jeanne; was she to be tried for magical arts, for sorcery and
+witchcraft? It is very probable that the mission of L'Oyseleur was to
+obtain evidence that would clear up this question by means of recalling
+to her the stories of her childhood, of the enchanted tree, and the
+Fairies' Well; from which sources, her accusers anxiously hoped to prove
+that she derived her inspiration. But it is very clear that no such
+evidence was forthcoming, and that it seemed to them hopeless to
+attribute sorcery to her; therefore the accusation was changed to that
+of heresy alone. The following mandate from the University authorising
+her prosecution will show what the charge was; and the reader will note
+that one of its darkest items is the costume, which for so many good
+and sufficient reasons she wore. Here is the official description of the
+accused:
+
+"A woman, calling herself the Maid, leaving the dress and habit of her
+sex against the divine law, a thing abominable to God, clothed and armed
+in the habit and condition of a man, has done cruel deeds of homicide,
+and as is said has made the simple people believe, in order to abuse
+and lead them astray, that she was sent by God, and had knowledge of His
+divine secrets; along with several other doctrines (_dogmatisations_),
+very dangerous, prejudicial, and scandalous to our holy Catholic faith,
+in pursuing which abuses, and exercising hostility against us and our
+people, she has been taken in arms, before Compiegne, and brought as a
+prisoner before us."
+
+According to French law the indictment ought to have been founded upon a
+preliminary examination into the previous life of the accused, which, as
+it does not appear in the formal accusations, it was supposed had never
+been made. Recent researches, however, have proved that it was made, but
+was not of a nature to strengthen or justify any accusation. All that
+the examiners could discover was that Jeanne d'Arc was a good and honest
+maid who left a spotless reputation behind her in her native village,
+and that not a suspicion of _dogmatisations_, nor worship of fairies,
+nor any other unseemly thing was associated with her name. Other things
+less favourable, we are told, were reported of her: the statement,
+for instance, made in apparent good faith by Monstrelet the Burgundian
+chronicler, that she had been for some time a servant in an _auberge_,
+and there had learned to ride, and to consort with men--a statement
+totally without foundation, which was scarcely referred to in the trial.
+
+The skill of M. Quicherat discovered the substance of those inquiries
+among the many secondary papers, but they were not made use of in the
+formal proceedings. This also we are told, though contrary to the habit
+of French law, was justified by the methods of the Inquisition, which
+were followed throughout the trial. One breach of law and justice,
+however, is permitted by no code. It is expressly forbidden by French,
+and even by inquisitorial law, that a prisoner should be tried by
+his enemies--that is by judges avowedly hostile to him: an initial
+difficulty which it would have been impossible to get over and which
+had therefore to be ignored. One brave and honest man, Nicolas de
+Houppeville, had the courage to make this observation in one of the
+earliest sittings of the assembly:
+
+"Neither the Bishop of Beauvais" (he said) "nor the other members of the
+tribunal ought to be judges in the matter; and it did not seem to him a
+good mode of procedure that those who were of the opposite party to
+the accused should be her judges--considering also that she had been
+examined already by the clergy of Poitiers, and by the Archbishop of
+Rheims, who was the metropolitan of the said Bishop of Beauvais."
+
+Nicolas de Houppeville was a lawyer and had a right to be heard on such
+a point; but the reply of the judges was to throw him into prison, not
+without threats on the part of the civil authorities to carry the point
+further by throwing him into the Seine. This was the method by which
+every honest objection was silenced. That the examination at Poitiers,
+where the judges, as has been seen, were by no means too favourable to
+Jeanne, should never have been referred to by her present examiners,
+though there was no doubt it ought to have been one of the most
+important sources of the preliminary information--is also very
+remarkable. It was suggested indeed to Jeanne at a late period of the
+trial, that she might appeal to the Archbishop; but he was, as she well
+knew, one of her most cruel enemies.
+
+Still more important was the breach of all justice apparent in the fact
+that she had no advocate, no counsel on her side, no one to speak to
+her and conduct her defence. It was suggested to her near the end of the
+proceedings that she might choose one of her judges to fill this office;
+but even if the proposal had been a genuine one or at all likely to
+be to her advantage, it was then too late to be of any use. These
+particulars, we believe, were enough to invalidate any process in strict
+law; but the name of law seems ridiculous altogether as applied to this
+rambling and cruel cross-examination in which was neither sense nor
+decorum. The reader will understand that there were no witnesses either
+for or against her, the answers of the accused herself forming the
+entire evidence.
+
+One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at
+least more clear. The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left
+in the usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which
+the English troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and
+carrying on their noisy conversation, if nothing worse and more
+offensive--sometimes, as Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing
+(her sole solace) the soft voices of her saintly visitors--was not her
+only disturbance. Her solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive
+visitors of various kinds. L'Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who
+professed to be her countryman and who beguiled her into talk of her
+childhood and native place, was the first of these; and it is possible
+that at first his presence was a pleasure to her. One other visitor of
+whom we hear accidentally, a citizen of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems to
+have got in private interest and with a more or less good motive and no
+evil meaning. He warned her to answer with prudence the questions put
+to her, since it was a matter of life and death. She seemed to him to
+be "very simple" and still to believe that she might be ransomed. Earl
+Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on various occasions. He
+probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and thus heard her cry for
+help in her danger, executing, let us hope, summary vengeance on her
+brutal assailant; but he also evidently took advantage of his power to
+show his interesting prisoner to his friends on occasion. And it was he
+who took her original captor, Jean de Luxembourg, now Comte de Ligny,
+by whom she had been given up, to see her, along with an English lord,
+sometimes named as Lord Sheffield. The Belgian who had put so many good
+crowns in his pocket for her ransom, thought it good taste to enter with
+a jesting suggestion that he had come to buy her back.
+
+"Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear arms
+against us again," he said. The Maid was not deceived by this mocking
+suggestion. "It is well for you to jest," she said, "but I know you have
+no such power. I know that the English will kill me, believing, after I
+am dead, that they will be able to win all the kingdom of France: but
+if there were a hundred thousand more Goddens than there are, they shall
+never win the kingdom of France." The English lord drew his dagger to
+strike the helpless girl, all the stories say, but was prevented by
+Warwick. Warwick, however, we are told, though he had thus saved her
+twice, "recovered his barbarous instincts" as soon as he got outside,
+and indignantly lamented the possibility of Jeanne's escape from the
+stake.
+
+Such incidents as these alone lightened or darkened her weary days in
+prison. A traitor or spy, a prophet of evil shaking his head over her
+danger, a contemptuous party of jeering nobles; afterwards inquisitors,
+for ever repeating in private their tedious questions: these all visited
+her--but never a friend. Jeanne was not afraid of the English lord's
+dagger, or of the watchful eye of Warwick over her. Even when spying
+through a hole, if the English earl and knight, indeed permitted himself
+that strange indulgence, his presence and inspection must have been
+almost the only defence of the prisoner. Our historians all quote,
+with an admiration almost as misplaced as their horror of Warwick's
+"barbarous instincts," the _vrai galant homme_ of an Englishman who in
+the midst of the trial cried out "_Brave femme_!" (it is difficult to
+translate the words, for _brave_ means more than brave)--"why was she
+not English?" However we are not concerned to defend the English share
+of the crime. The worst feature of all is that she never seems to
+have been visited by any one favourable and friendly to her, except
+afterwards, the two or three pitying priests whose hearts were touched
+by her great sufferings, though they remained among her judges, and gave
+sentence against her. No woman seems ever to have entered that dreadful
+prison except those "matrons" who came officially as has been already
+said. The ladies de Ligny had cheered her in her first confinement,
+the kind women of Abbeville had not been shut out even from the gloomy
+fortress of Le Crotoy. But here no woman ever seems to have been
+permitted to enter, a fact which must either be taken to prove the
+hostility of the population, or the very vigorous regulations of the
+prison. Perhaps the barbarous watch set upon her, the soldiers ever
+present, may have been a reason for the absence of any female visitor.
+At all events it is a very distinct fact that during the whole period
+of her trial, five months of misery, except on the one occasion already
+referred to, no woman came to console the unfortunate Maid. She had
+never before during all her vicissitudes been without their constant
+ministrations.
+
+One woman, the only one we ever hear of who was not the partisan and
+lover of the Maid, does, however, make herself faintly seen amid the
+crowd. Catherine of La Rochelle--the woman who had laid claim to saintly
+visitors and voices like those of Jeanne, and who had been for a time
+received and feted at the Court of Charles with vile satisfaction, as
+making the loss of the Maid no such great thing--had by this time been
+dropped as useless, on the appearance of the shepherd boy quoted by the
+Archbishop of Rheims, and had fallen into the hands of the English: was
+not she too a witch, and admirably qualified to give evidence as to the
+other witch, for whose blood all around her were thirsting? Catherine
+was ready to say anything that was evil of her sister sorceress. "Take
+care of her," she said; "if you lose sight of her for one moment, the
+devil will carry her away." Perhaps this was the cause of the guard
+in Jeanne's room, the ceaseless scrutiny to which she was exposed. The
+vulgar slanderer was allowed to escape after this valuable testimony.
+She comes into history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights
+that mean nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again
+with her false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have
+been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians.
+Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It
+is profane to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of
+a mountebank. This is the only woman in all her generation, so far
+as appears to us, who was not the partisan and devoted friend of the
+spotless Maid.
+
+The aspect of that old-world city of Rouen, still so old and picturesque
+to the visitor of to-day, though all new since that time except the
+churches, is curious and interesting to look back upon. It must have
+hummed and rustled with life through every street; not only with the
+English troops, and many a Burgundian man-at-arms, swaggering about,
+swearing big oaths and filling the air with loud voices,--but with all
+the polished bands of the doctors, men first in fame and learning of
+the famous University, and beneficed priests of all classes, canons
+and deans and bishops, with the countless array that followed them, the
+cardinal's tonsured Court in addition, standing by and taking no share
+in the business: but all French and English alike, occupied with one
+subject, talking of the trial, of the new points brought out, of the
+opinions of this doctor and that, of Maitre Nicolas who had presumed on
+his lawyership to correct the bishop, and had suffered for it: of the
+bold canon who ventured to whisper a suggestion to the prisoner, and who
+ever since had had the eye of the governor upon him: of Warwick, keeping
+a rough shield of protection around the Maid but himself fiercely
+impatient of the law's delay, anxious to burn the witch and be done with
+her. And Jeanne herself, the one strange figure that nobody understood;
+was she a witch? Was she an angelic messenger? Her answers so simple,
+so bold, so full of the spirit and sentiment of truth, must have been
+reported from one to another. This is what she said; does that look like
+a deceiver? could the devils inspire that steadfastness, that constancy
+and quiet? or was it not rather the angels, the saints as she said?
+Never, we may be sure, had there been in Rouen a time of so much
+interest, such a theme for conversations, such a subject for all
+thoughts. The eager court sat with their tonsured heads together, keen
+to seize every weak point. Did you observe how she hesitated on this?
+Let us push that, we'll get an admission on that point to-morrow. It is
+impossible to believe that in such an assembly every man was a partisan,
+much less that each one of them was thinking of the fee of the English,
+the daily allowance which it was the English habit to make. That were to
+imagine a France, base indeed beyond the limits of human baseness. All
+the Norman dignitaries of the Church, all the most learned doctors
+of the University--no! that is too great a stretch of our faith. The
+greater part no doubt believed as an indisputable fact, that Jeanne was
+either a witch or an impostor, as we should all probably do now. And
+the vertigo of Inquisition gained upon them; they became day by day more
+exasperated with her seeming innocence, with what must have seemed to
+them the cunning and cleverness, impossible to her age and sex, of
+her replies. Who could have kept the girl so cool, so dauntless, so
+embarrassing in her straight-forwardness and sincerity? The saints? the
+saints were not dialecticians; far more likely the evil one himself, in
+whom the Church has always such faith. "He hath a devil and by Beelzebub
+casteth out devils." It was all like a play, only more exciting than
+any play, and going on endlessly, the excitement always getting stronger
+till it became the chief stimulus and occupation of life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII -- THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION. FEBRUARY, 1431.
+
+It was in the chapel of the Castle of Rouen, on the 21st of February,
+that the trial of Jeanne was begun. The judges present numbered about
+forty, and are carefully classed as doctors in theology, abbots, canons,
+doctors in canonical and civil law, with the Bishop of Beauvais at their
+head (the archepiscopal see of Rouen being vacant, as is added: but not
+that my lord of Beauvais hoped for that promotion). They were assembled
+there in all the solemnity of their priestly and professional robes,
+the reporters ready with their pens, the range of dark figures forming a
+semicircle round the presiding Bishop, when the officer of the court led
+in the prisoner, clothed in her worn and war-stained tunic, like a boy,
+with her hair cut close as for the helmet, and her slim figure, no doubt
+more slim than ever, after her long imprisonment. She had asked to be
+allowed to hear mass before coming to the bar, but this was refused. It
+was a privilege which she had never failed to avail herself of in her
+most triumphant days. Now the chapel--the sanctuary of God contained
+for her no sacred sacrifice, but only those dark benches of priests amid
+whom she found no responsive countenance, no look of kindness.
+
+Jeanne was addressed sternly by Cauchon, in an exhortation which it is
+sad to think was not in Latin, as it appears in the _Proces_. She was
+then required to take the oath on the Scriptures to speak the truth, and
+to answer all questions addressed to her. Jeanne had already held that
+conversation with L'Oyseleur in the prison which Cauchon and Warwick had
+listened to in secret with greedy ears, but which Manchon, the honest
+reporter, had refused to take down. Perhaps, therefore, the Bishop knew
+that the slim creature before him, half boy half girl, was not likely to
+be overawed by his presence or questions; but it cannot have been but a
+wonder to the others, all gazing at her, the first men in Normandy,
+the most learned in Paris, to hear her voice, _assez femme_, young and
+clear, arising in the midst of them, "I know not what things I may be
+asked," said Jeanne. "Perhaps you may ask me questions which I cannot
+answer." The assembly was startled by this beginning.
+
+"Will you swear to answer truly all that concerns the faith, and that
+you know?"
+
+"I will swear," said Jeanne, "about my father and mother and what I have
+done since coming to France; but concerning my revelations from God
+I will answer to no man, except only to Charles my King; I should not
+reveal them were you to cut off my head, unless by the secret counsel of
+my visions."
+
+The Bishop continued not without gentleness, enjoining her to swear at
+least that in everything that touched the faith she would speak truth;
+and Jeanne kneeling down crossed her hands upon the book of the Gospel,
+or Missal as it is called in the report, and took the required oath,
+always under the condition she stated, to answer truly on everything she
+knew concerning the faith, except in respect to her revelations.
+
+The examination then began with the usual formalities. She was asked her
+name (which she said with touching simplicity was Jeannette at home but
+Jeanne in France), the names of her father and mother, godfather and
+godmothers, the priest who baptised her, the place where she was born,
+etc., her age, almost nineteen; her education, consisting of the Pater
+Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, which her mother had taught her.
+
+Here she was asked, a curious interruption to the formal interrogatory,
+to say the Pater Noster--the reason of which sudden demand was that
+witches and sorcerers were supposed to be unable to repeat that prayer.
+As unexpected as the question was Jeanne's reply. She answered that if
+the Bishop would hear her in confession she would say it willingly. She
+had been refused all the exercises of piety, and she was speaking to a
+company of priests.
+
+There is a great dignity of implied protest against this treatment in
+such an answer. The request was made a second time with a promise of
+selecting two worthy Frenchmen to hear her: but her reply was the same.
+She would say the prayer when she made her confession but not otherwise.
+She was ready it would seem in proud humility to confess to any or
+to all of her enemies, as one whose conscience was clear, and who had
+nothing to conceal.
+
+She was then commanded not to attempt to escape from her prison, on pain
+of being condemned for heresy, but to this again she demurred at once.
+She would not accept the prohibition, but would escape if she could,
+so that no man could say that she had broken faith; although since her
+capture she had been bound in chains and her feet fastened with irons.
+To this, her examiner said that it was necessary so to secure her in
+order that she might not escape. "It is true and certain," she replied,
+"whatever others may wish, that to every prisoner it is lawful to escape
+if he can." It may be remarked, as she forcibly pointed out afterwards,
+that she had never given her faith, never surrendered, but had always
+retained her freedom of action.
+
+The tribunal thereupon called in the captain in charge of Jeanne's
+prison, a gentleman called John Gris in the record, probably John Grey,
+along with two soldiers, Bernoit and Talbot, and enjoined them to guard
+her securely and not to permit her to talk with any one without the
+permission of the court. This was all the business done on the first day
+of audience.
+
+On the 22d of February at eight o'clock in the morning, the sitting was
+resumed. In the meantime, however, the chapel had been found too small
+and too near the outer world, the proceedings being much interrupted by
+shouts and noises from without, and probably incommoded within by the
+audience which had crowded it the first day. The judges accordingly
+assembled in the great hall of the castle; they were forty-nine in
+number on the second day, the number being chiefly swelled by canons
+of Rouen. After some preliminary business the accused was once more
+introduced, and desired again to take the oath. Jeanne replied that she
+had done so on the previous day and that this was enough; upon which
+there followed a short altercation, which, however, ended by her consent
+to swear again that she would answer truly in all things that concerned
+the faith. The questioner this day was Jean Beaupere (_Pulchri patris_,
+as he is called in the Latin), a theologian, Master of Arts, Canon of
+Paris and of Besancon, "one of the greatest props of the University of
+Paris," a man holding a number of important offices, and who afterwards
+appeared at the Council of Bale as the deputy of Normandy. He began
+by another exhortation to speak the truth, to which Jeanne replied as
+before that what she did say she would say truly, but that she would not
+answer upon all subjects. "I have done nothing but by revelation," she
+said.
+
+These preliminaries on both sides having been gone through, the
+examination was resumed. Jeanne informed the court in answer to
+Beaupere's question that she had been taught by her mother to sew and
+did not fear to compete with any woman in Rouen in these crafts; that
+she had once been absent from home when her family were driven out of
+their village by fear of the Burgundians, and that she had then lived
+for about fifteen days in the house of a woman called La Rousse, at
+Neufchateau; that when she was at home she was occupied in the work of
+the house and did not go to the fields with the sheep and other animals;
+that she went to confession regularly to the Cure of her own village, or
+when he could not hear her, to some other priest, by permission of the
+Cure; also that two or three times she had made her confession to the
+mendicant friars--this being during her stay in Neufchateau (where
+presumably she was not acquainted with the clergy); and that she
+received the sacrament always at Easter. Asked whether she had
+communicated at other feasts than Easter, she said briefly that this
+was enough. "Go on to the rest," _passez outre_, she added, and the
+questioner seems to have been satisfied. Then came the really vital
+part of the matter. She proceeded--no direct question on the point being
+recorded, though no doubt it was made--to tell how when she was about
+thirteen she heard voices from God bidding her to be good and obedient.
+The first time she was much afraid. The voice came about the hour of
+noon, in summer, in her father's garden. She was fasting but had not
+fasted the preceding day. The voice came from the right, towards the
+church; and came rarely without a great light. This light came always
+from the side whence the voice proceeded, and was a very bright
+radiance. When she came into France she still continued to hear the same
+voices.
+
+She was then asked how she could see the light when it was at the side;
+to which foolish question Jeanne gave no reply, but "turned to other
+matters," saying voluntarily with a soft implied reproof of the noise
+around her--that if she were in a wood, that is in a quiet place, she
+could hear the voices coming towards her. She added (going on, one could
+imagine, in a musing, forgetting the congregation of sinners about her)
+that it seemed to her a noble voice, and that she believed it came from
+God, and that when she had heard it three times she knew it was the
+voice of an angel; the voice always came quite clearly to her, and she
+understood it well.
+
+She was then asked what it said to her concerning the salvation of her
+soul.
+
+She said that it taught her to rule her life well, to go often to
+church: and told her that it was necessary that she, Jeanne, should
+go to France. The said Jeanne added that she would not be questioned
+further concerning the voice, or the manner in which it was made known
+to her, but that two or three times in a week it had said to her that
+she must go to France; but that her father knew nothing of this. The
+voice said to her that she should go to France, until she could endure
+it no longer; it said to her that she should raise the siege, which was
+set against the city of Orleans. It said also that she must go to Robert
+of Baudricourt, in the city of Vaucouleurs, who was captain of that
+place, and that he would give her people to go with her; to which she
+had answered that she was a poor girl who knew not how to ride, nor how
+to conduct war. She then said that she went to her uncle and told him
+that she wished to go with him for a little while to his house, and that
+she lived there for eight days; she then told her uncle that she must go
+to Vaucouleurs, and the said uncle took her there. Also she went on to
+say that when she came to the said city of Vaucouleurs, she recognised
+Robert of Baudricourt; though she had never seen him before she knew him
+by the voice that said to her which was he. She then told this Robert
+that it was necessary that she should go to France, but twice over he
+refused and repulsed her; the third time, however, he received her, and
+gave her certain men to go with her; the voice had told her that this
+would be so.
+
+She said also that the Duke of Lorraine sent for her to come to him, and
+that she went under a safe conduct granted by him, and told him that
+she must go to France. He asked her whether he should recover from his
+illness; but she told him that she knew nothing of that, and she talked
+very little to him of her journey. She told the Duke that he ought to
+send his son and his people with her to take her to France, and that
+she would pray God to restore his health; and then she was taken back to
+Vaucouleurs. She said also that when she left Vaucouleurs she wore the
+dress of a man, without any other arms than a sword which Robert de
+Baudricourt had given her; and that she had with her a chevalier, a
+squire, and four servants, and that they slept for the first night at
+St. Urbain, in the abbey there. She was then asked by whose advice she
+wore the dress of a man, but refused to answer. Finally she said that
+she charged no man with giving her this advice.
+
+She went on to say that the said Robert de Baudricourt exacted an oath
+from those who went with her, that they would conduct her to the end of
+her journey well and safely; and that he said, as she left him, "Go, and
+let come what will." She also said that she knew well that God loved the
+Duke of Orleans, concerning whom she had more revelations than about any
+other living man, except him whom she called her King. She added that it
+was necessary for her to wear male attire, and that whoever advised her
+to do so had given her wise counsel.
+
+She then said that she sent a letter to the English before Orleans, in
+which she required them to go away, a copy of which letter had been read
+to her in Rouen; but there were two or three mistakes, especially in
+the words which called upon them to surrender to the Maid instead of
+to surrender to the King. (There is no indication why these two latter
+statements should have been introduced into the midst of her narrative
+of the journey; it may have been in reply to some other question
+interjected by another of her examiners: _Passez outre_, as she herself
+says. She immediately resumes the simple and straightforward tale.)
+
+The said Jeanne went on to say that her further journey to him whom she
+called her King was without any impediment; and that when she arrived
+at the town of St. Catherine de Fierbois she sent news of her arrival to
+the town of Chasteau-Chinon where the said King was. She arrived there
+herself about noon and went to an inn(1); and after dinner went to him
+whom she called her King, who was in the castle. She then said that when
+she entered the chamber where he was, she knew him among all others,
+by the revelation of her "voices." She told her King that she wished to
+make war against the English.
+
+She was then asked whether when she heard the "voices" in the presence
+of the King the light was also seen in that place. She answered as
+before: _Passez outre: Transeatis ultra_. "Go on," as we might say, "to
+the other questions."
+
+She was asked if she had seen an angel hovering over her King. She
+answered: "Spare me; _passez outre_." She added afterwards, however,
+that before he put his hand to the work, the King had many beautiful
+apparitions and revelations. She was asked what these were. She
+answered: "I will not tell you; it is not I who should answer; send to
+the King and he will tell you."
+
+She was then asked if her voices had promised her that when she came to
+the King he would receive her. She answered that those of her own
+party knew that she had been sent from God and that some had heard
+and recognised the voices. Further, she said that her King and various
+others had heard and seen(2) the voices coming to her--Charles of
+Bourbon (Comte de Clermont) and two or three others with him. She then
+said that there was no day in which she did not hear that voice; but
+that she asked nothing from it except the salvation of her soul. Besides
+this, Jeanne confessed that the voice said she should be led to the town
+of St. Denis in France, where she wished to remain--that is after the
+attack on Paris--but that against her will the lords forced her to leave
+it: if she had not been wounded she would not have gone: but she was
+wounded in the moats of Paris: however she was healed in five days. She
+then said that she had made an assault, called in French _escarmouche_
+(skirmish), upon the town of Paris. She was asked if it was on a holy
+day, and said that she believed it was on a festival. She was then
+asked if she thought it well done to fight on a holy day, and answered,
+"_Passez outre_." Go on to the next question.
+
+This is a verbatim account of one day of the trial. Most of the
+translations which exist give questions as well as answers: but these
+are but occasionally given in the original document, and Jeanne's
+narrative reads like a calm, continuous statement, only interrupted now
+and then by a question, usually a cunning attempt to startle her with
+a new subject, and to hurry some admission from her. The great dignity
+with which she makes her replies, the occasional flash of high spirit,
+the calm determination with which she refuses to be led into discussion
+of the subjects which she had from the first moment reserved, are very
+remarkable. We have seen her hitherto only in conflict, in the din of
+battle and the fatigue, yet exuberant energy, of rapid journeys. Her
+circumstances were now very different. She had been shut up in prison
+for months, for six weeks at least she had been in irons, and the air
+of heaven had not blown upon this daughter of the fields; her robust yet
+sensitive maidenhood had been exposed to a hundred offences, and to the
+constant society, infecting the very air about, of the rudest of men;
+yet so far is her spirit from being broken that she meets all those
+potent, grave, and reverend doctors and ecclesiastics, with the
+simplicity and freedom of a princess, answering frankly or holding
+her peace as seems good to her, afraid of nothing, keeping her
+self-possession, all her wits about her as we say, without panic
+and without presumption. The trial of Jeanne is indeed almost more
+miraculous than her fighting; a girl not yet nineteen, forsaken of all,
+without a friend! It is less wonderful that she should have developed
+the qualities of a general, of a gunner, every gift of war--than that in
+her humiliation and distress she should thus hold head against all
+the most subtle intellects in France, and bear, with but one moment of
+faltering, a continued cross-examination of three months, without losing
+her patience, her heart, or her courage.
+
+*****
+
+The third day brought a still larger accession of judges, sixty-two of
+them taking their places on the benches round the Bishop in the great
+hall; and the day began with another and longer altercation between
+Cauchon and Jeanne on the subject of the oath again demanded of her. She
+maintained her resolution to say nothing of her voices. "We" according
+to the record "required of her that she should swear simply and
+absolutely without reservation." She would seem to have replied with
+impatience, "Let me speak freely:" adding "By my faith you may ask me
+many questions which I will not answer": then explaining, "Many things
+you may ask me, but I will tell you nothing truly that concerns my
+revelations; for you might compel me to say things which I have sworn
+not to say; and so I should perjure myself, which you ought not to
+wish." This explains several statements which she made later in respect
+to her introduction to the King. She repeated emphatically: "I warn
+you well, you who call yourselves my judges, that you take a great
+responsibility upon you, and that you burden me too much." She said also
+that it was enough to have already sworn twice. She was again asked to
+swear simply and absolutely, and answered, "It is enough to have sworn
+twice," and that all the clerks in Rouen and Paris could not condemn her
+unless lawfully; also that of her coming she would speak the truth but
+not all the truth; and that the space of eight days would not be enough
+to tell all.
+
+"We the said Bishop" (continues the report) "then said to her that she
+should ask advice from those present whether she ought to swear or
+not. She replied again that of her coming she would speak truly and not
+otherwise, nor would it be fit that she should talk at large. We then
+told her that it would throw suspicion on what she said if she did not
+swear to speak the truth. She answered as before. We repeated that she
+must swear precisely and absolutely. She answered that she would say
+what she knew, but not all, and that she had come on the part of God,
+and appealed to God from whom she came. Again requested and admonished
+to swear on pain of every punishment that could be put on her, again
+answered '_Passez outre_.' Finally she consented to swear that she would
+speak the truth in everything that concerned the trial."
+
+Her examination was then resumed by Beaupere as before, who elicited
+from her that she had fasted (he seems to have wished to make out that
+the fasting had something to do with her visions) since noon the day
+before (it was Lent); and also that she had heard her voices both on
+that day and the day before, three times on the previous day, the first
+time in the morning when she was asleep, and awakened by them. Did she
+kneel and thank them? She thanked them, sitting up in her bed (to which
+she was chained, as her questioner knew) and clasping her hands. She
+asked them what she was to do, and they told her to answer boldly.
+
+It may be remarked here that more frequently as the examination goes
+on, part of Jeanne's words are quoted in the first person, as if the
+reporters had been specially struck by them, while the bulk of her
+evidence goes on more calmly in the third person, the narrative form.
+After saying that she was bidden to answer boldly, she seems to have
+turned to the Bishop, and to have addressed him individually: "You say
+you are my judge; I warn you to take care what you are doing, for I
+am sent from God, and you are putting yourself in much peril" (_magno
+periculo: gallice_, adds the reporter, _en grant dangier_).
+
+She was then asked if her voices ever changed their meaning, and
+answered that she had never heard two speak contrary to each other; what
+they had said that day was that she should speak boldly. Asked, if the
+voice forbade her to reply to questions asked, she replied; "I will not
+answer you. I have revelations touching the King which I will not tell
+you." Asked, if the voices forbade her to reveal these revelations, she
+answered, "I have not consulted them; give me fifteen days' delay and I
+will answer you"; but being again exhorted to reply, said: "If the voice
+forbade me to speak, how many times should I tell you?" Again asked, if
+she were forbidden to speak, answered, "I believe I am not forbidden
+by men"--repeating that she would not reply, and knew not how far she
+should reply, for it had not been revealed to her; but that she believed
+firmly, as firmly as the Christian faith, and that God had redeemed us
+from the pains of hell, that this voice came from Him.
+
+Questioned concerning the voice, what it appeared to be when it spoke,
+if that of an angel, or from God Himself; or if it was the voice of a
+saint or of saints (feminine), answered: "The voice comes from God; and
+I believe that I should not tell you all I know, for I should displease
+these voices if I answered you; and as for this question I pray you
+to leave me free." Asked if she thought that to speak the truth would
+displease God, she answered, "What the voices say I am to tell to the
+King, not to you," adding that during that night they had said much to
+her for the good of the King, and that if she could but let him know
+she would willingly drink no wine up to Easter (the reader will remember
+that her frugal fare consisted of bread dipped in the wine and water,
+which is justly called _eau rougie_ in France). Asked, if she could not
+induce the voices to speak to her King directly, she answered that she
+knew not whether her voices would consent, unless it were the will of
+God, and God consented to it, adding, "They might well reveal it to the
+King; and with that I should be content." Asked, if the voices could
+not communicate with the King as they did in her presence, she answered,
+that she did not know whether this was God's will; and added, that
+unless it were the will of God she would not know how to act. Asked, if
+it was by the advice of her voices that she attempted to escape from
+her prison, she answered, "I have nothing to say to you on that point."
+Asked, if she always saw a light when the voices were heard, she
+answered: "Yes: that with the sound of the voices light came." Asked if
+she saw anything else coming with the voices, answered: "I do not tell
+you all. I am not allowed to do so, nor does my oath touch that; the
+voices are good and noble, but neither of that will I answer." She was
+then asked to give in writing the points on which she would not reply.
+Then she was asked if her voices had eyes and ears, and answered, "You
+shall not have this either," adding, that it was a saying among children
+that men were sometimes hanged for speaking the truth.
+
+She was then asked if she knew herself to be in the grace of God. She
+replied: "If I am not so, may God put me in His grace; if I am, may God
+keep me in it. I should be the most miserable in the world if I were not
+in the grace of God." She said besides, that if she were in a state of
+sin she did not believe her voices would come to her, and she wished
+that everyone could understand them as she did, adding, that she was
+about thirteen when they came to her first.
+
+She was then asked, whether in her childhood she had played with the
+other children in the fields, and various other particulars about
+Domremy, whether there were any Burgundians there? to which Jeanne
+answered boldly that there was one, and that she wished his head might
+be cut off, adding piously, "that is, if it pleased God"(3); she was
+also asked whether she had fought along with the other children against
+the children of the neighbouring Burgundian village of Maxy (Maxey sur
+Meuse): why she hated the Burgundians, and many questions of this
+kind, with a close examination about a certain tree near the village of
+Domremy, which some called the Tree of the good Ladies, and others, the
+Fairies' Tree; and also about a well there, the Fairies' Well, of which
+poor patients were said to drink and get well. Jeanne (no doubt relieved
+by the simple character of these questions) made answer freely and
+without hesitation, in no way denying that she had danced and sung with
+the other children, and made garlands for the image of the Blessed Marie
+of Domremy; but she did not remember whether she had ever done so after
+attaining years of discretion, and certainly she had never seen a fairy,
+nor worked any spell by their means. At the end, after having thus been
+put off her guard, she was suddenly asked about her dress (a capital
+point in the eyes of her judges): whether she wished to have a woman's
+dress. Probably she was, as they hoped, tired, and expecting no such
+question, for she answered quickly yet with instant recovery: "Bring
+me one to go home in and I will accept it; otherwise no. I prefer this,
+since it pleases God that I should wear it." The recollection of Domremy
+and of the pleasant fields, must have carried her back to the days when
+the little Jeanne was like the rest in her short, full petticoats of
+crimson stuff, free of any danger: what could be better to go home in?
+but she immediately remembered the obvious and excellent reasons she had
+for wearing another costume now. So ended the third day.
+
+In the meantime there had been, we are told, various interruptions
+during the examination; perhaps it was then that Nicolas de Houppeville
+protested against Bishop Cauchon as a partisan and a Burgundian, and
+therefore incapable by law of judging a member of the opposite party:
+and had been rudely silenced, and afterwards punished, as we have
+already heard. Another kind of opposition less bold had begun to be
+remarked, which was that one of the persons present, by word and sign,
+whispering suggestions to her, or warning her with his eyes, was helping
+the unfortunate prisoner in her defence. Probably this did little good,
+"for she was often troubled and hurried in her answers," we are told;
+but it was a sign of good-will, at least. When Frere Isambard, who was
+the person in question, speaks at a later period he tells us that "the
+questions put to Jeanne were too difficult, subtle, and dangerous, so
+that the great clerks and learned men who were present scarcely would
+have known how to answer them, and that many in the assembly murmured
+at them." Perhaps the good Frere Isambard might have spared himself the
+trouble; for Jeanne, however she may have suffered, was probably more
+able to hold her own than many of those great clerks, and did so with
+unfailing courage and spirit. One of the other judges, Jean Fabry, a
+bishop, declared afterwards that "her answers were so good, that for
+three weeks he believed that they were inspired." Manchon, the reporter,
+he who had refused to take down the private conversation of Jeanne in
+her prison with the vile traitor, L'Oyseleur, makes his voice heard also
+to the effect that "Monseigneur of Beauvais would have had everything
+written as pleased him, and when there was anything that displeased him
+he forbade the secretaries to report it as being of no importance for
+the trial." On another day a humbler witness still, Massieu, one of the
+officers of the court, who had the charge of taking Jeanne daily
+from her prison to the hall, and back again, met in the courtyard an
+Englishman, who seems to have been a singing man or lay clerk "of
+the King's chapel in England," probably attached to Winchester's
+ecclesiastical retinue. This man asked him: "What do you think of her
+answers? Will she be burned? What will happen?" "Up to this time," said
+Massieu, "I have heard nothing from her that was not honourable and
+good. She seems to me a good woman, but how it will all end God only
+knows!"
+
+No doubt conversations of this kind were being carried on all over
+Rouen. Would she be burned? What would happen? Could any one stand and
+answer like that hour after hour and day by day, inspired only by the
+devil? There was no popular enthusiasm for her even now. How should
+there have been in that partisan province, more English than French? But
+a chill doubt began to steal into many minds whether she was so bad as
+had been thought, whether indeed she might not after all be something
+quite different from what she had been thought? Nature had begun to work
+in the agitated place, and even in that black-robed, eager assembly. If
+there was a vile L'Oyseleur trying to get her confidence in private, and
+so betray her, there was also a kind Frere Isambard, privately plucking
+at her sleeve, imploring her to be cautious, whispering an answer
+probably not half so wise as her own natural reply, yet warming her
+heart with the suggestion of a friend at hand.
+
+On the fourth day, Jeanne was again required to swear, and replied as
+before, that so far as concerned the trial she would answer truly,
+but not all she knew. "You ought to be satisfied: I have sworn
+sufficiently," she said; and with this her judges seem to have been
+content. Beaupere then resumed his questions, but first asked her,
+perhaps with a momentary gleam of compassion and a sudden consciousness
+of the pallor and weariness of the young prisoner, how she did. She
+answered, one can imagine with what tone of indignant disdain: "You see
+how I am: I am as well as I can be." He then cross-examined her closely
+as to what voices she had heard since her last appearance in court,
+but drew from her only the same answer, "The voice tells me to answer
+boldly," and that she would tell them as much as she was permitted by
+God to tell them, but concerning her revelations for the King of France
+she would say nothing except by permission of her voices.
+
+She was then asked what kind of voices they were which she heard, were
+they voices of angels, or of saints (_sancti aut sanctae_, male or female
+saints) or from God Himself? She answered that the voices were those of
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret, whose heads were crowned with beautiful
+crowns, very rich and precious. "So much as this God allows me to say.
+If you doubt send to Poitiers, where I was questioned before." (It may
+perhaps be permissible to suppose that the kind whisperer at her elbow
+might have suggested the repeated references to Poitiers that follow,
+but which are not to be found before: though it was most natural she
+should refer to this place where she was examined at the beginning of
+her mission.) Asked how she knew which of these two saints, she answered
+that she could quite distinguish one from the other by the manner of
+their salutation; that she had been led and guided by them for seven
+years, and that she knew them because they had named themselves to her.
+She was then asked how they were dressed? and answered: "I cannot tell
+you; I am not permitted to reveal this; if you do not believe me send to
+Poitiers." She said also that at her coming into France she had revealed
+these things, but could not now. She was asked what was the age of her
+saints, but replied that she was not permitted to tell. Asked, if both
+saints spoke at once or one after the other, she replied: "I have not
+permission to tell you: but I always consult them both together." Asked,
+which had appeared to her first, and answered: "I do not know which it
+was; I did know, but have forgotten. It is written in the register of
+Poitiers."
+
+"She then said she had much comfort from St. Michael. Again, asked,
+which had come first, she replied that it was St. Michael. Asked, if
+a long time had passed since she first heard the voice of St. Michael,
+answered: "I do not name to you the voice of St. Michael; but his
+conversation was of great comfort to me." Asked, again, what voice came
+first to her when she was thirteen, answered, that it was St. Michael
+whom she saw before her eyes, and that he was not alone, but accompanied
+by many angels of Heaven. She said also that she would not have come
+into France but by the command of God. Asked, if she saw St. Michael and
+the angels really, with her ordinary senses, she answered: "I saw them
+with my bodily eyes as I see you, and when they left me I wept, desiring
+much that they would take me with them." Asked, what was the form
+in which he appeared, she replied: "I cannot answer you; I am not
+permitted." Asked, what St. Michael said to her the first time, she
+cried, "You shall have no answer to-day." Then went on to say that her
+voices told her to reply boldly. Afterwards she said that she had told
+her King once all that had been revealed to her; said also that she was
+not permitted to say here what St. Michael had said; but that it would
+be better to send for a copy of the books which were at Poitiers than to
+question her on this subject. Asked, what sign she had that these
+were revelations of God, and that it was really St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret with whom she talked, she answered: "It is enough that I tell
+you they were St. Catherine and St. Margaret: believe me or not as you
+will."
+
+Asked how she distinguished the points on which she was allowed to
+speak from the others, she answered, that on some points she had asked
+permission to speak, and not on others, adding, that she would rather
+have been torn by wild horses than to have come to France, unless by
+the license of God. Asked how it was that she put on a man's dress, she
+answered, that dress appeared to her a small matter, that she did not
+adopt that dress by the counsel of any man, and that she neither put on
+a dress nor did anything, but according as God, or the angels, commanded
+her to do so. Asked, if she knew whether such a command to assume the
+dress of a man was lawful, she answered: "All that I did, I did by the
+precepts of our Lord; and if I were bidden to wear another dress I would
+do so, because it was at the bidding of God." Asked, if she had done
+it by the orders of Robert de Baudricourt, answered "No." Asked, if she
+thought that she had done well in assuming a man's dress, answered, that
+as all she did was by the command of the Lord, she believed that she had
+done well, and expected a good guarantee and good succour. Asked, if in
+this particular case of assuming the dress of a man she thought she had
+done well, answered, that nothing in the world had made her do it, but
+the command of God.
+
+She was then asked whether light always accompanied the voices when
+they came to her, she answered, with an evident reference to her first
+interview with Charles, that there were many lights on every side as was
+fit. "It is not only to you that light comes" (or you have not all the
+light to yourself,--a curious phrase). Asked, if there was an angel over
+the head of the King when she saw him for the first time, she answered:
+"By the Blessed Mary, if there were, I know not, I saw none." Asked, if
+there was light, she answered: "There were about three hundred soldiers,
+and fifty of them held torches, without counting any spiritual light.
+And rarely do I have the revelations without light." Asked, if her King
+had faith in what she said, she answered, that he had good signs, and
+also by his clergy. Asked, what revelations her King had, she answered:
+"You shall have nothing from me this year." Then added that for three
+weeks she was cross-examined by the clergy, both in the town of Chinon
+and at Poitiers, and that her King had signs concerning her, before he
+believed in her. And the clergy of his party had found nothing in her,
+in respect to her faith, that was not good. Asked, whether she gone to
+the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois, answered: "yes," and that she
+had there heard three masses in one day, and from thence went to Chinon;
+she added that she had sent a letter thence to the King, in which it was
+contained that she sent this to know if she might come to the town
+in which the King was; for that she had travelled a hundred and fifty
+leagues to come to him and to bring him help, for she knew much good
+concerning him. And she thought it was contained in this letter that she
+should recognise the King among all the rest.
+
+She said besides, that she had a sword which was given to her at
+Vaucouleurs; she said also that, being in Tours or at Chinon, she sent
+for a sword which was in the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois behind
+the altar, and that when it was found it was rusty. Asked, how she knew
+about this sword, she answered, that it was rusty because of being in
+the ground, and there were five crosses on it, and that she knew this
+sword by her voices, and not by any man's report. She wrote to the
+ecclesiastics of the place where it was and asked them for this sword,
+and they sent it to her. It was found not much below the ground behind
+the altar; she was not sure if it was before or behind the altar, but
+wrote that it was behind the altar. And when it was found the clergy
+cleaned it and rubbed off the rust, which came off easily; and it was an
+armourer of Tours who went to fetch it. The clergy made a scabbard for
+it before sending it to the said Jeanne, and they of Tours made another,
+so that it had two scabbards, one of crimson velvet and one of cloth of
+gold. And she herself procured another of strong leather. She said also
+that when she was captured she had not that sword. Said also that she
+continued to wear the said sword until she left St. Denis after the
+assault on Paris. Asked, what benediction she made, or if she made any
+on this sword, she answered, that she made no benediction, nor knew how
+to make one, but that she loved the sword because it had come to her
+from the Church of the blessed Catherine whom she loved much. Asked,
+if she had placed it on the altar at the village of Coulenges, Les
+Vineuses, or elsewhere, placing it there that it might bring good luck,
+she answered, that she knew nothing of this. Asked, if she did not pray
+that the sword might have good fortune: "It is good to know that I
+wish all my armour (_harnesseum meum; gallice, mon harnois_) to be very
+fortunate." Asked, where she had left the sword, answered, that she had
+deposited a sword and armour at St. Denis, but it was not this sword.
+She added that she had it in Lagny: but that she afterwards wore the
+sword which had been taken from a Burgundian, which was a good sword
+for war and gave good strokes (_gallice, de bonnes bouffes_ and _de bons
+torchons_). Said also that to tell where she left it had nothing to do
+with the trial, and she would answer nothing.
+
+She said also that her brothers had everything that belonged to her, her
+horses, swords, and everything, and that she believed they were worth
+in all about 12,000 francs. She was also asked whether when she was at
+Orleans she had a standard, and what colour it was; answered, that she
+had a standard, the field of which was sown with lilies, and on it was a
+figure of the world with angels on each side. It was white, and made
+of a stuff called boucassin, upon which was written the name _Jhesus
+Maria_, so that all might see, and it was fringed with silk. Asked, if
+the name _Jhesus Maria_ was written above or below or at the side, she
+answered, "At the side." Asked, if she loved her sword or standard best,
+she answered, that she loved her standard best. Asked, why she had that
+picture on the standard, she answered: "I have sufficiently told you
+that I did nothing but by the command of God." She added that she
+herself carried her standard when in battle that she might not hurt
+anyone, and said that she had never killed any man.
+
+Asked, how many men her King gave her when she began her work, answered,
+from ten to twelve(4) thousand men, and that she attacked first the
+bastile of St. Loup at Orleans, and afterwards that of the bridge.
+Asked, from which bastile it was that her men were driven back, she
+answered, that she did not remember; adding, that she had been sure that
+she could raise the siege at Orleans, for it had been so revealed to
+her; and that she told this to her King before it occurred. Asked,
+whether, when she made assault, she told her men that all the arrows,
+stones, cannon-balls, etc., would be intercepted by her, she answered
+no--that more than a hundred were wounded: that what she had said to her
+people was that they should have no doubts, for they should certainly
+raise the siege of Orleans. She said also that in attacking the bastile
+of the bridge she herself was wounded by an arrow in the neck, and was
+much comforted by St. Catherine, and was healed in fifteen days; but
+that she never gave up riding and working all that time. Asked, if she
+knew that she would be wounded, she answered, that she knew it well
+and had told her King, but that, notwithstanding, she went about her
+business. It was revealed to her by the voices of her two saints, the
+blessed Catherine and the blessed Margaret. She said besides, that she
+was the first to place a scaling ladder on the bastile of the bridge,
+and as she raised it she was struck in the neck.
+
+She was then asked why she did not treat with the Captain of Jargeau;
+she answered that the lords of her party had replied to the English, who
+had asked for a truce of fifteen days, that they could not have it, but
+that they might retire, they and their horses at once; she had said for
+her part that if they retired in their doublets and tunics their lives
+should be spared, otherwise the city would be taken by storm. Asked, if
+she had consulted with her counsel, that is with her voices, whether the
+truce should be granted or not, she answered, that she did not remember.
+
+It will be remarked, as the slow examination goes on day after day, that
+Jeanne, becoming at moments impatient, sometimes gives a rough answer,
+and at other times plays a little with her questioner as if in
+contempt. "By the Blessed Mary, I know not!" is evidently an outburst
+of impatience at the exhausting, exasperating folly of some of these
+questions, and this will be further visible in future sittings. It
+seems very likely that the reference to Poitiers, which was an excellent
+suggestion, commending itself to her invariable good sense, came from
+the kind priest who tried to serve her as he best could; but there are
+other answers a little incoherent, which look as if Frere Isambard,
+if it were he, had confused her in her own response without conveying
+anything better to her mind, especially on the occasions when she
+refuses to reply, and then does so, abandoning her ground at once. Her
+patience and steadiness are quite extraordinary however even in the less
+self-collected moments. Thus end the proceedings of the fourth day.
+
+*****
+
+The fifth day began with the usual dispute about the oath, Jeanne
+still retaining her reservation with the greatest firmness. She seems,
+however, at the end, to have repeated her oath to answer everything that
+had to do with the trial--"And as much as I say I will say as if I
+were before the Pope of Rome." These words must have given the Magister
+Beaupere an admirable occasion for introducing one of the things charged
+against her for which there was actual proof--her letter to the Comte
+d'Armagnac in respect to the Pope. He seized upon it evidently with
+eagerness, and asked her which she held to be the true Pope. To this she
+answered quietly, "Are there two?"--the most confusing reply.(5)
+
+She was asked if she had received letters from the Comte d'Armagnac,
+asking to know which of the three existing Popes he ought to obey; she
+answered that she had his letter, and had replied to it, saying among
+other things that when she was in Paris and at rest she would answer
+him; and added that she was on the point of mounting her horse when she
+gave that reply. The copy of the letter and the reply being read to her
+she was asked if that was what she had said; to which she replied that
+she had answered his letter in part, not in full. Asked, if she knew the
+counsels of the King of Kings so as to be able to say which the count
+should obey, she answered, that she knew nothing. Asked, if she was in
+doubt as to which the count ought to obey, she replied that she knew not
+which to bid him obey; but that she, the said Jeanne, held and believed
+that we ought to obey our Pope who was in Rome; that as for what he
+asked, that she should tell him which God desired him to obey, she had
+said she knew nothing; but she sent much to him which was not put in
+writing. And as for herself she believed in the Lord Pope of Rome.
+Asked, whether in respect to the three pontiffs she had received
+counsel, she answered, that she had neither written nor made to be
+written anything about the three pontiffs. And this she swore on her
+oath. Asked, if she were in the habit of putting on her letters the name
+_Jhesus Maria_ with a cross, answered, that she did so sometimes but not
+always, and that sometimes she put a cross to shew that these letters
+were not to be taken seriously (as likely to fall into the enemy's
+hands).
+
+Some questions were then put to her about her letters to the Duke of
+Bedford and to the English King, and copies were read to her to which
+she objected on some small points, but mistakenly it would seem, as that
+she had summoned them to surrender to the King, while the scribe had put
+"surrender to the Maid." She said, however, that they were her letters,
+and that she held by them. She added that before seven years the English
+would lose more than they had lost at Orleans,(6) and that their cause
+would be lost in France; she said also that the said English should have
+greater disasters than they had yet had in France, and that God would
+give greater victories to France. Asked, how she knew this, she replied:
+"I know it by the revelations made to me, and that it will happen in
+seven years, and I might well be angry that it is deferred so long."
+Asked, when this would happen, she said that she knew neither the day
+nor the hour.
+
+She was tormented a little further as to the dates, whether this would
+happen before the St. Jean, or before the St. Martin in winter, but made
+no answer except that before the St. Martin in winter they should see
+many things, and it might be that the English should fail; as a matter
+of fact Paris opened its gates to Charles VII. within the seven years
+specified, so that Jeanne's prophecy may be held to have been fulfilled.
+
+We then come once more to a long and profitless interrogatory upon
+her saints, in which the crowd of judges forgot their dignity and
+overwhelmed her with a flood of often very foolish, and sometimes worse
+than foolish questions.
+
+Asked, how she knew the future, she answered that she knew it by St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret; asked, if St. Gabriel was with St. Michael
+when he came to her, she answered, that she could not remember. Asked,
+if she saw them always in the same dress, answered yes, and they were
+crowned very richly. Of their other garments she could not speak; she
+knew nothing of their tunics. Asked, how she knew whether they were men
+or women, answered, that she knew well by their voices which revealed
+them to her; and that she knew nothing save by revelation and the
+precepts of God. Asked, what appearances she saw, she answered, that she
+saw faces. Asked, if these saints had hair, she answered, "It is good to
+know." Asked, if there was anything between their crowns and their hair,
+answered, no. Asked, if their hair was long and hanging down, answered,
+"I know nothing about it." She also said that their voices were
+beautiful sweet, and humble, and that she understood them well. Asked,
+how they could speak when they had no bodies, she answered, "I refer it
+to God." She repeated that the voices were beautiful, humble, and sweet,
+and that they could speak French. Asked, if St. Margaret did not speak
+English, answered: "How could she speak English when she was not on the
+English side?"
+
+This would seem to infer that the St. Margaret referred to was not the
+legendary St. Margaret of the dragon, but St. Margaret of Scotland, well
+known in France from the long connection between those two countries,
+and a popular mediaeval saint. She would naturally have spoken English,
+being a Saxon, but also quite naturally would have been against the
+English, as a Scottish queen; but of these refinements it is very
+unlikely that Jeanne knew anything, and her prompt and somewhat sharp
+reply evidently cut the inquiry short. The next question was, did they
+wear gold rings in their ears or elsewhere, these crowned saints; to
+which she answered a little contemptuously, "I know nothing about it."
+She was then asked if she herself had rings: on which "turning to us the
+aforesaid Bishop, she said, 'You have one of mine; give it back to me.'
+She then said that the Burgundians had her other ring, and asked of us
+if we had the ring to shew it to her. Asked, who gave her this ring,
+answered, her father or her mother, and that the name _Jhesus Maria_
+was written upon it, but that she knew not who put it there, nor even
+whether there was a stone in the ring; it was given to her in the
+village of Domremy. She added that her brother gave her another ring
+which we had, and said that she desired that it might be given to the
+Church."
+
+A sudden change was now made in the cross-examination according to the
+methods of that operation, throwing her back without warning upon the
+village superstitions of Domremy, the magic tree and fountain. Many of
+the questions which follow are so trivial and are so evidently instinct
+with evil meaning, that it seems a wrong to Beaupere to impute the whole
+of the interrogatory to him; other questions were evidently interposed
+by the excited assembly.
+
+Asked, if St. Catherine and St. Margaret talked with her under the tree
+of which mention had been made above, she answered, "I know nothing
+about it." Asked, if the saints were seen at the fountain near the
+tree, answered yes, that she had heard them there; but what her saints
+promised to her, there or elsewhere, she answered, that nothing was
+promised except by permission from God. Asked, what promises were made
+to her, she answered, "This has nothing at all to do with your trial,"
+but added, that among other things they said to her that her King
+should be restored to his kingdom, and that his adversaries should
+be destroyed. She said also that they promised to take her, the said
+Jeanne, to Paradise, as she had asked them to do. Asked, if she had any
+other promises, she said there was one promise that had nothing to do
+with the trial, but that in three months she would tell them what that
+other promise was. Asked, if the voices told her she would be set free
+from her prison in three months, she answered: "This does not concern
+your trial; nor do I know when I shall be set free." And she added that
+those who wished to send her out of this world might well go before her.
+Asked, if her council did not tell her when she should be set free from
+her present prison, answered: "Ask me this in three months' time; I can
+promise you as much as that"--but added: "You may ask those present, on
+their oaths, if this has anything to do with the trial."
+
+Startled by this suggestion, the judges seem to have held a hurried
+consultation among themselves to see whether these matters did really
+touch the trial; the result apparently decided them to return again to
+the question of the local superstitions of Domremy, the only point on
+which there seemed a chance of breaking down the extraordinarily just
+and steadfast intelligence of the girl who stood before them. After this
+pause she resumed, apparently not in answer to any question.
+
+"I have well told you that there were things you should not know, and
+some time I must needs be set free. But I must have permission if I
+speak; therefore I will ask to have delay in this." Asked, if her voices
+forbade her to speak the truth, she said: "Do you expect me to tell you
+things that concern the King of France? There is a great deal here that
+has nothing to do with the trial." She said also that she knew that her
+King should enjoy the kingdom of France, as well as she knew that they
+were there before her in judgment. She added that she would have been
+dead but for the revelations which comforted her daily. She was then
+asked what she had done with her mandragora (mandrake)? she answered
+that she had no mandragora, nor had ever had. She had heard say that
+near her village there was one, but had never seen it. She had heard say
+that it was a dangerous thing, and that it was wicked to keep it; but
+knew nothing of its use. Asked, in what place this mandrake was, and
+what she had heard of it? she said that she had heard that it grew under
+the tree of which mention has been made, but did not know the place; she
+said also that she had heard that above the mandragora was a hazel tree.
+Asked, what she heard was done with the mandragora, answered, that she
+had heard that it brought money, but did not believe it; and added that
+her voices had never told her anything about it.
+
+Asked, what was the appearance of St. Michael when she saw him first,
+she answered, that she saw no crown, and knew nothing of his dress.
+Asked, if he was naked, she answered, "Do you think God has nothing to
+clothe him with?" Asked, if he had hair, she answered, "Why should
+it have been cut?" She said further that she had not seen the blessed
+Michael since she left the castle of Crotoy, nor did she see him often.
+At last she said that she knew not whether he had hair or not. Asked,
+whether he carried scales, she answered, "I know nothing of it," but
+added that she had much joy in seeing him, and she knew when she saw him
+that she was not in a state of sin. She also said that St. Catherine and
+St. Margaret often made her confess to them, and said that if she had
+been in a state of sin it was without knowing it. She was then asked
+whether, when she confessed, she believed herself to be in a state of
+mortal sin; she answered, that she knew not whether she had been in that
+state, but did not believe she had done the works of sin. "It would not
+have pleased God," she said, "that I should have been so; nor would it
+have pleased Him that I should have done the works of sin by which my
+soul should have been burdened."
+
+She was then asked what sign she gave to the King that she came to him
+from God; she answered: "I have told you always that nothing should draw
+this from me.(7) Ask me no more." Asked, if she had not sworn to reveal
+what was asked of her touching the trial, answered, "I have told you
+that I will tell you nothing that was for our King; and of this which
+belongs to him I will not speak." Asked, if she knew the sign which she
+gave to the King, she answered: "You shall know nothing from me." When
+it was said to her that this did concern the trial, she answered, "Of
+that which I have promised to keep secret I shall tell you nothing";
+and further she said, "I promised in that place and I could not tell you
+without perjuring myself." Asked, to whom she promised? answered, that
+she had promised to Saints Catherine and Margaret, and this was shown to
+the King. She also said she had promised it to these two saints, because
+they had required it of her. And the same Jeanne had done this at their
+request. "Too many people would have asked me concerning it, if I had
+not promised to the aforesaid saints." She was then asked, when
+she showed this sign to the King if there were others with him; she
+answered, that to her there was no one near him, even though many people
+might have been present. (As a matter of fact the sign was given to
+Charles when he talked with the Maid apart in a recess, the great hall
+being full of the Court and followers; so that this was strictly true.)
+Asked further, if she saw a crown over the head of her King when
+she showed him this sign, but replied: "I cannot answer you without
+perjury." Asked further if her King had a crown when he was at Rheims,
+answered, that in her opinion her King had a crown which he found at
+Rheims, but a very fine one was afterwards brought for him. He did this
+to hasten matters, at the desire of the city of Rheims; but if he had
+been more certain, he could have had a crown a thousand times richer.
+(All this is very obscure.)
+
+Asked, if she had seen this crown, she answered: "I could not tell you
+without perjury, but I heard that it was a very rich one." It was then
+determined to conclude for this day.
+
+On the sixth day there was again the same questions about the oath,
+ending in the usual way. And the cross-examination was at once
+continued.
+
+She was asked if she would say whether St. Michael had wings, and what
+bodies and members had St. Catherine and St. Margaret; and she answered,
+"I have told you what I know, and will make no other reply"; she said,
+moreover, that when she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret, she knew at once that they were saints of Paradise. Asked, if
+she saw anything more than their faces, she answered: "I have told you
+all I know of them: and I would rather have had my head taken off than
+tell you all I know." She then said that in whatever concerned the trial
+she would speak freely. Asked, if she believed that St. Michael and St.
+Gabriel had natural heads, she answered: "I saw them with my eyes and
+I believe that they are, as firmly as I believe that God is." Asked, if
+she believed that God made them in the form in which she saw them, she
+answered, "Yes." Asked, if she believed that God had created them in the
+same form from the beginning, answered: "You shall have no more for the
+present, except what I have already said."
+
+This subject was then dropped, and the examiner made another leap
+forward to a different part of her life. "Did you know by revelation
+that you should break prison?" he said. To this Jeanne answered
+indignantly: "This has nothing to do with your trial. Would you have me
+speak against myself?"
+
+Again questioned what her "voices" had said to her in respect to her
+attempts at escape, she again answered: "This has nothing to do with the
+trial; I go back to the trial. If all your questions were about that,
+I should tell you all." She said besides, on her faith, that she knew
+neither the day nor the hour when she should escape. She was then asked
+what the voices said to her generally, and answered: "In truth, they
+tell me I shall be freed, but neither the day nor the hour; and that I
+ought to speak boldly, and with a glad countenance." She was then asked
+whether, when first she saw her King, he asked her whether it was by
+revelation that she had assumed the dress of a man? she replied: "I have
+answered this. I cannot recollect whether he asked me. But it is written
+in the book at Poitiers." Asked, whether the doctors who examined her
+there, some for a month, some for three weeks, had asked her about her
+change of dress; she answered: "I don't remember; but I know they asked
+me when I assumed the dress of a man, and I told them it was in the town
+of Vaucouleurs." Asked, whether these doctors had inquired whether it
+was her voices which had made her take that dress, answered, "I don't
+remember." Asked if her Queen wished her to change her dress when she
+first saw her, answered, "I don't remember." Asked if her King, Queen,
+and all of her party did not ask her to lay aside the dress of a man,
+she answered, "This has nothing to do with the trial." Asked, if the
+same was not requested of her in the castle of Beaurevoir, she answered:
+"It is true. And I replied that I could not lay it aside without the
+permission of God." She said further that the demoiselle of Luxembourg
+(aunt of Jeanne's captor, and a very old woman) and the lady of
+Beaurevoir offered her a woman's dress, or stuff to make one, and begged
+her to wear it; but she replied that she had not yet the permission of
+our Lord, and that it was not yet time. Asked, if M. Jean de Pressy and
+others at Arras had offered her a woman's dress, she answered, "He and
+others have often asked it of me." Asked, if she thought she would have
+done wrong in putting on a woman's dress, she answered, that it was
+better to obey her sovereign Lord, that is, God; she said also that if
+she had done it, she would rather have done it at the request of these
+two ladies than of any other in France, except her Queen. Asked, if,
+when God revealed to her that she should change her dress, it was by the
+voice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, or St. Margaret, she answered, "You
+shall hear no more about it." Asked, when the King first employed her,
+and her standard was made, whether the men-at-arms and others who took
+part in the war did not have flags imitated from hers? she answered, "It
+is well to know that the lords retained their own arms"; she also added
+that her brothers-in-arms made such pennons as pleased them. Asked, how
+these were made, if they were of linen or cloth, answered, that they
+were of white satin, some of them with lilies; that she had but two or
+three lances in her own company--but that in the rest of the army some
+carried pennons like hers, but only to distinguish them from others.
+Asked, if the banners were often renewed, answered: "I know not; when
+the staff was broken it was renewed." Asked, if she had not said that
+the pennons copied from hers were fortunate, answered, that she had
+said, "Go in boldly among the English"; and that she had done the same
+herself. Asked, if she said that they should have good luck if they bore
+the banners well, answered, that she had told them what would happen,
+and what should still happen. Asked, if she had caused holy water to
+be sprinkled on the pennons when they were new, she answered, "That has
+nothing to do with the trial"; but added that if she did so sprinkle
+them she was not instructed to answer that question now. Asked, if
+the others put _Jhesus Maria_ upon their pennons, she answered: "By
+my faith, I know nothing about it." Asked, if she had ever carried or
+caused to be carried in a procession round a church or altar the linen
+of which the pennons were made, answered no, that she had never seen
+anything of the kind done.
+
+Asked, when she was before Jargeau, what it was that she wore behind
+her helmet, and if she had not something round it, she answered: "By my
+faith, there was nothing." Asked, if she knew a certain Brother Richard,
+she answered: "I never saw him till I was before Troyes." Asked, what
+cheer Brother Richard made to her, answered, that she thought the people
+of Troyes had sent him to her, doubting whether she had come on the part
+of God, and that as he approached her he made the sign of the cross, and
+sprinkled holy water; she said to him: "Come on boldly; I shall not fly
+away." Asked, if she had seen, or had caused to be made, any images or
+pictures of herself, she answered, that at Arras she had seen a picture
+in the hands of a Scot, where she was represented fully armed, kneeling
+on one knee, and presenting a letter to the King; but that she had never
+caused any image or picture of herself to be made. Asked concerning a
+table in the house of her host, upon which were painted three women,
+with _Justice, Peace, Union_ inscribed beneath, answered, that she knew
+nothing of it. Asked, if she knew that those of her party caused masses
+and prayers to be made in her honour, she answered, that she knew not;
+and if they did so, it was not by any command of hers; but that if they
+did so, her opinion was that they did no wrong. Asked, if those of her
+party firmly believed that she was sent from God, she answered: "I know
+not whether they believed it; but even if they did not believe it, I am
+none the less sent on the part of God." Asked, whether she thought that
+to believe that she was sent from god was a worthy faith, she answered,
+that if they believed that she was sent from God they were not mistaken.
+Asked, if she knew what her party meant by kissing her feet and hands
+and her garments, answered, that many people did it, but that her hands
+were kissed as little as she could help it. The poor people, however,
+came to her of their own free will, because she never oppressed them,
+but protected them as far as was in her power. Asked, what reverence
+the people of Troyes made to her, she answered, "None at all," and added
+that she believed Brother Richard came into Troyes with her army, but
+that she had not seen him coming in. Asked, if he had not preached at
+the gates when she came, answered, that she scarcely paused there at
+all, and knew nothing of any sermon. Asked, how long she was at Rheims,
+and answered, four or five days. Asked, whether she baptised (stood
+godmother to) children there, she answered: To one at Troyes, but did
+not remember any at Rheims or at Chateau-Thierry; but there were two at
+St. Denis; and willingly she called the boys "Charles," in honour of her
+King, and the girls "Jeanne," according to what their mothers wished.
+Asked, if the good women of the town did not touch with their rings the
+rings she wore, she answered, that many women touched her hands and her
+rings; but she did not know why they did it. Asked, what she did with
+the gloves in which her King was consecrated, she answered that "Gloves
+were distributed to the knights and nobles that came there"; and there
+was one who lost his; but she did not say that she would find it for
+him. Also she said that her standard was in the church at Rheims, and
+she believed near the altar, and she herself had carried it for a short
+time, but did not know whether Brother Richard had held it.
+
+She was then asked if she communicated and went to confession often
+while moving about the country, and if she received the sacrament in her
+male costume; to which she answered "yes, but without her arms"; she was
+then questioned about a horse belonging to the Bishop of Senlis,
+which had not suited her, a matter completely without importance. The
+inference intended was that it was taken from him without being paid
+for; but there was no evidence that the Maid knew anything about it. We
+then come to the incident of Lagny.
+
+She was asked how old the child was which she saw at Lagny, and
+answered, three days; it had been brought to Lagny to the Church of
+Notre Dame, and she was told that all the maids in Lagny were before our
+Lady praying for it, and she also wished to go and pray God and our Lady
+that its life might come back; and she went, and prayed with the rest.
+And finally life appeared; it yawned three times, and was baptised and
+buried in consecrated ground. It had given no sign of life for three
+days and was black as her coat, but when it yawned its colour began to
+come back. She was there with the other maids on her knees before our
+Lady to make her prayer.
+
+The reader must understand that this was no special appeal to Jeanne's
+miraculous power, but a custom of that intense and tender charity
+with which the Church of Rome corrects her dogmatism upon questions of
+salvation. A child unbaptised could not be buried in consecrated ground,
+and was subject to all the sorrows of the unredeemed; but who could
+doubt that the priest would be easily persuaded by some wavering of the
+tapers on the altar upon the little dead face, some flicker of his own
+compassionate eyelids, that sufficient life had come back to permit the
+holy rite to be administered? The whole little scene is affecting in the
+extreme, the young creatures all kneeling, fervently appealing to
+the Maiden-mother, the priest ready to take instant advantage of any
+possible flicker, the Maid of France, no conspicuous figure, but weeping
+and praying among the rest. There was no thought here of the raising
+of the dead--the prayer was for breath enough only to allow of the holy
+observance, the blessed water, the last possibility of human love and
+effort.
+
+Jeanne was then questioned concerning Catherine of La Rochelle, the
+supposed prophetess, who had been played against her by La Tremouille
+and his follows, and narrated how she had watched two nights to see
+the mysterious lady clothed in cloth of gold who was said to appear to
+Catherine, but had not seen her, and that she had advised the woman
+to return to her husband and children. Catherine's mission was to go
+through the "good towns" with heralds and trumpets to call upon those
+who had money or treasure of any kind to give it to the King, and she
+professed to have a supernatural knowledge where such money was hidden.
+(No doubt La Tremouille must have thought that to get money, which was
+so scarce, in such a simple way, was worth trying at least. But Jeanne's
+opinion was that it was folly, and that there was nothing in it; an
+opinion fully verified. Catherine's advice had been that Jeanne should
+go to the Duke of Burgundy to make peace; but Jeanne had answered that
+no peace could be made save at the end of the lance.)
+
+She was then asked about the siege of La Charite; she answered, that she
+had made an assault: but had not sprinkled holy water, or caused it
+to be sprinkled. Asked, why she did not enter the city as she had the
+command of God to do so, she replied: "Who told you that I was commanded
+to enter?" Asked, if she had not had the advice of her voices, she
+answered, that she had desired to go into France (meaning towards
+Paris), but the generals had told her that it was better to go first
+to La Charite. She was then asked if she had been long in the tower of
+Beaurevoir; answered, that she was there about four months, and that
+when she heard the English come she was angry and much troubled. Her
+voices forbade her several times to attempt to escape; but at last,
+in the doubt she had of the English she threw herself down, commending
+herself to God and to our Lady, and was much hurt. But after she had
+done this the voice of St. Catherine said to her not to be afraid, that
+she should be healed, and that Compiegne would be relieved.
+
+Also she said that she prayed always for the relief of Compiegne with
+her council. Asked, what she said after she had thrown herself down,
+she answered, that some said that she was dead; and as soon as the
+Burgundians saw that she was not dead, they told her that she had thrown
+herself down. Asked, if she had said that she would rather die than fall
+into the hands of the English, she answered, that she would much rather
+have rendered her soul to God than have fallen into the hands of the
+English. Asked, if she was not in a great rage, and if she did not
+blaspheme the name of God, she answered, that she never said evil of
+any saint, and that it was not her custom to swear. Asked respecting
+Soissons, when the captain had surrendered the town, whether she had
+not cursed God, and said that if she had gotten hold of the captain, she
+would have cut him into four pieces; she answered, that she never swore
+by any saint, and that those who said so had not understood her.
+
+*****
+
+At this point the public trial of Jeanne came to a sudden end. Either
+the feeling produced in the town, and even among the judges, by her
+undeviating, simple, and dignified testimony had begun to be more than
+her persecutors had calculated upon; or else they hoped to make shorter
+work with her when deprived of the free air of publicity, the sight no
+doubt of some sympathetic faces, and the consciousness of being still
+able to vindicate her cause and to maintain her faith before men. Two
+or three fierce Inquisitors within her cell, and the Bishop, that man
+without heart or pity at their head, might still tear admissions
+from her weariness, which a certain sympathetic atmosphere in a large
+auditory, swept by waves of natural feeling, would strengthen her to
+keep back. The Bishop made a proclamation that in order not to vex and
+tire his learned associates he would have the minutes of the previous
+sittings reduced into form, and submitted to them for judgment, while
+he himself carried on apart what further interrogatory was necessary.
+We are told that he was warned by a counsellor of the town that secret
+examinations without witnesses or advocate on the prisoner's side, were
+illegal; but Monseigneur de Beauvais was well aware that anything would
+be legal which effected his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed
+of, the legality or illegality of the proceedings would be of small
+importance. I have thought it right to give to the best of my power a
+literal translation of these examinations, notwithstanding their great
+length; as, except in one book, now out of print and very difficult to
+procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so far as I am aware, exists;
+and it seems to me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader
+(always capable of skipping at his pleasure), it is better to unfold the
+complete scene with all its tedium and badgering, which brings out by
+every touch the extraordinary self-command, valour, and sense of
+this wonderful Maid, the youngest, perhaps, and most ignorant of the
+assembly, yet meeting all with a modest and unabashed countenance, true,
+pure, and natural,--a far greater miracle in her simplicity and noble
+steadfastness than even in the wonders she had done.
+
+     (1) She was in reality detained two days, which fact, no
+     doubt, she judged to be an unimportant detail.
+
+     (2) Probably meaning, had been present when the voices came
+     to her and had perceived her state of listening and
+     abstraction.
+
+     (3) This was her special friend, Gerard of Epinal--her
+     _compere_ and gossip; was it jesting beguiled by some
+     childish recollection, or mock threat of youthful days that
+     she said this?
+
+     (4) An answer evidently given in the vagueness of imperfect
+     knowledge, meaning a very great number.
+
+     (5) Quicherat gives a note on this subject to point out that
+     there was really was but one Pope at this moment, the
+     question having been settled by the abdication of Clement
+     VIII., Benedict XIV. being a mere impostor. We cannot
+     believe, however, that this historical cutting of the knot
+     could be known to Jeanne. She probably felt only, with her
+     fine instinct, that there could be but one Pope, and that to
+     be deceived on such a matter ought to have been a thing
+     impossible to all those priests and learned men; as a matter
+     of fact the three claimants, on account of whom the Comte
+     d'Armagnac had appealed to her, were no longer existing at
+     the time he wrote.
+
+     (6) She meant Paris, which was lost by the English,
+     according to her prophecy within the time named.
+
+     (7) It should here be noted that Jeanne's sign to the King
+     being, as he afterwards declared, the answer to his most
+     private devotions and the final setting at rest of a doubt
+     which might have injured him much had it been known that he
+     entertained it--it would have been dishonourable on her part
+     and a great wrong to him had she revealed it.
+
+     (8) The translation of M. Fabre is now, I believe,
+     reprinted, but it is not satisfactory.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV --THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON. LENT, 1431.
+
+It must not be forgotten, in the history of this strange trial, that the
+prisoner was brought from the other side of France expressly that she
+might be among a people who were not of her own party, and who had no
+natural sympathies with her, but a hereditary connection with England,
+which engaged all its partialities on that side. For this purpose it was
+that the _venue_, the town expected the coming of the Witch, and all the
+dark revelations that might be extracted from her, her spells, and the
+details of that contract with the devil which was so entrancing to
+the popular imagination, with excitement and eagerness. Such a _Cause
+Celebre_ had never taken place among them before; and everybody no doubt
+looked forward to the pleasure of seeing it proved that it was not by
+the will of Heaven, but by some monstrous combination of black arts,
+that such an extraordinary result as the defeat of the invincible
+English soldiers had been brought about. The litigious and logical
+Normans no doubt looked forward to it as to the most interesting
+entertainment, ending in the complete vindication of their own side and
+the exposure of the nefarious arms used by their adversaries.
+
+But when the proceedings had been opened, and in place of some
+dark-browed and termagant sorceress, with the mark of every evil passion
+in her face, there appeared before the spectators crowding into every
+available corner, the slim, youthful figure--was it boy or girl?--the
+serene and luminous countenance of the Maid, the flower of youth raising
+its whiteness and innocence in the midst of all those black-robed,
+subtle Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance must
+have given a shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may be
+called the lay spectators, those who had no especial bias more than
+common report, and whose credit or interest were not involved in
+bringing this unlikely criminal to condemnation. "A girl! Like our own
+Jeanne at home," might many a father have said, dismayed and confounded.
+She had, they all say, those eyes of innocence which it is so impossible
+not to believe, and that virginal voice, _assez femme_, which a
+sentimental Frenchman insists upon as belonging only to the spotless.
+At all events she had the bearing of honesty, purity, and truth. She was
+not afraid though all the powers of hell--or was it only of the
+Church and the Law?--were arrayed against her: no guilty mystery to be
+discovered, was in her countenance. But it must have been plain to the
+keen and not too charitable Normans that such semblances are not always
+to be trusted, and that the devil himself even, on occasion, can take
+upon himself the appearance of an angel of light; so that after the
+first shock of wonder they no doubt settled themselves to listen,
+believing that soon they would have their imaginations fed with tales
+of horror, and would discover the hoofs and the horns and unveil
+with triumph the lurking demon. The French historians never take into
+consideration the fact that it was the belief of Rouen and Normandy, as
+well as of any similar town or province in England, that the child
+Henry VI. was lawful king, and that whatever was on the other side was
+a hateful adversary, to be brought to such disaster and shame as was
+possible, without mercy and without delay.
+
+But after a few days of the examination which we have just reported,
+public opinion was greatly staggered, and knew not how to turn.
+Gradually the conviction must have been forced upon every mind which had
+any candour left, that Jeanne, at that dreadful bar, with the stake
+in sight, and all the learning of Paris--the entire power of one great
+national and half of another, all England and half France against--(many
+more than half France, for the other part had abandoned her
+cause),--showed nothing of the demon, but all--if not of the angel, yet
+of the Maid, the emblem of perfection to that rude world, though
+often so barbarously handled. It might almost be said of the age,
+notwithstanding its immorality and rampant viciousness, that in its eyes
+a true virgin could do no harm. And hers was one if ever such a thing
+existed on earth. The talk in the streets began to take a very different
+tone. Massieu the clerical sheriff's officer saw nothing in her answers
+that was not good and right. Out of the midst of the crowd of listeners
+would burst an occasional cry of "Well said!" An Englishman, even a
+knight, overcome by his feelings, cried out: "Why was not she English,
+this brave girl!" All these were ominous sounds. Still more ominous was
+the utterance of Maitre Jean Lohier, a lawyer of Rouen, who declared
+loudly that the trial was not a legal trial for the reasons which
+follow:
+
+"In the first place because it was not in the form of an ordinary trial;
+secondly, because it was not held in a public court, and those present
+had not full and complete freedom to say what was their full and
+unbiassed opinion; thirdly, because there was question of the honour of
+the King of France of whose party Jeanne was, without calling him,
+or any one for him; fourthly, because neither libel nor articles were
+produced, and this woman who was only an uninstructed girl, had no
+advocate to answer for her before so many Masters and Doctors, on such
+grave matters, and especially those which touched upon the revelations
+of which she spoke; therefore it seemed to him that the trial was worth
+nothing. For these things Monseigneur de Beauvais was very indignant
+against the said Maitre Lohier, saying: 'Here is Lohier who is going to
+make a fine fuss about our trial; he calumniates us all, and tells the
+world it is of no good. If one were to go by him, one would have to
+begin everything over again, and all that has been done would be of no
+use.' Monseigneur de Beauvais said besides: 'It is easy to see on which
+foot he halts (_de quel pied il cloche_). By St. John, we shall do
+nothing of the kind; we shall go on with our trial as we have begun
+it.'"
+
+A day or two later Manchon, the Clerk of the Court (he who refused to
+take down Jeanne's conversation with her Judas), met this same lawyer
+Lohier at church, and asked him, as no doubt every man asked every
+other whom he met, how did he think the trial was going? to which Lohier
+answered: "You see the manner in which they proceed; they will take her,
+if they can, in her words--that is to say, the assertions in which she
+says _I know for certain_, things that concern her apparitions. If she
+would say, 'It seems to me' instead of 'I know for certain,' I do not
+see how any man could condemn her. It appears that they proceed against
+her rather from hate than from any other cause, and for this reason I
+shall not remain here. I will have nothing to do with it." This I think
+shows very clearly that Lohier, like the bulk of the population, by no
+means thought at first that it was "from hate" that the trial proceeded,
+but honestly believed that he had been called to try Jeanne as a
+professor of the black arts; and that he had discovered from her own
+testimony that she was not so, and that the motive of the trial was
+entirely a different one from that of justice; one in fact with which an
+honest man could have nothing to do.
+
+It is very significant also that the number of judges present in
+court on the sixth day, the last of the public examination, was only
+thirty-eight, as against the sixty-two of the second day, which seems to
+prove that a general disgust and alarm was growing in the minds of those
+most closely concerned. Warwick and the soldiers, impatient of all
+such business, striding in noisily from time to time to give a careless
+glance at the proceedings, might not stay long enough to share the
+impression--or might, who can say? Their business was to get this
+pestilent woman, even if by chance she might be an innocent fanatic,
+cleared off the face of the earth and out of their way.
+
+After the sixth day, however, it would seem that the Bishop and his
+tools had taken fright at the progress of public opinion. Before
+dismissing the court on that occasion, Cauchon made an address to the
+disturbed and anxious judges, informing them that he would not tire them
+out with prolonged sittings, but that a few specially chosen assistants
+would now examine into what further details were necessary. In the
+meantime all would be put in writing; so that they might think it over
+and deliberate within themselves, so as to be able each to make a
+report either to himself, the Bishop, or to some one deputed by him.
+The assessors, thus thrown out of work, were however forbidden to leave
+Rouen without the Bishop's permission--probably because of the threat
+of Lohier. Repeated meetings were held in Cauchon's house to arrange
+the details of the proceedings to follow; and during this time it was
+perhaps hoped that any excitement outside would quiet down. The Bishop
+himself had in the meantime other work in hand. He had to receive
+certain important visitors, one of them the man who held the appointment
+of Chancellor of France on the English side, and who was well acquainted
+with the mind of his masters. We have no information whatever whether
+Cauchon ever himself wavered, or allowed the possibility of acquitting
+Jeanne to enter his mind; but he must have seen that it was of the last
+necessity to know what would satisfy the English chiefs. No doubt he was
+confirmed and strengthened in the conviction that by hook or by crook
+her condemnation must be accomplished, by the conversation of these
+illustrious visitors. To save Jeanne was impossible he must have been
+told. No English soldier would strike a blow while she lived. England
+itself, the whole country, trembled at her name. Till she was got rid of
+nothing could be done.
+
+There was of course great exaggeration in all this, for the English had
+fought desperately enough in her presence except on the one occasion
+of Patay, notwithstanding all the early prestige of Jeanne. But at all
+events it was made perfectly clear that the foregoing conclusion must
+be carried out, and that Jeanne must die: and, not only so, but she must
+die with opprobrium and disgrace as a witch, which almost everybody out
+of Rouen now believed her to be. The public examination which lasted six
+days was concluded on the third of March, 1430. On the following days,
+the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth of March, meetings
+were held, as we have said, in the Bishop's house to consider what
+it would be well to do next, at one of which a select company of
+Inquisitors was chosen to carry on the examination in private. These
+were Jean de la Fontaine, a lawyer learned in canon law; Jean Beaupere,
+already her interrogator; Nicolas Midi, a Doctor in Theology; Pierre
+Morice, Canon of Rouen and Ambassador from the English King to the
+Council of Bale; Thomas de Courcelles, the learned and excellent young
+Doctor already described; Nicolas l'Oyseleur, the traitor, also already
+sufficiently referred to; and Manchon, the honest Clerk of the court:
+the names of Gerard Feuillet, also a distinguished man, and Jean
+Fecardo, an advocate, are likewise also mentioned. They seem to have
+served in their turn, three or four at a time. This private session
+began on the 10th of March, a week after the conclusion of the public
+trial, and was held in the prison chamber inhabited by the Maid.
+
+We shall not attempt to follow literally those private examinations,
+which would take a great deal more space than we have at our command,
+and would be fatiguing to the reader from the constant and prolonged
+repetitions; we shall therefore quote only such parts as are new or so
+greatly enlarged from Jeanne's original statements as to seem so. At the
+first day's examination in her prison she was questioned about Compiegne
+and her various proceedings before reaching that place.(1) She was
+asked, for one thing, if her voices had bidden her make the sally in
+which she was taken; to which she answered that had she known the time
+she was to be taken she would not have gone out, unless upon the express
+command of the saints. She was then asked about her standard, her
+arms, and her horses, and replied that she had no coat-of-arms, but her
+brothers had, who also had all her money, from ten to twelve thousand
+francs, which was "no great treasure to make war upon," besides five
+chargers, and about seven other horses, all from the King. The examiners
+then came to their principal object, and having lulled her mind with
+these trifles, turned suddenly to a subject on which they still hoped
+she might commit herself, the sign which had proved her good faith to
+the King. It is scarcely possible to avoid the feeling, grave as all
+the circumstances were, that a little _malice_, a glance of mischievous
+pleasure, kindled in Jeanne's eye. She had refused to enter into further
+explanations again and again. She had warned them that she would give
+them no true light on the subjects that concerned the King. Now she
+would seem to have had sudden recourse to the mystification that is dear
+to youth, to have tossed her young head and said: "_Have then your own
+way_"; and forthwith proceeded to romance, according to the indications
+given her of what was wanted, without thought of preserving any
+appearance of reality. Most probably indeed, her air and tone would make
+it apparent to her persistent questioners how complete a fable, or at
+least parable, it was.
+
+Asked, what sign she gave to the King, she replied that it was a
+beautiful and honourable sign, very creditable and very good, and rich
+above all. Asked, if it still lasted; answered, "It would be good to
+know; it will last a thousand years and more if well guarded," adding
+that it was in the treasure of the King. Asked, if it was of gold or
+silver or of precious stones, or in the form of a crown; answered: "I
+will tell you nothing more; but no man could devise a thing so rich as
+this sign; but the sign that is necessary for you is that God should
+deliver me out of your hands, and that is what He will do." She also
+said that when she had to go to the King it was said by her voices: "Go
+boldly; and when you are before the King he will have a sign which will
+make him receive and believe in you." Asked, what reverence she made
+when the sign came to the King, and if it came from God; answered, that
+she had thanked God for having delivered her from the priests of her own
+party who had argued against her, and that she had knelt down several
+times; she also said that an angel from God, and not from another,
+brought the sign to the King; and she had thanked the Lord many times;
+she added that the priests ceased to argue against when they had seen
+that sign. Asked, if the clergy of her party (_de par dela_) saw the
+above sign; answered yes, that her King if he were satisfied; and he
+answered yes. And afterwards she went to a little chapel close by, and
+heard them say that after she was gone more than three hundred people
+saw the said sign. She said besides that for love of her, and that they
+should give up questioning her, God permitted those of her party to see
+the sign. Asked, if the King and she made reverence to the angel when
+he brought the sign; answered yes, for herself, that she knelt down and
+took off her hood.
+
+What Jeanne meant by this strange romance can only, I think be explained
+by this hypothesis. She was "dazed and bewildered," say some of the
+historians, evidently not knowing how to interpret so strange
+an interruption to her narrative; but there is no other sign of
+bewilderment; her mind was always clear and her intelligence complete.
+Granting that the whole story was boldly ironical, its object is very
+apparent. Honour forbade her to betray the King's secret, and she had
+expressly said she would not do so. But her story seems to say--_since
+you will insist that there was a sign, though I have told you I could
+give you no information, have it your own way; you shall have a sign and
+one of the very best; it delivered me from the priests of my own party
+(de par dela)_. Jeanne was no milk-sop; she was bold enough to send a
+winged shaft to the confusion of the priests of the other side who had
+tormented her in the same way. One can imagine a lurking smile at the
+corner of her mouth. Let them take it since they would have it. And we
+may well believe there was that in her eye, and in the details heaped up
+so lightly to form the miraculous tale, which left little doubt in the
+minds of the questioners, of the spirit in which she spoke: though to us
+who only read the record the effect is of a more bewildering kind.
+
+Two days after, on Monday, the 12th of March, the Inquisitors began by
+several additional questions concerning the angel who brought the
+sign to the King; was it the same whom she first saw, or another? She
+answered that it was the same, and no other was wanted. Asked, if this
+angel had not deceived her since she had been taken prisoner; answered,
+that SHE BELIEVED SINCE IT SO PLEASED OUR LORD THAT IT WAS BEST THAT SHE
+SHOULD BE TAKEN. Asked, if the angel had not failed her; answered, "How
+could he have failed me, when he comforts me every day?" This comfort
+is what she understands to come through St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+Asked, whether she called them, or they came without being called, she
+answered, that they often came without being called, and if they did
+not come soon enough, she asked our Saviour to send them. Asked, if St.
+Denis had ever appeared to her; answered, not that she knew. Asked,
+if when she promised to our Lord to remain a virgin she spoke to Him;
+answered, that it ought to be enough to speak to those who were sent by
+Him that is to say, St. Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, what induced
+her to summon a man to Toul, in respect to marriage; answered, "I did
+not summon him; it was he who summoned me"; and that on that occasion
+she had sworn before the judge to speak the truth, which was that she
+had not made him any promise. She also said that the first time she had
+heard the voices she made a vow of virginity so long as it pleased God,
+being then about the age of thirteen.
+
+It was the object of the judges by these questions to prove that,
+according to a fable which had obtained some credit, Jeanne during her
+visit to La Rousse, the village inn-keeper at Neufchateau, had acted as
+servant in the house and tarnished her good fame--so that her betrothed
+had refused to marry her: and that he had been brought before the
+Bishop's court at Toul for his breach of promise, as we should say.
+Exactly the reverse was the case, as the reader will remember.
+
+Jeanne was further asked, if she had spoken of her visions to her
+cure or to any ecclesiastic: and answered no, but only to Robert de
+Baudricourt and to her King; but added that she was not bidden by her
+voices to conceal them, but feared to reveal them lest the Burgundians
+should hear of them and prevent her going. And especially she had much
+doubt of her father, lest he should hinder her from going. Asked, if she
+thought she did well to go away without the permission of her father
+and mother, when it is certain we ought to honour our father and mother;
+answered, that in every other thing she had fully obeyed him, except
+in respect to her departure; but she had written to them, and they had
+pardoned her. Asked, if when she left her father and mother she did not
+think it was a sin; answered, that her voices were quite willing that
+she should tell them, if it were not for the pain it would have
+given them; but as for herself, she would not have told them for any
+consideration; also that her voices left her to do as she pleased, to
+tell or not.
+
+*****
+
+Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we
+hope had her piece of bread and her _eau rougie_. In the afternoon these
+indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions throw
+a fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which this
+wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.
+
+She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that
+while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her
+father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with
+the troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and held
+her in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point except that
+of her affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also said that her
+mother had told her what her father had said to her brothers: "If I
+could think that the thing would happen of which I have dreamed, I wish
+she might be drowned first; and if you would not do it, I would drown
+her with my own hands"; and that he nearly lost his senses when she went
+to Vaucouleurs.
+
+How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern, and
+unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and pure
+may not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of personal
+degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in the intensity
+of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to us in many
+lands, always one of the most impressive of human pictures, with
+no trust of love in him but an overwhelming faith in every vicious
+possibility. If there is no evidence to prove that, even at the moment
+when Jeanne was supreme, when he was induced to go to Rheims to see the
+coronation, Jacques d'Arc was still dark, unresponsive, never more sure
+than any of the Inquisitors that his daughter was not a witch, or worse,
+a shameless creature linked to the captains and the splendid personages
+about her by very different ties from those which appeared--there is at
+least not a word to prove that he had changed his mind. She does not add
+anything to soften the description here given. The sudden appearance of
+this dark remorseless figure, looking on from his village, who probably
+in all Domremy--when Domremy got to hear the news--would be the only
+person who would in his desperation almost applaud that stake and
+devouring flame, is too startling for words.
+
+The end of this day's examination was remarkable also for a sudden light
+upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke
+of Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most
+cherished hopes to deliver.
+
+Asked, how she meant to rescue the Duc d'Orleans: she answered, that by
+that time she hoped to have taken English prisoners enough to exchange
+for him: and if she had not taken enough she should have crossed the
+sea, in power, to search for him in England. Asked, if St. Catherine
+and St. Margaret had told her absolutely and without condition that she
+should take enough prisoners to exchange for the Duc d'Orleans, who was
+in England, or otherwise, that she should cross the sea to fetch him and
+bring him back within three years; she answered yes: and that she had
+told the King and had begged him to permit her to make prisoners. She
+said further that if she had lasted three years without hindrance, she
+should have delivered him. Otherwise she said she had not thought of so
+long a time as three years, although it should have been more than one;
+but she did not at present recollect exactly.
+
+There is a curious story existing, though we do not remember whence
+it comes and there is not a scrap of evidence for it, which suggests a
+rumour that Jeanne was not the child of the d'Arc family at all, but
+in fact an abandoned and illegitimate child of the Queen, Isabel of
+Bavaria, and that her real father was the murdered Duc d'Orleans. This
+suggestion might explain the ease with which she fell into the way of
+Courts, a sort of air _a la Princesse_ which certainly was about her,
+and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A
+shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared
+in history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little
+conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are
+certain fanciful suggestions in the thought.
+
+After the above, Jeanne was again questioned and at great length upon
+the sign given to the King, upon the angel who brought it, the manner of
+his coming and going, the persons who saw him, those who saw the crown
+bestowed upon the King, and so on, in the most minute detail. That the
+purpose of the sign was that "they should give up arguing and so let
+her proceed on her mission," she repeated again and again; but here is a
+curious additional note.
+
+She was asked how the King and the people with him were convinced that
+it was an angel; and answered, that the King knew it by the instruction
+of the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign of the crown.
+Asked, how the ecclesiastics (_gens d'eglise_) knew it was an angel she
+answered, "By their knowledge (science), and because they were priests."
+
+Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind?
+We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which
+Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the strange
+tale.
+
+She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices
+that she attacked La Charite, and afterwards Paris, her two points of
+failure; the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her that
+those voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no.
+To Paris she went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a
+skirmish, or assault of arms (_vaillance d'armes_); but she intended to
+go farther, and to pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting and
+make the skirmish into a serious assault; the same was the case before
+La Charite. She was asked whether she had no revelation concerning Pont
+l'Eveque, and said that since it was revealed to her at Melun that she
+should be taken, she had had more recourse to the will of the captains
+than to her own; but she did not tell them that it was revealed to her
+that she should be taken. Asked, if she thought it was well done
+to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity of our Lady, which was a
+festival of the Church; she answered, that it was always well to keep
+the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience it seemed to her that
+it was and always would be a good thing to keep the feasts of our Lady,
+from one end to the other.
+
+In the afternoon the examiners returned to the attempt at escape or
+suicide--they seemed to have preferred the latter explanation--made at
+Beaurevoir; and as Jeanne expresses herself with more freedom as to her
+personal motives in these prison examinations and opens her heart more
+freely, there is much here which we give in full.
+
+She was asked first what was the cause of her leap from the tower of
+Beaurevoir. She answered that she had heard that all the people of
+Compiegne, down to the age of seven, were to be put to the sword, and
+that she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good
+people; this was one of the reasons; the other was that she knew that
+she was sold to the English and that she would rather die than fall into
+the hands of the English, her enemies. Asked, if she made that leap
+by the command of her voices; answered, that St. Catherine said to her
+almost every day that she was not to leap, for that God would help her,
+and also the people of Compiegne: and she, Jeanne, said to St. Catherine
+that since God intended to help the people of Compiegne she would fain
+be there. And St. Catherine said: "You must take it in good part, but
+you will not be delivered till you have seen the King of the English."
+And she, Jeanne, answered: "Truly I do not wish to see him. I would
+rather die than fall into the hands of the English." Asked, if she had
+said to St. Catherine and St. Margaret, "Will God leave the good people
+of Compiegne to die so cruelly?" answered, that she did not say "so
+cruelly," but said it in this way: "Will God leave these good people
+of Compiegne to die, who have been and are so loyal to their lord?" She
+added that after she fell there were two or three days that she would
+not eat; and that she was so hurt by the leap that she could not eat;
+but all the time she was comforted by St. Catherine, who told her to
+confess and ask pardon of God for that act, and that without doubt the
+people of Compiegne would have succour before Martinmas. And then she
+took pains to recover and began to eat, and shortly was healed.
+
+Asked, whether, when she threw herself down, she wished to kill herself,
+she answered no; but that in throwing herself down she commended herself
+to God, and hoped by means of that leap to escape and to avoid being
+delivered to the English. Asked, if, when she recovered the power of
+speech, she had denied and blasphemed God and the saints, as had been
+reported; answered, that she remembered nothing of the kind, and that,
+as far as she knew, she had never denied and blasphemed God and His
+saints there nor anywhere else, and did not confess that she had done
+so, having no recollection of it. Asked, if she would like to see the
+information taken on the spot, answered: "I refer myself to God, and not
+another, and to a good confession." Asked, if her voices ever desired
+delay for their replies; answered, that St. Catherine always answered
+her at once, but sometimes she, Jeanne, could not hear because of
+the tumult round her (_turbacion des personnes_) and the noise of her
+guards; but that when she asked anything of St. Catherine, sometimes
+she, and sometimes St. Margaret asked of our Lord, and then by the
+command of our Lord an answer was given to her. Asked, if, when they
+came, there was always light accompanying them, and if she did not
+see that light when she heard the voice in the castle without knowing
+whether it was in her chamber or not: answered, that there was never
+a day that they did not come into the castle, and that they never came
+without light: and that time she heard the voice, but did not remember
+whether she saw the light, or whether she saw St. Catherine. Also she
+said she had asked from her voices three things: one, her release: the
+other, that God would help the French, and keep the town faithful: and
+the other the salvation of her soul. Afterwards she asked that she might
+have a copy of these questions and her answers if she were to be taken
+to Paris, that she may give them to the people in Paris, and say to
+them, "This is how I was questioned in Rouen, and here are my replies,"
+that she might not be exhausted by so many questions.
+
+Asked, what she meant when she said that Monseigneur de Beauvais put
+himself in danger by bringing her to trial, and why Monseigneur de
+Beauvais more than others, she answered, that this was and is what she
+said to Monseigneur de Beauvais: "You say that you are my judge. I know
+not whether you are so; but take care that you judge well, or you will
+put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if our Lord should
+chastise you for it, I may have done my duty in warning you." Asked,
+what was that danger? she answered, that St. Catherine had said that she
+should have succour, but that she knew not whether this meant that
+she would be delivered from prison, or that, when she was before the
+tribunal, there might come trouble by which she should be delivered;
+she thought, however, it would be the one or the other. And all the more
+that her voices told her that she would be delivered by a great victory;
+and afterwards they said to her: "Take everything cheerfully, do not
+be disturbed by this martyrdom: thou shalt thence come at last to the
+kingdom of Heaven." And this the voices said simply and absolutely--that
+is to say, without fail; she explained that she called It martyrdom
+because of all the pain and adversity that she had suffered in prison;
+and she knew not whether she might have still more to suffer, but waited
+upon our Lord. She was then asked whether, since her voices had said
+that she should go to Paradise, she felt assured that she should be
+saved and not damned in hell; she answered, that she believed firmly
+what her voices said about her being saved, as firmly as if she were
+so already. And when it was said to her that this answer was of great
+weight, she answered that she herself held it as a great treasure.
+
+We have said that Jeanne's answers to the Inquisitors in prison had a
+more familiar form than in the public examination; which seem to
+prove that they were not unkind to her, further, at least, than by the
+persistence and tediousness of their questions. The Bishop for one thing
+was seldom present; the sittings were frequently presided over by the
+Deputy Inquisitor, who had made great efforts to be free of the business
+altogether, and had but very recently been forced into it; so that we
+may at least imagine, as he was so reluctant, that he did what he could
+to soften the proceedings. Jean de la Fontaine, too, was a milder man
+than her former questioners, and in so small an assembly she could not
+be disturbed and interrupted by Frere Isambard's well-meant signs and
+whispers. She speaks at length and with a self-disclosure which seems to
+have little that was painful in it, like one matured into a kind of
+age by long weariness and trouble, who regards the panorama of her life
+passing before her with almost a pensive pleasure. And it is clear that
+Jeanne's ear, still so young and keen, notwithstanding that attitude of
+mind, was still intent upon sounds from without, and that Jeanne's
+heart still expected a sudden assault, a great victory for France, which
+should open her prison doors--or even a rising in the very judgment hall
+to deliver her. How could they keep still outside, Dunois, Alencon,
+La Hire, the mighty men of valour, while they knew that she was being
+racked and tortured within? She who could not bear to be out of the
+conflict to serve her friends at Compiegne, even when succour from on
+high had been promised, how was it possible that these gallant knights
+could live and let her die, their gentle comrade, their dauntless
+leader? In those long hours, amid the noise of the guards within and the
+garrison around, how she must have thought, over and over again, where
+were they? when were they coming? how often imagined that a louder clang
+of arms than usual, a rush of hasty feet, meant that they were here!
+
+But honour and love kept Jeanne's lips closed. Not a word did she say
+that could discredit King, or party, or friends; not a reproach to those
+who had abandoned her. She still looked for the great victory in which
+Monseigneur, if he did not take care, might run the risk of being
+roughly handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court that would
+pitch him form his guilty seat. It was but the fourteenth of March
+still, and there were six weary weeks to come. She did not know the hour
+or the day, but yet she believed that this great deliverance was on its
+way.
+
+And there was a great deliverance to come: but not of this kind. The
+voices of God--how can we deny it?--are often, though in a loftier
+sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise to the
+ear but break it to the heart. They promised her a great victory: and
+she had it, and also the fullest deliverance: but only by the stake and
+the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any other girl
+of her age. They did not speak to deceive her, but she was deceived;
+they kept their promise, but not as she understood it. "These all died
+in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar
+off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them." Jeanne too was
+persuaded of them, but was not to receive them--except in the other way.
+
+On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne fasted,
+whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely questioned
+on the subject, this time, of Franquet d'Arras, who, as has been above
+narrated, was taken by her in the course of some indiscriminate fighting
+in the north. She was asked if it was not mortal sin to take a man as
+prisoner of war and then give him up to be executed. There was evidently
+no perception of similarities in the minds of the judges, for this was
+precisely what had been done in the case of Jeanne herself; but even she
+does not seem to have been struck by the fact. Their object, apparently,
+was by proving that she was in a state of sin, to prove also that her
+voices were of no authority, as being unable to discover so simple a
+principle as this.
+
+When they spoke to her of "one named Franquet d'Arras, who was executed
+at Lagny," she answered that she consented to his death, as he deserved
+it, for he had confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and a traitor.
+She said that his trial lasted fifteen days, the Bailli de Senlis and
+the law officers of Lagny being the judges; and she added that she had
+wished to have Franquet, to exchange him for a man of Paris, Seigneur de
+Lours (corrected, innkeeper at the sign of l'Ours); but when she heard
+that this man was dead, and when the Bailli told her that she would
+go very much against justice if she set Franquet free, she said to the
+Bailli: "Since my man is dead whom I wished to deliver, do with this one
+whatever justice demands." Asked, if she took the money or allowed it to
+be taken by him who had taken Franquet, she answered, that she was not a
+money changer or a treasurer of France, to deal with money.
+
+She was then reminded that having assaulted Paris on a holy day, having
+taken the horse of Monseigneur de Senlis, having thrown herself down
+from the tower of Beaurevoir, having consented to the death of Franquet
+d'Arras, and being still dressed in the costume of a man, did she not
+think that she must be in a state of mortal sin? She answered to the
+first question about Paris: "I do not think I was guilty of mortal sin,
+and if I have sinned it is to God that I would make it known, and in
+confession to God by the priest." To the second question, concerning the
+horse of Senlis, she answered, that she believed firmly that there was
+not mortal sin in this, seeing it was valued, and the Bishop had due
+notice of it, and at all events it was sent back to the Seigneur de la
+Tremouille to give it back to Monseigneur de Senlis. The said horse was
+of no use to her; and, on the other hand, she did not wish to keep it
+because she heard that the Bishop was displeased that his horse should
+have been taken. And as for the tower of Beaurevoir: "I did it not to
+destroy myself, but in the hope of saving myself and of going to the aid
+of the good people who were in need." But after having done it, she had
+confessed her sin, and asked pardon of our Lord, and had pardon of Him.
+And she allowed that it was not right to have made that leap, but that
+she did wrong.
+
+The next day an important question was introduced, the only one as
+yet which Jeanne does not seem to have been able to answer with
+understanding. On points of fact or in respect to her visions she was
+always quite clear, but questions concerning the Church were beyond
+her knowledge. It is only indeed after some time has elapsed that we
+perceive why such a question was introduced.
+
+After admonitions made to her she was required, if she had done anything
+contrary to the faith, to submit herself to the decision of the Church.
+She replied, that her answers had all been heard and seen by clerks,
+and that they could say whether there was anything in them against the
+faith: and that if they would point out to her where any error was,
+afterwards she would tell them what was said by her counsellors. At
+all events if there was anything against the faith which our Lord had
+commanded, she would not sustain it, and would be very sorry to go
+against that. Here it was shown to her that there was a Church militant
+and a Church triumphant, and she was asked if she knew the difference
+between them. She was also required to put herself under the
+jurisdiction of the Church, in respect to what she had done, whether it
+was good or evil, but replied, "I will answer no more on this point for
+the present."
+
+Having thrown in this tentative question which she did not understand,
+they returned to the question of her dress, which holds such an
+important place in the entire interrogatory. If she were allowed to
+hear mass as she wished, having been all this time deprived of religious
+ordinances, did not she think it would be more honest and befitting that
+she should go in the dress of a woman? To this she replied vaguely, that
+she would much rather go to mass in the dress of a woman than to retain
+her male costume and not to hear mass; and that if she were certified
+that she should hear mass, she would be there in a woman's dress. "I
+certify you that you shall hear mass," the examiner replied, "but you
+must be dressed as a woman." "What would you say," she answered as with
+a momentary doubt, "if I had sworn to my King never to change?" but
+she added: "Anyhow I answer for it. Find me a dress, long, touching the
+ground, without a train, and give it to me to go to mass; but I will
+return to my present dress when I come back." She was then asked why
+she would not have all the parts of a female dress to go to mass in; she
+said, "I will take counsel upon that, and answer you," and begged again
+for the honour of God and our Lady that she might be allowed to hear
+mass in this good town. Afterwards she was again recommended to assume
+the whole dress of a woman and gave a conditional assent: "Get me
+a dress like that of a young _bourgeoise_, that is to say, a long
+_houppelande_; I will wear that and a woman's hood to go to mass." After
+having promised, however, she made an appeal to them to leave her free,
+and to think no more of her garb, but to allow her to hear mass without
+changing it. This would seem to have been refused, and all at once
+without warning the jurisdiction of the Church was suddenly introduced
+again.
+
+She was asked, whether in all she did and said she would submit herself
+to the Church, and replied: "All my deeds and works are in the hands of
+God, and I depend only on Him; and I certify that I desire to do nothing
+and say nothing against the Christian faith; and if I have done or said
+anything in the body that was against the Christian faith which our
+Lord has established, I should not defend it but cast it forth from
+me." Asked again, if she would not submit to the laws of the Church she
+replied: "I can answer no more to-day on this point; but on Saturday
+send the clerk to me, if you do not come, and I will answer by the grace
+of God, and it can be put in writing."
+
+A great many questions followed as to her visions, but chiefly what had
+been asked before. One thing only we may note, since it was one of the
+special sayings all her own, which fell from the lips of Jeanne, during
+this private and almost sympathetic examination. After being questioned
+closely as to how she knew her first visitor to be St. Michael, etc.,
+she was asked, how she would have known had he been "l'Anemy" himself
+(a Norman must surely have used this word), taking the form of an angel:
+and finally, what doctrine he taught her?
+
+She answered; above all things he said that she was to be a good child
+and that God would help her: and among other things that she was to go
+to the succour of the King of France. But the greater part of what the
+angel taught her, she continued, was already in their book; and THE
+ANGEL SHOWED HER THE GREAT PITY THERE WAS OF THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
+
+The pity of it! That which has always gone most to the tender heart: a
+country torn in pieces, brother fighting against brother, the invader
+seated at the native hearth, and blood and fire making the smiling land
+a desert: "_la pitie qui estoit au royaume de France_."
+
+Did the Inquisitor break down here? Could no one go on? or was it mere
+human incompetence to feel the divine touch? Some one broke into a
+foolish question about the height of the angel, and the sitting was
+hurriedly concluded. Monseigneur might well be on his mettle; that
+very pity, was it not stealing into the souls of his private committee
+deputed for so different a use?
+
+*****
+
+Next day the questions about St. Michael's personal appearance were
+resumed, as a little feint we can only suppose, for the great question
+of the Church was again immediately introduced; but in the meantime
+Jeanne had described her visitor in terms which it is pleasant to dwell
+on. "He was in the form of a _tres vrai prud' homme_." The term is
+difficult to translate, as is the Galantuomo of Italy. The "King-Honest
+Man," we used to say in English in the days of his late Majesty Victor
+Emmanuel of Italy; but that is not all that is meant--_un vrai prud'
+homme_, a man good, honest, brave, the best man, is more like it.
+The girl's honest imagination thought of no paraphernalia of wings or
+shining plumes. It was not the theatrical angel, not even the angel of
+art whom she saw--whom it would have been so easy to invent, nay to take
+quite truthfully from the first painted window, radiating colour and
+brightness through the dim, low-roofed church. But even with such
+material handy, Jeanne was not led into the conventional. She knew
+nothing about wings or emblematic scales. He was in the form of a brave
+and gentle man. She knew not anything greater, nor would she be seduced
+into fable however sacred. Then once more the true assault began.
+
+She was asked, if she would submit all her sayings and doings, good or
+evil, to the judgment of our Holy Mother, the Church. She replied, that
+as for the Church, she loved it and would sustain it with all her might
+for our Christian faith; and that it was not she whom they ought to
+disturb and hinder from going to church or from hearing mass. As to the
+good things she had done, and that had happened, she must refer all to
+the King of Heaven, who had sent her to Charles, King of France; and it
+should be seen that the French would soon gain a great advantage which
+God would send them, so great that all the kingdom of France would
+be shaken. And this, she said, that when it came to pass, they might
+remember that she had said it. She was again asked, if she would submit
+to the jurisdiction of the Church, and answered, "I refer everything
+to our Lord who sent me, to our Lady, and to the blessed Saints of
+Paradise"; and added her opinion was that our Lord and the Church meant
+the same thing, and that difficulties should not be made concerning
+this, when there was no difficulty, and they were both one. She was then
+told that there was the Church triumphant, in which are God, the saints,
+the angels, and all saved souls. The Church militant is our Holy Father
+the Pope, vicar of God on earth, the cardinals, the prelates of the
+Church, and the clergy and all good Christians and Catholics, which
+Church properly assembled cannot err, but is guided by the Holy Spirit.
+And this being the case she was asked if she would refer her cause to
+the Church militant thus explained to her. She replied that she had
+come to the King of France on the part of God, on the part of the Virgin
+Mary, the blessed Saints of Paradise, and the Church victorious in
+Heaven, and at their commandment; and to that Church she submitted all
+her good deeds, and all that she had done and might do. And if they
+asked her whether she would submit to the Church militant, answered,
+that she would now answer no more than this.
+
+Here again the argument strayed back to the futile subject of dress,
+always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges were
+non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and shows
+that dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to mingle with
+her hopes.
+
+Asked, what she had to say about the woman's dress that had been offered
+to her, to hear mass in: she answered, that she would not take it yet,
+not until the Lord pleased; but that if it were necessary to lead her
+out to be executed, and if she should then have to be undressed, she
+required of the Lords of the Church that they would give her the grace
+to have a long chemise, and a kerchief for her head; that she would
+prefer to die rather than to alter what our Lord had directed her to do,
+and that she firmly believed our Lord would not let her descend so low,
+but that she should soon be helped by God and by a miracle. She was then
+asked, if what she did in respect to the man's costume was by command of
+God, why she asked for a woman's chemise in case of death? answered, _It
+is enough that it should be long_.
+
+The effect of these words in which so much was implied, must have made
+a supreme sensation among the handful of men gathered round the helpless
+girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror before the
+eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could have been
+suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold, the fire--and
+the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to every evil gaze,
+must have showed themselves at least for a moment against that dark
+background of prison wall. It was enough that it should be long--to hide
+her as much as was possible from those dreadful staring eyes.
+
+The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the dress
+of the saints. But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne herself,
+it was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more weighty
+thoughts. Presently they asked if the saints hated the English, to which
+she replied that they hated what God hated and loved what He loved. She
+was then asked if God hated the English. She replied that of the love or
+hate that God had for the English, or what God did for their souls,
+she knew nothing; but she knew well that they should be driven out of
+France, except those who died there; and that God would send victory
+to the French against the English. Asked, if God was for the English so
+long as they were prosperous in France: she answered, that she knew not
+whether God hated the French, but believed He had allowed them to be
+beaten because of their sins.
+
+Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great statesman
+or a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the question
+concerning John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes. "If we shall
+say: From heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him not? but if we
+shall say of men we fear the people." And she was only a peasant girl
+and the event of which they spoke had been before her little time.
+
+Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to kill
+Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT MISFORTUNE
+FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE: but that however it might be among
+themselves, God had sent her to the succour of the King.
+
+One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual
+changes of the subject: one of which called forth as follows her last
+deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
+
+Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would answer
+as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done before our
+Holy Father the Pope, although at several points in the trial she would
+have had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer more plainly than
+before Monseigneur de Beauvais--she said that she had answered as
+much as she knew, and that if anything came to her memory that she had
+forgotten to say, she would say it willingly. Asked, if it seemed to her
+that she would be bound to answer the plain truth to the Pope, the vicar
+of God, in all he asked her touching the faith and her conscience, she
+replied that she desired to be taken before him, and then she would
+answer all that she ought to answer.
+
+Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second
+party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly
+attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have
+conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained time,
+probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to understand
+it.
+
+This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and
+whisperer, L'Oyseleur, was working against it in the background. Jeanne
+evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not understand the
+distinction between the Church militant and the Church triumphant: that
+God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could decide upon the
+questions which were between her Lord and herself, was too firmly fixed
+in her mind: and again and again the men whose desire was to make her
+adopt this expedient, were driven back into the ever repeated questions
+about St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little
+interval that remained, in a series of useless questions about her
+standard. Was it true that this standard had been carried into the
+Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind?
+"It had been through the labour and the pain," she said, "there was good
+reason that it should have the honour."
+
+This last movement of a proud spirit, absolutely disinterested and
+without thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the word,
+gives a sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful wranglings
+in prison, in which, however, there is a softening of tone visible
+throughout, and evident effect of human nature bringing into immediate
+contact divers human creatures day after day. Jeanne is often at her
+best, and never so frequently as during these less formal sittings
+utters those flying words, simple and noble and of absolute truth to
+nature, which are noted everywhere, even in the most rambling records.
+
+*****
+
+The private examination, concluding with that last answer about the
+banner, came to an end on the 17th March, the day before Passion Sunday.
+Several subsequent days were occupied with repeated consultations in
+the Bishop's palace, and the reading over of the minutes of the
+examinations, to the judges first and afterwards to Jeanne, who
+acknowledged their correctness, with one or two small amendments. It is
+only now that Cauchon reappears in his own person. On the morning of the
+following Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, he and four other doctors with
+him had a conversation with Jeanne in her prison, very early in the
+morning, touching her repeated application to be allowed to hear
+mass and to communicate. The Bishop offered her his ultimatum: if she
+consented to resume her woman's dress, she might hear mass, but not
+otherwise; to which Jeanne replied, sorrowfully, that she would have
+done so before now if she could; but that it was not in her power to
+do so. Thus after the long and bitter Lent her hopes of sharing in the
+sacred feast were finally taken from her. It remains uncertain whether
+she considered that her change of dress would be direct disobedience
+to God, which her words seem often to imply; or whether it would mean
+renunciation of her mission, which she still hoped against hope to be
+able to resume; or if the fear of personal insult weighed most with
+her. The latter reason had evidently something to do with it, but, as
+evidently, not all.
+
+The background to these curious sittings, afterwards revealed to us,
+casts a hazy side-light upon them. Probably the Bishop, never present,
+must have been made aware by his spies of an intention on the part of
+those most favourable to Jeanne to support an appeal to the Pope; and
+L'Oyseleur, the traitor, who was all this time admitted to her cell by
+permission of Cauchon, and really as his tool and agent, was actively
+employed in prejudicing her mind against them, counselling her not to
+trust to those clerks, not to yield to the Church. How he managed to
+explain his own appearance on the other side, his official connection
+with the trial, and constant presence as one of her judges, it is hard
+to imagine. Probably he gave her to believe that he had sought that
+position (having got himself liberated from the imprisonment which he
+had represented himself as sharing) for her sake, to be able to help
+her.
+
+On the other hand her friends, whose hearts were touched by her candour
+and her sufferings, were not inactive. Jean de la Fontaine and the two
+monks--l'Advenu and Frere Isambard--also succeeded in gaining admission
+to her, and pressed upon her the advantage of appealing to the Church,
+to the Council of Bale about to assemble, or to the Pope himself, which
+would have again changed the _venue_, and transferred her into less
+prejudiced hands. It is very likely that Jeanne in her ignorance and
+innocence might have held by her reference to the supreme tribunal
+of God in any case; and it is highly unlikely that of the English
+authorities, intent on removing the only thing in France of which their
+forces were afraid, should have given her up into the hands of the Pope,
+or allowed her to be transferred to any place of defence beyond their
+reach; but at least it is a relief to the mind to find that all these
+men were not base, as appears on the face of things, but that pity and
+justice and human feeling sometimes existed under the priest's gown and
+the monk's cowl, if also treachery and falsehood of the blackest kind.
+The Bishop, who remained withdrawn, we know not why, from all these
+private sittings in the prison (probably busy with his ecclesiastical
+duties as Holy Week was approaching), heard with fury of this visit and
+advice, and threatened vengeance upon the meddlers, not without effect,
+for Jean de la Fontaine, we are told--who had been deep in his councils,
+and indeed his deputy, as chief examiner--disappeared from Rouen
+immediately after, and was heard of no more.
+
+     (1) Compiegne was a strong point. Had she proclaimed a
+     promise from St. Catherine, of victory? Chastelain says so,
+     long after date and with errors in fact. Two Anglo-
+     Compiegnais were at her trial. The Rehabilitation does not
+     go into this question.--(From Mr. Lang.)
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV -- RE-EXAMINATION. MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+
+Upon all these contentions followed the calm of Palm Sunday, a great
+and touching festival, the first break upon the gloom of Lent, and a
+forerunner of the blessedness of Easter. We have already told how--a
+semblance of charity with which the reader might easily be deceived--the
+Bishop and four of his assessors had gone to the prison to offer to the
+Maid permission to receive the sacrament if she would do so in a woman's
+dress: and how after pleading that she might be allowed that privilege
+as she was, in her male costume, and with a pathetic statement that she
+would have yielded if she could, but that it was impossible--she
+finally refused; and was so left in her prison to pass that sacred day
+unsuccoured and alone. The historian Michelet, in the wonderful sketch
+in which he rises superior to himself, and which amidst all after
+writings remains the most beautiful and touching memorial of Jeanne
+d'Arc, has made this day a central point in his tale, using with the
+skill of genius the service of the Church appropriate to the day, in
+heart-rending contrast with those doors of the prison which did not
+open, and the help of God which did not come to the young and solitary
+captive. _Le beau jour fleuri_ passed over her in darkness and
+desertion: her agony and passion lay before her like those of the
+Divine Sufferer, to whom every day of the succeeding week is specially
+consecrated. There is almost indeed a painful following of the Saviour's
+steps in these dark days, the circumstances lending themselves in a
+wonderful way to the comparison which French writers love to make, but
+which many of us must always feel, however spotless the sufferer, to
+have a certain irreverence in them. But if ever martyr were worthy of
+being called a partaker of the sufferings of Christ it was surely this
+girl, free, if ever human creature was, from self-seeking, or thought
+of reward, or ambitious hope, in whose heart there had never been any
+motive but the service of God and the deliverance of her country, who
+had neither looked before nor after, nor put her own interests into
+consideration in any way. Silently the feast passed with no holy
+privileges of religion, no blessed token of the spring, no remembrance
+of the waving palms and scattered blossoms over which her Lord rode into
+Jerusalem to die. She had not that sweet fallacious triumph; but the
+darker ordeal remained for her to follow.
+
+On Tuesday the 27th of March, her troubles began again. Before Palm
+Sunday, the report of the trial had been read to her. She had now to
+hear the formal reading of the articles founded upon it, to give a final
+response if she had any to give, or explanation, or addition, if she
+thought proper. The sitting was held in the great hall of the Castle
+of Rouen before a band of more than forty, all assembled for this final
+test. The Bishop made a prefactory speech to the prisoner, pointing out
+to her how benign and merciful were the judges now assembled, that they
+had no wish to punish, but rather to instruct and lead her in the right
+way; and requesting her at this late period in the proceedings to choose
+one or more from among them to help her. To which Jeanne replied; "In
+the first place concerning my good and our faith, I thank you and all
+the company. As for the counsellor you offer me I thank you also, but I
+have no need to depart from our Lord as my counsellor."
+
+The articles, in which the former questions put to her and answered by
+her, were now repeated in the form of accusations, were then read to her
+one by one; her sorcery, sacrilege, etc., being taken as facts. To a
+few she repeated, with various forcible and fine turns of phrase, her
+previous answers, with here and there a new explanation; but to the
+great majority she referred simply to her former replies, or denied
+the charge, as follows: "The second article concerning sortilege,
+superstitious acts and divination, she denied, and in respect to
+adoration (i.e. allowing herself to be adored) said: If any kissed her
+hands or her garments, it was not by her will, and that she kept herself
+from it as much as she could; and the rest of the article she denies."
+This is a specimen of the manner in which she responded, with a
+clear-headed and undisturbed intelligence, point after point--_ipsa
+Johanna negat_, is the usual refrain: or else she referred with dignity
+to previous replies as her sole answer. But sometimes the girl was
+moved to indignation, sometimes added a word in her own defence: "As for
+fairies she knew not what they were, and as for her education she had
+been well and duly instructed what to believe, as a good child should."
+This was her answer to the article in which all the folk-lore of
+Domremy, all the fairy tales, had been collected into a solemn statement
+of heresy. The matter of dress was once more treated in endless detail,
+with many interjected questions and reports of what she had already
+said: and at the end, answering the statement that woman's dress was
+most fit for woman's work, Jeanne added the quick _mot_: "As for the
+usual work of women, there are enough of other women to do it." On
+another occasion when the report ran that she claimed to have done all
+things by the counsel of God, she interrupted and said "that it ought
+to be, all that I have done well." To her former answer that she had
+yielded to the desire of the French knights in attacking Paris, she
+added the fine words, "It seemed to me that it was their duty to attack
+their adversaries." In respect to her visions she added to her former
+answer, "that she had not asked advice of bishop, cure, or any other
+before believing her revelations, but had many times prayed God to
+reveal them to others of her party." About calling her saints when she
+required their aid she added, that she asked God and Our Lady to send
+her council and comfort, and immediately her heavenly visitors came; and
+that this was the prayer she made:
+
+"Gentle God, in honour of Your(1) passion, I pray You, if You love me,
+that You would reveal to me how I ought to answer these people of the
+Church. I know well by what command it was that I took this dress, but
+I know not in what manner I ought to give it up. For this may it please
+You to teach me."
+
+In respect to the reproach that she had been a general in the war (_chef
+de guerre_), she explained that if she were, it was to drive out the
+English, repelling the accusation that she had assumed this title in
+pride; and to that which accused her of preferring to live among men,
+she explained that when she was in a lodging she generally had a woman
+with her; but that when engaged in war she lived in her clothes whenever
+there was not a woman present. In respect to her hope of escaping
+from prison, she was asked if her council had thrown any light on that
+question, and replied, "I have yet to tell you." Manchon, the
+clerk, makes a note upon his margin at these words, "Proudly
+answered"--_superbe responsum_.
+
+This re-examination lasted for two long days, the 27th and 28th of
+March. On several points Jeanne requested that she might be allowed to
+give an answer on Saturday, and accordingly, on Saturday, the last day
+of March, Easter Eve, she was visited in prison by the Bishop and
+seven or eight assessors. She was then asked if she would submit to
+the judgment of the Church on earth all that she had done and said,
+specially in things that concerned her trial. She answered that she
+would submit to the judgment of the Church militant, provided that it
+did not enforce anything that was impossible. She explained that
+what she called impossible was to acknowledge that the visions and
+revelations came otherwise than from God, or that what she had done was
+not on the part of God: these she would never deny or revoke for any
+power on earth: and that which our Lord had commanded or should command,
+she would not give up for any living man, and this would be impossible
+to her. And in case the Church should command her to do anything
+contrary to the command given her by God she would not do it for any
+reason whatsoever. Asked whether she would submit to the Church if the
+Church militant pronounced that her revelations were delusions or from
+the devil, or superstitious, or evil things, she answered that she would
+refer everything to our Lord, whose command she always obeyed; and that
+she knew well that everything had come to her by the commandment of God;
+and that what she had affirmed during this trial to have been done by
+the commandment of God it would be impossible for her to deny. And in
+case the Church militant commanded her to go against God, she would
+submit herself to no man in this world but to our Lord, whose good
+commandment she had always obeyed. She was asked if she did not believe
+that she was subject to the Church on earth, that is, to our Holy Father
+the Pope, the Cardinals, Bishops, and other prelates of the Church.
+She answered, "_Yes, our Lord being served first_." Asked if she had
+directions from her voices not to submit to the Church militant which
+is on earth, nor to its judgment, she replied that she does not answer
+according to what comes into her head, but that when she replies it is
+by commandment; and that she has never been told not to obey the Church,
+our Lord being served first (_noster Sire premier servi_).
+
+Other less formal particulars come to us long after, from various
+witnesses at the _proces de rehabilitation_, in which a lively picture
+is given of this scene. Frere Isambard had apparently managed, as was
+his wont, to get close to the prisoner, and to whisper to her to appeal
+to the Council of Bale. "What is this Council of Bale?" she asked in the
+same tone. Isambard replied that it was the "congregation of the whole
+Church, Catholic and Universal, and that there would be as many there on
+her side as on that of the English." "Ah!" she cried, "since there will
+be some of our party in that place, I will willingly yield and submit
+to the Council of Bale, to our Holy Father the Pope, and to the sacred
+Council."(2) And immediately--continues the deposition--the Bishop of
+Beauvais cried out, "Silence, in the devil's name!" and told the notary
+to take no notice of what she said, that she would submit herself to the
+Council of Bale; whereupon a second cry burst from the bosom of Jeanne,
+"You write what is against me, but you will not write what is for me."
+"Because of these things, the English and their officers threatened
+terribly the said Frere Isambard, warning him that if he did not hold
+his peace he would be thrown in the Seine." No notice whatever is taken
+of any such interruption in the formal record. It must have been before
+this time that Jean de la Fontaine disappeared. He left Rouen secretly
+and never returned, nor does he ever appear again. Frere Isambard is
+said to have taken temporary refuge in his convent; they scattered,
+_de par l'diable_, according to the Christian adjuration of Mgr. De
+Beauvais; though l'Advenu would seem to have held his ground, and served
+as Confessor to Jeanne in her agony, at which Frere Isambard was also
+present. We are told that the Deputy Inquisitor Lemaitre, he who had
+been got to lend the aid of his presence with such difficulty, fiercely
+warned the authorities that he would have no harm done to those two
+friars, from which we may infer that he too had leanings towards the
+Maid; and these honest and loyal men, well deserving of their country
+and of mankind, should not lose their record when the tragic story of so
+much human treachery and baseness has to be told.
+
+*****
+
+After this there came a long pause, full of much business to the judges,
+councillors, and clerks who had to reduce the seventy articles to
+twelve, in order to forward a summary of the case to the University of
+Paris for their judgment. Jeanne in the meantime had been left, but not
+neglected, in her prison. The great Feast of Easter had passed without
+any sacred consolation of the Church; but Monseigneur de Beauvais,
+in his kindness, sent her a carp to keep the feast withal, if not any
+spiritual food. It was quite congenial to the spirit of the time to
+imagine that the carp had been poisoned, and such a thought seems to
+have crossed the mind of Jeanne, who was very ill after eating of it,
+and like to die. But it was not thus, poisoned in prison, that it would
+have suited any of her persecutors to let her die. As a matter of fact,
+as soon as it was known that she was ill, the best doctors procurable
+were sent to the prison with peremptory orders to prolong her life
+and cure her at any cost. But for a little time we lose sight of
+the sick-bed on which the unfortunate Maid lay fully dressed, never
+relinquishing the garb which was her protection, with her feet chained
+to her uneasy couch. Even at the moment when her life hung in the
+balance we read of no indulgence granted in this respect, no unlocking
+of the infamous chain, nor substitution of a gentler nurse for the
+attendant _houspillers_, who were her guards night and day.
+
+When the Bishop and his court had completed their business and sent off
+to Paris the important document on which so much depended, they found
+themselves at leisure to return to Jeanne, to inquire after her health
+and to make her "a charitable admonition." It was on the 18th of April,
+after the silence of more than a fortnight, that their visit was made
+with this benevolent purpose. Seven of her judges attended the Bishop
+into the sick-chamber. They had come, he assured her, charitably and
+familiarly, to visit her in her sickness and to carry her comfort and
+consolation. Most of these men were indeed familiar enough: she had seen
+their faces already through many a dreadful day, though there were one
+or two which were new and strange, come to stare at her in the depths
+of her distress. Cauchon reminded her how much and how carefully she had
+been questioned by the most wise and learned men; and that those there
+present were ready to do anything for the salvation of her soul and
+body in every possible way, by instructing or advising her. He added,
+however, that if she still refused to accept advice, and to act
+according to the counsel of the Church, she was in the greatest
+danger--to which she replied:
+
+"It seems to me, being so ill as I am, that I am in great danger of
+death. And if it is thus that God pleases to decide for me, I ask of you
+to be allowed to confess and receive my Saviour, and to be laid in holy
+ground."
+
+"If you desire to have the rites and sacraments of the Church," said
+Cauchon, "you must do as good Catholics ought to do, submit to Holy
+Church." She answered, "I can say no other thing to you." She was then
+told that if she was in fear of death through sickness she ought all the
+more to amend her life; but that she could not have the privileges
+of the Church as a Catholic, if she did not submit to the Church. She
+answered: "If my body dies in prison, I hope that you will bury me in
+consecrated ground: yet if not, I still hope in our Lord."
+
+She was then reminded that she had said in her trial--if anything had
+been said or done by her against our Christian faith ordained by our
+Lord, that she would not stand by it. She answered, "I refer to the
+answer I made, and to our Lord."
+
+It was then asked of her, since she believed herself to have had many
+revelations from God by St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret,
+whether if there should appear some good creature (_sic_) who professed
+to have had a revelation from God in respect to her, she would believe
+that? She answered that there was no Christian in the world who could
+come to her professing to have had a revelation, of whom she should not
+know whether he spoke the truth or not: she would know it through St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+Asked, if she could not imagine that God might reveal something to a
+good creature who might be unknown to her, she answered: "Yes; but I
+would not believe either man or woman without a sign."
+
+Asked, if she believed that the Holy Scripture was revealed by God, she
+answered, "You know that I do, and it is good to know."
+
+The last answer she made in respect to submission to Holy Church was
+this, "Whatever may happen to me I will neither do nor say anything
+else, for I have answered before, during the trial."
+
+She was then "exhorted powerfully by the venerable doctors present"
+(four are mentioned by name) to submit to our Mother the Church, with
+many authorities and examples drawn from the Holy Scriptures; and
+finally, Magister Nicolas Midi made her an exhortation from Matthew
+xviii.: "If your brother trespass against you," and what follows, "If
+he will not hear the Church, let him be to you as a heathen man and
+a publican." This was expounded to Jeanne in the French tongue and,
+finally, she was told that if she would not obey and submit to the
+Church she must be given up as if she was a Saracen. To which Jeanne
+replied that she was a good Christian and well baptised, and that she
+desired to die as a Christian. She was then asked whether, since she
+begged leave of the Church to receive her Saviour, she would submit
+to the Church if it were promised to her that she should receive. She
+answered that she would say no more than she had said; that she loved
+God, served Him, and was a good Christian, and would aid and uphold the
+Holy Church with all her power. Asked if she wished that a beautiful
+procession should be made for her to restore her to health, she answered
+that she would be glad if the Church and the Catholics would pray for
+her.
+
+For another fortnight Jeanne was sent back into the silence, and to her
+own thoughts, which must have grown heavier and heavier as the weary
+days went on, and no sound of approaching deliverance came, no rumour
+of help at hand. All was quiet and safe at Rouen; amid the babble of the
+courtyard which she might hear fitfully when her guardians were quieter
+than usual, there was not one word which brought the hope of a French
+army at hand, or of any movement to rescue her. All was silent in the
+world around, not a breath of hope, not the whisper of a friend. It was
+not till the 2d of May that the dreadful blank was again broken, and she
+was called to the great hall of the castle for another interview with
+her tormentors. When she was led into the hall it was full, as in the
+first sitting, sixty-three judges in all being present. The interest
+had flagged or the pity had grown as the trial dragged its slow length
+along; but now, when every day the verdict was expected from Paris, the
+interest had risen again. On her way from her prison to the hall, it was
+necessary to pass the door of the castle chapel: and here once or twice
+Massieu, the officer of the court, had permitted her to pause and kneel
+down as she passed. This was all the celebration of the Paschal Feast
+that was permitted to Jeanne. The compassionate official, however, was
+discovered in this small service of charity, and sternly reprimanded
+and threatened. Henceforward she had to pass without even a longing look
+through the door at the altar on which was the holy sacrament.
+
+She came in on the renewed sitting of the 2d May to find the assembled
+priests settling themselves, after the address which had been made to
+them, to hear another address which John de Chasteillon, Archdeacon, had
+prepared for herself, in which he said much that was good both for body
+and soul, to which she consented. He had a list of twelve articles in
+his hands, and explained and expounded them to her, as they were the
+occasion of the sitting. He then "admonished her in charity," explaining
+that those who were faithful to Christ hold firmly and closely to the
+Christian creed, and adjuring her to consent and to amend her ways. To
+this Jeanne answered: "Read your book," meaning the schedule held by
+Monseigneur the Archdeacon, "and then I will answer you. I refer myself
+to God my master in all things; and I love Him with all my heart."
+
+To read this book, however, was precisely what Monseigneur the
+Archdeacon had no intention of doing. She was never allowed to hear the
+twelve articles upon which the verdict against her was founded; but the
+speaker gave her a long discourse by way of explanation, following more
+or less the schedule which he held. This "monition general," however,
+elicited no detailed reply from Jeanne, who answered briefly with some
+impatience, "I refer myself to my judge, who is the King of Heaven
+and earth." The "Lord Archdeacon" then proceeded to "monitions
+particulares."
+
+It was then once more explained to her that this reference to God alone
+was a refusal to submit to the Church militant, and she was instructed
+in the authority of the Church, which it was the duty of every Christian
+to believe--_unam sanctam Ecclesiam_ always guided by the Holy Spirit
+and which could not err, to the judgment of which every question should
+be referred. She answered: "I believe in the Church here below; but my
+doings and sayings, as I have already said, I refer and submit to God. I
+believe that the Church militant cannot err or fail; but as for my deeds
+and words I put them all before God, who has made me do that which
+I have done"; she also said that she submitted herself to God, her
+Creator, who had made her do everything, and referred everything to Him,
+and to Him alone.
+
+She was then asked, if she would have no judge on earth and if our
+Holy Father the Pope were not her judge; she answered: "I will tell you
+nothing more. I have a good master, that is our Lord, on whom I depend
+for everything, and not an any other."
+
+She was then told that if she would not believe the Church and the
+article _Ecclesiam sanctam Catholicam_, that she might be reckoned as
+a heretic and punished by burning: to which she answered: "I can say
+nothing else to you; and if I saw the fire before me, I should say only
+that which I say, and could do nothing else." (Once more at this point
+the clerk writes on his margin, "Proud reply"--_Superba responsio_--but
+whether in admiration or in blame it would be hard to say.)
+
+Asked, if the Council General, or the Holy Father, Cardinals, etc., were
+there--whether she would submit to them. "You shall have no other answer
+from me," she said.
+
+Asked, if she would submit to our Holy Father the Pope: she answered,
+"Take me to him and I will answer him," but would say no more.
+
+Questioned in respect to her dress, she answered, that she would
+willingly accept a long dress and a woman's hood to go to church to
+receive her Saviour, provided that, as she had already said, she were
+allowed to wear it on that occasion only, and then to take back that
+which she at present wore. Further, when it was set before her that she
+wore that dress without any need, being in prison, she answered, "When
+I have done that for which I was sent by God, I will then take back a
+woman's dress." Asked, if she thought she did well in being dressed like
+a man, she answered, "I refer every thing to our Lord."
+
+Again, after the exhortation made to her, namely, that in saying
+that she did well and did not sin in wearing that dress, and in the
+circumstances which concerned her assuming and wearing it, and in
+saying that God and the saints made her do so--she blasphemed, and as
+is contained in this schedule, erred and did evil: she answered that she
+never blasphemed God or the saints.
+
+She was then admonished to give up that dress, and no longer to think it
+was right, and to return to the garb of a woman; but answered that she
+would make no change in this respect.
+
+Concerning her revelations: she replied in regard to them, that she
+referred everything to her judge, that is God, and that her revelations
+were from God, without any other medium.
+
+Asked concerning the sign given to the King if she would refer to
+the Archbishop of Rheims, the Sire de Boussac, Charles de Bourbon, La
+Tremouille, and La Hire, to them or to any one of them, who, according
+to what she formerly said, had seen the crown, and were present when the
+angel brought it, and gave it to the Archbishop; or if she would refer
+to any others of her party who might write under their seals that it was
+so; she answered, "Send a messenger, and I will write to them about the
+whole trial": but otherwise she was not disposed to refer to them.
+
+In respect to her presumption in divining the future, etc., she
+answered, "I refer everything to my judge who is God, and to what I have
+already answered, which is written in the book."
+
+Asked, if two or three or four knights of her party were to be
+brought here under a safe conduct, whether she would refer to them her
+apparitions and other things contained in this trial; answered, "Let
+them come and then I will answer:" but otherwise she was not willing to
+refer to anyone.
+
+Asked whether, at the Church of Poitiers where she was examined, she had
+submitted to the Church, she answered, "Do you hope to catch me in this
+way, and by that draw advantage to yourselves?"
+
+In conclusion, "afresh and abundantly," she was admonished to submit
+herself to the Church, on pain of being abandoned by the Church; for if
+the Church left her she would be in great danger of body and of soul;
+and she might well put herself in peril of eternal fire for the soul, as
+well as of temporal fire for the body, by the sentence of other judges.
+"You will not do this which you say against me, without doing injury to
+your own bodies and souls," she said.
+
+Asked, whether she could give a reason why she would not submit to the
+Church: but to this she would make no additional reply.
+
+Again a week passed in busy talk and consultation without, in silence
+and desertion within. On the 9th of May the prisoner was again led, this
+time to the great tower, apparently the torture chamber of the castle,
+where she found nine of her judges awaiting her, and was once more
+adjured to speak the truth, with the threat of torture if she continued
+to refuse. Never was her attitude more calm, more dignified and lofty in
+its simplicity, than at this grim moment.
+
+"Truly," she replied, "if you tear the limbs from my body, and my soul
+out of it, I can say nothing other than what I have said; or if I said
+anything different, I should afterwards say that you had compelled me to
+do it by force." She added that on the day of the Holy Cross, the 3d of
+May past, she had been comforted by St. Gabriel. She believed that it
+was St. Gabriel: and she knew by her voices that it was St. Gabriel. She
+had asked counsel of her voices whether she should submit to the Church,
+because the priests pressed her so strongly to submit: but it had been
+said to her that if she desired our Lord to help her she must depend
+upon Him for everything. She added that she knew well that our Lord had
+always been the master of all she did, and that the Enemy had nothing
+to do with her deeds. Also she had asked her voices if she should be
+burned, and the said voices had replied to her that she was to wait for
+the Lord and He would help her.
+
+Afterwards in respect to the crown which had been handed by the angel to
+the Archbishop of Rheims, she was asked if she would refer to him. She
+answered: "Bring him here, that I may hear what he says, and then I
+shall answer you; he will not dare to say the contrary of that which I
+have said to you."
+
+The Archbishop of Rheims had been her constant enemy; all the hindrances
+that had occurred in her active life, and the constant attempts made
+to balk her even in her brief moment of triumph, came from him and his
+associate La Tremouille. He was the last person in the world to whom
+Jeanne naturally would have appealed. Perhaps that was the admirable
+reason why he was suggested in this dreadful crisis of her fate.
+
+A few days later, it was discussed among those dark inquisitors whether
+the torture should be applied or not. Finally, among thirteen there were
+but two (let not the voice of sacred vengeance be silent on their shame
+though after four centuries and more), Thomas de Courcelles, first of
+theologians, cleverest of ecclesiastical lawyers, mildest of men, and
+Nicolas L'Oyseleur, the spy and traitor, who voted for the torture. One
+man most reasonably asked why she should be put to torture when they
+had ample material for judgment without it? One cannot but feel that
+the proceedings on this occasion were either intended to beguile the
+impatience of the English authorities, eager to be done with the whole
+business, or to add a quite gratuitous pang to the sufferings of the
+heroic girl. As the men were not devils, though probably possessed by
+this time, the more cruel among them, by the horrible curiosity, innate
+alas! in human nature, of seeing how far a suffering soul could go, it
+is probable that the first motive was the true one. The English, Warwick
+especially, whose every movement was restrained by this long-pending
+affair, were exceedingly impatient, and tempted at times to take the
+matter into their own hands, and spoil the perfectness of this well
+constructed work of art, conducted according to all the rules, the
+beautiful trial which was dear to the Bishop's heart--and destined to
+be, though perhaps in a sense somewhat different to that which he hoped,
+his chief title to fame.
+
+Ten days after, the decision of the University of Paris arrived, and a
+great assembly of counsellors, fifty-one in all, besides the permanent
+presidents, collected together in the chapel of the Archbishop's
+house, to hear that document read, along with many other documents, the
+individual opinions of a host of doctors and eminent authorities.
+After an explanation of the solemn care given by the University to the
+consideration of every one of the twelve articles of the indictment,
+that learned tribunal pronounced its verdict upon each. The length of
+the proceedings makes it impossible to reproduce these. First as to the
+early revelations given to Jeanne, described in the first and second
+articles, they are denounced as "murderous, seductive, and pernicious
+fictions," the apparitions those of "malignant spirits and devils,
+Belial, Satan, and Behemoth." The third article, which concerned her
+recognition of the saints, was described more mildly as containing
+errors in faith; the fourth, as to her knowledge of future events, was
+characterised as "superstitious and presumptuous divination." The fifth,
+concerning her dress, declared her to be "blasphemous and contemptuous
+of God in His Sacraments." The sixth, by which she was accused of loving
+bloodshed, because she made war against those who did not obey the
+summons in her letters bearing the name Jhesus Maria, was declared to
+prove that she was cruel, "seeking the shedding of blood, seditious,
+and a blasphemer of God." The tenor is the same to the end: Blasphemy,
+superstition, pernicious doctrine, impiety, cruelty, presumption, lying;
+a schismatic, a heretic, an apostate, an idolator, an invoker of demons.
+These are the conclusions drawn by the most solemn and weighty tribunal
+on matters of faith in France. The precautions taken to procure a
+full and trustworthy judgment, the appeal to each section in turn, the
+Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Law, the "Nations," all separately
+and than all together passing every item in review--are set forth at
+full length. Every formality had been fulfilled, every rule followed,
+every detail was in the fullest order, signed and sealed and attested by
+solemn notaries, bristling with well-known names. A beautiful judgment,
+equal to the trial, which was beautiful too--not a rule omitted except
+those of justice, fairness, and truth! The doctors sat and listened with
+every fine professional sense satisfied.
+
+"If the beforesaid woman, charitably exhorted and admonished by
+competent judges, does not return spontaneously to the Catholic faith,
+publicly abjure her errors, and give full satisfaction to her judges,
+she is hereby given up to the secular judge to receive the reward of her
+deeds."
+
+The attendant judges, each in his place, now added their adhesion.
+Most of them simply stated their agreement with the judgment of the
+University, or with that of the Bishop of Fecamp, which was a similar
+tenor; a few wished that Jeanne should be again "charitably admonished";
+many desired that on this selfsame day the final sentence should
+be pronounced. One among them, a certain Raoul Sauvage (Radulphus
+Silvestris), suggested that she should be brought before the people in
+a public place, a suggestion afterwards carried out. Frere Isambard
+desired that she should be charitably admonished again and have another
+chance, and that her final fate should still be in the hands of "us her
+judges." The conclusion was that one more "charitable admonition" should
+be given to Jeanne, and that the law should then take its course.
+The suggestion that she should make a public appearance had only one
+supporter.
+
+This dark scene in the chapel is very notable, each man rising to
+pronounce what was in reality a sentence of death,--fifty of them almost
+unanimous, filled no doubt with a hundred different motives, to please
+this man or that, to win favour, to get into the way of promotion,--but
+all with a distinct consciousness of the great yet horrible spectacle,
+the stake, the burning:--though perhaps here and there was one with a
+hope that perpetual imprisonment, bread of sorrow and water of anguish,
+might be substituted for that terrible death. Finally, it was decided
+that--always on the side of mercy, as every act proved--the tribunal
+should once more "charitably admonish" the prisoner for the salvation
+of her soul and body, and that after all this "good deliberation and
+wholesome counsel" the case should be concluded.
+
+Again there follows a pause of four days. No doubt the Bishop and his
+assessors had other things to do, their ecclesiastical functions,
+their private business, which could not always be put aside because one
+forsaken soul was held in suspense day after day. Finally on the 24th of
+May, Jeanne again received in her prison a dignified company, some quite
+new and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the reader's mind
+that it was perhaps to show off the interesting prisoner to two new
+and powerful bishops, the first, Louis of Luxembourg, a relative of her
+first captor, that this last examination was held), nine men in all,
+crowding her chamber--_exponuntur Johannae defectus sui_, says the
+record--to expound to Jeanne her faults. It was Magister Peter Morice to
+whom this office was confided. Once more the "schedule" was gone over,
+and an address delivered laden with all the bad words of the University.
+"Jeanne, dearest friend," said the orator at last, "it is now time, at
+the end of the trial, to think well what words these are." She would
+seem to have spoken during this address, at least once--to say that
+she held to everything she had said during the trial. When Morice had
+finished she was once more questioned personally.
+
+She was asked if she still thought and believed that it was not her duty
+to submit her deeds and words to the Church militant, or to any other
+except God, upon which she replied, "What I have always said and held to
+during the trial, I maintain to this moment"; and added that if she
+were in judgment and saw the fire lighted, the faggots burning, and the
+executioner ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the fire,
+she could say nothing else, but would sustain what she had said in her
+trial, to death.
+
+Once more the scribe has written on his margin the words _Responsio
+Johannae superba_--the proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her
+expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation about her,
+must have moved the man, thus for the third time to send down to us his
+distinctly human impression of the worn out prisoner before her judges.
+"And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more, the cause
+was concluded," says the record, so formal, sustained within such
+purely abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb and
+reverberation of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the Inquisitor
+too all words seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid the excited
+crowd in the Temple the officers of the Pharisees approaching to lay
+hands on a greater than Jeanne, fell back, not knowing why, and could
+not do their office. This man was silenced also. Two bishops were
+present, and one a great man full of patronage; but not for the richest
+living in Normandy could Peter Morice find any more to say.
+
+These are in one sense the words of Jeanne; the last we have from her in
+her prison, the last of her consistent and unbroken life. After, there
+was a deeper horror to go through, a moment when all her forces failed.
+Here on the verge of eternity she stands heroic and unyielding, brave,
+calm, and steadfast as at the outset of her career, the Maid of France.
+Were the fires lighted and the faggots burning, and she herself within
+the fire, she had no other word to say.
+
+     (1) It is correct in French to use the second person plural
+     in addressing God, _thou_ being a more intimate and less
+     respectful form of speech. Such a difference is difficult to
+     remember, and troubles the ear. The French, even those who
+     ought to know better, sometimes speak of it as a supreme
+     profanity on the part of the profane English, that they
+     address God as _thou_.
+
+     (2) The French report goes on, "et requiert ----," but no
+     more. It is not in the Latin. The scribe was stopped by the
+     Bishop's profane outcry, and forbidden to register the fact
+     she was about to make a direct appeal to the Pope.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI -- THE ABJURATION. MAY 24, 1431.
+
+On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the
+officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart
+still high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had been
+no doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with every
+repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the last.
+And the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very near to
+her; no doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange information
+about herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside of the Castle
+of Rouen, rose half-comprehended from the echoing courtyard outside and
+the babble of her guards within. She would hear even as she was conveyed
+along the echoing stone passages something here and there of the popular
+expectation:--a burning! the wonderful unheard of sight, which by hook
+or by crook everyone must see; and no doubt among the English talk she
+might now be able to make out something concerning this long business
+which had retarded all warlike proceedings but which would soon be over
+now, and the witch burnt. There must have been some, even among those
+rude companions, who would be sorry, who would feel that she was no
+witch, yet be helpless to do anything for her, any more than Massieu
+could, or Frere Isambard: and if it was all for the sake of certain
+words to be said, was the wench mad? would it not be better to say
+anything, to give up anything rather than be burned at the stake?
+Jeanne, notwithstanding the wonderful courage of her last speech,
+must have returned to her cell with small illusion possible to her
+intelligent spirit. The stake had indeed come very near, the flames
+already dazzled her eyes, she must have felt her slender form shrink
+together at the thought. All that long night, through the early daylight
+of the May morning did she lie and ponder, as for far less reasons
+so many of us have pondered as we lay wakeful through those morning
+watches. God's promises are great, but where is the fulfilment? We ask
+for bread and he gives us, if not a stone, yet something which we cannot
+realise to be bread till after many days. Jeanne's voices had never
+paused in their pledge to her of succour. "Speak boldly, God will help
+you--fear nothing"; there would be aid for her before three months,
+and great victory. They went on saying so, though the stake was already
+being raised. What did they mean? what did they mean? Could she still
+trust them? or was it possible----?
+
+Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced
+the fire. She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the
+heartrending ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give
+her that heroic command. Still and always, they said God will help
+you, our Lord will stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean
+deliverance, deliverance! What else could it mean? If she held her head
+high as she returned to the horrible monotony of that prison so often
+left with hope, so often re-entered in sadness, it must soon have
+dropped upon her tired bosom. Slowly the clouds had settled round her.
+Over and over again had she affirmed them to be true--these voices that
+had guided her steps and led her to victory. And they had promised her
+the aid of God if she went forward boldly, and spoke and did not fear.
+But now every way of salvation was closing; all around her were fierce
+soldiers thirsting for her blood, smooth priests who admonished her in
+charity, threatening her with eternal fire for the soul, temporal fire
+for the body. She felt that fire, already blowing towards her as if on
+the breath of the evening wind, and her girlish flesh shrank. Was that
+what the voices had called deliverance? was that the grand victory, the
+aid of the Lord?
+
+It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she
+had reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in
+bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison
+became intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough
+jests half through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the clang
+of their arms when relieved. Early next morning a party of her usual
+visitors came in upon her to give her fresh instruction and advice.
+Something new was about to happen to-day. She was to be led forth, to
+breathe the air of heaven, to confront the people, the raging sea of
+men's faces, all the unknown world about her. The crowd had never been
+unfriendly to Jeanne. It had closed about her, almost wherever she was
+visible, with sweet applause and outcries of joy. Perhaps a little hope
+stirred her heart in the thought of being surrounded once more by the
+common folk, though probably it did not occur to her to think of these
+Norman strangers as her own people. And a great day was before her, a
+day in which something might still be done, in which deliverance might
+yet come. L'Oyseleur, who was one of her visitors, adjured her now
+to change her conduct, to accept whatever means of salvation might be
+offered to her. There was no longer any mention of Pope or Council,
+but only of the Church to which she ought to yield. How it was that he
+preserved his influence over her, having been proved to be a member
+of the tribunal that judged her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a
+fellow-countryman, nor any of the things he had professed to be, no once
+can tell us; but evidently he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to
+have received him without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed
+she seems to have been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who
+professed to wish her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
+
+It would require, however, no great persuasion on L'Oyseleur's part to
+convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that
+something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be
+so determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but
+delivered from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping of
+the Church, there would be time to think of everything, even to make her
+peace with her voices who would surely understand if, for the saving of
+her life, and out of terror for the dreadful fire, she abandoned
+them for a moment. She had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and they had
+forgiven. One faltering word now, a mark of her hand upon a paper, and
+she would be safe--even if still all they said was true; and if indeed
+and in fact, after buoying her up from day to day, such a dreadful thing
+might be as that they were not true----
+
+The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment,
+of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
+
+Then there came into the prison a better man than L'Oyseleur, Jean
+Beaupere, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of all
+these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he came
+in all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to warn
+her. He came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor. "Jean
+Beaupere entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by permission,
+and advertised her that she would straightway be taken to the scaffold
+to be addressed (_pour y etre preschee_), and that if she was a good
+Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and words under
+the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and specially of the
+ecclesiastical judges." "Accept the woman's dress and do all that you
+are told," her other adviser had said. When the car that was to convey
+her came to the prison doors, L'Oyseleur accompanied her, no doubt with
+a show of supporting her to the end. What a change from the confined and
+gloomy prison to the dazzling clearness of the May daylight, the air,
+the murmuring streets, the throng that gazed and shouted and followed!
+Life that had run so low in the prisoner's veins must have bounded up
+within her in response to that sunshine and open sky, and movement and
+sound of existence--summer weather too, and everything softened in the
+medium of that soft breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She
+had been three months in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along
+the roughly paved streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange
+object appeared to Jeanne's eyes in the midst of the market-place, a
+lofty scaffold with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd,
+the logs all arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four
+horses, to bring hither the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready,
+everything arranged--for whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that
+she might see the preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the
+great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?
+
+In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different scene.
+That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a great open
+space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In this were
+erected two platforms, one facing the other. On the first sat the court
+of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester having a place by
+the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president, with several other
+bishops and dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on the other platform,
+were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to which Jeanne was conducted
+by Massieu, who never left her, and L'Oyseleur, who kept as near as he
+could, the rest of the platform being immediately covered by lawyers,
+doctors, all the camp followers, so to speak, of the black army, who
+could find footing there. Jeanne was in her usual male dress, the
+doublet and hose, with her short-clipped hair--no doubt looking like a
+slim boy among all this dark crowd of men. The people swayed like a
+sea all about and around--the throng which had gathered in her progress
+through the streets pushing out the crowd already assembled with a
+movement like the waves of the sea. Every step of the trial all
+through had been attended by preaching, by discourses and reasoning and
+admonishments, charitable and otherwise. Now she was to be "preached"
+for the last time.
+
+It was Doctor Guillaume Erard who ascended the pulpit, a great preacher,
+one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to hear. He
+himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no doubt, set
+up there on that height before the eyes of all the people, he thought of
+his own reputation, and of the great audience, and Winchester the more
+than king, the great English Prince, the wealthiest and most influential
+of men. The preacher took his text from a verse in St. John's Gospel:
+"A branch cannot bear fruit except it remain in the vine." The centre
+circle containing the two platforms was surrounded by a close ring of
+English soldiers, understanding none of it, and anxious only that the
+witch should be condemned.
+
+It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was long
+and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine periods
+admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every reproach
+upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the House of
+France, and the head of that House, "Charles who calls himself King."
+"He has," cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by the eye of
+Winchester upon him, "adhered, like a schismatic and heretical person as
+he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman, disgraced and full of
+dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who are under his sway, and
+the nobility. This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and to thee I say that thy
+King is a schismatic and a heretic."
+
+In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by that
+clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the tumult of
+battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used to abuse
+in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this assault on her
+King. And interruption to a sermon has always a dramatic and startling
+effect, but when that voice arose now, when the startled speaker
+stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is easy to imagine what
+a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must have arisen in the midst
+of the crowd. "By my faith, sire," cried Jeanne, "saving your respect,
+I swear upon my life that my King is the most noble Christian of all
+Christians, that he is not what you say."
+
+The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally
+the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of
+animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart
+overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts. "Here," said Erard, "are my lords
+the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to submit your
+acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in these acts and
+words there are many things which it seemed to the clergy were not good
+either to say or to sustain."
+
+To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), "I will
+answer you." And as to her submission to the Church she said: "I have
+told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said
+may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God
+first, I refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on
+the part of God." She also said that no one was to blame for her acts
+and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in
+them, the blame was hers and no other's.
+
+Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, "I
+refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope."
+
+It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy Father
+was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in his
+diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother the
+Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and officers
+of the Church had a right to determine in her case. And of this she was
+admonished three times.
+
+After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a
+great part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she would
+hold to all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in everything
+their ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the above-named
+and of the great multitude assembled she made her abjuration in the
+manner that follows:
+
+And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions
+and revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not
+sustain them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother
+the Holy Church.
+
+*****
+
+In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made.
+Manchon writes on his margin: _At the end of the sentence Jeanne,
+fearing the fire, said she would obey the Church_. Even into the bare
+legal document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding in
+the silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation of
+the previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering
+submission, _timens igneum_--in fear of the fire.
+
+The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those
+eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Erard, from his
+pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that
+she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called
+upon Massieu to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own
+deposition), "after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if
+she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her to
+refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not. Which
+thing she did, saying to Erard, 'I refer to the Church universal whether
+I should abjure or not.' To which Erard answered, 'You shall abjure at
+once or you will be burnt.' Massieu gives further particulars in another
+part of the Rehabilitation process. Erard, he says, asked what he was
+saying to the prisoner, and he answered that she would sign if the
+schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that she could not write, and
+then added that she wished it to be decided by the Church, and ought
+not to sign unless that was done: and also required that she should be
+placed in the custody of the Church, and freed from the hands of the
+English. The same Erard answered that there had been ample delay, and
+that if she did not sign at once she should be burned, and forbade
+Massieu to say any more."
+
+Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from
+the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to have
+promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the Church.
+"Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save yourself?" was
+called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast, but her heart
+failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering. Once she called out
+over their heads, "All that I did was done for good, and it was well
+to do it:"--her last cry. Then she would seem to have recovered in
+some measure her composure. Probably her agitated brain was unable to
+understand the formula of recantation which was read to her amid all
+the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a vague faith in the
+condition she had herself stated, that the paper should be submitted
+to the Church, and that she should at once be transferred to an
+ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made, namely, that it was a
+very short document upon which she hastily in her despair made a cross,
+and that it was a long one, consisting of several pages, which was shown
+afterwards with _Jehanne_ scribbled underneath. "In fact," says Massieu,
+"she abjured and made a cross with the pen which the witness handed to
+her:" he, if any one must have known exactly what happened.
+
+No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform.
+But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators closing
+round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the appeals,
+seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to risk her
+young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had gone on
+reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two sentences
+all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to absolve
+her--which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on bread
+and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English were
+impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge, but it is
+evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a cat with a
+mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three months past; they
+had desired at once to get her out of their way. But the idea of her
+perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the risk of such a
+prisoner was more than they chose to encounter. Nevertheless there are
+some things a churchman cannot do. When it was seen that Jeanne had
+yielded, that she had put her mark to something on a paper flourished
+forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the Bishop turned to the
+Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was to do? There was but
+one answer possible to Winchester, had he been English and Jeanne's
+natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to penitence was the only
+practicable way.
+
+Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was
+that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross on
+the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the murmurs
+of the crowd. The _cedule_ to which she put her sign "contained eight
+lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three pages long, and
+full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this (the abjuration
+published) was not the one of which mention is made in the trial; "for
+the one read by the deponent and signed by the said Jeanne was quite
+different." This would seem to prove the fact that a much enlarged
+version of an act of abjuration, in its original form strictly confined
+to the necessary points and expressed in few words--was afterwards
+published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her own admissions,
+as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough to tell as an
+abjuration at all.
+
+When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been
+taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence
+must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and
+pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the
+bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied all
+thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual prison,
+with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy soul by
+solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all those
+crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what Jeanne
+expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more shamed and
+downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There seems even
+to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials. Some of them
+congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward to say, "You
+have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul." She herself,
+excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she was not to go.
+She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact of her perpetual
+imprisonment with complete faith and content. It meant to her instant
+relief from her hideous prison-house, and she could not contain her
+impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church--_gens de' Eglise_--lead
+me to your prison; let me be no longer in the hands of the English," she
+cried with feverish anxiety. To gain this point, to escape the irons
+and the dreadful durance which she had suffered so long, was all her
+thought. The men about her could not answer this appeal. Some of them
+no doubt knew very well what the answer must be, and some must have
+seen the angry looks and stern exclamation which Warwick addressed to
+Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and
+the stir among the soldiers at sight of his displeasure. But perhaps
+flurried by all that had happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the
+victim in her moment of hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop
+to ask where they were to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar
+of Longueville. Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing,
+perhaps in Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says
+this witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a
+"fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "_this fellow was also one of them_."
+Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and Cauchon
+turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken back whence
+she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her abjuration, which by
+no just title could be called an abjuration, had been in vain.
+
+Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she
+had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in
+reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what
+she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and
+bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms--but for what? to escape
+those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of Dionysius,
+its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going back was beyond
+words. We hear of no word that she said when she realised the hideous
+fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter waters closed over her
+head. Again the chains to be locked and double locked that bound her to
+her dreadful bed, again the presence of those men who must have been
+all the more odious to her from the momentary hope that she had got free
+from them for ever.
+
+The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard
+upon her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor,
+Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical
+persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost
+blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently, though
+with a word of warning that should she change her mind and return to her
+evil ways there would be no further place for repentance. As a return
+for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he required her immediately
+to put on the female dress which his attendants had brought. There is
+something almost ludicrous, could we forget the tragedy to follow, in
+the bundle of humble clothing brought by such exalted personages, with
+the solemnity which became a thing upon which hung the issues of life or
+death. Jeanne replied with the humility of a broken spirit. "I take them
+willingly," she said, "and in everything I will obey the Church." Then
+silence closed upon her, the horrible silence of the prison, full of
+hidden listeners and of watching eyes.
+
+Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It
+was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain have
+seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but Monseigneur de
+Beauvais had to hold head against the great English authorities who were
+out of all patience, fearing that the witch might still slip through
+their fingers and by her spells and incantations make the heart of the
+troops melt once more within them. If the mind of the Church had been as
+charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if all the power of Rome could
+have got the Maid now out of the English grip. They were exasperated,
+and felt that they too, as well as the prisoner, had been played with.
+But the Bishop had good hope in his mind, still to be able to content
+his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it was true, but the more he inquired
+into that act, the less secure he must have felt about it. And she might
+relapse; and if she relapsed there would be no longer any place for
+repentance. And it is evident that his confidence in the power of the
+clothes was boundless. In any case a few days more would make all clear.
+
+They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance,
+well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One
+account is given by Frere Isambard, whom she told in the presence of
+several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a _Millourt
+Anglois_, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again
+the man's dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu
+is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be released
+from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards took away her
+female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack containing the
+other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding them that these were
+forbidden to her; but got no answer except a brutal order to get up. It
+is very probable that both stories are true. Frere Isambard found her
+weeping and agitated, and nothing is more probable than this was the
+occasion on which Warwick heard her cries, and interfered to save her.
+Massieu's version, of which he is certain, was communicated to him a
+day or two after when they happened to be alone together. It was on the
+Thursday before Trinity Sunday that she put on the female dress, but it
+would seem that rumours on the subject of a relapse had begun to spread
+even before the Sunday on which that event happened: and Beaupere
+and Midi were sent by the Bishop to investigate. But they were very
+ill-received in the Castle, sworn at by the guards, and forced to go
+back without seeing Jeanne, there being as yet, it appeared, nothing
+to see. On the morning of the Monday, however, the rumours arose with
+greater force; and no doubt secret messages must have informed the
+Bishop that the hoped-for relapse had taken place. He set out himself
+accordingly, accompanied by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight
+of the familiar names so often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt
+with much show of pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle
+was all in excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event
+so trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the
+visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed
+once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four
+days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her, and
+humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an outcry of
+astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes," she replied,
+"she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no triumph in what she
+said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of one who in the most
+desperate strait has taken her resolution and must abide by it, whether
+she likes it or not. She was asked why she had resumed that dress, and
+who had made her do so. There was no question of anything else at first.
+The tunic and _gippon_ were at once enough to decide her fate.
+
+She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing
+her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a
+woman.
+
+She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the dress
+of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn or had
+made any such oath.
+
+She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more lawful
+to wear a man's dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and also
+that she had taken it back because the promise made to her had not been
+kept, that she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour, and be
+delivered from her irons.
+
+She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to resume
+it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in irons; but if
+they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of her irons and put
+her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she would be good, and
+do whatever the Church pleased.
+
+She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of her
+voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them again.
+To this she answered, recovering a little courage, "Yes."
+
+She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God had
+made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity there
+was of the treason to which she had consented by making abjuration and
+revocation in order to save her life: and that she had earned damnation
+for herself to save her life. Also that before Thursday her voices had
+told her that she should do what she did that day, that on the scaffold
+they had told her to answer the preachers boldly, and that this preacher
+whom she called a false preacher had accused her of many things she
+never did. She also added that if she said God had not sent her she
+would damn herself, for true it was that God had sent her. Also that her
+voices had told her since, that she had done a great sin in confessing
+that she had sinned; but that for fear of the fire she had said that
+which she had said.
+
+She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were
+those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were
+so; and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold
+that she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret, she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she
+never intended to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of the
+fire, and she had denied nothing but what was contrary to truth; and
+she said that she would like better to make her penitence all at one
+time--that is to say, in dying, than to endure a long penitence in
+prison. Also that she had never done anything against God or the faith
+whatever they might have made her say; and that for what was in the
+schedule of the abjuration she did not know what it was. Also she said
+that she never intended to revoke anything so long as it pleased our
+Lord. At the end she said that if her judges would have her do so, she
+might put on again her female dress; but for the rest she would do no
+more.
+
+"What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his
+own mouth." Jeanne's protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and
+defence, overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it
+with questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed;
+the end of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be
+accomplished. No one could say she had not had full justice done her;
+every formality had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried out.
+Now there was but one thing before her, whose sad young voice with many
+pauses thus sighed forth its last utterance; and for her judges, one
+last spectacle to prepare, and the work to complete which it had taken
+them three long months to do.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII -- THE SACRIFICE. MAY 31, 1431.
+
+It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in certain
+circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of Beauvais had
+entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew exactly, with
+a perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least, that,
+notwithstanding the effect which his theatrical _mise en scene_ had
+produced upon the imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or earth
+would induce that young soul to content itself with a lie. He knew it,
+though lies were his daily bread; the children of this world are wiser
+in their generation than the children of light. He had bidden his
+English patrons to wait a little, and now his predictions were
+triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of any man that on such
+a certainty he could have calculated and laid his devilish plans; but
+there would seem to have existed in the mediaeval churchman a certain
+horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic which was peculiar
+to their age and profession, and which no better principle in their own
+minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their delight of sensation,
+in distinction from the other appetites perhaps scarcely less cruel
+which other men indulged with no such horrified denunciation from the
+rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared with Cauchon that sharp
+sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her out; young Courcelles, so
+modest and unassuming and so learned, among the rest; not L'Oyseleur, it
+appears by the sequel. That Judas, like the greater traitor, was
+struck to the heart; but the less bad man who had only persecuted, not
+betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and only rejoiced that at last
+the victim was ready to drop into the flames which had been so carefully
+prepared.
+
+The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried
+with their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the
+Archbishop's house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily
+called together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner
+escaped had been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one each
+man rose again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of Fecamp,
+led the tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done: to give
+her up to the secular justice, "praying that she might be gently
+dealt with." Man after man added his voice "to that of Abbot of Fecamp
+aforesaid"--that she might be gently dealt with! Not one of them could
+be under any doubt what gentle meaning would be in the execution;
+but apparently the words were of some strange use in salving their
+consciences.
+
+The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In point
+of view of the law, there should have followed another trial, more
+evidence, pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to Monseigneur
+de Beauvais that he now defied law, and no longer prolonged the useless
+ceremonials of that mockery of justice. It is said that in coming out of
+the prison, through the courtyard full of Englishmen, where Warwick
+was in waiting to hear what news, the Bishop greeted them with all the
+satisfaction of success, laughing and bidding them "Make good cheer, the
+thing is done." In the same spirit of satisfaction was the rapid action
+of the further proceedings. On Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on
+Wednesday morning at eight 'clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear
+her sentence, and there, without even that formality, the penalty was at
+once carried out. No time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
+
+All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison
+where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge
+of her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful
+scene, which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty
+years after by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it had
+become the only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest colours,
+and themselves as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt that
+so remarkable an occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a deep
+impression on the minds of all those who were in any way actors in
+or spectators of that wonderful scene. And every word of all these
+different reports is on oath; but notwithstanding, a touch of
+unconscious colour, a more favourable sentiment, influenced by the
+feeling of later days, may well have crept in. With this warning we
+may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy, all the more for the
+atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no way idealised,
+which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in which Jeanne
+figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified, tormented, and
+often trembling girl.
+
+On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l'Advenu appeared in the
+cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell--first "to announce
+to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true contrition and
+penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the said l'Advenu did
+very carefully and charitably." Jeanne on her part received the news
+with no conventional resignation or calm. Was it possible that she had
+been deceived and really hoped for mercy? She began to weep and to cry
+at the sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding the solemnity of her last
+declaration, that she would rather bear her punishment all at once than
+to endure the long punishment of her prison, her heart failed before
+the imminent stake, the immediate martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and
+earth: "My body, which has never been corrupted, must it be burned to
+ashes to-day!" No one but Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her
+perfect purity; was it good for nothing but to be burned, that young
+body not nineteen years old? "Ah," she said, "I would rather be beheaded
+seven times than burned! I appeal to God against all these great wrongs
+they do me." But after a while the passion wore itself out, the child's
+outburst was stilled; calming herself, she knelt down and made her
+confession to the compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to
+"receive her Saviour" as she had so often prayed and entreated before.
+It would appear that this had not been within Friar Martin's commission.
+He sent to ask the Bishop's leave, and it was granted "anything she
+asked for"--as they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned
+convict. But the Host was brought into the prison without ceremony,
+without accompanying candles or vestment for the priest. There are
+always some things which are insupportable to a man. Brother Martin
+could bear the sight of the girl's anguish, but not to administer to
+her a diminished rite. He sent again to demand what was needful, out of
+respect for the Holy Sacrament and the present victim. And his request
+had come, it would seem, to some canon or person in authority whose
+heart had been touched by the wonderful Maid in her long martyrdom. This
+nameless sympathiser did all that a man could do. He sent the Host with
+a train of priests chanting litanies as they went through the streets,
+with torches burning in the pure early daylight; some of these exhorted
+the people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her. She must have
+heard in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the clergy, the
+pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the voices, that
+sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the city was
+touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been sympathetic to
+Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was about to die:
+she had stood bravely against the world and answered like a true
+Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets, a girl just
+nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated for the time.
+
+Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over, received
+at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that rite which
+He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not permitted
+to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the sacred
+commemoration. All the time she was still _preschee_ and admonished
+by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop and his
+followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different parts in
+that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult to say.
+The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal warrant
+for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of mind
+is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it, and
+a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope and
+strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that she
+sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation for
+which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already mentioned,
+importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring to get from
+her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and was herself
+a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil spirits, not
+good,--drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be they good spirits,
+or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act of giving her her
+last communion, Brother Martin paused with the consecrated Host in his
+hands.
+
+"Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
+answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer."
+Then this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your
+voices?" Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the voices,
+which have deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not give this
+deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus, who did not
+live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
+
+The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
+satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. "So,
+Jeanne," he said, "you have always told us that your 'voices' said you
+were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us
+the truth at last." Then Jeanne answered: "Truly I see that they have
+deceived me." The report is Cauchon's, and therefore little to be
+trusted; but the sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that,
+even in records more trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her.
+The other spectators all report another portion of this conversation.
+"Bishop, it is by you I die," are the words with which the Maid is said
+to have met him. "Oh Jeanne, have patience," he replied. "It is because
+you did not keep your promise." "If you had kept yours, and sent me to
+the prison of the Church, and put me in gentle hands, it would not
+have happened," she replied. "I appeal from you to God." Several of the
+attendants, also according to the Bishop's account, heard from her the
+same sad words: "They have deceived me"; and there seems no reason why
+we should not believe it. Her mind was weighed down under this dreadful
+unaccountable fact. She was forsaken--as a greater sufferer was; and a
+horror of darkness had closed around her. "Ah, Sieur Pierre," she said
+to Morice, "where shall I be to-night?" The man had condemned her as a
+relapsed heretic, a daughter of perdition. He had just suggested to her
+that her angels must have been devils. Nevertheless perhaps his face
+was not unkindly, he had not meant all the harm he did. He ought to have
+answered, "In Hell, with the spirits you have trusted"; that would have
+been the only logical response. What he did say was very different.
+"Have you not good faith in the Lord?" said the judge who had doomed
+her. Amazing and notable speech! They had sentenced her to be burned for
+blasphemy as an envoy of the devil; they believed in fact that she was
+the child of God, and going straight in that flame to the skies. Jeanne,
+with the sound, clear head and the "sane mind" to which all of
+them testified, did she perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the
+inconceivable contradiction? "Ah," she said, "yes, God helping me, I
+shall be in Paradise."
+
+There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to the
+mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully not
+repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed "as if
+it had been a thing of small importance," that her story of the angel
+bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither expected nor
+intended to be believed. For this we have to thank L'Oyseleur and the
+rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that dreadful morning in the
+prison.
+
+Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the
+long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre
+was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy Office.
+She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the crowded
+courtyard where her "chariot" awaited her. It was her confessor's part
+to remain by her side, and Frere Isambard and Massieu, the officer,
+both her friends, were also with her. It is said that L'Oyseleur rushed
+forward at this moment, either to accompany her also, or, as many say,
+to fling himself at her feet and implore her pardon. He was hustled
+aside by the crowd and would have been killed by the English, it is
+said, but for Warwick. The bystanders would seem to have been seized
+with a sudden disgust for all the priests about, thinking them Jeanne's
+friends, the historians insinuate--more likely in scorn and horror of
+their treachery. And then the melancholy procession set forth.
+
+The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part:
+eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortege,
+as the car rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid
+attained to the calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all the
+high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs that
+gaped and gazed upon her on every side. In the midst of the consolations
+of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears, other words, the
+plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips, "Rouen! Rouen!" she
+said; "am I to die here?" It seemed incredible to her, impossible. She
+looked about still for some sign of disturbance, some rising among the
+crowd, some cry of "France! France!" or glitter of mail. Nothing: but
+the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the soldiers roughly clearing
+the way, the rude chariot rumbling on. "Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you
+shall yet suffer because of this," she murmured in her distraction, amid
+her moanings and tears.
+
+At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space encumbered
+with three erections--one reaching up so high that the shadow of it
+seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled up in an
+enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the executioner
+himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to secure
+unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling form. Two
+platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs and benches
+for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with the civil
+officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in their turn.
+Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it matter? No
+sentence at all was read to her, not even the ecclesiastical one which
+was illegal also. She was probably placed first on the same platform
+with her judges, where there was a pulpit from which she was to be
+_preschee_ for the last time. Of all Jeanne's sufferings this could
+scarcely be the least, that she was always _preschee_, lectured,
+addressed, sermonised through every painful step of her career.
+
+The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul
+scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance,
+when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her
+errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was Nicolas
+Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and his text
+was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all the other
+members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which had to be cut
+off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church
+might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor,
+giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence
+the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of
+invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace."
+Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop
+himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final
+repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The narrative shows
+that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in her career, paid no
+attention to the tirade levelled at her from the president's place.
+"She knelt down on the platform showing great signs and appearance of
+contrition, so that all those who looked upon her wept. She called on
+her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed glorious Virgin Mary,
+and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She called specially--was
+it with still a return towards the hoped for miracle? was it with the
+instinctive cry towards an old and faithful friend?--"St. Michael, St.
+Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would seem to have been a moment in
+which the hush and silence of a great crowd surrounded this
+wonderful stage, where was that white figure on her knees, praying,
+speaking--sometimes to God, sometimes to the saintly unseen companions
+of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to those about her. She asked
+the priests, thronging all round, those who had churches, to say a mass
+for her soul. She asked all whom she might have offended to forgive her.
+Through her tears and prayers broke again and again the sorrowful cry of
+"Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly that I must die?" No reason is given for
+the special pang that seems to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned
+a campaign in Normandy with Alencon. Had there been perhaps some special
+hope which made this conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in
+the Norman capital her standard and that of her King?
+
+There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their
+fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to
+the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the
+deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the
+profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he
+would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That which
+her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to bear. She called upon
+the saints, but they did not answer. She was shamed in the sight of
+men. But as she knelt there weeping, the Bishop's evil voice scarcely
+silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient--the entire crowd, touched
+to its heart with one impulse, broke into a burst of weeping and
+lamentation, "_a chaudes larmes_" according to the graphic French
+expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen personal pang of sorrow
+and fellow-feeling and impotence to help. Winchester--withdrawn high on
+his platform, ostentatiously separated from any share in it, a
+spectator merely--wept; and the judges wept. The Bishop of Boulogne was
+overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed down the accursed Cauchon's
+cheeks. The very world stood still to see that white form of purity, and
+valour, and faith, the Maid, not shouting triumphant on the height of
+victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature
+could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us
+here all day; must we dine here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain
+that simulated cruelty. And then the executioner stepped in and seized
+the victim.
+
+It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be no
+chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim the
+atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that the
+ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach her:
+the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel explanation.
+There was a writing set over the little platform which gave footing to
+the attendants below the stake, upon which were written the following
+words:
+
+JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER,
+BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL,
+DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
+
+This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and religion
+branded the Maid of France--one half of her countrymen: the other half,
+silent, speaking no word, looking on.
+
+Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees,
+asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no
+cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way
+seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal
+parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all
+the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of her
+disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its broken
+edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried, pressing it
+against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross to preserve as
+a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold and silver. This
+was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few remaining steps and
+mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high over all that sea of
+heads. When she was bound securely to her stake, she asked again for a
+cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church, to be held before her
+as long as her eyes could see. Frere Isambard and Massieu, following her
+closely still, sent to the nearest church, and procured probably some
+cross which was used for processional purposes on a long staff which
+could be held up before her. The friar stood upon the faggots holding
+it up, and calling out broken words of encouragement so long that Jeanne
+bade him withdraw, lest the fire should catch his robes. And so at last,
+as the flames began to rise, she was left alone, the good brother always
+at the foot of the pile, painfully holding up with uplifted arms the
+cross that she might still see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up
+with the red glow of the fire, the horrified, trembling crowd like an
+agitated sea around. The wild flames rose and fell in sinister gleams
+and flashes, the smoke blew upwards, by times enveloping that white
+Maid standing out alone against a sky still blue and sweet with
+May--Pandemonium underneath, but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came
+a great cry from among the black fumes that began to reach the clouds:
+"My voices were of God! They have not deceived me!" She had seen and
+recognised it at last. Here it was, the miracle: the great victory
+that had been promised--though not with clang of swords and triumph of
+rescuing knights, and "St. Denis for France!"--but by the sole hand
+of God, a victory and triumph for all time, for her country a crown of
+glory and ineffable shame.
+
+Thus died the Maid of France--with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips--till the
+merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat; and
+one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the fire,
+wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through the air
+in the good monk's trembling hands--from eyes which opened bright upon
+the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so long thought
+and dreamed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII -- AFTER.
+
+The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known
+in history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the
+great catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been fact
+and evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been recorded
+all the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the most
+innocent of all, sought out Frere Isambard, and confessed to him in an
+anguish of remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had done.
+An Englishman who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in which the
+witch should be burned, when he rushed forward to keep his word was
+seized with sudden compunction--believed that he saw a white dove
+flutter forth from amid the smoke over her head, and, almost fainting
+at the sight, had to be led by his comrades to the nearest tavern for
+refreshment, a life-like touch in which we recognise our countryman; but
+he too found his way that afternoon to Frere Isambard like the other. A
+horrible story is told by the _Bourgeois de Paris_, whose contemporary
+journal is one of the authorities for this period, that "the fire was
+drawn aside" in order that Jeanne's form, with all its clothing burned
+away, should be visible by one last act of shameless insult to the
+crowd. The fifteenth century believed, as we have said, everything that
+is cruel and horrible, as indeed the vulgar mind does at all ages; but
+such brutal imaginings have seldom any truth to support them, and there
+is no such suggestion in the actual record. Isambard and Massieu heard
+from one of the officials that when every other part of her body
+was destroyed the heart was found intact, but was, by the order of
+Winchester, flung into the Seine along with all the ashes of that
+sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics should be kept.
+
+Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed
+this dreadful scene. "When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried out
+for water, holy water, and called to St. Michael; then hung her head upon
+her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently died." "Being
+in the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud voice the holy
+name of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of paradise, she
+gave up her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name of Jesus in
+sign of the fervour of her faith." One of the Canons of Rouen, standing
+sobbing in the crowd, said to another: "Would that my soul were in the
+same place where the soul of that woman is at this moment"; which indeed
+is not very different from the authorised saying of Pierre Morice in
+the prison. Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he who wrote _superba
+responsio_ on his margin, and had written down every word of her long
+examination--his occupation for three months,--says that he "never wept
+so much for anything that happened to himself, and that for a
+whole month he could not recover his calm." This man adds a very
+characteristic touch, to wit, that "with part of the pay which he had
+for the trial, he bought a missal, that he might have a reason for
+praying for her." Jean Tressat, "secretary to the King of England"
+(whatever that office may have been), went home from the execution
+crying out, "We are all lost, for we have burned a saint." A priest,
+afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, "did not believe that there was any man
+who could restrain his tears."
+
+The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none
+are visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is
+extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed
+inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be continually
+pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed to have bought
+all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges, among whom were
+the most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but of none of this
+is there any proof given. That they were anxious to procure Jeanne's
+condemnation and death, is very certain. Not one among them believed
+in her sacred mission, almost all considered her a sorceress, the most
+dangerous of evil influences, a witch who had brought shame and loss to
+England by her incantations and evil spells. On that point there
+could be no doubt whatever. She alone had stopped the progress of the
+invaders, and broken the charm of their invariable success. But all that
+she had done had been in favour of Charles, who made no attempt to serve
+or help her, and who had thwarted her plans, and hindered her work so
+long as it was possible to do so, even when she was performing miracles
+for his sake. And Alencon, Dunois, La Hire, where were they and all the
+knights? Two of them at least were at Louvins, within a day's march,
+but never made a step to rescue her. We need not ask where were the
+statesmen and clergy on the French side, for they were unfeignedly glad
+to have the burden of condemning her taken from their hands. No one
+in her own country said a word or struck a blow for Jeanne. As for
+the suborning of the University of Paris _en masse_, and all its
+best members in particular, that is a general baseness in which it is
+impossible to believe. There is no appearance even of any particular
+pressure put upon the judges. Jean de la Fontaine disappeared, we are
+told, and no one ever knew what became of him: but it was from Cauchon
+he fled. And nothing seems to have happened to the monks who attended
+the Maid to the scaffold, nor to the others who sobbed about the
+pile. On the other side, the Doctors who condemned her were in no way
+persecuted or troubled by the French authorities when the King came to
+his own. There was at the time a universal tacit consent in France to
+all that was done at Rouen on the 31st of May, 1431.
+
+One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already
+sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that
+dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It
+was two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and
+sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly allied
+to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie existing
+between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the hostile
+indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to Jeanne, who
+had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of Paris and
+the adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much against them as
+against the English, and the national sentiment to which she, a patriot
+before her age, appealed,--bidding not only the English go home, or
+fight and be vanquished, which was their only alternative--but
+the Burgundians to be converted and to live in peace with their
+brothers,--did not exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards, or Normans
+was the daughter of far Champagne a fellow countrywoman. There was
+neither sympathy nor kindness in their hearts on that score. Some were
+humane and full of pity for a simple woman in such terrible straits; but
+no more in Paris than in Rouen was the Maid of Orleans a native champion
+persecuted by the English; she was to both an enemy, a sorceress,
+putting their soldiers and themselves to shame.
+
+I have no desire to lessen our(1) guilt, whatever cruelty may have
+been practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much
+was practised--the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final
+stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and
+often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that she
+was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A prisoner of
+war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in her downfall
+was a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame is greater upon
+those who sold than upon those who bought; and greatest of all upon
+those who did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did not move a finger, to
+rescue. And indeed we have been the most penitent of all concerned; we
+have shrived ourselves by open confession and tears. We have quarrelled
+with our Shakespeare on account of the Maid, and do not know how we
+could have forgiven him, but for the notable and delightful discovery
+that it was not he after all, but another and a lesser hand that
+endeavoured to befoul her shining garments. France has never quarrelled
+with her Voltaire for a much fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
+
+The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to the
+remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the assembly
+held on the Thursday after Jeanne's death, how and when we are not told.
+It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is the place of
+meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole testimonial is
+that the manuscript is in the same hand which has written the previous
+records: but whereas each page in that record was signed at the bottom
+by responsible notaries, Manchon and his colleagues, no name whatever
+certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and persons of high importance, all
+judges on the trial, all concerned in that last scene in the prison,
+stand up and give their report of what happened there--part of which
+we have quoted--their object being to establish that Jeanne at the last
+acknowledged herself to be deceived. According to their own showing it
+was exactly such an acknowledgment as our Lord might have been supposed
+to make in the moment of his agony when the words of the psalm, "My God,
+my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems
+no reason that we can see, why this evidence should not be received as
+substantially true. The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's
+part was then made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived
+in respect to her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart.
+It was to her the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning
+showed her the truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her
+renewed conviction. The scene at the stake would lose something of its
+greatness without that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled
+soul.
+
+Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had, according
+to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost, it became a
+danger to the King of France that it should be possible to imagine
+that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of sorcery; and
+accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the decisions
+of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen, which had
+witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the depositions of
+witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which it had taken a
+long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted for judgment, and
+a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was given. The _proces_
+was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the mother and brothers of
+Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight, Pierre de Lys, a gentleman
+of coat armour--against the heirs and representatives of Cauchon, Bishop
+of Beauvais, and Lemaitre, the Deputy Inquisitor--with other persons
+chiefly concerned in the judgment. Some of these men were dead, some,
+wisely, not to be found. The result was such a mass of testimony as put
+every incident of the life of the Maid in the fullest light from her
+childhood to her death, and in consequence secured a triumphant and full
+acquittal of herself and her name from every reproach. This remarkable
+and indeed unique occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused
+any enthusiasm. Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the
+extraordinary calm of contemporary opinion which was still too near the
+catastrophe to see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of
+news which hindered the common knowledge of a trial--a thing too heavy
+to be blown upon the winds,--while it promulgated the legend, a thing
+so much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an
+extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many
+ages, and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory,
+in the country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots
+and champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear than
+daily bread.
+
+In the new and wonderful spring of life that succeeded the revolution
+of 1830, the martyr of the fifteenth century came to light as by a
+revelation. The episode of the Pucelle in Michelet's _History of France_
+touched the heart of the world, and remains one of the finest efforts of
+history and the most popular picture of the saint. And perhaps, though
+so much less important in point of art, the maiden work of another
+maiden of Orleans--the little statue of Jeanne, so pure, so simple, so
+spiritual, made by the Princess Marie of that house, the daughter of the
+race which the Maid held in visionary love, and which thus only has ever
+attempted any return of that devotion--had its part in reawakening
+her name and memory. It fell again, however, after the great work of
+Quicherat had finally given to the country the means of fully
+forming its opinion on the subject which Fabre's translation, though
+unfortunately not literal and adorned with modern decorations, was
+calculated to render popular. A great crop of statues and some pictures
+not of any great artistic merit have since been dedicated to the memory
+of the Maid: but yet the public enthusiasm has never risen above the
+tide mark of literary applause.
+
+There has been, however, a great movement of enthusiasm lately to gain
+for Jeanne the honour of canonisation(2); but it seems to have failed,
+or at least to have sunk again for the moment into silence. Perhaps
+these honours are out of date in our time. One of the most recent
+writers on the subject, M. Henri Blaze de Bury, suggests that one reason
+which retards this final consecration is "England, certainly not a
+negligible quantity to a Pope of our time." Let no such illusion move
+any mind, French or ecclesiastical. Canonisation means to us, I presume,
+and even to a great number of Catholics, simply the highest honour
+that can be paid to a holy and spotless name. In that sense there is
+no distinction of nation, and the English as warmly as the French, both
+being guilty towards her, and before God on her account--would welcome
+all honour that could be paid to one who, more truly than any princess
+of the blood, is Jeanne of France, the Maid, alone in her lofty humility
+and valour, and in everlasting fragrance of modesty and youth.
+
+     (1) The writer must add that personally, as a Scot, she has
+     no right to use this pronoun. Scotland is entirely guiltless
+     of this crime. The Scots were fighting on the side of France
+     through all these wars, a little perhaps for love of France,
+     but much more out of natural hostility to the English. Yet
+     at this time of day, except to state that fact, it is
+     scarcely necessary to throw off the responsibility. The
+     English side is now our side, though it was not so in the
+     fifteenth century: and a writer of the English tongue must
+     naturally desire that there should at least be fair play.
+
+     (2) I am informed, however, that she is already "Venerable,"
+     not a very appropriate title--the same, I presume, as
+     Bienheureuse, which is prettier,--and may therefore be
+     addressed by the faithful in prayer, though her rank is
+     only, as it were, brevet rank, and her elevation incomplete.
+
+
+
+
+
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+Etext prepared by Emma Dudding, emma_302@hotmail.com
+Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+and John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz
+
+
+
+
+
+Jeanne d'Arc
+Her Life and Death
+
+
+by Mrs. Oliphant
+Author of "Makers of Florence," "Makers of Venice," etc.
+
+
+
+TO
+
+COUSIN ANNIE
+(MRS. HARRY COGHILL)
+
+THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
+IN LOVE OF OUR COMMON HEROINE
+AND IN REMEMBRANCE OF LONG AND FAITHFUL
+AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
+
+
+
+PREPARER'S NOTE
+
+  The original book for this text was published as a volume in a
+  series "Heroes of the Nations," edited by Evelyn Abbot, M.H.,
+  Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and published by G.P. Putnam's
+  Sons / The Knickerbocker Press in 1896. The title material
+  includes the note:
+
+  FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE
+  GLORIA RERUM--OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265.
+  THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
+  FAME SHALL LIVE.
+
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
+1412-1423.
+
+It is no small effort for the mind, even of the most well-informed,
+how much more of those whose exact knowledge is not great (which is
+the case with most readers, and alas! with most writers also), to
+transport itself out of this nineteenth century which we know so
+thoroughly, and which has trained us in all our present habits and
+modes of thought, into the fifteenth, four hundred years back in time,
+and worlds apart in every custom and action of life. What is there
+indeed the same in the two ages? Nothing but the man and the woman,
+the living agents in spheres so different; nothing but love and grief,
+the affections and the sufferings by which humanity is ruled and of
+which it is capable. Everything else is changed: the customs of life,
+and its methods, and even its motives, the ruling principles of its
+continuance. Peace and mutual consideration, the policy which even in
+its selfish developments is so far good that it enables men to live
+together, making existence possible,--scarcely existed in those days.
+The highest ideal was that of war, war no doubt sometimes for good
+ends, to redress wrongs, to avenge injuries, to make crooked things
+straight--but yet always war, implying a state of affairs in which the
+last thing that men thought of was the golden rule, and the highest
+attainment to be looked for was the position of a protector, doer of
+justice, deliverer of the oppressed. Our aim now that no one should be
+oppressed, that every man should have justice as by the order of
+nature, was a thing unthought of. What individual help did feebly for
+the sufferer then, the laws do for us now, without fear or favour:
+which is a much greater thing to say than that the organisation of
+modern life, the mechanical helps, the comforts, the easements of the
+modern world, had no existence in those days. We are often told that
+the poorest peasant in our own time has aids to existence that had not
+been dreamt of for princes in the Middle Ages. Thirty years ago the
+world was mostly of opinion that the balance was entirely on our side,
+and that in everything we were so much better off than our fathers,
+that comparison was impossible. Since then there have been many
+revolutions of opinion, and we think it is now the general conclusion
+of wise men, that one period has little to boast itself of against
+another, that one form of civilisation replaces another without
+improving upon it, at least to the extent which appears on the
+surface. But yet the general prevalence of peace, interrupted only by
+occasional wars, even when we recognise a certain large and terrible
+utility in war itself, must always make a difference incalculable
+between the condition of the nations now, and then.
+
+It is difficult, indeed, to imagine any concatenation of affairs which
+could reduce a country now to the condition in which France was in the
+beginning of the fifteenth century. A strong and splendid kingdom, to
+which in early ages one great man had given the force and supremacy of
+a united nation, had fallen into a disintegration which seems almost
+incredible when regarded in the light of that warm flame of
+nationality which now illumines, almost above all others, the French
+nation. But Frenchmen were not Frenchmen, they were Burgundians,
+Armagnacs, Bretons, Provencaux five hundred years ago. The interests
+of one part of the kingdom were not those of the other. Unity had no
+existence. Princes of the same family were more furious enemies to
+each other, at the head of their respective fiefs and provinces, than
+the traditional foes of their race; and instead of meeting an invader
+with a united force of patriotic resistance, one or more of these
+subordinate rulers was sure to side with the invader and to execute
+greater atrocities against his own flesh and blood than anything the
+alien could do.
+
+When Charles VII. of France began, nominally, his reign, his uncles
+and cousins, his nearest kinsmen, were as determinedly his opponents,
+as was Henry V. of England, whose frank object was to take the crown
+from his head. The country was torn in pieces with different causes
+and cries. The English were but little farther off from the Parisian
+than was the Burgundian, and the English king was only a trifle less
+French than were the members of the royal family of France. These
+circumstances are little taken into consideration in face of the
+general history, in which a careless reader sees nothing but the two
+nations pitted against each other as they might be now, the French
+united in one strong and distinct nationality, the three kingdoms of
+Great Britain all welded into one. In the beginning of the fifteenth
+century the Scots fought on the French side, against their intimate
+enemy of England, and if there had been any unity in Ireland, the
+Irish would have done the same. The advantages and disadvantages of
+subdivision were in full play. The Scots fought furiously against the
+English--and when the latter won, as was usually the case, the Scots
+contingent, whatever bounty might be shown to the French, was always
+exterminated. On the other side the Burgundians, the Armagnacs, and
+Royalists met each other almost more fiercely than the latter
+encountered the English. Each country was convulsed by struggles of
+its own, and fiercely sought its kindred foes in the ranks of its more
+honest and natural enemy.
+
+When we add to these strange circumstances the facts that the French
+King, Charles VI., was mad, and incapable of any real share either in
+the internal government of his country or in resistance to its
+invader: that his only son, the Dauphin, was no more than a foolish
+boy, led by incompetent councillors, and even of doubtful legitimacy,
+regarded with hesitation and uncertainty by many, everybody being
+willing to believe the worst of his mother, especially after the
+treaty of Troyes in which she virtually gave him up: that the King's
+brothers or cousins at the head of their respective fiefs were all
+seeking their own advantage, and that some of them, especially the
+Duke of Burgundy, had cruel wrongs to avenge: it will be more easily
+understood that France had reached a period of depression and apparent
+despair which no principle of national elasticity or new spring of
+national impulse was present to amend. The extraordinary aspect of
+whole districts in so strong and populous a country, which disowned
+the native monarch, and of towns and castles innumerable which were
+held by the native nobility in the name of a foreign king, could
+scarcely have been possible under other circumstances. Everything was
+out of joint. It is said to be characteristic of the nation that it is
+unable to play publicly (as we say) a losing game; but it is equally
+characteristic of the race to forget its humiliations as if they had
+never been, and to come out intact when the fortune of war changes,
+more French than ever, almost unabashed and wholly uninjured, by the
+catastrophe which had seemed fatal.
+
+If we had any right to theorise on such a subject--which is a thing
+the French themselves above all other men love to do,--we should be
+disposed to say, that wars and revolutions, legislation and politics,
+are things which go on over the head of France, so to speak--boilings
+on the surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such
+a word may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while
+she herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually
+obstinate, tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit
+of a certain kind of well-being congenial to her--goes steadily on,
+less susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less
+excitable on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the
+commotion is over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving, uninjured
+in any essential particular by the most terrific of convulsions. This
+of course is to be said more or less of every country, the strain of
+common life being always, thank God, too strong for every temporary
+commotion--but it is true in a special way of France:--witness the
+extraordinary manner in which in our own time, and under our own eyes,
+that wonderful country righted herself after the tremendous
+misfortunes of the Franco-German war, in which for a moment not only
+her prestige, her honour, but her money and credit seemed to be lost.
+
+It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary
+tenacity of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and
+solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and
+light head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous /elan/,
+which are popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features
+of France--at the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a
+wonderful embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of
+Jeanne d'Arc. To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it
+is an angelic revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the
+dream of a woman's fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of
+any man--even a poet:--for the man, even in his most uncontrolled
+imaginations, carries with him a certain practical limitation of what
+can be--whereas the woman at her highest is absolute, and disregards
+all bounds of possibility. The Maid of Orleans, the Virgin of France,
+is the sole being of her kind who has ever attained full expression in
+this world. She can neither be classified, as her countrymen love to
+classify, nor traced to any system of evolution as we all attempt to
+do nowadays. She is the impossible verified and attained. She is the
+thing in every race, in every form of humanity, which the dreaming
+girl, the visionary maid, held in at every turn by innumerable
+restrictions, her feet bound, her actions restrained, not only by
+outward force, but by the law of her nature, more effectual still,--
+has desired to be. That voiceless poet, to whom what can be is
+nothing, but only what should be if miracle could be attained to
+fulfil her trance and rapture of desire--is held by no conditions,
+modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most
+credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne
+of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination. She
+is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable,
+alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable
+path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the
+flowers in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood
+which are common to us all.
+
+And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country
+of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes
+to the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that
+has brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the
+nations. This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the
+mind and charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul
+delights. How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of
+that distracted and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the
+fierce thirst for gain, and failure of every noble faculty? Who can
+tell? By the grace of God, by the inspiration of heaven, the only
+origins in which the student of nature, which is over nature, can put
+any trust. No evolution, no system of development, can explain Jeanne.
+There is but one of her and no more in all the astonished world.
+
+With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and
+beautiful name. To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary.
+Though she is the finest emblem to the world in general of that noble,
+fearless, and spotless Virginity which is one of the finest
+inspirations of the mediaeval mind, yet she is inherently French,
+though France scarcely was in her time: and national, though as yet
+there were rather the elements of a nation than any indivisible People
+in that great country. Was not she herself one of the strongest and
+purest threads of gold to draw that broken race together and bind it
+irrevocably, beneficially, into one?
+
+It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of
+French territory that this national deliverer came. It is a
+commonplace that a Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own
+country against the other from which but a line divides him in fact,
+and scarcely so much in race--than the calmer inhabitant of the
+midland country who knows no such press of constant antagonism; and
+Jeanne is another example of this well known fact. It is even a
+question still languidly discussed whether Jeanne and her family were
+actually on one side of the line or the other. "Il faut opter," says
+M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest biographers, as if the peasant
+household of 1412 had inhabited an Alsatian cottage in 1872. When the
+line is drawn so closely, it is difficult to determine, but Jeanne
+herself does not ever seem to have entertained a moment's doubt on the
+subject, and she after all is the best authority. Perhaps Villon was
+thinking more of his rhyme than of absolute fact when he spoke of
+"Jeanne la bonne Lorraine." She was born on the 5th of January, 1412,
+in the village of Domremy, on the banks of the Meuse, one of those
+little grey hamlets, with its little church tower, and remains of a
+little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound not sufficient for the
+name of hill--which are scattered everywhere through those level
+countries, like places which have never been built, which have grown
+out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity--perhaps, one feels, only
+a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old--yet always inhabitable in all
+the ages, with the same names lingering about, the same surroundings,
+the same mild rural occupations, simple plenty and bare want mingling
+together with as little difference of level as exists in the sweeping
+lines of the landscape round.
+
+The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to the
+invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the
+universal conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak,
+the adjacent village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English
+alliance, while little Domremy was for the King. And once at least
+when Jeanne was a girl at home, the family were startled in their
+quiet by the swoop of an armed party of Burgundians, and had to gather
+up babies and what portable property they might have, and flee across
+the frontier, where the good Lorrainers received and sheltered them,
+till they could go back to their village, sacked and pillaged and
+devastated in the meantime by the passing storm. Thus even in their
+humility and inoffensiveness the Domremy villagers knew what war and
+its miseries were, and the recollection would no doubt be vivid among
+the children, of that half terrible, half exhilarating adventure, the
+fright and excitement of personal participation in the troubles, of
+which, night and day, from one quarter or another, they must have
+heard.
+
+Domremy had originally belonged[1] to the Abbey of St. Remy at Rheims
+--the ancient church of which, in its great antiquity, is still an
+interest and a wonder even in comparison with the amazing splendour of
+the cathedral of that place, so rich and ornate, which draws the eyes
+of the visitor to itself, and its greater associations. It is possible
+that this ancient connection with Rheims may have brought the great
+ceremony for which it is ever memorable, the consecration of the kings
+of France, more distinctly before the musing vision of the village
+girl; but I doubt whether such chance associations are ever much to be
+relied upon. The village was on the high-road to Germany; it must have
+been therefore in the way of news, and of many rumours of what was
+going on in the centres of national life, more than many towns of
+importance. Feudal bands, a rustic Seigneur with his little troop,
+going out for their forty days' service, or returning home after it,
+must have passed along the banks of the lazy Meuse many days during
+the fighting season, and indeed throughout the year, for garrison duty
+would be as necessary in winter as in summer; or a wandering pair of
+friars who had seen strange sights must have passed with their wallets
+from the neighbouring convents, collecting the day's provision, and
+leaving news and gossip behind, such as flowed to these monastic
+hostelries from all quarters--tales of battles, and anecdotes of the
+Court, and dreadful stories of English atrocities, to stir the village
+and rouse ever generous sentiment and stirring of national
+indignation. They are said by Michelet to have been no man's vassals,
+these outlying hamlets of Champagne; the men were not called upon to
+follow their lord's banner at a day's notice, as were the sons of
+other villages. There is no appearance even of a lord at all upon this
+piece of Church land, which was, we are told, directly held under the
+King, and would only therefore be touched by a general levy /en
+masse/--not even perhaps by that, so far off were they, and so near
+the frontier, where a reluctant man-at-arms could without difficulty
+make his escape, as the unwilling conscript sometimes does now.
+
+There would seem to have been no one of more importance in Domremy
+than Jacques d'Arc himself and his wife, respectable peasants, with a
+little money, a considerable rural property in flocks and herds and
+pastures, and a good reputation among their kind. He had three sons
+working with their father in the peaceful routine of the fields; and
+two daughters, of whom some authorities indicate Jeanne as the
+younger, and some as the elder. The cottage interior, however, appears
+more clearly to us than the outward aspect of the family life. The
+daughters were not, like the children of poorer peasants, brought up
+to the rude outdoor labours of the little farm. Painters have
+represented Jeanne as keeping her father's sheep, and even the early
+witnesses say the same; but it is contradicted by herself, who ought
+to know best--(except in taking her turn to herd them into a place of
+safety on an alarm). If she followed the flocks to the fields, it must
+have been, she says, in her childhood, and she has no recollection of
+it. Hers was a more sheltered and safer lot. The girls were brought up
+by their mother indoors in all the labours of housewifery, but also in
+the delicate art of needlework, so much more exquisite in those days
+than now. Perhaps Isabeau, the mistress of the house, was of convent
+training, perhaps some ancient privilege in respect to the manufacture
+of ornaments for the altar, and church vestments, was still retained
+by the tenants of what had been Church lands. At all events this, and
+other kindred works of the needle, seems to have been the chief
+occupation to which Jeanne was brought up.
+
+The education of this humble house seems to have come entirely from
+the mother. It was natural that the children should not know A from B,
+as Jeanne afterward said; but no one did, probably, in the village nor
+even on much higher levels than that occupied by the family of Jacques
+d'Arc. But the children at their mother's knee learned the Credo, they
+learned the simple universal prayers which are common to the wisest
+and simplest, which no great savant or poet could improve, and no
+child fail to understand: "Our Father, which art in Heaven," and that
+"Hail, Mary, full of grace," which the world in that day put next.
+These were the alphabet of life to the little Champagnards in their
+rough woollen frocks and clattering sabots; and when the house had
+been set in order,--a house not without comfort, with its big wooden
+presses full of linen, and the /pot au feu/ hung over the cheerful
+fire,--came the real work, perhaps embroideries for the Church,
+perhaps only good stout shirts made of flax spun by their own hands
+for the father and the boys, and the fine distinctive coif of the
+village for the women. "Asked if she had learned any art or trade,
+said: Yes, that her mother had taught her to sew and spin, and so
+well, that she did not think any woman in Rouen could teach her
+anything." When the lady in the ballad makes her conditions with the
+peasant woman who is to bring up her boy, her "gay goss hawk," and
+have him trained in the use of sword and lance, she undertakes to
+teach the "turtle-doo," the woman child substituted for him, "to lay
+gold with her hand." No doubt Isabeau's child learned this difficult
+and dainty art, and how to do the beautiful and delicate embroidery
+which fills the treasuries of the old churches.
+
+And while they sat by the table in the window, with their shining
+silks and gold thread, the mother made the quiet hours go by with tale
+and legend--of the saints first of all--and stories from Scripture,
+quaintly interpreted into the costume and manners of their own time,
+as one may still hear them in the primitive corners of Italy: mingled
+with incidents of the war, of the wounded man tended in the village,
+and the victors all flushed with triumph, and the defeated with
+trailing arms and bowed heads, riding for their lives: perhaps little
+epics and tragedies of the young knight riding by to do his devoir
+with his handful of followers all spruce and gay, and the battered and
+diminished remnant that would come back. And then the Black
+Burgundians, the horrible English ogres, whose names would make the
+children shudder! No /God-den/[2] had got so far as Domremy; there
+was no personal knowledge to soften the picture of the invader. He was
+unspeakable as the Turk to the imagination of the French peasant,
+diabolical as every invader is.
+
+This was the earliest training of the little maid before whom so
+strange and so great a fortune lay. /Autre personne que sadite mere ne
+lui apprint/--any lore whatsoever; and she so little--yet everything
+that was wanted--her prayers, her belief, the happiness of serving
+God, and also man; for when any one was sick in the village, either a
+little child with the measles, or a wounded soldier from the wars,
+Isabeau's modest child--no doubt the mother too--was always ready to
+help. It must have been a family /de bien/, in the simple phrase of
+the country, helpful, serviceable, with charity and aid for all. An
+honest labourer, who came to speak for Jeanne at the second trial,
+held long after her death, gave his incontestable evidence to this. "I
+was then a child," he said, "and it was she who nursed me in my
+illness." They were all more or less devout in those days, when faith
+was without question, and the routine of church ceremonial was
+followed as a matter of course; but few so much as Jeanne, whose chief
+pleasure it was to say her prayers in the little dark church, where
+perhaps in the morning sunshine, as she made her early devotions,
+there would blaze out upon her from a window, a Holy Michael in
+shining armour, transfixing the dragon with his spear, or a St.
+Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with her cross in her
+hand. So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to find out
+some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the suggestion
+which is unpleasing. The little country church was in the gift of St.
+Remy, and some benefactor of the rural cure might well have given a
+painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people. St.
+Margaret was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her
+cross, and was thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.
+
+Sitting much of her time at or outside the cottage door with her
+needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and
+dreams, the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a
+traveller, of the calmest English temperament and sobriety of
+Protestant fancy, to whom the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a
+touching reminder--which he never neglects wherever he may be--to
+uncover the head and lift up the heart; how much more the devout
+peasant girl softly startled in the midst of her dreaming by that call
+to prayer. She was so fond of those bells that she bribed the careless
+bell-ringer with simple presents to be more attentive to his duty.
+From the garden where she sat with her work, the cloudy foliage of the
+/bois de chene/, the oak wood, where were legends of fairies and a
+magic well, to which her imagination, better inspired, seems to have
+given no great heed, filled up the prospect on one side. At a later
+period, her accusers attempted to make out that she had been a devotee
+of these nameless woodland spirits, but in vain. No doubt she was one
+of the procession on the holy day once a year, when the cure of the
+parish went out through the wood to the Fairies' Well to say his mass,
+and exorcise what evil enchantment might be there. But Jeanne's
+imagination was not of the kind to require such stimulus. The saints
+were enough for her; and indeed they supplied to a great extent the
+fairy tales of the age, though it was not of love and fame and living
+happy ever after, but of sacrifice and suffering and valorous
+martyrdom that their glory was made up.
+
+We hear of the woods, the fields, the cottages, the little church and
+its bells, the garden where she sat and sewed, the mother's stories,
+the morning mass, in this quiet preface of the little maiden's life;
+but nothing of the highroad with its wayfarers, the convoys of
+provisions for the war, the fighting men that were coming and going.
+Yet these, too, must have filled a large part in the village life, and
+it is evident that a strong impression of the pity of it all, of the
+distraction of the country and all the cruelties and miseries of which
+she could not but hear, must have early begun to work in Jeanne's
+being, and that while she kept silence the fire burned in her heart.
+The love of God, and that love of country which has nothing to say to
+political patriotism but translates itself in an ardent longing and
+desire to do "some excelling thing" for the benefit and glory of that
+country, and to heal its wounds--were the two principles of her life.
+We have not the slightest indication how much or how little of this
+latter sentiment was shared by the simple community about her; unless
+from the fact that the Domremy children fought with those of Maxey,
+their disaffected neighbours, to the occasional effusion of blood. We
+do not know even of any volunteer from the village, or enthusiasm for
+the King.[3] The district was voiceless, the little clusters of
+cottages fully occupied in getting their own bread, and probably like
+most other village societies, disposed to treat any military impulse
+among their sons as mere vagabondism and love of adventure and
+idleness.
+
+Nothing, so far as anyone knows, came near the most unlikely volunteer
+of all, to lead her thoughts to that art of war of which she knew
+nothing, and of which her little experience could only have shown her
+the horrors and miseries, the sufferings of wounded fugitives and the
+ruin of sacked houses. Of all people in the world, the little daughter
+of a peasant was the last who could have been expected to respond to
+the appeal of the wretched country. She had three brothers who might
+have served the King, and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper
+about, of that kind which in every country is the fittest material for
+fighting, and "food for powder." But to none of these did the call
+come. Every detail goes to increase the profound impression of
+peacefulness which fills the atmosphere--the slow river floating by,
+the roofs clustered together, the church bells tinkling their
+continual summons, the girl with her work at the cottage door in the
+shadow of the apple trees. To pack the little knapsack of a brother or
+a lover, and to convoy him weeping a little way on his road to the
+army, coming back to the silent church to pray there, with the soft
+natural tears which the uses of common life must soon dry--that is all
+that imagination could have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too young
+for any interposition of the lover, too undeveloped, the French
+historians tell us with their astonishing frankness, to the end of her
+short life, to have been moved by any such thought. She might have
+poured forth a song, a prayer, a rude but sweet lament for her
+country, out of the still bosom of that rustic existence. Such things
+have been, the trouble of the age forcing an utterance from the very
+depths of its inarticulate life. But it was not for this that Jeanne
+d'Arc was born.
+----------
+[1] Mr. Andrew Lang informs me that the real proprietor was a certain
+    "Dame d'Orgevillier." "On Jeanne's side of the burn," he adds,
+    with a picturesque touch of realism, "the people were probably
+    /free/ as attached to the Royal Chatellenie of Vancouleurs, as
+    described below."
+
+[2] This was probably not the God-dam of later French, a reflection of
+    the supposed prevalent English oath, but most likely merely the
+    God-den or good-day, the common salutation.
+
+[3] Domremy was split, Mr. Lang says, by the burn, and Jeanne's side
+    were probably King's men. We have it on her own word that there
+    was but one Burgundian in the village, but that might mean on her
+    side.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS.
+1424-1429.
+
+In the year 1424, the year in which, after the battle of Agincourt,
+France was delivered over to Henry V., an extraordinary event occurred
+in the life of this little French peasant. We have not the same horror
+of that treaty, naturally, as have the French. Henry V. is a favourite
+of our history, probably not so much for his own merit as because of
+that master-magician, Shakespeare, who of his supreme good pleasure,
+in the exercise of that voluntary preference, which even God himself
+seems to show to some men, has made of that monarch one of the best
+beloved of our hearts. Dear to us as he is, in Eastcheap as at
+Agincourt, and more in the former than the latter, even our sense of
+the disgraceful character of that bargain, /le traite infame/ of
+Troyes, by which Queen Isabeau betrayed her son, and gave her daughter
+and her country to the invader, is softened a little by our high
+estimation of the hero. But this is simple national prejudice;
+regarded from the French side, or even by the impartial judgment of
+general humanity, it was an infamous treaty, and one which might well
+make the blood boil in French veins.
+
+We look at it at present, however, through the atmosphere of the
+nineteenth century, when France is all French, and when the royal
+house of England has no longer any French connection. If George III.,
+much more George II., on the basis of his kingdom of Hanover, had
+attempted to make himself master of a large portion of Germany, the
+situation would have been more like that of Henry V. in France than
+anything we can think of now. It is true the kings of England were no
+longer dukes of Normandy--but they had been so within the memory of
+man: and that noble duchy was a hereditary appanage of the family of
+the Conqueror; while to other portions of France they had the link of
+temporary possession and inheritance through French wives and mothers;
+added to which is the fact that Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, thirsting
+to avenge his father's blood upon the Dauphin, would have been
+probably a more dangerous usurper than Henry, and that the actual
+sovereign, the unfortunate, mad Charles VI., was in no condition to
+maintain his own rights.
+
+There is little evidence, however, that this treaty, or anything so
+distinct in detail, had made much impression on the outlying borders
+of France. What was known there, was only that the English were
+victorious, that the rightful King of France was still uncrowned and
+unacknowledged, and that the country was oppressed and humiliated
+under the foot of the invader. The fact that the new King was not yet
+the Lord's anointed, and had never received the seal of God, as it
+were, to his commission, was a fact which struck the imagination of
+the village as of much more importance than many greater things--being
+at once more visible and matter-of-fact, and of more mystical and
+spiritual efficacy than any other circumstance in the dreadful tale.
+
+Jeanne was in the garden as usual, seated, as we should say in
+Scotland, at "her seam," not quite thirteen, a child in all the
+innocence of infancy, yet full of dreams, confused no doubt and vague,
+with those impulses and wonderings--impatient of trouble, yearning to
+give help--which tremble on the chaos of a young soul like the first
+lightening of dawn upon the earth. It was summer, and afternoon, the
+time of dreams. It would be easy in the employment of legitimate fancy
+to heighten the picturesqueness of that quiet scene--the little girl
+with her favourite bells, the birds picking up the crumbs of brown
+bread at her feet. She was thinking of nothing, most likely, in a
+vague suspense of musing, the wonder of youth, the awakening of
+thought, as yet come to little definite in her child's heart--looking
+up from her work to note some passing change of the sky, a something
+in the air which was new to her. All at once between her and the
+church there shone a light on the right hand, unlike anything she had
+ever seen before; and out of it came a voice equally unknown and
+wonderful. What did the voice say? Only the simplest words, words fit
+for a child, no maxim or mandate above her faculties--"/Jeanne, sois
+bonne et sage enfant; va souvent a l'eglise./" Jeanne, be good! What
+more could an archangel, what less could the peasant mother within
+doors, say? The little girl was frightened, but soon composed herself.
+The voice could be nothing but sacred and blessed which spoke thus. It
+would not appear that she mentioned it to anyone. It is such a secret
+as a child, in that wavering between the real and unreal, the world
+not realised of childhood, would keep, in mingled shyness and awe,
+uncertain, rapt in the atmosphere of vision, within her own heart.
+
+It is curious how often this wonderful scene has been repeated in
+France, never connected with so high a mission, but yet embracing the
+same circumstances, the same situation, the same semi-angelic nature
+of the woman-child. The little Bernadette of Lourdes is almost of our
+own day; she, too is one who puts the scorner to silence. What her
+visions and her voices were, who can say? The last historian of them
+is not a man credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is
+silent, except in a wondering impression of the sacred and the true,
+before the little Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the
+many sordid results that have followed and all that sad machinery of
+expected miracle through which even, repulsive as it must always be, a
+something breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and
+account for except in ways more incredible than miracle--so is the
+rest of the world. Why has this logical, sceptical, doubting country,
+so able to quench with an epigram, or blow away with a breath of
+ridicule the finest vision--become the special sphere and birthplace
+of these spotless infant-saints? This is one of the wonders which
+nobody attempts to account for. Yet Bernadette is as Jeanne, though
+there are more than four hundred years between.
+
+After what intervals the vision returned we are not told, nor in what
+circumstances. It seems to have come chiefly out-of-doors, in the
+silence and freedom of the fields or garden. Presently the heavenly
+radiance shaped itself into some semblance of forms and figures, one
+of which, clearer than the others, was like a man, but with wings and
+a crown on his head and the air "/d'un vrai prud' homme/"; a noble
+apparition before whom at first the little maid trembled, but whose
+majestic, honest regard soon gave her confidence. He bade her once
+more to be good, and that God would help her; then he told her the sad
+story of her own suffering country, /la pitie qui estoit au royaume de
+France/. Was it the pity of heaven that the archangel reported to the
+little trembling girl, or only that which woke with the word in her
+own childish soul? He has chosen the small things of this world to
+confound the great. Jeanne's young heart was full of pity already, and
+of yearning over the helpless mother-country which had no champion to
+stand for her. "She had great doubts at first whether it was St.
+Michael, but afterwards when he had instructed her and shown her many
+things, she believed firmly that it was he."
+
+It was this warrior-angel who opened the matter to her, and disclosed
+her mission. "Jeanne," he said, "you must go to the help of the King
+of France; and it is you who shall give him back his kingdom." Like a
+still greater Maid, trembling, casting in her mind what this might
+mean, she replied, confused, as if that simple detail were all:
+"Messire, I am only a poor girl; I cannot ride or lead armed men." The
+vision took no notice of this plea. He became minute in his
+directions, indicating exactly what she was to do. "Go to Messire de
+Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and he will take you to the King.
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret will come and help you." Jeanne was
+overwhelmed by this exactness, by the sensation of receiving direct
+orders. She cried, weeping and helpless, terrified to the bottom of
+her soul--What was she that she should do this? a little girl, able to
+guide nothing but her needle or her distaff, to lend her simple aid in
+nursing a sick child. But behind all her fright and hesitation, her
+heart was filled with the emotion thus suggested to her--the
+immeasurable /pitie que estoit au royaume de France/. Her heart became
+heavy with this burden. By degrees it came about that she could think
+of nothing else; and her little life was confused by expectations and
+recollections of the celestial visitant, who might arrive upon her at
+any moment, in the midst perhaps of some innocent play, or when she
+sat sewing in the garden before her father's humble door.
+
+After a while the /vrai prud' homme/ came seldom; other figures more
+like herself, soft forms of women, white and shining, with golden
+circlets and ornaments, appeared to her in the great halo of the
+light; they bowed their heads, naming themselves, as to a sister
+spirit, Catherine, and the other Margaret. Their voices were sweet and
+soft with a sound that made you weep. They were both martyrs,
+encouraging and strengthening the little martyr that was to be. "A
+lady is there in the heavens who loves thee": Virgil could not say
+more to rouse the flagging strength of Dante. When these gentle
+figures disappeared, the little maid wept in an anguish of tenderness,
+longing if only they would take her with them. It is curious that
+though she describes in this vague rapture the appearance of her
+visitors, it is always as "/mes voix/" that she names them--the sight
+must always have been more imperfect than the message. Their outlines
+and their lovely faces might shine uncertain in the excess of light;
+but the words were always plain. The pity for France that was in their
+hearts spread itself into the silent rural atmosphere, touching every
+sensitive chord in the nature of little Jeanne. It was as if her
+mother lay dying there before her eyes.
+
+Curious to think how little anyone could have suspected such meetings
+as these, in the cottage hard by, where the weary ploughmen from the
+fields would come clamping in for their meal, and Dame Isabeau would
+call to the child, even sharply perhaps now and then, to leave that
+all-absorbing needlework and come in and help, as Martha called Mary
+fourteen hundred years before; and where the priest, mumbling his mass
+of a cold morning in the little church, would smile indulgent on the
+faithful little worshipper when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne
+there whoever might be absent. She was a shy girl, blushing and
+drooping her head when a stranger spoke to her, red and shame-faced
+when they laughed at her in the village as a /devote/ before her time;
+but with nothing else to blush about in all her simple record.
+
+Neither to her parents, nor to the cure when she made her confession,
+does she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though
+they had lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon
+them, and could keep silence no longer. She was but thirteen when the
+revelations began and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to
+fulfil her mission. She had no guidance from her voices, she herself
+says, as to whether she should tell or not tell what had been
+communicated to her; and no doubt was kept back by her shyness, and by
+the dreamy confusion of childhood between the real and unreal. One
+would have thought that a life in which these visions were of constant
+recurrence would have been rapt altogether out of wholesome use and
+wont, and all practical service. But this does not seem for a moment
+to have been the case. Jeanne was no hysterical girl, living with her
+head in a mist, abstracted from the world. She had all the enthusiasms
+even of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding her with the
+intimacy of the village, paying her visits, staying all night, sharing
+her room and her bed. She was ready to be sent for by any poor woman
+that needed help or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle;
+one would love to know if perhaps in the /Tresor/ at Rheims there was
+some stole or maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But
+the /Tresor/ at Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be
+told, and the bottles and vases for the consecration of Charles X.,
+that /pauvre sire/, are more thought of than relics of an earlier age.
+
+At length, however, one does not know how, the secret of her double
+life came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long
+intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually
+pressed upon her--meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to
+shed terrified tears over and wonder at--ripened her intelligence so
+that she came at last to perceive that it was practicable, a thing to
+be done, a charge to be obeyed. She had this before her, as a girl in
+ordinary circumstances has the new developments of life to think of,
+and how to be a wife and mother. And the news brought by every passer-
+by would prove doubly interesting, doubly important to Jeanne, in her
+daily growing comprehension of what she was called upon to do. As she
+felt the current more and more catching her feet, sweeping her on,
+overcoming all resistance in her own mind, she must have been more and
+more anxious to know what was going on in the distracted world, more
+and more touched by that great pity which had awakened her soul. And
+all these reports were of a nature to increase that pity till it
+became overwhelming. The tales she would hear of the English must have
+been tales of cruelty and horror; not so many years ago what tales did
+not we hear of German ferocity in the French villages, perhaps not
+true at all, yet making their impression always; and it was more
+probable in that age that every such story should be true. Then the
+compassion which no one can help feeling for a young man deprived of
+his rights, his inheritance taken from him, his very life in danger,
+threatened by the stranger and usurper, was deepened in every
+particular by the fact that it was the King, the very impersonation of
+France, appointed by God as the head of the country, who was in
+danger. Everything that Jeanne heard would help to swell the stream.
+
+Thus she must have come step by step--this extraordinary, impossible
+suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul--to perceive a kind of
+miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how
+everything pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed
+natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which
+promised a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to
+deliver France, might have affected her mind, did we not have it from
+her own voice that she had never heard that prophecy[1]; but the word
+of the blessed Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife's
+tale; and the child's alarm would seem to have died away as she came
+to her full growth. And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions,
+but a robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of
+sense and determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the
+level of the crowd. We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the
+making of a great general in her untutored female soul,--which is
+perhaps the most wonderful thing in her career,--and saw with the eye
+of an experienced and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see
+it, the fit order of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at
+her command. This I honestly avow is to me the most incredible point
+in the story. I am not disturbed by the apparition of the saints;
+there is in them an ineffable appropriateness and fitness against
+which the imagination, at least, has not a word to say. The wonder is
+not, to the natural mind, that such interpositions of heaven come, but
+that they come so seldom. But that Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the
+little girl over her sewing, whose only fault was that she went to
+church too often, should have the genius of a soldier, is too
+bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring influence
+leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful with the rude
+artillery of the time, divining the better way in strategy,--this is a
+wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet according to Alencon,
+Dunois, and other military authorities, it was true.
+
+We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long
+musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no
+longer, nor what it was which induced her at last to select the
+confidant she did. No doubt she must have been considering and
+weighing the matter for a long time before she fixed upon the man who
+was her relation, yet did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a
+townsman for the extraordinary revelations she had to make. One of her
+neighbours, her gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was
+godmother, had perhaps at one moment seemed to her a likely helper.
+But he belonged to the opposite party. "If you were not a Burgundian,"
+she said to him once, "there is something I might tell you." The
+honest fellow took this to mean that she had some thought of marriage,
+the most likely and natural supposition. It was at this moment, when
+her heart was burning with her great secret, the voices urging her on
+day by day, and her power of self-constraint almost at an end, that
+Providence sent Durand Laxart, her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on
+some family visit. She would seem to have taken advantage of the
+opportunity with eagerness, asking him privately to take her home with
+him, and to explain to her father and mother that he wanted her to
+take care of his wife. No doubt the girl, devoured with so many
+thoughts, would have the air of requiring "a change" as we say, and
+that the mother would be very ready to accept for her an invitation
+which might bring back the brightness to her child. Laxart was a
+peasant like the rest, a /prud' homme/ well thought of among his
+people. He lived in Burey le Petit, near to Vaucouleurs, the chief
+place of the district, and Jeanne already knew that it was to the
+captain of Vaucouleurs that she was to address herself. Thus she
+secured her object in the simplest and most natural way.
+
+Yet the reader cannot but hold his breath at the thought of what that
+amazing revelation must have been to the homely, rustic soul, her
+companion, communicated as they went along the common road in the
+common daylight. "She said to the witness that she must go to France
+to the Dauphin, to make him to be crowned King." It must have been as
+if a thunderbolt had fallen at his feet when the girl whom he had
+known in every development of her little life, thus suddenly disclosed
+to him her secret purpose and determination. All her simple excellence
+the good man knew, and that she was no fantastic chatterer, but truly
+/une bonne douce fille/, bold in nothing but kindness, with nothing to
+blush for but the fault of going too often to church. "Did you never
+hear that France should be made desolate by a woman and restored by a
+maid?" she said; and this would seem to have been an unanswerable
+argument. He had, henceforth, nothing to do but to promote her purpose
+as best he could in every way.
+
+It would not seem at all unlikely to this good man that the Archangel
+Michael, if Jeanne's revelation to him went so far, should have named
+Robert de Baudricourt, the chief of the district, captain of the town
+and its forces, the principal personage in all the neighbourhood, as
+the person to whom Jeanne's purpose was to be revealed, but rather a
+guarantee of St. Michael himself, familiar with good society; and the
+Seigneur must have been more or less in good intelligence with his
+people, not too alarming to be referred to, even on so insignificant a
+subject as the vagaries of a country girl--though these by this time
+must have begun to seem something more than vagaries to the half-
+convinced peasant. And it was no doubt a great relief to his mind thus
+to put the decision of the question into the hands of a man better
+informed than himself. Laxart proceeded to Vaucouleurs upon his
+mission, shyly yet with confidence. He would seem to have had a
+preliminary interview with Baudricourt before introducing Jeanne. The
+stammering countryman, the bluff, rustic noble and soldier, cheerfully
+contemptuous, receiving, with a loud laugh into all the echoes, the
+extraordinary demand that he should send a little girl from Domremy to
+the King, to deliver France, come before us like a picture in the
+countryman's simple words. Robert de Baudricourt would scarcely hear
+the story out. "Box her ears," he said, "and send her home to her
+mother." The little fool! What did she know of the English, those
+brutal, downright fighters, against whom no /elan/ was sufficient, who
+stood their ground and set up vulgar posts around their lines, instead
+of trusting to the rush of sudden valour, and the tactics of the
+tournament! She deliver France! On a much smaller argument and to put
+down a less ambition, the half serious, half amused adviser has bidden
+a young fanatic's ears to be boxed on many an unimportant occasion,
+and has often been justified in so doing. There would be a half hour
+of gaiety after poor Laxart, crestfallen, had got his dismissal. The
+good man must have turned back to Jeanne, where she waited for him in
+courtyard or antechamber, with a heavy heart. No boxing of ears was
+possible to him. The mere thought of it was blasphemy. This was on
+Ascension Day the 13 May, 1428.
+
+Jeanne, however, was not discouraged by M. de Baudricourt's joke, and
+her interview with him changed his views completely. She appears
+indeed from the moment of setting out from her father's house to have
+taken a new attitude. These great personages of the country before
+whom all the peasants trembled, were nothing to this village maid,
+except, perhaps, instruments in the hand of God to speed her on her
+way if they could see their privileges--if not, to be swept out of it
+like straws by the wind. It had no doubt been hard for her to leave
+her father's house; but after that disruption what did anything
+matter? And she had gone through five years of gradual training of
+which no one knew. The tears and terror, the plea, "I am a poor girl;
+I cannot even ride," of her first childlike alarm had given place to a
+profound acquaintance with the voices and their meaning. They were now
+her familiar friends guiding her at every step; and what was the
+commonplace burly Seigneur, with his roar of laughter, to Jeanne? She
+went to her audience with none of the alarm of the peasant. A certain
+young man of Baudricourt's suite, Bertrand de Poulengy, another young
+D'Artagnan seeking his fortune, was present in the hall and witnessed
+the scene. The joke would seem to have been exhausted by the time
+Jeanne appeared, or her perfect gravity and simplicity, and beautiful
+manners--so unlike her rustic dress and village coif--imposed upon the
+Seigneur and his little court. This is how the story is told, twenty-
+five years after, by the witness, then an elderly knight, recalling
+the story of his youth.
+
+"She said that she came to Robert on the part of her Lord, that he
+should send to the Dauphin, and tell him to hold out, and have no
+fear, for the Lord would send him succour before the middle of Lent.
+She also said that France did not belong to the Dauphin but to her
+Lord; but her Lord willed that the Dauphin should be its King, and
+hold it in command, and that in spite of his enemies she herself would
+conduct him to be consecrated. Robert then asked her who was this
+Lord? She answered, 'The King of Heaven.' This being done [the witness
+adds] she returned to her father's house with her uncle, Durand Laxart
+of Burey le Petit."
+
+This brief and sudden preface to her career passed over and had no
+immediate effect; indeed but for Bertrand we should have been unable
+to separate it from the confused narrative to which all these
+witnesses brought what recollection they had, often without sequence
+or order, Durand himself taking no notice of any interval between this
+first visit to Vaucouleurs and the final one.[2] The episode of
+Ascension Day appears like the formal /sommation/ of French law, made
+as a matter of form before the appellant takes action on his own
+responsibility; but Baudricourt had probably more to do with it than
+appears to be at all certain from the after evidence. One of the
+persons present, at all events, young Poulengy above mentioned, bore
+it in mind and pondered it in his heart.
+
+Meantime, Jeanne returned home--the strangest home-going,--for by this
+time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and
+rumour must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern
+telegraph, to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore
+unaware of any difference between Jeanne and her companions save the
+greater goodness to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must
+have reached Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with
+the kind Durand, a changed creature, already the consecrated Maid of
+France, La Pucelle, apart from all others. The French peasant is a
+hard man, more fierce in his terror of the unconventional, of having
+his domestic affairs exposed to the public eye, or his family
+disgraced by an exhibition of anything unusual either in act or
+feeling, than almost any other class of beings. And it is evident that
+he took his daughter's intention according to the coarsest
+interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention of
+joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and
+dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever
+of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl,
+but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We
+do not know what passed when she returned, further than that her
+father had a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of
+the purpose that had so long been ripening in her mind. He dreamed
+that he saw her surrounded by armed men, in the midst of the troopers,
+the most evident and natural interpretation of her purpose, for who
+could divine that she meant to be their leader and general, on a level
+not with the common men-at-arms, but of princes and nobles? In the
+morning he told his dream to his wife and also to his sons. "If I
+could think that the thing would happen that I dreamed, I would wish
+that she should be drowned; and if you would not do it, I should do it
+with my own hands." The reader remembers with a shudder the Meuse
+flowing at the foot of the garden, while the fierce peasant, mad with
+fear lest shame should be coming to his family, clenched his strong
+fist and made this outcry of dismay.
+
+No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
+whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
+expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
+substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
+probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so
+good a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly
+and so helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too
+willing to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be
+egged up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at
+Toul and swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her
+childhood. So timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic,
+would simply obey the bishop's decision and would not be bold enough
+even to remonstrate, though it is curious that with the spectacle of
+her grave determination before them, and sorrowful sense of that
+necessity of her mission which had steeled her to dispense with their
+consent, they should have expected such an expedient to arrest her
+steps. The affair, we must suppose, had gone through all the more
+usual stages of entreaty on the lover's part, and persuasion on that
+of the parents, before such an attempt was finally made. But the shy
+Jeanne had by this time attained that courage of desperation which is
+not inconsistent with the most gentle nature; and without saying
+anything to anyone, she too went to Toul, appeared before the bishop,
+and easily freed herself from the pretended engagement, though whether
+with any reference to her very different destination we are not
+told.[3]
+
+These proceedings, however, and the father's dreams and the
+remonstrances of the mother, must have made troubled days in the
+cottage, and scenes of wrath and contradiction, hard to bear. The
+winter passed distracted by these contentions, and it is difficult to
+imagine how Jeanne could have borne this had it not been that the
+period of her outset had already been indicated, and that it was only
+in the middle of Lent that her succour was to reach the King. The
+village, no doubt, was almost as much distracted as her father's house
+to hear of these strange discussions and of the incredible purpose of
+the /bonne douce fille/, whose qualities everybody knew and about whom
+there was nothing eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple
+goodness, to distinguish her above her neighbours. In the meantime her
+voices called her continually to her work. They set her free from the
+ordinary yoke of obedience, always so strong in the mind of a French
+girl. The dreadful step of abandoning her home, not to be thought of
+under any other circumstances, was more and more urgently pressed upon
+her. Could it indeed be saints and angels who ordained a step which
+was outside of all the habits and first duties of nature? But we have
+no reason to believe that this nineteenth-century doubt of her
+visitors, and of whether their mandates were right, entered into the
+mind of a girl who was of her own period and not of ours. She went on
+steadfastly, certain of her mission now, and inaccessible either to
+remonstrance or appeal.
+
+It was towards the beginning of Lent, as Poulengy tells us, that the
+decision was made, and she left home finally, to go "to France" as is
+always said. But it seems to have been in January that she set out
+once more for Vaucouleurs, accompanied by her uncle, who took her to
+the house of some humble folk they knew, a carter and his wife, where
+they lodged. Jeanne wore her peasant dress of heavy red homespun, her
+rude heavy shoes, her village coif. She never made any pretence of
+ladyhood or superiority to her class, but was always equal to the
+finest society in which she found herself, by dint of that simple good
+faith, sense, and seriousness, without excitement or exaggeration, and
+radiant purity and straightforwardness which were apparent to all
+seeing eyes. By this time all the little world about knew something of
+her purpose and followed her every step with wonder and quickly rising
+curiosity: and no doubt the whole town was astir, women gazing at
+their doors, all on her side from the first moment, the men half
+interested, half insolent, as she went once more to the chateau to
+make her personal appeal. Simple as she was, the /bonne douce fille/
+was not intimidated by the guard at the gates, the lounging soldiers,
+the no doubt impudent glances flung at her by these rude companions.
+She was inaccessible to alarms of that kind--which, perhaps, is one of
+the greatest safeguards against them even in more ordinary cases. We
+find little record of her second interview with Baudricourt. The
+/Journal du Siege d'Orleans/ and the /Chronique de la Pucelle/ both
+mention it as if it had been one of several, which may well have been
+the case, as she was for three weeks in Vaucouleurs. It is almost
+impossible to arrange the incidents of this interval between her
+arrival there and her final departure for Chinon on the 23d February,
+during which time she made a pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Nicolas and
+also a visit to the Duke of Lorraine. It is clear, however, that she
+must have repeated her demand with such stress and urgency that the
+Captain of Vaucouleurs was a much perplexed man. It was a very natural
+idea then, and in accordance with every sentiment of the time that he
+should suspect this wonderful girl, who would not be daunted, of being
+a witch and capable of bringing an evil fate on all who crossed her.
+All thought of boxing her ears must ere this have departed from his
+mind. He hastened to consult the cure, which was the most reasonable
+thing to do. The cure was as much puzzled as the Captain. The Church,
+it must be said, if always ready to take advantage afterwards of such
+revelations, has always been timid, even sceptical about them at
+first. The wisdom of the rulers, secular and ecclesiastic, suggested
+only one thing to do, which was to exorcise, and perhaps to overawe
+and frighten, the young visionary. They paid a joint and solemn visit
+to the carter's house, where no doubt their entrance together was
+spied by many eager eyes; and there the priest solemnly taking out his
+stole invested himself in his priestly robes and exorcised the evil
+spirits, bidding them come out of the girl if they were her
+inspiration. There seems a certain absurdity in this sudden assault
+upon the evil one, taking him as it were by surprise: but it was not
+ridiculous to any of the performers, though Jeanne no doubt looked on
+with serene and smiling eyes. She remarked afterwards to her hostess,
+that the cure had done wrong, as he had already heard her in
+confession.
+
+Outside, the populace were in no uncertainty at all as to her mission.
+A little mob hung about the door to see her come and go, chiefly to
+church, with her good hostess in attendance, as was right and seemly,
+and a crowd streaming after them who perhaps of their own accord might
+have neglected mass, but who would not, if they could help it, lose a
+look at the new wonder. One day a young gentleman of the neighbourhood
+was passing by, and amused by the commotion, came through the crowd to
+have a word with the peasant lass. "What are you doing here, /ma
+mie/?" the young man said. "Is the King to be driven out of the
+kingdom, and are we all to be made English?" There is a tone of banter
+in the speech, but he had already heard of the Maid from his friend,
+Bertrand, and had been affected by the other's enthusiasm. "Robert de
+Baudricourt will have none of me or my words," she replied,
+"nevertheless before Mid-Lent I must be with the King, if I should
+wear my feet up to my knees; for nobody in the world, be it king,
+duke, or the King of Scotland's daughter, can save the kingdom of
+France except me alone: though I would rather spin beside my poor
+mother, and this is not my work: but I must go and do it, because my
+Lord so wills it." "And who is your Seigneur?" he asked. "God," said
+the girl. The young man was moved, he too, by that wind which bloweth
+where it listeth. He stretched out his hands through the gaping crowd
+and took hers, holding them between his own, to give her his pledge:
+and so swore by his faith, her hands in his hands, that he himself
+would conduct her to the King. "When will you go?" he said. "Rather
+to-day than to-morrow," answered the messenger of God.
+
+This was the second convert of La Pucelle. The peasant /bonhomme/
+first, the noble gentleman after him; not to say all the women
+wherever she went, the gazing, weeping, admiring crowd which now
+followed her steps, and watched every opening of the door which
+concealed her from their eyes. The young gentleman was Jean de
+Novelonpont, "surnamed Jean de Metz": and so moved was he by the
+fervour of the girl, and by her strong sense of the necessity of
+immediate operations, that he proceeded at once to make preparations
+for the journey. They would seem to have discussed the dress she ought
+to wear, and Jeanne decided for many obvious reasons to adopt the
+costume of a man--or rather boy. She must, one would imagine have been
+tall, for no remark is ever made on this subject, as if her dress had
+dwarfed her, which is generally the case when a woman assumes the
+habit of a man: and probably with her peasant birth and training, she
+was, though slim, strongly made and well knit, besides being at the
+age when the difference between boy and girl is sometimes but little
+noticeable.
+
+In the meantime Baudricourt had not been idle. He must have been moved
+by the sight of Jeanne, at least to perceive a certain gravity in the
+business for which he was not prepared; and her composure under the
+cure's exorcism would naturally deepen the effect which her own
+manners and aspect had upon all who were free of prejudice. Another
+singular event, too, added weight to her character and demand. One day
+after her return from Lorraine, February 12th, 1429, she intimated to
+all her surroundings and specially to Baudricourt, that the King had
+suffered a defeat near Orleans, which made it still more necessary
+that she should be at once conducted to him. It was found when there
+was time for the news to come, that this defeat, the Battle of the
+Herrings, so-called, had happened as she said, at the exact time; and
+such a strange fact added much to the growing enthusiasm and
+excitement. Baudricourt is said by Michelet to have sent off a secret
+express to the Court to ask what he should do; but of this there seems
+to be no direct evidence, though likelihood enough. The Court at
+Chinon contained a strong feminine element, behind the scenes. And it
+might be found that there were uses for the enthusiast, even if she
+did not turn out to be inspired. No doubt there were many comings and
+goings at this period which can only be traced confusedly through the
+depositions of Jeanne's companions twenty-five years after. She had at
+least two interviews with Baudricourt before the exorcism of the cure
+and his consequent change of procedure towards her. Then, escorted by
+her uncle Laxart, and apparently by Jean de Metz, she had made a
+pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Nicolas, as already mentioned, on which
+occasion, being near Nancy, she was sent for by the Duke of Lorraine,
+then lying ill at his castle in that city, who had a fancy to consult
+the young prophetess, sorceress--who could tell what she was?--on the
+subject apparently of his illness. He was the son of Queen Yolande of
+Anjou, who was mother-in-law to Charles VII., and it would no doubt be
+thought of some importance to secure his good opinion. Jeanne gave the
+exalted patient no light on the subject of his health, but only the
+(probably unpleasing) advice to flee from the wrath of God and to be
+reconciled with his wife, from whom he was separated. He too, however,
+was moved by the sight of her and her straightforward, undeviating
+purpose. He gave her four francs, Durand tells us,--not much of a
+present,--which she gave to her uncle, and which helped to buy her
+outfit. Probably he made a good report of her to his mother, for
+shortly after her return to Vaucouleurs (I again follow Michelet who
+ought to be well informed) a messenger from Chinon arrived to take her
+to the King.[4] In the councils of that troubled Court, perhaps, the
+idea of a prodigy and miraculous leader, though she was nothing but a
+peasant girl, would be not without attraction, a thing to conjure
+withal, so far as the multitude were concerned.
+
+Anyhow from any point of view, in the hopeless condition of affairs,
+it was expedient that nothing which gave promise of help, either real
+or visionary, should lightly be rejected. There was much anxiety no
+doubt in the careless Court still dancing and singing in the midst of
+calamity, but the reception of the ambitious peasant would form an
+exciting incident at least, if nothing more important and notable.
+
+Thus the whole anxious world of France stirred round that youthful
+figure in the little frontier town, repeating with many an alteration
+and exaggeration the sayings of Jeanne, and those popular
+superstitions about the Maid from Lorraine which might be so naturally
+applied to her. It would seem, indeed, that she had herself attached
+some importance to this prophecy, for both her uncle Laxart and her
+hostess at Vaucouleurs report that she asked them if they had heard
+it: which question "stupefied" the latter, whose mind evidently jumped
+at once to the conviction that the prophecy was fulfilled. Not in
+Domremy itself, however, were these things considered with the same
+awe-stricken and admiring faith. Nothing had softened the mood of
+Jacques d'Arc. It was a shame to the village /prud' homme/ to think of
+his daughter away from all the protection of home, living among men,
+encountering the young Seigneurs who cared for no maiden's reputation,
+hearing the soldiers' rude talk, exposed to their insults, or worse
+still to their kindness. Probably even now he thought of her as
+surrounded by troopers and men-at-arms, instead of the princes and
+peers with whom henceforth Jeanne's lot was to be cast; but in the
+former case there would have perhaps been less to fear than in the
+latter. Anyhow, Jeanne's communications with her family were more
+painful to her than had been the jeers of Baudricourt or the exorcism
+of the cure. They sent her angry orders to come back, threats of
+parental curses and abandonment. We may hope that the mother, grieved
+and helpless, had little to do with this persecution. The woman who
+had nourished her children upon saintly legend and Scripture story
+could scarcely have been hard upon the child, of whom she, better than
+any, knew the perfect purity and steadfast resolution. One of the
+little household at least, revolted by the stern father's fury,
+perhaps secretly encouraged by the mother, broke away and joined his
+sister at a later period. But we hear, during her lifetime, little or
+nothing of Pierre.
+
+Much time, however, was passed in these preliminaries. The final start
+was not made till the 23d February, 1429, when the permission is
+supposed to have come by the hands of Colet de Vienne, the King's
+messenger, who attended by a single archer, was to be her escort. It
+is possible that he had no mission to this effect, but he certainly
+did escort her to Chinon. The whole town gathered before the house of
+Baudricourt to see her depart. Baudricourt, however, does not seem to
+have provided any guard for her. Jean de Metz, who had so chivalrously
+pledged himself to her service, with his friend De Poulengy, equally
+ready for adventure, each with his servant, formed her sole
+protectors.[5] Jean de Metz had already sent her the clothes of one of
+his retainers, with the light breastplate and partial armour that
+suited it; and the townspeople had subscribed to buy her a further
+outfit, and a horse which seems to have cost sixteen francs--not so
+small a sum in those days as now. Laxart declares himself to have been
+responsible for this outlay, though the money was afterwards paid by
+Baudricourt, who gave Jeanne a sword, which some of her historians
+consider a very poor gift: none, however, of her equipments would seem
+to have been costly. The little party set out thus, with a sanction of
+authority, from the Captain's gate, the two gentlemen and the King's
+messenger at the head of the party with their attendants, and the Maid
+in the midst. "Go: and let what will happen," was the parting
+salutation of Baudricourt. The gazers outside set up a cry when the
+decisive moment came, and someone, struck with the feeble force which
+was all the safeguard she had for her long journey through an agitated
+country--perhaps a woman in the sudden passion of misgiving which
+often follows enthusiasm,--called out to Jeanne with an astonished
+outcry to ask how she could dare to go by such a dangerous road. "It
+was for that I was born," answered the fearless Maid. The last thing
+she had done had been to write a letter to her parents, asking their
+pardon if she obeyed a higher command than theirs, and bidding them
+farewell.
+
+The French historians, with that amazement which they always show when
+they find a man behaving like a gentleman towards a woman confided to
+his honour, all pause with deep-drawn breath to note that the awe of
+Jeanne's absolute purity preserved her from any unseemly overture, or
+even evil thought, on the part of her companions. We need not take up
+even the shadow of so grave a censure upon Frenchmen in general,
+although in the far distance of the fifteenth century. The two young
+men, thus starting upon a dangerous adventure, pledged by their honour
+to protect and convey her safely to the King's presence, were noble
+and generous cavaliers, and we may well believe had no evil thoughts.
+They were not, however, without an occasional chill of reflection when
+once they had taken the irrevocable step of setting out upon this wild
+errand. They travelled by night to escape the danger of meeting bands
+of Burgundians or English on the way, and sometimes had to ford a
+river to avoid the town, where they would have found a bridge.
+Sometimes, too, they had many doubts, Bertrand says, perhaps as to
+their reception at Chinon, perhaps even whether their mission might
+not expose them to the ridicule of their kind, if not to unknown
+dangers of magic and contact with the Evil One, should this wonderful
+girl turn out no inspired virgin but a pretender or sorceress. Jean de
+Metz informs us that she bade them not to fear, that she had been sent
+to do what she was now doing; that her brothers in paradise would tell
+her how to act, and that for the last four or five years her brothers
+in paradise and her God had told her that she must go to the war to
+save the kingdom of France. This phrase must have struck his ear, as
+he thus repeats it. Her brothers in paradise! She had not apparently
+talked of them to anyone as yet, but now no one could hinder her more,
+and she felt herself free to speak. A great calm seems to have been in
+her soul. She had at last begun her work. How it was all to end for
+her she neither foresaw nor asked; she knew only what she had to do.
+When they ventured into a town she insisted on stopping to hear mass,
+bidding them fear nothing. "God clears the way for me," she said; "I
+was born for this," and so proceeded safe, though threatened with many
+dangers. There is something that breathes of supreme satisfaction and
+content in her repetition of those words.
+----------
+[1] She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword, that France
+    should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards redeemed by a
+    virgin, which she quoted to several persons on her first setting
+    out.
+
+[2] I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of these
+    events quite clear to myself.
+
+[3] Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was made after
+    she had finally left Domremy, and when she was already accompanied
+    by the escort which was to attend her to Chinon.
+
+[4] Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this. He thinks the man was a
+    mere King's messenger with news, probably charged with the
+    melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the
+    Herrings): and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her
+    little part was entirely accidental.
+
+[5] Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the party. /La
+    Chronique de la Pucelle/ says two of her brothers. Mr. Andrew
+    Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did not join his sister's
+    party till much later--in the beginning of June: and this is the
+    statement of Jean de Metz. But Quicherat is also of opinion that
+    they both fought in the relief of Orleans.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BEFORE THE KING.
+FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+
+Jeanne and her little party were eleven days on the road, but do not
+seem to have encountered any special peril. They lodged sometimes in
+the security of a convent, sometimes in a village hostel, pursuing the
+long and tedious way across the great levels of midland France, which
+has so few features of beauty except in the picturesque towns with
+their castles and churches, which the escort avoided. At length they
+paused in the village of Fierbois not far from Chinon where the Court
+was, in order to announce their arrival and ask for an audience, which
+was not immediately accorded. Charles held his Court with incredible
+gaiety and folly, in the midst of almost every disaster that could
+overtake a king, in the castle of Chinon on the banks of the Vienne.
+The situation and aspect of this noble building, now in ruins, is
+wonderfully like that of Windsor Castle. The great walls, interrupted
+and strengthened by huge towers, stretch along a low ridge of rocky
+hill, with the swift and clear river, a little broader and swifter
+than the Thames, flowing at its foot. The red and high-pitched roofs
+of the houses clustered between the castle hill and the stream, give a
+point of resemblance the more. The large and ample dwelling,
+defensible, but with no thought of any need of defence, a midland
+castle surrounded by many a level league of wealthy country, which no
+hostile force should ever have power to get through, must have looked
+like the home of a well-established royalty. There was no sound or
+sight of war within its splendid enclosure. Noble lords and gentlemen
+crowded the corridors; trains of gay ladies, attendant upon two
+queens, filled the castle with fine dresses and gay voices. There had
+been but lately a dreadful and indeed shameful defeat, inflicted by a
+mere English convoy of provisions upon a large force of French and
+Scottish soldiers, the former led by such men as Dunois, La Hire,
+Xaintrailles, etc., the latter by the Constable of Scotland, John
+Stuart--which defeat might well have been enough to subdue every sound
+of revelry: yet Charles's Court was ringing with music and pleasantry,
+as if peace had reigned around.
+
+It may be believed that there were many doubts and questions how to
+receive this peasant from the fields, which prevented an immediate
+reply to her demand for an audience. From the first, de la Tremoille,
+Charles's Prime Minister and chief adviser, was strongly against any
+encouragement of the visionary, or dealings with the supernatural; but
+there would no doubt be others, hoping if not for a miraculous maid,
+yet at least for a passing wonder, who might kindle enthusiasm in the
+country and rouse the ignorant with hopes of a special blessing from
+Heaven. The gayer and younger portion of the Court probably expected a
+little amusement, above all, a new butt for their wit, or perhaps a
+soothsayer to tell their fortunes and promise good things to come.
+They had not very much to amuse them, though they made the best of it.
+The joys of Paris were very far off; they were all but imprisoned in
+this dull province of Touraine; nobody knew at what moment they might
+be forced to leave even that refuge. For the moment here was a new
+event, a little stir of interest, something to pass an hour. Jeanne
+had to wait two days in Chinon before she was granted an audience, but
+considering the carelessness of the Court and the absence of any
+patron that was but a brief delay.
+
+The chamber of audience is now in ruins. A wild rose with long,
+arching, thorny branches and pale flowers, straggles over the
+greensward where once the floor was trod by so many gay figures. From
+the broken wall you look sheer down upon the shining river; one great
+chimney, which at that season must have been still the most pleasant
+centre of the large, draughty hall, shows at the end of the room, with
+a curious suggestion of warmth and light which makes ruin more
+conspicuous. The room must have been on the ground floor almost level
+with the soil towards the interior of the castle, but raised to the
+height of the cliffs outside. It was evening, an evening of March, and
+fifty torches lighted up the ample room; many noble personages, almost
+as great as kings, and clothed in the bewildering splendour of the
+time, and more than three hundred cavaliers of the best names in
+France filled it to overflowing. The peasant girl from Domremy in the
+hose and doublet of a servant, a little travel-worn after her tedious
+journey, was led in by one of those splendid seigneurs, dazzled with
+the grandeur she had never seen before, looking about her in wonder to
+see which was the King--while Charles, perhaps with boyish pleasure in
+the mystification, perhaps with a little half-conviction stealing over
+him that there might be something more in it, stood among the smiling
+crowd.
+
+The young stranger looked round upon all those amused, light-minded,
+sceptical faces, and without a moment's hesitation went forward and
+knelt down before him. "Gentil Dauphin," she said, "God give you good
+life." "But it is not I that am the King; there is the King," said
+Charles. "Gentil Prince, it is you and no other," she said; then
+rising from her knee: "Gentil Dauphin, I am Jeanne the Maid. I am sent
+to you by the King of Heaven to tell you that you shall be consecrated
+and crowned at Rheims, and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven,
+who is King of France." The little masquerade had failed, the jest was
+over. There would be little more laughing among the courtiers, when
+they saw the face of Charles grow grave. He took the new-comer aside,
+perhaps to that deep recess of the window where in the darkening night
+the glimmer of the clear, flowing river, the great vault of sky would
+still be visible dimly, outside the circle of the blazing interior
+with all its smoky lights.
+
+Charles VII. of France was, like many of his predecessors, a /pauvre
+Sire/ enough. He had thought more of his amusements than of the
+troubles of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will
+sometimes spring from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and
+after all, the dread responsibility, the sense that in all his
+helplessness and inability to do anything he was still the man who
+ought to do all, would seem to have moved him from time to time. A
+secret doubt in his heart, divulged to no man, had added bitterness to
+the conviction of his own weakness. Was he indeed the heir of France?
+Had he any right to that sustaining confidence which would have borne
+up his heart in the midst of every discouragement? His very mother had
+given him up and set him aside. He was described as the so-called
+Dauphin in treaties signed by Charles and Isabeau his parents. If
+anyone knew, she knew; and was it possible that more powerful even
+than the English, more cruel than the Burgundians, this stain of
+illegitimacy was upon him, making all effort vain? There is no telling
+where the sensitive point is in any man's heart, and little worthy as
+was this King, the story we are here told has a thrill of truth in it.
+It is reported by a certain Sala, who declares that he had it from the
+lips of Charles's favourite and close follower, the Seigneur de Boisi,
+a courtier who, after the curious custom of the time, shared even the
+bed of his master. This was confided to Boisi by the King in the
+deepest confidence, in the silence of the wakeful night:
+
+"This was in the time of the good King Charles, when he knew not what
+step to take, and did nothing but think how to redeem his life: for as
+I have told you he was surrounded by enemies on all sides. The King in
+this extreme thought, went in one morning to his oratory all alone;
+and there he made a prayer to our Lord, in his heart, without
+pronouncing any words, in which he asked of Him devoutly that if he
+were indeed the true heir, descended from the royal House of France,
+and that justly the kingdom was his, that He would be pleased to guard
+and defend him, or at the worst to give him grace to escape into Spain
+or Scotland, whose people, from all antiquity, were brothers-in-arms,
+friends and allies of the kings of France, and that he might find a
+refuge there."
+
+Perhaps there is some excuse for a young man's endeavour to forget
+himself in folly or even in dissipation when his secret thoughts are
+so despairing as these.
+
+It was soon after this melancholy moment that the arrival of Jeanne
+took place. The King led her aside, touched as all were, by her look
+of perfect sincerity and good faith; but it is she herself, not
+Charles, who repeats what she said to him. "I have to tell you," said
+the young messenger of God, "on the part of my Lord (/Messire/) that
+you are the true heir of France and the son of the King; He has sent
+me to conduct you to Rheims that you may receive your consecration and
+your crown,"--perhaps here, Jeanne caught some look which she did not
+understand in his eyes, for she adds with, one cannot but think a
+touch of sternness--"if you will."
+
+Was it a direct message from God in answer to his prayer, uttered
+within his own heart, without words, so that no one could have guessed
+that secret? At least it would appear that Charles thought so: for how
+should this peasant maid know the secret fear that had gnawed at his
+heart? "When thou wast in the garden under the fig-tree I saw thee."
+Great was the difference between the Israelite without guile and the
+troubled young man, with whose fate the career of a great nation was
+entangled; but it is not difficult to imagine what the effect must
+have been on the mind of Charles when he was met by this strange,
+authoritative statement, uttered like all that Jeanne said, /de la
+part de Dieu/.
+
+The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was
+surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious
+as they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with
+which in themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be
+allowed, also, that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless
+young King on the word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to
+every law of reason, madness and folly. She would seem to have had the
+women on her side always and at every point. The Church did not stir,
+or else was hostile; the commanders and military men about, regarded
+with scornful disgust the idea that an enterprise which they
+considered hopeless should be confided to an ignorant woman--all with
+perfect reason we are obliged to allow. Probably it was to gain time--
+yet without losing the aid of such a stimulus to the superstitious
+among the masses--and to retard any rash undertaking--that it was
+proposed to subject Jeanne to an examination of doctors and learned
+men touching her faith and the character of her visions, which all
+this time had been of continual recurrence, yet charged with no
+further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the one simple,
+constantly repeated command.
+
+Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops,
+Jeanne was taken to Poitiers--where the university and the local
+parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which
+were on the side of the King, were assembled--to undergo this
+investigation. It is curious that the entire history of this wildest
+and strangest of all visionary occurrences is to be found in a series
+of processes at law, each part recorded and certified under oath; but
+so it is. The village maid was placed at the bar, before a number of
+acute legists, ecclesiastics, and statesmen, to submit her to a not-
+too-benevolent cross-examination. Several of these men were still
+alive at the time of the Rehabilitation and gave their recollections
+of this examination, though its formal records have not been
+preserved. A Dominican monk, Aymer, one of an order she loved,
+addressed her gravely with the severity with which that institution is
+always credited. "You say that God will deliver France; if He has so
+determined, He has no need of men-at-arms." "Ah!" cried the girl, with
+perhaps a note of irritation in her voice, "the men must fight; it is
+God who gives the victory." To another discomfited Brother, Jeanne,
+exasperated, answered with a little roughness, showing that our Maid,
+though gentle as a child to all gentle souls, was no piece of subdued
+perfection, but a woman of the fields, and lately much in the company
+of rough-spoken men. He was of Limoges, a certain Brother Seguin,
+"/bien aigre homme/," and disposed apparently to weaken the trial by
+questions without importance: he asked her what language her celestial
+visitors spoke? "Better than yours," answered the peasant girl. He
+could not have been, as we say in Scotland, altogether "an ill man,"
+for he acknowledged that he spoke the patois of his district, and
+therefore that the blow was fair. But perhaps for the moment he was
+irritated too. He asked her, a question equally unnecessary, "do you
+believe in God?" to which with more and more impatience she made a
+similar answer: "Better than you do." There was nothing to be made of
+one so well able to defend herself. "Words are all very well," said
+the monk, "but God would not have us believe you, unless you show us
+some sign." To this Jeanne made an answer more dignified, though still
+showing signs of exasperation, "I have not come to Poitiers to give
+signs," she said; "but take me to Orleans--I will then show the signs
+I am sent to show. Give me as small a band as you please, but let me
+go."
+
+The situation of Orleans was at the time a desperate one. It was
+besieged by a strong army of English, who had built a succession of
+towers round the city, from which to assail it, after the manner of
+the times. The town lies in the midst of the plain of the Loire, with
+not so much as a hillock to offer any advantage to the besiegers.
+Therefore these great works were necessary in face of a very strenuous
+resistance, and the possibility of provisioning the besieged, which
+their river secured. The English from their high towers kept up a
+disastrous fire, which, though their artillery was of the rudest kind,
+did great execution. The siege was conducted by eminent generals. The
+works were of themselves great fortifications, the assailants
+numerous, and strengthened by the prestige of almost unbroken success;
+there seemed no human hope of the deliverance of the town unless by an
+overwhelming army, which the King's party did not possess, or by some
+wonderful and utterly unexpected event. Jeanne had always declared the
+destruction of the English and the relief of Orleans to be the first
+step in her mission.
+
+Besides the formal and official examination of her faith and
+character, held at Poitiers, private inquests of all kinds were made
+concerning of the claims of the miraculous maid. She was visited by
+every curious person, man or woman, in the neighbourhood, and plied
+with endless questions, so that her simple personal story, and that of
+her revelations--/mes voix/, as she called them--became familiarly
+known from her own report, to the whole country round about. The women
+pressed a question specially interesting--for no doubt, many a good
+mother half convinced otherwise, shook her head at Jeanne's costume--
+Why she wore the dress of a man? for which the Maid gave very good
+reasons: in the first place because it was the only dress for
+fighting, which, though so far from her desires or from the habits of
+her life, was henceforward to be her work; and also because in her
+strange circumstances, constrained as she was to live among men, she
+considered it safest for herself--statements which evidently convinced
+the minds of the questioners. It was, no doubt, good policy to make
+her thus widely and generally known, and the result was a daily
+growing enthusiasm for her and belief in her, in all classes. The
+result of the formal process was that the doctors could find nothing
+against her, and they reluctantly allowed that the King might lawfully
+take what advantage he could of her offered services.
+
+Jeanne was then brought back to Chinon, where she was lodged in one of
+the great towers still standing, though no special room is pointed out
+as hers. And there she was subjected to another process, more
+penetrating still than the interrogations of the graver tribunals. The
+Queens and their ladies and all the women of the Court took her in
+hand. They inquired into her history in every subtle and intimate
+feminine way, testing her innocence and purity; and once more she came
+out triumphant. The final judgment was given as follows: "After
+hearing all these reports, the King taking into consideration the
+great goodness that was in the Maid, and that she declared herself to
+be sent by God, it was by the said Seigneur and his council determined
+that from henceforward he should make use of her for his wars, since
+it was for this that she was sent."
+
+It was now necessary to equip Jeanne for her service. She had a
+/maison/, an /etat majeur/, or staff, formed for her, the chief of
+which, Jean d'Aulon, already distinguished and worthy of such a trust
+never left her thenceforward until the end of her active career. Her
+chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, also followed her fortunes faithfully.
+Charles would have given her a sword to replace the probably
+indifferent weapon given her by Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs; but Jeanne
+knew where to find the sword destined for her. She gave orders that
+someone should be sent to Fierbois, the village at which she had
+paused on her way to Chinon, to fetch a sword which would be found
+there buried behind the high altar of the church of St. Catherine. To
+make this as little miraculous as possible, we are told by some
+historians that it was common for knights to be buried with their
+arms, and that Jeanne, in her visit to this church, where she heard
+three masses in succession to make up for the absence of constant
+religious services on her journey--had probably seen some tomb or
+other token that such an interment had taken place. However, as we are
+compelled to receive the far greater miracle of Jeanne herself and her
+work, without explanation, it is foolish to take the trouble to
+attempt any explanation of so small a matter as this. The sword in
+fact was found, by the clergy of the church, and was by them cleaned
+and polished and put in a scabbard of crimson velvet, scattered over
+with fleur-de-lys in gold, for her use. Her standard, which she
+considered of the greatest importance was made apparently at Tours. It
+was of white linen, fringed with silk and embroidered with a figure of
+the Saviour holding a globe in His hands, while an angel knelt at
+either side in adoration. Jhesus' Maria was inscribed at the foot. A
+repetition of this banner, which must have been re-copied from age to
+age is to be seen now at Tours. Having indicated the exact device to
+be emblazoned upon the banner, as dictated to her by her saints,--
+Margaret and Catherine--Jeanne announced her intention of carrying it
+herself, a somewhat surprising office for one who was to act as a
+general. But it was the command of her heavenly guides. "Take the
+standard on the part of God, and carry it boldly," they had said. She
+had, besides, a simple, half-childish intention of her own in this,
+which she explained shame-faced--she had no wish to use her sword
+though she loved it, and would kill no man. The banner was a more safe
+occupation, and saved her from all possibility of blood-shedding; it
+must however, have required the robust arm of a peasant to sustain the
+heavy weight.
+
+It will show how long a time all these examinations and preparations
+had taken when we read that Jeanne set out from Blois, where she had
+passed some time in military preparations, only on the 27th day of
+April; nearly two whole months had thus been taken up in testing her
+truth, and arranging details, trifling and unnecessary in her eyes:--a
+period which had been passed in great anxiety by the people of
+Orleans, with the huge bastilles of the English--three of which were
+named Paris, Rouen, and London--towering round them, their provisions
+often intercepted, all the business of life come to a standstill, and
+the overwhelming responsibility upon them of being almost the last
+barrier between the invader and the final subjugation of France. It is
+strange to add that, judging by ordinary rules, the garrison of
+Orleans ought to have been quite sufficient in itself in numbers and
+science of war, to have beaten and dispersed the English force which
+had thus succeeded in shutting them in; there were many notable
+captains among them, with Dunois, known as the Bastard of Orleans, one
+of the most celebrated and brave of French generals, at their head.
+Dunois was in no way inferior to the generals of the English army; he
+was popular, beloved by the people and soldiers alike, and though
+illegitimate, of the House of Orleans, one of the native seigneurs of
+the place. The wonder is how he and his officers permitted the
+building of these towers, and the shutting in of the town which they
+were quite strong enough to protect. But it was a losing game which
+they were playing, a part which does not suit the genius of the
+nation; and the superstition in favour of the English who had won so
+many battles with all the disadvantages on their side,--cutting the
+finest armies to pieces--was strong upon the imagination of the time.
+It seemed a fate which no valour or skill upon the side of the French
+could avert. Dunois, himself an unlikely person, one would have
+thought, to yield the honour of the fight to a woman, seems to have
+perceived that without a strong counter-motive, not within the range
+of ordinary methods, the situation was beyond hope.
+
+Accordingly, on the 27th or 28th of April, Jeanne set out at the head
+of her little army, accompanied by a great number of generals and
+captains. She had been equipped by the Queen of Sicily (with a touch
+of that keen sense of decorative effect which belonged to the age) in
+white armour inlaid with silver--all shining like her own St. Michael
+himself, a radiance of whiteness and glory under the sun--armed /de
+toutes pieces sauve la teste/, her uncovered head rising in full
+relief from the dazzling breastplate and gorget. This is the
+description given of her by an eye-witness a little later. The country
+is flat as the palm of one's hand. The white armour must have flashed
+back the sun for miles and miles of the level road, to the eyes which
+from the height of any neighbouring tower watched the party setting
+out. It is all fertile now, the richest plain, and even then, corn and
+wine must have been in full bourgeon, the great fresh greenness of the
+big leaves coming out upon such low stumps of vine as were left in the
+soil; but the devastated country was in those days covered with a wild
+growth like the /macchia/ of Italian wilds, which half hid the
+movements of the expedition. They went by the Loire to Tours, where
+Jeanne had been assigned a dwelling of her own, with the estate of a
+general; and from thence to Blois, where they had to wait for some
+days while the convoy of provisions, which they were to convey to
+Orleans, was being prepared. And there Jeanne fulfilled one of the
+preliminary duties of her mission. She had informed her examiners at
+Poitiers that she had been commanded to write to the English generals
+before attacking them, appealing to them /de la part de Dieu/, to give
+up their conquests, and leave France to the French. The letter which
+we quote would seem to have been dictated by her at Poitiers, probably
+to the confessor who now formed part of her suite and who attended her
+wherever she went:
+
+  JHESUS MARIA.
+
+  King of England, and you Duke of Bedford calling yourself Regent
+  of France, you, William de la Poule, Comte de Sulford, John, Lord
+  of Talbot, and you Thomas, Lord of Scales, who call yourself
+  lieutenants of the said Bedford, listen to the King of Heaven:
+  Give back to the Maid who is here sent on the part of God the King
+  of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns which you have taken by
+  violence in His France. She is ready to make peace if you will
+  hear reason and be just towards France and pay for what you have
+  taken. And you archers, brothers-in-arms, gentles and others who
+  are before the town of Orleans, go in peace on the part of God; if
+  you do not so you will soon have news of the Maid who will see you
+  shortly to your great damage. King of England, if you do not this,
+  I am captain in this war, and in whatsoever place in France I find
+  your people I will make them go away. I am sent here on the part
+  of God the King of Heaven to push you all forth of France. If you
+  obey I will be merciful. And be not strong in your own opinion,
+  for you do not hold the kingdom from God the Son of the Holy Mary,
+  but it is held by Charles the true heir, for God, the King of
+  Heaven so wills, and it is revealed by the Maid who shall enter
+  Paris in good company. If you will not believe this news on the
+  part of God and the Maid, in whatever place you may find
+  yourselves we shall make our way there, and make so great a
+  commotion as has not been in France for a thousand years, if you
+  will not hear reason. And believe this, that the King of Heaven
+  will send more strength to the Maid than you can bring against her
+  in all your assaults, to her and to her good men-at-arms. You,
+  Duke of Bedford, the Maid prays and requires you to destroy no
+  more. If you act according to reason you may still come in her
+  company where the French shall do the greatest work that has ever
+  been done for Christianity. Answer then if you will still continue
+  against the city of Orleans. If you do so you will soon recall it
+  to yourself by great misfortunes. Written the Saturday of Holy
+  Week (22 March, 1429).[1]
+
+Jeanne had by this time made a wonderful moral revolution in her
+little army; most likely she had not been in the least aware what an
+army was, until this moment; but frank and fearless, she had
+penetrated into every corner, and it was not in her to permit those
+abuses at which an ordinary captain has to smile. The pernicious and
+shameful crowd of camp followers fled before her like shadows before
+the day. She stopped the big oaths and unthinking blasphemies which
+were so common, so that La Hire, one of the chief captains, a rough
+and ready Gascon, was reduced to swear by his /baton/, no more sacred
+name being permitted to him. Perhaps this was the origin of the
+harmless swearing which abounds in France, meaning probably just as
+much and as little as bigger oaths in careless mouths; but no doubt
+the soldiers' language was very unfit for gentle ears. Jeanne moved
+among the wondering ranks, all radiant in her silver armour and with
+her virginal undaunted countenance, exhorting all those rude and noisy
+brothers to take thought of their duties here, and of the other life
+that awaited them. She would stop the march of the army that a
+conscience-stricken soldier might make his confession, and desired the
+priests to hear it if necessary without ceremony, or church, under the
+first tree. Her tender heart was such that she shrank from any man's
+death, and her hair rose up on her head, as she said, at the sight of
+French blood shed--although her mission was to shed it on all sides
+for a great end. But the one thing she could not bear was that either
+Frenchmen or Englishmen should die unconfessed, "unhouseled,
+disappointed, unannealed." The army went along attended by songs of
+choristers and masses of priests, the grave and solemn music of the
+Church accompanied strangely by the fanfares and bugle notes. What a
+strange procession to pass along the great Loire in its spring
+fulness, the raised banners and crosses, and that dazzling white
+figure, all effulgence, reflected in the wayward, quick flowing
+stream!
+
+La Hire, who is like a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as
+a model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort
+Jeanne upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town.
+There could not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to
+conduct to a great battle the country maid who was to carry the
+honours of the day from them both, and make men fight like heroes, who
+under them did nothing but run away. The candour and true courage of
+such leaders in circumstances so extraordinary, are beyond praise, for
+it was an offence both to their pride and skill in their profession,
+had she been anything less than the messenger of God which she claimed
+to be; and these rude soldiers were not men to be easily moved by
+devout imaginations. There would seem, however, even in the case of
+the greater of the two, to have arisen a strange friendship and mutual
+understanding between the famous man of war and the peasant girl.
+Jeanne, always straightforward and simple, speaks to him, not with the
+downcast eyes of her humility, but as an equal, as if the great Dunois
+had been a /prud' homme/ of her own degree. There is no appearance
+indeed that the Maid allowed herself to be overborne now by any
+shyness or undue humility. She speaks loudly, so as to be heard by
+those fighting men, taking something of their own brief and decisive
+tone, often even impatient, as one who would not be put aside either
+by cunning or force.
+
+Her meeting with Dunois makes this at once evident. She had been
+deceived in the manner of her approach to Orleans, her companions,
+among whom there were several field-marshals and distinguished
+leaders, taking advantage of her ignorance of the place to lead her by
+the opposite bank of the river instead of that on which the English
+towers were built, which she desired to attack at once. This was the
+beginning of a long series of deceits and hostile combinations, by
+which at every step of her way she was met and retarded; but it
+turned, as these devices generally did, to the discomfiture of the
+adverse captains. She crossed the river at Checy above Orleans, to
+meet Dunois who had come so far to meet her. It will be seen by the
+conversation which she held with him on his first appearance, how
+completely Jeanne had learnt to assert herself, and how much she had
+overcome any fear of man. "Are you the Bastard of Orleans?" she said.
+"I am; and glad of your coming," he replied. "Is it you who have had
+me led to this side of the river and not to the bank on which Talbot
+is and his English?" He answered that he and the wisest of the leaders
+had thought it the best and safest way. "The counsel of God, our Lord,
+is more sure and more powerful than yours," she replied. The
+expedition, as a matter of fact, had to turn back, and to lose
+precious time, there being, it is to be presumed, no means of
+transporting so large a force across the river. The large convoy of
+provisions which Jeanne brought was embarked in boats while the
+majority of the army returned to Blois, in order to cross by the
+bridge.
+
+Jeanne, however, having freely expressed her opinion, adapted herself
+to the circumstances, though extremely averse to separate herself from
+her soldiers, good men who had confessed and prepared their souls for
+every emergency. She finally consented, however, to ride on with
+Dunois and La Hire. The wind was against the convoy, so that the heavy
+boats, deeply laden with beeves and corn, had a dangerous and slow
+voyage before them. "Have patience," cried Jeanne; "by the help of God
+all will go well"; and immediately the wind changed, to the
+astonishment and joy of all, and the boats arrived in safety "in spite
+of the English, who offered no hindrance whatever," as she had
+predicted. The little party made their way along the bank, and in the
+twilight of the April evening, about eight o'clock, entered Orleans.
+The Deliverer, it need not be said, was hailed with joy indescribable.
+She was on a white horse, and carried, Dunois says, the banner in her
+hand, though it was carried before her when she entered the town. The
+white figure in the midst of those darkly gleaming mailed men, would
+in itself throw a certain glory through the dimness of the night, as
+she passed the gates and came into view by the blaze of all the
+torches, and the lights in the windows, over the dark swarming crowds
+of the citizens. Her white banner waving, her white armour shining, it
+was little wonder that the throng that filled the streets received the
+Maid "as if they had seen God descending among them." "And they had
+good reason," says the Chronicle, "for they had suffered many
+disturbances, labours, and pains, and, what is worse, great doubt
+whether they ever should be delivered. But now all were comforted, as
+if the siege were over, by the divine strength that was in this simple
+Maid whom they regarded most affectionately, men, women, and little
+children. There was a marvellous press around her to touch her or the
+horse on which she rode, so much so that one of the torchbearers
+approached too near and set fire to her pennon; upon which she touched
+her horse with her spurs, and turning him cleverly, extinguished the
+flame, as if she had long followed the wars."
+
+There could have been nothing she resembled so much as St. Michael,
+the warrior-angel, who, as all the world knew, was her chief
+counsellor and guide, and who, no doubt, blazed, a familiar figure,
+from some window in the cathedral to which this his living picture
+rode without a pause, to give thanks to God before she thought of
+refreshment or rest. She spoke to the people who surrounded her on
+every side as she went on through the tumultuous streets, bidding them
+be of good courage and that if they had faith they should escape from
+all their troubles. And it was only after she had said her prayers and
+rendered her thanksgiving, that she returned to the house selected for
+her--the house of an important personage, Jacques Boucher, treasurer
+to the Duke of Orleans, not like the humble places where she had
+formerly lodged. The houses of that age were beautiful, airy and
+light, with much graceful ornament and solid comfort, the arched and
+vaulted Gothic beginning to give place to those models of domestic
+architecture which followed the Renaissance, with their ample windows
+and pleasant space and breadth. There the table was spread with a
+joyous meal in honour of this wonderful guest, to which, let us hope,
+Dunois and La Hire and the rest did full justice. But Jeanne was
+indifferent to the feast. She mixed with water the wine poured for her
+into a silver cup, and dipped her bread in it, five or six small
+slices. The visionary peasant girl cared for none of the dainty meats.
+And then she retired to the comfort of a peaceful chamber, where the
+little daughter of the house shared her bed: strange return to the
+days when Hauvette and Mengette in Domremy lay by her side and talked
+as girls love to do, through half the silent night. Perhaps little
+Charlotte, too, lay awake with awe to wonder at that other young head
+on the pillow, a little while ago shut into the silver helmet, and
+shining like the archangel's. The /etat majeur/, the Chevalier
+d'Aulon, Jean de Metz, and Bertrand de Poulengy, who had never left
+her, first friends and most faithful, and her brother Pierre d'Arc,
+were lodged in the same house. It was the last night of April, 1429.
+----------
+[1] The dates must of course be reckoned by the old style.--This
+    letter was dispatched from Tours, during her pause there.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS.
+MAY 1-8, 1429.
+
+Next morning there was a council of war among the many leaders now
+collected within the town. It was the eager desire of Jeanne that an
+assault should be made at once, in all the enthusiasm of the moment,
+upon the English towers, without waiting even for the arrival of the
+little army which she had preceded. But the captains of the defence
+who had borne the heat and burden of the day, and who might naturally
+enough be irritated by the enthusiasm with which this stranger had
+been received, were of a different opinion. I quote here a story, for
+which I am told there is no foundation whatever, touching a personage
+who probably never existed, so that the reader may take it as he
+pleases, with indulgence for the writer's weakness, or indignation at
+her credulity. It seems to me, however, to express very naturally a
+sentiment which must have existed among the many captains who had been
+fighting unsuccessfully for months in defence of the beleaguered city.
+A certain Guillaume de Gamache felt himself insulted above all by the
+suggestion. "What," he cried, "is the advice of this hussy from the
+fields (/une peronnelle de bas lieu/) to be taken against that of a
+knight and captain! I will fold up my banner and become again a simple
+soldier. I would rather have a nobleman for my master than a woman
+whom nobody knows."
+
+Dunois, who was too wise to weaken the forces at his command by such a
+quarrel, is said to have done his best to reconcile and soothe the
+angry captain. This, however, if it was true, was only a mild instance
+of the perpetual opposition which the Maid encountered from the very
+beginning of her career and wherever she went. Notwithstanding her
+victories, she remained through all her career a /peronnelle/ to these
+men of war (with the noble exception, of course, of Alencon, Dunois,
+Xaintrailles, La Hire, and others). They were sore and wounded by her
+appearance and her claims. If they could cheat her, balk her designs,
+steal a march in any way, they did so, from first to last, always
+excepting the few who were faithful to her. Dunois could afford to be
+magnanimous, but the lesser men were jealous, envious, embittered. A
+/peronnelle/, a woman nobody knew! And they themselves were belted
+knights, experienced soldiers, of the best blood of France. It was not
+unnatural; but this atmosphere of hate, malice, and mortification
+forms the background of the picture wherever the Maid moves in her
+whiteness, illuminating to us the whole scene. The English hated her
+lustily as their enemy and a witch, casting spells and enchantments so
+that the strength was sucked out of a man's arm and the courage from
+his heart: but the Frenchmen, all but those who were devoted to her,
+regarded her with an ungenerous opposition, the hate of men shamed and
+mortified by every triumph she achieved.
+
+Jeanne was angry, too, and disappointed, more than she had been by all
+discouragements before. She had believed, perhaps, that once in the
+field these oppositions would be over, and that her mission would be
+rapidly accomplished. But she neither rebelled nor complained. What
+she did was to occupy herself about what she felt to be her business,
+without reference to any commander. She sent out two heralds,[1] who
+were attached to her staff, and therefore at her personal disposal, to
+summon once more Talbot and Glasdale (Classidas, as the French called
+him) /de la part de Dieu/ to evacuate their towers and return home. It
+would seem that in her miraculous soul she had a visionary hope that
+this appeal might be successful. What so noble, what so Christian, as
+that the one nation should give up, of free-will, its attempt upon the
+freedom and rights of another, if once the duty were put simply before
+it--and both together joining hands, march off, as she had already
+suggested, to do the noblest deed that had ever yet been done for
+Christianity? That same evening she rode forth with her little train;
+and placing herself on the town end of the bridge (which had been
+broken in the middle), as near as the breach would permit to the
+bastille, or fort of the Tourelles, which was built across the further
+end of the bridge, on the left side of the Loire--called out to the
+enemy, summoning them once more to withdraw while there was time. She
+was overwhelmed, as might have been expected, with a storm of abusive
+shouts and evil words, Classidas and his captains hurrying to the
+walls to carry on the fierce exchange of abuse. To be called dairy-
+maid and /peronnelle/ was a light matter, but some of the terms used
+were so cruel that, according to some accounts, she betrayed her
+womanhood by tears, not prepared apparently for the use of such foul
+weapons against her. The /Journal du Siege/ declares, however, that
+she was "aucunement yree" (angry), but answered that they lied, and
+rode back to the city.
+
+The next Sunday, the 1st of May, Dunois, alarmed by the delay of his
+main body, set out for Blois to meet them, and we are told that Jeanne
+accompanied him to the special point of danger, where the English from
+their fortifications might have stopped his progress, and took up a
+position there, along with La Hire, between the expedition and the
+enemy. But in the towers not a man budged, not a shot was fired. It
+was again a miracle, and she had predicted it. The party of Dunois
+marched on in safety, and Jeanne returned to Orleans, once more
+receiving on the breeze some words of abuse from the defenders of
+those battlements, which sent forth no more dangerous missile, and
+replying again with her summons, "/Retournez de la par Dieu a
+Angleterre./" The townsfolk watched her coming and going with an
+excitement impossible to describe; they walked by the side of her
+charger to the cathedral, which was the end of every progress; they
+talked to her, all speaking together, pressing upon her--and she to
+them, bidding them to have no fear. "Messire has sent me," she said
+again and again. She went out again, Wednesday, 4th May, on the return
+of Dunois, to meet the army, with the same result, that they entered
+quietly, the English not firing a shot.
+
+On this same day, in the afternoon, after the early dinner, there
+happened a wonderful scene. Jeanne, it appeared, had fallen asleep
+after her meal, no doubt tired with the expedition of the morning, and
+her chief attendant, D'Aulon, who had accompanied Dunois to fetch the
+troops from Blois, being weary after his journey, had also stretched
+himself on a couch to rest. They were all tired, the entry of the
+troops having been early in the morning, a fact of which the angry
+captains of Orleans, who had not shared in that expedition, took
+advantage to make a secret sortie unknown to the new chiefs. All at
+once the Maid awoke in agitation and alarm. Her "voices" had awakened
+her from her sleep. "My council tell me to go against the English,"
+she cried; "but if to assail their towers or to meet Fastolfe I cannot
+tell." As she came to the full command of her faculties her trouble
+grew. "The blood of our soldiers is flowing," she said; "why did they
+not tell me? My arms, my arms!" Then she rushed down stairs to find
+her page amusing himself in the tranquil afternoon, and called to him
+for her horse. All was quiet, and no doubt her attendants thought her
+mad: but D'Aulon, who knew better than to contradict his mistress,
+armed her rapidly, and Luis, the page, brought her horse to the door.
+By this time there began to rise a distant rumour and outcry, at which
+they all pricked their ears. As Jeanne put her foot in the stirrup she
+perceived that her standard was wanting, and called to the page, Louis
+de Contes, above, to hand it to her out of the window. Then with the
+heavy flag-staff in her hand she set spurs to her horse, her
+attendants one by one clattering after her, and dashed onward "so that
+the fire flashed from the pavement under the horse's feet."
+
+Jeanne's presentiment was well-founded. There had been a private
+expedition against the English fort of St. Loup carried out quietly to
+steal a march upon her--Gamache, possibly, or other malcontents of his
+temper, in the hope perhaps of making use of her prestige to gain a
+victory without her presence. But it had happened with this sally as
+with many others which had been made from Orleans; and when Jeanne
+appeared outside the gate which she and the rest of the followers
+after her had almost forced--coming down upon them at full gallop, her
+standard streaming, her white armour in a blaze of reflection, she met
+the fugitives flying back towards the shelter of the town. She does
+not seem to have paused or to have deigned to address a word to them,
+though the troop of soldiers and citizens who had snatched arms and
+flung themselves after her, arrested and turned them back. Straight to
+the foot of the tower she went, Dunois startled in his turn,
+thundering after her. It is not for a woman to describe, any more than
+it was for a woman to execute such a feat of war. It is said that she
+put herself at the head of the citizens, Dunois at the head of the
+soldiers. One moment of pity and horror and heart-sickness Jeanne had
+felt when she met several wounded men who were being carried towards
+the town. She had never seen French blood shed before, and the
+dreadful thought that they might die unconfessed, overwhelmed her
+soul; but this was but an incident of her breathless gallop to the
+encounter. To isolate the tower which was attacked was the first
+necessity, and then the conflict was furious--the English discouraged,
+but fighting desperately against a mysterious force which overwhelmed
+them, at the same time that it redoubled the ardour of every
+Frenchman. Lord Talbot sent forth parties from the other forts to help
+their companions, but these were met in the midst by the rest of the
+army arriving from Orleans, which stopped their course. It was not
+till evening, "the hour of Vespers," that the bastille was finally
+taken, with great slaughter, the Orleanists giving little quarter.
+During these dreadful hours the Maid was everywhere visible with her
+standard, the most marked figure, shouting to her men, weeping for the
+others, not fighting herself so far as we hear, but always in the
+front of the battle. When she went back to Orleans triumphant, she led
+a band of prisoners with her, keeping a wary eye upon them that they
+might not come to harm.
+
+The next day, May 5th, was the Feast of the Ascension, and it was
+spent by Jeanne in rest and in prayer. But the other leaders were not
+so devout. They held a crowded and anxious council of war, taking care
+that no news of it should reach the ears of the Maid. When, however,
+they had decided upon the course to pursue they sent for her, and
+intimated to her their decision to attack only the smaller forts,
+which she heard with great impatience, not sitting down, but walking
+about the room in disappointment and anger. It is difficult[2] for the
+present writer to follow the plans of this council or to understand in
+what way Jeanne felt herself contradicted and set aside. However it
+was, the fact seems certain that their plan failed at first, the
+English having themselves abandoned one of the smaller forts on the
+right side of the river and concentrated their forces in the greater
+ones of Les Augustins and Les Tourelles on the left bank. For all
+this, reference to the map is necessary, which will make it quite
+clear. It was Classidas, as he is called, Glasdale, the most furious
+enemy of France, and one of the bravest of the English captains who
+held the former, and for a moment succeeded in repulsing the attack.
+The fortune of war seemed about to turn back to its former current,
+and the French fell back on the boats which had brought them to the
+scene of action, carrying the Maid with them in their retreat. But she
+perceived how critical the moment was, and reining up her horse from
+the bank, down which she was being forced by the crowd, turned back
+again, closely followed by La Hire, and at once, no doubt, by the
+stouter hearts who only wanted a leader--and charging the English, who
+had regained their courage as the white armour of the witch
+disappeared, and were in full career after the fugitives--drove them
+back to their fortifications, which they gained with a rush, leaving
+the ground strewn with the wounded and dying. Jeanne herself did not
+draw bridle till she had planted her standard on the edge of the moat
+which surrounded the tower.
+
+Michelet is very brief concerning this first victory, and claims only
+that "the success was due in part to the Maid," although the crowd of
+captains and men-at-arms where by themselves quite sufficient for the
+work, had there been any heart in them. But this was true to fact in
+almost every case: and it is clear that she was simply the heart,
+which was the only thing wanted to those often beaten Frenchmen; where
+she was, where they could hear her robust young voice echoing over all
+the din, they were as men inspired; when the impetus of their flight
+carried her also away, they became once more the defeated of so many
+battles. The effect upon the English was equally strong; when the back
+of Jeanne was turned, they were again the men of Agincourt; when she
+turned upon them, her white breastplate blazing out like a star, the
+sunshine striking dazzling rays from her helmet, they trembled before
+the sorceress; an angel to her own side, she was the very spirit of
+magic and witchcraft to her opponents. Classidas, or which captain
+soever of the English side it might happen to be, blaspheming from the
+battlements, hurled all the evil names of which a trooper was capable,
+upon her, while she from below summoned them, in different tones of
+appeal and menace, calling upon them to yield, to go home, to give up
+the struggle. Her form, her voice are always evident in the midst of
+the great stone bullets, the cloth-yard shafts that were flying--they
+were so near, the one above, the other below, that they could hear
+each other speak.
+
+On the 7th of May the fort of Les Augustins on the left bank was
+taken. It will be seen by reference to the map, that this bastille, an
+ancient convent, stood at some distance from the river, in peaceful
+times a little way beyond the bridge, and no doubt a favourite Sunday
+walk from the city. The bridge was now closed up by the frowning bulk
+of the Tourelles built upon it, with a smaller tower or "boulevard" on
+the left bank communicating with it by a drawbridge. When Les
+Augustins was taken, the victorious French turned their arms against
+this boulevard, but as night had fallen by this time, they suspended
+the fighting, having driven back the English, who had made a sally in
+help of Les Augustins. Here in the dark, which suited their purpose,
+another council was held. The captains decided that they would now
+pursue their victory no further, the town being fully supplied with
+provisions and joyful with success, but that they would await the
+arrival of reinforcements before they proceeded further; probably
+their object was solely to get rid of Jeanne, to conclude the struggle
+without her, and secure the credit of it. The council was held in the
+camp within sight of the fort, by the light of torches; after she had
+been persuaded to withdraw, on account of a slight wound in her foot
+from a calthrop, it is said. This message was sent after her into
+Orleans. She heard it with quiet disdain. "You have held your council,
+and I have had mine," she said calmly to the messengers; then turning
+to her chaplain, "Come to me to-morrow at dawn," she said, "and do not
+leave me; I shall have much to do. My blood will be shed. I shall be
+wounded[3] to-morrow," pointing above her right breast. Up to this
+time no weapon had touched her; she had stood fast among all the
+flying arrows, the fierce play of spear and sword, and had taken no
+harm.
+
+In the morning early, at sunrise, she dashed forth from the town
+again, though the generals, her hosts, and all the authorities who
+were in the plot endeavoured to detain her. "Stay with us, Jeanne,"
+said the people with whom she lodged--official people, much above the
+rank of the Maid--"stay and help us to eat this fish fresh out of the
+river." "Keep it for this evening," she said, "and I shall return by
+the bridge and bring you some Goddens to have their share." She had
+already brought in a party of the Goddens on the night before to
+protect them from the fury of the crowd. The peculiarity of this
+promise lay in the fact that the bridge was broken, and could not be
+passed, even without that difficulty, without passing through the
+Tourelles and the boulevard which blocked it at the other end. At the
+closed gates another great official stood by, to prevent her passing,
+but he was soon swept away by the flood of enthusiasts who followed
+the white horse and its white rider. The crowd flung themselves into
+the boats to cross the river with her, horse and man. Les Tourelles
+stood alone, black and frowning across the shining river in its early
+touch of golden sunshine, on the south side of the Loire, the lower
+tower of the boulevard on the bank blackened with the fire of last
+night's attack, and the smoking ruins of Les Augustins beyond. The
+French army, whom Orleans had been busy all night feeding and
+encouraging, lay below, not yet apparently moving either for action or
+retreat. Jeanne plunged among them like a ray of light, D'Aulon
+carrying her banner; and passing through the ranks, she took up her
+place on the border of the moat of the boulevard. Her followers rushed
+after with that /elan/ of desperate and uncalculating valour which was
+the great power of the French arms. In the midst of the fray the
+girl's clear voice, /assez voix de femme/, kept shouting
+encouragements, /de la part de Dieu/ always her war-cry. "/Bon coeur,
+bonne esperance/," she cried--"the hour is at hand." But after hours
+of desperate fighting the spirit of the assailants began to flag.
+Jeanne, who apparently did not at any time take any active part in the
+struggle, though she exposed herself to all its dangers, seized a
+ladder, placed it against the wall, and was about to mount, when an
+arrow struck her full in the breast. The Maid fell, the crowd closed
+round; for a moment it seemed as if all were lost.
+
+Here we have over again in the fable our friend Gamache. It is a
+pretty story, and though we ask no one to take it for absolute fact,
+there is no reason why some such incident might not have occurred.
+Gamache, the angry captain who rather than follow a /peronnelle/ to
+the field was prepared to fold his banner round its staff, and give up
+his rank, is supposed to have been the nearest to her when she fell.
+It was he who cleared the crowd from about her and raised her up.
+"Take my horse," he said, "brave creature. Bear no malice. I confess
+that I was in the wrong." "It is I that should be wrong if I bore
+malice," cried Jeanne, "for never was a knight so courteous"
+(/chevalier si bien apprins/). She was surrounded immediately by her
+people, the chaplain whom she had bidden to keep near her, her page,
+all her special attendants, who would have conveyed her out of the
+fight had she consented. Jeanne had the courage to pull the arrow out
+of the wound with her own hand,--"it stood a hand breadth out" behind
+her shoulder--but then, being but a girl and this her first experience
+of the sort, notwithstanding her armour and her rank as General-in-
+Chief, she cried with the pain, this commander of seventeen. Somebody
+then proposed to charm the wound with an incantation, but the Maid
+indignant, cried out, "I would rather die." Finally a compress soaked
+in oil was placed upon it, and Jeanne withdrew a little with her
+chaplain, and made her confession to him, as one who might be about to
+die.
+
+But soon her mood changed. She saw the assailants waver and fall back;
+the attack grew languid, and Dunois talked of sounding the retreat.
+Upon this she got to her feet, and scrambled somehow on her horse.
+"Rest a little," she implored the generals about her, "eat something,
+refresh yourselves: and when you see my standard floating against the
+wall, forward, the place is yours." They seem to have done as she
+suggested, making a pause, while Jeanne withdrew a little into a
+vineyard close by, where there must have been a tuft of trees, to
+afford her a little shelter. There she said her prayers, and tasted
+that meat to eat that men wot not of, which restores the devout soul.
+Turning back she took her standard from her squire's hand, and planted
+it again on the edge of the moat. "Let me know," she said, "when the
+pennon touches the wall." The folds of white and gold with the benign
+countenance of the Saviour, now visible, now lost in the changes of
+movement, floated over their heads on the breeze of the May day.
+"Jeanne," said the squire, "it touches!" "On!" cried the Maid, her
+voice ringing through the momentary quiet. "On! All is yours!" The
+troops rose as one man; they flung themselves against the wall, at the
+foot of which that white figure stood, the staff of her banner in her
+hand, shouting, "All is yours." Never had the French /elan/ been so
+wildly inspired, so irresistible; they swarmed up the wall "as if it
+had been a stair." "Do they think themselves immortal?" the panic-
+stricken English cried among themselves--panic-stricken not by their
+old enemies, but by the white figure at the foot of the wall. Was she
+a witch, as had been thought? was not she indeed the messenger of God?
+The dazzling rays that shot from her armour seemed like butterflies,
+like doves, like angels floating about her head. They had thought her
+dead, yet here she stood again without a sign of injury; or was it
+Michael himself, the great archangel whom she resembled do much?
+Arrows flew round her on every side but never touched her. She struck
+no blow, but the folds of her standard blew against the wall, and her
+voice rose through all the tumult. "On! Enter! /de la part de Dieu!/
+for all is yours."
+
+The Maid had other words to say, "/Renty, renty/, Classidas!" she
+cried, "you called me vile names, but I have a great pity for your
+soul." He on his side showered down blasphemies. He was at the last
+gasp; one desperate last effort he made with a handful of men to
+escape from the boulevard by the drawbridge to Les Tourelles, which
+crossed a narrow strip of the river. But the bridge had been fired by
+a fire-ship from Orleans and gave way under the rush of the heavily-
+armed men; and the fierce Classidas and his companions were plunged
+into the river, where a knight in armour, like a tower falling, went
+to the bottom in a moment. Nearly thirty of them, it is said, plunged
+thus into the great Loire and were seen no more.
+
+It was the end of the struggle. The French flag swung forth on the
+parapet, the French shout rose to heaven. Meanwhile a strange sight
+was to be seen--the St. Michael in shining armour, who had led that
+assault, shedding tears for the ferocious Classidas, who had cursed
+her with his last breath. "/J'ai grande pitie de ton ame./" Had he but
+had time to clear his soul and reconcile himself with God!
+
+This was virtually the end of the siege of Orleans. The broken bridge
+on the Loire had been rudely mended, with a great /gouttiere/ and
+planks, and the people of Orleans had poured out over it to take the
+Tourelles in flank--the English being thus taken between Jeanne's army
+on the one side and the citizens on the other. The whole south bank of
+the river was cleared, not an Englishman left to threaten the richest
+part of France, the land flowing with milk and honey. And though there
+still remained several great generals on the other side with strong
+fortifications to fall back upon, they seem to have been paralysed,
+and did not strike a blow. Jeanne was not afraid of them, but her
+ardour to continue the fight dropped all at once; enough had been
+done. She awaited the conclusion with confidence. Needless to say that
+Orleans was half mad with joy, every church sounding its bells,
+singing its song of triumph and praise, the streets so crowded that it
+was with difficulty that the Maid could make her progress through
+them, with throngs of people pressing round to kiss her hand, if might
+be, her greaves, her mailed shoes, her charger, the floating folds of
+her banner. She had said she would be wounded and so she was, as might
+be seen, the envious rent of the arrow showing through the white
+plates of metal on her shoulder. She had said all should be theirs /de
+par Dieu:/ and all was theirs, thanks to our Lord and also to St.
+Aignan and St. Euvert, patrons of Orleans, and to St. Louis and St.
+Charlemagne in heaven who had so great pity of the kingdom of France:
+and to the Maid on earth, the Heaven-sent deliverer, the spotless
+virgin, the celestial warrior--happy he who could reach to kiss it,
+the point of her mailed shoe.
+
+Someone says that she rode through all this half-delirious joy like a
+creature in a dream,--fatigue, pain, the happy languor of the end
+attained, and also the profound pity that was the very inspiration of
+her spirit, for all those souls of men gone to their account without
+help of Church or comfort of priest--overwhelming her. But next day,
+which was Sunday, she was up again and eagerly watching all that went
+on. A strange sight was Orleans on that Sunday of May. On the south
+side of the Loire, all those half-ruined bastilles smoking and
+silenced, which once had threatened not the city only but all the
+south of France; on the north the remaining bands of English drawn up
+in order of battle. The excitement of the town and of the generals in
+it, was intense; worn as they were with three days of continuous
+fighting, should they sally forth again and meet that compact, silent,
+doubly defiant army, which was more or less fresh and unexhausted?
+Jeanne's opinion was, No; there had been enough of fighting, and it
+was Sunday, the holy day; but apparently the French did go out though
+keeping at a distance, watching the enemy. By orders of the Maid an
+altar was raised between the two armies in full sight of both sides,
+and there mass was celebrated, under the sunshine, by the side of the
+river which had swallowed Classidas and all his men. French and
+English together devoutly turned towards and responded to that Mass in
+the pause of bewildering uncertainty. "Which way are their heads
+turned?" Jeanne asked when it was over. "They are turned away from us,
+they are turned to Meung," was the reply. "Then let them go, /de par
+Dieu/," the Maid replied.
+
+The siege had lasted for seven months, but eight days of the Maid were
+enough to bring it to an end. The people of Orleans still, every year,
+on the 8th of May, make a procession round the town and give thanks to
+God for its deliverance. Henceforth, the Maid was known no longer as
+Jeanne d'Arc, the peasant of Domremy, but as /La Pucelle d'Orleans/,
+in the same manner in which one might speak of the Prince of Waterloo,
+or the Duc de Malakoff.
+----------
+[1] Their special mission seems to have been a demand for the return
+    of a herald previously sent who had never come back. As Dunois
+    accompanied the demand by a threat to kill the English prisoners
+    in Orleans if the herald was not sent back, the request was at
+    once accorded, with fierce defiances to the Maid, the dairy-maid
+    as she is called, bidding her go back to her cows, and threatening
+    to burn her if they caught her.
+
+[2] I avail myself here as elsewhere of Mr. Lang's lucid description.
+    "It is really perfectly intelligible. The Council wanted a feint
+    on the left bank, Jeanne an attack on the right. She knew their
+    scheme, untold, but entered into it. There was, however, no feint.
+    She deliberately forced the fighting. There was grand fighting,
+    well worth telling," adds my martial critic, who understands it so
+    much better than I do, and who I am happy to think is himself
+    telling the tale in another way.
+
+[3] She had made this prophecy a month before, and it was recorded
+    three weeks before the event in the Town Book of Brabant.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE.
+JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+
+The rescue of Orleans and the defeat of the invincible English were
+news to move France from one end to the other, and especially to raise
+the spirits and restore the courage of that part of France which had
+no sympathy with the invaders and to which the English yoke was
+unaccustomed and disgraceful. The news flew up and down the Loire from
+point to point, arousing every village, and breathing new heart and
+encouragement everywhere; while in the meantime Jeanne, partially
+healed of her wound (on May 9th she rode out in a /maillet/, a light
+coat of chain-mail), after a few days' rest in the joyful city which
+she had saved with all its treasures, set out on her return to Chinon.
+She found the King at Loches, another of the strong places on the
+Loire where there was room for a Court, and means of defence for a
+siege should such be necessary, as is the case with so many of these
+wonderful castles upon the great French river. Hot with eagerness to
+follow up her first great success and accomplish her mission, Jeanne's
+object was to march on at once with the young Prince, with or without
+his immense retinue, to Rheims where he should be crowned and anointed
+King as she had promised. Her instinctive sense of the necessities of
+the position, if we use that language--more justly, her boundless
+faith in the orders which she believed had been give her from Heaven,
+to accomplish this great act without delay, urged her on. She was
+straitened, if we may quote the most divine of words, till it should
+be accomplished.
+
+But the Maid, flushed with victory, with the shouts of Orleans still
+ringing in her ears, the applause of her fellow-soldiers, the sound of
+the triumphant bells, was plunged all at once into the indolence, the
+intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering
+favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into
+foolish amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and
+buffoons alike dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always
+counselling caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and
+drink for to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything
+that was enjoyable in the present moment, to subject a young sovereign
+to toils and excitement, and probable loss, for the uncertain
+advantage of a vain ceremony, when he might be enjoying himself safely
+and at his ease, throughout the summer months, on the cheerful banks
+of the Loire? On the other hand, the Chancellor, the Chamberlains, the
+Church, all his graver advisers (with the exception of Gerson, the
+great theologian to whom has been ascribed the authorship of the
+/Imitation of Christ/, who is reported to have said, "If France
+deserts her, and she fails, she is none the less inspired") shook
+their hands and advised that the way should be quite safe and free of
+danger before the King risked himself upon it. It was thus that Jeanne
+was received when, newly alighted from her charger, her shoulder still
+but half healed, her eyes scarcely clear of the dust and smoke, she
+found herself once more in the ante-chamber, wasting the days, waiting
+in vain behind closed doors, tormented by the lutes and madrigals, the
+light women and lighter men, useless and contemptible, of a foolish
+Court. The Maid, in all the energy and impulse of a success which had
+proved all her claims, had also a premonition that her own time was
+short, if not a direct intimation, as some believe, to that effect:
+and mingled her remonstrances and appeals with the cry of warning: "I
+shall only last a year: take the good of me as long as it is
+possible."
+
+No doubt she was a very great entertainment to the idle seigneurs and
+ladies who would try to persuade her to tell them what was to happen
+to them, she who had prophesied the death of Glasdale and her own
+wound and so many other things. The Duke of Lorraine on her first
+setting out had attempted to discover from Jeanne what course his
+illness would take, and whether he should get better; and all the
+demoiselles and demoiseaux, the flutterers of the ante-chamber, would
+be still more likely to surround with their foolish questions the
+stout-hearted, impatient girl who had acquired a little of the
+roughness of her soldier comrades, and had never been slow at any time
+in answering a fool according to his folly; for Jeanne was no meek or
+sentimental maiden, but a robust and vigorous young woman, ready with
+a quick response, as well as with a ready blow did any one touch her
+unadvisedly, or use any inappropriate freedom. At last, one day while
+she waited vainly outside the cabinet in which the King was retired
+with a few of his councillors, Jeanne's patience failed her
+altogether. She knocked at the door, and being admitted threw herself
+at the feet of the King. To Jeanne he was no king till he had received
+the consecration necessary for every sovereign of France. "Noble
+Dauphin," she cried, "why should you hold such long and tedious
+councils? Rather come to Rheims and receive your worthy crown."
+
+The Bishop of Castres, Christopher de Harcourt, who was present, asked
+her if she would not now in the presence of the King describe to them
+the manner in which her council instructed her, when they talked with
+her. Jeanne reddened and replied: "I understand that you would like to
+know, and I would gladly satisfy you." "Jeanne," said the King in his
+turn, "it would be very good if you could do what they ask, in the
+presence of those here." She answered at once and with great feeling:
+"When I am vexed to find myself disbelieved in the things I say from
+God, I retire by myself and pray to God, complaining and asking of Him
+why I am not listened to. And when I have prayed I hear a voice which
+says, 'Daughter of God, go, go, go! I will help thee, go!' And when I
+hear that voice I feel a great joy." Her face shone as she spoke,
+"lifting her eyes to heaven," like the face of Moses while still it
+bore the reflection of the glory of God, so that the men were dazzled
+who sat, speechless, looking on.
+
+The result was that Charles kindly promised to set out as soon as the
+road between him and Rheims should be free of the English, especially
+the towns on the Loire in which a great part of the army dispersed
+from Orleans had taken refuge, with the addition of the auxiliary
+forces of Sir John Fastolfe, a name so much feared by the French, but
+at which the English reader can scarcely forbear a smile. That the
+young King did not think of putting himself at the head of the troops
+or of taking part in the campaign shows sufficiently that he was
+indeed a /pauvre sire/, unworthy his gallant people. Jeanne, however,
+nothing better being possible, seems to have accepted this mission
+with readiness, and instantly began her preparations to carry it out.
+It is here that the young Seigneur Guy de Laval comes in with his
+description of her already quoted. He was no humble squire but a great
+personage to whom the King was civil and pleased to show courtesy. The
+young man writes to /ses meres/, that is, it seems, his mother and
+grandmother, to whom, in their distant chateau, anxiously awaiting
+news of the two youths gone to the wars, their faithful son makes his
+report of himself and his brother. The King, he says, sent for the
+Maid, in order, Sir Guy believes, that he might see her. And
+afterwards the young man went to Selles where she was just setting out
+on the campaign.
+
+From Selles, he writes on the 8th June, exactly a month after the
+deliverance of Orleans:
+
+ "I went to her lodging to see her, and she sent for wine and told
+  me we should soon drink wine in Paris. It was a miraculous thing
+  (/toute divine/) to see her and hear her. She left Selles on
+  Monday at the hour of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de
+  Boussac and a great many armed men with her. I saw her mount her
+  horse, all in white armour excepting the head, a little axe in her
+  hand. The great black charger was very restive at her door and
+  would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said, 'to the cross which
+  is in front of the church,' and there she mounted, the horse
+  standing still as if he had been bound. Then turning towards the
+  church which was close by she said in a womanly voice (/assez voix
+  de femme/), 'You priests and people of the Church, make
+  processions and prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road,
+  'Forward,' she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page;
+  she had her little axe in her hand, and by her side rode a brother
+  who had joined her eight days before. The Maid told me in her
+  lodging that she had sent you, grandmother, a small gold ring,
+  which was indeed a very small affair, and that she would fain have
+  sent you something better, considering your recommendation. To-day
+  M. d'Alencon, the Bastard of Orleans, and Gaucourt were to leave
+  Selles, following the Maid. And men are arriving from all parts
+  every day, all with good hope in God who I believe will help us.
+  But money there is none at the Court, so that for the present I
+  have no hope of any help or assistance. Therefore I desire you,
+  /Madame ma mere/, who have my seal, spare not the land neither in
+  sale nor mortgage . . . . My much honoured ladies and mothers, I
+  pray the blessed Son of God that you have a good life and long;
+  and both of us recommend ourselves to our brother Louis. And we
+  send our greetings to the reader of this letter. Written from
+  Selles, Wednesday, 8th June, 1429. This afternoon are arrived M.
+  de Vendome, M. de Boussac, and others, and La Hire has joined the
+  army, and we shall soon be at work (/on besognera bientot/)--May
+  God grant that it should be according to your desire."
+
+It was with difficulty that the Duc d'Alencon had been got to start,
+his wife consenting with great reluctance. He had been long a prisoner
+in England, and had lately been ransomed for a great sum of money;
+"Was not that a sufficient sacrifice?" the Duchess asked indignantly.
+To risk once more a husband so costly was naturally a painful thing to
+do, and why could not Jeanne be content and stay where she was? Jeanne
+comforted the lady, perhaps with a little good-humoured contempt.
+"Fear nothing, Madame," she said; "I will bring him back to you safe
+and sound." Probably Alencon himself had no great desire to be second
+in command to this country lass, even though she had delivered
+Orleans; and if he set out at all he would have preferred to take
+another direction and to protect his own property and province. The
+gathering of the army thus becomes visible to us; parties are
+continually coming in; and no doubt, as they marched along, many a
+little chateau--and they abound through the country each with its
+attendant hamlet--gave forth its master or heir, poor but noble,
+followed by as many men-at-arms, perhaps only two or three, as the
+little property could raise, to swell the forces with the best and
+surest of material, the trained gentlemen with hearts full of chivalry
+and pride, but with the same hardy, self-denying habits as the sturdy
+peasants who followed them, ready for any privation; with a proud
+delight to hear that /on besognera bientot/--with that St. Michael at
+their head, and no longer any fear of the English in their hearts.
+
+The first /besogne/ on which this army entered was the siege of
+Jargeau, June 11th, into which town Suffolk had thrown himself and his
+troops when the siege of Orleans was raised. The town was strong and
+so was the garrison, experienced too in all the arts of war, and
+already aware of the wild enthusiasm by which Jeanne was surrounded.
+She passed through Orleans on the 10th of June, and had there been
+joined by various new detachments. The number of her army was now
+raised, we are told, to twelve hundred lances, which means, as each
+"lance" was a separate party, about three thousand six hundred men,
+though the /Journal du Siege/ gives a much larger number; at all
+events it was a small army with which to decide a quarrel between the
+two greatest nations of Christendom. Her associates in command were
+here once more seized by the prevailing sin of hesitation, and many
+arguments were used to induce her to postpone the assault. It would
+seem that this hesitation continued until the very moment of attack,
+and was only put an end to when Jeanne herself impatiently seized her
+banner from the hand of her squire, and planting herself at the foot
+of the walls let loose the fervour of the troops and cheered them on
+to the irresistible rush in which lay their strength. For it was with
+the commanders, not with the followers, that the weakness lay. The
+Maid herself was struck on the head by a stone from the battlements
+which threw her down; but she sprang up again in a moment unhurt.
+"/Sus! Sus!/ Our Lord has condemned the English--all is yours!" she
+cried. She would seem to have stood there in her place with her
+banner, a rallying-point and centre in the midst of all the confusion
+of the fight, taking this for her part in it, and though she is always
+in the thick of the combat, never, so far as we are told, striking a
+blow, exposed to all the instruments of war, but injured by none. The
+effect of her mere attitude, the steadiness of her stand, under the
+terrible rain of stone bullets and dreadful arrows, must of itself
+have been indescribable.
+
+In the midst of the fiery struggle, there is almost a comic point in
+her watch over Alencon, for whose safety she had pledged herself, now
+dragging him from a dangerous spot with a cry of warning, now pushing
+him forward with an encouraging word. On the first of these occasions
+a gentleman of Anjou, M. de Lude, who took his place in the front was
+killed, which seems hard upon the poor gentleman, who was probably
+quite as well worth caring for as Alencon. "/Avant, gentil duc/," she
+cried at another moment, "forward! Are you afraid? you know I promised
+your wife to bring you safe home." Thus her voice keeps ringing
+through the din, her white armour gleams. "/Sus! Sus!/" the bold cry
+is almost audible, sibilant, whistling amid the whistling of the
+arrows.
+
+Suffolk, the English Bayard, the most chivalrous of knights, was at
+last forced to yield. One story tells us that he would give up his
+sword only to Jeanne herself,[1] but there is a more authentic
+description of his selection of one youth among his assailants whom
+the quick perceptions of the leader had singled out. "Are you noble?"
+Suffolk asks in the brevity of such a crisis. "Yes; Guillame Regnault,
+gentleman of Auvergne." "Are you a knight?" "Not yet." The victor put
+a knee to the ground before his captive, the vanquished touched him
+lightly on the shoulder with the sword which he then gave over to him.
+Suffolk was always the finest gentleman, the most perfect gentle
+knight of his time.
+
+"Now let us go and see the English of Meung," cried Jeanne,
+unwearying, as soon as this victory was assured. That place fell
+easily; it is called the bridge of Meung, in the Chronicle, without
+further description, therefore presumably the fortress was not
+attacked--and they proceeded onward to Beaugency. These towns still
+shine over the plain, along the line of the Loire, visible as far as
+the eye will carry over the long levels, the great stream linking one
+to another like pearls on a thread. There is nothing in the landscape
+now to give even a moment's shelter to the progress of a marching army
+which must have been seen from afar, wherever it moved; or to veil the
+shining battlements, and piled up citadels rising here and there,
+concentrated points and centres of life. The great white Castle of
+Blois, the darker tower of Beaugency, still stand where they stood
+when Jeanne and her men drew near, as conspicuous in their elevation
+of walls and towers as if they had been planted on a mountain top. On
+more than one occasion during this wonderful progress from victory to
+victory, the triumphant leaders returned for a day or two to Orleans
+to tell their good tidings, and to celebrate their success.
+
+And there is but one voice as to the military skill which she
+displayed in these repeated operations. The reader sees her, with her
+banner, posted in the middle of the fight, guiding her men with a sort
+of infallible instinct which adds force to her absolute quick
+perception of every difficulty and advantage, the unhesitating
+promptitude, attending like so many servants upon the inspiration
+which is the soul of all. These are things to which a writer ignorant
+of war is quite unable to do justice. What was almost more wonderful
+still was the manner in which the Maid held her place among the
+captains, most of whom would have thwarted her if they could, with a
+consciousness of her own superior place, in which there is never the
+slightest token of presumption or self-esteem. She guarded and guided
+Alencon with a good-natured and affectionate disdain; and when there
+was risk of a great quarrel and a splitting of forces she held the
+balance like an old and experienced guide of men.
+
+This latter crisis occurred before Beaugency on the 15th of June, when
+the Comte de Richemont, Constable of France, the brother of the Duc de
+Bretagne, a great nobleman and famous leader, but in disgrace with the
+King and exiled from the Court, suddenly appeared with a considerable
+army to join himself to the royalist forces, probably with the hope of
+securing the leading place. Richemont was no friend to Jeanne; though
+he apparently asked her help and influence to reconcile him with the
+King. He seems indeed to have thought it a disgrace to France that her
+troops should be led, and victories gained by no properly appointed
+general, but by a woman, probably a witch, a creature unworthy to
+stand before armed men. It must not be forgotten that even now this
+was the general opinion of her out of the range of her immediate
+influence. The English held it like a religion. Bedford, in his
+description of the siege of Orleans and its total failure, reports to
+England that the discomfiture of the hitherto always triumphant army
+was "caused in great part by the fatal faith and vain fear that the
+French had, of a disciple and servant of the enemy of man, called the
+Maid, who uses many false enchantments, and witchcraft, by which not
+only is the number of our soldiers diminished but their courage
+marvellously beaten down, and the boldness of our enemies increased."
+Richemont was a sworn enemy of all such. "Never man hated more, all
+heresies, sorcerers, and sorceresses, than he; for he burned more in
+France, in Poitou, and Bretagne, than any other of his time." The
+French generals were divided as to the merits of Richemont and the
+advantages to be derived from his support. Alencon, the nominal
+commander, declared that he would leave the army if Richemont were
+permitted to join it. The letters of the King were equally hostile to
+him; but on the other hand there were some who held that the accession
+of the Constable was of more importance than all the Maids in France.
+It was a moment which demanded very wary guidance. Jeanne, it would
+seem, did not regard his arrival with much pleasure; probably even the
+increase of her forces did not please her as it would have pleased
+most commanders, holding so strongly as she did, to the miraculous
+character of her own mission and that it was not so much the strength
+of her troops as the help of God that got her the victory. But it was
+not her part to reject or alienate any champion of France. We have an
+account of their meeting given by a retainer of Richemont, which is
+picturesque enough. "The Maid alighted from her horse, and the
+Constable also. 'Jeanne,' he said, 'they tell me that you are against
+me. I know not if you are from God (/de la part de Dieu/) or not. If
+you are from God I do not fear you; if you are of the devil, I fear
+you still less.' 'Brave Constable,' said Jeanne, 'you have not come
+here by any will of mine; but since you are here you are welcome.'"
+
+Armed neutrality but suspicion on one side, dignified indifference but
+acceptance on the other, could not be better shown.
+
+These successes, however, had been attended by various /escarmouches/
+going on behind. The English, who had been driven out of one town
+after another, had now drawn together under the command of Talbot, and
+a party of troops under Fastolfe, who came to relieve them, had turned
+back as Jeanne proceeded, making various unsuccessful attempts to
+recover what had been lost. Failing in all their efforts they returned
+across the country to Genville, and were continuing their retreat to
+Paris when the two enemies came within reach of each other. An
+encounter in open field was a new experience of which Jeanne as yet
+had known nothing. She had been successful in assault, in the
+operations of the siege, but to meet the enemy hand to hand in battle
+was what she had never been required to do; and every tradition, every
+experience, was in favour of the English. From Agincourt to the Battle
+of the Herrings at Rouvray near Orleans, which had taken place in the
+beginning of the year (a fight so named because the field of battle
+had been covered with herrings, the conquerors in this case being
+merely the convoy in charge of provisions for the English, which
+Fastolfe commanded), such a thing had not been known as that the
+French should hold their own, much less attain any victory over the
+invaders. In these circumstances there was much talk of falling back
+upon the camp near Beaugency and of retreating or avoiding an
+engagement; anything rather than hazard one of those encounters which
+had infallibly ended in disaster. But Jeanne was of the same mind as
+always, to go forward and fear nothing. "Fall upon them! Go at them
+boldly," she cried. "If they were in the clouds we should have them.
+The gentle King will now gain the greatest victory he has ever had."
+
+It is curious to hear that in that great plain of the Beauce, so flat,
+so fertile, with nothing but vines and cornfields now against the
+horizon, the two armies at last almost stumbled upon each other by
+accident, in the midst of the brushwood by which the country was
+wildly overgrown. The story is that a stag roused by the French scouts
+rushed into the midst of the English, who were advantageously placed
+among the brushwood to arrest the enemy on their march; the wild
+creature terrified and flying before an army blundered into the midst
+of the others, was fired at and thus betrayed the vicinity of the foe.
+The English had no time to form or set up their usual defences. They
+were so taken by surprise that the rush of the French came without
+warning, with a suddenness which gave it double force. La Hire made
+the first attack as leader of the van, and there was thus emulation
+between the two parties, which should be first upon the enemy. When
+Alencon asked Jeanne what was to be the issue of the fight, she said
+calmly, "Have you good spurs?" "What! You mean we shall turn our backs
+on our enemies?" cried her questioner. "Not so," she replied. "The
+English will not fight, they will fly, and you will want good spurs to
+pursue them." Even this somewhat fantastic prophecy put heart into the
+men, who up to this time had been wont to fly and not to fight.
+
+And this was what happened, strange as it may seem. Talbot himself was
+with the English forces, and many a gallant captain beside: but the
+men and their leaders were alike broken in spirit and filled with
+superstitious terrors. Whether these were the forces of hell or those
+of heaven that came against them no one could be sure; but it was a
+power beyond that of earth. The dazzled eyes which seemed to see
+flights of white butterflies fluttering about the standard of the
+Maid, could scarcely belong to one who thought her a servant of the
+enemy of men. But she was a pernicious witch to Talbot, and strangely
+enough to Richemont also, who was on her own side. The English force
+was thrown into confusion, partly, we may suppose, from the broken
+ground on which they were discovered, the undergrowth of the wood
+which hid both armies from each other. But soon that disorder turned
+into the wildest panic and flight. It would almost seem as if between
+these two hereditary opponents one must always be forced into this
+miserable part. Not all the chivalry of France had been able to
+prevent it at the long string of battles in which they were, before
+the revelation of the Maid; and not the desperate and furious valour
+of Talbot could preserve his English force from the infection now.
+Fastolfe, with the philosophy of an old soldier, deciding that it was
+vain to risk his men when the field was already lost, rode off with
+all his band. Talbot fought with desperation, half mad with rage to be
+thus a second time overcome by so unlikely an adversary, and finally
+was taken prisoner; while the whole force behind him fled and were
+killed in their flight, the plain being scattered with their dead
+bodies.
+
+Jeanne herself made use of those spurs concerning which she had
+enquired, and carried away by the passion of battle, followed in the
+pursuit, we are told, until she met a Frenchman brutally ill-using a
+prisoner whom he had taken, upon which the Maid, indignant, flung
+herself from her horse, and, seating herself on the ground beside the
+unfortunate Englishman, took his bleeding head upon her lap and,
+sending for a priest, made his departure from life at least as easy as
+pity and spiritual consolation could make it on such a disastrous
+field. In all the records there is no mention of any actual fighting
+on her part. She stands in the thick of the flying arrows with her
+banner, exposing herself to every danger; in moments of alarm, when
+her forces seem flagging, she seizes and places a ladder against the
+wall for an assault, and climbs the first as some say; but we never
+see her strike a blow. On the banks of the Loire the fate of the mail-
+clad Glasdale, hopeless in the strong stream underneath the ruined
+bridge, brought tears to her eyes, and now all the excitement of the
+pursuit vanished in an instant from her mind, when she saw the English
+man-at-arms dying without the succour of the Church. Pity was always
+in her heart; she was ever on the side of the angels, though an angel
+of war and not of peace.
+
+It is perhaps because the numbers engaged were so few that this flight
+or "Chasse de Patay," has not taken a more important place in the
+records of French historians. In general it is only by means of
+Fontenoy that the /amour propre/ of the French nation defends itself
+against the overwhelming list of battles in which the English have had
+the better of it. But this was probably the most complete victory that
+has ever been gained over the stubborn enemy whom French tactics are
+so seldom able to touch; and the conquerors were purely French without
+any alloy of alien arms, except a few Scots, to help them. The entire
+campaign on the Loire was one of triumph for the French arms, and of
+disaster for the English. They--it is perhaps a point of national
+pride to admit it frankly--were as well beaten as heart of Frenchman
+could desire, beaten not only in the result, but in the conduct of the
+campaign, in heart and in courage, in skill and in genius. There is no
+reason in the world why it should not be admitted. But it was not the
+French generals, not even Dunois, who secured these victories. It was
+the young peasant woman, the dauntless Maid, who underneath the white
+mantle of her inspiration, miraculous indeed, but not so miraculous as
+this, had already developed the genius of a soldier, and who in her
+simplicity, thinking nothing but of her "voices" and the counsel they
+gave her, was already the best general of them all.
+
+When Talbot stood before the French generals, no less a person than
+Alencon himself is reported to have made a remark to him, of that
+ungenerous kind which we call in feminine language "spiteful," and
+which is not foreign to the habit of that great nation. "You did not
+think this morning what would have happened to you before sunset,"
+said the Duc d'Alencon to the prisoner. "It is the fortune of war,"
+replied the English chief.
+
+Once more, however it is like a sudden fall from the open air and
+sunshine when the victorious army and its chiefs turned back to the
+Court where the King and his councillors sat idle, waiting for news of
+what was being done for them. A battle-field is no fine sight; the
+excitement of the conflict, the great end to be served by it, the
+sense of God's special protection, even the tremendous uproar of the
+fight, the intoxication of personal action, danger, and success have,
+we do not doubt a rapture and passion in them for the moment, which
+carry the mind away; but the bravest soldier holds his breath when he
+remembers the after scene, the dead and dying, the horrible injuries
+inflicted, the loss and misery. However, not even the miserable scene
+of the Chasse de Patay is so painful as the reverse of the dismal
+picture, the halls of the royal habitation where, while men died for
+him almost within hearing of the fiddling and the dances, the young
+King trifled away his useless days among his idle favourites, and the
+musicians played, the assemblies were held, and all went on as in the
+Tuileries. We feel as if we had fallen fathoms deep into the
+meannesses of mankind when we come back from the bloodshed and the
+horror outside, to the King's presence within. The troops which had
+gone out in uncertainty, on an enterprise which might well have proved
+too great for them, had returned in full flush of triumph, having at
+last fully broken the spell of the English superiority--which was the
+greatest victory that could have been achieved: besides gaining the
+substantial advantage of three important towns brought back to the
+King's allegiance--only to find themselves as little advanced as
+before, coming back to the self-same struggle with indolent
+complaining, indifference, and ingratitude.
+
+Jeanne had given the signs that had been demanded from her. She had
+delivered Orleans, she cleared the King's road toward the north. She
+had filled the French forces with an enthusiasm and transport of
+valour which swept away all the traditions of ill fortune. From every
+point of view the instant march upon Rheims and the accomplishment of
+the great object of her mission had not only become practicable, but
+was the wisest and most prudent thing to do.
+
+But this was not the opinion of the Chancellor of France, the
+Archbishop of Rheims, and La Tremouille, or of the indolent young King
+himself, who was very willing to rejoice in the relief from all
+immediate danger, the restoration of the surrounding country, and even
+the victory itself, if only they would have left him in quiet where he
+was, sufficiently comfortable, amused, and happy, without forcing
+necessary dangers. Jeanne's successes and her unseasonable zeal and
+the commotion that she and her train of captains made, pouring in, in
+all the excitement of their triumph, into the midst of the madrigals--
+seem to have been anything but welcome. Go to Rheims to be crowned?
+yes, some time when it was convenient, when it was safe. But in the
+meantime what was more important was to forbid Richemont, whom the
+Chancellor hated and the King did not love, to come into the presence
+or to have any share either in warfare or in pageant. This was not
+only in itself an extremely foolish thing to do, which is always a
+recommendation, but it was at the same time an excuse for wasting a
+little precious time. When this was at last accomplished, and
+Richemont, though deeply wounded and offended, proved himself so much
+a man of honour and a patriot, that though dismissed by the King he
+still upheld, if languidly, his cause--there was yet a great deal of
+resistance to be overcome. Paris though so far off was thrown into
+great excitement and alarm by the flight at Patay, and the whole city
+was in commotion fearing an immediate advance and attack. But in
+Loches, or wherever Charles may have been, it was all taken very
+easily. Fastolfe, the fugitive, had his Garter taken from him as the
+greatest disgrace that could be inflicted, for his shameful flight,
+about the time when Richemont, one of the victors, was being sent off
+and disgraced on the other side for the crime of having helped to
+inflict, without the consent of the King, the greatest blow which had
+yet been given to the English domination! So the Court held on its
+ridiculous and fatal course.
+
+However the force of public feeling which must have been very frankly
+expressed by many important voices was too much for Charles and he was
+at length compelled to put himself in motion. The army had assembled
+at Gien, where he joined it, and the great wave of enthusiasm awakened
+by Jeanne, and on which he now moved forth as on the top of the wave,
+was for the time triumphant. No one dared say now that the Maid was a
+sorceress, or that it was by the aid of Beelzebub that she cast out
+devils; but a hundred jealousies and hatreds worked against her behind
+backs, among the courtiers, among the clergy, strange as that may
+sound, in sight of the absolute devotion of her mind, and the saintly
+life she led. So much was this the case still, notwithstanding the
+practical proofs she had given of her claims, that even persons of
+kindred mind, partially sharing her inspirations, such as the famous
+Brother Richard of Troyes, looked upon her with suspicion and alarm--
+fearing a delusion of Satan. It is more easy perhaps to understand why
+the archbishops and bishops should have been inclined against her,
+since, though perfectly orthodox and a good Catholic, Jeanne had been
+independent of all priestly guidance and had sought no sanction from
+the Church to her commission, which she believed to be given by
+Heaven. "Give God the praise; but we know that this woman is a
+sinner." This was the best they could find to say of her in the moment
+of her greatest victories; but indeed it is no disparagement to Jeanne
+or to any saint that she should share with her Master the opprobrium
+of such words as these.
+
+At last however a reluctant start was made. Jeanne with her "people,"
+her little staff, in which, now, were two of her brothers, a second
+having joined her after Orleans, left Gien on the 28th of June; and
+the next day the King very unwillingly set out. There is given a long
+list of generals who surrounded and accompanied him, three or four
+princes of the blood, the Bastard of Orleans, the Archbishop of
+Rheims, marshals, admirals, and innumerable seigneurs, among whom was
+our young Guy de Laval who wrote the letter to his "mothers" which we
+have already quoted and whose faith in the Maid we thus know; and our
+ever faithful La Hire, the big-voiced Gascon who had permission to
+swear by his /baton/, the d'Artagnan of this history. We reckon these
+names as those of friends: Dunois the ever-brave, Alencon the /gentil
+Duc/ for whom Jeanne had a special and protecting kindness, La Hire
+the rough captain of Free Lances, and the graceful young seigneur, Sir
+Guy as we should have called him had he been English, who was so ready
+to sell or mortgage his land that he might convey his troop
+befittingly to the wars. This little group brightens the march for us
+with their friendly faces. We know that they have but one thought of
+the warrior maiden in whose genius they had begun to have a wondering
+confidence as well as in her divine mission. While they were there we
+feel that she had at least so many who understood her, and who bore
+her the affection of brothers. We are told that in the progress of the
+army Jeanne had no definite place. She rode where she pleased,
+sometimes in the front, sometimes in the rear. One imagines with
+pleasure that wherever her charger passed along the lines it would be
+accompanied by one or other of those valiant and faithful companions.
+
+The first place at which a halt was made was Auxerre, a town occupied
+chiefly by Burgundians, which closed its gates, but by means of
+bribes, partly of provisions to be supplied, partly of gifts to La
+Tremouille, secured itself from the attack which Jeanne longed to
+lead. Other smaller strongholds on the road yielded without
+hesitation. At last they came to Troyes, a large and strong place,
+well garrisoned and confident in its strength, the town distinguished
+in the history of the time by the treaty made there, by which the
+young King had been disinherited--and by the marriage of Henry of
+England with the Princess Catherine of France, in whose right he was
+to succeed to the throne. It was an ill-omened place for a French king
+and the camp was torn with dissensions. Should the army march by,
+taking no notice of it and so get all the sooner to Rheims? or should
+they pause first, to try their fortune against those solid walls? But
+indeed it was not the camp that debated this question. The camp was of
+Jeanne's mind whichever side she took, and her side was always that of
+the promptest action. The garrison made a bold sortie, the very day of
+the arrival of Charles and his forces, but had been beaten back: and
+the King encamped under the walls, wavering and uncertain whether he
+might not still depart on the morrow, but sending a repeated summons
+to surrender, to which no attention was paid.
+
+Once more there was a pause of indecision; the King was not bold
+enough either to push on and leave the city, or to attack it. Again
+councils of war succeeded each other day after day, discussing the
+matter over and over, leaving the King each time more doubtful, more
+timid than before. From these debates Jeanne was anxiously held back,
+while every silken fool gave his opinion. At last, one of the
+councillors was stirred by this strange anomaly. He declared among
+them all, that as it was by the advice of the Maid that the expedition
+had been undertaken, without her acquiescence it ought not to be
+abandoned. "When the King set out it was not because of the great
+puissance of the army he then had with him, or the great treasure he
+had to provide for them, nor yet because it seemed to him a probable
+thing to be accomplished; but the said expedition was undertaken
+solely at the suit of the said Jeanne, who urged him constantly to go
+forward, to be crowned at Rheims, and that he should find little
+resistance, for it was the pleasure and will of God. If the said
+Jeanne is not to be allowed to give her advice now, it is my opinion
+that we should turn back," said the Seigneur de Treves, who had never
+been a partisan of or believer in Jeanne. We are told that at this
+fortunate moment when one of her opponents had thus pronounced in her
+favour, Jeanne, impatient and restless, knocked at the door of the
+council chamber as she had done before in her rustic boldness; and
+then there occurred a brief and characteristic dialogue.
+
+"Jeanne," said the Archbishop of Rheims, taking the first word,
+probably with the ready instinct of a conspirator to excuse himself
+from having helped to shut her out, "the King and his council are in
+great perplexity to know what they should do."
+
+"Shall I be believed if I speak?" said the Maid.
+
+"I cannot tell," replied the King, interposing; "though if you say
+things that are reasonable and profitable, I shall certainly believe
+you."
+
+"Shall I be believed?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes," said the King, "according as you speak."
+
+"Noble Dauphin," she exclaimed, "order your people to assault the city
+of Troyes, to hold no more councils; for, by my God, in three days I
+will introduce you into the town of Troyes, by love or by force, and
+false Burgundy shall be dismayed."
+
+"Jeanne," said the Chancellor, "if you could do that in six days, we
+might well wait."
+
+"You shall be master of the place," said the Maid, addressing herself
+steadily to the King, "not in six days, but to-morrow."
+
+And then there occurred once more the now habitual scene. It was no
+longer the miracle it had been to see her dash forward to her post
+under the walls with her standard which was the signal for battle, to
+which the impatient troops responded, confident in her, as she in
+herself. But for the first time we hear how the young general,
+learning her trade of war day by day, made her preparations for the
+siege. She was a gunner born, according to all we hear, and was quick
+to perceive the advantage of her rude artillery though she had never
+seen one of these /bouches de feu/ till she encountered them at
+Orleans. The whole army was set to work during the night, knights and
+men-at-arms alike, to raise--with any kind of handy material, palings
+faggots, tables, even doors and windows, taken it must be feared from
+some neighbouring village or faubourg--a mound on which to place the
+guns. The country as we have said is as flat as the palm of one's
+hand. They worked all night under cover of the darkness with
+incredible devotion, while the alarmed townsfolk not knowing what was
+being done, but no doubt divining something from the unusual
+commotion, betook themselves to the churches to pray, and began to
+ponder whether after all it might not be better to join the King whose
+armies were led by St. Michael himself in the person of his
+representative, than to risk a siege. Once more the spell of the Maid
+fell on the defenders of the place. It was witchcraft, it was some
+vile art. They had no heart to man the battlements, to fight like
+their brothers at Orleans and Jargeau in face of all the powers of the
+evil one: the cry of "/Sus! Sus!/" was like the death-knell in their
+ears.
+
+While the soldiers within the walls were thus trembling and drawing
+back, the bishop and his clergy took the matter in hand; they sallied
+forth, a long procession attended by half the city, to parley with the
+King. It was in the earliest dawn, while yet the peaceful world was
+scarcely awake; but the town had been in commotion all night, every
+visionary person in it seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and a panic
+of superstition and spiritual terror taking the strength out of every
+arm. Jeanne was already at her post, a glimmering white figure in the
+faint and visionary twilight of the morning, when the gates of the
+city swung back before this tremulous procession. The King, however,
+received the envoys graciously, and readily promised to guarantee all
+the rights of Troyes, and to permit the garrison to depart in peace,
+if the town was given up to him. We are not told whether the Maid
+acquiesced in this arrangement, though it at once secured the
+fulfilment of her prophecy; but in any case she would seem to have
+been suspicious of the good faith of the departing garrison. Instead
+of retiring to her tent she took her place at the gate, watchful, to
+see the enemy march forth. And her suspicion was not without reason.
+The allied troops, English and Burgundian, poured forth from the city
+gates, crestfallen, unwilling to look the way of the white witch, who
+might for aught they knew lay them under some dreadful spell, even in
+the moment of passing. But in the midst of them came a darker band,
+the French prisoners whom they had previously taken, who were as a
+sort of funded capital in their hands, each man worth so much money as
+a ransom, It was for this that Jeanne had prepared herself. "/En nom
+Dieu/," she cried, "they shall not be carried away." The march was
+stopped, the alarm given, the King unwillingly aroused once more from
+his slumbers. Charles must have been disturbed at the most untimely
+hour by the ambassadors from the town, and it mattered little to his
+supreme indolence and indifference what might happen to his
+unfortunate lieges; but he was forced to bestir himself, and even to
+give something from his impoverished exchequer for the ransom of the
+prisoners, which must have been more disagreeable still. The feelings
+of these men who would have been dragged away in captivity under the
+eyes of their victorious countrymen, but for the vigilance of the
+Maid, may easily be imagined.
+
+Jeanne seems to have entered the town at once, to prepare for the
+reception of the King, and to take instant possession of the place,
+forestalling all further impediment. The people in the streets,
+however, received her in a very different way from those of Orleans,
+with trouble and alarm, staring at her as at a dangerous and malignant
+visitor. The Brother Richard, before mentioned, the great preacher and
+reformer, was the oracle of Troyes, and held the conscience of the
+city in his hands. When he suddenly appeared to confront her, every
+eye was turned upon them. But the friar himself was in no less doubt
+than his disciples; he approached her dubiously, crossing himself,
+making the sacred sign in the air, and sprinkling a shower of holy
+water before him to drive away the demon, if demon there was. Jeanne
+was not unused to support the rudest accost, and her frank voice,
+still /assez femme/, made itself heard over every clamour. "Come on, I
+shall not fly away," she cried, with, one hopes, a laugh of confident
+innocence and good-humour, in face of those significant gestures and
+the terrified looks of all about her. French art has been unkind to
+Jeanne, occupying itself very little about her till recently; but her
+short career is full of pictures. Here the simple page grows bright
+with the ancient houses and highly coloured crowd: the frightened and
+eager faces at every window, the white warrior in the midst, sending
+forth a thousand rays from the polished steel and silver of
+breastplate and helmet: and the brown Franciscan monk advancing amid a
+shower of water drops, a mysterious repetition of signs. It gives us
+an extraordinary epitome of the history of France at that period to
+turn from this scene to the wild enthusiasm of Orleans, its crowd of
+people thronging about her, its shouts rending the air; while Troyes
+was full of terror, doubt, and ill-will, though its nearest neighbour,
+so to speak, the next town, and so short a distance away.
+
+A little later in the same day, the next after the surrender, Jeanne,
+riding with her standard by the side of the King, conducted him to the
+cathedral where he confirmed his previous promises and received the
+homage of the town. It was a beautiful sight, the chronicle tells us,
+to see all these magnificent people, so well dressed and well mounted;
+"/il feroit tres beau voir./"
+
+The fate of Troyes decided that of Chalons, the only other important
+town on the way, the gates of which were thrown open as Charles and
+his army, which grew and increased every day, proceeded on its road.
+Every promise of the Maid had been so far accomplished, both in the
+greater object and in the details: and now there was nothing between
+Charles the disinherited and almost ruined Dauphin of three months
+ago, trying to forget himself in the seclusion and the sports of
+Chinon--and the sacred ceremonial which drew with it every tradition
+and every assurance of an ancient and lawful throne.
+
+Jeanne had her little adventure, personal to herself on the way.
+Though there were neither posts nor telegraphs in those days, there
+has always been a strange swift current in the air or soil which has
+conveyed news, in a great national crisis, from one end of the country
+to the other. It was not so great a distance to Domremy on the Meuse
+from Troyes on the Loire, and it appears that a little group of
+peasants, bolder than the rest, had come forth to hang about the road
+when the army passed and see what was so fine a sight, and perhaps to
+catch a glimpse of their /payse/, their little neighbour, the
+/commere/ who was godmother to Gerard d'Epinal's child, the youthful
+gossip of his young wife--but who was now, if all tales were true, a
+great person, and rode by the side of the King. They went as far as
+Chalons to see if perhaps all this were true and not a fable; and no
+doubt stood astonished to see her ride by, to hear all the marvellous
+tales that were told of her, and to assure themselves that it was
+truly Jeanne upon whom, more than upon the King, every eye was bent.
+This small scene in the midst of so many great ones would probably
+have been the most interesting of all had it been told us at any
+length. The peasant travellers surrounded her with wistful questions,
+with wonder and admiration. Was she never afraid among all those risks
+of war, when the arrows hailed about her and the /bouches de feu/, the
+mouths of fire, bellowed and flung forth great stones and bullets upon
+her? "I fear nothing but treason," said the victorious Maid. She knew,
+though her humble visitors did not, how that base thing skulked at her
+heels, and infested every path. It must not be forgotten that this
+wonderful and victorious campaign, with all its lists of towns taken
+and armies discomfited, lasted six weeks only, almost every day of
+which was distinguished by some victory.
+----------
+[1] The former story was written in 1429, by the Greffier of Rochelle.
+    "I will yield me only to her, the most valiant woman in the
+    world." The Greffier was writing at the moment, but not, of
+    course, as an eyewitness.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CORONATION.
+JULY 17, 1429.
+
+The road was now clear, and even the most timid of counsellors could
+not longer hold back the most indolent of kings. Jeanne had kept her
+word once more and fulfilled her own prophecy, and a force of
+enthusiasm and certainty, not to be put down, pressed forward the
+unwilling Court towards the great ceremonial of the coronation, to
+which all except those most chiefly concerned attached so great an
+importance. Charles would have hesitated still, and questioned the
+possibility of resistance on the part of Rheims, if that city had not
+sent a deputation of citizens with the keys of the town, to meet him.
+After this it was but a triumphal march into the sacred place, where
+the great cathedral dominated a swarming, busy, mediaeval city. King
+and Archbishop had a double triumph, for the priest like the monarch
+had been shut out from his lawful throne, and it was only in the train
+of the Maid that this great ecclesiastic was able to take possession
+of his dignities. The King alighted with the Archbishop at the
+Archeveche which is close to the cathedral, an immense, old palace in
+which the heads of the expedition were lodged. There is a magnificent
+old hall still remaining in which no doubt they all assembled,
+scarcely able to believe that their object was accomplished and that
+the King of France was actually in Rheims, and all the prophecies
+fulfilled. The Archbishop marched into the city in the morning;
+Charles and his Court, and all his great seigneurs, and the body of
+his army, in which there were many fighting men half armed, and some
+in their rustic clothes as they had left their fields to join the King
+in his march--poured in in the evening, after the ecclesiastical
+procession, filling the town with commotion. Jeanne rode beside the
+King, her banner in her hand. It was July, the vigil of the Madeleine,
+and every church poured forth its crowd to witness the entry, and the
+populace, half troubled, half glad, gazed its eyes out upon the white
+warrior at the side of the King. Her father and uncle were there to
+meet her at the old inn in the Place, which still proudly preserves
+the record of the peasant guests: two astonished rustics, no doubt,
+were thrust forth from some window to watch that incredible sight--
+Jacques who would rather have drowned his daughter with his own hands,
+than have seen her thus launched among men, gazing still aghast at the
+resplendent figure of the chevaliere at the head of the procession.
+This was very different from what he had thought of when his village
+respectability was tortured by the idea of his girl among the
+troopers, yet probably the rigid peasant had never changed his mind.
+
+We are told by M. Blaze de Bury of an ancient custom which we do not
+find stated elsewhere. A platform was erected, he tells us, outside
+the choir of the cathedral to which the King was led the evening
+before the coronation, surrounded by his peers, who showed him to the
+assembled people with a traditional proclamation: "Here is your King
+whom we, peers of France, crown as King and sovereign lord. And if
+there is a soul here which has any objection to make, let him speak
+and we will answer him. And to-morrow he shall be consecrated by the
+grace of the Holy Spirit if you have nothing to say against it." The
+people replied by cries of "Noel, Noel!" It is not to be supposed that
+the veto of the people of Rheims would have been effectual had they
+opposed: but the scene is wonderfully picturesque. No doubt Jeanne too
+was there, watching over her King, as she seems to have done, like a
+mother over her child, at this crisis of his affairs.
+
+That night there was little sleep in Rheims, for everything had to be
+prepared in haste, the decorations of the cathedral, the provisions
+for the ceremonial. Many of the necessary articles were at Saint Denis
+in the hands of the English, and the treasury of the cathedral had to
+be ransacked to find the fitting vessels. Fortunately it was rich,
+more rich probably than it is now, when the commonplace silver of the
+beginning of this century has replaced the ancient vials. Through the
+short summer night everyone was at work in these preparations; and by
+the dawn of day visitors began to flow into the city, great personages
+and small, to attend the great ceremonial and to pay their homage. The
+greatest of all was the Duke of Lorraine, he who had consulted Jeanne
+about his health, husband of the heiress of that rich principality,
+and son of Queen Yolande who was no doubt with the Court. All France
+seemed to pour into the famous town, where so important an act was
+about to be accomplished, with money and wine flowing on all hands,
+and the enthusiasm growing along with the popular excitement and
+profit. Even great London is stirred to its limits, many miles off
+from the centre of proceedings, by such a great event; how much more
+the little mediaeval city, in which every one might hope to see
+something of the pageant, as one shining group after another, with
+armour blazing in the sun, and sleek horses caracoling, arrived at the
+great gates of the Archeveche: and lesser parties scarcely less
+interesting poured in in need of lodging, of equipment and provisions;
+while every housewife searched her stores for a piece of brilliant
+stuff, of old silk or embroidery, to make her house shine like the
+rest.
+
+Early in the morning, a wonderful procession came out of the
+Archbishop's house. Four splendid peers of France, in full armour with
+their banners, rode through the streets to the old Abbey of Saint Remy
+--the old church which Leo IX. consecrated, in the eleventh century,
+on an equally splendid occasion, and which may still be seen to-day--
+to fetch from its shrine, where it was strictly guarded by the monks,
+the Sainte Ampoule, the holy and sacred vial in which the oil of
+consecration had been sent to Clovis out of Heaven. These noble
+messengers were the "hostages" of this sacred charge, engaging
+themselves by an oath never to lose sight of it by night or day, till
+it was restored to its appointed guardians. This vow having been made,
+the Abbot of St. Remy, in his richest robes, appeared surrounded by
+his monks, carrying the treasure in his hands; and under a splendid
+canopy, blazing in the sunshine with cloth of gold, marched towards
+the cathedral under the escort of the Knights Hostages, blazing also
+in the flashes of their armour. This procession was met half-way,
+before the Church of St. Denis, by another, that of the Archbishop and
+his train, to whom the holy oil was solemnly confided, and carried by
+them to the cathedral, already filled by a dazzled and dazzling crowd.
+
+The Maid had her occupations this July morning like the rest. We hear
+nothing of any interview with her father, or with Durand the good
+uncle who had helped her in the beginning of her career; though it was
+Durand who was sent for to the King and questioned as to Jeanne's life
+in her childhood and early youth; which we may take as proof that
+Jacques d'Arc still stood aloof, /dour/, as a Scotch peasant father
+might have been, suspicious of his daughter's intimacy with all these
+fine people, and in no way cured of his objections to the publicity
+which is little less than shame to such rugged folk. And there were
+his two sons who would take him about, and with whom probably in their
+easier commonplace he was more at home than with Jeanne. What the Maid
+had to do on the morning of the coronation day was something very
+different from any home talk with her relations. She who felt herself
+commissioned not only to lead the armies of France, but to deal with
+her princes and take part in her councils, occupied the morning in
+dictating a letter to the Duke of Burgundy. She had summoned the
+English by letter three times repeated, to withdraw peaceably from the
+possessions which by God's will were French. It was with still better
+reason that she summoned Philip of Burgundy to renounce his feud with
+his cousin, and thus to heal the breach which had torn France in two:
+
+  JHESUS, MARIA.
+
+  High and redoubtable Prince, Duke of Burgundy. Jeanne the Maid
+  requires on the part of the King of Heaven, my most just sovereign
+  and Lord (/mon droicturier souverain seigneur/), that the King of
+  France and you make peace between yourselves, firm, strong and
+  that will endure. Pardon each other of good heart, entirely, as
+  loyal Christians ought to do, and if you desire to fight let it be
+  against the Saracens. Prince of Burgundy, I pray, supplicate, and
+  require, as humbly as may be, fight no longer against the holy
+  kingdom of France: withdraw, at once and speedily, your people who
+  are in any strongholds or fortresses of the said holy kingdom; and
+  on the part of the gentle King of France, he is ready to make
+  peace with you, having respect to his honour, and upon your life
+  that you never will gain a battle against loyal Frenchmen and that
+  all those who war against the said holy kingdom of France, war
+  against the King Jesus, King of Heaven and of all the world and my
+  just and sovereign Lord. And I pray and require with clasped hands
+  that you fight not, nor make any battle against us, neither your
+  friends nor your subjects; but believe always however great in
+  number may be the men you lead against us, that you will never
+  win, and it would be great pity for the great battle and the blood
+  that would be shed of those who came against us. Three weeks ago I
+  sent you a letter by a herald that you should be present at the
+  consecration of the King, which to-day, Sunday, the seventeenth of
+  the present month of July, is done in the city of Rheims: to which
+  I have had no answer, nor even any news by the said herald. To God
+  I commend you, and may He be your guard if it pleases Him, and I
+  pray God to make good peace.
+
+  Written at the aforesaid Rheims, the seventeenth day of July,
+  1429.
+
+When the letter was finished Jeanne put on her armour and prepared for
+the great ceremony. We are not told what part she took in it, nor is
+any more prominent position assigned to her than among the noble crowd
+of peers and generals who surrounded the altar, where her place would
+naturally be, upon the broad raised platform of the choir, so
+excellently adapted for such ceremonies. Her banner we are told was
+borne into the cathedral, in order, as she proudly explained
+afterwards, that having been foremost in the danger it should share
+the honour.
+
+But we have no right to suppose that the Maid took the position of the
+chief actor in the pageant and stood alone by the side of Charles, as
+the exigencies of the pictorial art have required her to do. When,
+however, the ceremony was completed, and he had received on his knees
+the anointing which separated him as king from every other class of
+men, and while the lofty vaults echoed with the cries of Noel! Noel!
+by which the people hailed the completed ceremony, Jeanne could
+contain herself no longer. The object was attained for which she had
+laboured and struggled, and overcome every opponent. She stepped
+forward out of the brilliant crowd, and threw herself at the feet of
+the now crowned monarch, embracing his knees. "Gentle King," she cried
+with tears, "now is the pleasure of God fulfilled--whose will it was
+that I should raise the siege of Orleans and lead you to this city of
+Rheims to receive your consecration. Now has He shown that you are
+true King, and that the kingdom of France truly belongs to you alone."
+
+Those broken words, her tears, the cry of that profound satisfaction
+which is almost anguish, the "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant
+depart in peace," which is so suitable to the lips of the old, so
+poignant from those of the young, pierced all hearts. It is added that
+she asked leave to withdraw, her work being done, and that all who saw
+her were filled with sympathy. It was no doubt the irresistible
+outburst of a heart too full; and though that fulness was all joy and
+triumph, yet there was in it a sense of completed work, a rending
+asunder and tearing away from life, the end of a wonderful and
+triumphant tale.
+
+There is a considerable controversy as to the precise meaning of that
+outburst of emotion. Did the Maid mean that her work was over, and her
+divine mission fulfilled? Was this all that she believed herself to be
+appointed to do? or did she expect, as she sometimes said, to /bouter/
+the English out of France altogether? In the one case she ought to
+have relinquished her work, and in not doing so she acted without the
+protection of God which had hitherto made her invulnerable. In the
+other, her "voices," her inspiration, must have failed her, for her
+course of triumph went no farther. It is impossible to decide between
+these contending theories. She did speak in both senses, sometimes
+declaring that she was to take Paris, sometimes, her intention to
+/bouter/ the English out of the kingdom. At the same time she betrayed
+a constant conviction that her office had limitations and must come to
+an end. "I will last but a year," she said to the King and to Alencon.
+The testimony of Dunois seems to be the best we can have on this
+point. He says in his deposition, made many years after her death:
+"Although Jeanne sometimes talked playfully to amuse people, of things
+concerning the war which were not afterwards accomplished, yet when
+she spoke seriously of the war, and of her own career and her
+vocation, she never affirmed anything but that she was sent to raise
+the siege of Orleans and to lead the King to Rheims to be crowned."
+
+If this were so was she wrong in continuing her warfare, and did she
+place herself in the position of one who goes on her own charges,
+finding the mission from on high unnecessary? Or in the other case did
+her inspiration fail her, or were the intrigues of Charles and his
+Court sufficient to balk the designs of Heaven? We prefer to think
+that Jeanne's commission concerned only those two things which she
+accomplished so completely; but that in continuing the war, she acted
+only as a well inspired and honourable young soldier might, though no
+longer as the direct messenger of God. She had as much right to do so
+as to return to her distaff or her needle in her native village; but
+she became subject to all the ordinary laws of war by so doing,
+exposed herself to be taken or overthrown like any man-at-arms, and
+accepted that risk. What is certain is, that every intrigue sprang up
+again afresh on the evening of that brilliant and triumphant
+ceremonial, and that from the moment of the accomplishment of her
+great work the failure of the Maid began.
+
+These intrigues had been in her way since her very first beginning, as
+has been seen. At Orleans, in the very field as well as in the council
+chamber and the presence, everything was done to balk her, and to
+cross her plans, but in vain; she triumphed over every contrivance
+against her, and broke through the plots, and overcame the plotters.
+But after Rheims the combination of dangers became ever greater and
+greater, and we may say that no merely human general would have had a
+chance in face of the many and bewildering influences of evil. Charles
+who was himself, at least at this period of his career, sufficiently
+indolent and unenterprising to have damped the energies of any
+commander, was, in addition, surrounded by advisers who had always
+been impatient and jealous of the interference of Jeanne, and would
+have cast her off as a witch, or passed her by as an impostor, had
+that been possible, without permitting her to strike a blow. They had
+now grudgingly made use of her, or rather, for this is too much to
+say, had permitted her action where they had no power to restrain it:
+but they were as little friendly, as malignant in their treatment of
+the Maid as ever, and more hopeful, now that so much had been done by
+her means, of being able to shake her off and pursue their fate in
+their own way.
+
+The position of Charles crowned King of France with all the
+traditional pomp, master of the Orleannais, with fresh bands of
+supporters coming in to swell his army day by day, and Paris itself
+almost within his reach, was very different from that of the
+discredited Dauphin at Chinon, whom half the world believed to have no
+right to the crown which his own mother had signed away from him, and
+who wasted his idle days in folly to the profit of the greedy
+councillors who schemed and trafficked with his enemies, and to the
+destruction of all his hopes. The strange apparition of virginal
+purity, energy, and faith which had taken up and saved him against his
+will and all his efforts had not ceased for a moment to be hateful to
+La Tremouille and his party; and Charles--though he seems to have had
+a certain appreciation of the Maid, and even a liking for her frank
+and fearless character, apart from any faith in her mission--was far
+too ready to accept the facts of the moment, and probably to believe
+that, after all, his own worth and favour with Heaven had a great deal
+to do with this dazzling triumph and success: certainly he was not the
+man to make any stand for his deliverer. But that she was an auxiliary
+too important to be sent away was reluctantly apparent to them all. To
+keep her as a sort of tame angel about the Court in order to be
+produced when she was wanted, to put heart into the soldiers and
+frighten the English as she certainly had the gift of doing, no doubt
+appeared to all as a thing desirable enough. And they dared not let
+her go "because of the people," nor, may we believe, would Alencon,
+Dunois, La Hire, and the rest have tolerated thus the abandonment of
+their comrade. To dismiss her even at her own word would have been
+impossible, and it is hard to believe that Jeanne, after that
+extraordinary brief career as a triumphant general and leader, could
+have gone back to her father's cottage of the village, though she
+thought she would fain have done so. If we are to believe that she
+felt her mission to be fulfilled, she was yet mistress of her fate to
+serve France and the King as seemed best.
+
+And we have no evidence that her "voices" forsook her, or discouraged
+her. They seem to have changed a little in their burden, they began to
+mingle a sadder tone in their intimations. It began to be breathed
+into her mind though not immediately, that something was to happen to
+her, some disaster not explained, yet that God was to be with her. It
+seems to me that all the circumstances are compatible with a change in
+Jeanne's consciousness, from the moment of the coronation. It might
+have been a grander thing had she retired there and then, her work
+being accomplished as she declared it to be; but it would not have
+been human. She was still a power, if no longer the direct messenger
+from Heaven; a general, with much skill and natural aptitude if not
+the Sent of God; and the ardour of a military career had got into her
+veins. No doubt she was much more good for that, now, than for sitting
+by the side of Isabeau d'Arc at Domremy, and working even into a piece
+of embroidery for the altar, her remembrances and visions of camp and
+siege and the intoxication of victory. She remained, conscious that
+she was no longer exactly as of old, to fight not only against the
+English, but with intimate enemies, far more bitter, whom now she
+knew, against the ordinary fortune of war, and against that which is a
+thousand times worse, the hatred and envy, the cruel carelessness, and
+the malignant schemes of her own countrymen for whom she had fought.
+
+This, so far as we can judge, appears to be the position of Jeanne in
+the second portion of her career; perhaps only dimly apprehended and
+at moments, by herself; not much thought of probably by those around
+her, the wisest of whom had always been sceptical of her divine
+commission; while the populace never saw any change in her, and
+believed that at one time as well as at another the Maid was the Maid,
+and had victory at her command. And no doubt that influence would have
+endured for some time at least, and her dauntless rush against every
+obstacle would have carried success with it, had she been able to
+carry out her plans, and fly forth upon Paris as she had done upon
+Orleans, carrying on the campaign swiftly, promptly, without pause or
+uncertainty. Bedford himself said that Paris "would fall at a blow,"
+if she came on. It had been hard enough, however, to do that, as we
+have seen, when she was the only hope of France and had the fire of
+the divine enthusiasm in her veins; but it was still more hard now to
+mould a young King elated with triumph, beginning to feel the crown
+safe upon his head, and to feel that if there was still much to gain,
+there was now a great deal to be lost. The position was complicated
+and made more difficult for Jeanne by every advantage she had gained.
+
+In the meantime the secret negotiations, which were always being
+carried on under the surface, had come to this point, that Charles had
+made a private treaty with Philip of Burgundy by which that prince
+pledged himself to give up Paris into the King's hands within fifteen
+days. This agreement furnished a sufficient pretext for the delay in
+marching against Paris, delay which was Charles's invariable method,
+and which but for Jeanne's hardihood and determination, had all but
+crushed the expedition to Rheims itself. It was never with any will of
+his or of his adviser, La Tremouille, that any stronghold was
+assailed. He would fain have passed by Troyes, as the reader will
+remember, he would fain have delayed going to Rheims; in each case he
+had been forced to move by the impetuosity of the Maid. But a treaty
+which touched the honour of the King was a different matter. Philip of
+Burgundy, with whom it was made, seems to have held the key of the
+position. He was called to Paris by Bedford on one side to defend the
+city against its lawful King; he had pledged himself on the other to
+Charles to give it up. He had in his hands, though it is uncertain
+whether he ever read it, that missive of the sorceress, the letter of
+Jeanne which I have quoted, calling upon him on the part of God to
+make peace. What was he to do? There were reasons drawing him to both
+sides. He was the enemy of Charles on account of the murder of his
+father, and therefore had every interest in keeping Paris from him; he
+was angry with the English on account of the marriage of the Duke of
+Gloucester with Jacqueline of Brabant, which interfered with his own
+rights and safety in Flanders, and therefore might have served himself
+by giving up the capital to the King. As for the appeal of Jeanne,
+what was the letter of that mad creature to a prince and statesman?
+The progress of affairs was arrested by this double problem. Jeanne
+had been the prominent, the only important figure in the history of
+France for some months past. Now that shining figure was jostled
+aside, and the ordinary laws of life, with all the counter changes of
+negotiation, the ineffectual comings and goings, the meaner half-seen
+persons, the fierce contending personal interests--in which there was
+no love of either God or man, or any elevated notion of patriotism--
+came again into play.
+
+Jeanne would seem to have already foreseen and felt this change even
+before she left Rheims; there is a new tone of sadness in some of her
+recorded words; or if not of sadness, at least of consciousness that
+an end was approaching to all these triumphs and splendours. The
+following tale is told in various different versions, as occurring
+with different people; but the account I give is taken from the lips
+of Dunois himself, a very competent witness. As the King, after his
+coronation, wended his way through the country, receiving submission
+and joyous welcome from every village and little town, it happened
+that while passing through the town of La Ferte, Jeanne rode between
+the Archbishop of Rheims and Dunois. The Archbishop had never been
+friendly to the Maid, and now it was clear, watched her with that half
+satirical, half amused look of the wise man, curious and cynical in
+presence of the incomprehensible, observing her ways and very ready to
+catch her tripping and to entangle her if possible in her own words.
+The people thronged the way, full of enthusiasm, acclaiming the King
+and shouting their joyful exclamations of "Noel!" though it does not
+appear that any part of their devotion was addressed to Jeanne
+herself. "Oh, the good people," she cried with tears in her eyes, "how
+joyful they are to see their noble King! And how happy should I be to
+end my days and be buried here among them!" The priest unmoved by such
+an exclamation from so young a mouth attempted instantly, like the
+Jewish doctors with our Lord, to catch her in her words and draw from
+her some expression that might be used against her. "Jeanne," he said,
+"in what place do you expect to die?" It was a direct challenge to the
+messenger of Heaven to take upon herself the gift of prophecy. But
+Jeanne in her simplicity shattered the snare which probably she did
+not even perceive: "When it pleases God," she said. "I know neither
+the place nor the time."
+
+It was enough, however, that she should think of death and of the
+sweetness of it, after her work accomplished, in the very moment of
+her height of triumph--to show something of a new leaven working in
+her virgin soul.
+
+One characteristic reward, however, Jeanne did receive. Her father and
+uncle were lodged at the public cost as benefactors of the kingdom, as
+may still be seen by the inscription on the old inn in the great Place
+at Rheims; and when Jacques d'Arc left the city he carried with him a
+patent--better than one of nobility which, however, came to the family
+later--of exemption for the villages of Domremy and Greux of all taxes
+and tributes; "an exemption maintained and confirmed up to the
+Revolution, in favour of the said Maid, native of that parish, in
+which are her relations." "In the register of the Exchequer," says M.
+Blaze de Bury, "at the name of the parish of Greux and Domremy, the
+place for the receipt is blank, with these words as explanation: /a
+cause de la Pucelle/, on account of the Maid." There could not have
+been a more delightful reward or one more after her own heart. It
+would be a graceful act of the France of to-day, which has so warmly
+revived the name and image of her maiden deliverer, to renew so
+touching a distinction to her native place.
+
+We are told that Jeanne parted with her father and uncle with tears,
+longing that she might return with them and go back to her mother who
+would rejoice to see her again. This was no doubt quite true, though
+it might be equally true that she could not have gone back. Did not
+the father return, a little sullen, grasping the present he had
+himself received, not sure still that it was not disreputable to have
+a daughter who wore coat armour and rode by the side of the King, a
+position certainly not proper for maidens of humble birth? The dazzled
+peasants turned their backs upon her while she was thus at the height
+of glory, and never, so far as appears, saw her face again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE SECOND PERIOD.
+1429-1430.
+
+The epic so brief, so exciting, so full of wonder had now reached its
+climax. Whatever we may think on the question as to whether Jeanne had
+now reached the limit of her commission, it is at least evident that
+she had reached the highest point of her triumph, and that her short
+day of glory and success came to an end in the great act which she had
+always spoken of as her chief object. She had crowned her King; she
+had recovered for him one of the richest of his provinces, and
+established a strong base for further action on his part. She had
+taught Frenchmen how not to fly before the English, and she had filled
+those stout-hearted English, who for a time had the Frenchmen in their
+powerful steel-clad grip, with terror and panic, and taught them how
+to fly in their turn. This was, from the first, what she had said she
+was appointed to do, and not one of her promises had been broken. Her
+career had been a short one, begun in April, ending in July, one brief
+continuous course of glory. But this triumphant career had come to its
+conclusion. The messenger of God had done her work; the servant must
+not desire to be greater than his Lord. There have been heroes in this
+world whose career has continued a glorious and a happy one to the
+end. Our hearts follow them in their noble career, but when the strain
+and pain are over they come into their kingdom and reap their reward
+the interest fails. We are glad, very glad, that they should live
+happy ever after, but their happiness does not attract us like their
+struggle.
+
+It is different with those whose work and whose motives are not those
+of this world. When they step out of the brilliant lights of triumph
+into sorrow and suffering, all that is most human in us rises to
+follow the bleeding feet, our hearts swell with indignation, with
+sorrow and love, and that instinctive admiration for the noble and
+pure, which proves that our birthright too is of Heaven, however we
+may tarnish or even deny that highest pedigree. The chivalrous romance
+of that age would have made of Jeanne d'Arc the heroine of human
+story. She would have had a noble lover, say our young Guy de Laval,
+or some other generous and brilliant Seigneur of France, and after her
+achievements she would have laid by her sword, and clothed herself
+with the beautiful garments of the age, and would have grown to be a
+noble lady in some half regal chateau, to which her name would have
+given new lustre. The young reader will probably long that it should
+be so; he will feel it an injustice, a wrong to humanity that so
+generous a soul should have no reward; it will seem to him almost a
+personal injury that there should not be a noble chevalier at hand to
+snatch that devoted Maid out of the danger that threatened her, out of
+the horrible fate that befell her; and we can imagine a generous boy,
+and enthusiastic girl, ready to gnash their teeth at the terrible and
+dishonouring thought that it was by English hands that this noble
+creature was tied to the stake and perished in the flames. For the
+last it becomes us[1] to repent, for it was to our everlasting shame;
+but not more to us than to France who condemned her, who lifted no
+finger to help her, who raised not even a cry, a protest, against the
+cruelty and wrong. But for her fate in itself let us not mourn over-
+much. Had the Maid become a great and honoured lady should not we all
+have said as Satan says in the Book of Job: Did Jeanne serve God for
+nought? We should say: See what she made by it. Honour and fame and
+love and happiness. She did nobly, but nobly has she been rewarded.
+
+But that is not God's way. The highest saint is born to martyrdom. To
+serve God for nought is the greatest distinction which He reserves for
+His chosen. And this was the fate to which the Maid of France was
+consecrated from the moment she set out upon her mission. She had the
+supreme glory of accomplishing that which she believed herself to be
+sent to do, and which I also believe she was sent to do, miraculously,
+by means undreamed of, and in which no one beforehand could have
+believed. But when that was done a higher consecration awaited her.
+She had to drink of the cup of which our Lord drank, and to be
+baptised with the baptism with which He was baptised. It was involved
+in every step of the progress that it should be so. And she was
+herself aware of it, vaguely, at heart, as soon as the object of her
+mission was attained. What else could have put the thought of dying
+into the mind of a girl of eighteen in the midst of the adoring crowd,
+to whom to see her, to touch her, was a benediction? When she went
+forth from those gates she was going to her execution, though the end
+was not to be yet. There was still a long struggle before her,
+lingering and slow, more bitter than death, the preface of
+discouragement, of disappointment, of failure when she had most hoped
+to succeed.
+
+She was on the threshold of this second period when she rode out of
+Rheims all brilliant in the summer weather, her banner faded now, but
+glorious, her shining armour bearing signs of warfare, her end
+achieved--yet all the while her heart troubled, uncertain, and full of
+unrest. And it is impossible not to note that from this time her plans
+were less defined than before. Up to the coronation she had known
+exactly what she meant to do, and in spite of all obstructions had
+done it, keeping her genial humour and her patience, steering her
+simple way through all the intrigues of the Court, without bitterness
+and without fear. But now a vague mist seems to fall about the path
+which was so open and so clear. Paris! Yes, the best policy, the true
+generalship would have been to march straight upon Paris, to lose no
+time, to leave as little leisure as possible to the intriguers to
+resume their old plots. So the generals thought as well as Jeanne: but
+the courtiers were not of that mind. The weak and foolish notion of
+falling back upon what they had gained, and of contenting themselves
+with that, was all they thought of; and the un-French, unpatriotic
+temper of Paris which wanted no native king, but was content with the
+foreigner, gave them a certain excuse. We could not even imagine
+London as being ever, at any time, contented with an alien rule. But
+Paris evidently was so, and was ready to defend itself to the death
+against its lawful sovereign. Jeanne had never before been brought
+face to face with such a complication. It had been a straightforward
+struggle, each man for his own side, up to this time. But now other
+things had to be taken into consideration. Here was no faithful
+Orleans holding out eager arms to its deliverer, but a crafty, self-
+seeking city, deaf to patriotism, indifferent to freedom, calculating
+which was most to its profit--and deciding that the stranger, with
+Philip of Burgundy at his back, was the safer guide. This was enough
+of itself to make a simple mind pause in astonishment and dismay.
+
+There is no evidence that the supernatural leaders who had shaped the
+course of the Maid failed her now. She still heard her "voices." She
+still held communion with the three saints who, she believed devoutly,
+came out of Heaven to aid her. The whole question of this supernatural
+guidance is one which is of course open to discussion. There are many
+in these days who do not believe in it at all, who believe in the
+exaltation of Jeanne's brain, in the excitement of her nerves, in some
+strange complication of bodily conditions, which made her believe she
+saw and heard what she did not really see or hear. For our part, we
+confess frankly that these explanations are no explanation at all so
+far as we are concerned; we are far more inclined to believe that the
+Maid spoke truth, she who never told a lie, she who fulfilled all the
+promises she made in the name of her guides, than that those people
+are right who tell us on their own authority that such interpositions
+of Heaven are impossible. Nobody in Jeanne's day doubted that Heaven
+did interpose directly in human affairs. The only question was, Was it
+Heaven in this instance? Was it not rather the evil one? Was it
+sorcery and witchcraft, or was it the agency of God? The English
+believed firmly that it was witchcraft; they could not imagine that it
+was God, the God of battles, who had always been on their side, who
+now took the courage out of their hearts and taught their feet to fly
+for the first time. It was the devil, and the Maid herself was a
+wicked witch. Neither one side nor the other believed that it was from
+Jeanne's excited nerves that these great things came. There were
+plenty of women with excited nerves in France, nerves much more
+excited than those of Jeanne, who was always reasonable at the height
+of her inspiration; but to none of them did it happen to mount the
+breach, to take the city, to drive the enemy--up to that moment
+invincible,--flying from the field.
+
+But it would seem as if these celestial visitants had no longer a
+clear and definite message for the Maid. Their words, which she
+quotes, were now promises of support, vague warnings of trouble to
+come. "Fear not, for God will stand by you." She thought they meant
+that she would be delivered in safety as she had been hitherto, her
+wounds healing, her sacred person preserved from any profane touch.
+But yet such promises have always something enigmatical in them, and
+it might be, as proved to be the case, that they meant rather
+consolation and strength to endure than deliverance. For the first
+time the Maid was often sad; she feared nothing, but the shadow was
+heavy on her heart. Orleans and Rheims had been clear as daylight, her
+"voices" had said to her "Do this" and she had done it. Now there was
+no definite direction. She had to judge for herself what was best, and
+to walk in darkness, hoping that what she did was what she was meant
+to do, but with no longer any certainty. This of itself was a great
+change, and one which no doubt she felt to her heart. M. Fabre tells
+(alone among the biographers of Jeanne) that there were symptoms of
+danger to her sound and steady mind, in her words and ways during the
+moment of triumph. Her chaplain Pasquerel wrote a letter in her name
+to the Hussites, against whom the Pope was then sending crusades, in
+which "I, the Maid," threatened, if they were not converted, to come
+against them and give them the alternative of death or amendment.
+Quicherat says that to the Count d'Armagnac who had written to her,
+whether in good faith or bad, to ask which of the three then existent
+Popes was the real one, she is reported to have answered that she
+would tell him as soon as the English left her free to do so. But this
+is a perverted account of what she really did say, and M. Fabre seems
+to be, like the rest of us, a little confused in his dates: and the
+documents themselves on which he builds are not of unquestioned
+authority. These, however, would be but small speck upon the sunshine
+of her perfect humility and sobriety; if indeed they are to be
+depended upon as authentic at all.
+
+The day of Jeanne, her time of glory and success, was but a short one
+--Orleans was delivered on the 8th of May, the coronation of Charles
+took place on the 17th of July; before the earliest of these dates she
+had spent nearly two months in an anxious yet hopeful struggle of
+preparation, before she was permitted to enter upon her career. The
+time of her discouragement was longer. It was ten months from the day
+when she rode out of Rheims, the 25th of July, 1429, till the 23d of
+May, 1430, when she was taken. She had said after the deliverance of
+Orleans that she had but a year in which to accomplish her work, and
+at a later period, Easter, 1430, her "voices" told her that "before
+the St. Jean" she would be in the power of her enemies. Both these
+statements came true. She rose quickly but fell more slowly,
+struggling along upon the downward course, unable to carry out what
+she would, hampered on every hand, and not apparently followed with
+the same fervour as of old. It is true that the principal cause of all
+seems to have been the schemes of the Court and the indolence of
+Charles; but all these hindrances had existed before, and the King and
+his treacherous advisers had been unwillingly dragged every mile of
+the way, though every step made had been to Charles's advantage. But
+now though the course is still one of victory the Maid no longer seems
+to be either the chief cause or the immediate leader. Perhaps this may
+be partly due to the fact that little fighting was necessary, town
+after town yielding to the King, which reduced the part of Jeanne to
+that of a spectator; but there is a change of atmosphere and tone
+which seems to point to something more fundamental than this. The
+historians are very unwilling to acknowledge, except Michelet who does
+so without hesitation, that she had herself fixed the term of her
+commission as ending at Rheims; it is certain that she said many
+things which bear this meaning, and every fact of her after career
+seems to us to prove it: but it is also true that her conviction
+wavered, and other sayings indicate a different belief or hope. She
+did no wrong in following the profession of arms in which she had made
+so glorious a beginning; she had many gifts and aptitudes for it of
+which she was not herself at first aware: but she was no longer the
+Envoy of God. Enough had been done to arouse the old spirit of France,
+to break the spell of the English supremacy; it was right and fitting
+that France should do the rest for herself. Perhaps Jeanne was not
+herself very clear on this point, and after her first statement of it,
+became less assured. It is not necessary that the servant should know
+the designs of the master. It did not after all affect her. Her
+business was to serve God to the best of her power, not to take the
+management out of His hands.
+
+The army went forth joyously upon its way, directing itself towards
+Paris. There was a pilgrimage to make, such as the Kings of France
+were in the habit of making after their coronation; there were
+pleasant incidents, the submission of a village, the faint resistance,
+instantly overcome, of a small town, to make the early days pleasant.
+Laon and Soissons both surrendered. Senlis and Beauvais received the
+King's envoys with joy. The independent captains of the army made
+little circles about, like parties of pleasure, bringing in another
+and another little stronghold to the allegiance of the King. When he
+turned aside, taking as he passed through, without as yet any serious
+deflection, the road rather to the Loire than to Paris, success still
+attended him. At Chateau-Thierry resistance was expected to give zest
+to the movement of the forces, but that too yielded at once as the
+others had done. The dates are very vague and it seems difficult to
+find any mode of reconciling them. Almost all the historians while
+accusing the King of foolish dilatoriness and confusion of plans give
+us a description of the undefended state of Paris at the moment, which
+a sudden stroke on the part of Charles might have carried with little
+difficulty, during the absence of all the chiefs from the city and the
+great terror of the inhabitants; but a comparison of dates shows that
+the Duke of Bedford re-entered Paris with strong reinforcements on the
+very day on which Charles left Rheims three days only after his
+coronation, so that he scarcely seems so much to blame as appears. But
+the general delay, inefficiency, and hesitation existing at
+headquarters, naturally lead to mistakes of this kind.
+
+The great point was that Paris itself was by no means disposed to
+receive the King. Strange as it seems to say so Paris was bitterly,
+fiercely English at that extraordinary moment, a fact which ought to
+be taken into account as the most important in the whole matter. There
+was no answering enthusiasm in the capital of France to form an
+auxiliary force behind its ramparts and encourage the besiegers
+outside. The populace perhaps might be indifferent: at the best it had
+no feeling on the subject; but there was no welcome awaiting the King.
+During the time of Bedford's absence the city felt itself to have "no
+lord"--/ceux de Paris avoit grand peur car nul seigneur n' y avoit/.
+It was believed that Charles would put all the inhabitants to the
+sword, and their desperation of feeling was rather that which leads to
+a wild and hopeless defence than to submission. The Duke of Bedford,
+governing in the name of the infant Henry VI. Of England, was their
+seigneur, instead of their natural sovereign. It is a fact which to us
+seems scarcely credible, but it was certainly true. There seems to
+have been no feeling even, on the subject, no general shame as of a
+national betrayal; nothing of the kind. Paris was English, holding by
+the English kings who had never lost a certain hold on France, and
+thinking no shame of its party. It was a hostile town, the chief of
+the English possessions. In the /Journal du Bourgeois de Paris/--who
+was no /bourgeois/ but a distinguished member of that university which
+held the Maid and all her ways in horror--Jeanne the deliverer, the
+incarnation of patriotism and of France is spoken of as "a creature in
+the form of a woman." How extraordinary is this evidence of a state of
+affairs in which it is almost impossible to believe! Paris is France
+nowadays to many people, though no doubt this is but a superficial
+judgment; but in the early part of the fifteenth century, she was
+frankly English, not by compulsion even, but by habit and policy.
+Perhaps the delays, the hesitation, the terrors of Charles and his
+counsellors are thus rendered more excusable than by any other
+explanation.
+
+In the meantime it is almost impossible to follow the wanderings of
+this vacillating army without a map. If the reader should trace its
+movements, he would see what a stumbling and devious course it took as
+of a man blundering in the dark. From Rheims to Soissons the way was
+clear; then there came a sudden move southward to Chateau-Thierry from
+which indeed there was still a straight line to Paris but which still
+more clearly indicated the highroad leading to the Orleannais, the
+faithful districts of the Loire. This retrograde movement was not made
+without a great outcry from the generals. Their opinion was that the
+King ought to press on to conquer everything while the English forces
+were still depressed and discouraged. In their mind this deflection
+towards the south was an abandonment at once of honour and safety. An
+unimportant check on the way, however, gave an argument to the leaders
+of the army, and Charles permitted himself to be dragged back. They
+then made their way by La Ferte-Milon, Crepy, and Daumartin, and on
+this road the English troops which had been led out from Paris by
+Bedford to intercept them came twice within fighting distance of the
+French army. The English, as all the French historians are eager to
+inform us, invariably entrenched themselves in their positions,
+surrounding their lines with sharp-pointed posts by which the equally
+invariable rush of the French could be broken. But the French on these
+occasions were too wise to repeat the impetuous charge which had
+ruined them at Crecy and Agincourt, and the consequence was that the
+two forces remained within sight of each other, with a few skirmishes
+going on at the flanks, but without any serious encounter.
+
+It will be more satisfactory, however, to copy the following
+/itineraire/ of Charles's movements from the Chronicle of Perceval de
+Cagny who was a member of the household of the Duc d'Alencon, and
+probably present, certainly at all events bound to have the best and
+most correct information. He informs us that the King left Rheims on
+Thursday the 21st of July, and dined, supped, and lay at the Abbey of
+St. Nanuol that night, where were brought to him the keys of the city
+of Laon. He then set out on /le voyage a venir devant Paris/.
+
+"And on Saturday the 23d of the same month the King dined, supped and
+lay at Soissons, and was there received the most honourably that the
+churchmen, burghers and other people of the town were capable of: for
+they had all great fear because of the destruction of the town which
+had been taken by the Burgundians and made to rebel against the King.
+
+"Friday the 29th day of July the King and his company were all day
+before Chateau-Thierry in order of battle, hoping that the Duke of
+Bedford would appear to fight. The place surrendered at the hour of
+vespers, and the King lodged there till Monday the first of August. On
+that day the King lay at Monmirail in Brie.
+
+"Tuesday the 2d of August he passed the night in the town of Provins,
+and had the best possible reception there, and remained till the
+Friday following, the 5th August. Sunday the 7th the King lay at the
+town of Coulommiers in Brie. Wednesday the 10th he lay at La Ferte-
+Milon, Thursday at Crespy in Valois--Friday at Laigny-le-Sec. The
+following Saturday the 13th the King held the field near Dammartin-en-
+Gouelle, for the whole day looking out for the English: but they came
+not.
+
+"On Sunday the 14th August the Maid, the Duc d'Alencon, the Count de
+Vendosme, the Marshals and other captains accompanied by six or seven
+thousand combatants were at the hour of vespers lodged in the fields
+near Montepilloy, nearly two leagues from the town of Senlis--The Duke
+of Bedford and other English captains with between eight and ten
+thousand English lying half a league from Senlis between our people
+and the said city on a little stream, in a village called Notre Dame
+de la Victoire. That evening our people skirmished with the English
+near to their camp and in this skirmish were people taken on each
+side, and of the English Captain d'Orbec and ten or twelve others, and
+people wounded on both sides: when night fell each retired to their
+own quarters."
+
+The same writer records an appeal in the true tone of chivalry
+addressed to the English by Jeanne and Alencon desiring them to come
+out from their entrenchments and fight: and promising to withdraw to a
+sufficient distance to permit the enemy to place himself in the open
+field. The French troops had first "put themselves in the best state
+of conscience that could possibly be, hearing mass at an early hour
+and then to horse." But the English would not come out. Jeanne, with
+her standard in her hand rode up to the English entrenchments, and
+some one says (not de Cagny) struck the posts with her banner,
+challenging the force within to come out and fight; while they on
+their side waved at the French in defiance, a standard copied from
+that of Jeanne, on which was depicted a distaff and spindle. But
+neither host approached any nearer. Finally, Charles made his way to
+Compiegne.
+
+At Chateau-Thierry there was concluded an arrangement with Philip of
+Burgundy for a truce of fifteen days, before the end of which time the
+Duke undertook to deliver Paris peaceably to the French. That this was
+simply to gain time and that no idea of giving up Paris had ever been
+entertained is evident; perhaps Charles was not even deceived. He, no
+more than Philip, had any desire to encounter the dangers of such a
+siege. But he was able at least to silence the clamours of the army
+and the representations of the persistent Maid by this truce. To wait
+for fifteen days and receive the prize without a blow struck, would
+not that be best? The counsellors of the King held thus a strong
+position, though the delay made the hearts of the warriors sick.
+
+The figure of Jeanne appears during these marchings and counter-
+marchings like that of any other general, pursuing a skilful but not
+unusual plan of campaign. That she did well and bravely there can be
+no doubt, and there is a characteristic touch which we recognise, in
+the fact that she and all of her company "put themselves in the best
+state of conscience that could be," before they took to horse; but the
+skirmishes and repulses are such as Alencon himself might have made.
+"She made much diligence," the same chronicler tells us, "to reduce
+and place many towns in the obedience of the King," but so did many
+others with like success. We hear no more her vigorous knock at the
+door of the council chamber if the discussion there was too long or
+the proceedings too secret. Her appearances are those of a general
+among many other generals, no longer with any special certainty in her
+movements as of a person inspired. We are reminded of a story told of
+a previous period, after the fight at Patay, when blazing forth in the
+indignation of her youthful purity at the sight of one of the camp
+followers, a degraded woman with some soldiers, she struck the wanton
+with the flat of her sword, driving her forth from the camp, where was
+no longer that chastened army of awed and reverent soldiers making
+their confession on the eve of every battle, whom she had led to
+Orleans. The sword she used on this occasion, was, it is said, the
+miraculous sword which had been found under the high altar of St.
+Catharine at Fierbois; but at the touch of the unclean the maiden
+brand broke in two. If this was an allegory[2] to show that the work
+of that weapon was over, and the common sword of the soldier enough
+for the warfare that remained, it could not be more clearly realised
+than in the history of this campaign. The only touch of our real Maid
+in her own distinct person comes to us in a letter written in a field
+on that same wavering road to Paris, dated as early as the 5th of
+August and addressed to the good people of Rheims, some of whom had
+evidently written to her to ask what was the meaning of the delay, and
+whether she had given up the cause of the country. There is a terse
+determination in its brief, indignant sentences which is a relief to
+the reader weary of the wavering and purposeless campaign:
+
+ "Dear and good friends, good and loyal Frenchmen of the town of
+  Rheims. Jeanne, the Maid, sends you news of her. It is true that
+  the King has made a truce of fifteen days with the Duke of
+  Burgundy, who promises to render peaceably the city of Paris in
+  that time. Do not, however, be surprised if I enter there sooner,
+  for I like not truces so made, and know not whether I will keep
+  them, but if I keep them, it will be only because of the honour of
+  the King."
+
+While Jeanne and her army thus played with the unmoving English,
+advancing and retiring, attempting every means of drawing them out,
+the enemy took advantage of one of these seeming withdrawals to march
+out of their camp suddenly and return to Paris, which all this time
+had been lying comparatively defenceless, had the French made their
+attack sooner. At the same time Charles moved on to Compiegne where he
+gave himself up to fresh intrigues with Philip of Burgundy, this time
+for a truce to last till Christmas. The Maid was grievously troubled
+by this step, /moult marrie/, and by the new period of delay and
+negotiation on which the Court had entered. Paris was not given up,
+nor was there any appearance that it ever would be, and to all the
+generals as well as to the Maid it was very evident that this was the
+next step to be taken. Some of the leaders wearied with inaction had
+pushed on to Normandy where four great fortresses--greatest of all the
+immense and mysterious stronghold on the high cliffs of the Seine,
+that imposing Chateau Gaillard which Richard Coeur-de-lion had built,
+the ruins of which, white and mystic, still dominate, like some
+Titanic ghost, above the course of the river--had yielded to them. So
+great was the danger of Normandy, the most securely English of all
+French provinces, that Bedford had again been drawn out of Paris to
+defend it. Here then was another opportunity to seize the capital. But
+Charles could not be induced to move. He found many ways of amusing
+himself at Compiegne, and the new treaty was being hatched with
+Burgundy which gave an excuse for doing nothing. The pause which
+wearied them all out, both captains and soldiers, at last became more
+than flesh and blood could bear.
+
+Jeanne once more was driven to take the initiative. Already on one
+occasion she had forced the hand of the lingering Court, and resumed
+the campaign of her own accord, an impatient movement which had been
+perfectly successful. No doubt again the army itself was becoming
+demoralised, and showing symptoms of falling to pieces. One day she
+sent for Alencon in haste during the absence of the ambassadors at
+Arras. "/Beau duc/," she cried, "prepare your troops and the other
+captains. /En mon Dieu, par mon martin/,[3] I will see Paris nearer
+than I have yet seen it." She had seen the towers from afar as she
+wandered over the country in Charles's lingering train. Her sudden
+resolution struck like fire upon the impatient band. They set out at
+once, Alencon and the Maid at the head of their division of the army,
+and all rejoiced to get to horse again, to push their way through
+every obstacle. They started on the 23d August, nearly a month after
+the departure from Rheims, a month entirely lost, though full of
+events, lost without remedy so far as Paris was concerned. At Senlis
+they made a pause, perhaps to await the King, who, it was hoped, would
+have been constrained to follow; then carrying with them all the
+forces that could be spared from that town, they spurred on to St.
+Denis where they arrived on the 27th: St. Denis, the other sacred town
+of France, the place of the tomb, as Rheims was the place of the
+crown.
+
+The royalty of France was Jeanne's passion. I do not say the King,
+which might be capable of malinterpretation, but the kings, the
+monarchy, the anointed of the Lord, by whom France was represented,
+embodied and made into a living thing. She had loved Rheims, its
+associations, its triumphs, the rejoicing of its citizens. These had
+been the accompaniments of her own highest victory. She came to St.
+Denis in a different mood, her heart hot with disappointment and the
+thwarting of all her plans. From whatever cause it might spring, it
+was clear that she was no longer buoyed up by that certainty which
+only a little while before had carried her through every danger and
+over every obstacle. But to have reached St. Denis at least was
+something. It was a place doubly sacred, consecrated to that royal
+House for which she would so willingly have given her life. And at
+last she was within sight of Paris, the greatest prize of all. Up to
+this time she had known in actual warfare nothing but victory. If her
+heart for the first time wavered and feared, there was still no
+certain reason that, /de par Dieu/, she might not win the day again.
+
+At St. Denis there was once more a cruel delay. Nearly a fortnight
+passed and there was no news of the King. The Maid employed the time
+in skirmishes and reconnoissances, but does not seem to have ventured
+on an attack without the sanction of Charles, whom Alencon, finally,
+going back on two several occasions, succeeded in setting in motion.
+Charles had remained at Compiegne to carry out his treaty with
+Burgundy, and the last thing he desired was this attack; but when he
+could resist no longer he moved on reluctantly to St. Denis, where his
+arrival was hailed with great delight. This was not until the 5th of
+September, and the army, wrought up to a high pitch of excitement and
+expectation, was eager for the fight. "There was no one of whatever
+condition, who did not say, 'She will lead the King into Paris, if he
+will let her,'" says the chronicler.
+
+In the meantime the authorities in Paris were at work, strengthening
+its fortifications, frightening the populace with threats of the
+vengeance of Charles, persuading every citizen of the danger of
+submission.
+
+The /Bourgeois/ tells us that letters came from "les Arminoz," that
+is, the party of the King, sealed with the seal of the Duc d'Alencon,
+and addressed to the heads of the city guilds and municipality
+inviting their co-operation as Frenchmen. "But," adds the Parisian,
+"it was easy to see through their meaning, and an answer was returned
+that they need not throw away their paper as no attention was paid to
+it." There is no sign at all that any national feeling existed to
+respond to such an appeal. Paris--its courts of law, Parliaments
+(salaried by Bedford), University, Church--every department, was
+English in the first place, Burgundian in the second, dependent on
+English support and money. There was no French party existing. The
+Maid was to them an evil sorceress, a creature in the form of a woman,
+exercising the blackest arts. Perhaps there was even a breath of
+consciousness in the air that Charles himself had no desire for the
+fall of the city. He had left the Parisians full time to make every
+preparation, he had held back as long as was possible. His favour was
+all on the side of his enemies; for his own forces and their leaders,
+and especially for the Maid, he had nothing but discouragement,
+distrust, and auguries of evil.
+
+Nevertheless, these oppositions came to an end, and Jeanne, though
+less ready and eager for the assault, found herself under the walls of
+Paris at last.
+----------
+[1] "The English, not US," says Mr. Andrew Lang: and it is pleasant to
+    a Scot to know that this is true. England and Scotland were then
+    twain, and the Scots fought in the ranks of our auld Ally. But for
+    the present age the distinction lasts no longer, and to the writer
+    of an English book on English soil it would be ungenerous to take
+    the advantage.
+
+[2] It is taken as a miraculous sign by another chronicler, Jean
+    Chartier, who tells us that when this fact came to the knowledge
+    of the King the sword was given by him to the workmen to be re-
+    founded--"but they could not do it, nor put the pieces together
+    again: which is a great proof (/grant approbation/) that the sword
+    came to her divinely. And it is notorious that since the breaking
+    of that sword, the said Jeanne neither prospered in arms to the
+    profit of the King nor otherwise as she had done before."
+
+[3] "It was her oath," adds the chronicler; no one is quite sure what
+    it means, but Quicherat is of opinion that it was her /baton/, her
+    stick or staff. Perceval de Cagny puts in this exclamation in
+    almost all the speeches of the Maid. It must have struck him as a
+    curious adjuration. Perhaps it explains why La Hire, unable to do
+    without something to swear by, was permitted by Jeanne in their
+    frank and humorous /camaraderie/ to swear by his stick, the same
+    rustic oath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT.
+AUTUMN, 1429.
+
+It was on the 7th September that Jeanne and her immediate followers
+reached the village of La Chapelle, where they encamped for the night.
+The next day was the day of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a
+great festival of the Church. It could scarcely be a matter of choice
+on the part of so devout a Catholic as Jeanne to take this day of all
+others, when every church bell was tinkling forth a summons to the
+faithful, for the day of assault. In all probability she was not now
+acting on her own impulse but on that of the other generals and
+nobles. Had she refused, might it not have been alleged against her
+that after all her impatience it was she who was the cause of delay?
+The forces with Jeanne were not very large, a great proportion of the
+army remaining with Charles no one seems to know where, either at St.
+Denis or at some intermediate spot, possibly to form a reserve force
+which could be brought up when wanted. The best informed historian
+only knows that Charles was not with the active force. But Alencon was
+at the head of the troops, along with many other names well known to
+us, La Hire, and young Guy de Laval, and Xantrailles, all mighty men
+of valour and the devoted friends of Jeanne. There is a something, a
+mist, an incertitude in the beginning of the assault which was unlike
+the previous achievements of Jeanne, a certain want of precaution or
+knowledge of the difficulties which does not reflect honour upon the
+generals with her. Absolutely new to warfare as she was before Orleans
+she had ridden out at once on her arrival there to inspect the
+fortifications of the besiegers. But probably the continual
+skirmishing of which we are told made this impossible here, so that,
+though the Maid studied the situation of the town in order to choose
+the best point for attack, it was only when already engaged that the
+army discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of which
+was full of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate of
+St. Honore and its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders back
+into the city: but their further progress was arrested by that
+discovery. It was on this occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have
+seized from a Burgundian in the melee, a sword, of which she boasted
+afterwards that it was a good sword capable of good blows, though we
+have no certain record that in all her battles she ever gave one blow,
+or shed blood at all.
+
+It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the
+discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other
+filled with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her
+standard at the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and
+cheer on her soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril,
+descending into the first fosse, and climbing up again on the second,
+the /dos d'ane/, which separated them, where she stood in the midst of
+a rain of arrows, fully exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers
+and gunners on the ramparts above, testing with her lance the depth of
+the water. We seem in the story to see her all alone or with her
+standard-bearer only by her side making this investigation; but that
+of course is only a pictorial suggestion, though it might for a moment
+be the fact. She remained there, however, from two in the afternoon
+till night, when she was forced away. The struggle must have raged
+around while she stood on the dark edge of the ditch probing the muddy
+water to see where it could best be crossed, shouting directions to
+her men in that voice /assez femme/, which penetrated the noise of
+battle, and summoning the active and desperate enemy overhead.
+"/Renty! Renty!/" she cried as she had done at Orleans--"/surrender to
+the King of France!/"
+
+We hear nothing now of the white armour; it must have been dimmed and
+worn by much fighting, and the banner torn and glorious with the
+chances of the war; but it still waved over her head, and she still
+stood fast, on the ridge between the two ditches, shouting her
+summons, cheering the men, a spot of light still, amid all the steely
+glimmering of the mail-coats and the dark downpour of that iron rain.
+Half a hundred war cries rending the air, shrieks from the walls of
+"Witch, Devil, Ribaude," and names still more insulting to her purity,
+could not silence that treble shout, the most wonderful, surely, that
+ever ran through such an infernal clamour, so prodigious, the
+chronicler says, that it was a marvel to hear it. /De par Dieu, Rendez
+vous, rendez vous, au roy de France/. If as we believe she never
+struck a blow, the aspect of that wonderful figure becomes more
+extraordinary still. While the boldest of her companions struggled
+across to fling themselves and what beams and ladders they could drag
+with them against the wall, she stood without even such shelter as
+close proximity to it might have given, cheering them on, exposed to
+every shot.
+
+The fight was desperate, and though there was no marked success on the
+part of the besiegers, yet there seems to have been nothing to
+discourage them, as the fight raged on. Few were wounded,
+notwithstanding the noise of the cannons and culverins, "by the grace
+of God and the good luck of the Maid." But towards the evening Jeanne
+herself suddenly swayed and fell, an arrow having pierced her thigh;
+she seems, however, to have struggled to her feet again, undismayed,
+when a still greater misfortune befell: her standard-bearer was hit,
+first in the foot, and then, as he raised his visor to pull the arrow
+from the wound, between his eyes, falling dead at her feet. What
+happened to the banner, we are not told; Jeanne most likely herself
+caught it as it fell. But at this stroke, more dreadful than her own
+wound, her strength failed her, and she crept behind a bush or heap of
+stones, where she lay, refusing to quit the place. Some say she
+managed to slide into the dry ditch where there was a little shelter,
+but resisted all attempts to carry her away, and some add that while
+she lay there she employed herself in a vain attempt to throw faggots
+into the ditch to make it passable. It is said that she kept calling
+out to them to persevere, to go on and Paris would be won. She had
+promised, they say, to sleep that night within the conquered city; but
+this promise comes to us with no seal of authority. Jeanne knew that
+it had taken her eight days to free Orleans, and she could scarcely
+have promised so sudden a success in the more formidable achievement.
+But she was at least determined in her conviction that perseverance
+only was needed. She must have lain for hours on the slope of the
+outer moat, urging on the troops with such force as her dauntless
+voice could give, repeating again and again that the place could be
+taken if they but held on. But when night came Alencon and some other
+of the captains overcame her resistance, and there being clearly no
+further possibility for the moment, succeeded in setting her upon her
+horse, and conveyed her back to the camp. While they rode with her,
+supporting her on her charger, she did nothing but repeat "/Quel
+dommage!/" Oh, what a misfortune, that the siege of Paris should fail,
+all for want of constancy and courage. "If they had but gone on till
+morning," she cried, "the inhabitants would have known." It is evident
+from this that she must have expected a rising within, and could not
+yet believe that no such thing was to be looked for. "/Par mon
+martin/, the place would have been taken," she said in the hearing one
+cannot but feel of the chronicler, who reports so often those homely
+words.
+
+Thus Jeanne was led back after the first day's attack. Her wound was
+not serious, and she had been repulsed during one of the day's
+fighting at Orleans without losing courage. But something had changed
+her spirit as well as the spirit of the army she led. There is a
+curious glimpse given us into her camp at this point, which indeed
+comes to us through the observation of an enemy, yet seems to have in
+it an unmistakable gleam of truth. It comes from one of the parties
+which had been granted a safe-conduct to carry away the dead of the
+English and Burgundian side. They tell us, among other circumstances,
+--such as that the French burnt their dead, a manifest falsehood, but
+admirably calculated to make them a horror to their neighbours,--that
+many in the ranks cursed the Maid who had promised that they should
+without any doubt sleep that night in Paris and plunder the wealthy
+city. The men with their safe-conduct creeping among the dead, to
+recover those bodies which had fallen on their own side, and furtively
+to count the fallen on the other--who were delighted to bring a report
+that the Maid was no longer the fountain of strength and blessing, but
+secretly cursed by her own forces--are sinister figures groping their
+way through the darkness of the September night.
+
+Next morning, however, her wound being slight, Jeanne was up early and
+in conference with Alencon, begging him to sound his trumpets and set
+forth once more. "I shall not budge from here, till Paris is taken,"
+she said. No doubt her spirit was up, and a determination to recover
+lost ground strong in her mind. While the commanders consulted
+together, there came a band of joyful augury into the camp, the
+Seigneur of Montmorency with sixty gentlemen, who had left the party
+of Burgundy in order to take service under the banner of the Maid. No
+doubt this important and welcome addition to their number exhilarated
+the entire camp, in the commotion of the reveille, while each man
+looked to his weapons, wiping off from breastplate and helmet the
+heavy dew of the September morning, greeting the new friends and
+brothers-in-arms who had come in, and arranging, with a better
+knowledge of the ground than that of yesterday, the mode of attack.
+Jeanne would not confess that she felt her wound, in her eagerness to
+begin the assault a second time. And all were in good spirits, the
+disappointment of the night having blown away, and the determination
+to do or die being stronger than ever. Were the men-at-arms perhaps
+less amenable? Were they whispering to each other that Jeanne had
+promised them Paris yesterday, and for the first time had not kept her
+word? It would almost require such a fact as this to explain what
+follows. For as they began to set out, the whole field in movement,
+there was suddenly seen approaching another party of cavaliers--
+perhaps another reinforcement like that of Montmorency? This new band,
+however, consisted but of two gentlemen and their immediate
+attendants, the Duc de Bar and the Comte de Clermont,[1] always a bird
+of evil omen, riding hot from St. Denis with orders from the King.
+These orders were abrupt and peremptory--to turn back. Jeanne and her
+companions were struck dumb for the moment. To turn back, and Paris at
+their feet! There must have burst forth a storm of remonstrance and
+appeal. We cannot tell how long the indignant parley lasted; the
+historians do not enlarge upon the disastrous incident. But at last
+the generals yielded to the orders of the King--Jeanne humiliated,
+miserable, and almost in despair. We cannot but feel that on no former
+occasion would she have given way so completely; she would have rushed
+to the King's presence, overwhelmed him with impetuous prayers,
+extorted somehow the permission to go on. But Charles was safe at
+seven miles' distance, and his envoys were imperious and peremptory,
+like men able to enforce obedience if it were not given. She obeyed at
+last, recovering courage a little in the hope of being able to
+persuade Charles to change his mind, and sanction another assault on
+Paris from the other side, by means of a bridge over the Seine towards
+St. Denis, which Alencon had constructed. Next morning it appears that
+without even asking that permission a portion of the army set out very
+early for this bridge: but the King had divined their project, and
+when they reached the river side the first thing they saw was their
+bridge in ruins. It had been treacherously destroyed in the night, not
+by their enemies, but by their King.
+
+It is natural that the French historians should exhaust themselves in
+explanation of this fatal change of policy. Quicherat, who was the
+first to bring to light all the most important records of this period
+of history, lays the entire blame upon La Tremoille, the chief adviser
+of Charles. But that Charles himself was at heart equally guilty no
+one can doubt. He was a man who proved himself in the end of his
+career to possess both sense and energy, though tardily developed. It
+was to him that Jeanne had given that private sign of the truth of her
+mission, by which he was overawed and convinced in the first moment of
+their intercourse. Within the few months which had elapsed since she
+appeared at Chinon every thing that was wonderful had been done for
+him by her means. He was then a fugitive pretender, not even very
+certain of his own claim, driven into a corner of his lawful
+dominions, and fully prepared to abandon even that small standing
+ground, to fly into Spain or Scotland, and give up the attempt to hold
+his place as King of France. Now he was the consecrated King, with the
+holy oil upon his brows, and the crown of his ancestors on his head,
+accepted and proclaimed, all France stirring to her old allegiance,
+new conquests falling into his hands every day, and the richest
+portion of his kingdom secure under his sway. To check thus
+peremptorily the career of the deliverer who had done so much for him,
+degrading her from her place, throwing more than doubt upon her
+inspiration, falsifying by force the promises which she had made--
+promises which had never failed before,--was a worse and deeper sin on
+the part of a young man, by right of his kingly office the very head
+of knighthood and every chivalrous undertaking, than it could be on
+the part of an old and subtle diplomatist who had never believed in
+such wild measures, and all through had clogged the steps and
+endeavoured to neutralise the mission of the warrior Maid. It is very
+clear, however, that between them it was the King and his chamberlain
+who made this assault upon Paris so evident and complete a failure.
+One day's repulse was nothing in a siege. There had been one great
+repulse and several lesser ones at Orleans. Jeanne, even though
+weakened by her wound, had sprung up that morning full of confidence
+and courage. In no way was the failure to be laid to her charge.
+
+But this could never, perhaps, have been explained to the whole body
+of the army, who had believed her word without a doubt and taken her
+success for granted. If they had been wavering before, which seems
+possible--for they must have been, to a considerable extent, new
+levies, the campaigners of the Loire having accomplished their period
+of feudal service,--this sudden downfall must have strengthened every
+doubt and damped every enthusiasm. The Maid of whom such wonderful
+tales had been told, she who had been the angel of triumph, the
+irresistible, before whom the English fled, and the very walls fell
+down--was she after all only a sorceress, as the others called her, a
+creature whose incantations had failed after the flash of momentary
+success? Such impressions are too apt to come like clouds over every
+popular enthusiasm, quenching the light and chilling the heart.
+
+Jeanne was thus dragged back to St. Denis against her will and every
+instinct of her being, and there ensued three days of passionate
+debate and discussion. For a moment it appeared as if she would have
+thrown off the bonds of loyal obedience and pursued her mission at all
+hazards. Her "voices," if they had previously given her uncertain
+sound, promising only the support and succour of God, but no success,
+now spoke more plainly and urged the continuance of the siege; and the
+Maid was torn in pieces between the requirements of her celestial
+guardians and the force of authority around her. If she had broken out
+into open rebellion who would have followed her? She had never yet
+done so; when the King was against her she had pleaded or forced an
+agreement, and received or snatched a consent from the malevolent
+chamberlain, as at Jargeau and Troyes. Never yet had she set herself
+in public opposition to the will of her sovereign. She had submitted
+to all kinds of tests and trials rather than this. And to have lain
+half a day wounded outside Paris and to stand there pleading her cause
+with her wound still unhealed were not likely things to strengthen her
+powers of resistance. "The Voices bade me remain at St. Denis," she
+said afterwards at her trial, "and I desired to remain; but the
+seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If I had not been wounded I
+should never have left." Added to the force of these circumstances, it
+was no doubt apparent to all that to resume operations after that
+forced retreat, and the betrayal it gave of divided counsels, would be
+less hopeful than ever. These arguments even convinced the bold La
+Hire, who for his part, being no better than a Free Lance, could move
+hither and thither as he would; and thus the first defeat of the Maid,
+a disaster involving all the misfortunes that followed in its train,
+was accomplished.
+
+Jeanne's last act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern
+reader gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a
+certain melancholy meaning. Before she left, dragged almost a captive
+in the train of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of
+the cathedral the armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris.
+It was not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from
+the wars. And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would
+have been easily comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind.
+Was it a movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the
+arms in which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?--or
+was it done in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that
+defeat, too, was a part of victory, and that not without that
+bitterness of failure could the fame of the soldier of Christ be
+perfected? I have remarked already that we hear no more of the white
+armour, inlaid with silver and dazzling like a mirror, in which she
+had begun her career; perhaps it was the remains of that panoply of
+triumph which she laid out before the altar of the patron saint of
+France, all dim now with hard work and the shadow of defeat. It must
+have marked a renunciation of one kind or another, the sacrifice of
+some hope. She was no longer Jeanne the invincible, the triumphant,
+whose very look made the enemy tremble and flee, and gave double force
+to every Frenchman's arm. Was she then and there abdicating, becoming
+to her own consciousness Jeanne the champion only, honest and true,
+but no longer the inspired Maid, the Envoy of God? To these questions
+we can give no answer; but the act is pathetic, and fills the mind
+with suggestions. She who had carried every force triumphantly with
+her, and quenched every opposition, bitter and determined though that
+had been, was now a thrall to be dragged almost by force in an
+unworthy train. It is evident that she felt the humiliation to the
+bottom of her heart. It is not for human nature to have the triumph
+alone: the humiliation, the overthrow, the chill and tragic shadow
+must follow. Jeanne had entered into that cloud when she offered the
+armour, that had been like a star in front of the battle, at the
+shrine of St. Denis.[2] Hers was now to be a sadder, a humbler,
+perhaps a still nobler part.
+
+It is enough to trace the further movements of the King to perceive
+how at every step the iron must have entered deeper and deeper into
+the heart of the Maid. He made his arrangements for the government of
+each of the towns which had acknowledged him: Beauvais, Compiegne,
+Senlis, and the rest. He appointed commissioners for the due
+regulation of the truce with Philip of Burgundy. And then the
+retreating army took its march southward towards the mild and wealthy
+country, all fertility and quiet, where a recreant prince might feel
+himself safe and amuse himself at his leisure--by Lagny, by Provins,
+by Bercy-sur Seine, where he had been checked before in his retreat
+and almost forced to the march on Paris--by Sens, and Montargis: until
+at last on the 29th of September, no doubt diminished by the
+withdrawal of many a local troop and knight whose service was over,
+the forces arrived at Gien, whence they had set forth at the end of
+June for a series of victories. It is to be supposed that the King was
+well enough satisfied with the conquests accomplished in three months.
+And, indeed, in ordinary circumstances they would have formed a
+triumphant list. Charles must have felt himself free to play after the
+work which he had not done; and to leave his good fortune and the able
+negotiators, who hoped to get Paris and other good things from Philip
+of Burgundy without paying anything for them, to do the rest.
+
+We can imagine nothing more dreadful for the Maid than the months that
+followed. The Court was not ungrateful to her; she received the
+warmest welcome from the Queen; she had a /maison/ arranged for her
+like the household of a noble chief, with the addition of women and
+maidens of rank to her existing staff, and everything which could
+serve to show that she was one whom the King delighted to honour. And
+Charles would have her apparelled gloriously like the king's daughter
+in the psalm. "He gave her a mantle of cloth of gold, open at both
+sides, to wear over her armour," and apparently did his best to make
+her, if not a noble lady, yet into the semblance of a noble young
+chevaliere, one the glories of his Court, with all the distinction of
+her achievements and all the complacences of a carpet knight. It was
+said afterwards, in the absence of any graver possibility of
+accusation, that she liked her fine clothes. The tears rise to the
+eyes at such a suggestion. She was so natural that let us hope she
+did, the martyr Maid whose torture had already begun. If that mantle
+of gold gave her a moment of pleasure, it is something to be thankful
+for in the midst of the dismal shadows that were already closing round
+her. They were ready to give her any shining mantle, any beautiful
+dress, even a title and a noble name if she would; but what the King
+and his counsellors were determined on, was, that she should no more
+have the fame of individual triumph, or do anything save under their
+orders.
+
+Alencon, the gentle duke, with whom she had taken so much trouble, and
+who had grown into a true and noble comrade, made one effort to free
+his friend and leader. He planned an expedition into Normandy, where,
+with the help of Jeanne, he hoped to inflict upon the English a loss
+so tremendous, the destruction of their base of operations, that they
+would be compelled to abandon the centre of France altogether, and
+leave the way open to Paris and to the recovery of the entire kingdom;
+but the King, or La Tremoille, as the historians prefer to say, would
+not permit Jeanne to accompany him, and this hope came to nothing.
+Alencon disbanded his troops, everything in the form of an army was
+broken up--the short period of feudal service making this inevitable,
+unless new levies were made--and no forces were left under arms except
+those bands which formed the body-guard of the King. Nevertheless,
+there was plenty of work to be done still, and the breaking up of the
+French forces encouraged many a little garrison of English partisans,
+which would have yielded naturally and easily to a strong national
+party.
+
+In the midst of the winter, however, it seemed appropriate to the
+Court to launch forth an expedition against some of the unsubdued
+towns, perhaps on account of the mortal languishment of Jeanne
+herself, perhaps for some other reason of its own. The first necessity
+was to collect the necessary forces, and for this reason Jeanne came
+to Bourges, where she was lodged in one of the great houses of the
+city, that of Raynard de Bouligny, /conseiller de roi/, and his wife,
+Marguerite, one of the Queen's ladies. She was there for three weeks
+collecting her men, and the noble gentlewoman, who was her hostess,
+was afterwards in the Rehabilitation trial, one of the witnesses to
+the purity of her life.
+
+From this lady and others we have a clear enough view of what the Maid
+was in this second chapter of her history. She spent her time in the
+most intimate intercourse with Madam Marguerite, sharing even her
+room, so that nothing could be more complete than the knowledge of her
+hostess of every detail of her young guest's life. And wonderful as
+was the difference between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most
+famous woman in France, the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her
+country, is as the life of Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,--as simple,
+as devout, and as pure. She loved to go to church for the early
+matins, but as it was not fit that she should go out alone at that
+hour, she besought Madame Marguerite to go with her. In the evening
+she went to the nearest church, and there with all her old childish
+love for the church bells, she had them rung for half an hour, calling
+together the poor, the beggars who haunt every Catholic church, the
+poor friars and bedesmen, the penniless and forlorn from all the
+neighbourhood. This custom would, no doubt, soon become known, and not
+only her poor pensioners, but the general crowd would gather to gaze
+at the Maid as well as to join in her prayers. It was her great
+pleasure to sing a hymn to the Virgin, probably one of the litanies
+which the unlearned worshipper loves, with its choruses and constant
+repetitions, in company with all those untutored voices, in the
+dimness of the church, while the twilight sank into night, and the
+twinkling stars of candles on the altar made a radiance in the middle
+of the gloom. When she had money to give she divided it, according to
+the liberal custom of her time, among her poor fellow-worshippers.
+These evening services were her recreation. The days were full of
+business, of enrolling soldiers, and regulating the "lances," groups
+of retainers, headed by their lord, who came to perform their feudal
+service.
+
+The ladies of the town who had the advantage of knowing Madame
+Marguerite did not fail to avail themselves of this privilege, and
+thronged to visit her wonderful guest. They brought her their sacred
+medals and rosaries to bless, and asked her a hundred questions. Was
+she afraid of being wounded; or was she assured that she would not be
+wounded? "No more than others," she said; and she put away their
+religious ornaments with a smile, bidding Madame Marguerite touch
+them, or the visitors themselves, which would be just as good as if
+she did it. She would seem to have been always smiling, friendly,
+checking with a laugh the adulation of her visitors, many of whom wore
+medals with her own effigy (if only one had been saved for us!) as
+there were many banners made after the pattern of hers. But cheerful
+as she was, a prevailing tone of sadness now appears to run through
+her life. On several occasions she spoke to her confessor and
+chaplain, who attended her everywhere, of her death. "If it should be
+my fate to die soon, tell the King our master on my part to build
+chapels where prayer may be made to the Most High for the salvation of
+the souls of those who shall die in the wars for the defence of the
+kingdom." This was the one thing she seemed anxious for, and it
+returned again and again to her mind. Her thoughts indeed were heavy
+enough. Her larger enterprises had been cruelly put a stop to: her
+companions-in-arms had been dispersed: she had been separated from
+her lieutenant Alencon, and from all the friends between whom and
+herself great mutual confidence had sprung up. Even the commission
+which had at last been put in her hands was a trifling one and led to
+nothing, bringing the King no nearer to any satisfactory end: and the
+troops were under command of a new captain whom she scarcely knew,
+d'Albert, who was the son-in-law of La Tremoille, and probably little
+inclined to be a friend to Jeanne. In these circumstances there was
+little of an exhilarating or promising kind.
+
+Nevertheless as an episode, few things had happened to Jeanne more
+memorable than the siege of St. Pierre-le-Moutier. The first assault
+upon the town was unsuccessful; the retreat had sounded and the troops
+were streaming back from the point of attack, when Jean d'Aulon, the
+faithful friend and brave gentleman who was at the head of the Maid's
+military household, being himself wounded in the heel and unable to
+stand or walk, saw the Maid almost alone before the stronghold, four
+or five men only with her. He dragged himself up as well as he could
+upon his horse, and hastened towards her, calling out to her to ask
+what she did there, and why she did not retire with the rest. She
+answered him, taking off her helmet to speak, that she would leave
+only when the place was taken--and went on shouting for faggots and
+beams to make a bridge across the ditch. It is to be supposed that
+seeing she paid no attention, nor budged a step from that dangerous
+point, this brave man, wounded though he was, must have made an effort
+to rally the retiring besiegers: but Jeanne seems to have taken no
+notice of her desertion nor ever to have paused in her shout for
+planks and gabions. "All to the bridge," she shouted, "/aux fagots et
+aux claies tout le monde!/ every one to the bridge." "Jeanne,
+withdraw, withdraw! You are alone," some one said to her. Bareheaded,
+her countenance all aglow, the Maid replied: "I have still with me
+fifty thousand of my men." Were those the men whom the prophet's
+servant saw when his eyes were opened and he beheld the innumerable
+company of angels that surrounded his master? But Jeanne, rapt in the
+trance and ecstasy of battle, gave no explanation. "To work, to work!"
+her clear voice went on, ringing over the startled head of the good
+knight who knew war, but not any rapture like this. History itself,
+awe-stricken, would almost have us believe that alone with her own
+hand the Maid took the city, so entirely does every figure disappear
+but that one, and the perplexed and terrified spectator vainly urging
+her to give up so desperate an attempt. But no doubt the shouts of a
+voice so strange to every such scene, the /vox infantile/, the amazing
+and clear voice, silvery and womanly, /assez femme/, and the efforts
+of d'Aulon to bring back the retreating troops were successful, and
+Jeanne once more, triumphantly kept her word. The place was strongly
+fortified, well provisioned, and full of people. Therefore the whole
+narrative is little less than miraculous, though very little is said
+of it. Had they but persevered, as she had said, a few hours longer
+before Paris, who could tell that the same result might not have been
+obtained?
+
+She was not successful, however, with La Charite, which after a siege
+of a month's duration still held out, and had to be abandoned. These
+long operations of regular warfare were not in Jeanne's way; and her
+coadjutor in command, it must be remembered, was in this case
+commissioned by her chief enemy. We are told that she was left without
+supplies, and in the depths of winter, in cold and rain and snow, with
+every movement hampered, and the ineffective government ever ready to
+send orders of retreat, or to cause bewildering and confusing delays
+by the want of every munition of war. Finally, at all events, the
+French forces withdrew, and again an unsuccessful enterprise was added
+to the record of the once victorious Maid. That she went on
+continually promising victory as in her early times, is probably the
+mere rumour spread by her detractors who were now so many, for there
+is no real evidence that she did so. Everything rather points to
+discouragement, uncertainty, and to a silent rage against the coercion
+which she could not overcome.
+----------
+[1] Clermont it was who deserted the Scots at the Battle of the
+    Herrings.
+
+[2] Jeanne's arms, offered at St. Denis, were afterwards taken by the
+    English and sent to the King of England (all except the sword with
+    its ornaments of gold) without giving anything to the church in
+    return: "qui est pur sacrilege et manifeste," says Jean Chartier.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+COMPIEGNE.
+1430.
+
+By this time France was once more all in flames: the English and
+Burgundians had entered and then abandoned Paris--Duke Philip
+cynically leaving that city, which he had promised to give up to
+Charles, to its own protection, in order to look after his more
+pressing personal concerns: while Bedford spread fire and flame about
+the adjacent country, retaking with much slaughter many of the towns
+which had opened their gates to the King. Thus while Charles gave no
+attention to anything beyond the Loire, and kept his chief champion
+there, as it were, on the leash, permitting no return to the most
+important field of operations, almost all that had been gained was
+again lost upon the banks of the Seine. This was the state of affairs
+when Jeanne returned humbled and sad from the abandoned siege of La
+Charite. Her enemy's counsels had triumphed all round and this was the
+result. Individual fightings of no particular account and under no
+efficient organisation were taking place day by day; here a town stood
+out heroically, there another yielded to the foreign arms; the
+population were thrown back into universal misery, the spring fields
+trampled under foot, the villages burned, every evil of war in full
+operation, invasion aggravated by faction, the English always aided by
+one side of France against the other, and neither peace nor security
+anywhere.
+
+This was the aspect of affairs on one side. On the other appeared a
+still less satisfactory scene. Charles amusing himself, his
+counsellors, La Tremoille, and the Archbishop of Rheims carrying on
+fictitious negotiations with Burgundy and playing with the Maid who
+was in their power, sending her out to make a show and cast a spell,
+then dragging her back at the end of their shameful chain: while the
+Court, the King and Queen, and all their flattering attendants gilded
+that chain and tried to make her forget by fine clothes and caresses,
+at once her mission and her despair. They were not ungrateful, no: let
+us do them justice, for they might well have added this to the number
+of their sins: mantles of cloth of gold, patents of nobility were at
+her command, had these been what she wanted. The only personal wrong
+they did to Jeanne was to set up against her a sort of opposition,
+another enchantress and visionary who had "voices" and apparitions
+too, and who was admitted to all the councils and gave her advice in
+contradiction of the Maid, a certain Catherine de la Rochelle, who was
+ready to say anything that was put into her mouth, but who had done
+nothing to prove any mission for France or from God. We have little
+light however upon the state of affairs in those castles, which one
+after another were the abode of the Court during this disastrous
+winter. They were safe enough on the other side of the Loire in the
+fat country where the vines still flourished and the young corn grew.
+Now and then a band of armed men was sent forth to succour a fighting
+town in the suffering and struggling Ile-de-France, always under the
+conflicting orders of those intrigants and courtiers: but within the
+Court, all was gay; "never man," as rough La Hire had said on an
+earlier occasion, "lost his kingdom more gaily or with better grace"
+than did Charles. Where was La Hire? Where was Dunois?--there is no
+appearance of these champions anywhere. Alencon had returned to his
+province. Only La Tremoille and the Archbishop holding all the strings
+in their hands, upsetting all military plans, disgusting every chief,
+met and talked and carried on their busy intrigues, and played their
+Sibyl--/Sibylle de carrefour/, says one of the historians indignantly
+--against the Maid, who, all discouraged and downcast, fretted by
+caresses, sick of inactivity, dragged out the uneasy days in an
+uncongenial world; but Jeanne has left no record of the sensations
+with which she saw these days pass, eating her heart out, gazing over
+that rapid river, on the other side of which all the devils were
+unchained and every result of her brief revolution was being lost.
+
+At length however the impatience and despair were more than she could
+bear; the Court was then at Sully and the spring had begun with its
+longer days and more passable roads. Without a word to anyone the Maid
+left the castle. The war had rolled towards these princely walls, as
+near as Melun, which was threatened by the English. A little band of
+intimate servants and associates, her two brothers, and a few faithful
+followers, were with her. So far as we know she never saw Charles or
+his courtiers again. They arrived at Melun in time to witness and to
+take part in the repulse of the English, and it was here that a
+communication was make to Jeanne by her saints of which afterwards
+there was frequent mention. Little had been said of them during her
+dark time of inaction, and their tone was no longer as of old. It was
+on the side of the moat of Melun where probably she was superintending
+some necessary work to strengthen the fortifications or to put them in
+better order for defence, that this message reached her. The "Voices"
+which so often had urged her to victory and engaged the faith of
+heaven for her success, had now a word to say, secret and personal to
+herself. It was that she should be taken prisoner; and the date was
+fixed, before the St. Jean. It was the middle of April when this
+communication was made and the Feast of St. Jean, as everybody knows,
+is in the end of June; two months only to work in, to strike another
+blow for France. The "Voices" bade her not to fear, that God would
+sustain her. But it would be impossible not to be startled by such a
+sudden intimation in the midst of her reviving plans. The Maid made
+one terrified prayer, that God would let her die when she was taken,
+not subject her to long imprisonment; her heart prophetically sprang
+to a sudden consciousness of the most likely, most terrible end that
+lay before her, for she had been often enough threatened with the
+stake and the fire to know what to expect. But the saintly voices made
+no reply. They bade her be strong and of good courage: is not that the
+all-sustaining, all-delusive message for every martyr? It was the will
+of God, and His support and sustaining power, which we often take to
+mean deliverance, but which is not always so--were promised. She asked
+where this terrible thing was to happen, but received no reply.
+Natural and simple as she was, she confessed afterwards that had she
+known she was to be taken on any certain day, she would not have gone
+out to meet the catastrophe unless she had been forced by evident duty
+to do so. But this was not revealed to her. "Before the St. Jean!" It
+must almost have seemed a guarantee that until that time or near it
+she was safe. She would seem to have said nothing immediately of this
+vision to sadden those about her.
+
+In the meantime, however, there were other adventures in store for
+her. From Melun to Lagny was no long journey, but it was through a
+country full of enemies in which she must have been subject to attack
+at every corner of every road or field. And she had not been long in
+the latter place which is said to have had a garrison of Scots, when
+news came of the passing of a band of Burgundians, a troop of raiders
+indeed, ravaging the country, taking advantage of the war to rob and
+lay waste churches, villages, and the growing fields wherever they
+passed. The troops was led by Franquet d'Arras, a famous "/pillard/,"
+robber of God and man. Jeanne set out to encounter this bandit with a
+party of some four hundred men, and various noble companions, among
+whom, however, we find no name familiar in her previous career, a
+certain Hugh Kennedy, a Scot, who is to be met with in various records
+of fighting, being one of the most notable among them. Franquet's band
+fought vigorously but were cut to pieces, and the leader was taken
+prisoner. When this man was brought back to Lagny, a prisoner to be
+ransomed, and whom Jeanne desired to exchange for one of her own side,
+the law laid claim to him as a criminal. He was a prisoner of war:
+what was it the Maid's duty to do? The question is hotly debated by
+the historians and it was brought against her at her trial. He was a
+murderer, a robber, the scourge of the country--especially to the poor
+whom Jeanne protected and cared for everywhere, was he pitiless and
+cruel. She gave him up to justice, and he was tried, condemned, and
+beheaded. If it was wrong from a military point of view, it was her
+only error, and shows how little there was with which to reproach her.
+
+In Lagny other things passed of a more private nature. Every day and
+all day long her "voices" repeated their message in her ears. "Before
+the St. Jean." She repeated it to some of her closest comrades but
+left herself no time to dwell upon it. Still worse than the giving up
+of Franquet was the supposed resuscitation of a child, born dead,
+which its parents implored her to pray for that it might live again to
+be baptised. She explained the story to her judges afterwards. It was
+the habit of the time, nay, we believe continues to this day in some
+primitive places, to lay the dead infant on the altar in such a case,
+in hope of a miracle. "It is true," said Jeanne, "that the maidens of
+the town were all assembled in the church praying God to restore life
+that it might be baptised. It is also true that I went and prayed with
+them. The child opened its eyes, yawned three or four times, was
+christened and died. This is all I know." The miracle is not one that
+will find much credit nowadays. But the devout custom was at least
+simple and intelligible enough, though it afforded an excellent
+occasion to attribute witchcraft to the one among those maidens who
+was not of Lagny but of God.
+
+From Lagny Jeanne went on to various other places in danger, or which
+wanted encouragement and help. She made two or three hurried visits to
+Compiegne, which was threatened by both parties of the enemy; at one
+time raising the siege of Choicy, near Compiegne, in company with the
+Archbishop of Rheims, a strange brother in arms. On another of her
+visits to Compiegne there is said to have occurred an incident which,
+if true, reveals to us with very sad reality the trouble that
+overshadowed the Maid. She had gone to early mass in the Church of St.
+Jacques, and communicated, as was her custom. It must have been near
+Easter--perhaps the occasion of the first communion of some of the
+children who are so often referred to, among whom she loved to
+worship. She had retired behind a pillar on which she leaned as she
+stood, and a number of people, among whom were many children, drew
+near after the service to gaze at her. Jeanne's heart was full, and
+she had no one near to whom she could open it and relieve her soul. As
+she stood against the pillar her trouble burst forth. "Dear friends
+and children," she said, "I have to tell you that I have been sold and
+betrayed, and will soon be given up to death. I beg of you to pray for
+me; for soon I shall no longer have any power to serve the King and
+the kingdom." These words were told to the writer who records them, in
+the year 1498, by two very old men who had heard them, being children
+at the time. The scene was one to dwell in a child's recollection,
+and, if true, it throws a melancholy light upon the thoughts that
+filled the mind of Jeanne, though her actions may have seemed as
+energetic and her impulses as strong as in her best days.
+
+At last the news came speeding through the country that Compiegne was
+being invested on all sides. It had been the headquarters of Charles
+and had received him with acclamations, and therefore the alarm of the
+townsfolk for the retribution awaiting them, should they fall into the
+hands of the enemy, was great; it was besides a very important
+position. Jeanne was at Crespy en Valois when this news reached her.
+She set out immediately (May 22, 1430) to carry aid to the garrison:
+"/F'irai voir mes bons amis de Compiegne/," she said. The words are on
+the base of her statue which now stands in the Place of that town.
+Something of her early impetuosity was in this impulse, and no
+apparent dread of any fatality. She rode all night at the head of her
+party, and arrived before the dawn, a May morning, the 23d, still a
+month from the fatal "St. Jean." Though the prophecy was always in her
+ears, she must have felt that whole month still before her, with a
+sensation of almost greater safety because the dangerous moment was
+fixed. The town received her with joy, and no doubt the satisfaction
+and relief which hailed her and her reinforcements gave additional
+fervour to the Maid, and drove out of her mind for a moment the fatal
+knowledge which oppressed it. There is some difficulty in
+understanding the events of this day, but the lucid narrative of
+Quicherat, which we shall now quote, gives a very vivid picture of it.
+Jeanne had timed her arrival so early in the morning, probably with
+the intention of keeping the adversaries in their camps unaware of so
+important an addition to the garrison, in order that she might
+surprise them by the sortie she had determined upon; but no doubt the
+news had leaked forth somehow, if through no other means, by the
+sudden ringing of the bells and sounds of joy from the city. She paid
+her usual visits to the churches, and noted and made all her
+arrangements for the sortie with her usual care, occupying the long
+summer day in these preparations. And it was not till five o'clock in
+the evening that everything was complete, and she sallied forth. We
+hear nothing of the state of the town, or of any suspicion existing at
+the time as to the governor Flavy who was afterwards believed by some
+to be the man who sold and betrayed her. It is a question debated
+warmly like all these questions. He was a man of bad reputation, but
+there is no evidence that he was a traitor. The incidents are all
+natural enough, and seem to indicate clearly the mere fortune of war
+upon which no man can calculate. We add from Quicherat the description
+of the field and what took place there:
+
+"Compiegne is situated on the left bank of the Oise. On the other side
+extends a great meadow, nearly a mile broad, at the end of which the
+rising ground of Picardy rises suddenly like a wall, shutting in the
+horizon. The meadow is so low and so subject to floods that it is
+crossed by an ancient foot of the low hills. Three village churches
+mark the extent of the landscape visible from the walls of Compiegne;
+Margny (sometimes spelt Marigny) at the end of the road; Clairoix
+three quarters of a league higher up, at the confluence of the two
+rivers, the Aronde and the Oise, close to the spot where another
+tributary, the Aisne, also flows into the Oise; and Venette a mile and
+a half lower down. The Burgundians had one camp at Margny, another at
+Clairoix; the headquarters of the English were at Venette. As for the
+inhabitants of Compiegne, their first defence facing the enemy was one
+of those redoubts or towers which the chronicles of the fifteenth
+century called a boulevard. It was placed at the end of the bridge and
+commanded the road.
+
+"The plan of the Maid was to make a sortie towards the evening, to
+attack Margny and afterwards Clairoix, and then at the opening of the
+Aronde valley to meet the Duke of Burgundy and his forces who were
+lodged there, and who would naturally come to the aid of his other
+troops when attacked. She took no thought for the English, having
+already carefully arranged with Flavy how they should be prevented
+from cutting off her retreat. The governor provided against any chance
+of this by arming the boulevard strongly with archers to drive off any
+advancing force, and also by keeping ready on the Oise a number of
+covered boats to receive the foot-soldiers in case of a retrograde
+movement.
+
+"The action began well: the garrison of Margny yielded in the
+twinkling of an eye. That of Clairoix rushing to the support of their
+brothers in arms was repulsed, then in its turn repulsed the French;
+and three times this alternative of advance and retreat took place on
+the flat ground of the meadow without serious injury to either party.
+This gave time to the English to take part in the fray;[1] though
+thanks to the precautions of Flavy all they could do was to swell the
+ranks of the Burgundians. But unfortunately the rear of the Maid's
+army was struck with the possibility that a diversion might be
+attempted from behind, and their retreat cut off. A panic seized them;
+they broke their ranks, turned back and fled, some to the boats, some
+to the barrier of the boulevard. The English witnessing this flight
+rushed after them, secure now on the side of Compiegne, where the
+archers no longer ventured to shoot lest they should kill the
+fugitives instead of the enemies. They (the English) thus got
+possession of the raised road, and pushed on so hotly after the
+fugitives that their horses' heads touched the backs of the crowd. It
+thus became necessary for the safety of the town to close the gates
+until the barrier of the boulevard should be set up again."
+
+*****
+
+These disastrous accidents had taken place while Jeanne, charging in
+front with her companions and body-guard, remained quite unaware of
+any misfortune. She would hear no call to retreat, even when her
+companions were roused to the dangers of their position. "Forward,
+they are ours!" was all her cry. As at St. Pierre-le-Moutier she was
+ready to defeat the Burgundian army alone. At length the others
+perceiving something of what had happened seized her bridle and forced
+her to retire. She was of herself too remarkable a figure to be
+concealed amid the group of armed men who rode with her, encircling
+her, defending the rear of the flying party. Over her armour she wore
+a crimson tunic, or according to some authorities a short cloak, of
+gorgeous material embroidered with gold, and though by this time the
+twilight must have afforded a partial shelter, yet the knowledge that
+she was there gave keenness to every eye. Behind, the scattered
+Burgundians had rallied and begun to pursue, while the armour and
+spears of the English glittered in front between the little party and
+the barrier which was blocked by a terrified crowd of fugitives. Even
+then a party of horsemen might have cut their way through; but at the
+moment when Jeanne and her followers drew near, the barrier was
+sharply closed and the wild, confused, and fighting crowd, treading
+each other down, struggling for life, were forced back upon the
+English lances. Thus the retreating band riding hard along the raised
+road, in order and unbroken, found the path suddenly barred by the
+forces of the enemy, the fugitives of their own army, and the closed
+gates of the town.
+
+An attempt was then made by the Maid and her companions to turn
+towards the western gate where there still might have been a chance of
+safety; but by this time the smaller figure among all those steel-clad
+men, and the waving mantle, must have been distinguished through the
+dusk and the dust. There was a wild rush of combat and confusion, and
+in a moment she was surrounded, seized, her horse and her person,
+notwithstanding all resistance. With cries of "Rendez vous," and many
+an evil name, fierce faces and threatening weapons closed round her.
+One of her assailants--a Burgundian knight, a Picard archer, the
+accounts differ--caught her by her mantle and dragged her from her
+horse; no Englishman let us be thankful, though no doubt all were
+equally eager and ready. Into the midst of that shouting mass of men,
+in the blinding cloud of dust, in the darkening of the night, the Maid
+of France disappeared for one terrible moment, and was lost to view.
+And then, and not till then, came a clamour of bells into the night,
+and all the steeples of Compiegne trembled with the call to arms, a
+sally to save the deliverer. Was it treachery? Was it only a
+perception, too late, of the danger? There are not wanting voices to
+say that a prompt sally might have saved Jeanne, and that it was quite
+within the power of the Governor and city had they chosen. Who can
+answer so dreadful a suggestion? it is too much shame to human nature
+to believe it. Perhaps within Compiegne as without, they were too slow
+to perceive the supreme moment, too much overwhelmed to snatch any
+chance of rescue till it was too late.
+
+Happily we have no light upon the tumult around the prisoner, the ugly
+triumph, the shouts and exultation of the captors who had seized the
+sorceress at last; nor upon the thoughts of Jeanne, with her
+threatened doom fulfilled and unknown horrors before her, upon which
+imagination must have thrown the most dreadful light, however strongly
+her courage was sustained by the promise of succour from on high. She
+had not been sent upon this mission as of old. No heavenly voice had
+said to her "Go and deliver Compiegne." She had undertaken that
+warfare on her own charges with no promise to encourage her, only the
+certainty of being overthrown "before the St. Jean." But the St. Jean
+was still far off, a long month of summer days between her and that
+moment of fate! So far as we can see Jeanne showed no unseemly
+weakness in this dark hour. One account tells us that she held her
+sword high over her head declaring that it was given by a higher than
+any who could claim its surrender there. But she neither struggled nor
+wept. Not a word against her constancy and courage could any one, then
+or after, find to say. The Burgundian chronicler tells us one thing,
+the French another. "The Maid, easily recognised by her costume of
+crimson and by the standard which she carried in her hand, alone
+continued to defend herself," says one; but that we are sure could not
+have been the case as long as d'Aulon, who accompanied her, was still
+able to keep on his horse. "She yielded and gave her parole to
+Lyonnel, batard de Wandomme," says another; but Jeanne herself
+declares that she gave her faith to no one, reserving to herself the
+right to escape if she could. In that dark evening scene nothing is
+clear except the fact that the Maid was taken, to the exultation and
+delight of her captors and to the terror and grief of the unhappy
+town, vainly screaming with all its bells to arms,--and with its sons
+and champions by hundreds dying under the English lances and in the
+dark waves of the Oise.
+
+The archer or whoever it was who secured this prize, took Jeanne back,
+along the bloody road with its relics of the fight, to Margny, the
+Burgundian camp, where the leaders crowded together to see so
+important a prisoner. "Thither came soon after," says Monstrelet, "the
+Duke of Burgundy from his camp of Coudon, and there assembled the
+English, the said Duke and those of the other camps in great numbers,
+making, one with the other, great cries and rejoicings on the taking
+of the Maid: whom the said Duke went to see in the lodging where she
+was and spoke some words to her which I cannot call to mind, though I
+was there present; after which the said Duke and the others withdrew
+for the night, leaving the Maid in the keeping of Messer John of
+Luxembourg"--to whom she had been immediately sold by her first
+captor. The same night, Philip, this noble Duke and Prince of France,
+wrote a letter to convey the blessed information:
+
+ "The great news of this capture should be spread everywhere and
+  brought to the knowledge of all, that they may see the error of
+  those who could believe and lend themselves to the pretensions of
+  such a woman. We write this in the hope of giving you joy,
+  comfort, and consolation, and that you may thank God our Creator.
+  Pray that it may be His holy will to be more and more favourable
+  to the enterprises of our royal master and to the restoration of
+  his sway over all his good and faithful subjects."
+
+This royal master was Henry VI. of England, the baby king, doomed
+already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and
+reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally,
+have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on
+that of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English,
+which is hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could
+in no way be attributed to the other nation of which he was the
+natural enemy, or at least, antagonist. Very naturally the subsequent
+proceedings in all their horror and cruelty are equally put down to
+the English account, although Frenchmen took, exulted over as a
+prisoner, tried and condemned as an enemy of God and the Church, the
+spotless creature who was France incarnate, the very embodiment of her
+country in all that was purest and noblest. We shall see with what
+spontaneous zeal all France, except her own small party, set to work
+to accomplish this noble office.
+
+Almost before one could draw breath the University of Paris claimed
+her as a proper victim for the Inquisition. Compiegne made no sally
+for her deliverance; Charles, no attempt to ransom her. From end to
+end of France not a finger was lifted for her rescue; the women wept
+over her, the poor people still crowded around the prisoner wherever
+seen, but the France of every public document, of every practical
+power, the living nation, when it did not utter cries of hatred, kept
+silence. We in England have over and over again acknowledged with
+shame our guilty part in her murder; but still to this day the
+Frenchman tries to shield his under cover of the English influence and
+terror. He cannot deny La Tremoille, nor Cauchon, nor the University,
+nor the learned doctors who did the deed; individually he is ready to
+give them all up to the everlasting fires which one cannot but hope
+are kept alive for some people in spite of all modern benevolences;
+but he skilfully turns back to the English as a moving cause of
+everything. Nothing can be more untrue. The English were not better
+than the French, but they had the excuse at least of being the enemy.
+France saved by a happy chance her /blanches mains/ from the actual
+blood of the pure and spotless Maid; but with exultation she prepared
+the victim for the stake, sent her thither, played with her like a cat
+with a mouse and condemned her to the fire. This is not to free us
+from our share: but it is the height of hypocrisy to lay the blood of
+Jeanne, entirely to our door.
+
+Thus Jeanne's inspiration proved itself over again in blood and tears;
+it had been proved already on battle-field and city wall, with loud
+trumpets of joy and victory. But the "voices" had spoken again,
+sounding another strain; not always of glory--it is not the way of
+God; but of prison, downfall, distress. "Be not astonished at it,"
+they said to her; "God will be with you." From day to day they had
+spoken in the same strain, with no joyful commands to go forth and
+conquer, but the one refrain: "Before the St. Jean." Perhaps there was
+a certain relief in her mind at first when the blow fell and the
+prophecy was accomplished. All she had to do now was to suffer, not to
+be surprised, to trust in God that He would support her. To Jeanne, no
+doubt, in the confidence and inexperience of her youth, that meant
+that God would deliver her. And so He did; but not as she expected.
+The sunshine of her life was over, and now the long shadow, the bitter
+storm was to come.
+
+Nothing could be more remarkable than the response of France in
+general to this extraordinary event. In Paris there were bonfires
+lighted to show their joy, the /Te Deum/ was sung at Notre Dame. At
+the Court Charles and his counsellors amused themselves with another
+prophet, a shepherd from the hills who was to rival Jeanne's best
+achievements, but never did so. Only the towns which she had delivered
+had still a tender thought for Jeanne. At Tours the entire population
+appeared in the streets with bare feet, singing the /Miserere/ in
+penance and affliction. Orleans and Blois made public prayers for her
+safety. Rheims, in which there was much independent interest in Jeanne
+and her truth, had to be specially soothed by a letter from the
+Archbishop, in which he made out with great cleverness that it was the
+fault of Jeanne alone that she was taken. "She did nothing but by her
+own will, without obeying the commandments of God," he says; "she
+would hear no counsel, but followed her own pleasure,"; and it is in
+this letter that we hear of the shepherd lad who was to replace
+Jeanne, and that it was his opinion or revelation that God had
+suffered the Maid to be taken because of her growing pride, because
+she loved fine clothes, and preferred her own will to any guidance. We
+do not know whether this contented the city of Rheims; similar
+reasoning however seems to have silenced France. Nobody uttered a
+protest, nor struck a blow; the mournful procession of Tours, where
+she had been first known in the outset of her career, the prayers of
+Orleans which she had delivered, are the only exceptions we know of.
+Otherwise there was lifted in France neither voice nor hand to avert
+her doom.
+----------
+[1] The three camps must have formed a sort of irregular triangle. The
+    English at Venette being only half a mile from the gates of
+    Compiegne.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CAPTIVE.
+MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+
+We have here to remark a complete suspension of all the ordinary laws
+at once of chivalry and of honest warfare. Jeanne had been captured as
+a general at the head of her forces. She was a prisoner of war. Such a
+prisoner ordinarily, even in the most cruel ages, is in no bodily
+danger. He is worth more alive than dead--a great ransom perhaps--
+perhaps the very end of the warfare, and the accomplishment of
+everything it was intended to gain: at least he is most valuable to
+exchange for other important prisoners on the opposite side. It was
+like taking away so much personal property to kill a prisoner, an
+outrage deeply resented by his captor and unjustified by any law. It
+was true that Jeanne herself had transgressed this universal custom
+but a little while before, by giving up Franquet d'Arras to his
+prosecutors. But Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted
+criminal, robber, and destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have
+departed from the military laws of right and wrong while everything in
+the country was under the hasty arbitration of war. No one, however,
+so far as we know, produces this matter of Franquet as a precedent in
+her own case. From the first moment of her seizure there was no
+question of the custom and privilege of warfare. She was taken as a
+wild animal might have been taken, the only doubt being how to make
+the most signal example of her. Vengeance in the gloomy form of the
+Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such word as ransom was
+breathed from her own side, none was demanded, none was offered. Her
+case is at once separated from every other.
+
+Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed
+to be the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to
+succour and help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something
+of the subtle jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger
+side, but yet always existing, in the abrogation of every law of
+chivalry as well as of warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is
+indeed of the highest strain of generosity who can bear to be beaten
+by a woman. And all the seething, agitated world of France had been
+beaten by this girl. The English and Burgundians, in the ordinary
+sense of the word, had been overcome in fair field, forced to fly
+before her; the French, her own side, had experienced an even more
+penetrating downfall by having the honours of victory taken from them,
+she alone winning the day where they had all failed. This is bitterer,
+perhaps, than merely to be compelled to raise a siege or to fail in a
+fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions, but the praise was to Jeanne
+who never struck a blow. Such great hearts as Dunois, such a courteous
+prince as Alencon, were too magnanimous to feel, or at least to
+resent, the grievance; they seconded her and fought under her with a
+nobility of mind and disinterestedness beyond praise; but it was not
+to be supposed that the common mass of the French captains were like
+these; she had wronged and shamed them by taking the glory from them,
+as much as she had shamed the English by making those universal
+victors fly before her. The burghers whom she had rescued, the poor
+people who were her brethren and whom she sought everywhere, might
+weep and cry out to Heaven, but they were powerless at such a moment.
+And every law that might have helped her was pushed aside.
+
+On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears
+in the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and
+implacable of all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an
+hour, a letter was addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital.
+Quicherat speaks of it as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-
+general of the Inquisition, written by the officials of the
+University; others tell us that an independent letter was sent from
+the University to second that of the Inquisitor. The University we may
+add was not a university like one of ours, or like any existing at the
+present day. It was an ecclesiastical corporation of the highest
+authority in every cause connected with the Church, while gathering
+law, philosophy, and literature under its wing. The first theologians,
+the most eminent jurists were collected there, not by any means always
+in alliance with the narrower tendencies and methods of the
+Inquisition. It is notable, however, that this great institution lost
+no time in claiming the prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was
+less her career as a warrior than her position as a sorceress. The
+actual facts of her life were of secondary importance to them.
+Orleans, Rheims, even her attack upon Paris were nothing in comparison
+with the black art which they believed to be her inspiration. The
+guidance of Heaven which was not the guidance of the Church was to
+them a claim which meant only rebellion of the direst kind. They had
+longed to seize her and strip her of her presumptuous pretensions from
+the first moment of her appearance. They could not allow a day of her
+overthrow to pass by without snatching at this much-desired victim.
+
+No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial
+for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame,
+the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly
+attractive to the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped
+for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into
+which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better
+understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it
+is the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to
+extremity and fighting for its life through all the subtleties of
+thought and fierce attacks of interrogation--or the mere love of
+inflicting torture, misery, and death, which the Church was prevented
+from doing in the common way, it is impossible to tell; but there is
+no doubt that a thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the
+prey, a sense of horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the
+air, whenever such a tribunal is thought of. The thrill, the stir, the
+eagerness among those black birds of doom is more evident than usual
+in the headlong haste of that demand. /Sous l'influence de
+l'Angleterre/, say the historians; the more shame for them if it was
+so; but they were clearly under influence wider and more infallible,
+the influence of that instinct, whatever it may be, which makes a
+trial for heresy ten thousand times more cruel, less restrained by any
+humanities of nature, than any other kind of trial which history
+records.
+
+That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of
+Jeanne, "called the Maid," as having "dogmatised, sown, published, and
+caused to be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued
+great scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith." "Using
+the rights of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy
+See of Rome we instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the
+Catholic faith, and under penalty of the law: and all other Catholic
+persons of whatsoever condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate,
+to send or to bring as prisoner before us with all speed and surety
+the said Jeanne, vehemently suspected of various crimes springing from
+heresy, that proceedings may be taken against her before us in the
+name of the Holy Inquisition, and with the favour and aid of the
+doctors and masters of the University of Paris, and other notable
+counsellors present there."
+
+It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the
+University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry. We can only
+reply again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests! But
+there was very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there
+is an eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like
+the headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of
+action suggested by a third party. Nor is there anything to lead us to
+believe that the movement was not spontaneous. It is little likely,
+indeed, that the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any
+inspired maid, any more than the enlightened Oxford would do so. But
+the ideas of the fifteenth century were widely different, and
+witchcraft and heresy were the most enthralling and exciting of
+subjects, as they are still to whosoever believes in them, learned or
+unlearned, great or small.
+
+It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who
+loved Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths
+by this catastrophe. We have no sympathy with those who compare the
+career of any mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and
+passion of our Lord. Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous
+element the disappointment of their hopes must have been in the misery
+of the first disciples, the Apostles, the mother, all the spectators
+who had watched with wonder and faith the mission of the Messiah. Had
+it failed? had all the signs come to nothing, all those divine words
+and ways, to our minds so much more wonderful than any miracles? Was
+there no meaning in them? Were they mere unaccountable delusions,
+deceptions of the senses, inspirations perhaps of mere genius--not
+from God at all except in a secondary way? In the three terrible days
+that followed the Crucifixion the burden of a world must have lain on
+the minds of those who had seen every hope fail: no legions of angels
+appearing, no overwhelming revelation from heaven, no change in a
+moment out of misery into the universal kingship, the triumphant
+march. That was but the self-delusion of the earth which continually
+travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the most terrible of all
+despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest nothing should be
+true.
+
+But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the
+deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself.
+Were her first triumphs accidents merely, were her "voices" delusions,
+had she been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the
+servant? It was a stupor which quenched every voice--a great silence
+through the country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours.
+The Compiegne people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do
+not mention Jeanne at all. We need not immediately take into account
+the baser souls always plentiful, the envious captains and the rest
+who might be secretly rejoicing. The entire country, both friends and
+foes, had come to a dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The
+last circumstance of which we must remind the reader, and which was of
+the greatest importance, is, that it was only a small part of France
+that knew anything personally of Jeanne. From Tours it is a far cry to
+Picardy. All her triumphs had taken place in the south. The captive of
+Beaulieu and Beaurevoir spent the sad months of her captivity among a
+population which could have heard of her only by flying rumours coming
+from hostile quarters. From the midland of France to the sea, near to
+which her prison was situated, is a long way, and those northern
+districts were as unlike the Orleannais as if they had been in two
+different countries. Rouen in Normandy no more resembled Rheims, than
+Edinburgh resembled London: and in the fifteenth century that was
+saying a great deal. Nothing can be more deceptive than to think of
+these separate and often hostile duchies as if they bore any
+resemblance to the France of to-day.
+
+The captor of Jeanne was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg and took her
+as we have seen to the quarters of his master at Margny, into whose
+hands she thenceforward passed. She was kept in the camp three or four
+days and then transferred to the castle of Beaulieu, which belonged to
+him; and afterwards to the more important stronghold of Beaurevoir,
+which seems to have been his principal residence. We know very few
+details of her captivity. According to one chronicler, d'Aulon, her
+faithful friend and intendant, was with her at least in the former of
+those prisons, where at first she would appear to have been hopeful
+and in good spirits, if we may trust to the brief conversation between
+her and d'Aulon, which is one of the few details which reach us of
+that period. While he lamented over the probable fate of Compiegne she
+was confident. "That poor town of Compiegne that you loved so much,"
+he said, "by this time it will be in the hands of the enemies of
+France." "No," said the Maid, "the places which the king of Heaven
+brought back to the allegiance of the gentle King Charles by me, will
+not be retaken by his enemies." In this case at least the prophecy
+came true.
+
+And perhaps there might have been at first a certain relief in
+Jeanne's mind, such as often follows after a long threatened blow has
+fallen. She had no longer the vague tortures of suspense, and probably
+believed that she would be ransomed as was usual: and in this silence
+and seclusion her "voices" which she had not obeyed as at first, but
+yet which had not abandoned her, nor shown estrangement, were more
+near and audible than amid the noise and tumult of war. They spoke to
+her often, sometimes three times a day, as she afterwards said, in the
+unbroken quiet of her prison. And though they no longer spoke of new
+enterprises and victories, their words were full of consolation. But
+it was not long that Jeanne's young and vigorous spirit could content
+itself with inaction. She was no mystic; willingly giving herself over
+to dreams and visions is more possible to the old than to the young.
+Her confidence and hope for her good friends of Compiegne gave way
+before the continued tale of their sufferings, and the inveterate
+siege which was driving them to desperation. No doubt the worst news
+was told to Jeanne, and twice over she made a desperate attempt to
+escape, in hope of being able to succour them, but without any
+sanction, as she confesses, from her spiritual instructors. At
+Beaulieu the attempt was simple enough: the narrative seems to imply
+that the doorway, or some part of the wall of her room, had been
+closed with laths or planks nailed across an opening: and between
+these she succeeded in slipping, "as she was very slight," with the
+hope of locking the door to an adjoining guard-room upon the men who
+had charge of her, and thus getting free. But alas! The porter of the
+chateau, who had no business there, suddenly appeared in the corridor,
+and she was discovered and taken back to her chamber. At Beaurevoir,
+which was farther off, her attempt was a much more desperate one, and
+indicates a despair and irritation of mind which had become
+unbearable. At this place her own condition was much alleviated; the
+castle was the residence of Jean de Luxembourg's wife and aunt, ladies
+who visited Jeanne continually, and soon became interested and
+attached to her; but as the master of the house was himself in the
+camp before Compiegne, they had the advantage or disadvantage, as far
+as the prisoner was concerned, of constant news, and Jeanne's trouble
+for her friends grew daily.
+
+She seems, indeed, after the assurance she had expressed at first, to
+have fallen into great doubt and even carried on within herself a
+despairing argument with her spiritual guides on this point, battling
+with these saintly influences as in the depths of the troubled heart
+many have done with the Creator Himself in similar circumstances.
+"How," she cried, "could God let them perish who had been so good and
+loyal to their King?" St. Catherine replied gently that He would
+Himself care for these /bons amis/, and even promised that "before the
+St. Martin" relief would come. But Jeanne had probably by this time--
+in her great disappointment and loneliness, and with the sense in her
+of so much power to help were she only free--got beyond her own
+control. They bade her to be patient. One of them, amid their
+exhortations to accept her fate cheerfully, and not to be astonished
+at it, seems to have conveyed to her mind the impression that she
+should not be delivered till she had seen the King of England. "Truly
+I will not see him! I would rather die than fall into the hands of the
+English," cried Jeanne in her petulance. The King of England is spoken
+of always, it is curious to note, as if he had been a great, severe
+ruler like his father, never as the child he really was. But Jeanne in
+her helplessness and impotence was impatient even with her saints. Day
+by day the news came in from Compiegne, all that was favourable to the
+Burgundians received with joy and thanksgiving by the ladies of
+Luxembourg, while the captive consumed her heart with vain
+indignation. At last Jeanne would seem to have wrought herself up to
+the most desperate of expedients. Whether her room was in the donjon,
+or whether she was allowed sufficient freedom in the house to mount to
+the battlements there, we are not informed--probably the latter was
+the case: for it was from the top of the tower that the rash girl at
+last flung herself down, carried away by what sudden frenzy of alarm
+or sting of evil tidings can never be known. Probably she had hoped
+that a miracle would be wrought on her behalf, and that faith was all
+that was wanted, as on so many other occasions. Perhaps she had heard
+of the negotiations to sell her to the English, which would give a
+keener urgency to her determination to get free; all that appears in
+the story, however, is her wild anxiety about Compiegne and her /bons
+amis/. How she escaped destruction no one knows. She was rescued for a
+more tremendous and harder fate.
+
+The Maid was taken up as dead from the foot of the tower (the height
+is estimated at sixty feet); but she was not dead, nor even seriously
+hurt. Her frame, so slight that she had been able to slip between the
+bars put up to secure her, had so little solidity that the shock would
+seem to have been all that ailed her. She was stunned and unconscious
+and remained so far some time; and for three days neither ate nor
+drank. But though she was so humbled by the effects of the fall, "she
+was comforted by St. Catherine, who bade her confess and implore the
+mercy of God" for her rash disobedience--and repeated the promise that
+before Martinmas Compiegne should be relieved. Jeanne did not perhaps
+in her rebellion deserve this encouragement; but the heavenly ladies
+were kind and pitiful and did not stand upon their dignity. The
+wonderful thing was that Jeanne recovered perfectly from this
+tremendous leap.
+
+The earthly ladies, though so completely on the other side, were
+scarcely less kind to the Maid. They visited her daily, carried their
+news to her, were very friendly and sweet: and no doubt other visitors
+came to make the acquaintance of a prisoner so wonderful. There was
+one point on which they were very urgent, and this was about her
+dress. It shamed and troubled them to see her in the costume of a man.
+Jeanne had her good reasons for that, which perhaps she did not care
+to tell them, fearing to shock the ears of a demoiselle of Luxembourg
+with the suggestion of dangers of which she knew nothing. No doubt it
+was true that while doing the serious work of war, as she said
+afterwards, it was best that she should be dressed as a man; but
+Jeanne had reason to know besides, that it was safer, among the rough
+comrades and gaolers who now surrounded her, to wear the tight-fitting
+and firmly fastened dress of a soldier. She answered the ladies and
+their remonstrances with all the grace of a courtier. Could she have
+done it she would rather have yielded the point to them, she said,
+than to any one else in France, except the Queen. The women wherever
+she went were always faithful to this young creature, so pure-womanly
+in her young angel-hood and man-hood. The poor followed to kiss her
+hands or her armour, the rich wooed her with tender flatteries and
+persuasions. There is not record in all her career of any woman who
+was not her friend.
+
+For the last dreary month of that winter she was sent to the fortress
+of Crotoy on the Somme, for what reason we are not told, probably to
+be more near the English into whose hands she was about to be given
+up: again another shameful bargain in which the guilt lies with the
+Burgundians and not with the English. If Charles I. was sold as we
+Scots all indignantly deny, the shame of the sale was on our nation,
+not on England, whom nobody has ever blamed for the transaction. The
+sale of Jeanne was brutally frank. It was indeed a ransom which was
+paid to Jean of Luxembourg with a share to the first captor, the
+archer who had secured her; but it was simple blood-money as everybody
+knew. At Crotoy she had once more the solace of female society, again
+with much pressing upon her of their own heavy skirts and hanging
+sleeves. A fellow-prisoner in the dungeon of Crotoy, a priest, said
+mass every day and gave her the holy communion. And her mind seems to
+have been soothed and calmed. Compiegne was relieved; the saints had
+kept their word: she had that burden the less upon her soul: and over
+the country there were against stirrings of French valour and success.
+The day of the Maid was over, but it began to bear the fruit of a
+national quickening of vigour and life.
+
+It was at Crotoy, in December, that she was transferred to English
+hands. The eager offer of the University of Paris to see her speedy
+condemnation had not been accepted, and perhaps the Burgundians had
+been willing to wait, to see if any ransom was forthcoming from
+France. Perhaps too, Paris, which sang the /Te Deum/ when she was
+taken prisoner, began to be a little startled by its own enthusiasm
+and to ask itself the question what there was to be so thankful about?
+--a result which has happened before in the history of that impulsive
+city:--and Paris was too near the centre of France, where the balance
+seemed to be turning again in favour of the national party, to have
+its thoughts distracted by such a trial as was impending. It seemed
+better to the English leaders to conduct their prisoner to a safer
+place, to the depths of Normandy where they were most strong. They
+seem to have carried her away in the end of the year, travelling
+slowly along the coast, and reaching Rouen by way of Eu and Dieppe, as
+far away as possible from any risk of rescue. She arrived in Rouen in
+the beginning of the year 1431, having thus been already for nearly
+eight months in close custody. But there were no further ministrations
+of kind women for Jeanne. She was now distinctly in the hands of her
+enemies, those who had no sympathy or natural softening of feeling
+towards her.
+
+The severities inflicted upon her in her new prison at Rouen were
+terrible, almost incredible. We are told that she was kept in an iron
+cage (like the Countess of Buchan in earlier days by Edward I.), bound
+hands, and feet, and throat, to a pillar, and watched incessantly by
+English soldiers--the latter being an abominable and hideous method of
+torture which was never departed from during the rest of her life.
+Afterwards, at the beginning of her trial she was relieved from the
+cage, but never from the presence and scrutiny of this fierce and
+hateful bodyguard. Such detestable cruelties were in the manner of the
+time, which does not make us the less sicken at them with burning
+indignation and the rage of shame. For this aggravation of her
+sufferings England alone was responsible. The Burgundians at their
+worst had not used her so. It is true that she was to them a piece of
+valuable property worth so much good money; which is a powerful
+argument everywhere. But to the English she meant no money: no one
+offered to ransom Jeanne on the side of her own party, for whom she
+had done so much. Even at Tours and Orleans, so far as appears, there
+was no subscription--to speak in modern terms,--no cry among the
+burghers to gather their crowns for her redemption--not a word, not an
+effort, only a barefooted procession, a mass, a Miserere, which had no
+issue. France stood silent to see what would come of it; and her
+scholars and divines swarmed towards Rouen to make sure that nothing
+but harm should come of it to the ignorant country lass, who had set
+up such pretences of knowing better than others. The King
+congratulated himself that he had another prophetess as good as she,
+and a Heaven-sent boy from the mountains who would do as well and
+better than Jeanne. Where was Dunois? Where was La Hire,[1] a soldier
+bound by no conventions, a captain whose troop went like the wind
+where it listed, and whose valour was known? Where was young Guy de
+Laval, so ready to sell his lands that his men might be fit for
+service? All silent; no man drawing a sword or saying a word. It is
+evident that in this frightful pause of fate, Jeanne had become to
+France as to England, the Witch whom it was perhaps a danger to have
+had anything to do with, whose spells had turned the world upside down
+for a moment: but these spells had become ineffectual or worn out as
+is the nature of sorcery. No explanation, not even the well-worn and
+so often valid one of human baseness, could explain the terrible
+situation, if not this.
+----------
+[1] La Hire was at Louvain, which we hear a little later the new
+    English levies would not march to besiege till the Maid was dead,
+    and where Dunois joined him in March of this fatal year. These two
+    at Louvain within a few leagues of Rouen and not a sword drawn for
+    Jeanne!--the wonder grows.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE JUDGES.
+1431.
+
+The name of Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, appears to us at this
+long distance as arising out of the infernal mists, into which, when
+his ministry of shame was accomplished, he disappeared again, bearing
+with him nothing but hatred and ill fame. Yet in his own day and to
+his contemporaries, he was not an inconsiderable man. He was of
+Rheims, a great student, and excellent scholar, the friend of many
+good men, highly esteemed among the ranks of the learned, a good man
+of business, which is not always the attribute of a scholar, and at
+the same time a Burgundian of pronounced sentiments, holding for his
+Duke, against the King. When Beauvais was summoned by Charles, after
+his coronation, at that moment of universal triumph when all seemed
+open for him to march upon Paris if he would, the city had joyfully
+thrown open its doors to the royal army, and in doing so had driven
+out its Bishop, who was hot on the other side. He would not seem to
+have been wanted in Paris at that moment. The "triste Bedford," as
+Michelet calls him, had no means of employing an ambitious priest, no
+dirty work for the moment to give him. It is natural to suppose that a
+man so admirably adapted for that employment went in search of it to
+the ecclesiastical court, not beloved of England, which the Cardinal
+Bishop of Winchester held there. Winchester was the only one of the
+House of Lancaster who had money to carry on the government either at
+home or abroad. The two priests, as the historians are always pleased
+to insinuate in respect to ecclesiastics, soon understood each other,
+and Winchester became aware that he had in Cauchon a tool ready for
+any shameful enterprise. It is not, however, necessary to assume so
+much as this, for we have not the least reason to believe that either
+one or the other of them had the slightest doubt on the subject of
+Jeanne, or as to her character. She was a pernicious witch, filling a
+hitherto invincible army with that savage fright which is but too well
+understood among men, and which produces cruel outrages as well as
+cowardly panic. The air of this very day, while I write, is ringing
+with the story of a woman burnt to death by her own family under the
+influence of that same horrible panic and terror. Cauchon was the
+countryman, almost the /pays/--an untranslatable expression,--of
+Jeanne; but he did not believe in her any more than the loftier
+ecclesiastics of France believed in Bernadette of Lourdes, who was of
+the spiritual lineage of Jeanne, nor than we should believe to-day in
+a similar pretender. It seems unnecessary then to think of dark plots
+hatched between these two dark priests against the white, angelic
+apparition of the Maid.
+
+What services Cauchon had done to recommend him to the favour of
+Winchester we are not told, but he was so much in favour that the
+Cardinal had recommended him to the Pope for the vacant archbishopric
+of Rouen a few months before there was any immediate question of
+Jeanne. The appointment was opposed by the clergy of Rouen, and the
+Pope had not come to any decision as yet on the subject. But no doubt
+the ambition of Cauchon made him very eager, with such a tempting
+prize before him, to recommend himself to his English patron by every
+means in his power. And he it was who undertook the office of
+negotiating the ransom of Jeanne from the hands of Jean de Luxembourg.
+We doubt whether after all it would be just even to call this a
+nefarious bargain. To the careless seigneur it would probably be very
+much a matter of course. The ransom offered--six thousand francs--was
+as good as if she had been a prince. The ladies at home might be
+indignant, but what was their foolish fancy for a high-flown girl in
+comparison with these substantial crowns in his pocket; and to be free
+from the responsibility of guarding her would be an advantage too. And
+if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why should he? A most
+pertinent question. Cauchon, on the other hand, could assure all
+objectors that no summary vengeance was to be taken on the Maid. She
+was to be judged by the Church, and by the best men the University
+could provide, and if she were found innocent, no doubt would go free.
+
+They must have been sanguine indeed who hoped for a triumphant
+acquittal of Jeanne; but still it may have been hoped that a trial by
+her countrymen would in every case be better for her than to languish
+in prison or to be seized perhaps by the English on some after
+occasion, and to perish by their hands. Let us therefore be fair to
+Cauchon, if possible, up to the beginning of the /Proces/. He was no
+Frenchman, but a Burgundian; his allegiance was to his Duke, not to
+the King of England; but his natural sovereign did so, and many, very
+many men of note and importance were equally base, and did not esteem
+it base at all. Had the inhabitants of Rheims, his native town, or of
+Rouen, in which /his/ trial and downfall took place as well as
+Jeanne's, pronounced for the King of Prussia in the last war, and
+proclaimed themselves his subjects, the traitors would have been hung
+with infamy from their own high towers, or driven into their river
+headlong. But things were very different in the fifteenth century.
+There has never been a moment in our history when either England or
+Scotland has pronounced for a foreign sway. Scotland fought with
+desperation for centuries against the mere name of suzerainty, though
+of a kindred race. There have been terrible moments of forced
+subjugation at the point of the sword; but never any such phenomena as
+appeared in France, so far on in the world's history as was that
+brilliant and highly cultured age. Such a state of affairs is to our
+minds impossible to understand or almost to believe: but in the
+interests of justice it must be fully acknowledged and understood.
+
+Cauchon arises accordingly, not at first with any infamy, out of the
+obscurity. He had been expelled and dethroned from his See, but this
+only for political reasons. He was ecclesiastically Bishop of Beauvais
+still; it was within his diocese that the Maid had taken prisoner, and
+there also her last acts of magic, if magic there was, had taken
+place. He had therefore a legal right to claim the jurisdiction, a
+right which no one had any interest in taking from him. If Paris was
+disappointed at not having so interesting a trial carried on before
+its courts, there was compensation in the fact that many doctors of
+the University were called to assist Cauchon in his examination of the
+Maid, and to bring her, witch, sorceress, heretic, whatever she might
+be, to question. These doctors were not undistinguished or unworthy
+men. A number of them held high office in the Church; almost all were
+honourably connected with the University, the source of learning in
+France. "With what art were they chosen!" exclaims M. Blaze de Bury.
+"A number of theologians, the elite of the time, had been named to
+represent France at the council of Bale; of these Cauchon chose the
+flower." This does not seem on the face of it to be a fact against,
+but rather in favour of, the tribunal, which the reader naturally
+supposes must have been the better, the more just, for being chosen
+among the flower of learning in France. They were not men who could be
+imagined to be the tools of any Bishop. Quicherat, in his moderate and
+able remarks on this subject, selects for special mention three men
+who took a very important part in it, Guillame Erard, Nicole Midi, and
+Tomas de Courcelles. They were all men who held a high place in the
+respect of their generation. Erard was a friend of Machet, the
+confessor of Charles VII., who had been a member of the tribunal at
+Poitiers which first pronounced upon the pretensions of Jeanne; yet
+after the trial of the Maid Machet still describes him as a man of the
+highest virtue and heavenly wisdom. Nicole Midi continued to hold an
+honourable place in his University for many years, and was the man
+chosen to congratulate Charles when Paris finally became again the
+residence of the King. Courcelles was considered the first theologian
+of the age. "He was an austere and eloquent young man," says
+Quicherat, "of a lucid mind, though nourished on abstractions. He was
+the first of theologians long before he had attained the age at which
+he could assume the rank of doctor, and even before he had finished
+his studies he was considered as the successor of Gerson. He was the
+light of the council of Bale. Eneas Piccolomini (Pope Pius II.) speaks
+with admiration of his capacity and his modesty. In him we recognise
+the father of the freedom of the Gallican Church. His
+disinterestedness is shown by the simple position with which he
+contented himself. He died with no higher rank than that of Dean of
+the Chapter of Paris."
+
+Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? Was this the man to be used for
+their vile ends by a savage English party thirsting for the blood of
+an innocent victim, and by the vile priest who was its tool? It does
+not seem so to our eyes across the long level of the centuries which
+clear away so many mists. And no more dreadful accusation can be
+brought against France than the suggestion that men like these, her
+best and most carefully trained, were willing to act as blood-hounds
+for the advantage and the pay of the invader. But there are many
+French historians to whom the mere fact of a black gown or at least an
+ecclesiastical robe, confounds every testimony, and to whom even the
+name of Frenchman does not make it appear possible that a priest
+should retain a shred of honour or of honesty. We should have said by
+the light of nature and probability that had every guarantee been
+required for the impartiality and justice of such a tribunal, they
+could not have been better secured than by the selection of such men
+to conduct its proceedings. They made a great and terrible mistake, as
+the wisest of men have made before now. They did much worse, they
+behaved to an unfortunate girl who was in their power with
+indescribable ferocity and cruelty; but we must hope that this was
+owing to the period at which they lived rather than to themselves.
+
+It is not perhaps indeed from the wise and learned, the Stoics and
+Pundits of a University, that we should choose judges for the divine
+simplicity of those babes and sucklings out of whose mouth praise is
+perfected. At the same time to choose the best men is not generally
+the way adopted to procure a base judgement. Cauchon might have been
+subject to this blame had he filled the benches of his court with
+creatures of his own, nameless priests and dialecticians, knowing
+nothing but their own poor science of words. He did not do so. There
+were but two Englishmen in the assembly, neither of them men of any
+importance or influence although there must have been many English
+priests in the country and in the train of Winchester. There were not
+even any special partisans of Burgundy, though some of the assessors
+were Burgundian by birth. We should have said, had we known no more
+than this, that every precaution had been taken to give the Maid the
+fairest trial. But at the same time a trial which is conducted under
+the name of the Inquisition is always suspect. The mere fact of that
+terrible name seems to establish a foregone conclusion; few are the
+prisoners at that bar who have ever escaped. This fact is almost all
+that can be set against the high character of the individuals who
+composed the tribunal. At all events it is no argument against the
+English that they permitted the best men in France to be chosen as
+Jeanne's judges. It is the most bewildering and astonishing of
+historical facts that they were so, and yet came to the conclusion
+they did, by the means they did, and that without falling under the
+condemnation, or scorn, or horror of their fellow-men.
+
+This then was the assembly which gathered in Rouen in the beginning of
+1431. Quicherat will not venture to affirm even that intimidation was
+directly employed to effect their decision. He says that the evidence
+"tends to prove" that this was the case, but honestly allows that, "it
+is well to remark that the witnesses contradict each other." "In all
+that I have said," he adds, "my intention has been to prove that the
+judges of the Maid had in no way the appearance of partisans hotly
+pursuing a political vengeance; but that, on the contrary, their known
+weight, the consideration which most of them enjoyed, and the nature
+of the tribunal for which they were assembled, were all calculated to
+produce generally an expectation full of confidence and respect."
+
+Meanwhile there is not a word to be said for the treatment to which
+Jeanne herself was subjected, she being, so far as is apparent,
+entirely in English custody. She had been treated with tolerable
+gentleness it would seem in the first part of her captivity while in
+the hands of Jean de Luxembourg, the Count de Ligny. The fact that the
+ladies of the house were for her friends must have assured this, and
+there is no complaint made anywhere of cruelty or even unkindness.
+When she arrived in Rouen she was confined in the middle chamber of
+the donjon, which was the best we may suppose, neither a dungeon under
+the soil, nor a room under the leads, but one to which there was
+access by a short flight of steps from the courtyard, and which was
+fully lighted and not out of reach or sight of life. But in this
+chamber was an iron cage,[1] within which she was bound, feet, and
+waist and neck, from the time of her arrival until the beginning of
+the trial, a period of about six weeks. Five English soldiers of the
+lowest class watched her night and day, three in the room itself, two
+at the door. It is enough to think for a moment of the probable
+manners and morals of these troopers to imagine what torture must have
+been inflicted by their presence upon a young woman who had always
+been sensitive above all things to the laws of personal modesty and
+reserve. Their course jests would no doubt be unintelligible to her,
+which would be an alleviation; but their coarse laughter, their
+revolting touch, their impure looks, would be an endless incessant
+misery. We are told that she indignantly bestowed a hearty buffet on
+the cheek of a tailor who approached her too closely when it was
+intended to furnish her with female dress; but she was helpless to
+defend herself when in her irons, and had to endure as she best could
+--the bars of her cage let us hope, if cage there was, affording her
+some little protection from the horror of the continual presence of
+these rude attendants, with whom it was a shame to English gentlemen
+and knights to surround a helpless woman.
+
+When her trial began Jeanne was released from her cage, but was still
+chained by one foot to a wooden beam during the day, and at night to
+the posts of her bed. Sometimes her guards would wake her to tell her
+that she had been condemned and was immediately to be led forth to
+execution; but that was a small matter. Attempts were also made to
+inflict the barest insult and outrage upon her, and on one occasion
+she is said to have been saved only by the Earl of Warwick, who heard
+her cries and went to her rescue. By night as by day she clung to her
+male garb, tightly fastened by the innumerable "points" of which
+Shakespeare so often speaks. Such were the horrible circumstances in
+which she awaited her public appearance before her judges. She was
+brought before them every day for months together, to be badgered by
+the keenest wits in France, coming back and back with artful questions
+upon every detail of every subject, to endeavour to shake her firmness
+or force her into self-contradiction. Imagine a cross-examination
+going on for months, like those--only more cruel than those--to which
+we sometimes see an unfortunate witness exposed in our own courts of
+law. There is nothing more usual than to see people break down
+entirely after a day or two of such a tremendous ordeal, in which
+their hearts and lives are turned inside out, their minds so
+bewildered that they know not what they are saying, and everything
+they have done in their lives exhibited in the worst, often in an
+entirely fictitious, light, to the curiosity and amusement of the
+world.
+
+But all our processes are mercy in comparison with those to which
+French prisoners at the bar are still exposed. It is unnecessary to
+enter into an account of these which are so well known; but they show
+that even such a trial as that of Jeanne was by no means so contrary
+to common usage, as it would be, and always would have been in
+England. In England we warn the accused to utter no rash word which
+may be used against him; in France the first principle is to draw from
+him every rash word that he can be made to bring forth. This was the
+method employed with Jeanne. Her judges were all Churchmen and
+dialecticians of the subtlest wit and most dexterous faculties in
+France; they had all, or almost all, a strong prepossession against
+her. Though we cannot believe that men of such quality were suborned,
+there was, no doubt, enough of jealous and indignant feeling among
+them to make the desire of convicting Jeanne more powerful with them
+than the desire for pure justice. She was a true Christian, but not
+perhaps the soundest of Church-women. Her visions had not the sanction
+of any priest's approval, except indeed the official but not warm
+affirmation of the Council at Poitiers. She had not hastened to take
+the Church into her confidence nor to put herself under its
+protection. Though her claims had been guaranteed by the company of
+divines at Poitiers, she herself had always appealed to her private
+instructions, through her saints, rather than to the guiding of any
+priest. The chief ecclesiastical dignitary of her own party had just
+held her up to the reprobation of the people for this cause: she was
+too independent, so proud that she would take no advice but acted
+according to her own will. The more accustomed a Churchman is to
+experience the unbounded devotion and obedience of women, the more
+enraged he is against those who judge for themselves or have other
+guides on whom they rely. Jeanne was, beside all other sins alleged
+against her, a presumptuous woman: and very few of these men had any
+desire to acquit her. They were little accustomed to researches which
+were solely intended to discover the truth: their principle rather
+was, as it has been the principle of many, to obtain proofs that their
+own particular way of thinking was the right one. It is not perhaps
+very good even for a system of doctrine when this is the principle by
+which it is tested. It is more fatal still, on this principle, to
+judge an individual for death or for life. It will be abundantly
+proved, however, by all that is to follow, that in face of this
+tribunal, learned, able, powerful, and prejudiced, the peasant girl of
+nineteen stood like a rock, unmoved by all their cleverness, undaunted
+by their severity, seldom or never losing her head, or her temper, her
+modest steadfastness, or her high spirit. If they hoped to have an
+easy bargain of her, never were men more mistaken. Not knowing a from
+b, as she herself said, untrained, unaided, she was more than a match
+for them all.
+
+Round about this centre of eager intelligence, curiosity, and
+prejudice, the cathedral and council chamber teeming with Churchmen,
+was a dark and silent ring of laymen and soldiers. A number of the
+English leaders were in Rouen, but they appear very little.
+Winchester, who had very lately come from England with an army, which
+according to some of the historians would not budge from Calais, where
+it had landed, "for fear of the Maid"--was the chief person in the
+place, but did not make any appearance at the trial, curiously enough;
+the Duke of Bedford we are informed was visible on one shameful
+occasion, but no more. But Warwick, who was the Governor of the town,
+appears frequently and various other lords with him. We see them in
+the mirror held up to us by the French historians, pressing round in
+an ever narrowing circle, closing up upon the tribunal in the midst,
+pricking the priests with perpetual sword points if they seem to
+loiter. They would have had everything pushed on, no delay, no
+possibility of escape. It is very possible that this was the case, for
+it is evident that the Witch was deeply obnoxious to the English, and
+that they were eager to have her and her endless process out of the
+way; but the evidence for their terror and fierce desire to expedite
+matters is of the feeblest. A canon of Rouen declared at the trial
+that he had heard it said by Maitre Pierre Morice, and Nicolas
+l'Oyseleur, judges assessors, and by other whose names he does not
+recollect, "that the said English were so afraid of her that they did
+not dare to begin the siege of Louviers until she was dead; and that
+it was necessary if one would please them, to hasten the trial as much
+as possible and to find the means of condemning her." Very likely this
+was quite true: but it cannot at all be taken for proved by such
+evidence. Another contemporary witness allows that though some of the
+English pushed on her trial for hate, some were well disposed to her;
+the manner of Jeanne's imprisonment is the only thing which inclines
+the reader to believe every evil thing that is said against them.
+
+Such were the circumstances in which Jeanne was brought to trail. The
+population, moved to pity and to tears as any population would have
+been, before the end, would seem at the beginning to have been
+indifferent and not to have taken much interest one way or another:
+the court, a hundred men and more with all their hangers-on, the
+cleverest men in France, one more distinguished and impeccable than
+the others: the stern ring of the Englishmen outside keeping an eye
+upon the tedious suit and all its convolutions: these all appear
+before us, surrounding as with bands of iron the young lonely victim
+in the donjon, who submitting to every indignity, and deprived of
+every aid, feeling that all her friends had abandoned her, yet stood
+steadfast and strong in her absolute simplicity and honesty. It was
+but two years in that same spring weather since she had left
+Vaucouleurs to seek the fortune of France, to offer herself to the
+struggle which now was coming to an end. Not a soul had Jeanne to
+comfort or stand by her. She had her saints who--one wonders if such a
+thought ever entered into her young visionary head--had lured her to
+her doom, and who still comforted her with enigmatical words, promises
+which came true in so sadly different a sense from that in which they
+were understood.
+----------
+[1] We are glad to add that the learned Quicherat has doubts on the
+    subject of the cage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BEFORE THE TRIAL.
+LENT, 1431.
+
+We have not, however, sufficiently described the horror of the prison,
+and the treatment to which Jeanne was exposed, though the picture is
+already dark enough. It throws a horrible yet also a grotesque light
+upon the savage manners of the time to find that the chamber in which
+she was confined, had secret provision for an /espionnage/ of the most
+base kind, openings made in the walls through which everything that
+took place in the room, every proceeding of the unfortunate prisoner,
+could be spied upon and every word heard. The idea of such a secret
+watch has always been attractive to the vulgar mind, and no doubt it
+has been believed to exist many times when there was little or no
+justification for such an infernal thought. From the "ear" of
+Dionysius, down to the /Trou Judas/, which early tourists on the
+Continent were taught to fear in every chamber door, the idea has
+descended to our own times. It would seem, however, to be beyond doubt
+that this odious means of acquiring information was in full operation
+during the trial of Jeanne, and various spies were permitted to peep
+at her, and to watch for any unadvised word she might say in her most
+private moments. We are told that the Duke of Bedford made use of the
+opportunity in a still more revolting way, and was present, a secret
+spectator, at the fantastic scene when Jeanne was visited by a
+committee of matrons who examined her person to prove or to disprove
+one of the hateful insinuations which were made about her. The
+imagination, however, refuses to conceive that a man of serious age
+and of high functions should have degraded himself to the level of a
+Peeping Tom in this way; all the French historians, nevertheless,
+repeat the story though on the merest hearsay evidence. And they also
+relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery was committed
+upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing two secretaries at these
+openings, to take down her conversation with a spy who had been sent
+to her in the guise of a countryman of her own; and that not only
+Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion, listening,
+while their plot was carried out by the vile traitor inside. The
+clerks, we are glad to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but
+Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The Englishmen indeed shrank
+from no ignominy; nor did the great French savants assembled under the
+presidency of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin with that
+they were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the
+trial almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked,
+in the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the
+profoundest ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken,
+L'Oyseleur (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented
+to be sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, a /pays/,
+like herself from Lorraine, to invite her confidence: but his long
+conversations with the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by
+the secretaries, elicited nothing from her that she did not say in the
+public examination. She had no secret devices to betray to a traitor.
+She would not seem, indeed, to have suspected the man at all, not even
+when she saw him among her judges taking part against her. Jeanne
+herself suspected no falsehood, but made her confession to him, when
+she found that he was a priest, and trusted him fully. The bewildering
+and confusing fact, turning all the contrivances of her judges into
+foolishness, was, that she had nothing to confess that she was not
+ready to tell in the eye of day.
+
+The adoption of this abominable method of eliciting secrets from the
+candid soul which had none, was justified, it appears, by the manner
+of her trial, which was after the rules of the Inquisition--by which
+even more than by those which regulate an ordinary French trial the
+guilt of the accused is a foregone conclusion for which proof is
+sought, not a fair investigation of facts for abstract purposes of
+justice. The first thing to be determined by the tribunal was the
+counts of the indictment against Jeanne; was she to be tried for
+magical arts, for sorcery and witchcraft? It is very probable that the
+mission of L'Oyseleur was to obtain evidence that would clear up this
+question by means of recalling to her the stories of her childhood, of
+the enchanted tree, and the Fairies' Well; from which sources, her
+accusers anxiously hoped to prove that she derived her inspiration.
+But it is very clear that no such evidence was forthcoming, and that
+it seemed to them hopeless to attribute sorcery to her; therefore the
+accusation was changed to that of heresy alone. The following mandate
+from the University authorising her prosecution will show what the
+charge was; and the reader will note that one of its darkest items is
+the costume, which for so many good and sufficient reasons she wore.
+Here is the official description of the accused:
+
+"A woman, calling herself the Maid, leaving the dress and habit of her
+sex against the divine law, a thing abominable to God, clothed and
+armed in the habit and condition of a man, has done cruel deeds of
+homicide, and as is said has made the simple people believe, in order
+to abuse and lead them astray, that she was sent by God, and had
+knowledge of His divine secrets; along with several other doctrines
+(/dogmatisations/), very dangerous, prejudicial, and scandalous to our
+holy Catholic faith, in pursuing which abuses, and exercising
+hostility against us and our people, she has been taken in arms,
+before Compiegne, and brought as a prisoner before us."
+
+According to French law the indictment ought to have been founded upon
+a preliminary examination into the previous life of the accused,
+which, as it does not appear in the formal accusations, it was
+supposed had never been made. Recent researches, however, have proved
+that it was made, but was not of a nature to strengthen or justify any
+accusation. All that the examiners could discover was that Jeanne
+d'Arc was a good and honest maid who left a spotless reputation behind
+her in her native village, and that not a suspicion of
+/dogmatisations/, nor worship of fairies, nor any other unseemly thing
+was associated with her name. Other things less favourable, we are
+told, were reported of her: the statement, for instance, made in
+apparent good faith by Monstrelet the Burgundian chronicler, that she
+had been for some time a servant in an /auberge/, and there had
+learned to ride, and to consort with men--a statement totally without
+foundation, which was scarcely referred to in the trial.
+
+The skill of M. Quicherat discovered the substance of those inquiries
+among the many secondary papers, but they were not made use of in the
+formal proceedings. This also we are told, though contrary to the
+habit of French law, was justified by the methods of the Inquisition,
+which were followed throughout the trial. One breach of law and
+justice, however, is permitted by no code. It is expressly forbidden
+by French, and even by inquisitorial law, that a prisoner should be
+tried by his enemies--that is by judges avowedly hostile to him: an
+initial difficulty which it would have been impossible to get over and
+which had therefore to be ignored. One brave and honest man, Nicolas
+de Houppeville, had the courage to make this observation in one of the
+earliest sittings of the assembly:
+
+"Neither the Bishop of Beauvais" (he said) "nor the other members of
+the tribunal ought to be judges in the matter; and it did not seem to
+him a good mode of procedure that those who were of the opposite party
+to the accused should be her judges--considering also that she had
+been examined already by the clergy of Poitiers, and by the Archbishop
+of Rheims, who was the metropolitan of the said Bishop of Beauvais."
+
+Nicolas de Houppeville was a lawyer and had a right to be heard on
+such a point; but the reply of the judges was to throw him into
+prison, not without threats on the part of the civil authorities to
+carry the point further by throwing him into the Seine. This was the
+method by which every honest objection was silenced. That the
+examination at Poitiers, where the judges, as has been seen, were by
+no means too favourable to Jeanne, should never have been referred to
+by her present examiners, though there was no doubt it ought to have
+been one of the most important sources of the preliminary information
+--is also very remarkable. It was suggested indeed to Jeanne at a late
+period of the trial, that she might appeal to the Archbishop; but he
+was, as she well knew, one of her most cruel enemies.
+
+Still more important was the breach of all justice apparent in the
+fact that she had no advocate, no counsel on her side, no one to speak
+to her and conduct her defence. It was suggested to her near the end
+of the proceedings that she might choose one of her judges to fill
+this office; but even if the proposal had been a genuine one or at all
+likely to be to her advantage, it was then too late to be of any use.
+These particulars, we believe, were enough to invalidate any process
+in strict law; but the name of law seems ridiculous altogether as
+applied to this rambling and cruel cross-examination in which was
+neither sense nor decorum. The reader will understand that there were
+no witnesses either for or against her, the answers of the accused
+herself forming the entire evidence.
+
+One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at
+least more clear. The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left
+in the usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which
+the English troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and carrying
+on their noisy conversation, if nothing worse and more offensive--
+sometimes, as Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing (her sole
+solace) the soft voices of her saintly visitors--was not her only
+disturbance. Her solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive
+visitors of various kinds. L'Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who
+professed to be her countryman and who beguiled her into talk of her
+childhood and native place, was the first of these; and it is possible
+that at first his presence was a pleasure to her. One other visitor of
+whom we hear accidentally, a citizen of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems
+to have got in private interest and with a more or less good motive
+and no evil meaning. He warned her to answer with prudence the
+questions put to her, since it was a matter of life and death. She
+seemed to him to be "very simple" and still to believe that she might
+be ransomed. Earl Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on
+various occasions. He probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and
+thus heard her cry for help in her danger, executing, let us hope,
+summary vengeance on her brutal assailant; but he also evidently took
+advantage of his power to show his interesting prisoner to his friends
+on occasion. And it was he who took her original captor, Jean de
+Luxembourg, now Comte de Ligny, by whom she had been given up, to see
+her, along with an English lord, sometimes named as Lord Sheffield.
+The Belgian who had put so many good crowns in his pocket for her
+ransom, thought it good taste to enter with a jesting suggestion that
+he had come to buy her back.
+
+"Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear
+arms against us again," he said. The Maid was not deceived by this
+mocking suggestion. "It is well for you to jest," she said, "but I
+know you have no such power. I know that the English will kill me,
+believing, after I am dead, that they will be able to win all the
+kingdom of France: but if there were a hundred thousand more Goddens
+than there are, they shall never win the kingdom of France." The
+English lord drew his dagger to strike the helpless girl, all the
+stories say, but was prevented by Warwick. Warwick, however, we are
+told, though he had thus saved her twice, "recovered his barbarous
+instincts" as soon as he got outside, and indignantly lamented the
+possibility of Jeanne's escape from the stake.
+
+Such incidents as these alone lightened or darkened her weary days in
+prison. A traitor or spy, a prophet of evil shaking his head over her
+danger, a contemptuous party of jeering nobles; afterwards
+inquisitors, for ever repeating in private their tedious questions:
+these all visited her--but never a friend. Jeanne was not afraid of
+the English lord's dagger, or of the watchful eye of Warwick over her.
+Even when spying through a hole, if the English earl and knight,
+indeed permitted himself that strange indulgence, his presence and
+inspection must have been almost the only defence of the prisoner. Our
+historians all quote, with an admiration almost as misplaced as their
+horror of Warwick's "barbarous instincts," the /vrai galant homme/ of
+an Englishman who in the midst of the trial cried out "/Brave femme/!"
+(it is difficult to translate the words, for /brave/ means more than
+brave)--"why was she not English?" However we are not concerned to
+defend the English share of the crime. The worst feature of all is
+that she never seems to have been visited by any one favourable and
+friendly to her, except afterwards, the two or three pitying priests
+whose hearts were touched by her great sufferings, though they
+remained among her judges, and gave sentence against her. No woman
+seems ever to have entered that dreadful prison except those "matrons"
+who came officially as has been already said. The ladies de Ligny had
+cheered her in her first confinement, the kind women of Abbeville had
+not been shut out even from the gloomy fortress of Le Crotoy. But here
+no woman ever seems to have been permitted to enter, a fact which must
+either be taken to prove the hostility of the population, or the very
+vigorous regulations of the prison. Perhaps the barbarous watch set
+upon her, the soldiers ever present, may have been a reason for the
+absence of any female visitor. At all events it is a very distinct
+fact that during the whole period of her trial, five months of misery,
+except on the one occasion already referred to, no woman came to
+console the unfortunate Maid. She had never before during all her
+vicissitudes been without their constant ministrations.
+
+One woman, the only one we ever hear of who was not the partisan and
+lover of the Maid, does, however, make herself faintly seen amid the
+crowd. Catherine of La Rochelle--the woman who had laid claim to
+saintly visitors and voices like those of Jeanne, and who had been for
+a time received and feted at the Court of Charles with vile
+satisfaction, as making the loss of the Maid no such great thing--had
+by this time been dropped as useless, on the appearance of the
+shepherd boy quoted by the Archbishop of Rheims, and had fallen into
+the hands of the English: was not she too a witch, and admirably
+qualified to give evidence as to the other witch, for whose blood all
+around her were thirsting? Catherine was ready to say anything that
+was evil of her sister sorceress. "Take care of her," she said; "if
+you lose sight of her for one moment, the devil will carry her away."
+Perhaps this was the cause of the guard in Jeanne's room, the
+ceaseless scrutiny to which she was exposed. The vulgar slanderer was
+allowed to escape after this valuable testimony. She comes into
+history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights that mean
+nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again with
+her false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have
+been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians.
+Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It
+is profane to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of
+a mountebank. This is the only woman in all her generation, so far as
+appears to us, who was not the partisan and devoted friend of the
+spotless Maid.
+
+The aspect of that old-world city of Rouen, still so old and
+picturesque to the visitor of to-day, though all new since that time
+except the churches, is curious and interesting to look back upon. It
+must have hummed and rustled with life through every street; not only
+with the English troops, and many a Burgundian man-at-arms, swaggering
+about, swearing big oaths and filling the air with loud voices,--but
+with all the polished bands of the doctors, men first in fame and
+learning of the famous University, and beneficed priests of all
+classes, canons and deans and bishops, with the countless array that
+followed them, the cardinal's tonsured Court in addition, standing by
+and taking no share in the business: but all French and English alike,
+occupied with one subject, talking of the trial, of the new points
+brought out, of the opinions of this doctor and that, of Maitre
+Nicolas who had presumed on his lawyership to correct the bishop, and
+had suffered for it: of the bold canon who ventured to whisper a
+suggestion to the prisoner, and who ever since had had the eye of the
+governor upon him: of Warwick, keeping a rough shield of protection
+around the Maid but himself fiercely impatient of the law's delay,
+anxious to burn the witch and be done with her. And Jeanne herself,
+the one strange figure that nobody understood; was she a witch? Was
+she an angelic messenger? Her answers so simple, so bold, so full of
+the spirit and sentiment of truth, must have been reported from one to
+another. This is what she said; does that look like a deceiver? could
+the devils inspire that steadfastness, that constancy and quiet? or
+was it not rather the angels, the saints as she said? Never, we may be
+sure, had there been in Rouen a time of so much interest, such a theme
+for conversations, such a subject for all thoughts. The eager court
+sat with their tonsured heads together, keen to seize every weak
+point. Did you observe how she hesitated on this? Let us push that,
+we'll get an admission on that point to-morrow. It is impossible to
+believe that in such an assembly every man was a partisan, much less
+that each one of them was thinking of the fee of the English, the
+daily allowance which it was the English habit to make. That were to
+imagine a France, base indeed beyond the limits of human baseness. All
+the Norman dignitaries of the Church, all the most learned doctors of
+the University--no! that is too great a stretch of our faith. The
+greater part no doubt believed as an indisputable fact, that Jeanne
+was either a witch or an impostor, as we should all probably do now.
+And the vertigo of Inquisition gained upon them; they became day by
+day more exasperated with her seeming innocence, with what must have
+seemed to them the cunning and cleverness, impossible to her age and
+sex, of her replies. Who could have kept the girl so cool, so
+dauntless, so embarrassing in her straight-forwardness and sincerity?
+The saints? the saints were not dialecticians; far more likely the
+evil one himself, in whom the Church has always such faith. "He hath a
+devil and by Beelzebub casteth out devils." It was all like a play,
+only more exciting than any play, and going on endlessly, the
+excitement always getting stronger till it became the chief stimulus
+and occupation of life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION.
+FEBRUARY, 1431.
+
+It was in the chapel of the Castle of Rouen, on the 21st of February,
+that the trial of Jeanne was begun. The judges present numbered about
+forty, and are carefully classed as doctors in theology, abbots,
+canons, doctors in canonical and civil law, with the Bishop of
+Beauvais at their head (the archepiscopal see of Rouen being vacant,
+as is added: but not that my lord of Beauvais hoped for that
+promotion). They were assembled there in all the solemnity of their
+priestly and professional robes, the reporters ready with their pens,
+the range of dark figures forming a semicircle round the presiding
+Bishop, when the officer of the court led in the prisoner, clothed in
+her worn and war-stained tunic, like a boy, with her hair cut close as
+for the helmet, and her slim figure, no doubt more slim than ever,
+after her long imprisonment. She had asked to be allowed to hear mass
+before coming to the bar, but this was refused. It was a privilege
+which she had never failed to avail herself of in her most triumphant
+days. Now the chapel--the sanctuary of God contained for her no sacred
+sacrifice, but only those dark benches of priests amid whom she found
+no responsive countenance, no look of kindness.
+
+Jeanne was addressed sternly by Cauchon, in an exhortation which it is
+sad to think was not in Latin, as it appears in the /Proces/. She was
+then required to take the oath on the Scriptures to speak the truth,
+and to answer all questions addressed to her. Jeanne had already held
+that conversation with L'Oyseleur in the prison which Cauchon and
+Warwick had listened to in secret with greedy ears, but which Manchon,
+the honest reporter, had refused to take down. Perhaps, therefore, the
+Bishop knew that the slim creature before him, half boy half girl, was
+not likely to be overawed by his presence or questions; but it cannot
+have been but a wonder to the others, all gazing at her, the first men
+in Normandy, the most learned in Paris, to hear her voice, /assez
+femme/, young and clear, arising in the midst of them, "I know not
+what things I may be asked," said Jeanne. "Perhaps you may ask me
+questions which I cannot answer." The assembly was startled by this
+beginning.
+
+"Will you swear to answer truly all that concerns the faith, and that
+you know?"
+
+"I will swear," said Jeanne, "about my father and mother and what I
+have done since coming to France; but concerning my revelations from
+God I will answer to no man, except only to Charles my King; I should
+not reveal them were you to cut off my head, unless by the secret
+counsel of my visions."
+
+The Bishop continued not without gentleness, enjoining her to swear at
+least that in everything that touched the faith she would speak truth;
+and Jeanne kneeling down crossed her hands upon the book of the
+Gospel, or Missal as it is called in the report, and took the required
+oath, always under the condition she stated, to answer truly on
+everything she knew concerning the faith, except in respect to her
+revelations.
+
+The examination then began with the usual formalities. She was asked
+her name (which she said with touching simplicity was Jeannette at
+home but Jeanne in France), the names of her father and mother,
+godfather and godmothers, the priest who baptised her, the place where
+she was born, etc., her age, almost nineteen; her education,
+consisting of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, which her mother
+had taught her.
+
+Here she was asked, a curious interruption to the formal
+interrogatory, to say the Pater Noster--the reason of which sudden
+demand was that witches and sorcerers were supposed to be unable to
+repeat that prayer. As unexpected as the question was Jeanne's reply.
+She answered that if the Bishop would hear her in confession she would
+say it willingly. She had been refused all the exercises of piety, and
+she was speaking to a company of priests.
+
+There is a great dignity of implied protest against this treatment in
+such an answer. The request was made a second time with a promise of
+selecting two worthy Frenchmen to hear her: but her reply was the
+same. She would say the prayer when she made her confession but not
+otherwise. She was ready it would seem in proud humility to confess to
+any or to all of her enemies, as one whose conscience was clear, and
+who had nothing to conceal.
+
+She was then commanded not to attempt to escape from her prison, on
+pain of being condemned for heresy, but to this again she demurred at
+once. She would not accept the prohibition, but would escape if she
+could, so that no man could say that she had broken faith; although
+since her capture she had been bound in chains and her feet fastened
+with irons. To this, her examiner said that it was necessary so to
+secure her in order that she might not escape. "It is true and
+certain," she replied, "whatever others may wish, that to every
+prisoner it is lawful to escape if he can." It may be remarked, as she
+forcibly pointed out afterwards, that she had never given her faith,
+never surrendered, but had always retained her freedom of action.
+
+The tribunal thereupon called in the captain in charge of Jeanne's
+prison, a gentleman called John Gris in the record, probably John
+Grey, along with two soldiers, Bernoit and Talbot, and enjoined them
+to guard her securely and not to permit her to talk with any one
+without the permission of the court. This was all the business done on
+the first day of audience.
+
+On the 22d of February at eight o'clock in the morning, the sitting
+was resumed. In the meantime, however, the chapel had been found too
+small and too near the outer world, the proceedings being much
+interrupted by shouts and noises from without, and probably incommoded
+within by the audience which had crowded it the first day. The judges
+accordingly assembled in the great hall of the castle; they were
+forty-nine in number on the second day, the number being chiefly
+swelled by canons of Rouen. After some preliminary business the
+accused was once more introduced, and desired again to take the oath.
+Jeanne replied that she had done so on the previous day and that this
+was enough; upon which there followed a short altercation, which,
+however, ended by her consent to swear again that she would answer
+truly in all things that concerned the faith. The questioner this day
+was Jean Beaupere (/Pulchri patris/, as he is called in the Latin), a
+theologian, Master of Arts, Canon of Paris and of Besancon, "one of
+the greatest props of the University of Paris," a man holding a number
+of important offices, and who afterwards appeared at the Council of
+Bale as the deputy of Normandy. He began by another exhortation to
+speak the truth, to which Jeanne replied as before that what she did
+say she would say truly, but that she would not answer upon all
+subjects. "I have done nothing but by revelation," she said.
+
+These preliminaries on both sides having been gone through, the
+examination was resumed. Jeanne informed the court in answer to
+Beaupere's question that she had been taught by her mother to sew and
+did not fear to compete with any woman in Rouen in these crafts; that
+she had once been absent from home when her family were driven out of
+their village by fear of the Burgundians, and that she had then lived
+for about fifteen days in the house of a woman called La Rousse, at
+Neufchateau; that when she was at home she was occupied in the work of
+the house and did not go to the fields with the sheep and other
+animals; that she went to confession regularly to the Cure of her own
+village, or when he could not hear her, to some other priest, by
+permission of the Cure; also that two or three times she had made her
+confession to the mendicant friars--this being during her stay in
+Neufchateau (where presumably she was not acquainted with the clergy);
+and that she received the sacrament always at Easter. Asked whether
+she had communicated at other feasts than Easter, she said briefly
+that this was enough. "Go on to the rest," /passez outre/, she added,
+and the questioner seems to have been satisfied. Then came the really
+vital part of the matter. She proceeded--no direct question on the
+point being recorded, though no doubt it was made--to tell how when
+she was about thirteen she heard voices from God bidding her to be
+good and obedient. The first time she was much afraid. The voice came
+about the hour of noon, in summer, in her father's garden. She was
+fasting but had not fasted the preceding day. The voice came from the
+right, towards the church; and came rarely without a great light. This
+light came always from the side whence the voice proceeded, and was a
+very bright radiance. When she came into France she still continued to
+hear the same voices.
+
+She was then asked how she could see the light when it was at the
+side; to which foolish question Jeanne gave no reply, but "turned to
+other matters," saying voluntarily with a soft implied reproof of the
+noise around her--that if she were in a wood, that is in a quiet
+place, she could hear the voices coming towards her. She added (going
+on, one could imagine, in a musing, forgetting the congregation of
+sinners about her) that it seemed to her a noble voice, and that she
+believed it came from God, and that when she had heard it three times
+she knew it was the voice of an angel; the voice always came quite
+clearly to her, and she understood it well.
+
+She was then asked what it said to her concerning the salvation of her
+soul.
+
+She said that it taught her to rule her life well, to go often to
+church: and told her that it was necessary that she, Jeanne, should go
+to France. The said Jeanne added that she would not be questioned
+further concerning the voice, or the manner in which it was made known
+to her, but that two or three times in a week it had said to her that
+she must go to France; but that her father knew nothing of this. The
+voice said to her that she should go to France, until she could endure
+it no longer; it said to her that she should raise the siege, which
+was set against the city of Orleans. It said also that she must go to
+Robert of Baudricourt, in the city of Vaucouleurs, who was captain of
+that place, and that he would give her people to go with her; to which
+she had answered that she was a poor girl who knew not how to ride,
+nor how to conduct war. She then said that she went to her uncle and
+told him that she wished to go with him for a little while to his
+house, and that she lived there for eight days; she then told her
+uncle that she must go to Vaucouleurs, and the said uncle took her
+there. Also she went on to say that when she came to the said city of
+Vaucouleurs, she recognised Robert of Baudricourt; though she had
+never seen him before she knew him by the voice that said to her which
+was he. She then told this Robert that it was necessary that she
+should go to France, but twice over he refused and repulsed her; the
+third time, however, he received her, and gave her certain men to go
+with her; the voice had told her that this would be so.
+
+She said also that the Duke of Lorraine sent for her to come to him,
+and that she went under a safe conduct granted by him, and told him
+that she must go to France. He asked her whether he should recover
+from his illness; but she told him that she knew nothing of that, and
+she talked very little to him of her journey. She told the Duke that
+he ought to send his son and his people with her to take her to
+France, and that she would pray God to restore his health; and then
+she was taken back to Vaucouleurs. She said also that when she left
+Vaucouleurs she wore the dress of a man, without any other arms than a
+sword which Robert de Baudricourt had given her; and that she had with
+her a chevalier, a squire, and four servants, and that they slept for
+the first night at St. Urbain, in the abbey there. She was then asked
+by whose advice she wore the dress of a man, but refused to answer.
+Finally she said that she charged no man with giving her this advice.
+
+She went on to say that the said Robert de Baudricourt exacted an oath
+from those who went with her, that they would conduct her to the end
+of her journey well and safely; and that he said, as she left him,
+"Go, and let come what will." She also said that she knew well that
+God loved the Duke of Orleans, concerning whom she had more
+revelations than about any other living man, except him whom she
+called her King. She added that it was necessary for her to wear male
+attire, and that whoever advised her to do so had given her wise
+counsel.
+
+She then said that she sent a letter to the English before Orleans, in
+which she required them to go away, a copy of which letter had been
+read to her in Rouen; but there were two or three mistakes, especially
+in the words which called upon them to surrender to the Maid instead
+of to surrender to the King. (There is no indication why these two
+latter statements should have been introduced into the midst of her
+narrative of the journey; it may have been in reply to some other
+question interjected by another of her examiners: /Passez outre/, as
+she herself says. She immediately resumes the simple and
+straightforward tale.)
+
+The said Jeanne went on to say that her further journey to him whom
+she called her King was without any impediment; and that when she
+arrived at the town of St. Catherine de Fierbois she sent news of her
+arrival to the town of Chasteau-Chinon where the said King was. She
+arrived there herself about noon and went to an inn[1]; and after
+dinner went to him whom she called her King, who was in the castle.
+She then said that when she entered the chamber where he was, she knew
+him among all others, by the revelation of her "voices." She told her
+King that she wished to make war against the English.
+
+She was then asked whether when she heard the "voices" in the presence
+of the King the light was also seen in that place. She answered as
+before: /Passez outre: Transeatis ultra/. "Go on," as we might say,
+"to the other questions."
+
+She was asked if she had seen an angel hovering over her King. She
+answered: "Spare me; /passez outre/." She added afterwards, however,
+that before he put his hand to the work, the King had many beautiful
+apparitions and revelations. She was asked what these were. She
+answered: "I will not tell you; it is not I who should answer; send to
+the King and he will tell you."
+
+She was then asked if her voices had promised her that when she came
+to the King he would receive her. She answered that those of her own
+party knew that she had been sent from God and that some had heard and
+recognised the voices. Further, she said that her King and various
+others had heard and seen[2] the voices coming to her--Charles of
+Bourbon (Comte de Clermont) and two or three others with him. She then
+said that there was no day in which she did not hear that voice; but
+that she asked nothing from it except the salvation of her soul.
+Besides this, Jeanne confessed that the voice said she should be led
+to the town of St. Denis in France, where she wished to remain--that
+is after the attack on Paris--but that against her will the lords
+forced her to leave it: if she had not been wounded she would not have
+gone: but she was wounded in the moats of Paris: however she was
+healed in five days. She then said that she had made an assault,
+called in French /escarmouche/ (skirmish), upon the town of Paris. She
+was asked if it was on a holy day, and said that she believed it was
+on a festival. She was then asked if she thought it well done to fight
+on a holy day, and answered, "/Passez outre/." Go on to the next
+question."
+
+This is a verbatim account of one day of the trial. Most of the
+translations which exist give questions as well as answers: but these
+are but occasionally given in the original document, and Jeanne's
+narrative reads like a calm, continuous statement, only interrupted
+now and then by a question, usually a cunning attempt to startle her
+with a new subject, and to hurry some admission from her. The great
+dignity with which she makes her replies, the occasional flash of high
+spirit, the calm determination with which she refuses to be led into
+discussion of the subjects which she had from the first moment
+reserved, are very remarkable. We have seen her hitherto only in
+conflict, in the din of battle and the fatigue, yet exuberant energy,
+of rapid journeys. Her circumstances were now very different. She had
+been shut up in prison for months, for six weeks at least she had been
+in irons, and the air of heaven had not blown upon this daughter of
+the fields; her robust yet sensitive maidenhood had been exposed to a
+hundred offences, and to the constant society, infecting the very air
+about, of the rudest of men; yet so far is her spirit from being
+broken that she meets all those potent, grave, and reverend doctors
+and ecclesiastics, with the simplicity and freedom of a princess,
+answering frankly or holding her peace as seems good to her, afraid of
+nothing, keeping her self-possession, all her wits about her as we
+say, without panic and without presumption. The trial of Jeanne is
+indeed almost more miraculous than her fighting; a girl not yet
+nineteen, forsaken of all, without a friend! It is less wonderful that
+she should have developed the qualities of a general, of a gunner,
+every gift of war--than that in her humiliation and distress she
+should thus hold head against all the most subtle intellects in
+France, and bear, with but one moment of faltering, a continued cross-
+examination of three months, without losing her patience, her heart,
+or her courage.
+
+*****
+
+The third day brought a still larger accession of judges, sixty-two of
+them taking their places on the benches round the Bishop in the great
+hall; and the day began with another and longer altercation between
+Cauchon and Jeanne on the subject of the oath again demanded of her.
+She maintained her resolution to say nothing of her voices. "We"
+according to the record "required of her that she should swear simply
+and absolutely without reservation." She would seem to have replied
+with impatience, "Let me speak freely:" adding "By my faith you may
+ask me many questions which I will not answer": then explaining, "Many
+things you may ask me, but I will tell you nothing truly that concerns
+my revelations; for you might compel me to say things which I have
+sworn not to say; and so I should perjure myself, which you ought not
+to wish." This explains several statements which she made later in
+respect to her introduction to the King. She repeated emphatically: "I
+warn you well, you who call yourselves my judges, that you take a
+great responsibility upon you, and that you burden me too much." She
+said also that it was enough to have already sworn twice. She was
+again asked to swear simply and absolutely, and answered, "It is
+enough to have sworn twice," and that all the clerks in Rouen and
+Paris could not condemn her unless lawfully; also that of her coming
+she would speak the truth but not all the truth; and that the space of
+eight days would not be enough to tell all.
+
+"We the said Bishop" (continues the report) "then said to her that she
+should ask advice from those present whether she ought to swear or
+not. She replied again that of her coming she would speak truly and
+not otherwise, nor would it be fit that she should talk at large. We
+then told her that it would throw suspicion on what she said if she
+did not swear to speak the truth. She answered as before. We repeated
+that she must swear precisely and absolutely. She answered that she
+would say what she knew, but not all, and that she had come on the
+part of God, and appealed to God from whom she came. Again requested
+and admonished to swear on pain of every punishment that could be put
+on her, again answered '/Passez outre/.' Finally she consented to
+swear that she would speak the truth in everything that concerned the
+trial."
+
+Her examination was then resumed by Beaupere as before, who elicited
+from her that she had fasted (he seems to have wished to make out that
+the fasting had something to do with her visions) since noon the day
+before (it was Lent); and also that she had heard her voices both on
+that day and the day before, three times on the previous day, the
+first time in the morning when she was asleep, and awakened by them.
+Did she kneel and thank them? She thanked them, sitting up in her bed
+(to which she was chained, as her questioner knew) and clasping her
+hands. She asked them what she was to do, and they told her to answer
+boldly.
+
+It may be remarked here that more frequently as the examination goes
+on, part of Jeanne's words are quoted in the first person, as if the
+reporters had been specially struck by them, while the bulk of her
+evidence goes on more calmly in the third person, the narrative form.
+After saying that she was bidden to answer boldly, she seems to have
+turned to the Bishop, and to have addressed him individually: "You say
+you are my judge; I warn you to take care what you are doing, for I am
+sent from God, and you are putting yourself in much peril" (/magno
+periculo: gallice/, adds the reporter, /en grant dangier/).
+
+She was then asked if her voices ever changed their meaning, and
+answered that she had never heard two speak contrary to each other;
+what they had said that day was that she should speak boldly. Asked,
+if the voice forbade her to reply to questions asked, she replied; "I
+will not answer you. I have revelations touching the King which I will
+not tell you." Asked, if the voices forbade her to reveal these
+revelations, she answered, "I have not consulted them; give me fifteen
+days' delay and I will answer you"; but being again exhorted to reply,
+said: "If the voice forbade me to speak, how many times should I tell
+you?" Again asked, if she were forbidden to speak, answered, "I
+believe I am not forbidden by men"--repeating that she would not
+reply, and knew not how far she should reply, for it had not been
+revealed to her; but that she believed firmly, as firmly as the
+Christian faith, and that God had redeemed us from the pains of hell,
+that this voice came from Him.
+
+Questioned concerning the voice, what it appeared to be when it spoke,
+if that of an angel, or from God Himself; or if it was the voice of a
+saint or of saints (feminine), answered: "The voice comes from God;
+and I believe that I should not tell you all I know, for I should
+displease these voices if I answered you; and as for this question I
+pray you to leave me free." Asked if she thought that to speak the
+truth would displease God, she answered, "What the voices say I am to
+tell to the King, not to you," adding that during that night they had
+said much to her for the good of the King, and that if she could but
+let him know she would willingly drink no wine up to Easter (the
+reader will remember that her frugal fare consisted of bread dipped in
+the wine and water, which is justly called /eau rougie/ in France).
+Asked, if she could not induce the voices to speak to her King
+directly, she answered that she knew not whether her voices would
+consent, unless it were the will of God, and God consented to it,
+adding, "They might well reveal it to the King; and with that I should
+be content." Asked, if the voices could not communicate with the King
+as they did in her presence, she answered, that she did not know
+whether this was God's will; and added, that unless it were the will
+of God she would not know how to act. Asked, if it was by the advice
+of her voices that she attempted to escape from her prison, she
+answered, "I have nothing to say to you on that point." Asked, if she
+always saw a light when the voices were heard, she answered: "Yes:
+that with the sound of the voices light came." Asked if she saw
+anything else coming with the voices, answered: "I do not tell you
+all. I am not allowed to do so, nor does my oath touch that; the
+voices are good and noble, but neither of that will I answer." She was
+then asked to give in writing the points on which she would not reply.
+Then she was asked if her voices had eyes and ears, and answered, "You
+shall not have this either," adding, that it was a saying among
+children that men were sometimes hanged for speaking the truth.
+
+She was then asked if she knew herself to be in the grace of God. She
+replied: "If I am not so, may God put me in His grace; if I am, may
+God keep me in it. I should be the most miserable in the world if I
+were not in the grace of God." She said besides, that if she were in a
+state of sin she did not believe her voices would come to her, and she
+wished that everyone could understand them as she did, adding, that
+she was about thirteen when they came to her first.
+
+She was then asked, whether in her childhood she had played with the
+other children in the fields, and various other particulars about
+Domremy, whether there were any Burgundians there? to which Jeanne
+answered boldly that there was one, and that she wished his head might
+be cut off, adding piously, "that is, if it pleased God"[3]; she was
+also asked whether she had fought along with the other children
+against the children of the neighbouring Burgundian village of Maxy
+(Maxey sur Meuse): why she hated the Burgundians, and many questions
+of this kind, with a close examination about a certain tree near the
+village of Domremy, which some called the Tree of the good Ladies, and
+others, the Fairies' Tree; and also about a well there, the Fairies'
+Well, of which poor patients were said to drink and get well. Jeanne
+(no doubt relieved by the simple character of these questions) made
+answer freely and without hesitation, in no way denying that she had
+danced and sung with the other children, and made garlands for the
+image of the Blessed Marie of Domremy; but she did not remember
+whether she had ever done so after attaining years of discretion, and
+certainly she had never seen a fairy, nor worked any spell by their
+means. At the end, after having thus been put off her guard, she was
+suddenly asked about her dress (a capital point in the eyes of her
+judges): whether she wished to have a woman's dress. Probably she was,
+as they hoped, tired, and expecting no such question, for she answered
+quickly yet with instant recovery: "Bring me one to go home in and I
+will accept it; otherwise no. I prefer this, since it pleases God that
+I should wear it." The recollection of Domremy and of the pleasant
+fields, must have carried her back to the days when the little Jeanne
+was like the rest in her short, full petticoats of crimson stuff, free
+of any danger: what could be better to go home in? but she immediately
+remembered the obvious and excellent reasons she had for wearing
+another costume now. So ended the third day.
+
+In the meantime there had been, we are told, various interruptions
+during the examination; perhaps it was then that Nicolas de
+Houppeville protested against Bishop Cauchon as a partisan and a
+Burgundian, and therefore incapable by law of judging a member of the
+opposite party: and had been rudely silenced, and afterwards punished,
+as we have already heard. Another kind of opposition less bold had
+begun to be remarked, which was that one of the persons present, by
+word and sign, whispering suggestions to her, or warning her with his
+eyes, was helping the unfortunate prisoner in her defence. Probably
+this did little good, "for she was often troubled and hurried in her
+answers," we are told; but it was a sign of good-will, at least. When
+Frere Isambard, who was the person in question, speaks at a later
+period he tells us that "the questions put to Jeanne were too
+difficult, subtle, and dangerous, so that the great clerks and learned
+men who were present scarcely would have known how to answer them, and
+that many in the assembly murmured at them." Perhaps the good Frere
+Isambard might have spared himself the trouble; for Jeanne, however
+she may have suffered, was probably more able to hold her own than
+many of those great clerks, and did so with unfailing courage and
+spirit. One of the other judges, Jean Fabry, a bishop, declared
+afterwards that "her answers were so good, that for three weeks he
+believed that they were inspired." Manchon, the reporter, he who had
+refused to take down the private conversation of Jeanne in her prison
+with the vile traitor, L'Oyseleur, makes his voice heard also to the
+effect that "Monseigneur of Beauvais would have had everything written
+as pleased him, and when there was anything that displeased him he
+forbade the secretaries to report it as being of no importance for the
+trial." On another day a humbler witness still, Massieu, one of the
+officers of the court, who had the charge of taking Jeanne daily from
+her prison to the hall, and back again, met in the courtyard an
+Englishman, who seems to have been a singing man or lay clerk "of the
+King's chapel in England," probably attached to Winchester's
+ecclesiastical retinue. This man asked him: "What do you think of her
+answers? Will she be burned? What will happen?" "Up to this time,"
+said Massieu, "I have heard nothing from her that was not honourable
+and good. She seems to me a good woman, but how it will all end God
+only knows!"
+
+No doubt conversations of this kind were being carried on all over
+Rouen. Would she be burned? What would happen? Could any one stand and
+answer like that hour after hour and day by day, inspired only by the
+devil? There was no popular enthusiasm for her even now. How should
+there have been in that partisan province, more English than French?
+But a chill doubt began to steal into many minds whether she was so
+bad as had been thought, whether indeed she might not after all be
+something quite different from what she had been thought? Nature had
+begun to work in the agitated place, and even in that black-robed,
+eager assembly. If there was a vile L'Oyseleur trying to get her
+confidence in private, and so betray her, there was also a kind Frere
+Isambard, privately plucking at her sleeve, imploring her to be
+cautious, whispering an answer probably not half so wise as her own
+natural reply, yet warming her heart with the suggestion of a friend
+at hand.
+
+On the fourth day, Jeanne was again required to swear, and replied as
+before, that so far as concerned the trial she would answer truly, but
+not all she knew. "You ought to be satisfied: I have sworn
+sufficiently," she said; and with this her judges seem to have been
+content. Beaupere then resumed his questions, but first asked her,
+perhaps with a momentary gleam of compassion and a sudden
+consciousness of the pallor and weariness of the young prisoner, how
+she did. She answered, one can imagine with what tone of indignant
+disdain: "You see how I am: I am as well as I can be." He then cross-
+examined her closely as to what voices she had heard since her last
+appearance in court, but drew from her only the same answer, "The
+voice tells me to answer boldly," and that she would tell them as much
+as she was permitted by God to tell them, but concerning her
+revelations for the King of France she would say nothing except by
+permission of her voices.
+
+She was then asked what kind of voices they were which she heard, were
+they voices of angels, or of saints (/sancti aut sanctae/, male or
+female saints) or from God Himself? She answered that the voices were
+those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, whose heads were crowned with
+beautiful crowns, very rich and precious. "So much as this God allows
+me to say. If you doubt send to Poitiers, where I was questioned
+before." (It may perhaps be permissible to suppose that the kind
+whisperer at her elbow might have suggested the repeated references to
+Poitiers that follow, but which are not to be found before: though it
+was most natural she should refer to this place where she was examined
+at the beginning of her mission.) Asked how she knew which of these
+two saints, she answered that she could quite distinguish one from the
+other by the manner of their salutation; that she had been led and
+guided by them for seven years, and that she knew them because they
+had named themselves to her. She was then asked how they were dressed?
+and answered: "I cannot tell you; I am not permitted to reveal this;
+if you do not believe me send to Poitiers." She said also that at her
+coming into France she had revealed these things, but could not now.
+She was asked what was the age of her saints, but replied that she was
+not permitted to tell. Asked, if both saints spoke at once or one
+after the other, she replied: "I have not permission to tell you: but
+I always consult them both together." Asked, which had appeared to her
+first, and answered: "I do not know which it was; I did know, but have
+forgotten. It is written in the register of Poitiers."
+
+"She then said she had much comfort from St. Michael. Again, asked,
+which had come first, she replied that it was St. Michael. Asked, if a
+long time had passed since she first heard the voice of St. Michael,
+answered: "I do not name to you the voice of St. Michael; but his
+conversation was of great comfort to me." Asked, again, what voice
+came first to her when she was thirteen, answered, that it was St.
+Michael whom she saw before her eyes, and that he was not alone, but
+accompanied by many angels of Heaven. She said also that she would not
+have come into France but by the command of God. Asked, if she saw St.
+Michael and the angels really, with her ordinary senses, she answered:
+"I saw them with my bodily eyes as I see you, and when they left me I
+wept, desiring much that they would take me with them." Asked, what
+was the form in which he appeared, she replied: "I cannot answer you;
+I am not permitted." Asked, what St. Michael said to her the first
+time, she cried, "You shall have no answer to-day." Then went on to
+say that her voices told her to reply boldly. Afterwards she said that
+she had told her King once all that had been revealed to her; said
+also that she was not permitted to say here what St. Michael had said;
+but that it would be better to send for a copy of the books which were
+at Poitiers than to question her on this subject. Asked, what sign she
+had that these were revelations of God, and that it was really St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret with whom she talked, she answered: "It is
+enough that I tell you they were St. Catherine and St. Margaret:
+believe me or not as you will."
+
+Asked how she distinguished the points on which she was allowed to
+speak from the others, she answered, that on some points she had asked
+permission to speak, and not on others, adding, that she would rather
+have been torn by wild horses than to have come to France, unless by
+the license of God. Asked how it was that she put on a man's dress,
+she answered, that dress appeared to her a small matter, that she did
+not adopt that dress by the counsel of any man, and that she neither
+put on a dress nor did anything, but according as God, or the angels,
+commanded her to do so. Asked, if she knew whether such a command to
+assume the dress of a man was lawful, she answered: "All that I did, I
+did by the precepts of our Lord; and if I were bidden to wear another
+dress I would do so, because it was at the bidding of God." Asked, if
+she had done it by the orders of Robert de Baudricourt, answered "No."
+Asked, if she thought that she had done well in assuming a man's
+dress, answered, that as all she did was by the command of the Lord,
+she believed that she had done well, and expected a good guarantee and
+good succour. Asked, if in this particular case of assuming the dress
+of a man she thought she had done well, answered, that nothing in the
+world had made her do it, but the command of God.
+
+She was then asked whether light always accompanied the voices when
+they came to her, she answered, with an evident reference to her first
+interview with Charles, that there were many lights on every side as
+was fit. "It is not only to you that light comes" (or you have not all
+the light to yourself,--a curious phrase). Asked, if there was an
+angel over the head of the King when she saw him for the first time,
+she answered: "By the Blessed Mary, if there were, I know not, I saw
+none." Asked, if there was light, she answered: "There were about
+three hundred soldiers, and fifty of them held torches, without
+counting any spiritual light. And rarely do I have the revelations
+without light." Asked, if her King had faith in what she said, she
+answered, that he had good signs, and also by his clergy. Asked, what
+revelations her King had, she answered: "You shall have nothing from
+me this year." Then added that for three weeks she was cross-examined
+by the clergy, both in the town of Chinon and at Poitiers, and that
+her King had signs concerning her, before he believed in her. And the
+clergy of his party had found nothing in her, in respect to her faith,
+that was not good. Asked, whether she gone to the church of St.
+Catherine of Fierbois, answered: "yes," and that she had there heard
+three masses in one day, and from thence went to Chinon; she added
+that she had sent a letter thence to the King, in which it was
+contained that she sent this to know if she might come to the town in
+which the King was; for that she had travelled a hundred and fifty
+leagues to come to him and to bring him help, for she knew much good
+concerning him. And she thought it was contained in this letter that
+she should recognise the King among all the rest.
+
+She said besides, that she had a sword which was given to her at
+Vaucouleurs; she said also that, being in Tours or at Chinon, she sent
+for a sword which was in the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois
+behind the altar, and that when it was found it was rusty. Asked, how
+she knew about this sword, she answered, that it was rusty because of
+being in the ground, and there were five crosses on it, and that she
+knew this sword by her voices, and not by any man's report. She wrote
+to the ecclesiastics of the place where it was and asked them for this
+sword, and they sent it to her. It was found not much below the ground
+behind the altar; she was not sure if it was before or behind the
+altar, but wrote that it was behind the altar. And when it was found
+the clergy cleaned it and rubbed off the rust, which came off easily;
+and it was an armourer of Tours who went to fetch it. The clergy made
+a scabbard for it before sending it to the said Jeanne, and they of
+Tours made another, so that it had two scabbards, one of crimson
+velvet and one of cloth of gold. And she herself procured another of
+strong leather. She said also that when she was captured she had not
+that sword. Said also that she continued to wear the said sword until
+she left St. Denis after the assault on Paris. Asked, what benediction
+she made, or if she made any on this sword, she answered, that she
+made no benediction, nor knew how to make one, but that she loved the
+sword because it had come to her from the Church of the blessed
+Catherine whom she loved much. Asked, if she had placed it on the
+altar at the village of Coulenges, Les Vineuses, or elsewhere, placing
+it there that it might bring good luck, she answered, that she knew
+nothing of this. Asked, if she did not pray that the sword might have
+good fortune: "It is good to know that I wish all my armour
+(/harnesseum meum; gallice, mon harnois/) to be very fortunate."
+Asked, where she had left the sword, answered, that she had deposited
+a sword and armour at St. Denis, but it was not this sword. She added
+that she had it in Lagny: but that she afterwards wore the sword which
+had been taken from a Burgundian, which was a good sword for war and
+gave good strokes (/gallice, de bonnes bouffes/ and /de bons
+torchons/). Said also that to tell where she left it had nothing to do
+with the trial, and she would answer nothing.
+
+She said also that her brothers had everything that belonged to her,
+her horses, swords, and everything, and that she believed they were
+worth in all about 12,000 francs. She was also asked whether when she
+was at Orleans she had a standard, and what colour it was; answered,
+that she had a standard, the field of which was sown with lilies, and
+on it was a figure of the world with angels on each side. It was
+white, and made of a stuff called boucassin, upon which was written
+the name /Jhesus Maria/, so that all might see, and it was fringed
+with silk. Asked, if the name /Jhesus Maria/ was written above or
+below or at the side, she answered, "At the side." Asked, if she loved
+her sword or standard best, she answered, that she loved her standard
+best. Asked, why she had that picture on the standard, she answered:
+"I have sufficiently told you that I did nothing but by the command of
+God." She added that she herself carried her standard when in battle
+that she might not hurt anyone, and said that she had never killed any
+man.
+
+Asked, how many men her King gave her when she began her work,
+answered, from ten to twelve[4] thousand men, and that she attacked
+first the bastile of St. Loup at Orleans, and afterwards that of the
+bridge. Asked, from which bastile it was that her men were driven
+back, she answered, that she did not remember; adding, that she had
+been sure that she could raise the siege at Orleans, for it had been
+so revealed to her; and that she told this to her King before it
+occurred. Asked, whether, when she made assault, she told her men that
+all the arrows, stones, cannon-balls, etc., would be intercepted by
+her, she answered no--that more than a hundred were wounded: that what
+she had said to her people was that they should have no doubts, for
+they should certainly raise the siege of Orleans. She said also that
+in attacking the bastile of the bridge she herself was wounded by an
+arrow in the neck, and was much comforted by St. Catherine, and was
+healed in fifteen days; but that she never gave up riding and working
+all that time. Asked, if she knew that she would be wounded, she
+answered, that she knew it well and had told her King, but that,
+notwithstanding, she went about her business. It was revealed to her
+by the voices of her two saints, the blessed Catherine and the blessed
+Margaret. She said besides, that she was the first to place a scaling
+ladder on the bastile of the bridge, and as she raised it she was
+struck in the neck.
+
+She was then asked why she did not treat with the Captain of Jargeau;
+she answered that the lords of her party had replied to the English,
+who had asked for a truce of fifteen days, that they could not have
+it, but that they might retire, they and their horses at once; she had
+said for her part that if they retired in their doublets and tunics
+their lives should be spared, otherwise the city would be taken by
+storm. Asked, if she had consulted with her counsel, that is with her
+voices, whether the truce should be granted or not, she answered, that
+she did not remember.
+
+It will be remarked, as the slow examination goes on day after day,
+that Jeanne, becoming at moments impatient, sometimes gives a rough
+answer, and at other times plays a little with her questioner as if in
+contempt. "By the Blessed Mary, I know not!" is evidently an outburst
+of impatience at the exhausting, exasperating folly of some of these
+questions, and this will be further visible in future sittings. It
+seems very likely that the reference to Poitiers, which was an
+excellent suggestion, commending itself to her invariable good sense,
+came from the kind priest who tried to serve her as he best could; but
+there are other answers a little incoherent, which look as if Frere
+Isambard, if it were he, had confused her in her own response without
+conveying anything better to her mind, especially on the occasions
+when she refuses to reply, and then does so, abandoning her ground at
+once. Her patience and steadiness are quite extraordinary however even
+in the less self-collected moments. Thus end the proceedings of the
+fourth day.
+
+*****
+
+The fifth day began with the usual dispute about the oath, Jeanne
+still retaining her reservation with the greatest firmness. She seems,
+however, at the end, to have repeated her oath to answer everything
+that had to do with the trial--"And as much as I say I will say as if
+I were before the Pope of Rome." These words must have given the
+Magister Beaupere an admirable occasion for introducing one of the
+things charged against her for which there was actual proof--her
+letter to the Comte d'Armagnac in respect to the Pope. He seized upon
+it evidently with eagerness, and asked her which she held to be the
+true Pope. To this she answered quietly, "Are there two?"--the most
+confusing reply.[5]
+
+She was asked if she had received letters from the Comte d'Armagnac,
+asking to know which of the three existing Popes he ought to obey; she
+answered that she had his letter, and had replied to it, saying among
+other things that when she was in Paris and at rest she would answer
+him; and added that she was on the point of mounting her horse when
+she gave that reply. The copy of the letter and the reply being read
+to her she was asked if that was what she had said; to which she
+replied that she had answered his letter in part, not in full. Asked,
+if she knew the counsels of the King of Kings so as to be able to say
+which the count should obey, she answered, that she knew nothing.
+Asked, if she was in doubt as to which the count ought to obey, she
+replied that she knew not which to bid him obey; but that she, the
+said Jeanne, held and believed that we ought to obey our Pope who was
+in Rome; that as for what he asked, that she should tell him which God
+desired him to obey, she had said she knew nothing; but she sent much
+to him which was not put in writing. And as for herself she believed
+in the Lord Pope of Rome. Asked, whether in respect to the three
+pontiffs she had received counsel, she answered, that she had neither
+written nor made to be written anything about the three pontiffs. And
+this she swore on her oath. Asked, if she were in the habit of putting
+on her letters the name /Jhesus Maria/ with a cross, answered, that
+she did so sometimes but not always, and that sometimes she put a
+cross to shew that these letters were not to be taken seriously (as
+likely to fall into the enemy's hands).
+
+Some questions were then put to her about her letters to the Duke of
+Bedford and to the English King, and copies were read to her to which
+she objected on some small points, but mistakenly it would seem, as
+that she had summoned them to surrender to the King, while the scribe
+had put "surrender to the Maid." She said, however, that they were
+her letters, and that she held by them. She added that before seven
+years the English would lose more than they had lost at Orleans,[6]
+and that their cause would be lost in France; she said also that the
+said English should have greater disasters than they had yet had in
+France, and that God would give greater victories to France. Asked,
+how she knew this, she replied: "I know it by the revelations made to
+me, and that it will happen in seven years, and I might well be angry
+that it is deferred so long." Asked, when this would happen, she said
+that she knew neither the day nor the hour.
+
+She was tormented a little further as to the dates, whether this would
+happen before the St. Jean, or before the St. Martin in winter, but
+made no answer except that before the St. Martin in winter they should
+see many things, and it might be that the English should fail; as a
+matter of fact Paris opened its gates to Charles VII. within the seven
+years specified, so that Jeanne's prophecy may be held to have been
+fulfilled.
+
+We then come once more to a long and profitless interrogatory upon her
+saints, in which the crowd of judges forgot their dignity and
+overwhelmed her with a flood of often very foolish, and sometimes
+worse than foolish questions.
+
+Asked, how she knew the future, she answered that she knew it by St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret; asked, if St. Gabriel was with St. Michael
+when he came to her, she answered, that she could not remember. Asked,
+if she saw them always in the same dress, answered yes, and they were
+crowned very richly. Of their other garments she could not speak; she
+knew nothing of their tunics. Asked, how she knew whether they were
+men or women, answered, that she knew well by their voices which
+revealed them to her; and that she knew nothing save by revelation and
+the precepts of God. Asked, what appearances she saw, she answered,
+that she saw faces. Asked, if these saints had hair, she answered, "It
+is good to know." Asked, if there was anything between their crowns
+and their hair, answered, no. Asked, if their hair was long and
+hanging down, answered, "I know nothing about it." She also said that
+their voices were beautiful sweet, and humble, and that she understood
+them well. Asked, how they could speak when they had no bodies, she
+answered, "I refer it to God." She repeated that the voices were
+beautiful, humble, and sweet, and that they could speak French. Asked,
+if St. Margaret did not speak English, answered: "How could she speak
+English when she was not on the English side?"
+
+This would seem to infer that the St. Margaret referred to was not the
+legendary St. Margaret of the dragon, but St. Margaret of Scotland,
+well known in France from the long connection between those two
+countries, and a popular mediaeval saint. She would naturally have
+spoken English, being a Saxon, but also quite naturally would have
+been against the English, as a Scottish queen; but of these
+refinements it is very unlikely that Jeanne knew anything, and her
+prompt and somewhat sharp reply evidently cut the inquiry short. The
+next question was, did they wear gold rings in their ears or
+elsewhere, these crowned saints; to which she answered a little
+contemptuously, "I know nothing about it." She was then asked if she
+herself had rings: on which "turning to us the aforesaid Bishop, she
+said, 'You have one of mine; give it back to me.' She then said that
+the Burgundians had her other ring, and asked of us if we had the ring
+to shew it to her. Asked, who gave her this ring, answered, her father
+or her mother, and that the name /Jhesus Maria/ was written upon it,
+but that she knew not who put it there, nor even whether there was a
+stone in the ring; it was given to her in the village of Domremy. She
+added that her brother gave her another ring which we had, and said
+that she desired that it might be given to the Church."
+
+A sudden change was now made in the cross-examination according to the
+methods of that operation, throwing her back without warning upon the
+village superstitions of Domremy, the magic tree and fountain. Many of
+the questions which follow are so trivial and are so evidently
+instinct with evil meaning, that it seems a wrong to Beaupere to
+impute the whole of the interrogatory to him; other questions were
+evidently interposed by the excited assembly.
+
+Asked, if St. Catherine and St. Margaret talked with her under the
+tree of which mention had been made above, she answered, "I know
+nothing about it." Asked, if the saints were seen at the fountain near
+the tree, answered yes, that she had heard them there; but what her
+saints promised to her, there or elsewhere, she answered, that nothing
+was promised except by permission from God. Asked, what promises were
+made to her, she answered, "This has nothing at all to do with your
+trial," but added, that among other things they said to her that her
+King should be restored to his kingdom, and that his adversaries
+should be destroyed. She said also that they promised to take her, the
+said Jeanne, to Paradise, as she had asked them to do. Asked, if she
+had any other promises, she said there was one promise that had
+nothing to do with the trial, but that in three months she would tell
+them what that other promise was. Asked, if the voices told her she
+would be set free from her prison in three months, she answered: "This
+does not concern your trial; nor do I know when I shall be set free."
+And she added that those who wished to send her out of this world
+might well go before her. Asked, if her council did not tell her when
+she should be set free from her present prison, answered: "Ask me this
+in three months' time; I can promise you as much as that"--but added:
+"You may ask those present, on their oaths, if this has anything to do
+with the trial."
+
+Startled by this suggestion, the judges seem to have held a hurried
+consultation among themselves to see whether these matters did really
+touch the trial; the result apparently decided them to return again to
+the question of the local superstitions of Domremy, the only point on
+which there seemed a chance of breaking down the extraordinarily just
+and steadfast intelligence of the girl who stood before them. After
+this pause she resumed, apparently not in answer to any question.
+
+"I have well told you that there were things you should not know, and
+some time I must needs be set free. But I must have permission if I
+speak; therefore I will ask to have delay in this." Asked, if her
+voices forbade her to speak the truth, she said: "Do you expect me to
+tell you things that concern the King of France? There is a great deal
+here that has nothing to do with the trial." She said also that she
+knew that her King should enjoy the kingdom of France, as well as she
+knew that they were there before her in judgment. She added that she
+would have been dead but for the revelations which comforted her
+daily. She was then asked what she had done with her mandragora
+(mandrake)? she answered that she had no mandragora, nor had ever had.
+She had heard say that near her village there was one, but had never
+seen it. She had heard say that it was a dangerous thing, and that it
+was wicked to keep it; but knew nothing of its use. Asked, in what
+place this mandrake was, and what she had heard of it? she said that
+she had heard that it grew under the tree of which mention has been
+made, but did not know the place; she said also that she had heard
+that above the mandragora was a hazel tree. Asked, what she heard was
+done with the mandragora, answered, that she had heard that it brought
+money, but did not believe it; and added that her voices had never
+told her anything about it.
+
+Asked, what was the appearance of St. Michael when she saw him first,
+she answered, that she saw no crown, and knew nothing of his dress.
+Asked, if he was naked, she answered, "Do you think God has nothing to
+clothe him with?" Asked, if he had hair, she answered, "Why should it
+have been cut?" She said further that she had not seen the blessed
+Michael since she left the castle of Crotoy, nor did she see him
+often. At last she said that she knew not whether he had hair or not.
+Asked, whether he carried scales, she answered, "I know nothing of
+it," but added that she had much joy in seeing him, and she knew when
+she saw him that she was not in a state of sin. She also said that St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret often made her confess to them, and said
+that if she had been in a state of sin it was without knowing it. She
+was then asked whether, when she confessed, she believed herself to be
+in a state of mortal sin; she answered, that she knew not whether she
+had been in that state, but did not believe she had done the works of
+sin. "It would not have pleased God," she said, "that I should have
+been so; nor would it have pleased Him that I should have done the
+works of sin by which my soul should have been burdened."
+
+She was then asked what sign she gave to the King that she came to him
+from God; she answered: "I have told you always that nothing should
+draw this from me.[7] Ask me no more." Asked, if she had not sworn to
+reveal what was asked of her touching the trial, answered, "I have
+told you that I will tell you nothing that was for our King; and of
+this which belongs to him I will not speak." Asked, if she knew the
+sign which she gave to the King, she answered: "You shall know nothing
+from me." When it was said to her that this did concern the trial, she
+answered, "Of that which I have promised to keep secret I shall tell
+you nothing"; and further she said, "I promised in that place and I
+could not tell you without perjuring myself." Asked, to whom she
+promised? answered, that she had promised to Saints Catherine and
+Margaret, and this was shown to the King. She also said she had
+promised it to these two saints, because they had required it of her.
+And the same Jeanne had done this at their request. "Too many people
+would have asked me concerning it, if I had not promised to the
+aforesaid saints." She was then asked, when she showed this sign to
+the King if there were others with him; she answered, that to her
+there was no one near him, even though many people might have been
+present. (As a matter of fact the sign was given to Charles when he
+talked with the Maid apart in a recess, the great hall being full of
+the Court and followers; so that this was strictly true.) Asked
+further, if she saw a crown over the head of her King when she showed
+him this sign, but replied: "I cannot answer you without perjury."
+Asked further if her King had a crown when he was at Rheims, answered,
+that in her opinion her King had a crown which he found at Rheims, but
+a very fine one was afterwards brought for him. He did this to hasten
+matters, at the desire of the city of Rheims; but if he had been more
+certain, he could have had a crown a thousand times richer. (All this
+is very obscure.)
+
+Asked, if she had seen this crown, she answered: "I could not tell you
+without perjury, but I heard that it was a very rich one." It was then
+determined to conclude for this day.
+
+On the sixth day there was again the same questions about the oath,
+ending in the usual way. And the cross-examination was at once
+continued.
+
+She was asked if she would say whether St. Michael had wings, and what
+bodies and members had St. Catherine and St. Margaret; and she
+answered, "I have told you what I know, and will make no other reply";
+she said, moreover, that when she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine
+and St. Margaret, she knew at once that they were saints of Paradise.
+Asked, if she saw anything more than their faces, she answered: "I
+have told you all I know of them: and I would rather have had my head
+taken off than tell you all I know." She then said that in whatever
+concerned the trial she would speak freely. Asked, if she believed
+that St. Michael and St. Gabriel had natural heads, she answered: "I
+saw them with my eyes and I believe that they are, as firmly as I
+believe that God is." Asked, if she believed that God made them in the
+form in which she saw them, she answered, "Yes." Asked, if she
+believed that God had created them in the same form from the
+beginning, answered: "You shall have no more for the present, except
+what I have already said."
+
+This subject was then dropped, and the examiner made another leap
+forward to a different part of her life. "Did you know by revelation
+that you should break prison?" he said. To this Jeanne answered
+indignantly: "This has nothing to do with your trial. Would you have
+me speak against myself?"
+
+Again questioned what her "voices" had said to her in respect to her
+attempts at escape, she again answered: "This has nothing to do with
+the trial; I go back to the trial. If all your questions were about
+that, I should tell you all." She said besides, on her faith, that she
+knew neither the day nor the hour when she should escape. She was then
+asked what the voices said to her generally, and answered: "In truth,
+they tell me I shall be freed, but neither the day nor the hour; and
+that I ought to speak boldly, and with a glad countenance." She was
+then asked whether, when first she saw her King, he asked her whether
+it was by revelation that she had assumed the dress of a man? she
+replied: "I have answered this. I cannot recollect whether he asked
+me. But it is written in the book at Poitiers." Asked, whether the
+doctors who examined her there, some for a month, some for three
+weeks, had asked her about her change of dress; she answered: "I don't
+remember; but I know they asked me when I assumed the dress of a man,
+and I told them it was in the town of Vaucouleurs." Asked, whether
+these doctors had inquired whether it was her voices which had made
+her take that dress, answered, "I don't remember." Asked if her Queen
+wished her to change her dress when she first saw her, answered, "I
+don't remember." Asked if her King, Queen, and all of her party did
+not ask her to lay aside the dress of a man, she answered, "This has
+nothing to do with the trial." Asked, if the same was not requested of
+her in the castle of Beaurevoir, she answered: "It is true. And I
+replied that I could not lay it aside without the permission of God."
+She said further that the demoiselle of Luxembourg (aunt of Jeanne's
+captor, and a very old woman) and the lady of Beaurevoir offered her a
+woman's dress, or stuff to make one, and begged her to wear it; but
+she replied that she had not yet the permission of our Lord, and that
+it was not yet time. Asked, if M. Jean de Pressy and others at Arras
+had offered her a woman's dress, she answered, "He and others have
+often asked it of me." Asked, if she thought she would have done wrong
+in putting on a woman's dress, she answered, that it was better to
+obey her sovereign Lord, that is, God; she said also that if she had
+done it, she would rather have done it at the request of these two
+ladies than of any other in France, except her Queen. Asked, if, when
+God revealed to her that she should change her dress, it was by the
+voice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, or St. Margaret, she answered,
+"You shall hear no more about it." Asked, when the King first employed
+her, and her standard was made, whether the men-at-arms and others who
+took part in the war did not have flags imitated from hers? she
+answered, "It is well to know that the lords retained their own arms";
+she also added that her brothers-in-arms made such pennons as pleased
+them. Asked, how these were made, if they were of linen or cloth,
+answered, that they were of white satin, some of them with lilies;
+that she had but two or three lances in her own company--but that in
+the rest of the army some carried pennons like hers, but only to
+distinguish them from others. Asked, if the banners were often
+renewed, answered: "I know not; when the staff was broken it was
+renewed." Asked, if she had not said that the pennons copied from hers
+were fortunate, answered, that she had said, "Go in boldly among the
+English"; and that she had done the same herself. Asked, if she said
+that they should have good luck if they bore the banners well,
+answered, that she had told them what would happen, and what should
+still happen. Asked, if she had caused holy water to be sprinkled on
+the pennons when they were new, she answered, "That has nothing to do
+with the trial"; but added that if she did so sprinkle them she was
+not instructed to answer that question now. Asked, if the others put
+/Jhesus Maria/ upon their pennons, she answered: "By my faith, I know
+nothing about it." Asked, if she had ever carried or caused to be
+carried in a procession round a church or altar the linen of which the
+pennons were made, answered no, that she had never seen anything of
+the kind done.
+
+Asked, when she was before Jargeau, what it was that she wore behind
+her helmet, and if she had not something round it, she answered: "By
+my faith, there was nothing." Asked, if she knew a certain Brother
+Richard, she answered: "I never saw him till I was before Troyes."
+Asked, what cheer Brother Richard made to her, answered, that she
+thought the people of Troyes had sent him to her, doubting whether she
+had come on the part of God, and that as he approached her he made the
+sign of the cross, and sprinkled holy water; she said to him: "Come on
+boldly; I shall not fly away." Asked, if she had seen, or had caused
+to be made, any images or pictures of herself, she answered, that at
+Arras she had seen a picture in the hands of a Scot, where she was
+represented fully armed, kneeling on one knee, and presenting a letter
+to the King; but that she had never caused any image or picture of
+herself to be made. Asked concerning a table in the house of her host,
+upon which were painted three women, with /Justice, Peace, Union/
+inscribed beneath, answered, that she knew nothing of it. Asked, if
+she knew that those of her party caused masses and prayers to be made
+in her honour, she answered, that she knew not; and if they did so, it
+was not by any command of hers; but that if they did so, her opinion
+was that they did no wrong. Asked, if those of her party firmly
+believed that she was sent from God, she answered: "I know not whether
+they believed it; but even if they did not believe it, I am none the
+less sent on the part of God." Asked, whether she thought that to
+believe that she was sent from god was a worthy faith, she answered,
+that if they believed that she was sent from God they were not
+mistaken. Asked, if she knew what her party meant by kissing her feet
+and hands and her garments, answered, that many people did it, but
+that her hands were kissed as little as she could help it. The poor
+people, however, came to her of their own free will, because she never
+oppressed them, but protected them as far as was in her power. Asked,
+what reverence the people of Troyes made to her, she answered, "None
+at all," and added that she believed Brother Richard came into Troyes
+with her army, but that she had not seen him coming in. Asked, if he
+had not preached at the gates when she came, answered, that she
+scarcely paused there at all, and knew nothing of any sermon. Asked,
+how long she was at Rheims, and answered, four or five days. Asked,
+whether she baptised (stood godmother to) children there, she
+answered: To one at Troyes, but did not remember any at Rheims or at
+Chateau-Thierry; but there were two at St. Denis; and willingly she
+called the boys "Charles," in honour of her King, and the girls
+"Jeanne," according to what their mothers wished. Asked, if the good
+women of the town did not touch with their rings the rings she wore,
+she answered, that many women touched her hands and her rings; but she
+did not know why they did it. Asked, what she did with the gloves in
+which her King was consecrated, she answered that "Gloves were
+distributed to the knights and nobles that came there"; and there was
+one who lost his; but she did not say that she would find it for him.
+Also she said that her standard was in the church at Rheims, and she
+believed near the altar, and she herself had carried it for a short
+time, but did not know whether Brother Richard had held it.
+
+She was then asked if she communicated and went to confession often
+while moving about the country, and if she received the sacrament in
+her male costume; to which she answered "yes, but without her arms";
+she was then questioned about a horse belonging to the Bishop of
+Senlis, which had not suited her, a matter completely without
+importance. The inference intended was that it was taken from him
+without being paid for; but there was no evidence that the Maid knew
+anything about it. We then come to the incident of Lagny.
+
+She was asked how old the child was which she saw at Lagny, and
+answered, three days; it hed been brought to Lagny to the Church of
+Notre Dame, and she was told that all the maids in Lagny were before
+our Lady praying for it, and she also wished to go and pray God and
+our Lady that its life might come back; and she went, and prayed with
+the rest. And finally life appeared; it yawned three times, and was
+baptised and buried in consecrated ground. It had given no sign of
+life for three days and was black as her coat, but when it yawned its
+colour began to come back. She was there with the other maids on her
+knees before our Lady to make her prayer.
+
+The reader must understand that this was no special appeal to Jeanne's
+miraculous power, but a custom of that intense and tender charity with
+which the Church of Rome corrects her dogmatism upon questions of
+salvation. A child unbaptised could not be buried in consecrated
+ground, and was subject to all the sorrows of the unredeemed; but who
+could doubt that the priest would be easily persuaded by some wavering
+of the tapers on the altar upon the little dead face, some flicker of
+his own compassionate eyelids, that sufficient life had come back to
+permit the holy rite to be administered? The whole little scene is
+affecting in the extreme, the young creatures all kneeling, fervently
+appealing to the Maiden-mother, the priest ready to take instant
+advantage of any possible flicker, the Maid of France, no conspicuous
+figure, but weeping and praying among the rest. There was no thought
+here of the raising of the dead--the prayer was for breath enough only
+to allow of the holy observance, the blessed water, the last
+possibility of human love and effort.
+
+Jeanne was then questioned concerning Catherine of La Rochelle, the
+supposed prophetess, who had been played against her by La Tremouille
+and his follows, and narrated how she had watched two nights to see
+the mysterious lady clothed in cloth of gold who was said to appear to
+Catherine, but had not seen her, and that she had advised the woman to
+return to her husband and children. Catherine's mission was to go
+through the "good towns" with heralds and trumpets to call upon those
+who had money or treasure of any kind to give it to the King, and she
+professed to have a supernatural knowledge where such money was
+hidden. [No doubt La Tremouille must have thought that to get money,
+which was so scarce, in such a simple way, was worth trying at least.
+But Jeanne's opinion was that it was folly, and that there was nothing
+in it; an opinion fully verified. Catherine's advice had been that
+Jeanne should go to the Duke of Burgundy to make peace; but Jeanne had
+answered that no peace could be made save at the end of the lance.]
+
+She was then asked about the siege of La Charite; she answered, that
+she had made an assault: but had not sprinkled holy water, or caused
+it to be sprinkled. Asked, why she did not enter the city as she had
+the command of God to do so, she replied: "Who told you that I was
+commanded to enter?" Asked, if she had not had the advice of her
+voices, she answered, that she had desired to go into France (meaning
+towards Paris), but the generals had told her that it was better to go
+first to La Charite. She was then asked if she had been long in the
+tower of Beaurevoir; answered, that she was there about four months,
+and that when she heard the English come she was angry and much
+troubled. Her voices forbade her several times to attempt to escape;
+but at last, in the doubt she had of the English she threw herself
+down, commending herself to God and to our Lady, and was much hurt.
+But after she had done this the voice of St. Catherine said to her not
+to be afraid, that she should be healed, and that Compiegne would be
+relieved.
+
+Also she said that she prayed always for the relief of Compiegne with
+her council. Asked, what she said after she had thrown herself down,
+she answered, that some said that she was dead; and as soon as the
+Burgundians saw that she was not dead, they told her that she had
+thrown herself down. Asked, if she had said that she would rather die
+than fall into the hands of the English, she answered, that she would
+much rather have rendered her soul to God than have fallen into the
+hands of the English. Asked, if she was not in a great rage, and if
+she did not blaspheme the name of God, she answered, that she never
+said evil of any saint, and that it was not her custom to swear. Asked
+respecting Soissons, when the captain had surrendered the town,
+whether she had not cursed God, and said that if she had gotten hold
+of the captain, she would have cut him into four pieces; she answered,
+that she never swore by any saint, and that those who said so had not
+understood her.
+
+*****
+
+At this point the public trial of Jeanne came to a sudden end. Either
+the feeling produced in the town, and even among the judges, by her
+undeviating, simple, and dignified testimony had begun to be more than
+her persecutors had calculated upon; or else they hoped to make
+shorter work with her when deprived of the free air of publicity, the
+sight no doubt of some sympathetic faces, and the consciousness of
+being still able to vindicate her cause and to maintain her faith
+before men. Two or three fierce Inquisitors within her cell, and the
+Bishop, that man without heart or pity at their head, might still tear
+admissions from her weariness, which a certain sympathetic atmosphere
+in a large auditory, swept by waves of natural feeling, would
+strengthen her to keep back. The Bishop made a proclamation that in
+order not to vex and tire his learned associates he would have the
+minutes of the previous sittings reduced into form, and submitted to
+them for judgment, while he himself carried on apart what further
+interrogatory was necessary. We are told that he was warned by a
+counsellor of the town that secret examinations without witnesses or
+advocate on the prisoner's side, were illegal; but Monseigneur de
+Beauvais was well aware that anything would be legal which effected
+his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or
+illegality of the proceedings would be of small importance. I have
+thought it right to give to the best of my power a literal translation
+of these examinations, notwithstanding their great length; as, except
+in one book, now out of print and very difficult to procure, no such
+detailed translation,[8] so far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to
+me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader (always capable of
+skipping at his pleasure), it is better to unfold the complete scene
+with all its tedium and badgering, which brings out by every touch the
+extraordinary self-command, valour, and sense of this wonderful Maid,
+the youngest, perhaps, and most ignorant of the assembly, yet meeting
+all with a modest and unabashed countenance, true, pure, and natural,
+--a far greater miracle in her simplicity and noble steadfastness than
+even in the wonders she had done.
+----------
+[1] She was in reality detained two days, which fact, no doubt, she
+    judged to be an unimportant detail.
+
+[2] Probably meaning, had been present when the voices came to her and
+    had perceived her state of listening and abstraction.
+
+[3] This was her special friend, Gerard of Epinal--her /compere/ and
+    gossip; was it jesting beguiled by some childish recollection, or
+    mock threat of youthful days that she said this?
+
+[4] An answer evidently given in the vagueness of imperfect knowledge,
+    meaning a very great number.
+
+[5] Quicherat gives a note on this subject to point out that there was
+    really was but one Pope at this moment, the question having been
+    settled by the abdication of Clement VIII., Benedict XIV. being a
+    mere impostor. We cannot believe, however, that this historical
+    cutting of the knot could be known to Jeanne. She probably felt
+    only, with her fine instinct, that there could be but one Pope,
+    and that to be deceived on such a matter ought to have been a
+    thing impossible to all those priests and learned men; as a matter
+    of fact the three claimants, on account of whom the Comte
+    d'Armagnac had appealed to her, were no longer existing at the
+    time he wrote.
+
+[6] She meant Paris, which was lost by the English, according to her
+    prophecy within the time named.
+
+[7] It should here be noted that Jeanne's sign to the King being, as
+    he afterwards declared, the answer to his most private devotions
+    and the final setting at rest of a doubt which might have injured
+    him much had it been known that he entertained it--it would have
+    been dishonourable on her part and a great wrong to him had she
+    revealed it.
+
+[8] The translation of M. Fabre is now, I believe, reprinted, but it
+    is not satisfactory.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON.
+LENT, 1431.
+
+It must not be forgotten, in the history of this strange trial, that
+the prisoner was brought from the other side of France expressly that
+she might be among a people who were not of her own party, and who had
+no natural sympathies with her, but a hereditary connection with
+England, which engaged all its partialities on that side. For this
+purpose it was that the /venue/, the town expected the coming of the
+Witch, and all the dark revelations that might be extracted from her,
+her spells, and the details of that contract with the devil which was
+so entrancing to the popular imagination, with excitement and
+eagerness. Such a /Cause Celebre/ had never taken place among them
+before; and everybody no doubt looked forward to the pleasure of
+seeing it proved that it was not by the will of Heaven, but by some
+monstrous combination of black arts, that such an extraordinary result
+as the defeat of the invincible English soldiers had been brought
+about. The litigious and logical Normans no doubt looked forward to it
+as to the most interesting entertainment, ending in the complete
+vindication of their own side and the exposure of the nefarious arms
+used by their adversaries.
+
+But when the proceedings had been opened, and in place of some dark-
+browed and termagant sorceress, with the mark of every evil passion in
+her face, there appeared before the spectators crowding into every
+available corner, the slim, youthful figure--was it boy or girl?--the
+serene and luminous countenance of the Maid, the flower of youth
+raising its whiteness and innocence in the midst of all those black-
+robed, subtle Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance
+must have given a shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may
+be called the lay spectators, those who had no especial bias more than
+common report, and whose credit or interest were not involved in
+bringing this unlikely criminal to condemnation. "A girl! Like our own
+Jeanne at home," might many a father have said, dismayed and
+confounded. She had, they all say, those eyes of innocence which it is
+so impossible not to believe, and that virginal voice, /assez femme/,
+which a sentimental Frenchman insists upon as belonging only to the
+spotless. At all events she had the bearing of honesty, purity, and
+truth. She was not afraid though all the powers of hell--or was it
+only of the Church and the Law?--were arrayed against her: no guilty
+mystery to be discovered, was in her countenance. But it must have
+been plain to the keen and not too charitable Normans that such
+semblances are not always to be trusted, and that the devil himself
+even, on occasion, can take upon himself the appearance of an angel of
+light; so that after the first shock of wonder they no doubt settled
+themselves to listen, believing that soon they would have their
+imaginations fed with tales of horror, and would discover the hoofs
+and the horns and unveil with triumph the lurking demon. The French
+historians never take into consideration the fact that it was the
+belief of Rouen and Normandy, as well as of any similar town or
+province in England, that the child Henry VI. was lawful king, and
+that whatever was on the other side was a hateful adversary, to be
+brought to such disaster and shame as was possible, without mercy and
+without delay.
+
+But after a few days of the examination which we have just reported,
+public opinion was greatly staggered, and knew not how to turn.
+Gradually the conviction must have been forced upon every mind which
+had any candour left, that Jeanne, at that dreadful bar, with the
+stake in sight, and all the learning of Paris--the entire power of one
+great national and half of another, all England and half France
+against--(many more than half France, for the other part had abandoned
+her cause),--showed nothing of the demon, but all--if not of the
+angel, yet of the Maid, the emblem of perfection to that rude world,
+though often so barbarously handled. It might almost be said of the
+age, notwithstanding its immorality and rampant viciousness, that in
+its eyes a true virgin could do no harm. And hers was one if ever such
+a thing existed on earth. The talk in the streets began to take a very
+different tone. Massieu the clerical sheriff's officer saw nothing in
+her answers that was not good and right. Out of the midst of the crowd
+of listeners would burst an occasional cry of "Well said!" An
+Englishman, even a knight, overcome by his feelings, cried out: "Why
+was not she English, this brave girl!" All these were ominous sounds.
+Still more ominous was the utterance of Maitre Jean Lohier, a lawyer
+of Rouen, who declared loudly that the trial was not a legal trial for
+the reasons which follow:
+
+"In the first place because it was not in the form of an ordinary
+trial; secondly, because it was not held in a public court, and those
+present had not full and complete freedom to say what was their full
+and unbiassed opinion; thirdly, because there was question of the
+honour of the King of France of whose party Jeanne was, without
+calling him, or any one for him; fourthly, because neither libel nor
+articles were produced, and this woman who was only an uninstructed
+girl, had no advocate to answer for her before so many Masters and
+Doctors, on such grave matters, and especially those which touched
+upon the revelations of which she spoke; therefore it seemed to him
+that the trial was worth nothing. For these things Monseigneur de
+Beauvais was very indignant against the said Maitre Lohier, saying:
+'Here is Lohier who is going to make a fine fuss about our trial; he
+calumniates us all, and tells the world it is of no good. If one were
+to go by him, one would have to begin everything over again, and all
+that has been done would be of no use.' Monseigneur de Beauvais said
+besides: 'It is easy to see on which foot he halts [/de quel pied il
+cloche/]. By St. John, we shall do nothing of the kind; we shall go on
+with our trial as we have begun it.'"
+
+A day or two later Manchon, the Clerk of the Court (he who refused to
+take down Jeanne's conversation with her Judas), met this same lawyer
+Lohier at church, and asked him, as no doubt every man asked every
+other whom he met, how did he think the trial was going? to which
+Lohier answered: "You see the manner in which they proceed; they will
+take her, if they can, in her words--that is to say, the assertions in
+which she says /I know for certain/, things that concern her
+apparitions. If she would say, 'It seems to me' instead of 'I know for
+certain,' I do not see how any man could condemn her. It appears that
+they proceed against her rather from hate than from any other cause,
+and for this reason I shall not remain here. I will have nothing to do
+with it." This I think shows very clearly that Lohier, like the bulk
+of the population, by no means thought at first that it was "from
+hate" that the trial proceeded, but honestly believed that he had been
+called to try Jeanne as a professor of the black arts; and that he had
+discovered from her own testimony that she was not so, and that the
+motive of the trial was entirely a different one from that of justice;
+one in fact with which an honest man could have nothing to do.
+
+It is very significant also that the number of judges present in court
+on the sixth day, the last of the public examination, was only thirty-
+eight, as against the sixty-two of the second day, which seems to
+prove that a general disgust and alarm was growing in the minds of
+those most closely concerned. Warwick and the soldiers, impatient of
+all such business, striding in noisily from time to time to give a
+careless glance at the proceedings, might not stay long enough to
+share the impression--or might, who can say? Their business was to get
+this pestilent woman, even if by chance she might be an innocent
+fanatic, cleared off the face of the earth and out of their way.
+
+After the sixth day, however, it would seem that the Bishop and his
+tools had taken fright at the progress of public opinion. Before
+dismissing the court on that occasion, Cauchon made an address to the
+disturbed and anxious judges, informing them that he would not tire
+them out with prolonged sittings, but that a few specially chosen
+assistants would now examine into what further details were necessary.
+In the meantime all would be put in writing; so that they might think
+it over and deliberate within themselves, so as to be able each to
+make a report either to himself, the Bishop, or to some one deputed by
+him. The assessors, thus thrown out of work, were however forbidden to
+leave Rouen without the Bishop's permission--probably because of the
+threat of Lohier. Repeated meetings were held in Cauchon's house to
+arrange the details of the proceedings to follow; and during this time
+it was perhaps hoped that any excitement outside would quiet down. The
+Bishop himself had in the meantime other work in hand. He had to
+receive certain important visitors, one of them the man who held the
+appointment of Chancellor of France on the English side, and who was
+well acquainted with the mind of his masters. We have no information
+whatever whether Cauchon ever himself wavered, or allowed the
+possibility of acquitting Jeanne to enter his mind; but he must have
+seen that it was of the last necessity to know what would satisfy the
+English chiefs. No doubt he was confirmed and strengthened in the
+conviction that by hook or by crook her condemnation must be
+accomplished, by the conversation of these illustrious visitors. To
+save Jeanne was impossible he must have been told. No English soldier
+would strike a blow while she lived. England itself, the whole
+country, trembled at her name. Till she was got rid of nothing could
+be done.
+
+There was of course great exaggeration in all this, for the English
+had fought desperately enough in her presence except on the one
+occasion of Patay, notwithstanding all the early prestige of Jeanne.
+But at all events it was made perfectly clear that the foregoing
+conclusion must be carried out, and that Jeanne must die: and, not
+only so, but she must die with opprobrium and disgrace as a witch,
+which almost everybody out of Rouen now believed her to be. The public
+examination which lasted six days was concluded on the third of March,
+1430. On the following days, the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh,
+eighth, and ninth of March, meetings were held, as we have said, in
+the Bishop's house to consider what it would be well to do next, at
+one of which a select company of Inquisitors was chosen to carry on
+the examination in private. These were Jean de la Fontaine, a lawyer
+learned in canon law; Jean Beaupere, already her interrogator; Nicolas
+Midi, a Doctor in Theology; Pierre Morice, Canon of Rouen and
+Ambassador from the English King to the Council of Bale; Thomas de
+Courcelles, the learned and excellent young Doctor already described;
+Nicolas l'Oyseleur, the traitor, also already sufficiently referred
+to; and Manchon, the honest Clerk of the court: the names of Gerard
+Feuillet, also a distinguished man, and Jean Fecardo, an advocate, are
+likewise also mentioned. They seem to have served in their turn, three
+or four at a time. This private session began on the 10th of March, a
+week after the conclusion of the public trial, and was held in the
+prison chamber inhabited by the Maid.
+
+We shall not attempt to follow literally those private examinations,
+which would take a great deal more space than we have at our command,
+and would be fatiguing to the reader from the constant and prolonged
+repetitions; we shall therefore quote only such parts as are new or so
+greatly enlarged from Jeanne's original statements as to seem so. At
+the first day's examination in her prison she was questioned about
+Compiegne and her various proceedings before reaching that place.[1]
+She was asked, for one thing, if her voices had bidden her make the
+sally in which she was taken; to which she answered that had she known
+the time she was to be taken she would not have gone out, unless upon
+the express command of the saints. She was then asked about her
+standard, her arms, and her horses, and replied that she had no coat-
+of-arms, but her brothers had, who also had all her money, from ten to
+twelve thousand francs, which was "no great treasure to make war
+upon," besides five chargers, and about seven other horses, all from
+the King. The examiners then came to their principal object, and
+having lulled her mind with these trifles, turned suddenly to a
+subject on which they still hoped she might commit herself, the sign
+which had proved her good faith to the King. It is scarcely possible
+to avoid the feeling, grave as all the circumstances were, that a
+little /malice/, a glance of mischievous pleasure, kindled in Jeanne's
+eye. She had refused to enter into further explanations again and
+again. She had warned them that she would give them no true light on
+the subjects that concerned the King. Now she would seem to have had
+sudden recourse to the mystification that is dear to youth, to have
+tossed her young head and said: "/Have then your own way/"; and
+forthwith proceeded to romance, according to the indications given her
+of what was wanted, without thought of preserving any appearance of
+reality. Most probably indeed, her air and tone would make it apparent
+to her persistent questioners how complete a fable, or at least
+parable, it was.
+
+Asked, what sign she gave to the King, she replied that it was a
+beautiful and honourable sign, very creditable and very good, and rich
+above all. Asked, if it still lasted; answered, "It would be good to
+know; it will last a thousand years and more if well guarded," adding
+that it was in the treasure of the King. Asked, if it was of gold or
+silver or of precious stones, or in the form of a crown; answered: "I
+will tell you nothing more; but no man could devise a thing so rich as
+this sign; but the sign that is necessary for you is that God should
+deliver me out of your hands, and that is what He will do." She also
+said that when she had to go to the King it was said by her voices:
+"Go boldly; and when you are before the King he will have a sign which
+will make him receive and believe in you." Asked, what reverence she
+made when the sign came to the King, and if it came from God;
+answered, that she had thanked God for having delivered her from the
+priests of her own party who had argued against her, and that she had
+knelt down several times; she also said that an angel from God, and
+not from another, brought the sign to the King; and she had thanked
+the Lord many times; she added that the priests ceased to argue
+against when they had seen that sign. Asked, if the clergy of her
+party (/de par dela/) saw the above sign; answered yes, that her King
+if he were satisfied; and he answered yes. And afterwards she went to
+a little chapel close by, and heard them say that after she was gone
+more than three hundred people saw the said sign. She said besides
+that for love of her, and that they should give up questioning her,
+God permitted those of her party to see the sign. Asked, if the King
+and she made reverence to the angel when he brought the sign; answered
+yes, for herself, that she knelt down and took off her hood.
+
+What Jeanne meant by this strange romance can only, I think be
+explained by this hypothesis. She was "dazed and bewildered," say some
+of the historians, evidently not knowing how to interpret so strange
+an interruption to her narrative; but there is no other sign of
+bewilderment; her mind was always clear and her intelligence complete.
+Granting that the whole story was boldly ironical, its object is very
+apparent. Honour forbade her to betray the King's secret, and she had
+expressly said she would not do so. But her story seems to say--/since
+you will insist that there was a sign, though I have told you I could
+give you no information, have it your own way; you shall have a sign
+and one of the very best; it delivered me from the priests of my own
+party (de par dela)/. Jeanne was no milk-sop; she was bold enough to
+send a winged shaft to the confusion of the priests of the other side
+who had tormented her in the same way. One can imagine a lurking smile
+at the corner of her mouth. Let them take it since they would have it.
+And we may well believe there was that in her eye, and in the details
+heaped up so lightly to form the miraculous tale, which left little
+doubt in the minds of the questioners, of the spirit in which she
+spoke: though to us who only read the record the effect is of a more
+bewildering kind.
+
+Two days after, on Monday, the 12th of March, the Inquisitors began by
+several additional questions concerning the angel who brought the sign
+to the King; was it the same whom she first saw, or another? She
+answered that it was the same, and no other was wanted. Asked, if this
+angel had not deceived her since she had been taken prisoner;
+answered, that SHE BELIEVED SINCE IT SO PLEASED OUR LORD THAT IT WAS
+BEST THAT SHE SHOULD BE TAKEN. Asked, if the angel had not failed her;
+answered, "How could he have failed me, when he comforts me every
+day?" This comfort is what she understands to come through St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, whether she called them, or they
+came without being called, she answered, that they often came without
+being called, and if they did not come soon enough, she asked our
+Saviour to send them. Asked, if St. Denis had ever appeared to her;
+answered, not that she knew. Asked, if when she promised to our Lord
+to remain a virgin she spoke to Him; answered, that it ought to be
+enough to speak to those who were sent by Him that is to say, St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, what induced her to summon a man to
+Toul, in respect to marriage; answered, "I did not summon him; it was
+he who summoned me"; and that on that occasion she had sworn before
+the judge to speak the truth, which was that she had not made him any
+promise. She also said that the first time she had heard the voices
+she made a vow of virginity so long as it pleased God, being then
+about the age of thirteen.
+
+It was the object of the judges by these questions to prove that,
+according to a fable which had obtained some credit, Jeanne during her
+visit to La Rousse, the village inn-keeper at Neufchateau, had acted
+as servant in the house and tarnished her good fame--so that her
+betrothed had refused to marry her: and that he had been brought
+before the Bishop's court at Toul for his breach of promise, as we
+should say. Exactly the reverse was the case, as the reader will
+remember.
+
+Jeanne was further asked, if she had spoken of her visions to her cure
+or to any ecclesiastic: and answered no, but only to Robert de
+Baudricourt and to her King; but added that she was not bidden by her
+voices to conceal them, but feared to reveal them lest the Burgundians
+should hear of them and prevent her going. And especially she had much
+doubt of her father, lest he should hinder her from going. Asked, if
+she thought she did well to go away without the permission of her
+father and mother, when it is certain we ought to honour our father
+and mother; answered, that in every other thing she had fully obeyed
+him, except in respect to her departure; but she had written to them,
+and they had pardoned her. Asked, if when she left her father and
+mother she did not think it was a sin; answered, that her voices were
+quite willing that she should tell them, if it were not for the pain
+it would have given them; but as for herself, she would not have told
+them for any consideration; also that her voices left her to do as she
+pleased, to tell or not.
+
+*****
+
+Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we
+hope had her piece of bread and her /eau rougie/. In the afternoon
+these indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions
+throw a fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which
+this wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.
+
+She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that
+while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her
+father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with
+the troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and
+held her in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point
+except that of her affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also
+said that her mother had told her what her father had said to her
+brothers: "If I could think that the thing would happen of which I
+have dreamed, I wish she might be drowned first; and if you would not
+do it, I would drown her with my own hands"; and that he nearly lost
+his senses when she went to Vaucouleurs.
+
+How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern,
+and unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and
+pure may not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of
+personal degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in
+the intensity of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to
+us in many lands, always one of the most impressive of human pictures,
+with no trust of love in him but an overwhelming faith in every
+vicious possibility. If there is no evidence to prove that, even at
+the moment when Jeanne was supreme, when he was induced to go to
+Rheims to see the coronation, Jacques d'Arc was still dark,
+unresponsive, never more sure than any of the Inquisitors that his
+daughter was not a witch, or worse, a shameless creature linked to the
+captains and the splendid personages about her by very different ties
+from those which appeared--there is at least not a word to prove that
+he had changed his mind. She does not add anything to soften the
+description here given. The sudden appearance of this dark remorseless
+figure, looking on from his village, who probably in all Domremy--when
+Domremy got to hear the news--would be the only person who would in
+his desperation almost applaud that stake and devouring flame, is too
+startling for words.
+
+The end of this day's examination was remarkable also for a sudden
+light upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke
+of Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most
+cherished hopes to deliver.
+
+Asked, how she meant to rescue the Duc d'Orleans: she answered, that
+by that time she hoped to have taken English prisoners enough to
+exchange for him: and if she had not taken enough she should have
+crossed the sea, in power, to search for him in England. Asked, if St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret had told her absolutely and without
+condition that she should take enough prisoners to exchange for the
+Duc d'Orleans, who was in England, or otherwise, that she should cross
+the sea to fetch him and bring him back within three years; she
+answered yes: and that she had told the King and had begged him to
+permit her to make prisoners. She said further that if she had lasted
+three years without hindrance, she should have delivered him.
+Otherwise she said she had not thought of so long a time as three
+years, although it should have been more than one; but she did not at
+present recollect exactly.
+
+There is a curious story existing, though we do not remember whence it
+comes and there is not a scrap of evidence for it, which suggests a
+rumour that Jeanne was not the child of the d'Arc family at all, but
+in fact an abandoned and illegitimate child of the Queen, Isabel of
+Bavaria, and that her real father was the murdered Duc d'Orleans. This
+suggestion might explain the ease with which she fell into the way of
+Courts, a sort of air /a la Princesse/ which certainly was about her,
+and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A
+shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared in
+history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little
+conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are
+certain fanciful suggestions in the thought.
+
+After the above, Jeanne was again questioned and at great length upon
+the sign given to the King, upon the angel who brought it, the manner
+of his coming and going, the persons who saw him, those who saw the
+crown bestowed upon the King, and so on, in the most minute detail.
+That the purpose of the sign was that "they should give up arguing and
+so let her proceed on her mission," she repeated again and again; but
+here is a curious additional note.
+
+She was asked how the King and the people with him were convinced that
+it was an angel; and answered, that the King knew it by the
+instruction of the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign
+of the crown. Asked, how the ecclesiastics (/gens d'eglise/) knew it
+was an angel she answered, "By their knowledge [science], and because
+they were priests."
+
+Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind?
+We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which
+Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the
+strange tale.
+
+She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices
+that she attacked La Charite, and afterwards Paris, her two points of
+failure; the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her
+that those voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no.
+To Paris she went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a
+skirmish, or assault of arms (/vaillance d'armes/); but she intended
+to go farther, and to pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting
+and make the skirmish into a serious assault; the same was the case
+before La Charite. She was asked whether she had no revelation
+concerning Pont l'Eveque, and said that since it was revealed to her
+at Melun that she should be taken, she had had more recourse to the
+will of the captains than to her own; but she did not tell them that
+it was revealed to her that she should be taken. Asked, if she thought
+it was well done to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity of our
+Lady, which was a festival of the Church; she answered, that it was
+always well to keep the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience
+it seemed to her that it was and always would be a good thing to keep
+the feasts of our Lady, from one end to the other.
+
+In the afternoon the examiners returned to the attempt at escape or
+suicide--they seemed to have preferred the latter explanation--made at
+Beaurevoir; and as Jeanne expresses herself with more freedom as to
+her personal motives in these prison examinations and opens her heart
+more freely, there is much here which we give in full.
+
+She was asked first what was the cause of her leap from the tower of
+Beaurevoir. She answered that she had heard that all the people of
+Compiegne, down to the age of seven, were to be put to the sword, and
+that she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good
+people; this was one of the reasons; the other was that she knew that
+she was sold to the English and that she would rather die than fall
+into the hands of the English, her enemies. Asked, if she made that
+leap by the command of her voices; answered, that St. Catherine said
+to her almost every day that she was not to leap, for that God would
+help her, and also the people of Compiegne: and she, Jeanne, said to
+St. Catherine that since God intended to help the people of Compiegne
+she would fain be there. And St. Catherine said: "You must take it in
+good part, but you will not be delivered till you have seen the King
+of the English." And she, Jeanne, answered: "Truly I do not wish to
+see him. I would rather die than fall into the hands of the English."
+Asked, if she had said to St. Catherine and St. Margaret, "Will God
+leave the good people of Compiegne to die so cruelly?" answered, that
+she did not say "so cruelly," but said it in this way: "Will God leave
+these good people of Compiegne to die, who have been and are so loyal
+to their lord?" She added that after she fell there were two or three
+days that she would not eat; and that she was so hurt by the leap that
+she could not eat; but all the time she was comforted by St.
+Catherine, who told her to confess and ask pardon of God for that act,
+and that without doubt the people of Compiegne would have succour
+before Martinmas. And then she took pains to recover and began to eat,
+and shortly was healed.
+
+Asked, whether, when she threw herself down, she wished to kill
+herself, she answered no; but that in throwing herself down she
+commended herself to God, and hoped by means of that leap to escape
+and to avoid being delivered to the English. Asked, if, when she
+recovered the power of speech, she had denied and blasphemed God and
+the saints, as had been reported; answered, that she remembered
+nothing of the kind, and that, as far as she knew, she had never
+denied and blasphemed God and His saints there nor anywhere else, and
+did not confess that she had done so, having no recollection of it.
+Asked, if she would like to see the information taken on the spot,
+answered: "I refer myself to God, and not another, and to a good
+confession." Asked, if her voices ever desired delay for their
+replies; answered, that St. Catherine always answered her at once, but
+sometimes she, Jeanne, could not hear because of the tumult round her
+(/turbacion des personnes/) and the noise of her guards; but that when
+she asked anything of St. Catherine, sometimes she, and sometimes St.
+Margaret asked of our Lord, and then by the command of our Lord an
+answer was given to her. Asked, if, when they came, there was always
+light accompanying them, and if she did not see that light when she
+heard the voice in the castle without knowing whether it was in her
+chamber or not: answered, that there was never a day that they did not
+come into the castle, and that they never came without light: and that
+time she heard the voice, but did not remember whether she saw the
+light, or whether she saw St. Catherine. Also she said she had asked
+from her voices three things: one, her release: the other, that God
+would help the French, and keep the town faithful: and the other the
+salvation of her soul. Afterwards she asked that she might have a copy
+of these questions and her answers if she were to be taken to Paris,
+that she may give them to the people in Paris, and say to them, "This
+is how I was questioned in Rouen, and here are my replies," that she
+might not be exhausted by so many questions.
+
+Asked, what she meant when she said that Monseigneur de Beauvais put
+himself in danger by bringing her to trial, and why Monseigneur de
+Beauvais more than others, she answered, that this was and is what she
+said to Monseigneur de Beauvais: "You say that you are my judge. I
+know not whether you are so; but take care that you judge well, or you
+will put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if our Lord
+should chastise you for it, I may have done my duty in warning you."
+Asked, what was that danger? she answered, that St. Catherine had said
+that she should have succour, but that she knew not whether this meant
+that she would be delivered from prison, or that, when she was before
+the tribunal, there might come trouble by which she should be
+delivered; she thought, however, it would be the one or the other. And
+all the more that her voices told her that she would be delivered by a
+great victory; and afterwards they said to her: "Take everything
+cheerfully, do not be disturbed by this martyrdom: thou shalt thence
+come at last to the kingdom of Heaven." And this the voices said
+simply and absolutely--that is to say, without fail; she explained
+that she called It martyrdom because of all the pain and adversity
+that she had suffered in prison; and she knew not whether she might
+have still more to suffer, but waited upon our Lord. She was then
+asked whether, since her voices had said that she should go to
+Paradise, she felt assured that she should be saved and not damned in
+hell; she answered, that she believed firmly what her voices said
+about her being saved, as firmly as if she were so already. And when
+it was said to her that this answer was of great weight, she answered
+that she herself held it as a great treasure.
+
+We have said that Jeanne's answers to the Inquisitors in prison had a
+more familiar form than in the public examination; which seem to prove
+that they were not unkind to her, further, at least, than by the
+persistence and tediousness of their questions. The Bishop for one
+thing was seldom present; the sittings were frequently presided over
+by the Deputy Inquisitor, who had made great efforts to be free of the
+business altogether, and had but very recently been forced into it; so
+that we may at least imagine, as he was so reluctant, that he did what
+he could to soften the proceedings. Jean de la Fontaine, too, was a
+milder man than her former questioners, and in so small an assembly
+she could not be disturbed and interrupted by Frere Isambard's well-
+meant signs and whispers. She speaks at length and with a self-
+disclosure which seems to have little that was painful in it, like one
+matured into a kind of age by long weariness and trouble, who regards
+the panorama of her life passing before her with almost a pensive
+pleasure. And it is clear that Jeanne's ear, still so young and keen,
+notwithstanding that attitude of mind, was still intent upon sounds
+from without, and that Jeanne's heart still expected a sudden assault,
+a great victory for France, which should open her prison doors--or
+even a rising in the very judgment hall to deliver her. How could they
+keep still outside, Dunois, Alencon, La Hire, the mighty men of
+valour, while they knew that she was being racked and tortured within?
+She who could not bear to be out of the conflict to serve her friends
+at Compiegne, even when succour from on high had been promised, how
+was it possible that these gallant knights could live and let her die,
+their gentle comrade, their dauntless leader? In those long hours,
+amid the noise of the guards within and the garrison around, how she
+must have thought, over and over again, where were they? when were
+they coming? how often imagined that a louder clang of arms than
+usual, a rush of hasty feet, meant that they were here!
+
+But honour and love kept Jeanne's lips closed. Not a word did she say
+that could discredit King, or party, or friends; not a reproach to
+those who had abandoned her. She still looked for the great victory in
+which Monseigneur, if he did not take care, might run the risk of
+being roughly handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court
+that would pitch him form his guilty seat. It was but the fourteenth
+of March still, and there were six weary weeks to come. She did not
+know the hour or the day, but yet she believed that this great
+deliverance was on its way.
+
+And there was a great deliverance to come: but not of this kind. The
+voices of God--how can we deny it?--are often, though in a loftier
+sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise to
+the ear but break it to the heart. They promised her a great victory:
+and she had it, and also the fullest deliverance: but only by the
+stake and the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any
+other girl of her age. They did not speak to deceive her, but she was
+deceived; they kept their promise, but not as she understood it.
+"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having
+seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them."
+Jeanne too was persuaded of them, but was not to receive them--except
+in the other way.
+
+On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne
+fasted, whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely
+questioned on the subject, this time, of Franquet d'Arras, who, as has
+been above narrated, was taken by her in the course of some
+indiscriminate fighting in the north. She was asked if it was not
+mortal sin to take a man as prisoner of war and then give him up to be
+executed. There was evidently no perception of similarities in the
+minds of the judges, for this was precisely what had been done in the
+case of Jeanne herself; but even she does not seem to have been struck
+by the fact. Their object, apparently, was by proving that she was in
+a state of sin, to prove also that her voices were of no authority, as
+being unable to discover so simple a principle as this.
+
+When they spoke to her of "one named Franquet d'Arras, who was
+executed at Lagny," she answered that she consented to his death, as
+he deserved it, for he had confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and
+a traitor. She said that his trial lasted fifteen days, the Bailli de
+Senlis and the law officers of Lagny being the judges; and she added
+that she had wished to have Franquet, to exchange him for a man of
+Paris, Seigneur de Lours (corrected, innkeeper at the sign of l'Ours);
+but when she heard that this man was dead, and when the Bailli told
+her that she would go very much against justice if she set Franquet
+free, she said to the Bailli: "Since my man is dead whom I wished to
+deliver, do with this one whatever justice demands." Asked, if she
+took the money or allowed it to be taken by him who had taken
+Franquet, she answered, that she was not a money changer or a
+treasurer of France, to deal with money.
+
+She was then reminded that having assaulted Paris on a holy day,
+having taken the horse of Monseigneur de Senlis, having thrown herself
+down from the tower of Beaurevoir, having consented to the death of
+Franquet d'Arras, and being still dressed in the costume of a man, did
+she not think that she must be in a state of mortal sin? She answered
+to the first question about Paris: "I do not think I was guilty of
+mortal sin, and if I have sinned it is to God that I would make it
+known, and in confession to God by the priest." To the second
+question, concerning the horse of Senlis, she answered, that she
+believed firmly that there was not mortal sin in this, seeing it was
+valued, and the Bishop had due notice of it, and at all events it was
+sent back to the Seigneur de la Tremouille to give it back to
+Monseigneur de Senlis. The said horse was of no use to her; and, on
+the other hand, she did not wish to keep it because she heard that the
+Bishop was displeased that his horse should have been taken. And as
+for the tower of Beaurevoir: "I did it not to destroy myself, but in
+the hope of saving myself and of going to the aid of the good people
+who were in need." But after having done it, she had confessed her
+sin, and asked pardon of our Lord, and had pardon of Him. And she
+allowed that it was not right to have made that leap, but that she did
+wrong.
+
+The next day an important question was introduced, the only one as yet
+which Jeanne does not seem to have been able to answer with
+understanding. On points of fact or in respect to her visions she was
+always quite clear, but questions concerning the Church were beyond
+her knowledge. It is only indeed after some time has elapsed that we
+perceive why such a question was introduced.
+
+After admonitions made to her she was required, if she had done
+anything contrary to the faith, to submit herself to the decision of
+the Church. She replied, that her answers had all been heard and seen
+by clerks, and that they could say whether there was anything in them
+against the faith: and that if they would point out to her where any
+error was, afterwards she would tell them what was said by her
+counsellors. At all events if there was anything against the faith
+which our Lord had commanded, she would not sustain it, and would be
+very sorry to go against that. Here it was shown to her that there was
+a Church militant and a Church triumphant, and she was asked if she
+knew the difference between them. She was also required to put herself
+under the jurisdiction of the Church, in respect to what she had done,
+whether it was good or evil, but replied, "I will answer no more on
+this point for the present."
+
+Having thrown in this tentative question which she did not understand,
+they returned to the question of her dress, which holds such an
+important place in the entire interrogatory. If she were allowed to
+hear mass as she wished, having been all this time deprived of
+religious ordinances, did not she think it would be more honest and
+befitting that she should go in the dress of a woman? To this she
+replied vaguely, that she would much rather go to mass in the dress of
+a woman than to retain her male costume and not to hear mass; and that
+if she were certified that she should hear mass, she would be there in
+a woman's dress. "I certify you that you shall hear mass," the
+examiner replied, "but you must be dressed as a woman." "What would
+you say," she answered as with a momentary doubt, "if I had sworn to
+my King never to change?" but she added: "Anyhow I answer for it. Find
+me a dress, long, touching the ground, without a train, and give it to
+me to go to mass; but I will return to my present dress when I come
+back." She was then asked why she would not have all the parts of a
+female dress to go to mass in; she said, "I will take counsel upon
+that, and answer you," and begged again for the honour of God and our
+Lady that she might be allowed to hear mass in this good town.
+Afterwards she was again recommended to assume the whole dress of a
+woman and gave a conditional assent: "Get me a dress like that of a
+young /bourgeoise/, that is to say, a long /houppelande/; I will wear
+that and a woman's hood to go to mass." After having promised,
+however, she made an appeal to them to leave her free, and to think no
+more of her garb, but to allow her to hear mass without changing it.
+This would seem to have been refused, and all at once without warning
+the jurisdiction of the Church was suddenly introduced again.
+
+She was asked, whether in all she did and said she would submit
+herself to the Church, and replied: "All my deeds and works are in the
+hands of God, and I depend only on Him; and I certify that I desire to
+do nothing and say nothing against the Christian faith; and if I have
+done or said anything in the body that was against the Christian faith
+which our Lord has established, I should not defend it but cast it
+forth from me." Asked again, if she would not submit to the laws of
+the Church she replied: "I can answer no more to-day on this point;
+but on Saturday send the clerk to me, if you do not come, and I will
+answer by the grace of God, and it can be put in writing."
+
+A great many questions followed as to her visions, but chiefly what
+had been asked before. One thing only we may note, since it was one of
+the special sayings all her own, which fell from the lips of Jeanne,
+during this private and almost sympathetic examination. After being
+questioned closely as to how she knew her first visitor to be St.
+Michael, etc., she was asked, how she would have known had he been
+"l'Anemy" himself (a Norman must surely have used this word), taking
+the form of an angel: and finally, what doctrine he taught her?
+
+She answered; above all things he said that she was to be a good child
+and that God would help her: and among other things that she was to go
+to the succour of the King of France. But the greater part of what the
+angel taught her, she continued, was already in their book; and THE
+ANGEL SHOWED HER THE GREAT PITY THERE WAS OF THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
+
+The pity of it! That which has always gone most to the tender heart: a
+country torn in pieces, brother fighting against brother, the invader
+seated at the native hearth, and blood and fire making the smiling
+land a desert: "/la pitie qui estoit au royaume de France/."
+
+Did the Inquisitor break down here? Could no one go on? or was it mere
+human incompetence to feel the divine touch? Some one broke into a
+foolish question about the height of the angel, and the sitting was
+hurriedly concluded. Monseigneur might well be on his mettle; that
+very pity, was it not stealing into the souls of his private committee
+deputed for so different a use?
+
+*****
+
+Next day the questions about St. Michael's personal appearance were
+resumed, as a little feint we can only suppose, for the great question
+of the Church was again immediately introduced; but in the meantime
+Jeanne had described her visitor in terms which it is pleasant to
+dwell on. "He was in the form of a /tres vrai prud' homme/." The term
+is difficult to translate, as is the Galantuomo of Italy. The "King-
+Honest Man," we used to say in English in the days of his late Majesty
+Victor Emmanuel of Italy; but that is not all that is meant--/un vrai
+prud' homme/, a man good, honest, brave, the best man, is more like
+it. The girl's honest imagination thought of no paraphernalia of wings
+or shining plumes. It was not the theatrical angel, not even the angel
+of art whom she saw--whom it would have been so easy to invent, nay to
+take quite truthfully from the first painted window, radiating colour
+and brightness through the dim, low-roofed church. But even with such
+material handy, Jeanne was not led into the conventional. She knew
+nothing about wings or emblematic scales. He was in the form of a
+brave and gentle man. She knew not anything greater, nor would she be
+seduced into fable however sacred. Then once more the true assault
+began.
+
+She was asked, if she would submit all her sayings and doings, good or
+evil, to the judgment of our Holy Mother, the Church. She replied,
+that as for the Church, she loved it and would sustain it with all her
+might for our Christian faith; and that it was not she whom they ought
+to disturb and hinder from going to church or from hearing mass. As to
+the good things she had done, and that had happened, she must refer
+all to the King of Heaven, who had sent her to Charles, King of
+France; and it should be seen that the French would soon gain a great
+advantage which God would send them, so great that all the kingdom of
+France would be shaken. And this, she said, that when it came to pass,
+they might remember that she had said it. She was again asked, if she
+would submit to the jurisdiction of the Church, and answered, "I refer
+everything to our Lord who sent me, to our Lady, and to the blessed
+Saints of Paradise"; and added her opinion was that our Lord and the
+Church meant the same thing, and that difficulties should not be made
+concerning this, when there was no difficulty, and they were both one.
+She was then told that there was the Church triumphant, in which are
+God, the saints, the angels, and all saved souls. The Church militant
+is our Holy Father the Pope, vicar of God on earth, the cardinals, the
+prelates of the Church, and the clergy and all good Christians and
+Catholics, which Church properly assembled cannot err, but is guided
+by the Holy Spirit. And this being the case she was asked if she would
+refer her cause to the Church militant thus explained to her. She
+replied that she had come to the King of France on the part of God, on
+the part of the Virgin Mary, the blessed Saints of Paradise, and the
+Church victorious in Heaven, and at their commandment; and to that
+Church she submitted all her good deeds, and all that she had done and
+might do. And if they asked her whether she would submit to the Church
+militant, answered, that she would now answer no more than this.
+
+Here again the argument strayed back to the futile subject of dress,
+always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges
+were non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and
+shows that dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to
+mingle with her hopes.
+
+Asked, what she had to say about the woman's dress that had been
+offered to her, to hear mass in: she answered, that she would not take
+it yet, not until the Lord pleased; but that if it were necessary to
+lead her out to be executed, and if she should then have to be
+undressed, she required of the Lords of the Church that they would
+give her the grace to have a long chemise, and a kerchief for her
+head; that she would prefer to die rather than to alter what our Lord
+had directed her to do, and that she firmly believed our Lord would
+not let her descend so low, but that she should soon be helped by God
+and by a miracle. She was then asked, if what she did in respect to
+the man's costume was by command of God, why she asked for a woman's
+chemise in case of death? answered, /It is enough that it should be
+long/.
+
+The effect of these words in which so much was implied, must have made
+a supreme sensation among the handful of men gathered round the
+helpless girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror
+before the eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could
+have been suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold,
+the fire--and the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to
+every evil gaze, must have showed themselves at least for a moment
+against that dark background of prison wall. It was enough that it
+should be long--to hide her as much as was possible from those
+dreadful staring eyes.
+
+The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the
+dress of the saints. But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne
+herself, it was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more
+weighty thoughts. Presently they asked if the saints hated the
+English, to which she replied that they hated what God hated and loved
+what He loved. She was then asked if God hated the English. She
+replied that of the love or hate that God had for the English, or what
+God did for their souls, she knew nothing; but she knew well that they
+should be driven out of France, except those who died there; and that
+God would send victory to the French against the English. Asked, if
+God was for the English so long as they were prosperous in France: she
+answered, that she knew not whether God hated the French, but believed
+He had allowed them to be beaten because of their sins.
+
+Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great
+statesman or a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the
+question concerning John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes.
+"If we shall say: From heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him
+not? but if we shall say of men we fear the people." And she was only
+a peasant girl and the event of which they spoke had been before her
+little time.
+
+Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to
+kill Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT
+MISFORTUNE FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE: but that however it might be
+among themselves, God had sent her to the succour of the King.
+
+One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual
+changes of the subject: one of which called forth as follows her last
+deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
+
+Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would
+answer as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done
+before our Holy Father the Pope, although at several points in the
+trial she would have had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer
+more plainly than before Monseigneur de Beauvais--she said that she
+had answered as much as she knew, and that if anything came to her
+memory that she had forgotten to say, she would say it willingly.
+Asked, if it seemed to her that she would be bound to answer the plain
+truth to the Pope, the vicar of God, in all he asked her touching the
+faith and her conscience, she replied that she desired to be taken
+before him, and then she would answer all that she ought to answer.
+
+Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second
+party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly
+attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have
+conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained
+time, probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to
+understand it.
+
+This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and
+whisperer, L'Oyseleur, was working against it in the background.
+Jeanne evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not
+understand the distinction between the Church militant and the Church
+triumphant: that God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could
+decide upon the questions which were between her Lord and herself, was
+too firmly fixed in her mind: and again and again the men whose desire
+was to make her adopt this expedient, were driven back into the ever
+repeated questions about St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little
+interval that remained, in a series of useless questions about her
+standard. Was it true that this standard had been carried into the
+Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind?
+"It had been through the labour and the pain," she said, "there was
+good reason that it should have the honour."
+
+This last movement of a proud spirit, absolutely disinterested and
+without thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the
+word, gives a sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful
+wranglings in prison, in which, however, there is a softening of tone
+visible throughout, and evident effect of human nature bringing into
+immediate contact divers human creatures day after day. Jeanne is
+often at her best, and never so frequently as during these less formal
+sittings utters those flying words, simple and noble and of absolute
+truth to nature, which are noted everywhere, even in the most rambling
+records.
+
+*****
+
+The private examination, concluding with that last answer about the
+banner, came to an end on the 17th March, the day before Passion
+Sunday. Several subsequent days were occupied with repeated
+consultations in the Bishop's palace, and the reading over of the
+minutes of the examinations, to the judges first and afterwards to
+Jeanne, who acknowledged their correctness, with one or two small
+amendments. It is only now that Cauchon reappears in his own person.
+On the morning of the following Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, he and
+four other doctors with him had a conversation with Jeanne in her
+prison, very early in the morning, touching her repeated application
+to be allowed to hear mass and to communicate. The Bishop offered her
+his ultimatum: if she consented to resume her woman's dress, she might
+hear mass, but not otherwise; to which Jeanne replied, sorrowfully,
+that she would have done so before now if she could; but that it was
+not in her power to do so. Thus after the long and bitter Lent her
+hopes of sharing in the sacred feast were finally taken from her. It
+remains uncertain whether she considered that her change of dress
+would be direct disobedience to God, which her words seem often to
+imply; or whether it would mean renunciation of her mission, which she
+still hoped against hope to be able to resume; or if the fear of
+personal insult weighed most with her. The latter reason had evidently
+something to do with it, but, as evidently, not all.
+
+The background to these curious sittings, afterwards revealed to us,
+casts a hazy side-light upon them. Probably the Bishop, never present,
+must have been made aware by his spies of an intention on the part of
+those most favourable to Jeanne to support an appeal to the Pope; and
+L'Oyseleur, the traitor, who was all this time admitted to her cell by
+permission of Cauchon, and really as his tool and agent, was actively
+employed in prejudicing her mind against them, counselling her not to
+trust to those clerks, not to yield to the Church. How he managed to
+explain his own appearance on the other side, his official connection
+with the trial, and constant presence as one of her judges, it is hard
+to imagine. Probably he gave her to believe that he had sought that
+position (having got himself liberated from the imprisonment which he
+had represented himself as sharing) for her sake, to be able to help
+her.
+
+On the other hand her friends, whose hearts were touched by her
+candour and her sufferings, were not inactive. Jean de la Fontaine and
+the two monks--l'Advenu and Frere Isambard--also succeeded in gaining
+admission to her, and pressed upon her the advantage of appealing to
+the Church, to the Council of Bale about to assemble, or to the Pope
+himself, which would have again changed the /venue/, and transferred
+her into less prejudiced hands. It is very likely that Jeanne in her
+ignorance and innocence might have held by her reference to the
+supreme tribunal of God in any case; and it is highly unlikely that of
+the English authorities, intent on removing the only thing in France
+of which their forces were afraid, should have given her up into the
+hands of the Pope, or allowed her to be transferred to any place of
+defence beyond their reach; but at least it is a relief to the mind to
+find that all these men were not base, as appears on the face of
+things, but that pity and justice and human feeling sometimes existed
+under the priest's gown and the monk's cowl, if also treachery and
+falsehood of the blackest kind. The Bishop, who remained withdrawn, we
+know not why, from all these private sittings in the prison (probably
+busy with his ecclesiastical duties as Holy Week was approaching),
+heard with fury of this visit and advice, and threatened vengeance
+upon the meddlers, not without effect, for Jean de la Fontaine, we are
+told--who had been deep in his councils, and indeed his deputy, as
+chief examiner--disappeared from Rouen immediately after, and was
+heard of no more.
+----------
+[1] Compiegne was a strong point. Had she proclaimed a promise from
+    St. Catherine, of victory? Chastelain says so, long after date and
+    with errors in fact. Two Anglo-Compiegnais were at her trial. The
+    Rehabilitation does not go into this question.--(From Mr. Lang.)
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+RE-EXAMINATION.
+MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+
+Upon all these contentions followed the calm of Palm Sunday, a great
+and touching festival, the first break upon the gloom of Lent, and a
+forerunner of the blessedness of Easter. We have already told how--a
+semblance of charity with which the reader might easily be deceived--
+the Bishop and four of his assessors had gone to the prison to offer
+to the Maid permission to receive the sacrament if she would do so in
+a woman's dress: and how after pleading that she might be allowed that
+privilege as she was, in her male costume, and with a pathetic
+statement that she would have yielded if she could, but that it was
+impossible--she finally refused; and was so left in her prison to pass
+that sacred day unsuccoured and alone. The historian Michelet, in the
+wonderful sketch in which he rises superior to himself, and which
+amidst all after writings remains the most beautiful and touching
+memorial of Jeanne d'Arc, has made this day a central point in his
+tale, using with the skill of genius the service of the Church
+appropriate to the day, in heart-rending contrast with those doors of
+the prison which did not open, and the help of God which did not come
+to the young and solitary captive. /Le beau jour fleuri/ passed over
+her in darkness and desertion: her agony and passion lay before her
+like those of the Divine Sufferer, to whom every day of the succeeding
+week is specially consecrated. There is almost indeed a painful
+following of the Saviour's steps in these dark days, the circumstances
+lending themselves in a wonderful way to the comparison which French
+writers love to make, but which many of us must always feel, however
+spotless the sufferer, to have a certain irreverence in them. But if
+ever martyr were worthy of being called a partaker of the sufferings
+of Christ it was surely this girl, free, if ever human creature was,
+from self-seeking, or thought of reward, or ambitious hope, in whose
+heart there had never been any motive but the service of God and the
+deliverance of her country, who had neither looked before nor after,
+nor put her own interests into consideration in any way. Silently the
+feast passed with no holy privileges of religion, no blessed token of
+the spring, no remembrance of the waving palms and scattered blossoms
+over which her Lord rode into Jerusalem to die. She had not that sweet
+fallacious triumph; but the darker ordeal remained for her to follow.
+
+On Tuesday the 27th of March, her troubles began again. Before Palm
+Sunday, the report of the trial had been read to her. She had now to
+hear the formal reading of the articles founded upon it, to give a
+final response if she had any to give, or explanation, or addition, if
+she thought proper. The sitting was held in the great hall of the
+Castle of Rouen before a band of more than forty, all assembled for
+this final test. The Bishop made a prefactory speech to the prisoner,
+pointing out to her how benign and merciful were the judges now
+assembled, that they had no wish to punish, but rather to instruct and
+lead her in the right way; and requesting her at this late period in
+the proceedings to choose one or more from among them to help her. To
+which Jeanne replied; "In the first place concerning my good and our
+faith, I thank you and all the company. As for the counsellor you
+offer me I thank you also, but I have no need to depart from our Lord
+as my counsellor."
+
+The articles, in which the former questions put to her and answered by
+her, were now repeated in the form of accusations, were then read to
+her one by one; her sorcery, sacrilege, etc., being taken as facts. To
+a few she repeated, with various forcible and fine turns of phrase,
+her previous answers, with here and there a new explanation; but to
+the great majority she referred simply to her former replies, or
+denied the charge, as follows: "The second article concerning
+sortilege, superstitious acts and divination, she denied, and in
+respect to adoration (i.e. allowing herself to be adored) said: If any
+kissed her hands or her garments, it was not by her will, and that she
+kept herself from it as much as she could; and the rest of the article
+she denies." This is a specimen of the manner in which she responded,
+with a clear-headed and undisturbed intelligence, point after point--
+/ipsa Johanna negat/, is the usual refrain: or else she referred with
+dignity to previous replies as her sole answer. But sometimes the girl
+was moved to indignation, sometimes added a word in her own defence:
+"As for fairies she knew not what they were, and as for her education
+she had been well and duly instructed what to believe, as a good child
+should." This was her answer to the article in which all the folk-lore
+of Domremy, all the fairy tales, had been collected into a solemn
+statement of heresy. The matter of dress was once more treated in
+endless detail, with many interjected questions and reports of what
+she had already said: and at the end, answering the statement that
+woman's dress was most fit for woman's work, Jeanne added the quick
+/mot/: "As for the usual work of women, there are enough of other
+women to do it." On another occasion when the report ran that she
+claimed to have done all things by the counsel of God, she interrupted
+and said "that it ought to be, all that I have done well." To her
+former answer that she had yielded to the desire of the French knights
+in attacking Paris, she added the fine words, "It seemed to me that it
+was their duty to attack their adversaries." In respect to her visions
+she added to her former answer, "that she had not asked advice of
+bishop, cure, or any other before believing her revelations, but had
+many times prayed God to reveal them to others of her party." About
+calling her saints when she required their aid she added, that she
+asked God and Our Lady to send her council and comfort, and
+immediately her heavenly visitors came; and that this was the prayer
+she made:
+
+ "Gentle God, in honour of Your[1] passion, I pray You, if You love
+  me, that You would reveal to me how I ought to answer these people
+  of the Church. I know well by what command it was that I took this
+  dress, but I know not in what manner I ought to give it up. For
+  this may it please You to teach me."
+
+In respect to the reproach that she had been a general in the war
+(/chef de guerre/), she explained that if she were, it was to drive
+out the English, repelling the accusation that she had assumed this
+title in pride; and to that which accused her of preferring to live
+among men, she explained that when she was in a lodging she generally
+had a woman with her; but that when engaged in war she lived in her
+clothes whenever there was not a woman present. In respect to her hope
+of escaping from prison, she was asked if her council had thrown any
+light on that question, and replied, "I have yet to tell you."
+Manchon, the clerk, makes a note upon his margin at these words,
+"Proudly answered"--/superbe responsum/.
+
+This re-examination lasted for two long days, the 27th and 28th of
+March. On several points Jeanne requested that she might be allowed to
+give an answer on Saturday, and accordingly, on Saturday, the last day
+of March, Easter Eve, she was visited in prison by the Bishop and
+seven or eight assessors. She was then asked if she would submit to
+the judgment of the Church on earth all that she had done and said,
+specially in things that concerned her trial. She answered that she
+would submit to the judgment of the Church militant, provided that it
+did not enforce anything that was impossible. She explained that what
+she called impossible was to acknowledge that the visions and
+revelations came otherwise than from God, or that what she had done
+was not on the part of God: these she would never deny or revoke for
+any power on earth: and that which our Lord had commanded or should
+command, she would not give up for any living man, and this would be
+impossible to her. And in case the Church should command her to do
+anything contrary to the command given her by God she would not do it
+for any reason whatsoever. Asked whether she would submit to the
+Church if the Church militant pronounced that her revelations were
+delusions or from the devil, or superstitious, or evil things, she
+answered that she would refer everything to our Lord, whose command
+she always obeyed; and that she knew well that everything had come to
+her by the commandment of God; and that what she had affirmed during
+this trial to have been done by the commandment of God it would be
+impossible for her to deny. And in case the Church militant commanded
+her to go against God, she would submit herself to no man in this
+world but to our Lord, whose good commandment she had always obeyed.
+She was asked if she did not believe that she was subject to the
+Church on earth, that is, to our Holy Father the Pope, the Cardinals,
+Bishops, and other prelates of the Church. She answered, "/Yes, our
+Lord being served first/." Asked if she had directions from her voices
+not to submit to the Church militant which is on earth, nor to its
+judgment, she replied that she does not answer according to what comes
+into her head, but that when she replies it is by commandment; and
+that she has never been told not to obey the Church, our Lord being
+served first (/noster Sire premier servi/).
+
+Other less formal particulars come to us long after, from various
+witnesses at the /proces de rehabilitation/, in which a lively picture
+is given of this scene. Frere Isambard had apparently managed, as was
+his wont, to get close to the prisoner, and to whisper to her to
+appeal to the Council of Bale. "What is this Council of Bale?" she
+asked in the same tone. Isambard replied that it was the "congregation
+of the whole Church, Catholic and Universal, and that there would be
+as many there on her side as on that of the English." "Ah!" she cried,
+"since there will be some of our party in that place, I will willingly
+yield and submit to the Council of Bale, to our Holy Father the Pope,
+and to the sacred Council."[2] And immediately--continues the
+deposition--the Bishop of Beauvais cried out, "Silence, in the devil's
+name!" and told the notary to take no notice of what she said, that
+she would submit herself to the Council of Bale; whereupon a second
+cry burst from the bosom of Jeanne, "You write what is against me, but
+you will not write what is for me." "Because of these things, the
+English and their officers threatened terribly the said Frere
+Isambard, warning him that if he did not hold his peace he would be
+thrown in the Seine." No notice whatever is taken of any such
+interruption in the formal record. It must have been before this time
+that Jean de la Fontaine disappeared. He left Rouen secretly and never
+returned, nor does he ever appear again. Frere Isambard is said to
+have taken temporary refuge in his convent; they scattered, /de par
+l'diable/, according to the Christian adjuration of Mgr. De Beauvais;
+though l'Advenu would seem to have held his ground, and served as
+Confessor to Jeanne in her agony, at which Frere Isambard was also
+present. We are told that the Deputy Inquisitor Lemaitre, he who had
+been got to lend the aid of his presence with such difficulty,
+fiercely warned the authorities that he would have no harm done to
+those two friars, from which we may infer that he too had leanings
+towards the Maid; and these honest and loyal men, well deserving of
+their country and of mankind, should not lose their record when the
+tragic story of so much human treachery and baseness has to be told.
+
+*****
+
+After this there came a long pause, full of much business to the
+judges, councillors, and clerks who had to reduce the seventy articles
+to twelve, in order to forward a summary of the case to the University
+of Paris for their judgment. Jeanne in the meantime had been left, but
+not neglected, in her prison. The great Feast of Easter had passed
+without any sacred consolation of the Church; but Monseigneur de
+Beauvais, in his kindness, sent her a carp to keep the feast withal,
+if not any spiritual food. It was quite congenial to the spirit of the
+time to imagine that the carp had been poisoned, and such a thought
+seems to have crossed the mind of Jeanne, who was very ill after
+eating of it, and like to die. But it was not thus, poisoned in
+prison, that it would have suited any of her persecutors to let her
+die. As a matter of fact, as soon as it was known that she was ill,
+the best doctors procurable were sent to the prison with peremptory
+orders to prolong her life and cure her at any cost. But for a little
+time we lose sight of the sick-bed on which the unfortunate Maid lay
+fully dressed, never relinquishing the garb which was her protection,
+with her feet chained to her uneasy couch. Even at the moment when her
+life hung in the balance we read of no indulgence granted in this
+respect, no unlocking of the infamous chain, nor substitution of a
+gentler nurse for the attendant /houspillers/, who were her guards
+night and day.
+
+When the Bishop and his court had completed their business and sent
+off to Paris the important document on which so much depended, they
+found themselves at leisure to return to Jeanne, to inquire after her
+health and to make her "a charitable admonition." It was on the 18th
+of April, after the silence of more than a fortnight, that their visit
+was made with this benevolent purpose. Seven of her judges attended
+the Bishop into the sick-chamber. They had come, he assured her,
+charitably and familiarly, to visit her in her sickness and to carry
+her comfort and consolation. Most of these men were indeed familiar
+enough: she had seen their faces already through many a dreadful day,
+though there were one or two which were new and strange, come to stare
+at her in the depths of her distress. Cauchon reminded her how much
+and how carefully she had been questioned by the most wise and learned
+men; and that those there present were ready to do anything for the
+salvation of her soul and body in every possible way, by instructing
+or advising her. He added, however, that if she still refused to
+accept advice, and to act according to the counsel of the Church, she
+was in the greatest danger--to which she replied:
+
+"It seems to me, being so ill as I am, that I am in great danger of
+death. And if it is thus that God pleases to decide for me, I ask of
+you to be allowed to confess and receive my Saviour, and to be laid in
+holy ground."
+
+"If you desire to have the rites and sacraments of the Church," said
+Cauchon, "you must do as good Catholics ought to do, submit to Holy
+Church." She answered, "I can say no other thing to you." She was then
+told that if she was in fear of death through sickness she ought all
+the more to amend her life; but that she could not have the privileges
+of the Church as a Catholic, if she did not submit to the Church. She
+answered: "If my body dies in prison, I hope that you will bury me in
+consecrated ground: yet if not, I still hope in our Lord."
+
+She was then reminded that she had said in her trial--if anything had
+been said or done by her against our Christian faith ordained by our
+Lord, that she would not stand by it. She answered, "I refer to the
+answer I made, and to our Lord."
+
+It was then asked of her, since she believed herself to have had many
+revelations from God by St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret,
+whether if there should appear some good creature (/sic/) who
+professed to have had a revelation from God in respect to her, she
+would believe that? She answered that there was no Christian in the
+world who could come to her professing to have had a revelation, of
+whom she should not know whether he spoke the truth or not: she would
+know it through St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+Asked, if she could not imagine that God might reveal something to a
+good creature who might be unknown to her, she answered: "Yes; but I
+would not believe either man or woman without a sign."
+
+Asked, if she believed that the Holy Scripture was revealed by God,
+she answered, "You know that I do, and it is good to know."
+
+The last answer she made in respect to submission to Holy Church was
+this, "Whatever may happen to me I will neither do nor say anything
+else, for I have answered before, during the trial."
+
+She was then "exhorted powerfully by the venerable doctors present"
+(four are mentioned by name) to submit to our Mother the Church, with
+many authorities and examples drawn from the Holy Scriptures; and
+finally, Magister Nicolas Midi made her an exhortation from Matthew
+xviii.: "If your brother trespass against you," and what follows, "If
+he will not hear the Church, let him be to you as a heathen man and a
+publican." This was expounded to Jeanne in the French tongue and,
+finally, she was told that if she would not obey and submit to the
+Church she must be given up as if she was a Saracen. To which Jeanne
+replied that she was a good Christian and well baptised, and that she
+desired to die as a Christian. She was then asked whether, since she
+begged leave of the Church to receive her Saviour, she would submit to
+the Church if it were promised to her that she should receive. She
+answered that she would say no more than she had said; that she loved
+God, served Him, and was a good Christian, and would aid and uphold
+the Holy Church with all her power. Asked if she wished that a
+beautiful procession should be made for her to restore her to health,
+she answered that she would be glad if the Church and the Catholics
+would pray for her.
+
+For another fortnight Jeanne was sent back into the silence, and to
+her own thoughts, which must have grown heavier and heavier as the
+weary days went on, and no sound of approaching deliverance came, no
+rumour of help at hand. All was quiet and safe at Rouen; amid the
+babble of the courtyard which she might hear fitfully when her
+guardians were quieter than usual, there was not one word which
+brought the hope of a French army at hand, or of any movement to
+rescue her. All was silent in the world around, not a breath of hope,
+not the whisper of a friend. It was not till the 2d of May that the
+dreadful blank was again broken, and she was called to the great hall
+of the castle for another interview with her tormentors. When she was
+led into the hall it was full, as in the first sitting, sixty-three
+judges in all being present. The interest had flagged or the pity had
+grown as the trial dragged its slow length along; but now, when every
+day the verdict was expected from Paris, the interest had risen again.
+On her way from her prison to the hall, it was necessary to pass the
+door of the castle chapel: and here once or twice Massieu, the officer
+of the court, had permitted her to pause and kneel down as she passed.
+This was all the celebration of the Paschal Feast that was permitted
+to Jeanne. The compassionate official, however, was discovered in this
+small service of charity, and sternly reprimanded and threatened.
+Henceforward she had to pass without even a longing look through the
+door at the altar on which was the holy sacrament.
+
+She came in on the renewed sitting of the 2d May to find the assembled
+priests settling themselves, after the address which had been made to
+them, to hear another address which John de Chasteillon, Archdeacon,
+had prepared for herself, in which he said much that was good both for
+body and soul, to which she consented. He had a list of twelve
+articles in his hands, and explained and expounded them to her, as
+they were the occasion of the sitting. He then "admonished her in
+charity," explaining that those who were faithful to Christ hold
+firmly and closely to the Christian creed, and adjuring her to consent
+and to amend her ways. To this Jeanne answered: "Read your book,"
+meaning the schedule held by Monseigneur the Archdeacon, "and then I
+will answer you. I refer myself to God my master in all things; and I
+love Him with all my heart."
+
+To read this book, however, was precisely what Monseigneur the
+Archdeacon had no intention of doing. She was never allowed to hear
+the twelve articles upon which the verdict against her was founded;
+but the speaker gave her a long discourse by way of explanation,
+following more or less the schedule which he held. This "monition
+general," however, elicited no detailed reply from Jeanne, who
+answered briefly with some impatience, "I refer myself to my judge,
+who is the King of Heaven and earth." The "Lord Archdeacon" then
+proceeded to "monitions particulares."
+
+It was then once more explained to her that this reference to God
+alone was a refusal to submit to the Church militant, and she was
+instructed in the authority of the Church, which it was the duty of
+every Christian to believe--/unam sanctam Ecclesiam/ always guided by
+the Holy Spirit and which could not err, to the judgment of which
+every question should be referred. She answered: "I believe in the
+Church here below; but my doings and sayings, as I have already said,
+I refer and submit to God. I believe that the Church militant cannot
+err or fail; but as for my deeds and words I put them all before God,
+who has made me do that which I have done"; she also said that she
+submitted herself to God, her Creator, who had made her do everything,
+and referred everything to Him, and to Him alone.
+
+She was then asked, if she would have no judge on earth and if our
+Holy Father the Pope were not her judge; she answered: "I will tell
+you nothing more. I have a good master, that is our Lord, on whom I
+depend for everything, and not an any other."
+
+She was then told that if she would not believe the Church and the
+article /Ecclesiam sanctam Catholicam/, that she might be reckoned as
+a heretic and punished by burning: to which she answered: "I can say
+nothing else to you; and if I saw the fire before me, I should say
+only that which I say, and could do nothing else." (Once more at this
+point the clerk writes on his margin, "Proud reply"--/Superba
+responsio/--but whether in admiration or in blame it would be hard to
+say.)
+
+Asked, if the Council General, or the Holy Father, Cardinals, etc.,
+were there--whether she would submit to them. "You shall have no
+other answer from me," she said.
+
+Asked, if she would submit to our Holy Father the Pope: she answered,
+"Take me to him and I will answer him," but would say no more.
+
+Questioned in respect to her dress, she answered, that she would
+willingly accept a long dress and a woman's hood to go to church to
+receive her Saviour, provided that, as she had already said, she were
+allowed to wear it on that occasion only, and then to take back that
+which she at present wore. Further, when it was set before her that
+she wore that dress without any need, being in prison, she answered,
+"When I have done that for which I was sent by God, I will then take
+back a woman's dress." Asked, if she thought she did well in being
+dressed like a man, she answered, "I refer every thing to our Lord."
+
+Again, after the exhortation made to her, namely, that in saying that
+she did well and did not sin in wearing that dress, and in the
+circumstances which concerned her assuming and wearing it, and in
+saying that God and the saints made her do so--she blasphemed, and as
+is contained in this schedule, erred and did evil: she answered that
+she never blasphemed God or the saints.
+
+She was then admonished to give up that dress, and no longer to think
+it was right, and to return to the garb of a woman; but answered that
+she would make no change in this respect.
+
+Concerning her revelations: she replied in regard to them, that she
+referred everything to her judge, that is God, and that her
+revelations were from God, without any other medium.
+
+Asked concerning the sign given to the King if she would refer to the
+Archbishop of Rheims, the Sire de Boussac, Charles de Bourbon, La
+Tremouille, and La Hire, to them or to any one of them, who, according
+to what she formerly said, had seen the crown, and were present when
+the angel brought it, and gave it to the Archbishop; or if she would
+refer to any others of her party who might write under their seals
+that it was so; she answered, "Send a messenger, and I will write to
+them about the whole trial": but otherwise she was not disposed to
+refer to them.
+
+In respect to her presumption in divining the future, etc., she
+answered, "I refer everything to my judge who is God, and to what I
+have already answered, which is written in the book."
+
+Asked, if two or three or four knights of her party were to be brought
+here under a safe conduct, whether she would refer to them her
+apparitions and other things contained in this trial; answered, "Let
+them come and then I will answer:" but otherwise she was not willing
+to refer to anyone.
+
+Asked whether, at the Church of Poitiers where she was examined, she
+had submitted to the Church, she answered, "Do you hope to catch me in
+this way, and by that draw advantage to yourselves?"
+
+In conclusion, "afresh and abundantly," she was admonished to submit
+herself to the Church, on pain of being abandoned by the Church; for
+if the Church left her she would be in great danger of body and of
+soul; and she might well put herself in peril of eternal fire for the
+soul, as well as of temporal fire for the body, by the sentence of
+other judges. "You will not do this which you say against me, without
+doing injury to your own bodies and souls," she said.
+
+Asked, whether she could give a reason why she would not submit to the
+Church: but to this she would make no additional reply.
+
+Again a week passed in busy talk and consultation without, in silence
+and desertion within. On the 9th of May the prisoner was again led,
+this time to the great tower, apparently the torture chamber of the
+castle, where she found nine of her judges awaiting her, and was once
+more adjured to speak the truth, with the threat of torture if she
+continued to refuse. Never was her attitude more calm, more dignified
+and lofty in its simplicity, than at this grim moment.
+
+"Truly," she replied, "if you tear the limbs from my body, and my soul
+out of it, I can say nothing other than what I have said; or if I said
+anything different, I should afterwards say that you had compelled me
+to do it by force." She added that on the day of the Holy Cross, the
+3d of May past, she had been comforted by St. Gabriel. She believed
+that it was St. Gabriel: and she knew by her voices that it was St.
+Gabriel. She had asked counsel of her voices whether she should submit
+to the Church, because the priests pressed her so strongly to submit:
+but it had been said to her that if she desired our Lord to help her
+she must depend upon Him for everything. She added that she knew well
+that our Lord had always been the master of all she did, and that the
+Enemy had nothing to do with her deeds. Also she had asked her voices
+if she should be burned, and the said voices had replied to her that
+she was to wait for the Lord and He would help her.
+
+Afterwards in respect to the crown which had been handed by the angel
+to the Archbishop of Rheims, she was asked if she would refer to him.
+She answered: "Bring him here, that I may hear what he says, and then
+I shall answer you; he will not dare to say the contrary of that which
+I have said to you."
+
+The Archbishop of Rheims had been her constant enemy; all the
+hindrances that had occurred in her active life, and the constant
+attempts made to balk her even in her brief moment of triumph, came
+from him and his associate La Tremouille. He was the last person in
+the world to whom Jeanne naturally would have appealed. Perhaps that
+was the admirable reason why he was suggested in this dreadful crisis
+of her fate.
+
+A few days later, it was discussed among those dark inquisitors
+whether the torture should be applied or not. Finally, among thirteen
+there were but two (let not the voice of sacred vengeance be silent on
+their shame though after four centuries and more), Thomas de
+Courcelles, first of theologians, cleverest of ecclesiastical lawyers,
+mildest of men, and Nicolas L'Oyseleur, the spy and traitor, who voted
+for the torture. One man most reasonably asked why she should be put
+to torture when they had ample material for judgment without it? One
+cannot but feel that the proceedings on this occasion were either
+intended to beguile the impatience of the English authorities, eager
+to be done with the whole business, or to add a quite gratuitous pang
+to the sufferings of the heroic girl. As the men were not devils,
+though probably possessed by this time, the more cruel among them, by
+the horrible curiosity, innate alas! in human nature, of seeing how
+far a suffering soul could go, it is probable that the first motive
+was the true one. The English, Warwick especially, whose every
+movement was restrained by this long-pending affair, were exceedingly
+impatient, and tempted at times to take the matter into their own
+hands, and spoil the perfectness of this well constructed work of art,
+conducted according to all the rules, the beautiful trial which was
+dear to the Bishop's heart--and destined to be, though perhaps in a
+sense somewhat different to that which he hoped, his chief title to
+fame.
+
+Ten days after, the decision of the University of Paris arrived, and a
+great assembly of counsellors, fifty-one in all, besides the permanent
+presidents, collected together in the chapel of the Archbishop's
+house, to hear that document read, along with many other documents,
+the individual opinions of a host of doctors and eminent authorities.
+After an explanation of the solemn care given by the University to the
+consideration of every one of the twelve articles of the indictment,
+that learned tribunal pronounced its verdict upon each. The length of
+the proceedings makes it impossible to reproduce these. First as to
+the early revelations given to Jeanne, described in the first and
+second articles, they are denounced as "murderous, seductive, and
+pernicious fictions," the apparitions those of "malignant spirits and
+devils, Belial, Satan, and Behemoth." The third article, which
+concerned her recognition of the saints, was described more mildly as
+containing errors in faith; the fourth, as to her knowledge of future
+events, was characterised as "superstitious and presumptuous
+divination." The fifth, concerning her dress, declared her to be
+"blasphemous and contemptuous of God in His Sacraments." The sixth, by
+which she was accused of loving bloodshed, because she made war
+against those who did not obey the summons in her letters bearing the
+name Jhesus Maria, was declared to prove that she was cruel, "seeking
+the shedding of blood, seditious, and a blasphemer of God." The tenor
+is the same to the end: Blasphemy, superstition, pernicious doctrine,
+impiety, cruelty, presumption, lying; a schismatic, a heretic, an
+apostate, an idolator, an invoker of demons. These are the conclusions
+drawn by the most solemn and weighty tribunal on matters of faith in
+France. The precautions taken to procure a full and trustworthy
+judgment, the appeal to each section in turn, the Faculty of Theology,
+the Faculty of Law, the "Nations," all separately and than all
+together passing every item in review--are set forth at full length.
+Every formality had been fulfilled, every rule followed, every detail
+was in the fullest order, signed and sealed and attested by solemn
+notaries, bristling with well-known names. A beautiful judgment, equal
+to the trial, which was beautiful too--not a rule omitted except those
+of justice, fairness, and truth! The doctors sat and listened with
+every fine professional sense satisfied.
+
+ "If the beforesaid woman, charitably exhorted and admonished by
+  competent judges, does not return spontaneously to the Catholic
+  faith, publicly abjure her errors, and give full satisfaction to
+  her judges, she is hereby given up to the secular judge to receive
+  the reward of her deeds."
+
+The attendant judges, each in his place, now added their adhesion.
+Most of them simply stated their agreement with the judgment of the
+University, or with that of the Bishop of Fecamp, which was a similar
+tenor; a few wished that Jeanne should be again "charitably
+admonished"; many desired that on this selfsame day the final sentence
+should be pronounced. One among them, a certain Raoul Sauvage
+(Radulphus Silvestris), suggested that she should be brought before
+the people in a public place, a suggestion afterwards carried out.
+Frere Isambard desired that she should be charitably admonished again
+and have another chance, and that her final fate should still be in
+the hands of "us her judges." The conclusion was that one more
+"charitable admonition" should be given to Jeanne, and that the law
+should then take its course. The suggestion that she should make a
+public appearance had only one supporter.
+
+This dark scene in the chapel is very notable, each man rising to
+pronounce what was in reality a sentence of death,--fifty of them
+almost unanimous, filled no doubt with a hundred different motives, to
+please this man or that, to win favour, to get into the way of
+promotion,--but all with a distinct consciousness of the great yet
+horrible spectacle, the stake, the burning:--though perhaps here and
+there was one with a hope that perpetual imprisonment, bread of sorrow
+and water of anguish, might be substituted for that terrible death.
+Finally, it was decided that--always on the side of mercy, as every
+act proved--the tribunal should once more "charitably admonish" the
+prisoner for the salvation of her soul and body, and that after all
+this "good deliberation and wholesome counsel" the case should be
+concluded.
+
+Again there follows a pause of four days. No doubt the Bishop and his
+assessors had other things to do, their ecclesiastical functions,
+their private business, which could not always be put aside because
+one forsaken soul was held in suspense day after day. Finally on the
+24th of May, Jeanne again received in her prison a dignified company,
+some quite new and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the
+reader's mind that it was perhaps to show off the interesting prisoner
+to two new and powerful bishops, the first, Louis of Luxembourg, a
+relative of her first captor, that this last examination was held),
+nine men in all, crowding her chamber--/exponuntur Johannae defectus
+sui/, says the record--to expound to Jeanne her faults. It was
+Magister Peter Morice to whom this office was confided. Once more the
+"schedule" was gone over, and an address delivered laden with all the
+bad words of the University. "Jeanne, dearest friend," said the orator
+at last, "it is now time, at the end of the trial, to think well what
+words these are." She would seem to have spoken during this address,
+at least once--to say that she held to everything she had said during
+the trial. When Morice had finished she was once more questioned
+personally.
+
+She was asked if she still thought and believed that it was not her
+duty to submit her deeds and words to the Church militant, or to any
+other except God, upon which she replied, "What I have always said and
+held to during the trial, I maintain to this moment"; and added that
+if she were in judgment and saw the fire lighted, the faggots burning,
+and the executioner ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the
+fire, she could say nothing else, but would sustain what she had said
+in her trial, to death.
+
+Once more the scribe has written on his margin the words /Responsio
+Johannae superba/--the proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her
+expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation about her,
+must have moved the man, thus for the third time to send down to us
+his distinctly human impression of the worn out prisoner before her
+judges. "And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more,
+the cause was concluded," says the record, so formal, sustained within
+such purely abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb
+and reverberation of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the
+Inquisitor too all words seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid
+the excited crowd in the Temple the officers of the Pharisees
+approaching to lay hands on a greater than Jeanne, fell back, not
+knowing why, and could not do their office. This man was silenced
+also. Two bishops were present, and one a great man full of patronage;
+but not for the richest living in Normandy could Peter Morice find any
+more to say.
+
+These are in one sense the words of Jeanne; the last we have from her
+in her prison, the last of her consistent and unbroken life. After,
+there was a deeper horror to go through, a moment when all her forces
+failed. Here on the verge of eternity she stands heroic and
+unyielding, brave, calm, and steadfast as at the outset of her career,
+the Maid of France. Were the fires lighted and the faggots burning,
+and she herself within the fire, she had no other word to say.
+----------
+[1] It is correct in French to use the second person plural in
+    addressing God, /thou/ being a more intimate and less respectful
+    form of speech. Such a difference is difficult to remember, and
+    troubles the ear. The French, even those who ought to know better,
+    sometimes speak of it as a supreme profanity on the part of the
+    profane English, that they address God as /thou/.
+
+[2] The French report goes on, "et requiert ----," but no more. It is
+    not in the Latin. The scribe was stopped by the Bishop's profane
+    outcry, and forbidden to register the fact she was about to make a
+    direct appeal to the Pope.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE ABJURATION.
+MAY 24, 1431.
+
+On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the
+officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart
+still high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had
+been no doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with
+every repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the
+last. And the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very
+near to her; no doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange
+information about herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside
+of the Castle of Rouen, rose half-comprehended from the echoing
+courtyard outside and the babble of her guards within. She would hear
+even as she was conveyed along the echoing stone passages something
+here and there of the popular expectation:--a burning! the wonderful
+unheard of sight, which by hook or by crook everyone must see; and no
+doubt among the English talk she might now be able to make out
+something concerning this long business which had retarded all warlike
+proceedings but which would soon be over now, and the witch burnt.
+There must have been some, even among those rude companions, who would
+be sorry, who would feel that she was no witch, yet be helpless to do
+anything for her, any more than Massieu could, or Frere Isambard: and
+if it was all for the sake of certain words to be said, was the wench
+mad? would it not be better to say anything, to give up anything
+rather than be burned at the stake? Jeanne, notwithstanding the
+wonderful courage of her last speech, must have returned to her cell
+with small illusion possible to her intelligent spirit. The stake had
+indeed come very near, the flames already dazzled her eyes, she must
+have felt her slender form shrink together at the thought. All that
+long night, through the early daylight of the May morning did she lie
+and ponder, as for far less reasons so many of us have pondered as we
+lay wakeful through those morning watches. God's promises are great,
+but where is the fulfilment? We ask for bread and he gives us, if not
+a stone, yet something which we cannot realise to be bread till after
+many days. Jeanne's voices had never paused in their pledge to her of
+succour. "Speak boldly, God will help you--fear nothing"; there would
+be aid for her before three months, and great victory. They went on
+saying so, though the stake was already being raised. What did they
+mean? what did they mean? Could she still trust them? or was it
+possible ----?
+
+Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced the
+fire. She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the
+heartrending ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give
+her that heroic command. Still and always, they said God will help
+you, our Lord will stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean
+deliverance, deliverance! What else could it mean? If she held her
+head high as she returned to the horrible monotony of that prison so
+often left with hope, so often re-entered in sadness, it must soon
+have dropped upon her tired bosom. Slowly the clouds had settled round
+her. Over and over again had she affirmed them to be true--these
+voices that had guided her steps and led her to victory. And they had
+promised her the aid of God if she went forward boldly, and spoke and
+did not fear. But now every way of salvation was closing; all around
+her were fierce soldiers thirsting for her blood, smooth priests who
+admonished her in charity, threatening her with eternal fire for the
+soul, temporal fire for the body. She felt that fire, already blowing
+towards her as if on the breath of the evening wind, and her girlish
+flesh shrank. Was that what the voices had called deliverance? was
+that the grand victory, the aid of the Lord?
+
+It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she
+had reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in
+bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison
+became intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough
+jests half through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the
+clang of their arms when relieved. Early next morning a party of her
+usual visitors came in upon her to give her fresh instruction and
+advice. Something new was about to happen to-day. She was to be led
+forth, to breathe the air of heaven, to confront the people, the
+raging sea of men's faces, all the unknown world about her. The crowd
+had never been unfriendly to Jeanne. It had closed about her, almost
+wherever she was visible, with sweet applause and outcries of joy.
+Perhaps a little hope stirred her heart in the thought of being
+surrounded once more by the common folk, though probably it did not
+occur to her to think of these Norman strangers as her own people. And
+a great day was before her, a day in which something might still be
+done, in which deliverance might yet come. L'Oyseleur, who was one of
+her visitors, adjured her now to change her conduct, to accept
+whatever means of salvation might be offered to her. There was no
+longer any mention of Pope or Council, but only of the Church to which
+she ought to yield. How it was that he preserved his influence over
+her, having been proved to be a member of the tribunal that judged
+her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a fellow-countryman, nor any of
+the things he had professed to be, no once can tell us; but evidently
+he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to have received him
+without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed she seems to have
+been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who professed to wish
+her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
+
+It would require, however, no great persuasion on L'Oyseleur's part to
+convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that
+something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be so
+determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but
+delivered from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping
+of the Church, there would be time to think of everything, even to
+make her peace with her voices who would surely understand if, for the
+saving of her life, and out of terror for the dreadful fire, she
+abandoned them for a moment. She had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and
+they had forgiven. One faltering word now, a mark of her hand upon a
+paper, and she would be safe--even if still all they said was true;
+and if indeed and in fact, after buoying her up from day to day, such
+a dreadful thing might be as that they were not true ----
+
+The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of
+disappointment, of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
+
+Then there came into the prison a better man than L'Oyseleur, Jean
+Beaupere, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of
+all these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he
+came in all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to
+warn her. He came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor.
+"Jean Beaupere entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by
+permission, and advertised her that she would straightway be taken to
+the scaffold to be addressed (/pour y etre preschee/), and that if she
+was a good Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and
+words under the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and
+specially of the ecclesiastical judges." "Accept the woman's dress and
+do all that you are told," her other adviser had said. When the car
+that was to convey her came to the prison doors, L'Oyseleur
+accompanied her, no doubt with a show of supporting her to the end.
+What a change from the confined and gloomy prison to the dazzling
+clearness of the May daylight, the air, the murmuring streets, the
+throng that gazed and shouted and followed! Life that had run so low
+in the prisoner's veins must have bounded up within her in response to
+that sunshine and open sky, and movement and sound of existence--
+summer weather too, and everything softened in the medium of that soft
+breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She had been three months
+in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along the roughly paved
+streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange object appeared
+to Jeanne's eyes in the midst of the market-place, a lofty scaffold
+with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd, the logs all
+arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four horses, to
+bring hither the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready, everything
+arranged--for whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that she
+might see the preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the
+great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?
+
+In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different
+scene. That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a
+great open space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In
+this were erected two platforms, one facing the other. On the first
+sat the court of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester
+having a place by the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president,
+with several other bishops and dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on
+the other platform, were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to
+which Jeanne was conducted by Massieu, who never left her, and
+L'Oyseleur, who kept as near as he could, the rest of the platform
+being immediately covered by lawyers, doctors, all the camp followers,
+so to speak, of the black army, who could find footing there. Jeanne
+was in her usual male dress, the doublet and hose, with her short-
+clipped hair--no doubt looking like a slim boy among all this dark
+crowd of men. The people swayed like a sea all about and around--the
+throng which had gathered in her progress through the streets pushing
+out the crowd already assembled with a movement like the waves of the
+sea. Every step of the trial all through had been attended by
+preaching, by discourses and reasoning and admonishments, charitable
+and otherwise. Now she was to be "preached" for the last time.
+
+It was Doctor Guillaume Erard who ascended the pulpit, a great
+preacher, one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to
+hear. He himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no
+doubt, set up there on that height before the eyes of all the people,
+he thought of his own reputation, and of the great audience, and
+Winchester the more than king, the great English Prince, the
+wealthiest and most influential of men. The preacher took his text
+from a verse in St. John's Gospel: "A branch cannot bear fruit except
+it remain in the vine." The centre circle containing the two platforms
+was surrounded by a close ring of English soldiers, understanding none
+of it, and anxious only that the witch should be condemned.
+
+It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was
+long and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine
+periods admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every
+reproach upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the
+House of France, and the head of that House, "Charles who calls
+himself King." "He has," cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by
+the eye of Winchester upon him, "adhered, like a schismatic and
+heretical person as he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman,
+disgraced and full of dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who
+are under his sway, and the nobility. This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and
+to thee I say that thy King is a schismatic and a heretic."
+
+In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by
+that clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the
+tumult of battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used
+to abuse in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this
+assault on her King. And interruption to a sermon has always a
+dramatic and startling effect, but when that voice arose now, when the
+startled speaker stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is
+easy to imagine what a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must
+have arisen in the midst of the crowd. "By my faith, sire," cried
+Jeanne, "saving your respect, I swear upon my life that my King is the
+most noble Christian of all Christians, that he is not what you say."
+
+The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally
+the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of
+animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart
+overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts. "Here," said Erard, "are my
+lords the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to
+submit your acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in
+these acts and words there are many things which it seemed to the
+clergy were not good either to say or to sustain."
+
+To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), "I will
+answer you." And as to her submission to the Church she said: "I have
+told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said
+may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God
+first, I refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on
+the part of God." She also said that no one was to blame for her acts
+and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in
+them, the blame was hers and no other's.
+
+Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, "I
+refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope."
+
+It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy
+Father was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in
+his diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother
+the Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and
+officers of the Church had a right to determine in her case. And of
+this she was admonished three times.
+
+After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a
+great part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she
+would hold to all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in
+everything their ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the
+above-named and of the great multitude assembled she made her
+abjuration in the manner that follows:
+
+And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions
+and revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not
+sustain them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother
+the Holy Church.
+
+*****
+
+In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made.
+Manchon writes on his margin: /At the end of the sentence Jeanne,
+fearing the fire, said she would obey the Church/. Even into the bare
+legal document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding
+in the silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation
+of the previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering
+submission, /timens igneum/--in fear of the fire.
+
+The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those
+eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Erard, from his
+pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that
+she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called upon
+Massieu to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own
+deposition), "after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if
+she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her
+to refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not.
+Which thing she did, saying to Erard, 'I refer to the Church universal
+whether I should abjure or not.' To which Erard answered, 'You shall
+abjure at once or you will be burnt.' Massieu gives further
+particulars in another part of the Rehabilitation process. Erard, he
+says, asked what he was saying to the prisoner, and he answered that
+she would sign if the schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that
+she could not write, and then added that she wished it to be decided
+by the Church, and ought not to sign unless that was done: and also
+required that she should be placed in the custody of the Church, and
+freed from the hands of the English. The same Erard answered that
+there had been ample delay, and that if she did not sign at once she
+should be burned, and forbade Massieu to say any more."
+
+Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from
+the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to
+have promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the
+Church. "Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save
+yourself?" was called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast,
+but her heart failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering.
+Once she called out over their heads, "All that I did was done for
+good, and it was well to do it:"--her last cry. Then she would seem to
+have recovered in some measure her composure. Probably her agitated
+brain was unable to understand the formula of recantation which was
+read to her amid all the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a
+vague faith in the condition she had herself stated, that the paper
+should be submitted to the Church, and that she should at once be
+transferred to an ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made,
+namely, that it was a very short document upon which she hastily in
+her despair made a cross, and that it was a long one, consisting of
+several pages, which was shown afterwards with /Jehanne/ scribbled
+underneath. "In fact," says Massieu, "she abjured and made a cross
+with the pen which the witness handed to her:" he, if any one must
+have known exactly what happened.
+
+No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform.
+But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators
+closing round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the
+appeals, seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to
+risk her young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had
+gone on reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two
+sentences all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to
+absolve her--which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on
+bread and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English
+were impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge,
+but it is evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a
+cat with a mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three
+months past; they had desired at once to get her out of their way. But
+the idea of her perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the
+risk of such a prisoner was more than they chose to encounter.
+Nevertheless there are some things a churchman cannot do. When it was
+seen that Jeanne had yielded, that she had put her mark to something
+on a paper flourished forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the
+Bishop turned to the Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was
+to do? There was but one answer possible to Winchester, had he been
+English and Jeanne's natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to
+penitence was the only practicable way.
+
+Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was
+that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross
+on the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the
+murmurs of the crowd. The /cedule/ to which she put her sign
+"contained eight lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three
+pages long, and full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this
+(the abjuration published) was not the one of which mention is made in
+the trial; "for the one read by the deponent and signed by the said
+Jeanne was quite different." This would seem to prove the fact that a
+much enlarged version of an act of abjuration, in its original form
+strictly confined to the necessary points and expressed in few words--
+was afterwards published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her
+own admissions, as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough
+to tell as an abjuration at all.
+
+When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been
+taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence
+must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and
+pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the
+bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied
+all thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual
+prison, with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy
+soul by solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all
+those crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what
+Jeanne expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more
+shamed and downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There
+seems even to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials.
+Some of them congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward
+to say, "You have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul."
+She herself, excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she
+was not to go. She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact
+of her perpetual imprisonment with complete faith and content. It
+meant to her instant relief from her hideous prison-house, and she
+could not contain her impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church
+--/gens de' Eglise/--lead me to your prison; let me be no longer in
+the hands of the English," she cried with feverish anxiety. To gain
+this point, to escape the irons and the dreadful durance which she had
+suffered so long, was all her thought. The men about her could not
+answer this appeal. Some of them no doubt knew very well what the
+answer must be, and some must have seen the angry looks and stern
+exclamation which Warwick addressed to Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne
+by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and the stir among the soldiers at
+sight of his displeasure. But perhaps flurried by all that had
+happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the victim in her moment of
+hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop to ask where they were
+to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar of Longueville.
+Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing, perhaps in
+Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says this
+witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a
+"fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "/this fellow was also one of them/."
+Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and
+Cauchon turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken
+back whence she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her
+abjuration, which by no just title could be called an abjuration, had
+been in vain.
+
+Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she
+had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in
+reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what
+she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and
+bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms--but for what? to
+escape those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of
+Dionysius, its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going
+back was beyond words. We hear of no word that she said when she
+realised the hideous fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter
+waters closed over her head. Again the chains to be locked and double
+locked that bound her to her dreadful bed, again the presence of those
+men who must have been all the more odious to her from the momentary
+hope that she had got free from them for ever.
+
+The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard upon
+her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor,
+Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical
+persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost
+blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently,
+though with a word of warning that should she change her mind and
+return to her evil ways there would be no further place for
+repentance. As a return for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he
+required her immediately to put on the female dress which his
+attendants had brought. There is something almost ludicrous, could we
+forget the tragedy to follow, in the bundle of humble clothing brought
+by such exalted personages, with the solemnity which became a thing
+upon which hung the issues of life or death. Jeanne replied with the
+humility of a broken spirit. "I take them willingly," she said, "and
+in everything I will obey the Church." Then silence closed upon her,
+the horrible silence of the prison, full of hidden listeners and of
+watching eyes.
+
+Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It
+was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain
+have seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but
+Monseigneur de Beauvais had to hold head against the great English
+authorities who were out of all patience, fearing that the witch might
+still slip through their fingers and by her spells and incantations
+make the heart of the troops melt once more within them. If the mind
+of the Church had been as charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if
+all the power of Rome could have got the Maid now out of the English
+grip. They were exasperated, and felt that they too, as well as the
+prisoner, had been played with. But the Bishop had good hope in his
+mind, still to be able to content his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it
+was true, but the more he inquired into that act, the less secure he
+must have felt about it. And she might relapse; and if she relapsed
+there would be no longer any place for repentance. And it is evident
+that his confidence in the power of the clothes was boundless. In any
+case a few days more would make all clear.
+
+They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance,
+well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One
+account is given by Frere Isambard, whom she told in the presence of
+several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a /Millourt
+Anglois/, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again
+the man's dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu
+is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be
+released from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards
+took away her female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack
+containing the other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding
+them that these were forbidden to her; but got no answer except a
+brutal order to get up. It is very probable that both stories are
+true. Frere Isambard found her weeping and agitated, and nothing is
+more probable than this was the occasion on which Warwick heard her
+cries, and interfered to save her. Massieu's version, of which he is
+certain, was communicated to him a day or two after when they happened
+to be alone together. It was on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday
+that she put on the female dress, but it would seem that rumours on
+the subject of a relapse had begun to spread even before the Sunday on
+which that event happened: and Beaupere and Midi were sent by the
+Bishop to investigate. But they were very ill-received in the Castle,
+sworn at by the guards, and forced to go back without seeing Jeanne,
+there being as yet, it appeared, nothing to see. On the morning of the
+Monday, however, the rumours arose with greater force; and no doubt
+secret messages must have informed the Bishop that the hoped-for
+relapse had taken place. He set out himself accordingly, accompanied
+by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight of the familiar names so
+often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt with much show of
+pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle was all in
+excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event so
+trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the
+visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed
+once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four
+days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her,
+and humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an
+outcry of astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes,"
+she replied, "she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no
+triumph in what she said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of
+one who in the most desperate strait has taken her resolution and must
+abide by it, whether she likes it or not. She was asked why she had
+resumed that dress, and who had made her do so. There was no question
+of anything else at first. The tunic and /gippon/ were at once enough
+to decide her fate.
+
+She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing
+her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a
+woman.
+
+She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the
+dress of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn
+or had made any such oath.
+
+She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more
+lawful to wear a man's dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and
+also that she had taken it back because the promise made to her had
+not been kept, that she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour,
+and be delivered from her irons.
+
+She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to
+resume it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in
+irons; but if they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of
+her irons and put her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she
+would be good, and do whatever the Church pleased.
+
+She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of
+her voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them
+again. To this she answered, recovering a little courage, "Yes."
+
+She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God
+had made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity
+there was of the treason to which she had consented by making
+abjuration and revocation in order to save her life: and that she had
+earned damnation for herself to save her life. Also that before
+Thursday her voices had told her that she should do what she did that
+day, that on the scaffold they had told her to answer the preachers
+boldly, and that this preacher whom she called a false preacher had
+accused her of many things she never did. She also added that if she
+said God had not sent her she would damn herself, for true it was that
+God had sent her. Also that her voices had told her since, that she
+had done a great sin in confessing that she had sinned; but that for
+fear of the fire she had said that which she had said.
+
+She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were
+those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were
+so; and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold
+that she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret, she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she
+never intended to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of
+the fire, and she had denied nothing but what was contrary to truth;
+and she said that she would like better to make her penitence all at
+one time--that is to say, in dying, than to endure a long penitence in
+prison. Also that she had never done anything against God or the faith
+whatever they might have made her say; and that for what was in the
+schedule of the abjuration she did not know what it was. Also she said
+that she never intended to revoke anything so long as it pleased our
+Lord. At the end she said that if her judges would have her do so, she
+might put on again her female dress; but for the rest she would do no
+more.
+
+"What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his
+own mouth." Jeanne's protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and
+defence, overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it
+with questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed;
+the end of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be
+accomplished. No one could say she had not had full justice done her;
+every formality had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried
+out. Now there was but one thing before her, whose sad young voice
+with many pauses thus sighed forth its last utterance; and for her
+judges, one last spectacle to prepare, and the work to complete which
+it had taken them three long months to do.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE SACRIFICE.
+MAY 31, 1431.
+
+It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in
+certain circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of
+Beauvais had entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew
+exactly, with a perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least,
+that, notwithstanding the effect which his theatrical /mise en scene/
+had produced upon the imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or
+earth would induce that young soul to content itself with a lie. He
+knew it, though lies were his daily bread; the children of this world
+are wiser in their generation than the children of light. He had
+bidden his English patrons to wait a little, and now his predictions
+were triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of any man that on
+such a certainty he could have calculated and laid his devilish plans;
+but there would seem to have existed in the mediaeval churchman a
+certain horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic which was
+peculiar to their age and profession, and which no better principle in
+their own minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their delight of
+sensation, in distinction from the other appetites perhaps scarcely
+less cruel which other men indulged with no such horrified
+denunciation from the rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared
+with Cauchon that sharp sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her
+out; young Courcelles, so modest and unassuming and so learned, among
+the rest; not L'Oyseleur, it appears by the sequel. That Judas, like
+the greater traitor, was struck to the heart; but the less bad man who
+had only persecuted, not betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and
+only rejoiced that at last the victim was ready to drop into the
+flames which had been so carefully prepared.
+
+The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried
+with their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the
+Archbishop's house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily
+called together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner
+escaped had been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one
+each man rose again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of
+Fecamp, led the tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done:
+to give her up to the secular justice, "praying that she might be
+gently dealt with." Man after man added his voice "to that of Abbot of
+Fecamp aforesaid"--that she might be gently dealt with! Not one of
+them could be under any doubt what gentle meaning would be in the
+execution; but apparently the words were of some strange use in
+salving their consciences.
+
+The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In
+point of view of the law, there should have followed another trial,
+more evidence, pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to
+Monseigneur de Beauvais that he now defied law, and no longer
+prolonged the useless ceremonials of that mockery of justice. It is
+said that in coming out of the prison, through the courtyard full of
+Englishmen, where Warwick was in waiting to hear what news, the Bishop
+greeted them with all the satisfaction of success, laughing and
+bidding them "Make good cheer, the thing is done." In the same spirit
+of satisfaction was the rapid action of the further proceedings. On
+Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on Wednesday morning at eight
+'clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear her sentence, and there,
+without even that formality, the penalty was at once carried out. No
+time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
+
+All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison
+where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge
+of her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful
+scene, which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty
+years after by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it
+had become the only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest
+colours, and themselves as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt
+that so remarkable an occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a
+deep impression on the minds of all those who were in any way actors
+in or spectators of that wonderful scene. And every word of all these
+different reports is on oath; but notwithstanding, a touch of
+unconscious colour, a more favourable sentiment, influenced by the
+feeling of later days, may well have crept in. With this warning we
+may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy, all the more for the
+atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no way idealised,
+which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in which
+Jeanne figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified,
+tormented, and often trembling girl.
+
+On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l'Advenu appeared in
+the cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell--first "to
+announce to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true
+contrition and penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the
+said l'Advenu did very carefully and charitably." Jeanne on her part
+received the news with no conventional resignation or calm. Was it
+possible that she had been deceived and really hoped for mercy? She
+began to weep and to cry at the sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding
+the solemnity of her last declaration, that she would rather bear her
+punishment all at once than to endure the long punishment of her
+prison, her heart failed before the imminent stake, the immediate
+martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and earth: "My body, which has
+never been corrupted, must it be burned to ashes to-day!" No one but
+Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her perfect purity; was it good
+for nothing but to be burned, that young body not nineteen years old?
+"Ah," she said, "I would rather be beheaded seven times than burned! I
+appeal to God against all these great wrongs they do me." But after a
+while the passion wore itself out, the child's outburst was stilled;
+calming herself, she knelt down and made her confession to the
+compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to "receive her
+Saviour" as she had so often prayed and entreated before. It would
+appear that this had not been within Friar Martin's commission. He
+sent to ask the Bishop's leave, and it was granted "anything she asked
+for"--as they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned convict.
+But the Host was brought into the prison without ceremony, without
+accompanying candles or vestment for the priest. There are always some
+things which are insupportable to a man. Brother Martin could bear the
+sight of the girl's anguish, but not to administer to her a diminished
+rite. He sent again to demand what was needful, out of respect for the
+Holy Sacrament and the present victim. And his request had come, it
+would seem, to some canon or person in authority whose heart had been
+touched by the wonderful Maid in her long martyrdom. This nameless
+sympathiser did all that a man could do. He sent the Host with a train
+of priests chanting litanies as they went through the streets, with
+torches burning in the pure early daylight; some of these exhorted the
+people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her. She must have heard
+in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the clergy, the
+pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the voices,
+that sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the
+city was touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been
+sympathetic to Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was
+about to die: she had stood bravely against the world and answered
+like a true Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets,
+a girl just nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated
+for the time.
+
+Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over,
+received at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that
+rite which He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not
+permitted to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the
+sacred commemoration. All the time she was still /preschee/ and
+admonished by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop
+and his followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different
+parts in that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult
+to say. The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal
+warrant for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of
+mind is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it,
+and a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope
+and strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that
+she sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation
+for which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already
+mentioned, importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring
+to get from her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and
+was herself a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil
+spirits, not good,--drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be they
+good spirits, or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act
+of giving her her last communion, Brother Martin paused with the
+consecrated Host in his hands.
+
+"Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
+answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer."
+Then this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your
+voices?" Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the
+voices, which have deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not
+give this deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus,
+who did not live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
+
+The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
+satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. "So,
+Jeanne," he said, "you have always told us that your 'voices' said you
+were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us
+the truth at last." Then Jeanne answered: "Truly I see that they have
+deceived me." The report is Cauchon's, and therefore little to be
+trusted; but the sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that,
+even in records more trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her.
+The other spectators all report another portion of this conversation.
+"Bishop, it is by you I die," are the words with which the Maid is
+said to have met him. "Oh Jeanne, have patience," he replied. "It is
+because you did not keep your promise." "If you had kept yours, and
+sent me to the prison of the Church, and put me in gentle hands, it
+would not have happened," she replied. "I appeal from you to God."
+Several of the attendants, also according to the Bishop's account,
+heard from her the same sad words: "They have deceived me"; and there
+seems no reason why we should not believe it. Her mind was weighed
+down under this dreadful unaccountable fact. She was forsaken--as a
+greater sufferer was; and a horror of darkness had closed around her.
+"Ah, Sieur Pierre," she said to Morice, "where shall I be to-night?"
+The man had condemned her as a relapsed heretic, a daughter of
+perdition. He had just suggested to her that her angels must have been
+devils. Nevertheless perhaps his face was not unkindly, he had not
+meant all the harm he did. He ought to have answered, "In Hell, with
+the spirits you have trusted"; that would have been the only logical
+response. What he did say was very different. "Have you not good faith
+in the Lord?" said the judge who had doomed her. Amazing and notable
+speech! They had sentenced her to be burned for blasphemy as an envoy
+of the devil; they believed in fact that she was the child of God, and
+going straight in that flame to the skies. Jeanne, with the sound,
+clear head and the "sane mind" to which all of them testified, did she
+perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the inconceivable
+contradiction? "Ah," she said, "yes, God helping me, I shall be in
+Paradise."
+
+There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to
+the mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully
+not repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed
+"as if it had been a thing of small importance," that her story of the
+angel bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither
+expected nor intended to be believed. For this we have to thank
+L'Oyseleur and the rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that
+dreadful morning in the prison.
+
+Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the
+long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre
+was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy
+Office. She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the
+crowded courtyard where her "chariot" awaited her. It was her
+confessor's part to remain by her side, and Frere Isambard and
+Massieu, the officer, both her friends, were also with her. It is said
+that L'Oyseleur rushed forward at this moment, either to accompany her
+also, or, as many say, to fling himself at her feet and implore her
+pardon. He was hustled aside by the crowd and would have been killed
+by the English, it is said, but for Warwick. The bystanders would seem
+to have been seized with a sudden disgust for all the priests about,
+thinking them Jeanne's friends, the historians insinuate--more likely
+in scorn and horror of their treachery. And then the melancholy
+procession set forth.
+
+The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part:
+eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortege, as
+the car rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid
+attained to the calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all
+the high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs
+that gaped and gazed upon her on every side. In the midst of the
+consolations of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears,
+other words, the plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips,
+"Rouen! Rouen!" she said; "am I to die here?" It seemed incredible to
+her, impossible. She looked about still for some sign of disturbance,
+some rising among the crowd, some cry of "France! France!" or glitter
+of mail. Nothing: but the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the
+soldiers roughly clearing the way, the rude chariot rumbling on.
+"Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you shall yet suffer because of this," she
+murmured in her distraction, amid her moanings and tears.
+
+At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space
+encumbered with three erections--one reaching up so high that the
+shadow of it seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled
+up in an enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the
+executioner himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to
+secure unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling
+form. Two platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs
+and benches for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with
+the civil officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in
+their turn. Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it
+matter? No sentence at all was read to her, not even the
+ecclesiastical one which was illegal also. She was probably placed
+first on the same platform with her judges, where there was a pulpit
+from which she was to be /preschee/ for the last time. Of all Jeanne's
+sufferings this could scarcely be the least, that she was always
+/preschee/, lectured, addressed, sermonised through every painful step
+of her career.
+
+The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul
+scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance,
+when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her
+errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was
+Nicolas Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and
+his text was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all
+the other members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which
+had to be cut off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and
+that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer,
+an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false
+penitence the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of
+that flood of invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade
+her "Go in peace." Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not
+cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her
+to a final repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The
+narrative shows that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in
+her career, paid no attention to the tirade levelled at her from the
+president's place. "She knelt down on the platform showing great signs
+and appearance of contrition, so that all those who looked upon her
+wept. She called on her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed
+glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She
+called specially--was it with still a return towards the hoped for
+miracle? was it with the instinctive cry towards an old and faithful
+friend?--"St. Michael, St. Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would
+seem to have been a moment in which the hush and silence of a great
+crowd surrounded this wonderful stage, where was that white figure on
+her knees, praying, speaking--sometimes to God, sometimes to the
+saintly unseen companions of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to
+those about her. She asked the priests, thronging all round, those who
+had churches, to say a mass for her soul. She asked all whom she might
+have offended to forgive her. Through her tears and prayers broke
+again and again the sorrowful cry of "Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly
+that I must die?" No reason is given for the special pang that seems
+to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned a campaign in Normandy
+with Alencon. Had there been perhaps some special hope which made this
+conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in the Norman capital
+her standard and that of her King?
+
+There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their
+fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to
+the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and
+the deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men,
+perhaps the profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted
+in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have
+him." That which her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to
+bear. She called upon the saints, but they did not answer. She was
+shamed in the sight of men. But as she knelt there weeping, the
+Bishop's evil voice scarcely silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient
+--the entire crowd, touched to its heart with one impulse, broke into
+a burst of weeping and lamentation, "/a chaudes larmes/" according to
+the graphic French expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen
+personal pang of sorrow and fellow-feeling and impotence to help.
+Winchester--withdrawn high on his platform, ostentatiously separated
+from any share in it, a spectator merely--wept; and the judges wept.
+The Bishop of Boulogne was overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed
+down the accursed Cauchon's cheeks. The very world stood still to see
+that white form of purity, and valour, and faith, the Maid, not
+shouting triumphant on the height of victory, but kneeling, weeping,
+on the verge of torture. Human nature could not bear this long. A
+hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us here all day; must we dine
+here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain that simulated cruelty. And
+then the executioner stepped in and seized the victim.
+
+It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be
+no chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim
+the atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that
+the ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach
+her: the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel
+explanation. There was a writing set over the little platform which
+gave footing to the attendants below the stake, upon which were
+written the following words:
+
+  JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER,
+  BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL,
+  DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
+
+This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and
+religion branded the Maid of France--one half of her countrymen: the
+other half, silent, speaking no word, looking on.
+
+Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees,
+asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no
+cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way
+seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal
+parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all
+the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of
+her disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its
+broken edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried,
+pressing it against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross
+to preserve as a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold
+and silver. This was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few
+remaining steps and mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high
+over all that sea of heads. When she was bound securely to her stake,
+she asked again for a cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church,
+to be held before her as long as her eyes could see. Frere Isambard
+and Massieu, following her closely still, sent to the nearest church,
+and procured probably some cross which was used for processional
+purposes on a long staff which could be held up before her. The friar
+stood upon the faggots holding it up, and calling out broken words of
+encouragement so long that Jeanne bade him withdraw, lest the fire
+should catch his robes. And so at last, as the flames began to rise,
+she was left alone, the good brother always at the foot of the pile,
+painfully holding up with uplifted arms the cross that she might still
+see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up with the red glow of the fire,
+the horrified, trembling crowd like an agitated sea around. The wild
+flames rose and fell in sinister gleams and flashes, the smoke blew
+upwards, by times enveloping that white Maid standing out alone
+against a sky still blue and sweet with May--Pandemonium underneath,
+but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came a great cry from among the
+black fumes that began to reach the clouds: "My voices were of God!
+They have not deceived me!" She had seen and recognised it at last.
+Here it was, the miracle: the great victory that had been promised--
+though not with clang of swords and triumph of rescuing knights, and
+"St. Denis for France!"--but by the sole hand of God, a victory and
+triumph for all time, for her country a crown of glory and ineffable
+shame.
+
+Thus died the Maid of France--with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips--till
+the merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat;
+and one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the
+fire, wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through
+the air in the good monk's trembling hands--from eyes which opened
+bright upon the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so
+long thought and dreamed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+AFTER.
+
+The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known
+in history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the
+great catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been
+fact and evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been
+recorded all the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the
+most innocent of all, sought out Frere Isambard, and confessed to him
+in an anguish of remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had
+done. An Englishman who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in
+which the witch should be burned, when he rushed forward to keep his
+word was seized with sudden compunction--believed that he saw a white
+dove flutter forth from amid the smoke over her head, and, almost
+fainting at the sight, had to be led by his comrades to the nearest
+tavern for refreshment, a life-like touch in which we recognise our
+countryman; but he too found his way that afternoon to Frere Isambard
+like the other. A horrible story is told by the /Bourgeois de Paris/,
+whose contemporary journal is one of the authorities for this period,
+that "the fire was drawn aside" in order that Jeanne's form, with all
+its clothing burned away, should be visible by one last act of
+shameless insult to the crowd. The fifteenth century believed, as we
+have said, everything that is cruel and horrible, as indeed the vulgar
+mind does at all ages; but such brutal imaginings have seldom any
+truth to support them, and there is no such suggestion in the actual
+record. Isambard and Massieu heard from one of the officials that when
+every other part of her body was destroyed the heart was found intact,
+but was, by the order of Winchester, flung into the Seine along with
+all the ashes of that sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics
+should be kept.
+
+Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed
+this dreadful scene. "When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried
+out for water, holy water, and called to St. Michael; then hung her
+head upon her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently
+died." "Being in the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud
+voice the holy name of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of
+paradise, she gave up her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name
+of Jesus in sign of the fervour of her faith." One of the Canons of
+Rouen, standing sobbing in the crowd, said to another: "Would that my
+soul were in the same place where the soul of that woman is at this
+moment"; which indeed is not very different from the authorised saying
+of Pierre Morice in the prison. Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he
+who wrote /superba responsio/ on his margin, and had written down
+every word of her long examination--his occupation for three months,--
+says that he "never wept so much for anything that happened to
+himself, and that for a whole month he could not recover his calm."
+This man adds a very characteristic touch, to wit, that "with part of
+the pay which he had for the trial, he bought a missal, that he might
+have a reason for praying for her." Jean Tressat, "secretary to the
+King of England" (whatever that office may have been), went home from
+the execution crying out, "We are all lost, for we have burned a
+saint." A priest, afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, "did not believe that
+there was any man who could restrain his tears."
+
+The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none
+are visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is
+extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed
+inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be
+continually pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed
+to have bought all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges,
+among whom were the most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but
+of none of this is there any proof given. That they were anxious to
+procure Jeanne's condemnation and death, is very certain. Not one
+among them believed in her sacred mission, almost all considered her a
+sorceress, the most dangerous of evil influences, a witch who had
+brought shame and loss to England by her incantations and evil spells.
+On that point there could be no doubt whatever. She alone had stopped
+the progress of the invaders, and broken the charm of their invariable
+success. But all that she had done had been in favour of Charles, who
+made no attempt to serve or help her, and who had thwarted her plans,
+and hindered her work so long as it was possible to do so, even when
+she was performing miracles for his sake. And Alencon, Dunois, La
+Hire, where were they and all the knights? Two of them at least were
+at Louvins, within a day's march, but never made a step to rescue her.
+We need not ask where were the statesmen and clergy on the French
+side, for they were unfeignedly glad to have the burden of condemning
+her taken from their hands. No one in her own country said a word or
+struck a blow for Jeanne. As for the suborning of the University of
+Paris /en masse/, and all its best members in particular, that is a
+general baseness in which it is impossible to believe. There is no
+appearance even of any particular pressure put upon the judges. Jean
+de la Fontaine disappeared, we are told, and no one ever knew what
+became of him: but it was from Cauchon he fled. And nothing seems to
+have happened to the monks who attended the Maid to the scaffold, nor
+to the others who sobbed about the pile. On the other side, the
+Doctors who condemned her were in no way persecuted or troubled by the
+French authorities when the King came to his own. There was at the
+time a universal tacit consent in France to all that was done at Rouen
+on the 31st of May, 1431.
+
+One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already
+sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that
+dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It
+was two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and
+sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly
+allied to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie
+existing between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the
+hostile indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to
+Jeanne, who had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of
+Paris and the adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much
+against them as against the English, and the national sentiment to
+which she, a patriot before her age, appealed,--bidding not only the
+English go home, or fight and be vanquished, which was their only
+alternative--but the Burgundians to be converted and to live in peace
+with their brothers,--did not exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards,
+or Normans was the daughter of far Champagne a fellow countrywoman.
+There was neither sympathy nor kindness in their hearts on that score.
+Some were humane and full of pity for a simple woman in such terrible
+straits; but no more in Paris than in Rouen was the Maid of Orleans a
+native champion persecuted by the English; she was to both an enemy, a
+sorceress, putting their soldiers and themselves to shame.
+
+I have no desire to lessen our[1] guilt, whatever cruelty may have
+been practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much
+was practised--the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final
+stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and
+often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that
+she was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A
+prisoner of war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in
+her downfall was a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame
+is greater upon those who sold than upon those who bought; and
+greatest of all upon those who did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did
+not move a finger, to rescue. And indeed we have been the most
+penitent of all concerned; we have shrived ourselves by open
+confession and tears. We have quarrelled with our Shakespeare on
+account of the Maid, and do not know how we could have forgiven him,
+but for the notable and delightful discovery that it was not he after
+all, but another and a lesser hand that endeavoured to befoul her
+shining garments. France has never quarrelled with her Voltaire for a
+much fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
+
+The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to
+the remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the
+assembly held on the Thursday after Jeanne's death, how and when we
+are not told. It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is
+the place of meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole
+testimonial is that the manuscript is in the same hand which has
+written the previous records: but whereas each page in that record was
+signed at the bottom by responsible notaries, Manchon and his
+colleagues, no name whatever certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and
+persons of high importance, all judges on the trial, all concerned in
+that last scene in the prison, stand up and give their report of what
+happened there--part of which we have quoted--their object being to
+establish that Jeanne at the last acknowledged herself to be deceived.
+According to their own showing it was exactly such an acknowledgment
+as our Lord might have been supposed to make in the moment of his
+agony when the words of the psalm, "My God, my God, why hast thou
+forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems no reason that we can
+see, why this evidence should not be received as substantially true.
+The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's part was then
+made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived in respect to
+her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart. It was to her
+the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning showed her the
+truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her renewed conviction.
+The scene at the stake would lose something of its greatness without
+that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled soul.
+
+Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had,
+according to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost,
+it became a danger to the King of France that it should be possible to
+imagine that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of
+sorcery; and accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the
+decisions of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen,
+which had witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the
+depositions of witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which
+it had taken a long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted
+for judgment, and a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was
+given. The /proces/ was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the
+mother and brothers of Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight,
+Pierre de Lys, a gentleman of coat armour--against the heirs and
+representatives of Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and Lemaitre, the
+Deputy Inquisitor--with other persons chiefly concerned in the
+judgment. Some of these men were dead, some, wisely, not to be found.
+The result was such a mass of testimony as put every incident of the
+life of the Maid in the fullest light from her childhood to her death,
+and in consequence secured a triumphant and full acquittal of herself
+and her name from every reproach. This remarkable and indeed unique
+occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused any enthusiasm.
+Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the extraordinary calm
+of contemporary opinion which was still too near the catastrophe to
+see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of news which
+hindered the common knowledge of a trial--a thing too heavy to be
+blown upon the winds,--while it promulgated the legend, a thing so
+much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an
+extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many
+ages, and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory,
+in the country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots
+and champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear
+than daily bread.
+
+In the new and wonderful spring of life that succeeded the revolution
+of 1830, the martyr of the fifteenth century came to light as by a
+revelation. The episode of the Pucelle in Michelet's /History of
+France/ touched the heart of the world, and remains one of the finest
+efforts of history and the most popular picture of the saint. And
+perhaps, though so much less important in point of art, the maiden
+work of another maiden of Orleans--the little statue of Jeanne, so
+pure, so simple, so spiritual, made by the Princess Marie of that
+house, the daughter of the race which the Maid held in visionary love,
+and which thus only has ever attempted any return of that devotion--
+had its part in reawakening her name and memory. It fell again,
+however, after the great work of Quicherat had finally given to the
+country the means of fully forming its opinion on the subject which
+Fabre's translation, though unfortunately not literal and adorned with
+modern decorations, was calculated to render popular. A great crop of
+statues and some pictures not of any great artistic merit have since
+been dedicated to the memory of the Maid: but yet the public
+enthusiasm has never risen above the tide mark of literary applause.
+
+There has been, however, a great movement of enthusiasm lately to gain
+for Jeanne the honour of canonisation[2]; but it seems to have failed,
+or at least to have sunk again for the moment into silence. Perhaps
+these honours are out of date in our time. One of the most recent
+writers on the subject, M. Henri Blaze de Bury, suggests that one
+reason which retards this final consecration is "England, certainly
+not a negligible quantity to a Pope of our time." Let no such illusion
+move any mind, French or ecclesiastical. Canonisation means to us, I
+presume, and even to a great number of Catholics, simply the highest
+honour that can be paid to a holy and spotless name. In that sense
+there is no distinction of nation, and the English as warmly as the
+French, both being guilty towards her, and before God on her account--
+would welcome all honour that could be paid to one who, more truly
+than any princess of the blood, is Jeanne of France, the Maid, alone
+in her lofty humility and valour, and in everlasting fragrance of
+modesty and youth.
+----------
+[1] The writer must add that personally, as a Scot, she has no right
+    to use this pronoun. Scotland is entirely guiltless of this crime.
+    The Scots were fighting on the side of France through all these
+    wars, a little perhaps for love of France, but much more out of
+    natural hostility to the English. Yet at this time of day, except
+    to state that fact, it is scarcely necessary to throw off the
+    responsibility. The English side is now our side, though it was
+    not so in the fifteenth century: and a writer of the English
+    tongue must naturally desire that there should at least be fair
+    play.
+
+[2] I am informed, however, that she is already "Venerable," not a
+    very appropriate title--the same, I presume, as Bienheureuse,
+    which is prettier,--and may therefore be addressed by the faithful
+    in prayer, though her rank is only, as it were, brevet rank, and
+    her elevation incomplete.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs. Oliphant
+
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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs. Oliphant***
+#1 in our series by Mrs. Oliphant
+
+
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+Title:  Jeanne d'Arc
+
+Author:  Mrs. Oliphant
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+March, 2001  [Etext #2553]
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+Etext prepared by Emma Dudding, emma_302@hotmail.com
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+and John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz
+
+
+
+
+
+Jeanne d'Arc
+Her Life and Death
+
+
+by Mrs. Oliphant
+Author of "Makers of Florence," "Makers of Venice," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+COUSIN ANNIE
+(MRS. HARRY COGHILL)
+
+THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
+IN LOVE OF OUR COMMON HEROINE
+AND IN REMEMBRANCE OF LONG AND FAITHFUL
+AFFECTION AND FRIENDSHIP
+
+
+
+PREPARER'S NOTE
+
+  The original book for this text was published as a volume in a
+  series "Heroes of the Nations," edited by Evelyn Abbot, M.H.,
+  Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and published by G.P. Putnam's
+  Sons / The Knickerbocker Press in 1896. The title material
+  includes the note:
+
+  FACTA DUCIS VIVENT, OPEROSAQUE
+  GLORIA RERUM--OVID, IN LIVIAM, 265.
+  THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON
+  FAME SHALL LIVE.
+
+
+
+
+
+JEANNE D'ARC
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FRANCE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
+1412-1423.
+
+It is no small effort for the mind, even of the most well-informed,
+how much more of those whose exact knowledge is not great (which is
+the case with most readers, and alas! with most writers also), to
+transport itself out of this nineteenth century which we know so
+thoroughly, and which has trained us in all our present habits and
+modes of thought, into the fifteenth, four hundred years back in time,
+and worlds apart in every custom and action of life. What is there
+indeed the same in the two ages? Nothing but the man and the woman,
+the living agents in spheres so different; nothing but love and grief,
+the affections and the sufferings by which humanity is ruled and of
+which it is capable. Everything else is changed: the customs of life,
+and its methods, and even its motives, the ruling principles of its
+continuance. Peace and mutual consideration, the policy which even in
+its selfish developments is so far good that it enables men to live
+together, making existence possible,--scarcely existed in those days.
+The highest ideal was that of war, war no doubt sometimes for good
+ends, to redress wrongs, to avenge injuries, to make crooked things
+straight--but yet always war, implying a state of affairs in which the
+last thing that men thought of was the golden rule, and the highest
+attainment to be looked for was the position of a protector, doer of
+justice, deliverer of the oppressed. Our aim now that no one should be
+oppressed, that every man should have justice as by the order of
+nature, was a thing unthought of. What individual help did feebly for
+the sufferer then, the laws do for us now, without fear or favour:
+which is a much greater thing to say than that the organisation of
+modern life, the mechanical helps, the comforts, the easements of the
+modern world, had no existence in those days. We are often told that
+the poorest peasant in our own time has aids to existence that had not
+been dreamt of for princes in the Middle Ages. Thirty years ago the
+world was mostly of opinion that the balance was entirely on our side,
+and that in everything we were so much better off than our fathers,
+that comparison was impossible. Since then there have been many
+revolutions of opinion, and we think it is now the general conclusion
+of wise men, that one period has little to boast itself of against
+another, that one form of civilisation replaces another without
+improving upon it, at least to the extent which appears on the
+surface. But yet the general prevalence of peace, interrupted only by
+occasional wars, even when we recognise a certain large and terrible
+utility in war itself, must always make a difference incalculable
+between the condition of the nations now, and then.
+
+It is difficult, indeed, to imagine any concatenation of affairs which
+could reduce a country now to the condition in which France was in the
+beginning of the fifteenth century. A strong and splendid kingdom, to
+which in early ages one great man had given the force and supremacy of
+a united nation, had fallen into a disintegration which seems almost
+incredible when regarded in the light of that warm flame of
+nationality which now illumines, almost above all others, the French
+nation. But Frenchmen were not Frenchmen, they were Burgundians,
+Armagnacs, Bretons, Provençaux five hundred years ago. The interests
+of one part of the kingdom were not those of the other. Unity had no
+existence. Princes of the same family were more furious enemies to
+each other, at the head of their respective fiefs and provinces, than
+the traditional foes of their race; and instead of meeting an invader
+with a united force of patriotic resistance, one or more of these
+subordinate rulers was sure to side with the invader and to execute
+greater atrocities against his own flesh and blood than anything the
+alien could do.
+
+When Charles VII. of France began, nominally, his reign, his uncles
+and cousins, his nearest kinsmen, were as determinedly his opponents,
+as was Henry V. of England, whose frank object was to take the crown
+from his head. The country was torn in pieces with different causes
+and cries. The English were but little farther off from the Parisian
+than was the Burgundian, and the English king was only a trifle less
+French than were the members of the royal family of France. These
+circumstances are little taken into consideration in face of the
+general history, in which a careless reader sees nothing but the two
+nations pitted against each other as they might be now, the French
+united in one strong and distinct nationality, the three kingdoms of
+Great Britain all welded into one. In the beginning of the fifteenth
+century the Scots fought on the French side, against their intimate
+enemy of England, and if there had been any unity in Ireland, the
+Irish would have done the same. The advantages and disadvantages of
+subdivision were in full play. The Scots fought furiously against the
+English--and when the latter won, as was usually the case, the Scots
+contingent, whatever bounty might be shown to the French, was always
+exterminated. On the other side the Burgundians, the Armagnacs, and
+Royalists met each other almost more fiercely than the latter
+encountered the English. Each country was convulsed by struggles of
+its own, and fiercely sought its kindred foes in the ranks of its more
+honest and natural enemy.
+
+When we add to these strange circumstances the facts that the French
+King, Charles VI., was mad, and incapable of any real share either in
+the internal government of his country or in resistance to its
+invader: that his only son, the Dauphin, was no more than a foolish
+boy, led by incompetent councillors, and even of doubtful legitimacy,
+regarded with hesitation and uncertainty by many, everybody being
+willing to believe the worst of his mother, especially after the
+treaty of Troyes in which she virtually gave him up: that the King's
+brothers or cousins at the head of their respective fiefs were all
+seeking their own advantage, and that some of them, especially the
+Duke of Burgundy, had cruel wrongs to avenge: it will be more easily
+understood that France had reached a period of depression and apparent
+despair which no principle of national elasticity or new spring of
+national impulse was present to amend. The extraordinary aspect of
+whole districts in so strong and populous a country, which disowned
+the native monarch, and of towns and castles innumerable which were
+held by the native nobility in the name of a foreign king, could
+scarcely have been possible under other circumstances. Everything was
+out of joint. It is said to be characteristic of the nation that it is
+unable to play publicly (as we say) a losing game; but it is equally
+characteristic of the race to forget its humiliations as if they had
+never been, and to come out intact when the fortune of war changes,
+more French than ever, almost unabashed and wholly uninjured, by the
+catastrophe which had seemed fatal.
+
+If we had any right to theorise on such a subject--which is a thing
+the French themselves above all other men love to do,--we should be
+disposed to say, that wars and revolutions, legislation and politics,
+are things which go on over the head of France, so to speak--boilings
+on the surface, with which the great personality of the nation if such
+a word may be used, has little to do, and cares but little for; while
+she herself, the great race, neither giddy nor fickle, but unusually
+obstinate, tenacious, and sober, narrow even in the unwavering pursuit
+of a certain kind of well-being congenial to her--goes steadily on,
+less susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less
+excitable on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the
+commotion is over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving, uninjured
+in any essential particular by the most terrific of convulsions. This
+of course is to be said more or less of every country, the strain of
+common life being always, thank God, too strong for every temporary
+commotion--but it is true in a special way of France:--witness the
+extraordinary manner in which in our own time, and under our own eyes,
+that wonderful country righted herself after the tremendous
+misfortunes of the Franco-German war, in which for a moment not only
+her prestige, her honour, but her money and credit seemed to be lost.
+
+It seems rather a paradox to point attention to the extraordinary
+tenacity of this basis of French character, the steady prudence and
+solidity which in the end always triumph over the light heart and
+light head, the excitability and often rash and dangerous /élan/,
+which are popularly supposed to be the chief distinguishing features
+of France--at the very moment of beginning such a fairy tale, such a
+wonderful embodiment of the visionary and ideal, as is the story of
+Jeanne d'Arc. To call it a fairy tale is, however, disrespectful: it
+is an angelic revelation, a vision made into flesh and blood, the
+dream of a woman's fancy, more ethereal, more impossible than that of
+any man--even a poet:--for the man, even in his most uncontrolled
+imaginations, carries with him a certain practical limitation of what
+can be--whereas the woman at her highest is absolute, and disregards
+all bounds of possibility. The Maid of Orleans, the Virgin of France,
+is the sole being of her kind who has ever attained full expression in
+this world. She can neither be classified, as her countrymen love to
+classify, nor traced to any system of evolution as we all attempt to
+do nowadays. She is the impossible verified and attained. She is the
+thing in every race, in every form of humanity, which the dreaming
+girl, the visionary maid, held in at every turn by innumerable
+restrictions, her feet bound, her actions restrained, not only by
+outward force, but by the law of her nature, more effectual still,--
+has desired to be. That voiceless poet, to whom what can be is
+nothing, but only what should be if miracle could be attained to
+fulfil her trance and rapture of desire--is held by no conditions,
+modified by no circumstances; and miracle is all around her, the most
+credible, the most real of powers, the very air she breathers. Jeanne
+of France is the very flower of this passion of the imagination. She
+is altogether impossible from beginning to end of her, inexplicable,
+alone, with neither rival nor even second in the one sole ineffable
+path: yet all true as one of the oaks in her wood, as one of the
+flowers in her garden, simple, actual, made of the flesh and blood
+which are common to us all.
+
+And she is all the more real because it is France, impure, the country
+of light loves and immodest passions, where all that is sensual comes
+to the surface, and the courtesan is the queen of ignoble fancy, that
+has brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the
+nations. This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the
+mind and charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul
+delights. How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of
+that distracted and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the
+fierce thirst for gain, and failure of every noble faculty? Who can
+tell? By the grace of God, by the inspiration of heaven, the only
+origins in which the student of nature, which is over nature, can put
+any trust. No evolution, no system of development, can explain Jeanne.
+There is but one of her and no more in all the astonished world.
+
+With the permission of the reader I will retain her natural and
+beautiful name. To translate it into Joan seems quite unnecessary.
+Though she is the finest emblem to the world in general of that noble,
+fearless, and spotless Virginity which is one of the finest
+inspirations of the mediæval mind, yet she is inherently French,
+though France scarcely was in her time: and national, though as yet
+there were rather the elements of a nation than any indivisible People
+in that great country. Was not she herself one of the strongest and
+purest threads of gold to draw that broken race together and bind it
+irrevocably, beneficially, into one?
+
+It is curious that it should have been from the farthest edge of
+French territory that this national deliverer came. It is a
+commonplace that a Borderer should be a more hot partisan of his own
+country against the other from which but a line divides him in fact,
+and scarcely so much in race--than the calmer inhabitant of the
+midland country who knows no such press of constant antagonism; and
+Jeanne is another example of this well known fact. It is even a
+question still languidly discussed whether Jeanne and her family were
+actually on one side of the line or the other. "Il faut opter," says
+M. Blaze de Bury, one of her latest biographers, as if the peasant
+household of 1412 had inhabited an Alsatian cottage in 1872. When the
+line is drawn so closely, it is difficult to determine, but Jeanne
+herself does not ever seem to have entertained a moment's doubt on the
+subject, and she after all is the best authority. Perhaps Villon was
+thinking more of his rhyme than of absolute fact when he spoke of
+"Jeanne la bonne Lorraine." She was born on the 5th of January, 1412,
+in the village of Domremy, on the banks of the Meuse, one of those
+little grey hamlets, with its little church tower, and remains of a
+little chateau on the soft elevation of a mound not sufficient for the
+name of hill--which are scattered everywhere through those level
+countries, like places which have never been built, which have grown
+out of the soil, of undecipherable antiquity--perhaps, one feels, only
+a hundred, perhaps a thousand years old--yet always inhabitable in all
+the ages, with the same names lingering about, the same surroundings,
+the same mild rural occupations, simple plenty and bare want mingling
+together with as little difference of level as exists in the sweeping
+lines of the landscape round.
+
+The life was calm in so humble a corner which offered nothing to the
+invader or marauder of the time, but yet was so much within the
+universal conditions of war that the next-door neighbour, so to speak,
+the adjacent village of Maxey, held for the Burgundian and English
+alliance, while little Domremy was for the King. And once at least
+when Jeanne was a girl at home, the family were startled in their
+quiet by the swoop of an armed party of Burgundians, and had to gather
+up babies and what portable property they might have, and flee across
+the frontier, where the good Lorrainers received and sheltered them,
+till they could go back to their village, sacked and pillaged and
+devastated in the meantime by the passing storm. Thus even in their
+humility and inoffensiveness the Domremy villagers knew what war and
+its miseries were, and the recollection would no doubt be vivid among
+the children, of that half terrible, half exhilarating adventure, the
+fright and excitement of personal participation in the troubles, of
+which, night and day, from one quarter or another, they must have
+heard.
+
+Domremy had originally belonged[1] to the Abbey of St. Remy at Rheims
+--the ancient church of which, in its great antiquity, is still an
+interest and a wonder even in comparison with the amazing splendour of
+the cathedral of that place, so rich and ornate, which draws the eyes
+of the visitor to itself, and its greater associations. It is possible
+that this ancient connection with Rheims may have brought the great
+ceremony for which it is ever memorable, the consecration of the kings
+of France, more distinctly before the musing vision of the village
+girl; but I doubt whether such chance associations are ever much to be
+relied upon. The village was on the high-road to Germany; it must have
+been therefore in the way of news, and of many rumours of what was
+going on in the centres of national life, more than many towns of
+importance. Feudal bands, a rustic Seigneur with his little troop,
+going out for their forty days' service, or returning home after it,
+must have passed along the banks of the lazy Meuse many days during
+the fighting season, and indeed throughout the year, for garrison duty
+would be as necessary in winter as in summer; or a wandering pair of
+friars who had seen strange sights must have passed with their wallets
+from the neighbouring convents, collecting the day's provision, and
+leaving news and gossip behind, such as flowed to these monastic
+hostelries from all quarters--tales of battles, and anecdotes of the
+Court, and dreadful stories of English atrocities, to stir the village
+and rouse ever generous sentiment and stirring of national
+indignation. They are said by Michelet to have been no man's vassals,
+these outlying hamlets of Champagne; the men were not called upon to
+follow their lord's banner at a day's notice, as were the sons of
+other villages. There is no appearance even of a lord at all upon this
+piece of Church land, which was, we are told, directly held under the
+King, and would only therefore be touched by a general levy /en
+masse/--not even perhaps by that, so far off were they, and so near
+the frontier, where a reluctant man-at-arms could without difficulty
+make his escape, as the unwilling conscript sometimes does now.
+
+There would seem to have been no one of more importance in Domremy
+than Jacques d'Arc himself and his wife, respectable peasants, with a
+little money, a considerable rural property in flocks and herds and
+pastures, and a good reputation among their kind. He had three sons
+working with their father in the peaceful routine of the fields; and
+two daughters, of whom some authorities indicate Jeanne as the
+younger, and some as the elder. The cottage interior, however, appears
+more clearly to us than the outward aspect of the family life. The
+daughters were not, like the children of poorer peasants, brought up
+to the rude outdoor labours of the little farm. Painters have
+represented Jeanne as keeping her father's sheep, and even the early
+witnesses say the same; but it is contradicted by herself, who ought
+to know best--(except in taking her turn to herd them into a place of
+safety on an alarm). If she followed the flocks to the fields, it must
+have been, she says, in her childhood, and she has no recollection of
+it. Hers was a more sheltered and safer lot. The girls were brought up
+by their mother indoors in all the labours of housewifery, but also in
+the delicate art of needlework, so much more exquisite in those days
+than now. Perhaps Isabeau, the mistress of the house, was of convent
+training, perhaps some ancient privilege in respect to the manufacture
+of ornaments for the altar, and church vestments, was still retained
+by the tenants of what had been Church lands. At all events this, and
+other kindred works of the needle, seems to have been the chief
+occupation to which Jeanne was brought up.
+
+The education of this humble house seems to have come entirely from
+the mother. It was natural that the children should not know A from B,
+as Jeanne afterward said; but no one did, probably, in the village nor
+even on much higher levels than that occupied by the family of Jacques
+d'Arc. But the children at their mother's knee learned the Credo, they
+learned the simple universal prayers which are common to the wisest
+and simplest, which no great savant or poet could improve, and no
+child fail to understand: "Our Father, which art in Heaven," and that
+"Hail, Mary, full of grace," which the world in that day put next.
+These were the alphabet of life to the little Champagnards in their
+rough woollen frocks and clattering sabots; and when the house had
+been set in order,--a house not without comfort, with its big wooden
+presses full of linen, and the /pot au feu/ hung over the cheerful
+fire,--came the real work, perhaps embroideries for the Church,
+perhaps only good stout shirts made of flax spun by their own hands
+for the father and the boys, and the fine distinctive coif of the
+village for the women. "Asked if she had learned any art or trade,
+said: Yes, that her mother had taught her to sew and spin, and so
+well, that she did not think any woman in Rouen could teach her
+anything." When the lady in the ballad makes her conditions with the
+peasant woman who is to bring up her boy, her "gay goss hawk," and
+have him trained in the use of sword and lance, she undertakes to
+teach the "turtle-doo," the woman child substituted for him, "to lay
+gold with her hand." No doubt Isabeau's child learned this difficult
+and dainty art, and how to do the beautiful and delicate embroidery
+which fills the treasuries of the old churches.
+
+And while they sat by the table in the window, with their shining
+silks and gold thread, the mother made the quiet hours go by with tale
+and legend--of the saints first of all--and stories from Scripture,
+quaintly interpreted into the costume and manners of their own time,
+as one may still hear them in the primitive corners of Italy: mingled
+with incidents of the war, of the wounded man tended in the village,
+and the victors all flushed with triumph, and the defeated with
+trailing arms and bowed heads, riding for their lives: perhaps little
+epics and tragedies of the young knight riding by to do his devoir
+with his handful of followers all spruce and gay, and the battered and
+diminished remnant that would come back. And then the Black
+Burgundians, the horrible English ogres, whose names would make the
+children shudder! No /God-den/[2] had got so far as Domremy; there
+was no personal knowledge to soften the picture of the invader. He was
+unspeakable as the Turk to the imagination of the French peasant,
+diabolical as every invader is.
+
+This was the earliest training of the little maid before whom so
+strange and so great a fortune lay. /Autre personne que sadite mère ne
+lui apprint/--any lore whatsoever; and she so little--yet everything
+that was wanted--her prayers, her belief, the happiness of serving
+God, and also man; for when any one was sick in the village, either a
+little child with the measles, or a wounded soldier from the wars,
+Isabeau's modest child--no doubt the mother too--was always ready to
+help. It must have been a family /de bien/, in the simple phrase of
+the country, helpful, serviceable, with charity and aid for all. An
+honest labourer, who came to speak for Jeanne at the second trial,
+held long after her death, gave his incontestable evidence to this. "I
+was then a child," he said, "and it was she who nursed me in my
+illness." They were all more or less devout in those days, when faith
+was without question, and the routine of church ceremonial was
+followed as a matter of course; but few so much as Jeanne, whose chief
+pleasure it was to say her prayers in the little dark church, where
+perhaps in the morning sunshine, as she made her early devotions,
+there would blaze out upon her from a window, a Holy Michael in
+shining armour, transfixing the dragon with his spear, or a St.
+Margaret dominating the same emblem of evil with her cross in her
+hand. So, at least, the historians conjecture, anxious to find out
+some reason for her visions; and there is nothing in the suggestion
+which is unpleasing. The little country church was in the gift of St.
+Remy, and some benefactor of the rural curé might well have given a
+painted window to make glad the hearts of the simple people. St.
+Margaret was no warrior-saint, but she overcame the dragon with her
+cross, and was thus a kind of sister spirit to the great archangel.
+
+Sitting much of her time at or outside the cottage door with her
+needlework, in itself an occupation so apt to encourage musing and
+dreams, the bells were one of Jeanne's great pleasures. We know a
+traveller, of the calmest English temperament and sobriety of
+Protestant fancy, to whom the midday Angelus always brings, he says, a
+touching reminder--which he never neglects wherever he may be--to
+uncover the head and lift up the heart; how much more the devout
+peasant girl softly startled in the midst of her dreaming by that call
+to prayer. She was so fond of those bells that she bribed the careless
+bell-ringer with simple presents to be more attentive to his duty.
+From the garden where she sat with her work, the cloudy foliage of the
+/bois de chêne/, the oak wood, where were legends of fairies and a
+magic well, to which her imagination, better inspired, seems to have
+given no great heed, filled up the prospect on one side. At a later
+period, her accusers attempted to make out that she had been a devotee
+of these nameless woodland spirits, but in vain. No doubt she was one
+of the procession on the holy day once a year, when the curé of the
+parish went out through the wood to the Fairies' Well to say his mass,
+and exorcise what evil enchantment might be there. But Jeanne's
+imagination was not of the kind to require such stimulus. The saints
+were enough for her; and indeed they supplied to a great extent the
+fairy tales of the age, though it was not of love and fame and living
+happy ever after, but of sacrifice and suffering and valorous
+martyrdom that their glory was made up.
+
+We hear of the woods, the fields, the cottages, the little church and
+its bells, the garden where she sat and sewed, the mother's stories,
+the morning mass, in this quiet preface of the little maiden's life;
+but nothing of the highroad with its wayfarers, the convoys of
+provisions for the war, the fighting men that were coming and going.
+Yet these, too, must have filled a large part in the village life, and
+it is evident that a strong impression of the pity of it all, of the
+distraction of the country and all the cruelties and miseries of which
+she could not but hear, must have early begun to work in Jeanne's
+being, and that while she kept silence the fire burned in her heart.
+The love of God, and that love of country which has nothing to say to
+political patriotism but translates itself in an ardent longing and
+desire to do "some excelling thing" for the benefit and glory of that
+country, and to heal its wounds--were the two principles of her life.
+We have not the slightest indication how much or how little of this
+latter sentiment was shared by the simple community about her; unless
+from the fact that the Domremy children fought with those of Maxey,
+their disaffected neighbours, to the occasional effusion of blood. We
+do not know even of any volunteer from the village, or enthusiasm for
+the King.[3] The district was voiceless, the little clusters of
+cottages fully occupied in getting their own bread, and probably like
+most other village societies, disposed to treat any military impulse
+among their sons as mere vagabondism and love of adventure and
+idleness.
+
+Nothing, so far as anyone knows, came near the most unlikely volunteer
+of all, to lead her thoughts to that art of war of which she knew
+nothing, and of which her little experience could only have shown her
+the horrors and miseries, the sufferings of wounded fugitives and the
+ruin of sacked houses. Of all people in the world, the little daughter
+of a peasant was the last who could have been expected to respond to
+the appeal of the wretched country. She had three brothers who might
+have served the King, and there was no doubt many a stout clodhopper
+about, of that kind which in every country is the fittest material for
+fighting, and "food for powder." But to none of these did the call
+come. Every detail goes to increase the profound impression of
+peacefulness which fills the atmosphere--the slow river floating by,
+the roofs clustered together, the church bells tinkling their
+continual summons, the girl with her work at the cottage door in the
+shadow of the apple trees. To pack the little knapsack of a brother or
+a lover, and to convoy him weeping a little way on his road to the
+army, coming back to the silent church to pray there, with the soft
+natural tears which the uses of common life must soon dry--that is all
+that imagination could have demanded of Jeanne. She was even too young
+for any interposition of the lover, too undeveloped, the French
+historians tell us with their astonishing frankness, to the end of her
+short life, to have been moved by any such thought. She might have
+poured forth a song, a prayer, a rude but sweet lament for her
+country, out of the still bosom of that rustic existence. Such things
+have been, the trouble of the age forcing an utterance from the very
+depths of its inarticulate life. But it was not for this that Jeanne
+d'Arc was born.
+----------
+[1] Mr. Andrew Lang informs me that the real proprietor was a certain
+    "Dame d'Orgévillier." "On Jeanne's side of the burn," he adds,
+    with a picturesque touch of realism, "the people were probably
+    /free/ as attached to the Royal Châtellenie of Vancouleurs, as
+    described below."
+
+[2] This was probably not the God-dam of later French, a reflection of
+    the supposed prevalent English oath, but most likely merely the
+    God-den or good-day, the common salutation.
+
+[3] Domremy was split, Mr. Lang says, by the burn, and Jeanne's side
+    were probably King's men. We have it on her own word that there
+    was but one Burgundian in the village, but that might mean on her
+    side.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS.
+1424-1429.
+
+In the year 1424, the year in which, after the battle of Agincourt,
+France was delivered over to Henry V., an extraordinary event occurred
+in the life of this little French peasant. We have not the same horror
+of that treaty, naturally, as have the French. Henry V. is a favourite
+of our history, probably not so much for his own merit as because of
+that master-magician, Shakespeare, who of his supreme good pleasure,
+in the exercise of that voluntary preference, which even God himself
+seems to show to some men, has made of that monarch one of the best
+beloved of our hearts. Dear to us as he is, in Eastcheap as at
+Agincourt, and more in the former than the latter, even our sense of
+the disgraceful character of that bargain, /le traité infâme/ of
+Troyes, by which Queen Isabeau betrayed her son, and gave her daughter
+and her country to the invader, is softened a little by our high
+estimation of the hero. But this is simple national prejudice;
+regarded from the French side, or even by the impartial judgment of
+general humanity, it was an infamous treaty, and one which might well
+make the blood boil in French veins.
+
+We look at it at present, however, through the atmosphere of the
+nineteenth century, when France is all French, and when the royal
+house of England has no longer any French connection. If George III.,
+much more George II., on the basis of his kingdom of Hanover, had
+attempted to make himself master of a large portion of Germany, the
+situation would have been more like that of Henry V. in France than
+anything we can think of now. It is true the kings of England were no
+longer dukes of Normandy--but they had been so within the memory of
+man: and that noble duchy was a hereditary appanage of the family of
+the Conqueror; while to other portions of France they had the link of
+temporary possession and inheritance through French wives and mothers;
+added to which is the fact that Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, thirsting
+to avenge his father's blood upon the Dauphin, would have been
+probably a more dangerous usurper than Henry, and that the actual
+sovereign, the unfortunate, mad Charles VI., was in no condition to
+maintain his own rights.
+
+There is little evidence, however, that this treaty, or anything so
+distinct in detail, had made much impression on the outlying borders
+of France. What was known there, was only that the English were
+victorious, that the rightful King of France was still uncrowned and
+unacknowledged, and that the country was oppressed and humiliated
+under the foot of the invader. The fact that the new King was not yet
+the Lord's anointed, and had never received the seal of God, as it
+were, to his commission, was a fact which struck the imagination of
+the village as of much more importance than many greater things--being
+at once more visible and matter-of-fact, and of more mystical and
+spiritual efficacy than any other circumstance in the dreadful tale.
+
+Jeanne was in the garden as usual, seated, as we should say in
+Scotland, at "her seam," not quite thirteen, a child in all the
+innocence of infancy, yet full of dreams, confused no doubt and vague,
+with those impulses and wonderings--impatient of trouble, yearning to
+give help--which tremble on the chaos of a young soul like the first
+lightening of dawn upon the earth. It was summer, and afternoon, the
+time of dreams. It would be easy in the employment of legitimate fancy
+to heighten the picturesqueness of that quiet scene--the little girl
+with her favourite bells, the birds picking up the crumbs of brown
+bread at her feet. She was thinking of nothing, most likely, in a
+vague suspense of musing, the wonder of youth, the awakening of
+thought, as yet come to little definite in her child's heart--looking
+up from her work to note some passing change of the sky, a something
+in the air which was new to her. All at once between her and the
+church there shone a light on the right hand, unlike anything she had
+ever seen before; and out of it came a voice equally unknown and
+wonderful. What did the voice say? Only the simplest words, words fit
+for a child, no maxim or mandate above her faculties--"/Jeanne, sois
+bonne et sage enfant; va souvent à l'église./" Jeanne, be good! What
+more could an archangel, what less could the peasant mother within
+doors, say? The little girl was frightened, but soon composed herself.
+The voice could be nothing but sacred and blessed which spoke thus. It
+would not appear that she mentioned it to anyone. It is such a secret
+as a child, in that wavering between the real and unreal, the world
+not realised of childhood, would keep, in mingled shyness and awe,
+uncertain, rapt in the atmosphere of vision, within her own heart.
+
+It is curious how often this wonderful scene has been repeated in
+France, never connected with so high a mission, but yet embracing the
+same circumstances, the same situation, the same semi-angelic nature
+of the woman-child. The little Bernadette of Lourdes is almost of our
+own day; she, too is one who puts the scorner to silence. What her
+visions and her voices were, who can say? The last historian of them
+is not a man credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is
+silent, except in a wondering impression of the sacred and the true,
+before the little Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the
+many sordid results that have followed and all that sad machinery of
+expected miracle through which even, repulsive as it must always be, a
+something breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and
+account for except in ways more incredible than miracle--so is the
+rest of the world. Why has this logical, sceptical, doubting country,
+so able to quench with an epigram, or blow away with a breath of
+ridicule the finest vision--become the special sphere and birthplace
+of these spotless infant-saints? This is one of the wonders which
+nobody attempts to account for. Yet Bernadette is as Jeanne, though
+there are more than four hundred years between.
+
+After what intervals the vision returned we are not told, nor in what
+circumstances. It seems to have come chiefly out-of-doors, in the
+silence and freedom of the fields or garden. Presently the heavenly
+radiance shaped itself into some semblance of forms and figures, one
+of which, clearer than the others, was like a man, but with wings and
+a crown on his head and the air "/d'un vrai prud' homme/"; a noble
+apparition before whom at first the little maid trembled, but whose
+majestic, honest regard soon gave her confidence. He bade her once
+more to be good, and that God would help her; then he told her the sad
+story of her own suffering country, /la pitié qui estoit au royaume de
+France/. Was it the pity of heaven that the archangel reported to the
+little trembling girl, or only that which woke with the word in her
+own childish soul? He has chosen the small things of this world to
+confound the great. Jeanne's young heart was full of pity already, and
+of yearning over the helpless mother-country which had no champion to
+stand for her. "She had great doubts at first whether it was St.
+Michael, but afterwards when he had instructed her and shown her many
+things, she believed firmly that it was he."
+
+It was this warrior-angel who opened the matter to her, and disclosed
+her mission. "Jeanne," he said, "you must go to the help of the King
+of France; and it is you who shall give him back his kingdom." Like a
+still greater Maid, trembling, casting in her mind what this might
+mean, she replied, confused, as if that simple detail were all:
+"Messire, I am only a poor girl; I cannot ride or lead armed men." The
+vision took no notice of this plea. He became minute in his
+directions, indicating exactly what she was to do. "Go to Messire de
+Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and he will take you to the King.
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret will come and help you." Jeanne was
+overwhelmed by this exactness, by the sensation of receiving direct
+orders. She cried, weeping and helpless, terrified to the bottom of
+her soul--What was she that she should do this? a little girl, able to
+guide nothing but her needle or her distaff, to lend her simple aid in
+nursing a sick child. But behind all her fright and hesitation, her
+heart was filled with the emotion thus suggested to her--the
+immeasurable /pitié que estoit au royaume de France/. Her heart became
+heavy with this burden. By degrees it came about that she could think
+of nothing else; and her little life was confused by expectations and
+recollections of the celestial visitant, who might arrive upon her at
+any moment, in the midst perhaps of some innocent play, or when she
+sat sewing in the garden before her father's humble door.
+
+After a while the /vrai prud' homme/ came seldom; other figures more
+like herself, soft forms of women, white and shining, with golden
+circlets and ornaments, appeared to her in the great halo of the
+light; they bowed their heads, naming themselves, as to a sister
+spirit, Catherine, and the other Margaret. Their voices were sweet and
+soft with a sound that made you weep. They were both martyrs,
+encouraging and strengthening the little martyr that was to be. "A
+lady is there in the heavens who loves thee": Virgil could not say
+more to rouse the flagging strength of Dante. When these gentle
+figures disappeared, the little maid wept in an anguish of tenderness,
+longing if only they would take her with them. It is curious that
+though she describes in this vague rapture the appearance of her
+visitors, it is always as "/mes voix/" that she names them--the sight
+must always have been more imperfect than the message. Their outlines
+and their lovely faces might shine uncertain in the excess of light;
+but the words were always plain. The pity for France that was in their
+hearts spread itself into the silent rural atmosphere, touching every
+sensitive chord in the nature of little Jeanne. It was as if her
+mother lay dying there before her eyes.
+
+Curious to think how little anyone could have suspected such meetings
+as these, in the cottage hard by, where the weary ploughmen from the
+fields would come clamping in for their meal, and Dame Isabeau would
+call to the child, even sharply perhaps now and then, to leave that
+all-absorbing needlework and come in and help, as Martha called Mary
+fourteen hundred years before; and where the priest, mumbling his mass
+of a cold morning in the little church, would smile indulgent on the
+faithful little worshipper when it was done, sure of seeing Jeanne
+there whoever might be absent. She was a shy girl, blushing and
+drooping her head when a stranger spoke to her, red and shame-faced
+when they laughed at her in the village as a /dévote/ before her time;
+but with nothing else to blush about in all her simple record.
+
+Neither to her parents, nor to the curé when she made her confession,
+does she seem to have communicated these strange experiences, though
+they had lasted for some time before she felt impelled to act upon
+them, and could keep silence no longer. She was but thirteen when the
+revelations began and she was seventeen when at last she set forth to
+fulfil her mission. She had no guidance from her voices, she herself
+says, as to whether she should tell or not tell what had been
+communicated to her; and no doubt was kept back by her shyness, and by
+the dreamy confusion of childhood between the real and unreal. One
+would have thought that a life in which these visions were of constant
+recurrence would have been rapt altogether out of wholesome use and
+wont, and all practical service. But this does not seem for a moment
+to have been the case. Jeanne was no hysterical girl, living with her
+head in a mist, abstracted from the world. She had all the enthusiasms
+even of youthful friendship, other girls surrounding her with the
+intimacy of the village, paying her visits, staying all night, sharing
+her room and her bed. She was ready to be sent for by any poor woman
+that needed help or nursing, she was always industrious at her needle;
+one would love to know if perhaps in the /Trésor/ at Rheims there was
+some stole or maniple with flowers on it, wrought by her hands. But
+the /Trésor/ at Rheims is nowadays rather vulgar if truth must be
+told, and the bottles and vases for the consecration of Charles X.,
+that /pauvre sire/, are more thought of than relics of an earlier age.
+
+At length, however, one does not know how, the secret of her double
+life came out. No doubt long brooding over these voices, long
+intercourse with such celestial visitors, and the mission continually
+pressed upon her--meaningless to the child at first, a thing only to
+shed terrified tears over and wonder at--ripened her intelligence so
+that she came at last to perceive that it was practicable, a thing to
+be done, a charge to be obeyed. She had this before her, as a girl in
+ordinary circumstances has the new developments of life to think of,
+and how to be a wife and mother. And the news brought by every passer-
+by would prove doubly interesting, doubly important to Jeanne, in her
+daily growing comprehension of what she was called upon to do. As she
+felt the current more and more catching her feet, sweeping her on,
+overcoming all resistance in her own mind, she must have been more and
+more anxious to know what was going on in the distracted world, more
+and more touched by that great pity which had awakened her soul. And
+all these reports were of a nature to increase that pity till it
+became overwhelming. The tales she would hear of the English must have
+been tales of cruelty and horror; not so many years ago what tales did
+not we hear of German ferocity in the French villages, perhaps not
+true at all, yet making their impression always; and it was more
+probable in that age that every such story should be true. Then the
+compassion which no one can help feeling for a young man deprived of
+his rights, his inheritance taken from him, his very life in danger,
+threatened by the stranger and usurper, was deepened in every
+particular by the fact that it was the King, the very impersonation of
+France, appointed by God as the head of the country, who was in
+danger. Everything that Jeanne heard would help to swell the stream.
+
+Thus she must have come step by step--this extraordinary, impossible
+suggestion once sown in her dreaming soul--to perceive a kind of
+miraculous reasonableness in it, to see its necessity, and how
+everything pointed towards such a deliverance. It would have seemed
+natural to believe that the prophecies of the countryside which
+promised a virgin from an oak grove, a maiden from Lorraine, to
+deliver France, might have affected her mind, did we not have it from
+her own voice that she had never heard that prophecy[1]; but the word
+of the blessed Michael, so often repeated, was more than an old wife's
+tale; and the child's alarm would seem to have died away as she came
+to her full growth. And Jeanne was no ethereal spirit lost in visions,
+but a robust and capable peasant girl, fearing little, and full of
+sense and determination, as well as of an inspiration so far above the
+level of the crowd. We hear with wonder afterwards that she had the
+making of a great general in her untutored female soul,--which is
+perhaps the most wonderful thing in her career,--and saw with the eye
+of an experienced and able soldier, as even Dunois did not always see
+it, the fit order of an attack, the best arrangement of the forces at
+her command. This I honestly avow is to me the most incredible point
+in the story. I am not disturbed by the apparition of the saints;
+there is in them an ineffable appropriateness and fitness against
+which the imagination, at least, has not a word to say. The wonder is
+not, to the natural mind, that such interpositions of heaven come, but
+that they come so seldom. But that Jacques d'Arc's daughter, the
+little girl over her sewing, whose only fault was that she went to
+church too often, should have the genius of a soldier, is too
+bewildering for words to say. A poet, yes, an inspiring influence
+leading on to miraculous victory; but a general, skilful with the rude
+artillery of the time, divining the better way in strategy,--this is a
+wonder beyond the reach of our faculties; yet according to Alençon,
+Dunois, and other military authorities, it was true.
+
+We have little means of finding out how it was that Jeanne's long
+musings came at last to a point at which they could be hidden no
+longer, nor what it was which induced her at last to select the
+confidant she did. No doubt she must have been considering and
+weighing the matter for a long time before she fixed upon the man who
+was her relation, yet did not belong to Domremy, and was safer than a
+townsman for the extraordinary revelations she had to make. One of her
+neighbours, her gossip, Gerard of Epinal, to whose child she was
+godmother, had perhaps at one moment seemed to her a likely helper.
+But he belonged to the opposite party. "If you were not a Burgundian,"
+she said to him once, "there is something I might tell you." The
+honest fellow took this to mean that she had some thought of marriage,
+the most likely and natural supposition. It was at this moment, when
+her heart was burning with her great secret, the voices urging her on
+day by day, and her power of self-constraint almost at an end, that
+Providence sent Durand Laxart, her uncle by marriage, to Domremy on
+some family visit. She would seem to have taken advantage of the
+opportunity with eagerness, asking him privately to take her home with
+him, and to explain to her father and mother that he wanted her to
+take care of his wife. No doubt the girl, devoured with so many
+thoughts, would have the air of requiring "a change" as we say, and
+that the mother would be very ready to accept for her an invitation
+which might bring back the brightness to her child. Laxart was a
+peasant like the rest, a /prud' homme/ well thought of among his
+people. He lived in Burey le Petit, near to Vaucouleurs, the chief
+place of the district, and Jeanne already knew that it was to the
+captain of Vaucouleurs that she was to address herself. Thus she
+secured her object in the simplest and most natural way.
+
+Yet the reader cannot but hold his breath at the thought of what that
+amazing revelation must have been to the homely, rustic soul, her
+companion, communicated as they went along the common road in the
+common daylight. "She said to the witness that she must go to France
+to the Dauphin, to make him to be crowned King." It must have been as
+if a thunderbolt had fallen at his feet when the girl whom he had
+known in every development of her little life, thus suddenly disclosed
+to him her secret purpose and determination. All her simple excellence
+the good man knew, and that she was no fantastic chatterer, but truly
+/une bonne douce fille/, bold in nothing but kindness, with nothing to
+blush for but the fault of going too often to church. "Did you never
+hear that France should be made desolate by a woman and restored by a
+maid?" she said; and this would seem to have been an unanswerable
+argument. He had, henceforth, nothing to do but to promote her purpose
+as best he could in every way.
+
+It would not seem at all unlikely to this good man that the Archangel
+Michael, if Jeanne's revelation to him went so far, should have named
+Robert de Baudricourt, the chief of the district, captain of the town
+and its forces, the principal personage in all the neighbourhood, as
+the person to whom Jeanne's purpose was to be revealed, but rather a
+guarantee of St. Michael himself, familiar with good society; and the
+Seigneur must have been more or less in good intelligence with his
+people, not too alarming to be referred to, even on so insignificant a
+subject as the vagaries of a country girl--though these by this time
+must have begun to seem something more than vagaries to the half-
+convinced peasant. And it was no doubt a great relief to his mind thus
+to put the decision of the question into the hands of a man better
+informed than himself. Laxart proceeded to Vaucouleurs upon his
+mission, shyly yet with confidence. He would seem to have had a
+preliminary interview with Baudricourt before introducing Jeanne. The
+stammering countryman, the bluff, rustic noble and soldier, cheerfully
+contemptuous, receiving, with a loud laugh into all the echoes, the
+extraordinary demand that he should send a little girl from Domremy to
+the King, to deliver France, come before us like a picture in the
+countryman's simple words. Robert de Baudricourt would scarcely hear
+the story out. "Box her ears," he said, "and send her home to her
+mother." The little fool! What did she know of the English, those
+brutal, downright fighters, against whom no /élan/ was sufficient, who
+stood their ground and set up vulgar posts around their lines, instead
+of trusting to the rush of sudden valour, and the tactics of the
+tournament! She deliver France! On a much smaller argument and to put
+down a less ambition, the half serious, half amused adviser has bidden
+a young fanatic's ears to be boxed on many an unimportant occasion,
+and has often been justified in so doing. There would be a half hour
+of gaiety after poor Laxart, crestfallen, had got his dismissal. The
+good man must have turned back to Jeanne, where she waited for him in
+courtyard or antechamber, with a heavy heart. No boxing of ears was
+possible to him. The mere thought of it was blasphemy. This was on
+Ascension Day the 13 May, 1428.
+
+Jeanne, however, was not discouraged by M. de Baudricourt's joke, and
+her interview with him changed his views completely. She appears
+indeed from the moment of setting out from her father's house to have
+taken a new attitude. These great personages of the country before
+whom all the peasants trembled, were nothing to this village maid,
+except, perhaps, instruments in the hand of God to speed her on her
+way if they could see their privileges--if not, to be swept out of it
+like straws by the wind. It had no doubt been hard for her to leave
+her father's house; but after that disruption what did anything
+matter? And she had gone through five years of gradual training of
+which no one knew. The tears and terror, the plea, "I am a poor girl;
+I cannot even ride," of her first childlike alarm had given place to a
+profound acquaintance with the voices and their meaning. They were now
+her familiar friends guiding her at every step; and what was the
+commonplace burly Seigneur, with his roar of laughter, to Jeanne? She
+went to her audience with none of the alarm of the peasant. A certain
+young man of Baudricourt's suite, Bertrand de Poulengy, another young
+D'Artagnan seeking his fortune, was present in the hall and witnessed
+the scene. The joke would seem to have been exhausted by the time
+Jeanne appeared, or her perfect gravity and simplicity, and beautiful
+manners--so unlike her rustic dress and village coif--imposed upon the
+Seigneur and his little court. This is how the story is told, twenty-
+five years after, by the witness, then an elderly knight, recalling
+the story of his youth.
+
+"She said that she came to Robert on the part of her Lord, that he
+should send to the Dauphin, and tell him to hold out, and have no
+fear, for the Lord would send him succour before the middle of Lent.
+She also said that France did not belong to the Dauphin but to her
+Lord; but her Lord willed that the Dauphin should be its King, and
+hold it in command, and that in spite of his enemies she herself would
+conduct him to be consecrated. Robert then asked her who was this
+Lord? She answered, 'The King of Heaven.' This being done [the witness
+adds] she returned to her father's house with her uncle, Durand Laxart
+of Burey le Petit."
+
+This brief and sudden preface to her career passed over and had no
+immediate effect; indeed but for Bertrand we should have been unable
+to separate it from the confused narrative to which all these
+witnesses brought what recollection they had, often without sequence
+or order, Durand himself taking no notice of any interval between this
+first visit to Vaucouleurs and the final one.[2] The episode of
+Ascension Day appears like the formal /sommation/ of French law, made
+as a matter of form before the appellant takes action on his own
+responsibility; but Baudricourt had probably more to do with it than
+appears to be at all certain from the after evidence. One of the
+persons present, at all events, young Poulengy above mentioned, bore
+it in mind and pondered it in his heart.
+
+Meantime, Jeanne returned home--the strangest home-going,--for by this
+time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and
+rumour must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern
+telegraph, to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore
+unaware of any difference between Jeanne and her companions save the
+greater goodness to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must
+have reached Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with
+the kind Durand, a changed creature, already the consecrated Maid of
+France, La Pucelle, apart from all others. The French peasant is a
+hard man, more fierce in his terror of the unconventional, of having
+his domestic affairs exposed to the public eye, or his family
+disgraced by an exhibition of anything unusual either in act or
+feeling, than almost any other class of beings. And it is evident that
+he took his daughter's intention according to the coarsest
+interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention of
+joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and
+dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever
+of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl,
+but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We
+do not know what passed when she returned, further than that her
+father had a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of
+the purpose that had so long been ripening in her mind. He dreamed
+that he saw her surrounded by armed men, in the midst of the troopers,
+the most evident and natural interpretation of her purpose, for who
+could divine that she meant to be their leader and general, on a level
+not with the common men-at-arms, but of princes and nobles? In the
+morning he told his dream to his wife and also to his sons. "If I
+could think that the thing would happen that I dreamed, I would wish
+that she should be drowned; and if you would not do it, I should do it
+with my own hands." The reader remembers with a shudder the Meuse
+flowing at the foot of the garden, while the fierce peasant, mad with
+fear lest shame should be coming to his family, clenched his strong
+fist and made this outcry of dismay.
+
+No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
+whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
+expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
+substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
+probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so
+good a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly
+and so helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too
+willing to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be
+egged up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at
+Toul and swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her
+childhood. So timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic,
+would simply obey the bishop's decision and would not be bold enough
+even to remonstrate, though it is curious that with the spectacle of
+her grave determination before them, and sorrowful sense of that
+necessity of her mission which had steeled her to dispense with their
+consent, they should have expected such an expedient to arrest her
+steps. The affair, we must suppose, had gone through all the more
+usual stages of entreaty on the lover's part, and persuasion on that
+of the parents, before such an attempt was finally made. But the shy
+Jeanne had by this time attained that courage of desperation which is
+not inconsistent with the most gentle nature; and without saying
+anything to anyone, she too went to Toul, appeared before the bishop,
+and easily freed herself from the pretended engagement, though whether
+with any reference to her very different destination we are not
+told.[3]
+
+These proceedings, however, and the father's dreams and the
+remonstrances of the mother, must have made troubled days in the
+cottage, and scenes of wrath and contradiction, hard to bear. The
+winter passed distracted by these contentions, and it is difficult to
+imagine how Jeanne could have borne this had it not been that the
+period of her outset had already been indicated, and that it was only
+in the middle of Lent that her succour was to reach the King. The
+village, no doubt, was almost as much distracted as her father's house
+to hear of these strange discussions and of the incredible purpose of
+the /bonne douce fille/, whose qualities everybody knew and about whom
+there was nothing eccentric, nothing unnatural, but only simple
+goodness, to distinguish her above her neighbours. In the meantime her
+voices called her continually to her work. They set her free from the
+ordinary yoke of obedience, always so strong in the mind of a French
+girl. The dreadful step of abandoning her home, not to be thought of
+under any other circumstances, was more and more urgently pressed upon
+her. Could it indeed be saints and angels who ordained a step which
+was outside of all the habits and first duties of nature? But we have
+no reason to believe that this nineteenth-century doubt of her
+visitors, and of whether their mandates were right, entered into the
+mind of a girl who was of her own period and not of ours. She went on
+steadfastly, certain of her mission now, and inaccessible either to
+remonstrance or appeal.
+
+It was towards the beginning of Lent, as Poulengy tells us, that the
+decision was made, and she left home finally, to go "to France" as is
+always said. But it seems to have been in January that she set out
+once more for Vaucouleurs, accompanied by her uncle, who took her to
+the house of some humble folk they knew, a carter and his wife, where
+they lodged. Jeanne wore her peasant dress of heavy red homespun, her
+rude heavy shoes, her village coif. She never made any pretence of
+ladyhood or superiority to her class, but was always equal to the
+finest society in which she found herself, by dint of that simple good
+faith, sense, and seriousness, without excitement or exaggeration, and
+radiant purity and straightforwardness which were apparent to all
+seeing eyes. By this time all the little world about knew something of
+her purpose and followed her every step with wonder and quickly rising
+curiosity: and no doubt the whole town was astir, women gazing at
+their doors, all on her side from the first moment, the men half
+interested, half insolent, as she went once more to the chateau to
+make her personal appeal. Simple as she was, the /bonne douce fille/
+was not intimidated by the guard at the gates, the lounging soldiers,
+the no doubt impudent glances flung at her by these rude companions.
+She was inaccessible to alarms of that kind--which, perhaps, is one of
+the greatest safeguards against them even in more ordinary cases. We
+find little record of her second interview with Baudricourt. The
+/Journal du Siège d'Orleans/ and the /Chronique de la Pucelle/ both
+mention it as if it had been one of several, which may well have been
+the case, as she was for three weeks in Vaucouleurs. It is almost
+impossible to arrange the incidents of this interval between her
+arrival there and her final departure for Chinon on the 23d February,
+during which time she made a pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Nicolas and
+also a visit to the Duke of Lorraine. It is clear, however, that she
+must have repeated her demand with such stress and urgency that the
+Captain of Vaucouleurs was a much perplexed man. It was a very natural
+idea then, and in accordance with every sentiment of the time that he
+should suspect this wonderful girl, who would not be daunted, of being
+a witch and capable of bringing an evil fate on all who crossed her.
+All thought of boxing her ears must ere this have departed from his
+mind. He hastened to consult the curé, which was the most reasonable
+thing to do. The curé was as much puzzled as the Captain. The Church,
+it must be said, if always ready to take advantage afterwards of such
+revelations, has always been timid, even sceptical about them at
+first. The wisdom of the rulers, secular and ecclesiastic, suggested
+only one thing to do, which was to exorcise, and perhaps to overawe
+and frighten, the young visionary. They paid a joint and solemn visit
+to the carter's house, where no doubt their entrance together was
+spied by many eager eyes; and there the priest solemnly taking out his
+stole invested himself in his priestly robes and exorcised the evil
+spirits, bidding them come out of the girl if they were her
+inspiration. There seems a certain absurdity in this sudden assault
+upon the evil one, taking him as it were by surprise: but it was not
+ridiculous to any of the performers, though Jeanne no doubt looked on
+with serene and smiling eyes. She remarked afterwards to her hostess,
+that the curé had done wrong, as he had already heard her in
+confession.
+
+Outside, the populace were in no uncertainty at all as to her mission.
+A little mob hung about the door to see her come and go, chiefly to
+church, with her good hostess in attendance, as was right and seemly,
+and a crowd streaming after them who perhaps of their own accord might
+have neglected mass, but who would not, if they could help it, lose a
+look at the new wonder. One day a young gentleman of the neighbourhood
+was passing by, and amused by the commotion, came through the crowd to
+have a word with the peasant lass. "What are you doing here, /ma
+mie/?" the young man said. "Is the King to be driven out of the
+kingdom, and are we all to be made English?" There is a tone of banter
+in the speech, but he had already heard of the Maid from his friend,
+Bertrand, and had been affected by the other's enthusiasm. "Robert de
+Baudricourt will have none of me or my words," she replied,
+"nevertheless before Mid-Lent I must be with the King, if I should
+wear my feet up to my knees; for nobody in the world, be it king,
+duke, or the King of Scotland's daughter, can save the kingdom of
+France except me alone: though I would rather spin beside my poor
+mother, and this is not my work: but I must go and do it, because my
+Lord so wills it." "And who is your Seigneur?" he asked. "God," said
+the girl. The young man was moved, he too, by that wind which bloweth
+where it listeth. He stretched out his hands through the gaping crowd
+and took hers, holding them between his own, to give her his pledge:
+and so swore by his faith, her hands in his hands, that he himself
+would conduct her to the King. "When will you go?" he said. "Rather
+to-day than to-morrow," answered the messenger of God.
+
+This was the second convert of La Pucelle. The peasant /bonhomme/
+first, the noble gentleman after him; not to say all the women
+wherever she went, the gazing, weeping, admiring crowd which now
+followed her steps, and watched every opening of the door which
+concealed her from their eyes. The young gentleman was Jean de
+Novelonpont, "surnamed Jean de Metz": and so moved was he by the
+fervour of the girl, and by her strong sense of the necessity of
+immediate operations, that he proceeded at once to make preparations
+for the journey. They would seem to have discussed the dress she ought
+to wear, and Jeanne decided for many obvious reasons to adopt the
+costume of a man--or rather boy. She must, one would imagine have been
+tall, for no remark is ever made on this subject, as if her dress had
+dwarfed her, which is generally the case when a woman assumes the
+habit of a man: and probably with her peasant birth and training, she
+was, though slim, strongly made and well knit, besides being at the
+age when the difference between boy and girl is sometimes but little
+noticeable.
+
+In the meantime Baudricourt had not been idle. He must have been moved
+by the sight of Jeanne, at least to perceive a certain gravity in the
+business for which he was not prepared; and her composure under the
+curé's exorcism would naturally deepen the effect which her own
+manners and aspect had upon all who were free of prejudice. Another
+singular event, too, added weight to her character and demand. One day
+after her return from Lorraine, February 12th, 1429, she intimated to
+all her surroundings and specially to Baudricourt, that the King had
+suffered a defeat near Orleans, which made it still more necessary
+that she should be at once conducted to him. It was found when there
+was time for the news to come, that this defeat, the Battle of the
+Herrings, so-called, had happened as she said, at the exact time; and
+such a strange fact added much to the growing enthusiasm and
+excitement. Baudricourt is said by Michelet to have sent off a secret
+express to the Court to ask what he should do; but of this there seems
+to be no direct evidence, though likelihood enough. The Court at
+Chinon contained a strong feminine element, behind the scenes. And it
+might be found that there were uses for the enthusiast, even if she
+did not turn out to be inspired. No doubt there were many comings and
+goings at this period which can only be traced confusedly through the
+depositions of Jeanne's companions twenty-five years after. She had at
+least two interviews with Baudricourt before the exorcism of the curé
+and his consequent change of procedure towards her. Then, escorted by
+her uncle Laxart, and apparently by Jean de Metz, she had made a
+pilgrimage to a shrine of St. Nicolas, as already mentioned, on which
+occasion, being near Nancy, she was sent for by the Duke of Lorraine,
+then lying ill at his castle in that city, who had a fancy to consult
+the young prophetess, sorceress--who could tell what she was?--on the
+subject apparently of his illness. He was the son of Queen Yolande of
+Anjou, who was mother-in-law to Charles VII., and it would no doubt be
+thought of some importance to secure his good opinion. Jeanne gave the
+exalted patient no light on the subject of his health, but only the
+(probably unpleasing) advice to flee from the wrath of God and to be
+reconciled with his wife, from whom he was separated. He too, however,
+was moved by the sight of her and her straightforward, undeviating
+purpose. He gave her four francs, Durand tells us,--not much of a
+present,--which she gave to her uncle, and which helped to buy her
+outfit. Probably he made a good report of her to his mother, for
+shortly after her return to Vaucouleurs (I again follow Michelet who
+ought to be well informed) a messenger from Chinon arrived to take her
+to the King.[4] In the councils of that troubled Court, perhaps, the
+idea of a prodigy and miraculous leader, though she was nothing but a
+peasant girl, would be not without attraction, a thing to conjure
+withal, so far as the multitude were concerned.
+
+Anyhow from any point of view, in the hopeless condition of affairs,
+it was expedient that nothing which gave promise of help, either real
+or visionary, should lightly be rejected. There was much anxiety no
+doubt in the careless Court still dancing and singing in the midst of
+calamity, but the reception of the ambitious peasant would form an
+exciting incident at least, if nothing more important and notable.
+
+Thus the whole anxious world of France stirred round that youthful
+figure in the little frontier town, repeating with many an alteration
+and exaggeration the sayings of Jeanne, and those popular
+superstitions about the Maid from Lorraine which might be so naturally
+applied to her. It would seem, indeed, that she had herself attached
+some importance to this prophecy, for both her uncle Laxart and her
+hostess at Vaucouleurs report that she asked them if they had heard
+it: which question "stupefied" the latter, whose mind evidently jumped
+at once to the conviction that the prophecy was fulfilled. Not in
+Domremy itself, however, were these things considered with the same
+awe-stricken and admiring faith. Nothing had softened the mood of
+Jacques d'Arc. It was a shame to the village /prud' homme/ to think of
+his daughter away from all the protection of home, living among men,
+encountering the young Seigneurs who cared for no maiden's reputation,
+hearing the soldiers' rude talk, exposed to their insults, or worse
+still to their kindness. Probably even now he thought of her as
+surrounded by troopers and men-at-arms, instead of the princes and
+peers with whom henceforth Jeanne's lot was to be cast; but in the
+former case there would have perhaps been less to fear than in the
+latter. Anyhow, Jeanne's communications with her family were more
+painful to her than had been the jeers of Baudricourt or the exorcism
+of the curé. They sent her angry orders to come back, threats of
+parental curses and abandonment. We may hope that the mother, grieved
+and helpless, had little to do with this persecution. The woman who
+had nourished her children upon saintly legend and Scripture story
+could scarcely have been hard upon the child, of whom she, better than
+any, knew the perfect purity and steadfast resolution. One of the
+little household at least, revolted by the stern father's fury,
+perhaps secretly encouraged by the mother, broke away and joined his
+sister at a later period. But we hear, during her lifetime, little or
+nothing of Pierre.
+
+Much time, however, was passed in these preliminaries. The final start
+was not made till the 23d February, 1429, when the permission is
+supposed to have come by the hands of Colet de Vienne, the King's
+messenger, who attended by a single archer, was to be her escort. It
+is possible that he had no mission to this effect, but he certainly
+did escort her to Chinon. The whole town gathered before the house of
+Baudricourt to see her depart. Baudricourt, however, does not seem to
+have provided any guard for her. Jean de Metz, who had so chivalrously
+pledged himself to her service, with his friend De Poulengy, equally
+ready for adventure, each with his servant, formed her sole
+protectors.[5] Jean de Metz had already sent her the clothes of one of
+his retainers, with the light breastplate and partial armour that
+suited it; and the townspeople had subscribed to buy her a further
+outfit, and a horse which seems to have cost sixteen francs--not so
+small a sum in those days as now. Laxart declares himself to have been
+responsible for this outlay, though the money was afterwards paid by
+Baudricourt, who gave Jeanne a sword, which some of her historians
+consider a very poor gift: none, however, of her equipments would seem
+to have been costly. The little party set out thus, with a sanction of
+authority, from the Captain's gate, the two gentlemen and the King's
+messenger at the head of the party with their attendants, and the Maid
+in the midst. "Go: and let what will happen," was the parting
+salutation of Baudricourt. The gazers outside set up a cry when the
+decisive moment came, and someone, struck with the feeble force which
+was all the safeguard she had for her long journey through an agitated
+country--perhaps a woman in the sudden passion of misgiving which
+often follows enthusiasm,--called out to Jeanne with an astonished
+outcry to ask how she could dare to go by such a dangerous road. "It
+was for that I was born," answered the fearless Maid. The last thing
+she had done had been to write a letter to her parents, asking their
+pardon if she obeyed a higher command than theirs, and bidding them
+farewell.
+
+The French historians, with that amazement which they always show when
+they find a man behaving like a gentleman towards a woman confided to
+his honour, all pause with deep-drawn breath to note that the awe of
+Jeanne's absolute purity preserved her from any unseemly overture, or
+even evil thought, on the part of her companions. We need not take up
+even the shadow of so grave a censure upon Frenchmen in general,
+although in the far distance of the fifteenth century. The two young
+men, thus starting upon a dangerous adventure, pledged by their honour
+to protect and convey her safely to the King's presence, were noble
+and generous cavaliers, and we may well believe had no evil thoughts.
+They were not, however, without an occasional chill of reflection when
+once they had taken the irrevocable step of setting out upon this wild
+errand. They travelled by night to escape the danger of meeting bands
+of Burgundians or English on the way, and sometimes had to ford a
+river to avoid the town, where they would have found a bridge.
+Sometimes, too, they had many doubts, Bertrand says, perhaps as to
+their reception at Chinon, perhaps even whether their mission might
+not expose them to the ridicule of their kind, if not to unknown
+dangers of magic and contact with the Evil One, should this wonderful
+girl turn out no inspired virgin but a pretender or sorceress. Jean de
+Metz informs us that she bade them not to fear, that she had been sent
+to do what she was now doing; that her brothers in paradise would tell
+her how to act, and that for the last four or five years her brothers
+in paradise and her God had told her that she must go to the war to
+save the kingdom of France. This phrase must have struck his ear, as
+he thus repeats it. Her brothers in paradise! She had not apparently
+talked of them to anyone as yet, but now no one could hinder her more,
+and she felt herself free to speak. A great calm seems to have been in
+her soul. She had at last begun her work. How it was all to end for
+her she neither foresaw nor asked; she knew only what she had to do.
+When they ventured into a town she insisted on stopping to hear mass,
+bidding them fear nothing. "God clears the way for me," she said; "I
+was born for this," and so proceeded safe, though threatened with many
+dangers. There is something that breathes of supreme satisfaction and
+content in her repetition of those words.
+----------
+[1] She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword, that France
+    should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards redeemed by a
+    virgin, which she quoted to several persons on her first setting
+    out.
+
+[2] I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of these
+    events quite clear to myself.
+
+[3] Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was made after
+    she had finally left Domremy, and when she was already accompanied
+    by the escort which was to attend her to Chinon.
+
+[4] Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this. He thinks the man was a
+    mere King's messenger with news, probably charged with the
+    melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the
+    Herrings): and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her
+    little part was entirely accidental.
+
+[5] Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the party. /La
+    Chronique de la Pucelle/ says two of her brothers. Mr. Andrew
+    Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did not join his sister's
+    party till much later--in the beginning of June: and this is the
+    statement of Jean de Metz. But Quicherat is also of opinion that
+    they both fought in the relief of Orleans.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BEFORE THE KING.
+FEB.-APRIL, 1429.
+
+Jeanne and her little party were eleven days on the road, but do not
+seem to have encountered any special peril. They lodged sometimes in
+the security of a convent, sometimes in a village hostel, pursuing the
+long and tedious way across the great levels of midland France, which
+has so few features of beauty except in the picturesque towns with
+their castles and churches, which the escort avoided. At length they
+paused in the village of Fierbois not far from Chinon where the Court
+was, in order to announce their arrival and ask for an audience, which
+was not immediately accorded. Charles held his Court with incredible
+gaiety and folly, in the midst of almost every disaster that could
+overtake a king, in the castle of Chinon on the banks of the Vienne.
+The situation and aspect of this noble building, now in ruins, is
+wonderfully like that of Windsor Castle. The great walls, interrupted
+and strengthened by huge towers, stretch along a low ridge of rocky
+hill, with the swift and clear river, a little broader and swifter
+than the Thames, flowing at its foot. The red and high-pitched roofs
+of the houses clustered between the castle hill and the stream, give a
+point of resemblance the more. The large and ample dwelling,
+defensible, but with no thought of any need of defence, a midland
+castle surrounded by many a level league of wealthy country, which no
+hostile force should ever have power to get through, must have looked
+like the home of a well-established royalty. There was no sound or
+sight of war within its splendid enclosure. Noble lords and gentlemen
+crowded the corridors; trains of gay ladies, attendant upon two
+queens, filled the castle with fine dresses and gay voices. There had
+been but lately a dreadful and indeed shameful defeat, inflicted by a
+mere English convoy of provisions upon a large force of French and
+Scottish soldiers, the former led by such men as Dunois, La Hire,
+Xaintrailles, etc., the latter by the Constable of Scotland, John
+Stuart--which defeat might well have been enough to subdue every sound
+of revelry: yet Charles's Court was ringing with music and pleasantry,
+as if peace had reigned around.
+
+It may be believed that there were many doubts and questions how to
+receive this peasant from the fields, which prevented an immediate
+reply to her demand for an audience. From the first, de la Tremoille,
+Charles's Prime Minister and chief adviser, was strongly against any
+encouragement of the visionary, or dealings with the supernatural; but
+there would no doubt be others, hoping if not for a miraculous maid,
+yet at least for a passing wonder, who might kindle enthusiasm in the
+country and rouse the ignorant with hopes of a special blessing from
+Heaven. The gayer and younger portion of the Court probably expected a
+little amusement, above all, a new butt for their wit, or perhaps a
+soothsayer to tell their fortunes and promise good things to come.
+They had not very much to amuse them, though they made the best of it.
+The joys of Paris were very far off; they were all but imprisoned in
+this dull province of Touraine; nobody knew at what moment they might
+be forced to leave even that refuge. For the moment here was a new
+event, a little stir of interest, something to pass an hour. Jeanne
+had to wait two days in Chinon before she was granted an audience, but
+considering the carelessness of the Court and the absence of any
+patron that was but a brief delay.
+
+The chamber of audience is now in ruins. A wild rose with long,
+arching, thorny branches and pale flowers, straggles over the
+greensward where once the floor was trod by so many gay figures. From
+the broken wall you look sheer down upon the shining river; one great
+chimney, which at that season must have been still the most pleasant
+centre of the large, draughty hall, shows at the end of the room, with
+a curious suggestion of warmth and light which makes ruin more
+conspicuous. The room must have been on the ground floor almost level
+with the soil towards the interior of the castle, but raised to the
+height of the cliffs outside. It was evening, an evening of March, and
+fifty torches lighted up the ample room; many noble personages, almost
+as great as kings, and clothed in the bewildering splendour of the
+time, and more than three hundred cavaliers of the best names in
+France filled it to overflowing. The peasant girl from Domremy in the
+hose and doublet of a servant, a little travel-worn after her tedious
+journey, was led in by one of those splendid seigneurs, dazzled with
+the grandeur she had never seen before, looking about her in wonder to
+see which was the King--while Charles, perhaps with boyish pleasure in
+the mystification, perhaps with a little half-conviction stealing over
+him that there might be something more in it, stood among the smiling
+crowd.
+
+The young stranger looked round upon all those amused, light-minded,
+sceptical faces, and without a moment's hesitation went forward and
+knelt down before him. "Gentil Dauphin," she said, "God give you good
+life." "But it is not I that am the King; there is the King," said
+Charles. "Gentil Prince, it is you and no other," she said; then
+rising from her knee: "Gentil Dauphin, I am Jeanne the Maid. I am sent
+to you by the King of Heaven to tell you that you shall be consecrated
+and crowned at Rheims, and shall be lieutenant of the King of Heaven,
+who is King of France." The little masquerade had failed, the jest was
+over. There would be little more laughing among the courtiers, when
+they saw the face of Charles grow grave. He took the new-comer aside,
+perhaps to that deep recess of the window where in the darkening night
+the glimmer of the clear, flowing river, the great vault of sky would
+still be visible dimly, outside the circle of the blazing interior
+with all its smoky lights.
+
+Charles VII. of France was, like many of his predecessors, a /pauvre
+Sire/ enough. He had thought more of his amusements than of the
+troubles of his country; but a wild and senseless gaiety will
+sometimes spring from despair as well as from lightness of heart; and
+after all, the dread responsibility, the sense that in all his
+helplessness and inability to do anything he was still the man who
+ought to do all, would seem to have moved him from time to time. A
+secret doubt in his heart, divulged to no man, had added bitterness to
+the conviction of his own weakness. Was he indeed the heir of France?
+Had he any right to that sustaining confidence which would have borne
+up his heart in the midst of every discouragement? His very mother had
+given him up and set him aside. He was described as the so-called
+Dauphin in treaties signed by Charles and Isabeau his parents. If
+anyone knew, she knew; and was it possible that more powerful even
+than the English, more cruel than the Burgundians, this stain of
+illegitimacy was upon him, making all effort vain? There is no telling
+where the sensitive point is in any man's heart, and little worthy as
+was this King, the story we are here told has a thrill of truth in it.
+It is reported by a certain Sala, who declares that he had it from the
+lips of Charles's favourite and close follower, the Seigneur de Boisi,
+a courtier who, after the curious custom of the time, shared even the
+bed of his master. This was confided to Boisi by the King in the
+deepest confidence, in the silence of the wakeful night:
+
+"This was in the time of the good King Charles, when he knew not what
+step to take, and did nothing but think how to redeem his life: for as
+I have told you he was surrounded by enemies on all sides. The King in
+this extreme thought, went in one morning to his oratory all alone;
+and there he made a prayer to our Lord, in his heart, without
+pronouncing any words, in which he asked of Him devoutly that if he
+were indeed the true heir, descended from the royal House of France,
+and that justly the kingdom was his, that He would be pleased to guard
+and defend him, or at the worst to give him grace to escape into Spain
+or Scotland, whose people, from all antiquity, were brothers-in-arms,
+friends and allies of the kings of France, and that he might find a
+refuge there."
+
+Perhaps there is some excuse for a young man's endeavour to forget
+himself in folly or even in dissipation when his secret thoughts are
+so despairing as these.
+
+It was soon after this melancholy moment that the arrival of Jeanne
+took place. The King led her aside, touched as all were, by her look
+of perfect sincerity and good faith; but it is she herself, not
+Charles, who repeats what she said to him. "I have to tell you," said
+the young messenger of God, "on the part of my Lord (/Messire/) that
+you are the true heir of France and the son of the King; He has sent
+me to conduct you to Rheims that you may receive your consecration and
+your crown,"--perhaps here, Jeanne caught some look which she did not
+understand in his eyes, for she adds with, one cannot but think a
+touch of sternness--"if you will."
+
+Was it a direct message from God in answer to his prayer, uttered
+within his own heart, without words, so that no one could have guessed
+that secret? At least it would appear that Charles thought so: for how
+should this peasant maid know the secret fear that had gnawed at his
+heart? "When thou wast in the garden under the fig-tree I saw thee."
+Great was the difference between the Israelite without guile and the
+troubled young man, with whose fate the career of a great nation was
+entangled; but it is not difficult to imagine what the effect must
+have been on the mind of Charles when he was met by this strange,
+authoritative statement, uttered like all that Jeanne said, /de la
+part de Dieu/.
+
+The impression thus made, however, was on Charles alone, and he was
+surrounded by councillors, so much the more pedantic and punctilious
+as they were incapable, and placed amidst pressing necessities with
+which in themselves they had no power to cope. It may easily be
+allowed, also, that to risk any hopes still belonging to the hapless
+young King on the word of a peasant girl was in itself, according to
+every law of reason, madness and folly. She would seem to have had the
+women on her side always and at every point. The Church did not stir,
+or else was hostile; the commanders and military men about, regarded
+with scornful disgust the idea that an enterprise which they
+considered hopeless should be confided to an ignorant woman--all with
+perfect reason we are obliged to allow. Probably it was to gain time--
+yet without losing the aid of such a stimulus to the superstitious
+among the masses--and to retard any rash undertaking--that it was
+proposed to subject Jeanne to an examination of doctors and learned
+men touching her faith and the character of her visions, which all
+this time had been of continual recurrence, yet charged with no
+further revelation, no mystic creed, but only with the one simple,
+constantly repeated command.
+
+Accordingly, after some preliminary handling by half a dozen bishops,
+Jeanne was taken to Poitiers--where the university and the local
+parliament, all the learning, law, and ecclesiastical wisdom which
+were on the side of the King, were assembled--to undergo this
+investigation. It is curious that the entire history of this wildest
+and strangest of all visionary occurrences is to be found in a series
+of processes at law, each part recorded and certified under oath; but
+so it is. The village maid was placed at the bar, before a number of
+acute legists, ecclesiastics, and statesmen, to submit her to a not-
+too-benevolent cross-examination. Several of these men were still
+alive at the time of the Rehabilitation and gave their recollections
+of this examination, though its formal records have not been
+preserved. A Dominican monk, Aymer, one of an order she loved,
+addressed her gravely with the severity with which that institution is
+always credited. "You say that God will deliver France; if He has so
+determined, He has no need of men-at-arms." "Ah!" cried the girl, with
+perhaps a note of irritation in her voice, "the men must fight; it is
+God who gives the victory." To another discomfited Brother, Jeanne,
+exasperated, answered with a little roughness, showing that our Maid,
+though gentle as a child to all gentle souls, was no piece of subdued
+perfection, but a woman of the fields, and lately much in the company
+of rough-spoken men. He was of Limoges, a certain Brother Seguin,
+"/bien aigre homme/," and disposed apparently to weaken the trial by
+questions without importance: he asked her what language her celestial
+visitors spoke? "Better than yours," answered the peasant girl. He
+could not have been, as we say in Scotland, altogether "an ill man,"
+for he acknowledged that he spoke the patois of his district, and
+therefore that the blow was fair. But perhaps for the moment he was
+irritated too. He asked her, a question equally unnecessary, "do you
+believe in God?" to which with more and more impatience she made a
+similar answer: "Better than you do." There was nothing to be made of
+one so well able to defend herself. "Words are all very well," said
+the monk, "but God would not have us believe you, unless you show us
+some sign." To this Jeanne made an answer more dignified, though still
+showing signs of exasperation, "I have not come to Poitiers to give
+signs," she said; "but take me to Orleans--I will then show the signs
+I am sent to show. Give me as small a band as you please, but let me
+go."
+
+The situation of Orleans was at the time a desperate one. It was
+besieged by a strong army of English, who had built a succession of
+towers round the city, from which to assail it, after the manner of
+the times. The town lies in the midst of the plain of the Loire, with
+not so much as a hillock to offer any advantage to the besiegers.
+Therefore these great works were necessary in face of a very strenuous
+resistance, and the possibility of provisioning the besieged, which
+their river secured. The English from their high towers kept up a
+disastrous fire, which, though their artillery was of the rudest kind,
+did great execution. The siege was conducted by eminent generals. The
+works were of themselves great fortifications, the assailants
+numerous, and strengthened by the prestige of almost unbroken success;
+there seemed no human hope of the deliverance of the town unless by an
+overwhelming army, which the King's party did not possess, or by some
+wonderful and utterly unexpected event. Jeanne had always declared the
+destruction of the English and the relief of Orleans to be the first
+step in her mission.
+
+Besides the formal and official examination of her faith and
+character, held at Poitiers, private inquests of all kinds were made
+concerning of the claims of the miraculous maid. She was visited by
+every curious person, man or woman, in the neighbourhood, and plied
+with endless questions, so that her simple personal story, and that of
+her revelations--/mes voix/, as she called them--became familiarly
+known from her own report, to the whole country round about. The women
+pressed a question specially interesting--for no doubt, many a good
+mother half convinced otherwise, shook her head at Jeanne's costume--
+Why she wore the dress of a man? for which the Maid gave very good
+reasons: in the first place because it was the only dress for
+fighting, which, though so far from her desires or from the habits of
+her life, was henceforward to be her work; and also because in her
+strange circumstances, constrained as she was to live among men, she
+considered it safest for herself--statements which evidently convinced
+the minds of the questioners. It was, no doubt, good policy to make
+her thus widely and generally known, and the result was a daily
+growing enthusiasm for her and belief in her, in all classes. The
+result of the formal process was that the doctors could find nothing
+against her, and they reluctantly allowed that the King might lawfully
+take what advantage he could of her offered services.
+
+Jeanne was then brought back to Chinon, where she was lodged in one of
+the great towers still standing, though no special room is pointed out
+as hers. And there she was subjected to another process, more
+penetrating still than the interrogations of the graver tribunals. The
+Queens and their ladies and all the women of the Court took her in
+hand. They inquired into her history in every subtle and intimate
+feminine way, testing her innocence and purity; and once more she came
+out triumphant. The final judgment was given as follows: "After
+hearing all these reports, the King taking into consideration the
+great goodness that was in the Maid, and that she declared herself to
+be sent by God, it was by the said Seigneur and his council determined
+that from henceforward he should make use of her for his wars, since
+it was for this that she was sent."
+
+It was now necessary to equip Jeanne for her service. She had a
+/maison/, an /état majeur/, or staff, formed for her, the chief of
+which, Jean d'Aulon, already distinguished and worthy of such a trust
+never left her thenceforward until the end of her active career. Her
+chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, also followed her fortunes faithfully.
+Charles would have given her a sword to replace the probably
+indifferent weapon given her by Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs; but Jeanne
+knew where to find the sword destined for her. She gave orders that
+someone should be sent to Fierbois, the village at which she had
+paused on her way to Chinon, to fetch a sword which would be found
+there buried behind the high altar of the church of St. Catherine. To
+make this as little miraculous as possible, we are told by some
+historians that it was common for knights to be buried with their
+arms, and that Jeanne, in her visit to this church, where she heard
+three masses in succession to make up for the absence of constant
+religious services on her journey--had probably seen some tomb or
+other token that such an interment had taken place. However, as we are
+compelled to receive the far greater miracle of Jeanne herself and her
+work, without explanation, it is foolish to take the trouble to
+attempt any explanation of so small a matter as this. The sword in
+fact was found, by the clergy of the church, and was by them cleaned
+and polished and put in a scabbard of crimson velvet, scattered over
+with fleur-de-lys in gold, for her use. Her standard, which she
+considered of the greatest importance was made apparently at Tours. It
+was of white linen, fringed with silk and embroidered with a figure of
+the Saviour holding a globe in His hands, while an angel knelt at
+either side in adoration. Jhesus' Maria was inscribed at the foot. A
+repetition of this banner, which must have been re-copied from age to
+age is to be seen now at Tours. Having indicated the exact device to
+be emblazoned upon the banner, as dictated to her by her saints,--
+Margaret and Catherine--Jeanne announced her intention of carrying it
+herself, a somewhat surprising office for one who was to act as a
+general. But it was the command of her heavenly guides. "Take the
+standard on the part of God, and carry it boldly," they had said. She
+had, besides, a simple, half-childish intention of her own in this,
+which she explained shame-faced--she had no wish to use her sword
+though she loved it, and would kill no man. The banner was a more safe
+occupation, and saved her from all possibility of blood-shedding; it
+must however, have required the robust arm of a peasant to sustain the
+heavy weight.
+
+It will show how long a time all these examinations and preparations
+had taken when we read that Jeanne set out from Blois, where she had
+passed some time in military preparations, only on the 27th day of
+April; nearly two whole months had thus been taken up in testing her
+truth, and arranging details, trifling and unnecessary in her eyes:--a
+period which had been passed in great anxiety by the people of
+Orleans, with the huge bastilles of the English--three of which were
+named Paris, Rouen, and London--towering round them, their provisions
+often intercepted, all the business of life come to a standstill, and
+the overwhelming responsibility upon them of being almost the last
+barrier between the invader and the final subjugation of France. It is
+strange to add that, judging by ordinary rules, the garrison of
+Orleans ought to have been quite sufficient in itself in numbers and
+science of war, to have beaten and dispersed the English force which
+had thus succeeded in shutting them in; there were many notable
+captains among them, with Dunois, known as the Bastard of Orleans, one
+of the most celebrated and brave of French generals, at their head.
+Dunois was in no way inferior to the generals of the English army; he
+was popular, beloved by the people and soldiers alike, and though
+illegitimate, of the House of Orleans, one of the native seigneurs of
+the place. The wonder is how he and his officers permitted the
+building of these towers, and the shutting in of the town which they
+were quite strong enough to protect. But it was a losing game which
+they were playing, a part which does not suit the genius of the
+nation; and the superstition in favour of the English who had won so
+many battles with all the disadvantages on their side,--cutting the
+finest armies to pieces--was strong upon the imagination of the time.
+It seemed a fate which no valour or skill upon the side of the French
+could avert. Dunois, himself an unlikely person, one would have
+thought, to yield the honour of the fight to a woman, seems to have
+perceived that without a strong counter-motive, not within the range
+of ordinary methods, the situation was beyond hope.
+
+Accordingly, on the 27th or 28th of April, Jeanne set out at the head
+of her little army, accompanied by a great number of generals and
+captains. She had been equipped by the Queen of Sicily (with a touch
+of that keen sense of decorative effect which belonged to the age) in
+white armour inlaid with silver--all shining like her own St. Michael
+himself, a radiance of whiteness and glory under the sun--armed /de
+toutes pièces sauve la teste/, her uncovered head rising in full
+relief from the dazzling breastplate and gorget. This is the
+description given of her by an eye-witness a little later. The country
+is flat as the palm of one's hand. The white armour must have flashed
+back the sun for miles and miles of the level road, to the eyes which
+from the height of any neighbouring tower watched the party setting
+out. It is all fertile now, the richest plain, and even then, corn and
+wine must have been in full bourgeon, the great fresh greenness of the
+big leaves coming out upon such low stumps of vine as were left in the
+soil; but the devastated country was in those days covered with a wild
+growth like the /macchia/ of Italian wilds, which half hid the
+movements of the expedition. They went by the Loire to Tours, where
+Jeanne had been assigned a dwelling of her own, with the estate of a
+general; and from thence to Blois, where they had to wait for some
+days while the convoy of provisions, which they were to convey to
+Orleans, was being prepared. And there Jeanne fulfilled one of the
+preliminary duties of her mission. She had informed her examiners at
+Poitiers that she had been commanded to write to the English generals
+before attacking them, appealing to them /de la part de Dieu/, to give
+up their conquests, and leave France to the French. The letter which
+we quote would seem to have been dictated by her at Poitiers, probably
+to the confessor who now formed part of her suite and who attended her
+wherever she went:
+
+  JHESUS MARIA.
+
+  King of England, and you Duke of Bedford calling yourself Regent
+  of France, you, William de la Poule, Comte de Sulford, John, Lord
+  of Talbot, and you Thomas, Lord of Scales, who call yourself
+  lieutenants of the said Bedford, listen to the King of Heaven:
+  Give back to the Maid who is here sent on the part of God the King
+  of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns which you have taken by
+  violence in His France. She is ready to make peace if you will
+  hear reason and be just towards France and pay for what you have
+  taken. And you archers, brothers-in-arms, gentles and others who
+  are before the town of Orleans, go in peace on the part of God; if
+  you do not so you will soon have news of the Maid who will see you
+  shortly to your great damage. King of England, if you do not this,
+  I am captain in this war, and in whatsoever place in France I find
+  your people I will make them go away. I am sent here on the part
+  of God the King of Heaven to push you all forth of France. If you
+  obey I will be merciful. And be not strong in your own opinion,
+  for you do not hold the kingdom from God the Son of the Holy Mary,
+  but it is held by Charles the true heir, for God, the King of
+  Heaven so wills, and it is revealed by the Maid who shall enter
+  Paris in good company. If you will not believe this news on the
+  part of God and the Maid, in whatever place you may find
+  yourselves we shall make our way there, and make so great a
+  commotion as has not been in France for a thousand years, if you
+  will not hear reason. And believe this, that the King of Heaven
+  will send more strength to the Maid than you can bring against her
+  in all your assaults, to her and to her good men-at-arms. You,
+  Duke of Bedford, the Maid prays and requires you to destroy no
+  more. If you act according to reason you may still come in her
+  company where the French shall do the greatest work that has ever
+  been done for Christianity. Answer then if you will still continue
+  against the city of Orleans. If you do so you will soon recall it
+  to yourself by great misfortunes. Written the Saturday of Holy
+  Week (22 March, 1429).[1]
+
+Jeanne had by this time made a wonderful moral revolution in her
+little army; most likely she had not been in the least aware what an
+army was, until this moment; but frank and fearless, she had
+penetrated into every corner, and it was not in her to permit those
+abuses at which an ordinary captain has to smile. The pernicious and
+shameful crowd of camp followers fled before her like shadows before
+the day. She stopped the big oaths and unthinking blasphemies which
+were so common, so that La Hire, one of the chief captains, a rough
+and ready Gascon, was reduced to swear by his /bâton/, no more sacred
+name being permitted to him. Perhaps this was the origin of the
+harmless swearing which abounds in France, meaning probably just as
+much and as little as bigger oaths in careless mouths; but no doubt
+the soldiers' language was very unfit for gentle ears. Jeanne moved
+among the wondering ranks, all radiant in her silver armour and with
+her virginal undaunted countenance, exhorting all those rude and noisy
+brothers to take thought of their duties here, and of the other life
+that awaited them. She would stop the march of the army that a
+conscience-stricken soldier might make his confession, and desired the
+priests to hear it if necessary without ceremony, or church, under the
+first tree. Her tender heart was such that she shrank from any man's
+death, and her hair rose up on her head, as she said, at the sight of
+French blood shed--although her mission was to shed it on all sides
+for a great end. But the one thing she could not bear was that either
+Frenchmen or Englishmen should die unconfessed, "unhouseled,
+disappointed, unannealed." The army went along attended by songs of
+choristers and masses of priests, the grave and solemn music of the
+Church accompanied strangely by the fanfares and bugle notes. What a
+strange procession to pass along the great Loire in its spring
+fulness, the raised banners and crosses, and that dazzling white
+figure, all effulgence, reflected in the wayward, quick flowing
+stream!
+
+La Hire, who is like a figure out of Dumas, and indeed did service as
+a model to that delightful romancer, had come from Orleans to escort
+Jeanne upon her way, and Dunois met her as she approached the town.
+There could not be found more unlikely companions than these two, to
+conduct to a great battle the country maid who was to carry the
+honours of the day from them both, and make men fight like heroes, who
+under them did nothing but run away. The candour and true courage of
+such leaders in circumstances so extraordinary, are beyond praise, for
+it was an offence both to their pride and skill in their profession,
+had she been anything less than the messenger of God which she claimed
+to be; and these rude soldiers were not men to be easily moved by
+devout imaginations. There would seem, however, even in the case of
+the greater of the two, to have arisen a strange friendship and mutual
+understanding between the famous man of war and the peasant girl.
+Jeanne, always straightforward and simple, speaks to him, not with the
+downcast eyes of her humility, but as an equal, as if the great Dunois
+had been a /prud' homme/ of her own degree. There is no appearance
+indeed that the Maid allowed herself to be overborne now by any
+shyness or undue humility. She speaks loudly, so as to be heard by
+those fighting men, taking something of their own brief and decisive
+tone, often even impatient, as one who would not be put aside either
+by cunning or force.
+
+Her meeting with Dunois makes this at once evident. She had been
+deceived in the manner of her approach to Orleans, her companions,
+among whom there were several field-marshals and distinguished
+leaders, taking advantage of her ignorance of the place to lead her by
+the opposite bank of the river instead of that on which the English
+towers were built, which she desired to attack at once. This was the
+beginning of a long series of deceits and hostile combinations, by
+which at every step of her way she was met and retarded; but it
+turned, as these devices generally did, to the discomfiture of the
+adverse captains. She crossed the river at Chécy above Orleans, to
+meet Dunois who had come so far to meet her. It will be seen by the
+conversation which she held with him on his first appearance, how
+completely Jeanne had learnt to assert herself, and how much she had
+overcome any fear of man. "Are you the Bastard of Orleans?" she said.
+"I am; and glad of your coming," he replied. "Is it you who have had
+me led to this side of the river and not to the bank on which Talbot
+is and his English?" He answered that he and the wisest of the leaders
+had thought it the best and safest way. "The counsel of God, our Lord,
+is more sure and more powerful than yours," she replied. The
+expedition, as a matter of fact, had to turn back, and to lose
+precious time, there being, it is to be presumed, no means of
+transporting so large a force across the river. The large convoy of
+provisions which Jeanne brought was embarked in boats while the
+majority of the army returned to Blois, in order to cross by the
+bridge.
+
+Jeanne, however, having freely expressed her opinion, adapted herself
+to the circumstances, though extremely averse to separate herself from
+her soldiers, good men who had confessed and prepared their souls for
+every emergency. She finally consented, however, to ride on with
+Dunois and La Hire. The wind was against the convoy, so that the heavy
+boats, deeply laden with beeves and corn, had a dangerous and slow
+voyage before them. "Have patience," cried Jeanne; "by the help of God
+all will go well"; and immediately the wind changed, to the
+astonishment and joy of all, and the boats arrived in safety "in spite
+of the English, who offered no hindrance whatever," as she had
+predicted. The little party made their way along the bank, and in the
+twilight of the April evening, about eight o'clock, entered Orleans.
+The Deliverer, it need not be said, was hailed with joy indescribable.
+She was on a white horse, and carried, Dunois says, the banner in her
+hand, though it was carried before her when she entered the town. The
+white figure in the midst of those darkly gleaming mailed men, would
+in itself throw a certain glory through the dimness of the night, as
+she passed the gates and came into view by the blaze of all the
+torches, and the lights in the windows, over the dark swarming crowds
+of the citizens. Her white banner waving, her white armour shining, it
+was little wonder that the throng that filled the streets received the
+Maid "as if they had seen God descending among them." "And they had
+good reason," says the Chronicle, "for they had suffered many
+disturbances, labours, and pains, and, what is worse, great doubt
+whether they ever should be delivered. But now all were comforted, as
+if the siege were over, by the divine strength that was in this simple
+Maid whom they regarded most affectionately, men, women, and little
+children. There was a marvellous press around her to touch her or the
+horse on which she rode, so much so that one of the torchbearers
+approached too near and set fire to her pennon; upon which she touched
+her horse with her spurs, and turning him cleverly, extinguished the
+flame, as if she had long followed the wars."
+
+There could have been nothing she resembled so much as St. Michael,
+the warrior-angel, who, as all the world knew, was her chief
+counsellor and guide, and who, no doubt, blazed, a familiar figure,
+from some window in the cathedral to which this his living picture
+rode without a pause, to give thanks to God before she thought of
+refreshment or rest. She spoke to the people who surrounded her on
+every side as she went on through the tumultuous streets, bidding them
+be of good courage and that if they had faith they should escape from
+all their troubles. And it was only after she had said her prayers and
+rendered her thanksgiving, that she returned to the house selected for
+her--the house of an important personage, Jacques Boucher, treasurer
+to the Duke of Orleans, not like the humble places where she had
+formerly lodged. The houses of that age were beautiful, airy and
+light, with much graceful ornament and solid comfort, the arched and
+vaulted Gothic beginning to give place to those models of domestic
+architecture which followed the Renaissance, with their ample windows
+and pleasant space and breadth. There the table was spread with a
+joyous meal in honour of this wonderful guest, to which, let us hope,
+Dunois and La Hire and the rest did full justice. But Jeanne was
+indifferent to the feast. She mixed with water the wine poured for her
+into a silver cup, and dipped her bread in it, five or six small
+slices. The visionary peasant girl cared for none of the dainty meats.
+And then she retired to the comfort of a peaceful chamber, where the
+little daughter of the house shared her bed: strange return to the
+days when Hauvette and Mengette in Domremy lay by her side and talked
+as girls love to do, through half the silent night. Perhaps little
+Charlotte, too, lay awake with awe to wonder at that other young head
+on the pillow, a little while ago shut into the silver helmet, and
+shining like the archangel's. The /état majeur/, the Chevalier
+d'Aulon, Jean de Metz, and Bertrand de Poulengy, who had never left
+her, first friends and most faithful, and her brother Pierre d'Arc,
+were lodged in the same house. It was the last night of April, 1429.
+----------
+[1] The dates must of course be reckoned by the old style.--This
+    letter was dispatched from Tours, during her pause there.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RELIEF OF ORLEANS.
+MAY 1-8, 1429.
+
+Next morning there was a council of war among the many leaders now
+collected within the town. It was the eager desire of Jeanne that an
+assault should be made at once, in all the enthusiasm of the moment,
+upon the English towers, without waiting even for the arrival of the
+little army which she had preceded. But the captains of the defence
+who had borne the heat and burden of the day, and who might naturally
+enough be irritated by the enthusiasm with which this stranger had
+been received, were of a different opinion. I quote here a story, for
+which I am told there is no foundation whatever, touching a personage
+who probably never existed, so that the reader may take it as he
+pleases, with indulgence for the writer's weakness, or indignation at
+her credulity. It seems to me, however, to express very naturally a
+sentiment which must have existed among the many captains who had been
+fighting unsuccessfully for months in defence of the beleaguered city.
+A certain Guillaume de Gamache felt himself insulted above all by the
+suggestion. "What," he cried, "is the advice of this hussy from the
+fields (/une péronnelle de bas lieu/) to be taken against that of a
+knight and captain! I will fold up my banner and become again a simple
+soldier. I would rather have a nobleman for my master than a woman
+whom nobody knows."
+
+Dunois, who was too wise to weaken the forces at his command by such a
+quarrel, is said to have done his best to reconcile and soothe the
+angry captain. This, however, if it was true, was only a mild instance
+of the perpetual opposition which the Maid encountered from the very
+beginning of her career and wherever she went. Notwithstanding her
+victories, she remained through all her career a /péronnelle/ to these
+men of war (with the noble exception, of course, of Alençon, Dunois,
+Xaintrailles, La Hire, and others). They were sore and wounded by her
+appearance and her claims. If they could cheat her, balk her designs,
+steal a march in any way, they did so, from first to last, always
+excepting the few who were faithful to her. Dunois could afford to be
+magnanimous, but the lesser men were jealous, envious, embittered. A
+/péronnelle/, a woman nobody knew! And they themselves were belted
+knights, experienced soldiers, of the best blood of France. It was not
+unnatural; but this atmosphere of hate, malice, and mortification
+forms the background of the picture wherever the Maid moves in her
+whiteness, illuminating to us the whole scene. The English hated her
+lustily as their enemy and a witch, casting spells and enchantments so
+that the strength was sucked out of a man's arm and the courage from
+his heart: but the Frenchmen, all but those who were devoted to her,
+regarded her with an ungenerous opposition, the hate of men shamed and
+mortified by every triumph she achieved.
+
+Jeanne was angry, too, and disappointed, more than she had been by all
+discouragements before. She had believed, perhaps, that once in the
+field these oppositions would be over, and that her mission would be
+rapidly accomplished. But she neither rebelled nor complained. What
+she did was to occupy herself about what she felt to be her business,
+without reference to any commander. She sent out two heralds,[1] who
+were attached to her staff, and therefore at her personal disposal, to
+summon once more Talbot and Glasdale (Classidas, as the French called
+him) /de la part de Dieu/ to evacuate their towers and return home. It
+would seem that in her miraculous soul she had a visionary hope that
+this appeal might be successful. What so noble, what so Christian, as
+that the one nation should give up, of free-will, its attempt upon the
+freedom and rights of another, if once the duty were put simply before
+it--and both together joining hands, march off, as she had already
+suggested, to do the noblest deed that had ever yet been done for
+Christianity? That same evening she rode forth with her little train;
+and placing herself on the town end of the bridge (which had been
+broken in the middle), as near as the breach would permit to the
+bastille, or fort of the Tourelles, which was built across the further
+end of the bridge, on the left side of the Loire--called out to the
+enemy, summoning them once more to withdraw while there was time. She
+was overwhelmed, as might have been expected, with a storm of abusive
+shouts and evil words, Classidas and his captains hurrying to the
+walls to carry on the fierce exchange of abuse. To be called dairy-
+maid and /péronnelle/ was a light matter, but some of the terms used
+were so cruel that, according to some accounts, she betrayed her
+womanhood by tears, not prepared apparently for the use of such foul
+weapons against her. The /Journal du Siège/ declares, however, that
+she was "aucunement yrée" (angry), but answered that they lied, and
+rode back to the city.
+
+The next Sunday, the 1st of May, Dunois, alarmed by the delay of his
+main body, set out for Blois to meet them, and we are told that Jeanne
+accompanied him to the special point of danger, where the English from
+their fortifications might have stopped his progress, and took up a
+position there, along with La Hire, between the expedition and the
+enemy. But in the towers not a man budged, not a shot was fired. It
+was again a miracle, and she had predicted it. The party of Dunois
+marched on in safety, and Jeanne returned to Orleans, once more
+receiving on the breeze some words of abuse from the defenders of
+those battlements, which sent forth no more dangerous missile, and
+replying again with her summons, "/Retournez de la par Dieu à
+Angleterre./" The townsfolk watched her coming and going with an
+excitement impossible to describe; they walked by the side of her
+charger to the cathedral, which was the end of every progress; they
+talked to her, all speaking together, pressing upon her--and she to
+them, bidding them to have no fear. "Messire has sent me," she said
+again and again. She went out again, Wednesday, 4th May, on the return
+of Dunois, to meet the army, with the same result, that they entered
+quietly, the English not firing a shot.
+
+On this same day, in the afternoon, after the early dinner, there
+happened a wonderful scene. Jeanne, it appeared, had fallen asleep
+after her meal, no doubt tired with the expedition of the morning, and
+her chief attendant, D'Aulon, who had accompanied Dunois to fetch the
+troops from Blois, being weary after his journey, had also stretched
+himself on a couch to rest. They were all tired, the entry of the
+troops having been early in the morning, a fact of which the angry
+captains of Orleans, who had not shared in that expedition, took
+advantage to make a secret sortie unknown to the new chiefs. All at
+once the Maid awoke in agitation and alarm. Her "voices" had awakened
+her from her sleep. "My council tell me to go against the English,"
+she cried; "but if to assail their towers or to meet Fastolfe I cannot
+tell." As she came to the full command of her faculties her trouble
+grew. "The blood of our soldiers is flowing," she said; "why did they
+not tell me? My arms, my arms!" Then she rushed down stairs to find
+her page amusing himself in the tranquil afternoon, and called to him
+for her horse. All was quiet, and no doubt her attendants thought her
+mad: but D'Aulon, who knew better than to contradict his mistress,
+armed her rapidly, and Luis, the page, brought her horse to the door.
+By this time there began to rise a distant rumour and outcry, at which
+they all pricked their ears. As Jeanne put her foot in the stirrup she
+perceived that her standard was wanting, and called to the page, Louis
+de Contes, above, to hand it to her out of the window. Then with the
+heavy flag-staff in her hand she set spurs to her horse, her
+attendants one by one clattering after her, and dashed onward "so that
+the fire flashed from the pavement under the horse's feet."
+
+Jeanne's presentiment was well-founded. There had been a private
+expedition against the English fort of St. Loup carried out quietly to
+steal a march upon her--Gamache, possibly, or other malcontents of his
+temper, in the hope perhaps of making use of her prestige to gain a
+victory without her presence. But it had happened with this sally as
+with many others which had been made from Orleans; and when Jeanne
+appeared outside the gate which she and the rest of the followers
+after her had almost forced--coming down upon them at full gallop, her
+standard streaming, her white armour in a blaze of reflection, she met
+the fugitives flying back towards the shelter of the town. She does
+not seem to have paused or to have deigned to address a word to them,
+though the troop of soldiers and citizens who had snatched arms and
+flung themselves after her, arrested and turned them back. Straight to
+the foot of the tower she went, Dunois startled in his turn,
+thundering after her. It is not for a woman to describe, any more than
+it was for a woman to execute such a feat of war. It is said that she
+put herself at the head of the citizens, Dunois at the head of the
+soldiers. One moment of pity and horror and heart-sickness Jeanne had
+felt when she met several wounded men who were being carried towards
+the town. She had never seen French blood shed before, and the
+dreadful thought that they might die unconfessed, overwhelmed her
+soul; but this was but an incident of her breathless gallop to the
+encounter. To isolate the tower which was attacked was the first
+necessity, and then the conflict was furious--the English discouraged,
+but fighting desperately against a mysterious force which overwhelmed
+them, at the same time that it redoubled the ardour of every
+Frenchman. Lord Talbot sent forth parties from the other forts to help
+their companions, but these were met in the midst by the rest of the
+army arriving from Orleans, which stopped their course. It was not
+till evening, "the hour of Vespers," that the bastille was finally
+taken, with great slaughter, the Orleanists giving little quarter.
+During these dreadful hours the Maid was everywhere visible with her
+standard, the most marked figure, shouting to her men, weeping for the
+others, not fighting herself so far as we hear, but always in the
+front of the battle. When she went back to Orleans triumphant, she led
+a band of prisoners with her, keeping a wary eye upon them that they
+might not come to harm.
+
+The next day, May 5th, was the Feast of the Ascension, and it was
+spent by Jeanne in rest and in prayer. But the other leaders were not
+so devout. They held a crowded and anxious council of war, taking care
+that no news of it should reach the ears of the Maid. When, however,
+they had decided upon the course to pursue they sent for her, and
+intimated to her their decision to attack only the smaller forts,
+which she heard with great impatience, not sitting down, but walking
+about the room in disappointment and anger. It is difficult[2] for the
+present writer to follow the plans of this council or to understand in
+what way Jeanne felt herself contradicted and set aside. However it
+was, the fact seems certain that their plan failed at first, the
+English having themselves abandoned one of the smaller forts on the
+right side of the river and concentrated their forces in the greater
+ones of Les Augustins and Les Tourelles on the left bank. For all
+this, reference to the map is necessary, which will make it quite
+clear. It was Classidas, as he is called, Glasdale, the most furious
+enemy of France, and one of the bravest of the English captains who
+held the former, and for a moment succeeded in repulsing the attack.
+The fortune of war seemed about to turn back to its former current,
+and the French fell back on the boats which had brought them to the
+scene of action, carrying the Maid with them in their retreat. But she
+perceived how critical the moment was, and reining up her horse from
+the bank, down which she was being forced by the crowd, turned back
+again, closely followed by La Hire, and at once, no doubt, by the
+stouter hearts who only wanted a leader--and charging the English, who
+had regained their courage as the white armour of the witch
+disappeared, and were in full career after the fugitives--drove them
+back to their fortifications, which they gained with a rush, leaving
+the ground strewn with the wounded and dying. Jeanne herself did not
+draw bridle till she had planted her standard on the edge of the moat
+which surrounded the tower.
+
+Michelet is very brief concerning this first victory, and claims only
+that "the success was due in part to the Maid," although the crowd of
+captains and men-at-arms where by themselves quite sufficient for the
+work, had there been any heart in them. But this was true to fact in
+almost every case: and it is clear that she was simply the heart,
+which was the only thing wanted to those often beaten Frenchmen; where
+she was, where they could hear her robust young voice echoing over all
+the din, they were as men inspired; when the impetus of their flight
+carried her also away, they became once more the defeated of so many
+battles. The effect upon the English was equally strong; when the back
+of Jeanne was turned, they were again the men of Agincourt; when she
+turned upon them, her white breastplate blazing out like a star, the
+sunshine striking dazzling rays from her helmet, they trembled before
+the sorceress; an angel to her own side, she was the very spirit of
+magic and witchcraft to her opponents. Classidas, or which captain
+soever of the English side it might happen to be, blaspheming from the
+battlements, hurled all the evil names of which a trooper was capable,
+upon her, while she from below summoned them, in different tones of
+appeal and menace, calling upon them to yield, to go home, to give up
+the struggle. Her form, her voice are always evident in the midst of
+the great stone bullets, the cloth-yard shafts that were flying--they
+were so near, the one above, the other below, that they could hear
+each other speak.
+
+On the 7th of May the fort of Les Augustins on the left bank was
+taken. It will be seen by reference to the map, that this bastille, an
+ancient convent, stood at some distance from the river, in peaceful
+times a little way beyond the bridge, and no doubt a favourite Sunday
+walk from the city. The bridge was now closed up by the frowning bulk
+of the Tourelles built upon it, with a smaller tower or "boulevard" on
+the left bank communicating with it by a drawbridge. When Les
+Augustins was taken, the victorious French turned their arms against
+this boulevard, but as night had fallen by this time, they suspended
+the fighting, having driven back the English, who had made a sally in
+help of Les Augustins. Here in the dark, which suited their purpose,
+another council was held. The captains decided that they would now
+pursue their victory no further, the town being fully supplied with
+provisions and joyful with success, but that they would await the
+arrival of reinforcements before they proceeded further; probably
+their object was solely to get rid of Jeanne, to conclude the struggle
+without her, and secure the credit of it. The council was held in the
+camp within sight of the fort, by the light of torches; after she had
+been persuaded to withdraw, on account of a slight wound in her foot
+from a calthrop, it is said. This message was sent after her into
+Orleans. She heard it with quiet disdain. "You have held your council,
+and I have had mine," she said calmly to the messengers; then turning
+to her chaplain, "Come to me to-morrow at dawn," she said, "and do not
+leave me; I shall have much to do. My blood will be shed. I shall be
+wounded[3] to-morrow," pointing above her right breast. Up to this
+time no weapon had touched her; she had stood fast among all the
+flying arrows, the fierce play of spear and sword, and had taken no
+harm.
+
+In the morning early, at sunrise, she dashed forth from the town
+again, though the generals, her hosts, and all the authorities who
+were in the plot endeavoured to detain her. "Stay with us, Jeanne,"
+said the people with whom she lodged--official people, much above the
+rank of the Maid--"stay and help us to eat this fish fresh out of the
+river." "Keep it for this evening," she said, "and I shall return by
+the bridge and bring you some Goddens to have their share." She had
+already brought in a party of the Goddens on the night before to
+protect them from the fury of the crowd. The peculiarity of this
+promise lay in the fact that the bridge was broken, and could not be
+passed, even without that difficulty, without passing through the
+Tourelles and the boulevard which blocked it at the other end. At the
+closed gates another great official stood by, to prevent her passing,
+but he was soon swept away by the flood of enthusiasts who followed
+the white horse and its white rider. The crowd flung themselves into
+the boats to cross the river with her, horse and man. Les Tourelles
+stood alone, black and frowning across the shining river in its early
+touch of golden sunshine, on the south side of the Loire, the lower
+tower of the boulevard on the bank blackened with the fire of last
+night's attack, and the smoking ruins of Les Augustins beyond. The
+French army, whom Orleans had been busy all night feeding and
+encouraging, lay below, not yet apparently moving either for action or
+retreat. Jeanne plunged among them like a ray of light, D'Aulon
+carrying her banner; and passing through the ranks, she took up her
+place on the border of the moat of the boulevard. Her followers rushed
+after with that /élan/ of desperate and uncalculating valour which was
+the great power of the French arms. In the midst of the fray the
+girl's clear voice, /assez voix de femme/, kept shouting
+encouragements, /de la part de Dieu/ always her war-cry. "/Bon cœur,
+bonne espérance/," she cried--"the hour is at hand." But after hours
+of desperate fighting the spirit of the assailants began to flag.
+Jeanne, who apparently did not at any time take any active part in the
+struggle, though she exposed herself to all its dangers, seized a
+ladder, placed it against the wall, and was about to mount, when an
+arrow struck her full in the breast. The Maid fell, the crowd closed
+round; for a moment it seemed as if all were lost.
+
+Here we have over again in the fable our friend Gamache. It is a
+pretty story, and though we ask no one to take it for absolute fact,
+there is no reason why some such incident might not have occurred.
+Gamache, the angry captain who rather than follow a /péronnelle/ to
+the field was prepared to fold his banner round its staff, and give up
+his rank, is supposed to have been the nearest to her when she fell.
+It was he who cleared the crowd from about her and raised her up.
+"Take my horse," he said, "brave creature. Bear no malice. I confess
+that I was in the wrong." "It is I that should be wrong if I bore
+malice," cried Jeanne, "for never was a knight so courteous"
+(/chevalier si bien apprins/). She was surrounded immediately by her
+people, the chaplain whom she had bidden to keep near her, her page,
+all her special attendants, who would have conveyed her out of the
+fight had she consented. Jeanne had the courage to pull the arrow out
+of the wound with her own hand,--"it stood a hand breadth out" behind
+her shoulder--but then, being but a girl and this her first experience
+of the sort, notwithstanding her armour and her rank as General-in-
+Chief, she cried with the pain, this commander of seventeen. Somebody
+then proposed to charm the wound with an incantation, but the Maid
+indignant, cried out, "I would rather die." Finally a compress soaked
+in oil was placed upon it, and Jeanne withdrew a little with her
+chaplain, and made her confession to him, as one who might be about to
+die.
+
+But soon her mood changed. She saw the assailants waver and fall back;
+the attack grew languid, and Dunois talked of sounding the retreat.
+Upon this she got to her feet, and scrambled somehow on her horse.
+"Rest a little," she implored the generals about her, "eat something,
+refresh yourselves: and when you see my standard floating against the
+wall, forward, the place is yours." They seem to have done as she
+suggested, making a pause, while Jeanne withdrew a little into a
+vineyard close by, where there must have been a tuft of trees, to
+afford her a little shelter. There she said her prayers, and tasted
+that meat to eat that men wot not of, which restores the devout soul.
+Turning back she took her standard from her squire's hand, and planted
+it again on the edge of the moat. "Let me know," she said, "when the
+pennon touches the wall." The folds of white and gold with the benign
+countenance of the Saviour, now visible, now lost in the changes of
+movement, floated over their heads on the breeze of the May day.
+"Jeanne," said the squire, "it touches!" "On!" cried the Maid, her
+voice ringing through the momentary quiet. "On! All is yours!" The
+troops rose as one man; they flung themselves against the wall, at the
+foot of which that white figure stood, the staff of her banner in her
+hand, shouting, "All is yours." Never had the French /élan/ been so
+wildly inspired, so irresistible; they swarmed up the wall "as if it
+had been a stair." "Do they think themselves immortal?" the panic-
+stricken English cried among themselves--panic-stricken not by their
+old enemies, but by the white figure at the foot of the wall. Was she
+a witch, as had been thought? was not she indeed the messenger of God?
+The dazzling rays that shot from her armour seemed like butterflies,
+like doves, like angels floating about her head. They had thought her
+dead, yet here she stood again without a sign of injury; or was it
+Michael himself, the great archangel whom she resembled do much?
+Arrows flew round her on every side but never touched her. She struck
+no blow, but the folds of her standard blew against the wall, and her
+voice rose through all the tumult. "On! Enter! /de la part de Dieu!/
+for all is yours."
+
+The Maid had other words to say, "/Renty, renty/, Classidas!" she
+cried, "you called me vile names, but I have a great pity for your
+soul." He on his side showered down blasphemies. He was at the last
+gasp; one desperate last effort he made with a handful of men to
+escape from the boulevard by the drawbridge to Les Tourelles, which
+crossed a narrow strip of the river. But the bridge had been fired by
+a fire-ship from Orleans and gave way under the rush of the heavily-
+armed men; and the fierce Classidas and his companions were plunged
+into the river, where a knight in armour, like a tower falling, went
+to the bottom in a moment. Nearly thirty of them, it is said, plunged
+thus into the great Loire and were seen no more.
+
+It was the end of the struggle. The French flag swung forth on the
+parapet, the French shout rose to heaven. Meanwhile a strange sight
+was to be seen--the St. Michael in shining armour, who had led that
+assault, shedding tears for the ferocious Classidas, who had cursed
+her with his last breath. "/J'ai grande pitié de ton âme./" Had he but
+had time to clear his soul and reconcile himself with God!
+
+This was virtually the end of the siege of Orleans. The broken bridge
+on the Loire had been rudely mended, with a great /gouttière/ and
+planks, and the people of Orleans had poured out over it to take the
+Tourelles in flank--the English being thus taken between Jeanne's army
+on the one side and the citizens on the other. The whole south bank of
+the river was cleared, not an Englishman left to threaten the richest
+part of France, the land flowing with milk and honey. And though there
+still remained several great generals on the other side with strong
+fortifications to fall back upon, they seem to have been paralysed,
+and did not strike a blow. Jeanne was not afraid of them, but her
+ardour to continue the fight dropped all at once; enough had been
+done. She awaited the conclusion with confidence. Needless to say that
+Orleans was half mad with joy, every church sounding its bells,
+singing its song of triumph and praise, the streets so crowded that it
+was with difficulty that the Maid could make her progress through
+them, with throngs of people pressing round to kiss her hand, if might
+be, her greaves, her mailed shoes, her charger, the floating folds of
+her banner. She had said she would be wounded and so she was, as might
+be seen, the envious rent of the arrow showing through the white
+plates of metal on her shoulder. She had said all should be theirs /de
+par Dieu:/ and all was theirs, thanks to our Lord and also to St.
+Aignan and St. Euvert, patrons of Orleans, and to St. Louis and St.
+Charlemagne in heaven who had so great pity of the kingdom of France:
+and to the Maid on earth, the Heaven-sent deliverer, the spotless
+virgin, the celestial warrior--happy he who could reach to kiss it,
+the point of her mailed shoe.
+
+Someone says that she rode through all this half-delirious joy like a
+creature in a dream,--fatigue, pain, the happy languor of the end
+attained, and also the profound pity that was the very inspiration of
+her spirit, for all those souls of men gone to their account without
+help of Church or comfort of priest--overwhelming her. But next day,
+which was Sunday, she was up again and eagerly watching all that went
+on. A strange sight was Orleans on that Sunday of May. On the south
+side of the Loire, all those half-ruined bastilles smoking and
+silenced, which once had threatened not the city only but all the
+south of France; on the north the remaining bands of English drawn up
+in order of battle. The excitement of the town and of the generals in
+it, was intense; worn as they were with three days of continuous
+fighting, should they sally forth again and meet that compact, silent,
+doubly defiant army, which was more or less fresh and unexhausted?
+Jeanne's opinion was, No; there had been enough of fighting, and it
+was Sunday, the holy day; but apparently the French did go out though
+keeping at a distance, watching the enemy. By orders of the Maid an
+altar was raised between the two armies in full sight of both sides,
+and there mass was celebrated, under the sunshine, by the side of the
+river which had swallowed Classidas and all his men. French and
+English together devoutly turned towards and responded to that Mass in
+the pause of bewildering uncertainty. "Which way are their heads
+turned?" Jeanne asked when it was over. "They are turned away from us,
+they are turned to Meung," was the reply. "Then let them go, /de par
+Dieu/," the Maid replied.
+
+The siege had lasted for seven months, but eight days of the Maid were
+enough to bring it to an end. The people of Orleans still, every year,
+on the 8th of May, make a procession round the town and give thanks to
+God for its deliverance. Henceforth, the Maid was known no longer as
+Jeanne d'Arc, the peasant of Domremy, but as /La Pucelle d'Orléans/,
+in the same manner in which one might speak of the Prince of Waterloo,
+or the Duc de Malakoff.
+----------
+[1] Their special mission seems to have been a demand for the return
+    of a herald previously sent who had never come back. As Dunois
+    accompanied the demand by a threat to kill the English prisoners
+    in Orleans if the herald was not sent back, the request was at
+    once accorded, with fierce defiances to the Maid, the dairy-maid
+    as she is called, bidding her go back to her cows, and threatening
+    to burn her if they caught her.
+
+[2] I avail myself here as elsewhere of Mr. Lang's lucid description.
+    "It is really perfectly intelligible. The Council wanted a feint
+    on the left bank, Jeanne an attack on the right. She knew their
+    scheme, untold, but entered into it. There was, however, no feint.
+    She deliberately forced the fighting. There was grand fighting,
+    well worth telling," adds my martial critic, who understands it so
+    much better than I do, and who I am happy to think is himself
+    telling the tale in another way.
+
+[3] She had made this prophecy a month before, and it was recorded
+    three weeks before the event in the Town Book of Brabant.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE CAMPAIGN OF THE LOIRE.
+JUNE, JULY, 1429.
+
+The rescue of Orleans and the defeat of the invincible English were
+news to move France from one end to the other, and especially to raise
+the spirits and restore the courage of that part of France which had
+no sympathy with the invaders and to which the English yoke was
+unaccustomed and disgraceful. The news flew up and down the Loire from
+point to point, arousing every village, and breathing new heart and
+encouragement everywhere; while in the meantime Jeanne, partially
+healed of her wound (on May 9th she rode out in a /maillet/, a light
+coat of chain-mail), after a few days' rest in the joyful city which
+she had saved with all its treasures, set out on her return to Chinon.
+She found the King at Loches, another of the strong places on the
+Loire where there was room for a Court, and means of defence for a
+siege should such be necessary, as is the case with so many of these
+wonderful castles upon the great French river. Hot with eagerness to
+follow up her first great success and accomplish her mission, Jeanne's
+object was to march on at once with the young Prince, with or without
+his immense retinue, to Rheims where he should be crowned and anointed
+King as she had promised. Her instinctive sense of the necessities of
+the position, if we use that language--more justly, her boundless
+faith in the orders which she believed had been give her from Heaven,
+to accomplish this great act without delay, urged her on. She was
+straitened, if we may quote the most divine of words, till it should
+be accomplished.
+
+But the Maid, flushed with victory, with the shouts of Orleans still
+ringing in her ears, the applause of her fellow-soldiers, the sound of
+the triumphant bells, was plunged all at once into the indolence, the
+intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering
+favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into
+foolish amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and
+buffoons alike dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always
+counselling caution, the other inventing amusements. "Let us eat and
+drink for to-morrow we die." Was it worth while to lose everything
+that was enjoyable in the present moment, to subject a young sovereign
+to toils and excitement, and probable loss, for the uncertain
+advantage of a vain ceremony, when he might be enjoying himself safely
+and at his ease, throughout the summer months, on the cheerful banks
+of the Loire? On the other hand, the Chancellor, the Chamberlains, the
+Church, all his graver advisers (with the exception of Gerson, the
+great theologian to whom has been ascribed the authorship of the
+/Imitation of Christ/, who is reported to have said, "If France
+deserts her, and she fails, she is none the less inspired") shook
+their hands and advised that the way should be quite safe and free of
+danger before the King risked himself upon it. It was thus that Jeanne
+was received when, newly alighted from her charger, her shoulder still
+but half healed, her eyes scarcely clear of the dust and smoke, she
+found herself once more in the ante-chamber, wasting the days, waiting
+in vain behind closed doors, tormented by the lutes and madrigals, the
+light women and lighter men, useless and contemptible, of a foolish
+Court. The Maid, in all the energy and impulse of a success which had
+proved all her claims, had also a premonition that her own time was
+short, if not a direct intimation, as some believe, to that effect:
+and mingled her remonstrances and appeals with the cry of warning: "I
+shall only last a year: take the good of me as long as it is
+possible."
+
+No doubt she was a very great entertainment to the idle seigneurs and
+ladies who would try to persuade her to tell them what was to happen
+to them, she who had prophesied the death of Glasdale and her own
+wound and so many other things. The Duke of Lorraine on her first
+setting out had attempted to discover from Jeanne what course his
+illness would take, and whether he should get better; and all the
+demoiselles and demoiseaux, the flutterers of the ante-chamber, would
+be still more likely to surround with their foolish questions the
+stout-hearted, impatient girl who had acquired a little of the
+roughness of her soldier comrades, and had never been slow at any time
+in answering a fool according to his folly; for Jeanne was no meek or
+sentimental maiden, but a robust and vigorous young woman, ready with
+a quick response, as well as with a ready blow did any one touch her
+unadvisedly, or use any inappropriate freedom. At last, one day while
+she waited vainly outside the cabinet in which the King was retired
+with a few of his councillors, Jeanne's patience failed her
+altogether. She knocked at the door, and being admitted threw herself
+at the feet of the King. To Jeanne he was no king till he had received
+the consecration necessary for every sovereign of France. "Noble
+Dauphin," she cried, "why should you hold such long and tedious
+councils? Rather come to Rheims and receive your worthy crown."
+
+The Bishop of Castres, Christopher de Harcourt, who was present, asked
+her if she would not now in the presence of the King describe to them
+the manner in which her council instructed her, when they talked with
+her. Jeanne reddened and replied: "I understand that you would like to
+know, and I would gladly satisfy you." "Jeanne," said the King in his
+turn, "it would be very good if you could do what they ask, in the
+presence of those here." She answered at once and with great feeling:
+"When I am vexed to find myself disbelieved in the things I say from
+God, I retire by myself and pray to God, complaining and asking of Him
+why I am not listened to. And when I have prayed I hear a voice which
+says, 'Daughter of God, go, go, go! I will help thee, go!' And when I
+hear that voice I feel a great joy." Her face shone as she spoke,
+"lifting her eyes to heaven," like the face of Moses while still it
+bore the reflection of the glory of God, so that the men were dazzled
+who sat, speechless, looking on.
+
+The result was that Charles kindly promised to set out as soon as the
+road between him and Rheims should be free of the English, especially
+the towns on the Loire in which a great part of the army dispersed
+from Orleans had taken refuge, with the addition of the auxiliary
+forces of Sir John Fastolfe, a name so much feared by the French, but
+at which the English reader can scarcely forbear a smile. That the
+young King did not think of putting himself at the head of the troops
+or of taking part in the campaign shows sufficiently that he was
+indeed a /pauvre sire/, unworthy his gallant people. Jeanne, however,
+nothing better being possible, seems to have accepted this mission
+with readiness, and instantly began her preparations to carry it out.
+It is here that the young Seigneur Guy de Laval comes in with his
+description of her already quoted. He was no humble squire but a great
+personage to whom the King was civil and pleased to show courtesy. The
+young man writes to /ses mères/, that is, it seems, his mother and
+grandmother, to whom, in their distant château, anxiously awaiting
+news of the two youths gone to the wars, their faithful son makes his
+report of himself and his brother. The King, he says, sent for the
+Maid, in order, Sir Guy believes, that he might see her. And
+afterwards the young man went to Selles where she was just setting out
+on the campaign.
+
+From Selles, he writes on the 8th June, exactly a month after the
+deliverance of Orleans:
+
+ "I went to her lodging to see her, and she sent for wine and told
+  me we should soon drink wine in Paris. It was a miraculous thing
+  (/toute divine/) to see her and hear her. She left Selles on
+  Monday at the hour of vespers for Romorantin, the Marshal de
+  Boussac and a great many armed men with her. I saw her mount her
+  horse, all in white armour excepting the head, a little axe in her
+  hand. The great black charger was very restive at her door and
+  would not let her mount. 'Lead him,' she said, 'to the cross which
+  is in front of the church,' and there she mounted, the horse
+  standing still as if he had been bound. Then turning towards the
+  church which was close by she said in a womanly voice (/assez voix
+  de femme/), 'You priests and people of the Church, make
+  processions and prayers to God for us'; then turning to the road,
+  'Forward,' she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page;
+  she had her little axe in her hand, and by her side rode a brother
+  who had joined her eight days before. The Maid told me in her
+  lodging that she had sent you, grandmother, a small gold ring,
+  which was indeed a very small affair, and that she would fain have
+  sent you something better, considering your recommendation. To-day
+  M. d'Alençon, the Bastard of Orleans, and Gaucourt were to leave
+  Selles, following the Maid. And men are arriving from all parts
+  every day, all with good hope in God who I believe will help us.
+  But money there is none at the Court, so that for the present I
+  have no hope of any help or assistance. Therefore I desire you,
+  /Madame ma mère/, who have my seal, spare not the land neither in
+  sale nor mortgage . . . . My much honoured ladies and mothers, I
+  pray the blessed Son of God that you have a good life and long;
+  and both of us recommend ourselves to our brother Louis. And we
+  send our greetings to the reader of this letter. Written from
+  Selles, Wednesday, 8th June, 1429. This afternoon are arrived M.
+  de Vendôme, M. de Boussac, and others, and La Hire has joined the
+  army, and we shall soon be at work (/on besognera bientôt/)--May
+  God grant that it should be according to your desire."
+
+It was with difficulty that the Duc d'Alençon had been got to start,
+his wife consenting with great reluctance. He had been long a prisoner
+in England, and had lately been ransomed for a great sum of money;
+"Was not that a sufficient sacrifice?" the Duchess asked indignantly.
+To risk once more a husband so costly was naturally a painful thing to
+do, and why could not Jeanne be content and stay where she was? Jeanne
+comforted the lady, perhaps with a little good-humoured contempt.
+"Fear nothing, Madame," she said; "I will bring him back to you safe
+and sound." Probably Alençon himself had no great desire to be second
+in command to this country lass, even though she had delivered
+Orleans; and if he set out at all he would have preferred to take
+another direction and to protect his own property and province. The
+gathering of the army thus becomes visible to us; parties are
+continually coming in; and no doubt, as they marched along, many a
+little château--and they abound through the country each with its
+attendant hamlet--gave forth its master or heir, poor but noble,
+followed by as many men-at-arms, perhaps only two or three, as the
+little property could raise, to swell the forces with the best and
+surest of material, the trained gentlemen with hearts full of chivalry
+and pride, but with the same hardy, self-denying habits as the sturdy
+peasants who followed them, ready for any privation; with a proud
+delight to hear that /on besognera bientôt/--with that St. Michael at
+their head, and no longer any fear of the English in their hearts.
+
+The first /besogne/ on which this army entered was the siege of
+Jargeau, June 11th, into which town Suffolk had thrown himself and his
+troops when the siege of Orleans was raised. The town was strong and
+so was the garrison, experienced too in all the arts of war, and
+already aware of the wild enthusiasm by which Jeanne was surrounded.
+She passed through Orleans on the 10th of June, and had there been
+joined by various new detachments. The number of her army was now
+raised, we are told, to twelve hundred lances, which means, as each
+"lance" was a separate party, about three thousand six hundred men,
+though the /Journal du Siège/ gives a much larger number; at all
+events it was a small army with which to decide a quarrel between the
+two greatest nations of Christendom. Her associates in command were
+here once more seized by the prevailing sin of hesitation, and many
+arguments were used to induce her to postpone the assault. It would
+seem that this hesitation continued until the very moment of attack,
+and was only put an end to when Jeanne herself impatiently seized her
+banner from the hand of her squire, and planting herself at the foot
+of the walls let loose the fervour of the troops and cheered them on
+to the irresistible rush in which lay their strength. For it was with
+the commanders, not with the followers, that the weakness lay. The
+Maid herself was struck on the head by a stone from the battlements
+which threw her down; but she sprang up again in a moment unhurt.
+"/Sus! Sus!/ Our Lord has condemned the English--all is yours!" she
+cried. She would seem to have stood there in her place with her
+banner, a rallying-point and centre in the midst of all the confusion
+of the fight, taking this for her part in it, and though she is always
+in the thick of the combat, never, so far as we are told, striking a
+blow, exposed to all the instruments of war, but injured by none. The
+effect of her mere attitude, the steadiness of her stand, under the
+terrible rain of stone bullets and dreadful arrows, must of itself
+have been indescribable.
+
+In the midst of the fiery struggle, there is almost a comic point in
+her watch over Alençon, for whose safety she had pledged herself, now
+dragging him from a dangerous spot with a cry of warning, now pushing
+him forward with an encouraging word. On the first of these occasions
+a gentleman of Anjou, M. de Lude, who took his place in the front was
+killed, which seems hard upon the poor gentleman, who was probably
+quite as well worth caring for as Alençon. "/Avant, gentil duc/," she
+cried at another moment, "forward! Are you afraid? you know I promised
+your wife to bring you safe home." Thus her voice keeps ringing
+through the din, her white armour gleams. "/Sus! Sus!/" the bold cry
+is almost audible, sibilant, whistling amid the whistling of the
+arrows.
+
+Suffolk, the English Bayard, the most chivalrous of knights, was at
+last forced to yield. One story tells us that he would give up his
+sword only to Jeanne herself,[1] but there is a more authentic
+description of his selection of one youth among his assailants whom
+the quick perceptions of the leader had singled out. "Are you noble?"
+Suffolk asks in the brevity of such a crisis. "Yes; Guillame Regnault,
+gentleman of Auvergne." "Are you a knight?" "Not yet." The victor put
+a knee to the ground before his captive, the vanquished touched him
+lightly on the shoulder with the sword which he then gave over to him.
+Suffolk was always the finest gentleman, the most perfect gentle
+knight of his time.
+
+"Now let us go and see the English of Meung," cried Jeanne,
+unwearying, as soon as this victory was assured. That place fell
+easily; it is called the bridge of Meung, in the Chronicle, without
+further description, therefore presumably the fortress was not
+attacked--and they proceeded onward to Beaugency. These towns still
+shine over the plain, along the line of the Loire, visible as far as
+the eye will carry over the long levels, the great stream linking one
+to another like pearls on a thread. There is nothing in the landscape
+now to give even a moment's shelter to the progress of a marching army
+which must have been seen from afar, wherever it moved; or to veil the
+shining battlements, and piled up citadels rising here and there,
+concentrated points and centres of life. The great white Castle of
+Blois, the darker tower of Beaugency, still stand where they stood
+when Jeanne and her men drew near, as conspicuous in their elevation
+of walls and towers as if they had been planted on a mountain top. On
+more than one occasion during this wonderful progress from victory to
+victory, the triumphant leaders returned for a day or two to Orleans
+to tell their good tidings, and to celebrate their success.
+
+And there is but one voice as to the military skill which she
+displayed in these repeated operations. The reader sees her, with her
+banner, posted in the middle of the fight, guiding her men with a sort
+of infallible instinct which adds force to her absolute quick
+perception of every difficulty and advantage, the unhesitating
+promptitude, attending like so many servants upon the inspiration
+which is the soul of all. These are things to which a writer ignorant
+of war is quite unable to do justice. What was almost more wonderful
+still was the manner in which the Maid held her place among the
+captains, most of whom would have thwarted her if they could, with a
+consciousness of her own superior place, in which there is never the
+slightest token of presumption or self-esteem. She guarded and guided
+Alençon with a good-natured and affectionate disdain; and when there
+was risk of a great quarrel and a splitting of forces she held the
+balance like an old and experienced guide of men.
+
+This latter crisis occurred before Beaugency on the 15th of June, when
+the Comte de Richemont, Constable of France, the brother of the Duc de
+Bretagne, a great nobleman and famous leader, but in disgrace with the
+King and exiled from the Court, suddenly appeared with a considerable
+army to join himself to the royalist forces, probably with the hope of
+securing the leading place. Richemont was no friend to Jeanne; though
+he apparently asked her help and influence to reconcile him with the
+King. He seems indeed to have thought it a disgrace to France that her
+troops should be led, and victories gained by no properly appointed
+general, but by a woman, probably a witch, a creature unworthy to
+stand before armed men. It must not be forgotten that even now this
+was the general opinion of her out of the range of her immediate
+influence. The English held it like a religion. Bedford, in his
+description of the siege of Orleans and its total failure, reports to
+England that the discomfiture of the hitherto always triumphant army
+was "caused in great part by the fatal faith and vain fear that the
+French had, of a disciple and servant of the enemy of man, called the
+Maid, who uses many false enchantments, and witchcraft, by which not
+only is the number of our soldiers diminished but their courage
+marvellously beaten down, and the boldness of our enemies increased."
+Richemont was a sworn enemy of all such. "Never man hated more, all
+heresies, sorcerers, and sorceresses, than he; for he burned more in
+France, in Poitou, and Bretagne, than any other of his time." The
+French generals were divided as to the merits of Richemont and the
+advantages to be derived from his support. Alençon, the nominal
+commander, declared that he would leave the army if Richemont were
+permitted to join it. The letters of the King were equally hostile to
+him; but on the other hand there were some who held that the accession
+of the Constable was of more importance than all the Maids in France.
+It was a moment which demanded very wary guidance. Jeanne, it would
+seem, did not regard his arrival with much pleasure; probably even the
+increase of her forces did not please her as it would have pleased
+most commanders, holding so strongly as she did, to the miraculous
+character of her own mission and that it was not so much the strength
+of her troops as the help of God that got her the victory. But it was
+not her part to reject or alienate any champion of France. We have an
+account of their meeting given by a retainer of Richemont, which is
+picturesque enough. "The Maid alighted from her horse, and the
+Constable also. 'Jeanne,' he said, 'they tell me that you are against
+me. I know not if you are from God (/de la part de Dieu/) or not. If
+you are from God I do not fear you; if you are of the devil, I fear
+you still less.' 'Brave Constable,' said Jeanne, 'you have not come
+here by any will of mine; but since you are here you are welcome.'"
+
+Armed neutrality but suspicion on one side, dignified indifference but
+acceptance on the other, could not be better shown.
+
+These successes, however, had been attended by various /escarmouches/
+going on behind. The English, who had been driven out of one town
+after another, had now drawn together under the command of Talbot, and
+a party of troops under Fastolfe, who came to relieve them, had turned
+back as Jeanne proceeded, making various unsuccessful attempts to
+recover what had been lost. Failing in all their efforts they returned
+across the country to Genville, and were continuing their retreat to
+Paris when the two enemies came within reach of each other. An
+encounter in open field was a new experience of which Jeanne as yet
+had known nothing. She had been successful in assault, in the
+operations of the siege, but to meet the enemy hand to hand in battle
+was what she had never been required to do; and every tradition, every
+experience, was in favour of the English. From Agincourt to the Battle
+of the Herrings at Rouvray near Orleans, which had taken place in the
+beginning of the year (a fight so named because the field of battle
+had been covered with herrings, the conquerors in this case being
+merely the convoy in charge of provisions for the English, which
+Fastolfe commanded), such a thing had not been known as that the
+French should hold their own, much less attain any victory over the
+invaders. In these circumstances there was much talk of falling back
+upon the camp near Beaugency and of retreating or avoiding an
+engagement; anything rather than hazard one of those encounters which
+had infallibly ended in disaster. But Jeanne was of the same mind as
+always, to go forward and fear nothing. "Fall upon them! Go at them
+boldly," she cried. "If they were in the clouds we should have them.
+The gentle King will now gain the greatest victory he has ever had."
+
+It is curious to hear that in that great plain of the Beauce, so flat,
+so fertile, with nothing but vines and cornfields now against the
+horizon, the two armies at last almost stumbled upon each other by
+accident, in the midst of the brushwood by which the country was
+wildly overgrown. The story is that a stag roused by the French scouts
+rushed into the midst of the English, who were advantageously placed
+among the brushwood to arrest the enemy on their march; the wild
+creature terrified and flying before an army blundered into the midst
+of the others, was fired at and thus betrayed the vicinity of the foe.
+The English had no time to form or set up their usual defences. They
+were so taken by surprise that the rush of the French came without
+warning, with a suddenness which gave it double force. La Hire made
+the first attack as leader of the van, and there was thus emulation
+between the two parties, which should be first upon the enemy. When
+Alençon asked Jeanne what was to be the issue of the fight, she said
+calmly, "Have you good spurs?" "What! You mean we shall turn our backs
+on our enemies?" cried her questioner. "Not so," she replied. "The
+English will not fight, they will fly, and you will want good spurs to
+pursue them." Even this somewhat fantastic prophecy put heart into the
+men, who up to this time had been wont to fly and not to fight.
+
+And this was what happened, strange as it may seem. Talbot himself was
+with the English forces, and many a gallant captain beside: but the
+men and their leaders were alike broken in spirit and filled with
+superstitious terrors. Whether these were the forces of hell or those
+of heaven that came against them no one could be sure; but it was a
+power beyond that of earth. The dazzled eyes which seemed to see
+flights of white butterflies fluttering about the standard of the
+Maid, could scarcely belong to one who thought her a servant of the
+enemy of men. But she was a pernicious witch to Talbot, and strangely
+enough to Richemont also, who was on her own side. The English force
+was thrown into confusion, partly, we may suppose, from the broken
+ground on which they were discovered, the undergrowth of the wood
+which hid both armies from each other. But soon that disorder turned
+into the wildest panic and flight. It would almost seem as if between
+these two hereditary opponents one must always be forced into this
+miserable part. Not all the chivalry of France had been able to
+prevent it at the long string of battles in which they were, before
+the revelation of the Maid; and not the desperate and furious valour
+of Talbot could preserve his English force from the infection now.
+Fastolfe, with the philosophy of an old soldier, deciding that it was
+vain to risk his men when the field was already lost, rode off with
+all his band. Talbot fought with desperation, half mad with rage to be
+thus a second time overcome by so unlikely an adversary, and finally
+was taken prisoner; while the whole force behind him fled and were
+killed in their flight, the plain being scattered with their dead
+bodies.
+
+Jeanne herself made use of those spurs concerning which she had
+enquired, and carried away by the passion of battle, followed in the
+pursuit, we are told, until she met a Frenchman brutally ill-using a
+prisoner whom he had taken, upon which the Maid, indignant, flung
+herself from her horse, and, seating herself on the ground beside the
+unfortunate Englishman, took his bleeding head upon her lap and,
+sending for a priest, made his departure from life at least as easy as
+pity and spiritual consolation could make it on such a disastrous
+field. In all the records there is no mention of any actual fighting
+on her part. She stands in the thick of the flying arrows with her
+banner, exposing herself to every danger; in moments of alarm, when
+her forces seem flagging, she seizes and places a ladder against the
+wall for an assault, and climbs the first as some say; but we never
+see her strike a blow. On the banks of the Loire the fate of the mail-
+clad Glasdale, hopeless in the strong stream underneath the ruined
+bridge, brought tears to her eyes, and now all the excitement of the
+pursuit vanished in an instant from her mind, when she saw the English
+man-at-arms dying without the succour of the Church. Pity was always
+in her heart; she was ever on the side of the angels, though an angel
+of war and not of peace.
+
+It is perhaps because the numbers engaged were so few that this flight
+or "Chasse de Patay," has not taken a more important place in the
+records of French historians. In general it is only by means of
+Fontenoy that the /amour propre/ of the French nation defends itself
+against the overwhelming list of battles in which the English have had
+the better of it. But this was probably the most complete victory that
+has ever been gained over the stubborn enemy whom French tactics are
+so seldom able to touch; and the conquerors were purely French without
+any alloy of alien arms, except a few Scots, to help them. The entire
+campaign on the Loire was one of triumph for the French arms, and of
+disaster for the English. They--it is perhaps a point of national
+pride to admit it frankly--were as well beaten as heart of Frenchman
+could desire, beaten not only in the result, but in the conduct of the
+campaign, in heart and in courage, in skill and in genius. There is no
+reason in the world why it should not be admitted. But it was not the
+French generals, not even Dunois, who secured these victories. It was
+the young peasant woman, the dauntless Maid, who underneath the white
+mantle of her inspiration, miraculous indeed, but not so miraculous as
+this, had already developed the genius of a soldier, and who in her
+simplicity, thinking nothing but of her "voices" and the counsel they
+gave her, was already the best general of them all.
+
+When Talbot stood before the French generals, no less a person than
+Alençon himself is reported to have made a remark to him, of that
+ungenerous kind which we call in feminine language "spiteful," and
+which is not foreign to the habit of that great nation. "You did not
+think this morning what would have happened to you before sunset,"
+said the Duc d'Alençon to the prisoner. "It is the fortune of war,"
+replied the English chief.
+
+Once more, however it is like a sudden fall from the open air and
+sunshine when the victorious army and its chiefs turned back to the
+Court where the King and his councillors sat idle, waiting for news of
+what was being done for them. A battle-field is no fine sight; the
+excitement of the conflict, the great end to be served by it, the
+sense of God's special protection, even the tremendous uproar of the
+fight, the intoxication of personal action, danger, and success have,
+we do not doubt a rapture and passion in them for the moment, which
+carry the mind away; but the bravest soldier holds his breath when he
+remembers the after scene, the dead and dying, the horrible injuries
+inflicted, the loss and misery. However, not even the miserable scene
+of the Chasse de Patay is so painful as the reverse of the dismal
+picture, the halls of the royal habitation where, while men died for
+him almost within hearing of the fiddling and the dances, the young
+King trifled away his useless days among his idle favourites, and the
+musicians played, the assemblies were held, and all went on as in the
+Tuileries. We feel as if we had fallen fathoms deep into the
+meannesses of mankind when we come back from the bloodshed and the
+horror outside, to the King's presence within. The troops which had
+gone out in uncertainty, on an enterprise which might well have proved
+too great for them, had returned in full flush of triumph, having at
+last fully broken the spell of the English superiority--which was the
+greatest victory that could have been achieved: besides gaining the
+substantial advantage of three important towns brought back to the
+King's allegiance--only to find themselves as little advanced as
+before, coming back to the self-same struggle with indolent
+complaining, indifference, and ingratitude.
+
+Jeanne had given the signs that had been demanded from her. She had
+delivered Orleans, she cleared the King's road toward the north. She
+had filled the French forces with an enthusiasm and transport of
+valour which swept away all the traditions of ill fortune. From every
+point of view the instant march upon Rheims and the accomplishment of
+the great object of her mission had not only become practicable, but
+was the wisest and most prudent thing to do.
+
+But this was not the opinion of the Chancellor of France, the
+Archbishop of Rheims, and La Tremouille, or of the indolent young King
+himself, who was very willing to rejoice in the relief from all
+immediate danger, the restoration of the surrounding country, and even
+the victory itself, if only they would have left him in quiet where he
+was, sufficiently comfortable, amused, and happy, without forcing
+necessary dangers. Jeanne's successes and her unseasonable zeal and
+the commotion that she and her train of captains made, pouring in, in
+all the excitement of their triumph, into the midst of the madrigals--
+seem to have been anything but welcome. Go to Rheims to be crowned?
+yes, some time when it was convenient, when it was safe. But in the
+meantime what was more important was to forbid Richemont, whom the
+Chancellor hated and the King did not love, to come into the presence
+or to have any share either in warfare or in pageant. This was not
+only in itself an extremely foolish thing to do, which is always a
+recommendation, but it was at the same time an excuse for wasting a
+little precious time. When this was at last accomplished, and
+Richemont, though deeply wounded and offended, proved himself so much
+a man of honour and a patriot, that though dismissed by the King he
+still upheld, if languidly, his cause--there was yet a great deal of
+resistance to be overcome. Paris though so far off was thrown into
+great excitement and alarm by the flight at Patay, and the whole city
+was in commotion fearing an immediate advance and attack. But in
+Loches, or wherever Charles may have been, it was all taken very
+easily. Fastolfe, the fugitive, had his Garter taken from him as the
+greatest disgrace that could be inflicted, for his shameful flight,
+about the time when Richemont, one of the victors, was being sent off
+and disgraced on the other side for the crime of having helped to
+inflict, without the consent of the King, the greatest blow which had
+yet been given to the English domination! So the Court held on its
+ridiculous and fatal course.
+
+However the force of public feeling which must have been very frankly
+expressed by many important voices was too much for Charles and he was
+at length compelled to put himself in motion. The army had assembled
+at Gien, where he joined it, and the great wave of enthusiasm awakened
+by Jeanne, and on which he now moved forth as on the top of the wave,
+was for the time triumphant. No one dared say now that the Maid was a
+sorceress, or that it was by the aid of Beelzebub that she cast out
+devils; but a hundred jealousies and hatreds worked against her behind
+backs, among the courtiers, among the clergy, strange as that may
+sound, in sight of the absolute devotion of her mind, and the saintly
+life she led. So much was this the case still, notwithstanding the
+practical proofs she had given of her claims, that even persons of
+kindred mind, partially sharing her inspirations, such as the famous
+Brother Richard of Troyes, looked upon her with suspicion and alarm--
+fearing a delusion of Satan. It is more easy perhaps to understand why
+the archbishops and bishops should have been inclined against her,
+since, though perfectly orthodox and a good Catholic, Jeanne had been
+independent of all priestly guidance and had sought no sanction from
+the Church to her commission, which she believed to be given by
+Heaven. "Give God the praise; but we know that this woman is a
+sinner." This was the best they could find to say of her in the moment
+of her greatest victories; but indeed it is no disparagement to Jeanne
+or to any saint that she should share with her Master the opprobrium
+of such words as these.
+
+At last however a reluctant start was made. Jeanne with her "people,"
+her little staff, in which, now, were two of her brothers, a second
+having joined her after Orleans, left Gien on the 28th of June; and
+the next day the King very unwillingly set out. There is given a long
+list of generals who surrounded and accompanied him, three or four
+princes of the blood, the Bastard of Orleans, the Archbishop of
+Rheims, marshals, admirals, and innumerable seigneurs, among whom was
+our young Guy de Laval who wrote the letter to his "mothers" which we
+have already quoted and whose faith in the Maid we thus know; and our
+ever faithful La Hire, the big-voiced Gascon who had permission to
+swear by his /bâton/, the d'Artagnan of this history. We reckon these
+names as those of friends: Dunois the ever-brave, Alençon the /gentil
+Duc/ for whom Jeanne had a special and protecting kindness, La Hire
+the rough captain of Free Lances, and the graceful young seigneur, Sir
+Guy as we should have called him had he been English, who was so ready
+to sell or mortgage his land that he might convey his troop
+befittingly to the wars. This little group brightens the march for us
+with their friendly faces. We know that they have but one thought of
+the warrior maiden in whose genius they had begun to have a wondering
+confidence as well as in her divine mission. While they were there we
+feel that she had at least so many who understood her, and who bore
+her the affection of brothers. We are told that in the progress of the
+army Jeanne had no definite place. She rode where she pleased,
+sometimes in the front, sometimes in the rear. One imagines with
+pleasure that wherever her charger passed along the lines it would be
+accompanied by one or other of those valiant and faithful companions.
+
+The first place at which a halt was made was Auxerre, a town occupied
+chiefly by Burgundians, which closed its gates, but by means of
+bribes, partly of provisions to be supplied, partly of gifts to La
+Tremouille, secured itself from the attack which Jeanne longed to
+lead. Other smaller strongholds on the road yielded without
+hesitation. At last they came to Troyes, a large and strong place,
+well garrisoned and confident in its strength, the town distinguished
+in the history of the time by the treaty made there, by which the
+young King had been disinherited--and by the marriage of Henry of
+England with the Princess Catherine of France, in whose right he was
+to succeed to the throne. It was an ill-omened place for a French king
+and the camp was torn with dissensions. Should the army march by,
+taking no notice of it and so get all the sooner to Rheims? or should
+they pause first, to try their fortune against those solid walls? But
+indeed it was not the camp that debated this question. The camp was of
+Jeanne's mind whichever side she took, and her side was always that of
+the promptest action. The garrison made a bold sortie, the very day of
+the arrival of Charles and his forces, but had been beaten back: and
+the King encamped under the walls, wavering and uncertain whether he
+might not still depart on the morrow, but sending a repeated summons
+to surrender, to which no attention was paid.
+
+Once more there was a pause of indecision; the King was not bold
+enough either to push on and leave the city, or to attack it. Again
+councils of war succeeded each other day after day, discussing the
+matter over and over, leaving the King each time more doubtful, more
+timid than before. From these debates Jeanne was anxiously held back,
+while every silken fool gave his opinion. At last, one of the
+councillors was stirred by this strange anomaly. He declared among
+them all, that as it was by the advice of the Maid that the expedition
+had been undertaken, without her acquiescence it ought not to be
+abandoned. "When the King set out it was not because of the great
+puissance of the army he then had with him, or the great treasure he
+had to provide for them, nor yet because it seemed to him a probable
+thing to be accomplished; but the said expedition was undertaken
+solely at the suit of the said Jeanne, who urged him constantly to go
+forward, to be crowned at Rheims, and that he should find little
+resistance, for it was the pleasure and will of God. If the said
+Jeanne is not to be allowed to give her advice now, it is my opinion
+that we should turn back," said the Seigneur de Treves, who had never
+been a partisan of or believer in Jeanne. We are told that at this
+fortunate moment when one of her opponents had thus pronounced in her
+favour, Jeanne, impatient and restless, knocked at the door of the
+council chamber as she had done before in her rustic boldness; and
+then there occurred a brief and characteristic dialogue.
+
+"Jeanne," said the Archbishop of Rheims, taking the first word,
+probably with the ready instinct of a conspirator to excuse himself
+from having helped to shut her out, "the King and his council are in
+great perplexity to know what they should do."
+
+"Shall I be believed if I speak?" said the Maid.
+
+"I cannot tell," replied the King, interposing; "though if you say
+things that are reasonable and profitable, I shall certainly believe
+you."
+
+"Shall I be believed?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes," said the King, "according as you speak."
+
+"Noble Dauphin," she exclaimed, "order your people to assault the city
+of Troyes, to hold no more councils; for, by my God, in three days I
+will introduce you into the town of Troyes, by love or by force, and
+false Burgundy shall be dismayed."
+
+"Jeanne," said the Chancellor, "if you could do that in six days, we
+might well wait."
+
+"You shall be master of the place," said the Maid, addressing herself
+steadily to the King, "not in six days, but to-morrow."
+
+And then there occurred once more the now habitual scene. It was no
+longer the miracle it had been to see her dash forward to her post
+under the walls with her standard which was the signal for battle, to
+which the impatient troops responded, confident in her, as she in
+herself. But for the first time we hear how the young general,
+learning her trade of war day by day, made her preparations for the
+siege. She was a gunner born, according to all we hear, and was quick
+to perceive the advantage of her rude artillery though she had never
+seen one of these /bouches de feu/ till she encountered them at
+Orleans. The whole army was set to work during the night, knights and
+men-at-arms alike, to raise--with any kind of handy material, palings
+faggots, tables, even doors and windows, taken it must be feared from
+some neighbouring village or faubourg--a mound on which to place the
+guns. The country as we have said is as flat as the palm of one's
+hand. They worked all night under cover of the darkness with
+incredible devotion, while the alarmed townsfolk not knowing what was
+being done, but no doubt divining something from the unusual
+commotion, betook themselves to the churches to pray, and began to
+ponder whether after all it might not be better to join the King whose
+armies were led by St. Michael himself in the person of his
+representative, than to risk a siege. Once more the spell of the Maid
+fell on the defenders of the place. It was witchcraft, it was some
+vile art. They had no heart to man the battlements, to fight like
+their brothers at Orleans and Jargeau in face of all the powers of the
+evil one: the cry of "/Sus! Sus!/" was like the death-knell in their
+ears.
+
+While the soldiers within the walls were thus trembling and drawing
+back, the bishop and his clergy took the matter in hand; they sallied
+forth, a long procession attended by half the city, to parley with the
+King. It was in the earliest dawn, while yet the peaceful world was
+scarcely awake; but the town had been in commotion all night, every
+visionary person in it seeing visions and dreaming dreams, and a panic
+of superstition and spiritual terror taking the strength out of every
+arm. Jeanne was already at her post, a glimmering white figure in the
+faint and visionary twilight of the morning, when the gates of the
+city swung back before this tremulous procession. The King, however,
+received the envoys graciously, and readily promised to guarantee all
+the rights of Troyes, and to permit the garrison to depart in peace,
+if the town was given up to him. We are not told whether the Maid
+acquiesced in this arrangement, though it at once secured the
+fulfilment of her prophecy; but in any case she would seem to have
+been suspicious of the good faith of the departing garrison. Instead
+of retiring to her tent she took her place at the gate, watchful, to
+see the enemy march forth. And her suspicion was not without reason.
+The allied troops, English and Burgundian, poured forth from the city
+gates, crestfallen, unwilling to look the way of the white witch, who
+might for aught they knew lay them under some dreadful spell, even in
+the moment of passing. But in the midst of them came a darker band,
+the French prisoners whom they had previously taken, who were as a
+sort of funded capital in their hands, each man worth so much money as
+a ransom, It was for this that Jeanne had prepared herself. "/En nom
+Dieu/," she cried, "they shall not be carried away." The march was
+stopped, the alarm given, the King unwillingly aroused once more from
+his slumbers. Charles must have been disturbed at the most untimely
+hour by the ambassadors from the town, and it mattered little to his
+supreme indolence and indifference what might happen to his
+unfortunate lieges; but he was forced to bestir himself, and even to
+give something from his impoverished exchequer for the ransom of the
+prisoners, which must have been more disagreeable still. The feelings
+of these men who would have been dragged away in captivity under the
+eyes of their victorious countrymen, but for the vigilance of the
+Maid, may easily be imagined.
+
+Jeanne seems to have entered the town at once, to prepare for the
+reception of the King, and to take instant possession of the place,
+forestalling all further impediment. The people in the streets,
+however, received her in a very different way from those of Orleans,
+with trouble and alarm, staring at her as at a dangerous and malignant
+visitor. The Brother Richard, before mentioned, the great preacher and
+reformer, was the oracle of Troyes, and held the conscience of the
+city in his hands. When he suddenly appeared to confront her, every
+eye was turned upon them. But the friar himself was in no less doubt
+than his disciples; he approached her dubiously, crossing himself,
+making the sacred sign in the air, and sprinkling a shower of holy
+water before him to drive away the demon, if demon there was. Jeanne
+was not unused to support the rudest accost, and her frank voice,
+still /assez femme/, made itself heard over every clamour. "Come on, I
+shall not fly away," she cried, with, one hopes, a laugh of confident
+innocence and good-humour, in face of those significant gestures and
+the terrified looks of all about her. French art has been unkind to
+Jeanne, occupying itself very little about her till recently; but her
+short career is full of pictures. Here the simple page grows bright
+with the ancient houses and highly coloured crowd: the frightened and
+eager faces at every window, the white warrior in the midst, sending
+forth a thousand rays from the polished steel and silver of
+breastplate and helmet: and the brown Franciscan monk advancing amid a
+shower of water drops, a mysterious repetition of signs. It gives us
+an extraordinary epitome of the history of France at that period to
+turn from this scene to the wild enthusiasm of Orleans, its crowd of
+people thronging about her, its shouts rending the air; while Troyes
+was full of terror, doubt, and ill-will, though its nearest neighbour,
+so to speak, the next town, and so short a distance away.
+
+A little later in the same day, the next after the surrender, Jeanne,
+riding with her standard by the side of the King, conducted him to the
+cathedral where he confirmed his previous promises and received the
+homage of the town. It was a beautiful sight, the chronicle tells us,
+to see all these magnificent people, so well dressed and well mounted;
+"/il feroit très beau voir./"
+
+The fate of Troyes decided that of Chalons, the only other important
+town on the way, the gates of which were thrown open as Charles and
+his army, which grew and increased every day, proceeded on its road.
+Every promise of the Maid had been so far accomplished, both in the
+greater object and in the details: and now there was nothing between
+Charles the disinherited and almost ruined Dauphin of three months
+ago, trying to forget himself in the seclusion and the sports of
+Chinon--and the sacred ceremonial which drew with it every tradition
+and every assurance of an ancient and lawful throne.
+
+Jeanne had her little adventure, personal to herself on the way.
+Though there were neither posts nor telegraphs in those days, there
+has always been a strange swift current in the air or soil which has
+conveyed news, in a great national crisis, from one end of the country
+to the other. It was not so great a distance to Domremy on the Meuse
+from Troyes on the Loire, and it appears that a little group of
+peasants, bolder than the rest, had come forth to hang about the road
+when the army passed and see what was so fine a sight, and perhaps to
+catch a glimpse of their /payse/, their little neighbour, the
+/commère/ who was godmother to Gerard d'Epinal's child, the youthful
+gossip of his young wife--but who was now, if all tales were true, a
+great person, and rode by the side of the King. They went as far as
+Chalons to see if perhaps all this were true and not a fable; and no
+doubt stood astonished to see her ride by, to hear all the marvellous
+tales that were told of her, and to assure themselves that it was
+truly Jeanne upon whom, more than upon the King, every eye was bent.
+This small scene in the midst of so many great ones would probably
+have been the most interesting of all had it been told us at any
+length. The peasant travellers surrounded her with wistful questions,
+with wonder and admiration. Was she never afraid among all those risks
+of war, when the arrows hailed about her and the /bouches de feu/, the
+mouths of fire, bellowed and flung forth great stones and bullets upon
+her? "I fear nothing but treason," said the victorious Maid. She knew,
+though her humble visitors did not, how that base thing skulked at her
+heels, and infested every path. It must not be forgotten that this
+wonderful and victorious campaign, with all its lists of towns taken
+and armies discomfited, lasted six weeks only, almost every day of
+which was distinguished by some victory.
+----------
+[1] The former story was written in 1429, by the Greffier of Rochelle.
+    "I will yield me only to her, the most valiant woman in the
+    world." The Greffier was writing at the moment, but not, of
+    course, as an eyewitness.--A. L.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CORONATION.
+JULY 17, 1429.
+
+The road was now clear, and even the most timid of counsellors could
+not longer hold back the most indolent of kings. Jeanne had kept her
+word once more and fulfilled her own prophecy, and a force of
+enthusiasm and certainty, not to be put down, pressed forward the
+unwilling Court towards the great ceremonial of the coronation, to
+which all except those most chiefly concerned attached so great an
+importance. Charles would have hesitated still, and questioned the
+possibility of resistance on the part of Rheims, if that city had not
+sent a deputation of citizens with the keys of the town, to meet him.
+After this it was but a triumphal march into the sacred place, where
+the great cathedral dominated a swarming, busy, mediæval city. King
+and Archbishop had a double triumph, for the priest like the monarch
+had been shut out from his lawful throne, and it was only in the train
+of the Maid that this great ecclesiastic was able to take possession
+of his dignities. The King alighted with the Archbishop at the
+Archevêché which is close to the cathedral, an immense, old palace in
+which the heads of the expedition were lodged. There is a magnificent
+old hall still remaining in which no doubt they all assembled,
+scarcely able to believe that their object was accomplished and that
+the King of France was actually in Rheims, and all the prophecies
+fulfilled. The Archbishop marched into the city in the morning;
+Charles and his Court, and all his great seigneurs, and the body of
+his army, in which there were many fighting men half armed, and some
+in their rustic clothes as they had left their fields to join the King
+in his march--poured in in the evening, after the ecclesiastical
+procession, filling the town with commotion. Jeanne rode beside the
+King, her banner in her hand. It was July, the vigil of the Madeleine,
+and every church poured forth its crowd to witness the entry, and the
+populace, half troubled, half glad, gazed its eyes out upon the white
+warrior at the side of the King. Her father and uncle were there to
+meet her at the old inn in the Place, which still proudly preserves
+the record of the peasant guests: two astonished rustics, no doubt,
+were thrust forth from some window to watch that incredible sight--
+Jacques who would rather have drowned his daughter with his own hands,
+than have seen her thus launched among men, gazing still aghast at the
+resplendent figure of the chevalière at the head of the procession.
+This was very different from what he had thought of when his village
+respectability was tortured by the idea of his girl among the
+troopers, yet probably the rigid peasant had never changed his mind.
+
+We are told by M. Blaze de Bury of an ancient custom which we do not
+find stated elsewhere. A platform was erected, he tells us, outside
+the choir of the cathedral to which the King was led the evening
+before the coronation, surrounded by his peers, who showed him to the
+assembled people with a traditional proclamation: "Here is your King
+whom we, peers of France, crown as King and sovereign lord. And if
+there is a soul here which has any objection to make, let him speak
+and we will answer him. And to-morrow he shall be consecrated by the
+grace of the Holy Spirit if you have nothing to say against it." The
+people replied by cries of "Noël, Noël!" It is not to be supposed that
+the veto of the people of Rheims would have been effectual had they
+opposed: but the scene is wonderfully picturesque. No doubt Jeanne too
+was there, watching over her King, as she seems to have done, like a
+mother over her child, at this crisis of his affairs.
+
+That night there was little sleep in Rheims, for everything had to be
+prepared in haste, the decorations of the cathedral, the provisions
+for the ceremonial. Many of the necessary articles were at Saint Denis
+in the hands of the English, and the treasury of the cathedral had to
+be ransacked to find the fitting vessels. Fortunately it was rich,
+more rich probably than it is now, when the commonplace silver of the
+beginning of this century has replaced the ancient vials. Through the
+short summer night everyone was at work in these preparations; and by
+the dawn of day visitors began to flow into the city, great personages
+and small, to attend the great ceremonial and to pay their homage. The
+greatest of all was the Duke of Lorraine, he who had consulted Jeanne
+about his health, husband of the heiress of that rich principality,
+and son of Queen Yolande who was no doubt with the Court. All France
+seemed to pour into the famous town, where so important an act was
+about to be accomplished, with money and wine flowing on all hands,
+and the enthusiasm growing along with the popular excitement and
+profit. Even great London is stirred to its limits, many miles off
+from the centre of proceedings, by such a great event; how much more
+the little mediæval city, in which every one might hope to see
+something of the pageant, as one shining group after another, with
+armour blazing in the sun, and sleek horses caracoling, arrived at the
+great gates of the Archevêché: and lesser parties scarcely less
+interesting poured in in need of lodging, of equipment and provisions;
+while every housewife searched her stores for a piece of brilliant
+stuff, of old silk or embroidery, to make her house shine like the
+rest.
+
+Early in the morning, a wonderful procession came out of the
+Archbishop's house. Four splendid peers of France, in full armour with
+their banners, rode through the streets to the old Abbey of Saint Remy
+--the old church which Leo IX. consecrated, in the eleventh century,
+on an equally splendid occasion, and which may still be seen to-day--
+to fetch from its shrine, where it was strictly guarded by the monks,
+the Sainte Ampoule, the holy and sacred vial in which the oil of
+consecration had been sent to Clovis out of Heaven. These noble
+messengers were the "hostages" of this sacred charge, engaging
+themselves by an oath never to lose sight of it by night or day, till
+it was restored to its appointed guardians. This vow having been made,
+the Abbot of St. Remy, in his richest robes, appeared surrounded by
+his monks, carrying the treasure in his hands; and under a splendid
+canopy, blazing in the sunshine with cloth of gold, marched towards
+the cathedral under the escort of the Knights Hostages, blazing also
+in the flashes of their armour. This procession was met half-way,
+before the Church of St. Denis, by another, that of the Archbishop and
+his train, to whom the holy oil was solemnly confided, and carried by
+them to the cathedral, already filled by a dazzled and dazzling crowd.
+
+The Maid had her occupations this July morning like the rest. We hear
+nothing of any interview with her father, or with Durand the good
+uncle who had helped her in the beginning of her career; though it was
+Durand who was sent for to the King and questioned as to Jeanne's life
+in her childhood and early youth; which we may take as proof that
+Jacques d'Arc still stood aloof, /dour/, as a Scotch peasant father
+might have been, suspicious of his daughter's intimacy with all these
+fine people, and in no way cured of his objections to the publicity
+which is little less than shame to such rugged folk. And there were
+his two sons who would take him about, and with whom probably in their
+easier commonplace he was more at home than with Jeanne. What the Maid
+had to do on the morning of the coronation day was something very
+different from any home talk with her relations. She who felt herself
+commissioned not only to lead the armies of France, but to deal with
+her princes and take part in her councils, occupied the morning in
+dictating a letter to the Duke of Burgundy. She had summoned the
+English by letter three times repeated, to withdraw peaceably from the
+possessions which by God's will were French. It was with still better
+reason that she summoned Philip of Burgundy to renounce his feud with
+his cousin, and thus to heal the breach which had torn France in two:
+
+  JHESUS, MARIA.
+
+  High and redoubtable Prince, Duke of Burgundy. Jeanne the Maid
+  requires on the part of the King of Heaven, my most just sovereign
+  and Lord (/mon droicturier souverain seigneur/), that the King of
+  France and you make peace between yourselves, firm, strong and
+  that will endure. Pardon each other of good heart, entirely, as
+  loyal Christians ought to do, and if you desire to fight let it be
+  against the Saracens. Prince of Burgundy, I pray, supplicate, and
+  require, as humbly as may be, fight no longer against the holy
+  kingdom of France: withdraw, at once and speedily, your people who
+  are in any strongholds or fortresses of the said holy kingdom; and
+  on the part of the gentle King of France, he is ready to make
+  peace with you, having respect to his honour, and upon your life
+  that you never will gain a battle against loyal Frenchmen and that
+  all those who war against the said holy kingdom of France, war
+  against the King Jesus, King of Heaven and of all the world and my
+  just and sovereign Lord. And I pray and require with clasped hands
+  that you fight not, nor make any battle against us, neither your
+  friends nor your subjects; but believe always however great in
+  number may be the men you lead against us, that you will never
+  win, and it would be great pity for the great battle and the blood
+  that would be shed of those who came against us. Three weeks ago I
+  sent you a letter by a herald that you should be present at the
+  consecration of the King, which to-day, Sunday, the seventeenth of
+  the present month of July, is done in the city of Rheims: to which
+  I have had no answer, nor even any news by the said herald. To God
+  I commend you, and may He be your guard if it pleases Him, and I
+  pray God to make good peace.
+
+  Written at the aforesaid Rheims, the seventeenth day of July,
+  1429.
+
+When the letter was finished Jeanne put on her armour and prepared for
+the great ceremony. We are not told what part she took in it, nor is
+any more prominent position assigned to her than among the noble crowd
+of peers and generals who surrounded the altar, where her place would
+naturally be, upon the broad raised platform of the choir, so
+excellently adapted for such ceremonies. Her banner we are told was
+borne into the cathedral, in order, as she proudly explained
+afterwards, that having been foremost in the danger it should share
+the honour.
+
+But we have no right to suppose that the Maid took the position of the
+chief actor in the pageant and stood alone by the side of Charles, as
+the exigencies of the pictorial art have required her to do. When,
+however, the ceremony was completed, and he had received on his knees
+the anointing which separated him as king from every other class of
+men, and while the lofty vaults echoed with the cries of Noël! Noël!
+by which the people hailed the completed ceremony, Jeanne could
+contain herself no longer. The object was attained for which she had
+laboured and struggled, and overcome every opponent. She stepped
+forward out of the brilliant crowd, and threw herself at the feet of
+the now crowned monarch, embracing his knees. "Gentle King," she cried
+with tears, "now is the pleasure of God fulfilled--whose will it was
+that I should raise the siege of Orleans and lead you to this city of
+Rheims to receive your consecration. Now has He shown that you are
+true King, and that the kingdom of France truly belongs to you alone."
+
+Those broken words, her tears, the cry of that profound satisfaction
+which is almost anguish, the "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant
+depart in peace," which is so suitable to the lips of the old, so
+poignant from those of the young, pierced all hearts. It is added that
+she asked leave to withdraw, her work being done, and that all who saw
+her were filled with sympathy. It was no doubt the irresistible
+outburst of a heart too full; and though that fulness was all joy and
+triumph, yet there was in it a sense of completed work, a rending
+asunder and tearing away from life, the end of a wonderful and
+triumphant tale.
+
+There is a considerable controversy as to the precise meaning of that
+outburst of emotion. Did the Maid mean that her work was over, and her
+divine mission fulfilled? Was this all that she believed herself to be
+appointed to do? or did she expect, as she sometimes said, to /bouter/
+the English out of France altogether? In the one case she ought to
+have relinquished her work, and in not doing so she acted without the
+protection of God which had hitherto made her invulnerable. In the
+other, her "voices," her inspiration, must have failed her, for her
+course of triumph went no farther. It is impossible to decide between
+these contending theories. She did speak in both senses, sometimes
+declaring that she was to take Paris, sometimes, her intention to
+/bouter/ the English out of the kingdom. At the same time she betrayed
+a constant conviction that her office had limitations and must come to
+an end. "I will last but a year," she said to the King and to Alençon.
+The testimony of Dunois seems to be the best we can have on this
+point. He says in his deposition, made many years after her death:
+"Although Jeanne sometimes talked playfully to amuse people, of things
+concerning the war which were not afterwards accomplished, yet when
+she spoke seriously of the war, and of her own career and her
+vocation, she never affirmed anything but that she was sent to raise
+the siege of Orleans and to lead the King to Rheims to be crowned."
+
+If this were so was she wrong in continuing her warfare, and did she
+place herself in the position of one who goes on her own charges,
+finding the mission from on high unnecessary? Or in the other case did
+her inspiration fail her, or were the intrigues of Charles and his
+Court sufficient to balk the designs of Heaven? We prefer to think
+that Jeanne's commission concerned only those two things which she
+accomplished so completely; but that in continuing the war, she acted
+only as a well inspired and honourable young soldier might, though no
+longer as the direct messenger of God. She had as much right to do so
+as to return to her distaff or her needle in her native village; but
+she became subject to all the ordinary laws of war by so doing,
+exposed herself to be taken or overthrown like any man-at-arms, and
+accepted that risk. What is certain is, that every intrigue sprang up
+again afresh on the evening of that brilliant and triumphant
+ceremonial, and that from the moment of the accomplishment of her
+great work the failure of the Maid began.
+
+These intrigues had been in her way since her very first beginning, as
+has been seen. At Orleans, in the very field as well as in the council
+chamber and the presence, everything was done to balk her, and to
+cross her plans, but in vain; she triumphed over every contrivance
+against her, and broke through the plots, and overcame the plotters.
+But after Rheims the combination of dangers became ever greater and
+greater, and we may say that no merely human general would have had a
+chance in face of the many and bewildering influences of evil. Charles
+who was himself, at least at this period of his career, sufficiently
+indolent and unenterprising to have damped the energies of any
+commander, was, in addition, surrounded by advisers who had always
+been impatient and jealous of the interference of Jeanne, and would
+have cast her off as a witch, or passed her by as an impostor, had
+that been possible, without permitting her to strike a blow. They had
+now grudgingly made use of her, or rather, for this is too much to
+say, had permitted her action where they had no power to restrain it:
+but they were as little friendly, as malignant in their treatment of
+the Maid as ever, and more hopeful, now that so much had been done by
+her means, of being able to shake her off and pursue their fate in
+their own way.
+
+The position of Charles crowned King of France with all the
+traditional pomp, master of the Orleannais, with fresh bands of
+supporters coming in to swell his army day by day, and Paris itself
+almost within his reach, was very different from that of the
+discredited Dauphin at Chinon, whom half the world believed to have no
+right to the crown which his own mother had signed away from him, and
+who wasted his idle days in folly to the profit of the greedy
+councillors who schemed and trafficked with his enemies, and to the
+destruction of all his hopes. The strange apparition of virginal
+purity, energy, and faith which had taken up and saved him against his
+will and all his efforts had not ceased for a moment to be hateful to
+La Tremouille and his party; and Charles--though he seems to have had
+a certain appreciation of the Maid, and even a liking for her frank
+and fearless character, apart from any faith in her mission--was far
+too ready to accept the facts of the moment, and probably to believe
+that, after all, his own worth and favour with Heaven had a great deal
+to do with this dazzling triumph and success: certainly he was not the
+man to make any stand for his deliverer. But that she was an auxiliary
+too important to be sent away was reluctantly apparent to them all. To
+keep her as a sort of tame angel about the Court in order to be
+produced when she was wanted, to put heart into the soldiers and
+frighten the English as she certainly had the gift of doing, no doubt
+appeared to all as a thing desirable enough. And they dared not let
+her go "because of the people," nor, may we believe, would Alençon,
+Dunois, La Hire, and the rest have tolerated thus the abandonment of
+their comrade. To dismiss her even at her own word would have been
+impossible, and it is hard to believe that Jeanne, after that
+extraordinary brief career as a triumphant general and leader, could
+have gone back to her father's cottage of the village, though she
+thought she would fain have done so. If we are to believe that she
+felt her mission to be fulfilled, she was yet mistress of her fate to
+serve France and the King as seemed best.
+
+And we have no evidence that her "voices" forsook her, or discouraged
+her. They seem to have changed a little in their burden, they began to
+mingle a sadder tone in their intimations. It began to be breathed
+into her mind though not immediately, that something was to happen to
+her, some disaster not explained, yet that God was to be with her. It
+seems to me that all the circumstances are compatible with a change in
+Jeanne's consciousness, from the moment of the coronation. It might
+have been a grander thing had she retired there and then, her work
+being accomplished as she declared it to be; but it would not have
+been human. She was still a power, if no longer the direct messenger
+from Heaven; a general, with much skill and natural aptitude if not
+the Sent of God; and the ardour of a military career had got into her
+veins. No doubt she was much more good for that, now, than for sitting
+by the side of Isabeau d'Arc at Domremy, and working even into a piece
+of embroidery for the altar, her remembrances and visions of camp and
+siege and the intoxication of victory. She remained, conscious that
+she was no longer exactly as of old, to fight not only against the
+English, but with intimate enemies, far more bitter, whom now she
+knew, against the ordinary fortune of war, and against that which is a
+thousand times worse, the hatred and envy, the cruel carelessness, and
+the malignant schemes of her own countrymen for whom she had fought.
+
+This, so far as we can judge, appears to be the position of Jeanne in
+the second portion of her career; perhaps only dimly apprehended and
+at moments, by herself; not much thought of probably by those around
+her, the wisest of whom had always been sceptical of her divine
+commission; while the populace never saw any change in her, and
+believed that at one time as well as at another the Maid was the Maid,
+and had victory at her command. And no doubt that influence would have
+endured for some time at least, and her dauntless rush against every
+obstacle would have carried success with it, had she been able to
+carry out her plans, and fly forth upon Paris as she had done upon
+Orleans, carrying on the campaign swiftly, promptly, without pause or
+uncertainty. Bedford himself said that Paris "would fall at a blow,"
+if she came on. It had been hard enough, however, to do that, as we
+have seen, when she was the only hope of France and had the fire of
+the divine enthusiasm in her veins; but it was still more hard now to
+mould a young King elated with triumph, beginning to feel the crown
+safe upon his head, and to feel that if there was still much to gain,
+there was now a great deal to be lost. The position was complicated
+and made more difficult for Jeanne by every advantage she had gained.
+
+In the meantime the secret negotiations, which were always being
+carried on under the surface, had come to this point, that Charles had
+made a private treaty with Philip of Burgundy by which that prince
+pledged himself to give up Paris into the King's hands within fifteen
+days. This agreement furnished a sufficient pretext for the delay in
+marching against Paris, delay which was Charles's invariable method,
+and which but for Jeanne's hardihood and determination, had all but
+crushed the expedition to Rheims itself. It was never with any will of
+his or of his adviser, La Tremouille, that any stronghold was
+assailed. He would fain have passed by Troyes, as the reader will
+remember, he would fain have delayed going to Rheims; in each case he
+had been forced to move by the impetuosity of the Maid. But a treaty
+which touched the honour of the King was a different matter. Philip of
+Burgundy, with whom it was made, seems to have held the key of the
+position. He was called to Paris by Bedford on one side to defend the
+city against its lawful King; he had pledged himself on the other to
+Charles to give it up. He had in his hands, though it is uncertain
+whether he ever read it, that missive of the sorceress, the letter of
+Jeanne which I have quoted, calling upon him on the part of God to
+make peace. What was he to do? There were reasons drawing him to both
+sides. He was the enemy of Charles on account of the murder of his
+father, and therefore had every interest in keeping Paris from him; he
+was angry with the English on account of the marriage of the Duke of
+Gloucester with Jacqueline of Brabant, which interfered with his own
+rights and safety in Flanders, and therefore might have served himself
+by giving up the capital to the King. As for the appeal of Jeanne,
+what was the letter of that mad creature to a prince and statesman?
+The progress of affairs was arrested by this double problem. Jeanne
+had been the prominent, the only important figure in the history of
+France for some months past. Now that shining figure was jostled
+aside, and the ordinary laws of life, with all the counter changes of
+negotiation, the ineffectual comings and goings, the meaner half-seen
+persons, the fierce contending personal interests--in which there was
+no love of either God or man, or any elevated notion of patriotism--
+came again into play.
+
+Jeanne would seem to have already foreseen and felt this change even
+before she left Rheims; there is a new tone of sadness in some of her
+recorded words; or if not of sadness, at least of consciousness that
+an end was approaching to all these triumphs and splendours. The
+following tale is told in various different versions, as occurring
+with different people; but the account I give is taken from the lips
+of Dunois himself, a very competent witness. As the King, after his
+coronation, wended his way through the country, receiving submission
+and joyous welcome from every village and little town, it happened
+that while passing through the town of La Ferté, Jeanne rode between
+the Archbishop of Rheims and Dunois. The Archbishop had never been
+friendly to the Maid, and now it was clear, watched her with that half
+satirical, half amused look of the wise man, curious and cynical in
+presence of the incomprehensible, observing her ways and very ready to
+catch her tripping and to entangle her if possible in her own words.
+The people thronged the way, full of enthusiasm, acclaiming the King
+and shouting their joyful exclamations of "Noël!" though it does not
+appear that any part of their devotion was addressed to Jeanne
+herself. "Oh, the good people," she cried with tears in her eyes, "how
+joyful they are to see their noble King! And how happy should I be to
+end my days and be buried here among them!" The priest unmoved by such
+an exclamation from so young a mouth attempted instantly, like the
+Jewish doctors with our Lord, to catch her in her words and draw from
+her some expression that might be used against her. "Jeanne," he said,
+"in what place do you expect to die?" It was a direct challenge to the
+messenger of Heaven to take upon herself the gift of prophecy. But
+Jeanne in her simplicity shattered the snare which probably she did
+not even perceive: "When it pleases God," she said. "I know neither
+the place nor the time."
+
+It was enough, however, that she should think of death and of the
+sweetness of it, after her work accomplished, in the very moment of
+her height of triumph--to show something of a new leaven working in
+her virgin soul.
+
+One characteristic reward, however, Jeanne did receive. Her father and
+uncle were lodged at the public cost as benefactors of the kingdom, as
+may still be seen by the inscription on the old inn in the great Place
+at Rheims; and when Jacques d'Arc left the city he carried with him a
+patent--better than one of nobility which, however, came to the family
+later--of exemption for the villages of Domremy and Greux of all taxes
+and tributes; "an exemption maintained and confirmed up to the
+Revolution, in favour of the said Maid, native of that parish, in
+which are her relations." "In the register of the Exchequer," says M.
+Blaze de Bury, "at the name of the parish of Greux and Domremy, the
+place for the receipt is blank, with these words as explanation: /à
+cause de la Pucelle/, on account of the Maid." There could not have
+been a more delightful reward or one more after her own heart. It
+would be a graceful act of the France of to-day, which has so warmly
+revived the name and image of her maiden deliverer, to renew so
+touching a distinction to her native place.
+
+We are told that Jeanne parted with her father and uncle with tears,
+longing that she might return with them and go back to her mother who
+would rejoice to see her again. This was no doubt quite true, though
+it might be equally true that she could not have gone back. Did not
+the father return, a little sullen, grasping the present he had
+himself received, not sure still that it was not disreputable to have
+a daughter who wore coat armour and rode by the side of the King, a
+position certainly not proper for maidens of humble birth? The dazzled
+peasants turned their backs upon her while she was thus at the height
+of glory, and never, so far as appears, saw her face again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE SECOND PERIOD.
+1429-1430.
+
+The epic so brief, so exciting, so full of wonder had now reached its
+climax. Whatever we may think on the question as to whether Jeanne had
+now reached the limit of her commission, it is at least evident that
+she had reached the highest point of her triumph, and that her short
+day of glory and success came to an end in the great act which she had
+always spoken of as her chief object. She had crowned her King; she
+had recovered for him one of the richest of his provinces, and
+established a strong base for further action on his part. She had
+taught Frenchmen how not to fly before the English, and she had filled
+those stout-hearted English, who for a time had the Frenchmen in their
+powerful steel-clad grip, with terror and panic, and taught them how
+to fly in their turn. This was, from the first, what she had said she
+was appointed to do, and not one of her promises had been broken. Her
+career had been a short one, begun in April, ending in July, one brief
+continuous course of glory. But this triumphant career had come to its
+conclusion. The messenger of God had done her work; the servant must
+not desire to be greater than his Lord. There have been heroes in this
+world whose career has continued a glorious and a happy one to the
+end. Our hearts follow them in their noble career, but when the strain
+and pain are over they come into their kingdom and reap their reward
+the interest fails. We are glad, very glad, that they should live
+happy ever after, but their happiness does not attract us like their
+struggle.
+
+It is different with those whose work and whose motives are not those
+of this world. When they step out of the brilliant lights of triumph
+into sorrow and suffering, all that is most human in us rises to
+follow the bleeding feet, our hearts swell with indignation, with
+sorrow and love, and that instinctive admiration for the noble and
+pure, which proves that our birthright too is of Heaven, however we
+may tarnish or even deny that highest pedigree. The chivalrous romance
+of that age would have made of Jeanne d'Arc the heroine of human
+story. She would have had a noble lover, say our young Guy de Laval,
+or some other generous and brilliant Seigneur of France, and after her
+achievements she would have laid by her sword, and clothed herself
+with the beautiful garments of the age, and would have grown to be a
+noble lady in some half regal chateau, to which her name would have
+given new lustre. The young reader will probably long that it should
+be so; he will feel it an injustice, a wrong to humanity that so
+generous a soul should have no reward; it will seem to him almost a
+personal injury that there should not be a noble chevalier at hand to
+snatch that devoted Maid out of the danger that threatened her, out of
+the horrible fate that befell her; and we can imagine a generous boy,
+and enthusiastic girl, ready to gnash their teeth at the terrible and
+dishonouring thought that it was by English hands that this noble
+creature was tied to the stake and perished in the flames. For the
+last it becomes us[1] to repent, for it was to our everlasting shame;
+but not more to us than to France who condemned her, who lifted no
+finger to help her, who raised not even a cry, a protest, against the
+cruelty and wrong. But for her fate in itself let us not mourn over-
+much. Had the Maid become a great and honoured lady should not we all
+have said as Satan says in the Book of Job: Did Jeanne serve God for
+nought? We should say: See what she made by it. Honour and fame and
+love and happiness. She did nobly, but nobly has she been rewarded.
+
+But that is not God's way. The highest saint is born to martyrdom. To
+serve God for nought is the greatest distinction which He reserves for
+His chosen. And this was the fate to which the Maid of France was
+consecrated from the moment she set out upon her mission. She had the
+supreme glory of accomplishing that which she believed herself to be
+sent to do, and which I also believe she was sent to do, miraculously,
+by means undreamed of, and in which no one beforehand could have
+believed. But when that was done a higher consecration awaited her.
+She had to drink of the cup of which our Lord drank, and to be
+baptised with the baptism with which He was baptised. It was involved
+in every step of the progress that it should be so. And she was
+herself aware of it, vaguely, at heart, as soon as the object of her
+mission was attained. What else could have put the thought of dying
+into the mind of a girl of eighteen in the midst of the adoring crowd,
+to whom to see her, to touch her, was a benediction? When she went
+forth from those gates she was going to her execution, though the end
+was not to be yet. There was still a long struggle before her,
+lingering and slow, more bitter than death, the preface of
+discouragement, of disappointment, of failure when she had most hoped
+to succeed.
+
+She was on the threshold of this second period when she rode out of
+Rheims all brilliant in the summer weather, her banner faded now, but
+glorious, her shining armour bearing signs of warfare, her end
+achieved--yet all the while her heart troubled, uncertain, and full of
+unrest. And it is impossible not to note that from this time her plans
+were less defined than before. Up to the coronation she had known
+exactly what she meant to do, and in spite of all obstructions had
+done it, keeping her genial humour and her patience, steering her
+simple way through all the intrigues of the Court, without bitterness
+and without fear. But now a vague mist seems to fall about the path
+which was so open and so clear. Paris! Yes, the best policy, the true
+generalship would have been to march straight upon Paris, to lose no
+time, to leave as little leisure as possible to the intriguers to
+resume their old plots. So the generals thought as well as Jeanne: but
+the courtiers were not of that mind. The weak and foolish notion of
+falling back upon what they had gained, and of contenting themselves
+with that, was all they thought of; and the un-French, unpatriotic
+temper of Paris which wanted no native king, but was content with the
+foreigner, gave them a certain excuse. We could not even imagine
+London as being ever, at any time, contented with an alien rule. But
+Paris evidently was so, and was ready to defend itself to the death
+against its lawful sovereign. Jeanne had never before been brought
+face to face with such a complication. It had been a straightforward
+struggle, each man for his own side, up to this time. But now other
+things had to be taken into consideration. Here was no faithful
+Orleans holding out eager arms to its deliverer, but a crafty, self-
+seeking city, deaf to patriotism, indifferent to freedom, calculating
+which was most to its profit--and deciding that the stranger, with
+Philip of Burgundy at his back, was the safer guide. This was enough
+of itself to make a simple mind pause in astonishment and dismay.
+
+There is no evidence that the supernatural leaders who had shaped the
+course of the Maid failed her now. She still heard her "voices." She
+still held communion with the three saints who, she believed devoutly,
+came out of Heaven to aid her. The whole question of this supernatural
+guidance is one which is of course open to discussion. There are many
+in these days who do not believe in it at all, who believe in the
+exaltation of Jeanne's brain, in the excitement of her nerves, in some
+strange complication of bodily conditions, which made her believe she
+saw and heard what she did not really see or hear. For our part, we
+confess frankly that these explanations are no explanation at all so
+far as we are concerned; we are far more inclined to believe that the
+Maid spoke truth, she who never told a lie, she who fulfilled all the
+promises she made in the name of her guides, than that those people
+are right who tell us on their own authority that such interpositions
+of Heaven are impossible. Nobody in Jeanne's day doubted that Heaven
+did interpose directly in human affairs. The only question was, Was it
+Heaven in this instance? Was it not rather the evil one? Was it
+sorcery and witchcraft, or was it the agency of God? The English
+believed firmly that it was witchcraft; they could not imagine that it
+was God, the God of battles, who had always been on their side, who
+now took the courage out of their hearts and taught their feet to fly
+for the first time. It was the devil, and the Maid herself was a
+wicked witch. Neither one side nor the other believed that it was from
+Jeanne's excited nerves that these great things came. There were
+plenty of women with excited nerves in France, nerves much more
+excited than those of Jeanne, who was always reasonable at the height
+of her inspiration; but to none of them did it happen to mount the
+breach, to take the city, to drive the enemy--up to that moment
+invincible,--flying from the field.
+
+But it would seem as if these celestial visitants had no longer a
+clear and definite message for the Maid. Their words, which she
+quotes, were now promises of support, vague warnings of trouble to
+come. "Fear not, for God will stand by you." She thought they meant
+that she would be delivered in safety as she had been hitherto, her
+wounds healing, her sacred person preserved from any profane touch.
+But yet such promises have always something enigmatical in them, and
+it might be, as proved to be the case, that they meant rather
+consolation and strength to endure than deliverance. For the first
+time the Maid was often sad; she feared nothing, but the shadow was
+heavy on her heart. Orleans and Rheims had been clear as daylight, her
+"voices" had said to her "Do this" and she had done it. Now there was
+no definite direction. She had to judge for herself what was best, and
+to walk in darkness, hoping that what she did was what she was meant
+to do, but with no longer any certainty. This of itself was a great
+change, and one which no doubt she felt to her heart. M. Fabre tells
+(alone among the biographers of Jeanne) that there were symptoms of
+danger to her sound and steady mind, in her words and ways during the
+moment of triumph. Her chaplain Pasquerel wrote a letter in her name
+to the Hussites, against whom the Pope was then sending crusades, in
+which "I, the Maid," threatened, if they were not converted, to come
+against them and give them the alternative of death or amendment.
+Quicherat says that to the Count d'Armagnac who had written to her,
+whether in good faith or bad, to ask which of the three then existent
+Popes was the real one, she is reported to have answered that she
+would tell him as soon as the English left her free to do so. But this
+is a perverted account of what she really did say, and M. Fabre seems
+to be, like the rest of us, a little confused in his dates: and the
+documents themselves on which he builds are not of unquestioned
+authority. These, however, would be but small speck upon the sunshine
+of her perfect humility and sobriety; if indeed they are to be
+depended upon as authentic at all.
+
+The day of Jeanne, her time of glory and success, was but a short one
+--Orleans was delivered on the 8th of May, the coronation of Charles
+took place on the 17th of July; before the earliest of these dates she
+had spent nearly two months in an anxious yet hopeful struggle of
+preparation, before she was permitted to enter upon her career. The
+time of her discouragement was longer. It was ten months from the day
+when she rode out of Rheims, the 25th of July, 1429, till the 23d of
+May, 1430, when she was taken. She had said after the deliverance of
+Orleans that she had but a year in which to accomplish her work, and
+at a later period, Easter, 1430, her "voices" told her that "before
+the St. Jean" she would be in the power of her enemies. Both these
+statements came true. She rose quickly but fell more slowly,
+struggling along upon the downward course, unable to carry out what
+she would, hampered on every hand, and not apparently followed with
+the same fervour as of old. It is true that the principal cause of all
+seems to have been the schemes of the Court and the indolence of
+Charles; but all these hindrances had existed before, and the King and
+his treacherous advisers had been unwillingly dragged every mile of
+the way, though every step made had been to Charles's advantage. But
+now though the course is still one of victory the Maid no longer seems
+to be either the chief cause or the immediate leader. Perhaps this may
+be partly due to the fact that little fighting was necessary, town
+after town yielding to the King, which reduced the part of Jeanne to
+that of a spectator; but there is a change of atmosphere and tone
+which seems to point to something more fundamental than this. The
+historians are very unwilling to acknowledge, except Michelet who does
+so without hesitation, that she had herself fixed the term of her
+commission as ending at Rheims; it is certain that she said many
+things which bear this meaning, and every fact of her after career
+seems to us to prove it: but it is also true that her conviction
+wavered, and other sayings indicate a different belief or hope. She
+did no wrong in following the profession of arms in which she had made
+so glorious a beginning; she had many gifts and aptitudes for it of
+which she was not herself at first aware: but she was no longer the
+Envoy of God. Enough had been done to arouse the old spirit of France,
+to break the spell of the English supremacy; it was right and fitting
+that France should do the rest for herself. Perhaps Jeanne was not
+herself very clear on this point, and after her first statement of it,
+became less assured. It is not necessary that the servant should know
+the designs of the master. It did not after all affect her. Her
+business was to serve God to the best of her power, not to take the
+management out of His hands.
+
+The army went forth joyously upon its way, directing itself towards
+Paris. There was a pilgrimage to make, such as the Kings of France
+were in the habit of making after their coronation; there were
+pleasant incidents, the submission of a village, the faint resistance,
+instantly overcome, of a small town, to make the early days pleasant.
+Laon and Soissons both surrendered. Senlis and Beauvais received the
+King's envoys with joy. The independent captains of the army made
+little circles about, like parties of pleasure, bringing in another
+and another little stronghold to the allegiance of the King. When he
+turned aside, taking as he passed through, without as yet any serious
+deflection, the road rather to the Loire than to Paris, success still
+attended him. At Château-Thierry resistance was expected to give zest
+to the movement of the forces, but that too yielded at once as the
+others had done. The dates are very vague and it seems difficult to
+find any mode of reconciling them. Almost all the historians while
+accusing the King of foolish dilatoriness and confusion of plans give
+us a description of the undefended state of Paris at the moment, which
+a sudden stroke on the part of Charles might have carried with little
+difficulty, during the absence of all the chiefs from the city and the
+great terror of the inhabitants; but a comparison of dates shows that
+the Duke of Bedford re-entered Paris with strong reinforcements on the
+very day on which Charles left Rheims three days only after his
+coronation, so that he scarcely seems so much to blame as appears. But
+the general delay, inefficiency, and hesitation existing at
+headquarters, naturally lead to mistakes of this kind.
+
+The great point was that Paris itself was by no means disposed to
+receive the King. Strange as it seems to say so Paris was bitterly,
+fiercely English at that extraordinary moment, a fact which ought to
+be taken into account as the most important in the whole matter. There
+was no answering enthusiasm in the capital of France to form an
+auxiliary force behind its ramparts and encourage the besiegers
+outside. The populace perhaps might be indifferent: at the best it had
+no feeling on the subject; but there was no welcome awaiting the King.
+During the time of Bedford's absence the city felt itself to have "no
+lord"--/ceux de Paris avoit grand peur car nul seigneur n' y avoit/.
+It was believed that Charles would put all the inhabitants to the
+sword, and their desperation of feeling was rather that which leads to
+a wild and hopeless defence than to submission. The Duke of Bedford,
+governing in the name of the infant Henry VI. Of England, was their
+seigneur, instead of their natural sovereign. It is a fact which to us
+seems scarcely credible, but it was certainly true. There seems to
+have been no feeling even, on the subject, no general shame as of a
+national betrayal; nothing of the kind. Paris was English, holding by
+the English kings who had never lost a certain hold on France, and
+thinking no shame of its party. It was a hostile town, the chief of
+the English possessions. In the /Journal du Bourgeois de Paris/--who
+was no /bourgeois/ but a distinguished member of that university which
+held the Maid and all her ways in horror--Jeanne the deliverer, the
+incarnation of patriotism and of France is spoken of as "a creature in
+the form of a woman." How extraordinary is this evidence of a state of
+affairs in which it is almost impossible to believe! Paris is France
+nowadays to many people, though no doubt this is but a superficial
+judgment; but in the early part of the fifteenth century, she was
+frankly English, not by compulsion even, but by habit and policy.
+Perhaps the delays, the hesitation, the terrors of Charles and his
+counsellors are thus rendered more excusable than by any other
+explanation.
+
+In the meantime it is almost impossible to follow the wanderings of
+this vacillating army without a map. If the reader should trace its
+movements, he would see what a stumbling and devious course it took as
+of a man blundering in the dark. From Rheims to Soissons the way was
+clear; then there came a sudden move southward to Château-Thierry from
+which indeed there was still a straight line to Paris but which still
+more clearly indicated the highroad leading to the Orleannais, the
+faithful districts of the Loire. This retrograde movement was not made
+without a great outcry from the generals. Their opinion was that the
+King ought to press on to conquer everything while the English forces
+were still depressed and discouraged. In their mind this deflection
+towards the south was an abandonment at once of honour and safety. An
+unimportant check on the way, however, gave an argument to the leaders
+of the army, and Charles permitted himself to be dragged back. They
+then made their way by La Ferté-Milon, Crépy, and Daumartin, and on
+this road the English troops which had been led out from Paris by
+Bedford to intercept them came twice within fighting distance of the
+French army. The English, as all the French historians are eager to
+inform us, invariably entrenched themselves in their positions,
+surrounding their lines with sharp-pointed posts by which the equally
+invariable rush of the French could be broken. But the French on these
+occasions were too wise to repeat the impetuous charge which had
+ruined them at Crécy and Agincourt, and the consequence was that the
+two forces remained within sight of each other, with a few skirmishes
+going on at the flanks, but without any serious encounter.
+
+It will be more satisfactory, however, to copy the following
+/itineraire/ of Charles's movements from the Chronicle of Perceval de
+Cagny who was a member of the household of the Duc d'Alençon, and
+probably present, certainly at all events bound to have the best and
+most correct information. He informs us that the King left Rheims on
+Thursday the 21st of July, and dined, supped, and lay at the Abbey of
+St. Nanuol that night, where were brought to him the keys of the city
+of Laon. He then set out on /le voyage à venir devant Paris/.
+
+"And on Saturday the 23d of the same month the King dined, supped and
+lay at Soissons, and was there received the most honourably that the
+churchmen, burghers and other people of the town were capable of: for
+they had all great fear because of the destruction of the town which
+had been taken by the Burgundians and made to rebel against the King.
+
+"Friday the 29th day of July the King and his company were all day
+before Château-Thierry in order of battle, hoping that the Duke of
+Bedford would appear to fight. The place surrendered at the hour of
+vespers, and the King lodged there till Monday the first of August. On
+that day the King lay at Monmirail in Brie.
+
+"Tuesday the 2d of August he passed the night in the town of Provins,
+and had the best possible reception there, and remained till the
+Friday following, the 5th August. Sunday the 7th the King lay at the
+town of Coulommièrs in Brie. Wednesday the 10th he lay at La Ferté-
+Milon, Thursday at Crespy in Valois--Friday at Laigny-le-Sec. The
+following Saturday the 13th the King held the field near Dammartin-en-
+Gouelle, for the whole day looking out for the English: but they came
+not.
+
+"On Sunday the 14th August the Maid, the Duc d'Alençon, the Count de
+Vendosme, the Marshals and other captains accompanied by six or seven
+thousand combatants were at the hour of vespers lodged in the fields
+near Montépilloy, nearly two leagues from the town of Senlis--The Duke
+of Bedford and other English captains with between eight and ten
+thousand English lying half a league from Senlis between our people
+and the said city on a little stream, in a village called Notre Dame
+de la Victoire. That evening our people skirmished with the English
+near to their camp and in this skirmish were people taken on each
+side, and of the English Captain d'Orbec and ten or twelve others, and
+people wounded on both sides: when night fell each retired to their
+own quarters."
+
+The same writer records an appeal in the true tone of chivalry
+addressed to the English by Jeanne and Alençon desiring them to come
+out from their entrenchments and fight: and promising to withdraw to a
+sufficient distance to permit the enemy to place himself in the open
+field. The French troops had first "put themselves in the best state
+of conscience that could possibly be, hearing mass at an early hour
+and then to horse." But the English would not come out. Jeanne, with
+her standard in her hand rode up to the English entrenchments, and
+some one says (not de Cagny) struck the posts with her banner,
+challenging the force within to come out and fight; while they on
+their side waved at the French in defiance, a standard copied from
+that of Jeanne, on which was depicted a distaff and spindle. But
+neither host approached any nearer. Finally, Charles made his way to
+Compiègne.
+
+At Château-Thierry there was concluded an arrangement with Philip of
+Burgundy for a truce of fifteen days, before the end of which time the
+Duke undertook to deliver Paris peaceably to the French. That this was
+simply to gain time and that no idea of giving up Paris had ever been
+entertained is evident; perhaps Charles was not even deceived. He, no
+more than Philip, had any desire to encounter the dangers of such a
+siege. But he was able at least to silence the clamours of the army
+and the representations of the persistent Maid by this truce. To wait
+for fifteen days and receive the prize without a blow struck, would
+not that be best? The counsellors of the King held thus a strong
+position, though the delay made the hearts of the warriors sick.
+
+The figure of Jeanne appears during these marchings and counter-
+marchings like that of any other general, pursuing a skilful but not
+unusual plan of campaign. That she did well and bravely there can be
+no doubt, and there is a characteristic touch which we recognise, in
+the fact that she and all of her company "put themselves in the best
+state of conscience that could be," before they took to horse; but the
+skirmishes and repulses are such as Alençon himself might have made.
+"She made much diligence," the same chronicler tells us, "to reduce
+and place many towns in the obedience of the King," but so did many
+others with like success. We hear no more her vigorous knock at the
+door of the council chamber if the discussion there was too long or
+the proceedings too secret. Her appearances are those of a general
+among many other generals, no longer with any special certainty in her
+movements as of a person inspired. We are reminded of a story told of
+a previous period, after the fight at Patay, when blazing forth in the
+indignation of her youthful purity at the sight of one of the camp
+followers, a degraded woman with some soldiers, she struck the wanton
+with the flat of her sword, driving her forth from the camp, where was
+no longer that chastened army of awed and reverent soldiers making
+their confession on the eve of every battle, whom she had led to
+Orleans. The sword she used on this occasion, was, it is said, the
+miraculous sword which had been found under the high altar of St.
+Catharine at Fierbois; but at the touch of the unclean the maiden
+brand broke in two. If this was an allegory[2] to show that the work
+of that weapon was over, and the common sword of the soldier enough
+for the warfare that remained, it could not be more clearly realised
+than in the history of this campaign. The only touch of our real Maid
+in her own distinct person comes to us in a letter written in a field
+on that same wavering road to Paris, dated as early as the 5th of
+August and addressed to the good people of Rheims, some of whom had
+evidently written to her to ask what was the meaning of the delay, and
+whether she had given up the cause of the country. There is a terse
+determination in its brief, indignant sentences which is a relief to
+the reader weary of the wavering and purposeless campaign:
+
+ "Dear and good friends, good and loyal Frenchmen of the town of
+  Rheims. Jeanne, the Maid, sends you news of her. It is true that
+  the King has made a truce of fifteen days with the Duke of
+  Burgundy, who promises to render peaceably the city of Paris in
+  that time. Do not, however, be surprised if I enter there sooner,
+  for I like not truces so made, and know not whether I will keep
+  them, but if I keep them, it will be only because of the honour of
+  the King."
+
+While Jeanne and her army thus played with the unmoving English,
+advancing and retiring, attempting every means of drawing them out,
+the enemy took advantage of one of these seeming withdrawals to march
+out of their camp suddenly and return to Paris, which all this time
+had been lying comparatively defenceless, had the French made their
+attack sooner. At the same time Charles moved on to Compiègne where he
+gave himself up to fresh intrigues with Philip of Burgundy, this time
+for a truce to last till Christmas. The Maid was grievously troubled
+by this step, /moult marrie/, and by the new period of delay and
+negotiation on which the Court had entered. Paris was not given up,
+nor was there any appearance that it ever would be, and to all the
+generals as well as to the Maid it was very evident that this was the
+next step to be taken. Some of the leaders wearied with inaction had
+pushed on to Normandy where four great fortresses--greatest of all the
+immense and mysterious stronghold on the high cliffs of the Seine,
+that imposing Château Gaillard which Richard Cœur-de-lion had built,
+the ruins of which, white and mystic, still dominate, like some
+Titanic ghost, above the course of the river--had yielded to them. So
+great was the danger of Normandy, the most securely English of all
+French provinces, that Bedford had again been drawn out of Paris to
+defend it. Here then was another opportunity to seize the capital. But
+Charles could not be induced to move. He found many ways of amusing
+himself at Compiègne, and the new treaty was being hatched with
+Burgundy which gave an excuse for doing nothing. The pause which
+wearied them all out, both captains and soldiers, at last became more
+than flesh and blood could bear.
+
+Jeanne once more was driven to take the initiative. Already on one
+occasion she had forced the hand of the lingering Court, and resumed
+the campaign of her own accord, an impatient movement which had been
+perfectly successful. No doubt again the army itself was becoming
+demoralised, and showing symptoms of falling to pieces. One day she
+sent for Alençon in haste during the absence of the ambassadors at
+Arras. "/Beau duc/," she cried, "prepare your troops and the other
+captains. /En mon Dieu, par mon martin/,[3] I will see Paris nearer
+than I have yet seen it." She had seen the towers from afar as she
+wandered over the country in Charles's lingering train. Her sudden
+resolution struck like fire upon the impatient band. They set out at
+once, Alençon and the Maid at the head of their division of the army,
+and all rejoiced to get to horse again, to push their way through
+every obstacle. They started on the 23d August, nearly a month after
+the departure from Rheims, a month entirely lost, though full of
+events, lost without remedy so far as Paris was concerned. At Senlis
+they made a pause, perhaps to await the King, who, it was hoped, would
+have been constrained to follow; then carrying with them all the
+forces that could be spared from that town, they spurred on to St.
+Denis where they arrived on the 27th: St. Denis, the other sacred town
+of France, the place of the tomb, as Rheims was the place of the
+crown.
+
+The royalty of France was Jeanne's passion. I do not say the King,
+which might be capable of malinterpretation, but the kings, the
+monarchy, the anointed of the Lord, by whom France was represented,
+embodied and made into a living thing. She had loved Rheims, its
+associations, its triumphs, the rejoicing of its citizens. These had
+been the accompaniments of her own highest victory. She came to St.
+Denis in a different mood, her heart hot with disappointment and the
+thwarting of all her plans. From whatever cause it might spring, it
+was clear that she was no longer buoyed up by that certainty which
+only a little while before had carried her through every danger and
+over every obstacle. But to have reached St. Denis at least was
+something. It was a place doubly sacred, consecrated to that royal
+House for which she would so willingly have given her life. And at
+last she was within sight of Paris, the greatest prize of all. Up to
+this time she had known in actual warfare nothing but victory. If her
+heart for the first time wavered and feared, there was still no
+certain reason that, /de par Dieu/, she might not win the day again.
+
+At St. Denis there was once more a cruel delay. Nearly a fortnight
+passed and there was no news of the King. The Maid employed the time
+in skirmishes and reconnoissances, but does not seem to have ventured
+on an attack without the sanction of Charles, whom Alençon, finally,
+going back on two several occasions, succeeded in setting in motion.
+Charles had remained at Compiègne to carry out his treaty with
+Burgundy, and the last thing he desired was this attack; but when he
+could resist no longer he moved on reluctantly to St. Denis, where his
+arrival was hailed with great delight. This was not until the 5th of
+September, and the army, wrought up to a high pitch of excitement and
+expectation, was eager for the fight. "There was no one of whatever
+condition, who did not say, 'She will lead the King into Paris, if he
+will let her,'" says the chronicler.
+
+In the meantime the authorities in Paris were at work, strengthening
+its fortifications, frightening the populace with threats of the
+vengeance of Charles, persuading every citizen of the danger of
+submission.
+
+The /Bourgeois/ tells us that letters came from "les Arminoz," that
+is, the party of the King, sealed with the seal of the Duc d'Alençon,
+and addressed to the heads of the city guilds and municipality
+inviting their co-operation as Frenchmen. "But," adds the Parisian,
+"it was easy to see through their meaning, and an answer was returned
+that they need not throw away their paper as no attention was paid to
+it." There is no sign at all that any national feeling existed to
+respond to such an appeal. Paris--its courts of law, Parliaments
+(salaried by Bedford), University, Church--every department, was
+English in the first place, Burgundian in the second, dependent on
+English support and money. There was no French party existing. The
+Maid was to them an evil sorceress, a creature in the form of a woman,
+exercising the blackest arts. Perhaps there was even a breath of
+consciousness in the air that Charles himself had no desire for the
+fall of the city. He had left the Parisians full time to make every
+preparation, he had held back as long as was possible. His favour was
+all on the side of his enemies; for his own forces and their leaders,
+and especially for the Maid, he had nothing but discouragement,
+distrust, and auguries of evil.
+
+Nevertheless, these oppositions came to an end, and Jeanne, though
+less ready and eager for the assault, found herself under the walls of
+Paris at last.
+----------
+[1] "The English, not US," says Mr. Andrew Lang: and it is pleasant to
+    a Scot to know that this is true. England and Scotland were then
+    twain, and the Scots fought in the ranks of our auld Ally. But for
+    the present age the distinction lasts no longer, and to the writer
+    of an English book on English soil it would be ungenerous to take
+    the advantage.
+
+[2] It is taken as a miraculous sign by another chronicler, Jean
+    Chartier, who tells us that when this fact came to the knowledge
+    of the King the sword was given by him to the workmen to be re-
+    founded--"but they could not do it, nor put the pieces together
+    again: which is a great proof (/grant approbation/) that the sword
+    came to her divinely. And it is notorious that since the breaking
+    of that sword, the said Jeanne neither prospered in arms to the
+    profit of the King nor otherwise as she had done before."
+
+[3] "It was her oath," adds the chronicler; no one is quite sure what
+    it means, but Quicherat is of opinion that it was her /baton/, her
+    stick or staff. Perceval de Cagny puts in this exclamation in
+    almost all the speeches of the Maid. It must have struck him as a
+    curious adjuration. Perhaps it explains why La Hire, unable to do
+    without something to swear by, was permitted by Jeanne in their
+    frank and humorous /camaraderie/ to swear by his stick, the same
+    rustic oath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+DEFEAT AND DISCOURAGEMENT.
+AUTUMN, 1429.
+
+It was on the 7th September that Jeanne and her immediate followers
+reached the village of La Chapelle, where they encamped for the night.
+The next day was the day of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a
+great festival of the Church. It could scarcely be a matter of choice
+on the part of so devout a Catholic as Jeanne to take this day of all
+others, when every church bell was tinkling forth a summons to the
+faithful, for the day of assault. In all probability she was not now
+acting on her own impulse but on that of the other generals and
+nobles. Had she refused, might it not have been alleged against her
+that after all her impatience it was she who was the cause of delay?
+The forces with Jeanne were not very large, a great proportion of the
+army remaining with Charles no one seems to know where, either at St.
+Denis or at some intermediate spot, possibly to form a reserve force
+which could be brought up when wanted. The best informed historian
+only knows that Charles was not with the active force. But Alençon was
+at the head of the troops, along with many other names well known to
+us, La Hire, and young Guy de Laval, and Xantrailles, all mighty men
+of valour and the devoted friends of Jeanne. There is a something, a
+mist, an incertitude in the beginning of the assault which was unlike
+the previous achievements of Jeanne, a certain want of precaution or
+knowledge of the difficulties which does not reflect honour upon the
+generals with her. Absolutely new to warfare as she was before Orleans
+she had ridden out at once on her arrival there to inspect the
+fortifications of the besiegers. But probably the continual
+skirmishing of which we are told made this impossible here, so that,
+though the Maid studied the situation of the town in order to choose
+the best point for attack, it was only when already engaged that the
+army discovered a double ditch round the walls, the inner one of which
+was full of water. By sheer impetuosity the French took the gate of
+St. Honoré and its "boulevard" or tower, driving its defenders back
+into the city: but their further progress was arrested by that
+discovery. It was on this occasion that Jeanne is supposed to have
+seized from a Burgundian in the mêlée, a sword, of which she boasted
+afterwards that it was a good sword capable of good blows, though we
+have no certain record that in all her battles she ever gave one blow,
+or shed blood at all.
+
+It would seem to have been only after the taking of this gate that the
+discovery was made as to the two deep ditches, one dry, the other
+filled with water. Jeanne, whose place had always been with her
+standard at the immediate foot of the wall, from whence to direct and
+cheer on her soldiers, pressed forward to this point of peril,
+descending into the first fosse, and climbing up again on the second,
+the /dos d'ane/, which separated them, where she stood in the midst of
+a rain of arrows, fully exposed to all the enraged crowd of archers
+and gunners on the ramparts above, testing with her lance the depth of
+the water. We seem in the story to see her all alone or with her
+standard-bearer only by her side making this investigation; but that
+of course is only a pictorial suggestion, though it might for a moment
+be the fact. She remained there, however, from two in the afternoon
+till night, when she was forced away. The struggle must have raged
+around while she stood on the dark edge of the ditch probing the muddy
+water to see where it could best be crossed, shouting directions to
+her men in that voice /assez femme/, which penetrated the noise of
+battle, and summoning the active and desperate enemy overhead.
+"/Renty! Renty!/" she cried as she had done at Orleans--"/surrender to
+the King of France!/"
+
+We hear nothing now of the white armour; it must have been dimmed and
+worn by much fighting, and the banner torn and glorious with the
+chances of the war; but it still waved over her head, and she still
+stood fast, on the ridge between the two ditches, shouting her
+summons, cheering the men, a spot of light still, amid all the steely
+glimmering of the mail-coats and the dark downpour of that iron rain.
+Half a hundred war cries rending the air, shrieks from the walls of
+"Witch, Devil, Ribaude," and names still more insulting to her purity,
+could not silence that treble shout, the most wonderful, surely, that
+ever ran through such an infernal clamour, so prodigious, the
+chronicler says, that it was a marvel to hear it. /De par Dieu, Rendez
+vous, rendez vous, au roy de France/. If as we believe she never
+struck a blow, the aspect of that wonderful figure becomes more
+extraordinary still. While the boldest of her companions struggled
+across to fling themselves and what beams and ladders they could drag
+with them against the wall, she stood without even such shelter as
+close proximity to it might have given, cheering them on, exposed to
+every shot.
+
+The fight was desperate, and though there was no marked success on the
+part of the besiegers, yet there seems to have been nothing to
+discourage them, as the fight raged on. Few were wounded,
+notwithstanding the noise of the cannons and culverins, "by the grace
+of God and the good luck of the Maid." But towards the evening Jeanne
+herself suddenly swayed and fell, an arrow having pierced her thigh;
+she seems, however, to have struggled to her feet again, undismayed,
+when a still greater misfortune befell: her standard-bearer was hit,
+first in the foot, and then, as he raised his visor to pull the arrow
+from the wound, between his eyes, falling dead at her feet. What
+happened to the banner, we are not told; Jeanne most likely herself
+caught it as it fell. But at this stroke, more dreadful than her own
+wound, her strength failed her, and she crept behind a bush or heap of
+stones, where she lay, refusing to quit the place. Some say she
+managed to slide into the dry ditch where there was a little shelter,
+but resisted all attempts to carry her away, and some add that while
+she lay there she employed herself in a vain attempt to throw faggots
+into the ditch to make it passable. It is said that she kept calling
+out to them to persevere, to go on and Paris would be won. She had
+promised, they say, to sleep that night within the conquered city; but
+this promise comes to us with no seal of authority. Jeanne knew that
+it had taken her eight days to free Orleans, and she could scarcely
+have promised so sudden a success in the more formidable achievement.
+But she was at least determined in her conviction that perseverance
+only was needed. She must have lain for hours on the slope of the
+outer moat, urging on the troops with such force as her dauntless
+voice could give, repeating again and again that the place could be
+taken if they but held on. But when night came Alençon and some other
+of the captains overcame her resistance, and there being clearly no
+further possibility for the moment, succeeded in setting her upon her
+horse, and conveyed her back to the camp. While they rode with her,
+supporting her on her charger, she did nothing but repeat "/Quel
+dommage!/" Oh, what a misfortune, that the siege of Paris should fail,
+all for want of constancy and courage. "If they had but gone on till
+morning," she cried, "the inhabitants would have known." It is evident
+from this that she must have expected a rising within, and could not
+yet believe that no such thing was to be looked for. "/Par mon
+martin/, the place would have been taken," she said in the hearing one
+cannot but feel of the chronicler, who reports so often those homely
+words.
+
+Thus Jeanne was led back after the first day's attack. Her wound was
+not serious, and she had been repulsed during one of the day's
+fighting at Orleans without losing courage. But something had changed
+her spirit as well as the spirit of the army she led. There is a
+curious glimpse given us into her camp at this point, which indeed
+comes to us through the observation of an enemy, yet seems to have in
+it an unmistakable gleam of truth. It comes from one of the parties
+which had been granted a safe-conduct to carry away the dead of the
+English and Burgundian side. They tell us, among other circumstances,
+--such as that the French burnt their dead, a manifest falsehood, but
+admirably calculated to make them a horror to their neighbours,--that
+many in the ranks cursed the Maid who had promised that they should
+without any doubt sleep that night in Paris and plunder the wealthy
+city. The men with their safe-conduct creeping among the dead, to
+recover those bodies which had fallen on their own side, and furtively
+to count the fallen on the other--who were delighted to bring a report
+that the Maid was no longer the fountain of strength and blessing, but
+secretly cursed by her own forces--are sinister figures groping their
+way through the darkness of the September night.
+
+Next morning, however, her wound being slight, Jeanne was up early and
+in conference with Alençon, begging him to sound his trumpets and set
+forth once more. "I shall not budge from here, till Paris is taken,"
+she said. No doubt her spirit was up, and a determination to recover
+lost ground strong in her mind. While the commanders consulted
+together, there came a band of joyful augury into the camp, the
+Seigneur of Montmorency with sixty gentlemen, who had left the party
+of Burgundy in order to take service under the banner of the Maid. No
+doubt this important and welcome addition to their number exhilarated
+the entire camp, in the commotion of the reveillé, while each man
+looked to his weapons, wiping off from breastplate and helmet the
+heavy dew of the September morning, greeting the new friends and
+brothers-in-arms who had come in, and arranging, with a better
+knowledge of the ground than that of yesterday, the mode of attack.
+Jeanne would not confess that she felt her wound, in her eagerness to
+begin the assault a second time. And all were in good spirits, the
+disappointment of the night having blown away, and the determination
+to do or die being stronger than ever. Were the men-at-arms perhaps
+less amenable? Were they whispering to each other that Jeanne had
+promised them Paris yesterday, and for the first time had not kept her
+word? It would almost require such a fact as this to explain what
+follows. For as they began to set out, the whole field in movement,
+there was suddenly seen approaching another party of cavaliers--
+perhaps another reinforcement like that of Montmorency? This new band,
+however, consisted but of two gentlemen and their immediate
+attendants, the Duc de Bar and the Comte de Clermont,[1] always a bird
+of evil omen, riding hot from St. Denis with orders from the King.
+These orders were abrupt and peremptory--to turn back. Jeanne and her
+companions were struck dumb for the moment. To turn back, and Paris at
+their feet! There must have burst forth a storm of remonstrance and
+appeal. We cannot tell how long the indignant parley lasted; the
+historians do not enlarge upon the disastrous incident. But at last
+the generals yielded to the orders of the King--Jeanne humiliated,
+miserable, and almost in despair. We cannot but feel that on no former
+occasion would she have given way so completely; she would have rushed
+to the King's presence, overwhelmed him with impetuous prayers,
+extorted somehow the permission to go on. But Charles was safe at
+seven miles' distance, and his envoys were imperious and peremptory,
+like men able to enforce obedience if it were not given. She obeyed at
+last, recovering courage a little in the hope of being able to
+persuade Charles to change his mind, and sanction another assault on
+Paris from the other side, by means of a bridge over the Seine towards
+St. Denis, which Alençon had constructed. Next morning it appears that
+without even asking that permission a portion of the army set out very
+early for this bridge: but the King had divined their project, and
+when they reached the river side the first thing they saw was their
+bridge in ruins. It had been treacherously destroyed in the night, not
+by their enemies, but by their King.
+
+It is natural that the French historians should exhaust themselves in
+explanation of this fatal change of policy. Quicherat, who was the
+first to bring to light all the most important records of this period
+of history, lays the entire blame upon La Tremoïlle, the chief adviser
+of Charles. But that Charles himself was at heart equally guilty no
+one can doubt. He was a man who proved himself in the end of his
+career to possess both sense and energy, though tardily developed. It
+was to him that Jeanne had given that private sign of the truth of her
+mission, by which he was overawed and convinced in the first moment of
+their intercourse. Within the few months which had elapsed since she
+appeared at Chinon every thing that was wonderful had been done for
+him by her means. He was then a fugitive pretender, not even very
+certain of his own claim, driven into a corner of his lawful
+dominions, and fully prepared to abandon even that small standing
+ground, to fly into Spain or Scotland, and give up the attempt to hold
+his place as King of France. Now he was the consecrated King, with the
+holy oil upon his brows, and the crown of his ancestors on his head,
+accepted and proclaimed, all France stirring to her old allegiance,
+new conquests falling into his hands every day, and the richest
+portion of his kingdom secure under his sway. To check thus
+peremptorily the career of the deliverer who had done so much for him,
+degrading her from her place, throwing more than doubt upon her
+inspiration, falsifying by force the promises which she had made--
+promises which had never failed before,--was a worse and deeper sin on
+the part of a young man, by right of his kingly office the very head
+of knighthood and every chivalrous undertaking, than it could be on
+the part of an old and subtle diplomatist who had never believed in
+such wild measures, and all through had clogged the steps and
+endeavoured to neutralise the mission of the warrior Maid. It is very
+clear, however, that between them it was the King and his chamberlain
+who made this assault upon Paris so evident and complete a failure.
+One day's repulse was nothing in a siege. There had been one great
+repulse and several lesser ones at Orleans. Jeanne, even though
+weakened by her wound, had sprung up that morning full of confidence
+and courage. In no way was the failure to be laid to her charge.
+
+But this could never, perhaps, have been explained to the whole body
+of the army, who had believed her word without a doubt and taken her
+success for granted. If they had been wavering before, which seems
+possible--for they must have been, to a considerable extent, new
+levies, the campaigners of the Loire having accomplished their period
+of feudal service,--this sudden downfall must have strengthened every
+doubt and damped every enthusiasm. The Maid of whom such wonderful
+tales had been told, she who had been the angel of triumph, the
+irresistible, before whom the English fled, and the very walls fell
+down--was she after all only a sorceress, as the others called her, a
+creature whose incantations had failed after the flash of momentary
+success? Such impressions are too apt to come like clouds over every
+popular enthusiasm, quenching the light and chilling the heart.
+
+Jeanne was thus dragged back to St. Denis against her will and every
+instinct of her being, and there ensued three days of passionate
+debate and discussion. For a moment it appeared as if she would have
+thrown off the bonds of loyal obedience and pursued her mission at all
+hazards. Her "voices," if they had previously given her uncertain
+sound, promising only the support and succour of God, but no success,
+now spoke more plainly and urged the continuance of the siege; and the
+Maid was torn in pieces between the requirements of her celestial
+guardians and the force of authority around her. If she had broken out
+into open rebellion who would have followed her? She had never yet
+done so; when the King was against her she had pleaded or forced an
+agreement, and received or snatched a consent from the malevolent
+chamberlain, as at Jargeau and Troyes. Never yet had she set herself
+in public opposition to the will of her sovereign. She had submitted
+to all kinds of tests and trials rather than this. And to have lain
+half a day wounded outside Paris and to stand there pleading her cause
+with her wound still unhealed were not likely things to strengthen her
+powers of resistance. "The Voices bade me remain at St. Denis," she
+said afterwards at her trial, "and I desired to remain; but the
+seigneurs took me away in spite of myself. If I had not been wounded I
+should never have left." Added to the force of these circumstances, it
+was no doubt apparent to all that to resume operations after that
+forced retreat, and the betrayal it gave of divided counsels, would be
+less hopeful than ever. These arguments even convinced the bold La
+Hire, who for his part, being no better than a Free Lance, could move
+hither and thither as he would; and thus the first defeat of the Maid,
+a disaster involving all the misfortunes that followed in its train,
+was accomplished.
+
+Jeanne's last act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern
+reader gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a
+certain melancholy meaning. Before she left, dragged almost a captive
+in the train of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of
+the cathedral the armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris.
+It was not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from
+the wars. And if she had been about to renounce her mission it would
+have been easily comprehensible. But no such thought was in her mind.
+Was it a movement of despair, was it with some womanish fancy that the
+arms in which she had suffered defeat should not be borne again?--or
+was it done in some gleam of higher revelation made to her that
+defeat, too, was a part of victory, and that not without that
+bitterness of failure could the fame of the soldier of Christ be
+perfected? I have remarked already that we hear no more of the white
+armour, inlaid with silver and dazzling like a mirror, in which she
+had begun her career; perhaps it was the remains of that panoply of
+triumph which she laid out before the altar of the patron saint of
+France, all dim now with hard work and the shadow of defeat. It must
+have marked a renunciation of one kind or another, the sacrifice of
+some hope. She was no longer Jeanne the invincible, the triumphant,
+whose very look made the enemy tremble and flee, and gave double force
+to every Frenchman's arm. Was she then and there abdicating, becoming
+to her own consciousness Jeanne the champion only, honest and true,
+but no longer the inspired Maid, the Envoy of God? To these questions
+we can give no answer; but the act is pathetic, and fills the mind
+with suggestions. She who had carried every force triumphantly with
+her, and quenched every opposition, bitter and determined though that
+had been, was now a thrall to be dragged almost by force in an
+unworthy train. It is evident that she felt the humiliation to the
+bottom of her heart. It is not for human nature to have the triumph
+alone: the humiliation, the overthrow, the chill and tragic shadow
+must follow. Jeanne had entered into that cloud when she offered the
+armour, that had been like a star in front of the battle, at the
+shrine of St. Denis.[2] Hers was now to be a sadder, a humbler,
+perhaps a still nobler part.
+
+It is enough to trace the further movements of the King to perceive
+how at every step the iron must have entered deeper and deeper into
+the heart of the Maid. He made his arrangements for the government of
+each of the towns which had acknowledged him: Beauvais, Compiègne,
+Senlis, and the rest. He appointed commissioners for the due
+regulation of the truce with Philip of Burgundy. And then the
+retreating army took its march southward towards the mild and wealthy
+country, all fertility and quiet, where a recreant prince might feel
+himself safe and amuse himself at his leisure--by Lagny, by Provins,
+by Bercy-sur Seine, where he had been checked before in his retreat
+and almost forced to the march on Paris--by Sens, and Montargis: until
+at last on the 29th of September, no doubt diminished by the
+withdrawal of many a local troop and knight whose service was over,
+the forces arrived at Gien, whence they had set forth at the end of
+June for a series of victories. It is to be supposed that the King was
+well enough satisfied with the conquests accomplished in three months.
+And, indeed, in ordinary circumstances they would have formed a
+triumphant list. Charles must have felt himself free to play after the
+work which he had not done; and to leave his good fortune and the able
+negotiators, who hoped to get Paris and other good things from Philip
+of Burgundy without paying anything for them, to do the rest.
+
+We can imagine nothing more dreadful for the Maid than the months that
+followed. The Court was not ungrateful to her; she received the
+warmest welcome from the Queen; she had a /maison/ arranged for her
+like the household of a noble chief, with the addition of women and
+maidens of rank to her existing staff, and everything which could
+serve to show that she was one whom the King delighted to honour. And
+Charles would have her apparelled gloriously like the king's daughter
+in the psalm. "He gave her a mantle of cloth of gold, open at both
+sides, to wear over her armour," and apparently did his best to make
+her, if not a noble lady, yet into the semblance of a noble young
+chevalière, one the glories of his Court, with all the distinction of
+her achievements and all the complacences of a carpet knight. It was
+said afterwards, in the absence of any graver possibility of
+accusation, that she liked her fine clothes. The tears rise to the
+eyes at such a suggestion. She was so natural that let us hope she
+did, the martyr Maid whose torture had already begun. If that mantle
+of gold gave her a moment of pleasure, it is something to be thankful
+for in the midst of the dismal shadows that were already closing round
+her. They were ready to give her any shining mantle, any beautiful
+dress, even a title and a noble name if she would; but what the King
+and his counsellors were determined on, was, that she should no more
+have the fame of individual triumph, or do anything save under their
+orders.
+
+Alençon, the gentle duke, with whom she had taken so much trouble, and
+who had grown into a true and noble comrade, made one effort to free
+his friend and leader. He planned an expedition into Normandy, where,
+with the help of Jeanne, he hoped to inflict upon the English a loss
+so tremendous, the destruction of their base of operations, that they
+would be compelled to abandon the centre of France altogether, and
+leave the way open to Paris and to the recovery of the entire kingdom;
+but the King, or La Tremoïlle, as the historians prefer to say, would
+not permit Jeanne to accompany him, and this hope came to nothing.
+Alençon disbanded his troops, everything in the form of an army was
+broken up--the short period of feudal service making this inevitable,
+unless new levies were made--and no forces were left under arms except
+those bands which formed the body-guard of the King. Nevertheless,
+there was plenty of work to be done still, and the breaking up of the
+French forces encouraged many a little garrison of English partisans,
+which would have yielded naturally and easily to a strong national
+party.
+
+In the midst of the winter, however, it seemed appropriate to the
+Court to launch forth an expedition against some of the unsubdued
+towns, perhaps on account of the mortal languishment of Jeanne
+herself, perhaps for some other reason of its own. The first necessity
+was to collect the necessary forces, and for this reason Jeanne came
+to Bourges, where she was lodged in one of the great houses of the
+city, that of Raynard de Bouligny, /conseiller de roi/, and his wife,
+Marguerite, one of the Queen's ladies. She was there for three weeks
+collecting her men, and the noble gentlewoman, who was her hostess,
+was afterwards in the Rehabilitation trial, one of the witnesses to
+the purity of her life.
+
+From this lady and others we have a clear enough view of what the Maid
+was in this second chapter of her history. She spent her time in the
+most intimate intercourse with Madam Marguerite, sharing even her
+room, so that nothing could be more complete than the knowledge of her
+hostess of every detail of her young guest's life. And wonderful as
+was the difference between the peasant maiden of Domremy and the most
+famous woman in France, the life of Jeanne, the Deliverer of her
+country, is as the life of Jeanne, the cottage sempstress,--as simple,
+as devout, and as pure. She loved to go to church for the early
+matins, but as it was not fit that she should go out alone at that
+hour, she besought Madame Marguerite to go with her. In the evening
+she went to the nearest church, and there with all her old childish
+love for the church bells, she had them rung for half an hour, calling
+together the poor, the beggars who haunt every Catholic church, the
+poor friars and bedesmen, the penniless and forlorn from all the
+neighbourhood. This custom would, no doubt, soon become known, and not
+only her poor pensioners, but the general crowd would gather to gaze
+at the Maid as well as to join in her prayers. It was her great
+pleasure to sing a hymn to the Virgin, probably one of the litanies
+which the unlearned worshipper loves, with its choruses and constant
+repetitions, in company with all those untutored voices, in the
+dimness of the church, while the twilight sank into night, and the
+twinkling stars of candles on the altar made a radiance in the middle
+of the gloom. When she had money to give she divided it, according to
+the liberal custom of her time, among her poor fellow-worshippers.
+These evening services were her recreation. The days were full of
+business, of enrolling soldiers, and regulating the "lances," groups
+of retainers, headed by their lord, who came to perform their feudal
+service.
+
+The ladies of the town who had the advantage of knowing Madame
+Marguerite did not fail to avail themselves of this privilege, and
+thronged to visit her wonderful guest. They brought her their sacred
+medals and rosaries to bless, and asked her a hundred questions. Was
+she afraid of being wounded; or was she assured that she would not be
+wounded? "No more than others," she said; and she put away their
+religious ornaments with a smile, bidding Madame Marguerite touch
+them, or the visitors themselves, which would be just as good as if
+she did it. She would seem to have been always smiling, friendly,
+checking with a laugh the adulation of her visitors, many of whom wore
+medals with her own effigy (if only one had been saved for us!) as
+there were many banners made after the pattern of hers. But cheerful
+as she was, a prevailing tone of sadness now appears to run through
+her life. On several occasions she spoke to her confessor and
+chaplain, who attended her everywhere, of her death. "If it should be
+my fate to die soon, tell the King our master on my part to build
+chapels where prayer may be made to the Most High for the salvation of
+the souls of those who shall die in the wars for the defence of the
+kingdom." This was the one thing she seemed anxious for, and it
+returned again and again to her mind. Her thoughts indeed were heavy
+enough. Her larger enterprises had been cruelly put a stop to: her
+companions-in-arms had been dispersed: she had been separated from
+her lieutenant Alençon, and from all the friends between whom and
+herself great mutual confidence had sprung up. Even the commission
+which had at last been put in her hands was a trifling one and led to
+nothing, bringing the King no nearer to any satisfactory end: and the
+troops were under command of a new captain whom she scarcely knew,
+d'Albert, who was the son-in-law of La Tremoïlle, and probably little
+inclined to be a friend to Jeanne. In these circumstances there was
+little of an exhilarating or promising kind.
+
+Nevertheless as an episode, few things had happened to Jeanne more
+memorable than the siege of St. Pierre-le-Moutier. The first assault
+upon the town was unsuccessful; the retreat had sounded and the troops
+were streaming back from the point of attack, when Jean d'Aulon, the
+faithful friend and brave gentleman who was at the head of the Maid's
+military household, being himself wounded in the heel and unable to
+stand or walk, saw the Maid almost alone before the stronghold, four
+or five men only with her. He dragged himself up as well as he could
+upon his horse, and hastened towards her, calling out to her to ask
+what she did there, and why she did not retire with the rest. She
+answered him, taking off her helmet to speak, that she would leave
+only when the place was taken--and went on shouting for faggots and
+beams to make a bridge across the ditch. It is to be supposed that
+seeing she paid no attention, nor budged a step from that dangerous
+point, this brave man, wounded though he was, must have made an effort
+to rally the retiring besiegers: but Jeanne seems to have taken no
+notice of her desertion nor ever to have paused in her shout for
+planks and gabions. "All to the bridge," she shouted, "/aux fagots et
+aux claies tout le monde!/ every one to the bridge." "Jeanne,
+withdraw, withdraw! You are alone," some one said to her. Bareheaded,
+her countenance all aglow, the Maid replied: "I have still with me
+fifty thousand of my men." Were those the men whom the prophet's
+servant saw when his eyes were opened and he beheld the innumerable
+company of angels that surrounded his master? But Jeanne, rapt in the
+trance and ecstasy of battle, gave no explanation. "To work, to work!"
+her clear voice went on, ringing over the startled head of the good
+knight who knew war, but not any rapture like this. History itself,
+awe-stricken, would almost have us believe that alone with her own
+hand the Maid took the city, so entirely does every figure disappear
+but that one, and the perplexed and terrified spectator vainly urging
+her to give up so desperate an attempt. But no doubt the shouts of a
+voice so strange to every such scene, the /vox infantile/, the amazing
+and clear voice, silvery and womanly, /assez femme/, and the efforts
+of d'Aulon to bring back the retreating troops were successful, and
+Jeanne once more, triumphantly kept her word. The place was strongly
+fortified, well provisioned, and full of people. Therefore the whole
+narrative is little less than miraculous, though very little is said
+of it. Had they but persevered, as she had said, a few hours longer
+before Paris, who could tell that the same result might not have been
+obtained?
+
+She was not successful, however, with La Charité, which after a siege
+of a month's duration still held out, and had to be abandoned. These
+long operations of regular warfare were not in Jeanne's way; and her
+coadjutor in command, it must be remembered, was in this case
+commissioned by her chief enemy. We are told that she was left without
+supplies, and in the depths of winter, in cold and rain and snow, with
+every movement hampered, and the ineffective government ever ready to
+send orders of retreat, or to cause bewildering and confusing delays
+by the want of every munition of war. Finally, at all events, the
+French forces withdrew, and again an unsuccessful enterprise was added
+to the record of the once victorious Maid. That she went on
+continually promising victory as in her early times, is probably the
+mere rumour spread by her detractors who were now so many, for there
+is no real evidence that she did so. Everything rather points to
+discouragement, uncertainty, and to a silent rage against the coercion
+which she could not overcome.
+----------
+[1] Clermont it was who deserted the Scots at the Battle of the
+    Herrings.
+
+[2] Jeanne's arms, offered at St. Denis, were afterwards taken by the
+    English and sent to the King of England (all except the sword with
+    its ornaments of gold) without giving anything to the church in
+    return: "qui est pur sacrilege et manifeste," says Jean Chartier.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+COMPIÈGNE.
+1430.
+
+By this time France was once more all in flames: the English and
+Burgundians had entered and then abandoned Paris--Duke Philip
+cynically leaving that city, which he had promised to give up to
+Charles, to its own protection, in order to look after his more
+pressing personal concerns: while Bedford spread fire and flame about
+the adjacent country, retaking with much slaughter many of the towns
+which had opened their gates to the King. Thus while Charles gave no
+attention to anything beyond the Loire, and kept his chief champion
+there, as it were, on the leash, permitting no return to the most
+important field of operations, almost all that had been gained was
+again lost upon the banks of the Seine. This was the state of affairs
+when Jeanne returned humbled and sad from the abandoned siege of La
+Charité. Her enemy's counsels had triumphed all round and this was the
+result. Individual fightings of no particular account and under no
+efficient organisation were taking place day by day; here a town stood
+out heroically, there another yielded to the foreign arms; the
+population were thrown back into universal misery, the spring fields
+trampled under foot, the villages burned, every evil of war in full
+operation, invasion aggravated by faction, the English always aided by
+one side of France against the other, and neither peace nor security
+anywhere.
+
+This was the aspect of affairs on one side. On the other appeared a
+still less satisfactory scene. Charles amusing himself, his
+counsellors, La Tremoïlle, and the Archbishop of Rheims carrying on
+fictitious negotiations with Burgundy and playing with the Maid who
+was in their power, sending her out to make a show and cast a spell,
+then dragging her back at the end of their shameful chain: while the
+Court, the King and Queen, and all their flattering attendants gilded
+that chain and tried to make her forget by fine clothes and caresses,
+at once her mission and her despair. They were not ungrateful, no: let
+us do them justice, for they might well have added this to the number
+of their sins: mantles of cloth of gold, patents of nobility were at
+her command, had these been what she wanted. The only personal wrong
+they did to Jeanne was to set up against her a sort of opposition,
+another enchantress and visionary who had "voices" and apparitions
+too, and who was admitted to all the councils and gave her advice in
+contradiction of the Maid, a certain Catherine de la Rochelle, who was
+ready to say anything that was put into her mouth, but who had done
+nothing to prove any mission for France or from God. We have little
+light however upon the state of affairs in those castles, which one
+after another were the abode of the Court during this disastrous
+winter. They were safe enough on the other side of the Loire in the
+fat country where the vines still flourished and the young corn grew.
+Now and then a band of armed men was sent forth to succour a fighting
+town in the suffering and struggling Île-de-France, always under the
+conflicting orders of those intrigants and courtiers: but within the
+Court, all was gay; "never man," as rough La Hire had said on an
+earlier occasion, "lost his kingdom more gaily or with better grace"
+than did Charles. Where was La Hire? Where was Dunois?--there is no
+appearance of these champions anywhere. Alençon had returned to his
+province. Only La Tremoïlle and the Archbishop holding all the strings
+in their hands, upsetting all military plans, disgusting every chief,
+met and talked and carried on their busy intrigues, and played their
+Sibyl--/Sibylle de carrefour/, says one of the historians indignantly
+--against the Maid, who, all discouraged and downcast, fretted by
+caresses, sick of inactivity, dragged out the uneasy days in an
+uncongenial world; but Jeanne has left no record of the sensations
+with which she saw these days pass, eating her heart out, gazing over
+that rapid river, on the other side of which all the devils were
+unchained and every result of her brief revolution was being lost.
+
+At length however the impatience and despair were more than she could
+bear; the Court was then at Sully and the spring had begun with its
+longer days and more passable roads. Without a word to anyone the Maid
+left the castle. The war had rolled towards these princely walls, as
+near as Melun, which was threatened by the English. A little band of
+intimate servants and associates, her two brothers, and a few faithful
+followers, were with her. So far as we know she never saw Charles or
+his courtiers again. They arrived at Melun in time to witness and to
+take part in the repulse of the English, and it was here that a
+communication was make to Jeanne by her saints of which afterwards
+there was frequent mention. Little had been said of them during her
+dark time of inaction, and their tone was no longer as of old. It was
+on the side of the moat of Melun where probably she was superintending
+some necessary work to strengthen the fortifications or to put them in
+better order for defence, that this message reached her. The "Voices"
+which so often had urged her to victory and engaged the faith of
+heaven for her success, had now a word to say, secret and personal to
+herself. It was that she should be taken prisoner; and the date was
+fixed, before the St. Jean. It was the middle of April when this
+communication was made and the Feast of St. Jean, as everybody knows,
+is in the end of June; two months only to work in, to strike another
+blow for France. The "Voices" bade her not to fear, that God would
+sustain her. But it would be impossible not to be startled by such a
+sudden intimation in the midst of her reviving plans. The Maid made
+one terrified prayer, that God would let her die when she was taken,
+not subject her to long imprisonment; her heart prophetically sprang
+to a sudden consciousness of the most likely, most terrible end that
+lay before her, for she had been often enough threatened with the
+stake and the fire to know what to expect. But the saintly voices made
+no reply. They bade her be strong and of good courage: is not that the
+all-sustaining, all-delusive message for every martyr? It was the will
+of God, and His support and sustaining power, which we often take to
+mean deliverance, but which is not always so--were promised. She asked
+where this terrible thing was to happen, but received no reply.
+Natural and simple as she was, she confessed afterwards that had she
+known she was to be taken on any certain day, she would not have gone
+out to meet the catastrophe unless she had been forced by evident duty
+to do so. But this was not revealed to her. "Before the St. Jean!" It
+must almost have seemed a guarantee that until that time or near it
+she was safe. She would seem to have said nothing immediately of this
+vision to sadden those about her.
+
+In the meantime, however, there were other adventures in store for
+her. From Melun to Lagny was no long journey, but it was through a
+country full of enemies in which she must have been subject to attack
+at every corner of every road or field. And she had not been long in
+the latter place which is said to have had a garrison of Scots, when
+news came of the passing of a band of Burgundians, a troop of raiders
+indeed, ravaging the country, taking advantage of the war to rob and
+lay waste churches, villages, and the growing fields wherever they
+passed. The troops was led by Franquet d'Arras, a famous "/pillard/,"
+robber of God and man. Jeanne set out to encounter this bandit with a
+party of some four hundred men, and various noble companions, among
+whom, however, we find no name familiar in her previous career, a
+certain Hugh Kennedy, a Scot, who is to be met with in various records
+of fighting, being one of the most notable among them. Franquet's band
+fought vigorously but were cut to pieces, and the leader was taken
+prisoner. When this man was brought back to Lagny, a prisoner to be
+ransomed, and whom Jeanne desired to exchange for one of her own side,
+the law laid claim to him as a criminal. He was a prisoner of war:
+what was it the Maid's duty to do? The question is hotly debated by
+the historians and it was brought against her at her trial. He was a
+murderer, a robber, the scourge of the country--especially to the poor
+whom Jeanne protected and cared for everywhere, was he pitiless and
+cruel. She gave him up to justice, and he was tried, condemned, and
+beheaded. If it was wrong from a military point of view, it was her
+only error, and shows how little there was with which to reproach her.
+
+In Lagny other things passed of a more private nature. Every day and
+all day long her "voices" repeated their message in her ears. "Before
+the St. Jean." She repeated it to some of her closest comrades but
+left herself no time to dwell upon it. Still worse than the giving up
+of Franquet was the supposed resuscitation of a child, born dead,
+which its parents implored her to pray for that it might live again to
+be baptised. She explained the story to her judges afterwards. It was
+the habit of the time, nay, we believe continues to this day in some
+primitive places, to lay the dead infant on the altar in such a case,
+in hope of a miracle. "It is true," said Jeanne, "that the maidens of
+the town were all assembled in the church praying God to restore life
+that it might be baptised. It is also true that I went and prayed with
+them. The child opened its eyes, yawned three or four times, was
+christened and died. This is all I know." The miracle is not one that
+will find much credit nowadays. But the devout custom was at least
+simple and intelligible enough, though it afforded an excellent
+occasion to attribute witchcraft to the one among those maidens who
+was not of Lagny but of God.
+
+From Lagny Jeanne went on to various other places in danger, or which
+wanted encouragement and help. She made two or three hurried visits to
+Compiègne, which was threatened by both parties of the enemy; at one
+time raising the siege of Choicy, near Compiègne, in company with the
+Archbishop of Rheims, a strange brother in arms. On another of her
+visits to Compiègne there is said to have occurred an incident which,
+if true, reveals to us with very sad reality the trouble that
+overshadowed the Maid. She had gone to early mass in the Church of St.
+Jacques, and communicated, as was her custom. It must have been near
+Easter--perhaps the occasion of the first communion of some of the
+children who are so often referred to, among whom she loved to
+worship. She had retired behind a pillar on which she leaned as she
+stood, and a number of people, among whom were many children, drew
+near after the service to gaze at her. Jeanne's heart was full, and
+she had no one near to whom she could open it and relieve her soul. As
+she stood against the pillar her trouble burst forth. "Dear friends
+and children," she said, "I have to tell you that I have been sold and
+betrayed, and will soon be given up to death. I beg of you to pray for
+me; for soon I shall no longer have any power to serve the King and
+the kingdom." These words were told to the writer who records them, in
+the year 1498, by two very old men who had heard them, being children
+at the time. The scene was one to dwell in a child's recollection,
+and, if true, it throws a melancholy light upon the thoughts that
+filled the mind of Jeanne, though her actions may have seemed as
+energetic and her impulses as strong as in her best days.
+
+At last the news came speeding through the country that Compiègne was
+being invested on all sides. It had been the headquarters of Charles
+and had received him with acclamations, and therefore the alarm of the
+townsfolk for the retribution awaiting them, should they fall into the
+hands of the enemy, was great; it was besides a very important
+position. Jeanne was at Crespy en Valois when this news reached her.
+She set out immediately (May 22, 1430) to carry aid to the garrison:
+"/F'irai voir mes bons amis de Compiègne/," she said. The words are on
+the base of her statue which now stands in the Place of that town.
+Something of her early impetuosity was in this impulse, and no
+apparent dread of any fatality. She rode all night at the head of her
+party, and arrived before the dawn, a May morning, the 23d, still a
+month from the fatal "St. Jean." Though the prophecy was always in her
+ears, she must have felt that whole month still before her, with a
+sensation of almost greater safety because the dangerous moment was
+fixed. The town received her with joy, and no doubt the satisfaction
+and relief which hailed her and her reinforcements gave additional
+fervour to the Maid, and drove out of her mind for a moment the fatal
+knowledge which oppressed it. There is some difficulty in
+understanding the events of this day, but the lucid narrative of
+Quicherat, which we shall now quote, gives a very vivid picture of it.
+Jeanne had timed her arrival so early in the morning, probably with
+the intention of keeping the adversaries in their camps unaware of so
+important an addition to the garrison, in order that she might
+surprise them by the sortie she had determined upon; but no doubt the
+news had leaked forth somehow, if through no other means, by the
+sudden ringing of the bells and sounds of joy from the city. She paid
+her usual visits to the churches, and noted and made all her
+arrangements for the sortie with her usual care, occupying the long
+summer day in these preparations. And it was not till five o'clock in
+the evening that everything was complete, and she sallied forth. We
+hear nothing of the state of the town, or of any suspicion existing at
+the time as to the governor Flavy who was afterwards believed by some
+to be the man who sold and betrayed her. It is a question debated
+warmly like all these questions. He was a man of bad reputation, but
+there is no evidence that he was a traitor. The incidents are all
+natural enough, and seem to indicate clearly the mere fortune of war
+upon which no man can calculate. We add from Quicherat the description
+of the field and what took place there:
+
+"Compiègne is situated on the left bank of the Oise. On the other side
+extends a great meadow, nearly a mile broad, at the end of which the
+rising ground of Picardy rises suddenly like a wall, shutting in the
+horizon. The meadow is so low and so subject to floods that it is
+crossed by an ancient foot of the low hills. Three village churches
+mark the extent of the landscape visible from the walls of Compiègne;
+Margny (sometimes spelt Marigny) at the end of the road; Clairoix
+three quarters of a league higher up, at the confluence of the two
+rivers, the Aronde and the Oise, close to the spot where another
+tributary, the Aisne, also flows into the Oise; and Venette a mile and
+a half lower down. The Burgundians had one camp at Margny, another at
+Clairoix; the headquarters of the English were at Venette. As for the
+inhabitants of Compiègne, their first defence facing the enemy was one
+of those redoubts or towers which the chronicles of the fifteenth
+century called a boulevard. It was placed at the end of the bridge and
+commanded the road.
+
+"The plan of the Maid was to make a sortie towards the evening, to
+attack Margny and afterwards Clairoix, and then at the opening of the
+Aronde valley to meet the Duke of Burgundy and his forces who were
+lodged there, and who would naturally come to the aid of his other
+troops when attacked. She took no thought for the English, having
+already carefully arranged with Flavy how they should be prevented
+from cutting off her retreat. The governor provided against any chance
+of this by arming the boulevard strongly with archers to drive off any
+advancing force, and also by keeping ready on the Oise a number of
+covered boats to receive the foot-soldiers in case of a retrograde
+movement.
+
+"The action began well: the garrison of Margny yielded in the
+twinkling of an eye. That of Clairoix rushing to the support of their
+brothers in arms was repulsed, then in its turn repulsed the French;
+and three times this alternative of advance and retreat took place on
+the flat ground of the meadow without serious injury to either party.
+This gave time to the English to take part in the fray;[1] though
+thanks to the precautions of Flavy all they could do was to swell the
+ranks of the Burgundians. But unfortunately the rear of the Maid's
+army was struck with the possibility that a diversion might be
+attempted from behind, and their retreat cut off. A panic seized them;
+they broke their ranks, turned back and fled, some to the boats, some
+to the barrier of the boulevard. The English witnessing this flight
+rushed after them, secure now on the side of Compiègne, where the
+archers no longer ventured to shoot lest they should kill the
+fugitives instead of the enemies. They (the English) thus got
+possession of the raised road, and pushed on so hotly after the
+fugitives that their horses' heads touched the backs of the crowd. It
+thus became necessary for the safety of the town to close the gates
+until the barrier of the boulevard should be set up again."
+
+*****
+
+These disastrous accidents had taken place while Jeanne, charging in
+front with her companions and body-guard, remained quite unaware of
+any misfortune. She would hear no call to retreat, even when her
+companions were roused to the dangers of their position. "Forward,
+they are ours!" was all her cry. As at St. Pierre-le-Moutier she was
+ready to defeat the Burgundian army alone. At length the others
+perceiving something of what had happened seized her bridle and forced
+her to retire. She was of herself too remarkable a figure to be
+concealed amid the group of armed men who rode with her, encircling
+her, defending the rear of the flying party. Over her armour she wore
+a crimson tunic, or according to some authorities a short cloak, of
+gorgeous material embroidered with gold, and though by this time the
+twilight must have afforded a partial shelter, yet the knowledge that
+she was there gave keenness to every eye. Behind, the scattered
+Burgundians had rallied and begun to pursue, while the armour and
+spears of the English glittered in front between the little party and
+the barrier which was blocked by a terrified crowd of fugitives. Even
+then a party of horsemen might have cut their way through; but at the
+moment when Jeanne and her followers drew near, the barrier was
+sharply closed and the wild, confused, and fighting crowd, treading
+each other down, struggling for life, were forced back upon the
+English lances. Thus the retreating band riding hard along the raised
+road, in order and unbroken, found the path suddenly barred by the
+forces of the enemy, the fugitives of their own army, and the closed
+gates of the town.
+
+An attempt was then made by the Maid and her companions to turn
+towards the western gate where there still might have been a chance of
+safety; but by this time the smaller figure among all those steel-clad
+men, and the waving mantle, must have been distinguished through the
+dusk and the dust. There was a wild rush of combat and confusion, and
+in a moment she was surrounded, seized, her horse and her person,
+notwithstanding all resistance. With cries of "Rendez vous," and many
+an evil name, fierce faces and threatening weapons closed round her.
+One of her assailants--a Burgundian knight, a Picard archer, the
+accounts differ--caught her by her mantle and dragged her from her
+horse; no Englishman let us be thankful, though no doubt all were
+equally eager and ready. Into the midst of that shouting mass of men,
+in the blinding cloud of dust, in the darkening of the night, the Maid
+of France disappeared for one terrible moment, and was lost to view.
+And then, and not till then, came a clamour of bells into the night,
+and all the steeples of Compiègne trembled with the call to arms, a
+sally to save the deliverer. Was it treachery? Was it only a
+perception, too late, of the danger? There are not wanting voices to
+say that a prompt sally might have saved Jeanne, and that it was quite
+within the power of the Governor and city had they chosen. Who can
+answer so dreadful a suggestion? it is too much shame to human nature
+to believe it. Perhaps within Compiègne as without, they were too slow
+to perceive the supreme moment, too much overwhelmed to snatch any
+chance of rescue till it was too late.
+
+Happily we have no light upon the tumult around the prisoner, the ugly
+triumph, the shouts and exultation of the captors who had seized the
+sorceress at last; nor upon the thoughts of Jeanne, with her
+threatened doom fulfilled and unknown horrors before her, upon which
+imagination must have thrown the most dreadful light, however strongly
+her courage was sustained by the promise of succour from on high. She
+had not been sent upon this mission as of old. No heavenly voice had
+said to her "Go and deliver Compiègne." She had undertaken that
+warfare on her own charges with no promise to encourage her, only the
+certainty of being overthrown "before the St. Jean." But the St. Jean
+was still far off, a long month of summer days between her and that
+moment of fate! So far as we can see Jeanne showed no unseemly
+weakness in this dark hour. One account tells us that she held her
+sword high over her head declaring that it was given by a higher than
+any who could claim its surrender there. But she neither struggled nor
+wept. Not a word against her constancy and courage could any one, then
+or after, find to say. The Burgundian chronicler tells us one thing,
+the French another. "The Maid, easily recognised by her costume of
+crimson and by the standard which she carried in her hand, alone
+continued to defend herself," says one; but that we are sure could not
+have been the case as long as d'Aulon, who accompanied her, was still
+able to keep on his horse. "She yielded and gave her parole to
+Lyonnel, bâtard de Wandomme," says another; but Jeanne herself
+declares that she gave her faith to no one, reserving to herself the
+right to escape if she could. In that dark evening scene nothing is
+clear except the fact that the Maid was taken, to the exultation and
+delight of her captors and to the terror and grief of the unhappy
+town, vainly screaming with all its bells to arms,--and with its sons
+and champions by hundreds dying under the English lances and in the
+dark waves of the Oise.
+
+The archer or whoever it was who secured this prize, took Jeanne back,
+along the bloody road with its relics of the fight, to Margny, the
+Burgundian camp, where the leaders crowded together to see so
+important a prisoner. "Thither came soon after," says Monstrelet, "the
+Duke of Burgundy from his camp of Coudon, and there assembled the
+English, the said Duke and those of the other camps in great numbers,
+making, one with the other, great cries and rejoicings on the taking
+of the Maid: whom the said Duke went to see in the lodging where she
+was and spoke some words to her which I cannot call to mind, though I
+was there present; after which the said Duke and the others withdrew
+for the night, leaving the Maid in the keeping of Messer John of
+Luxembourg"--to whom she had been immediately sold by her first
+captor. The same night, Philip, this noble Duke and Prince of France,
+wrote a letter to convey the blessed information:
+
+ "The great news of this capture should be spread everywhere and
+  brought to the knowledge of all, that they may see the error of
+  those who could believe and lend themselves to the pretensions of
+  such a woman. We write this in the hope of giving you joy,
+  comfort, and consolation, and that you may thank God our Creator.
+  Pray that it may be His holy will to be more and more favourable
+  to the enterprises of our royal master and to the restoration of
+  his sway over all his good and faithful subjects."
+
+This royal master was Henry VI. of England, the baby king, doomed
+already to expiate sins that were not his, by the saddest life and
+reign. The French historians whimsically but perhaps not unnaturally,
+have the air of putting down this baseness on Philip's part, and on
+that of his contemporaries in general, to the score of the English,
+which is hard measure, seeing that the treachery of a Frenchman could
+in no way be attributed to the other nation of which he was the
+natural enemy, or at least, antagonist. Very naturally the subsequent
+proceedings in all their horror and cruelty are equally put down to
+the English account, although Frenchmen took, exulted over as a
+prisoner, tried and condemned as an enemy of God and the Church, the
+spotless creature who was France incarnate, the very embodiment of her
+country in all that was purest and noblest. We shall see with what
+spontaneous zeal all France, except her own small party, set to work
+to accomplish this noble office.
+
+Almost before one could draw breath the University of Paris claimed
+her as a proper victim for the Inquisition. Compiègne made no sally
+for her deliverance; Charles, no attempt to ransom her. From end to
+end of France not a finger was lifted for her rescue; the women wept
+over her, the poor people still crowded around the prisoner wherever
+seen, but the France of every public document, of every practical
+power, the living nation, when it did not utter cries of hatred, kept
+silence. We in England have over and over again acknowledged with
+shame our guilty part in her murder; but still to this day the
+Frenchman tries to shield his under cover of the English influence and
+terror. He cannot deny La Tremoïlle, nor Cauchon, nor the University,
+nor the learned doctors who did the deed; individually he is ready to
+give them all up to the everlasting fires which one cannot but hope
+are kept alive for some people in spite of all modern benevolences;
+but he skilfully turns back to the English as a moving cause of
+everything. Nothing can be more untrue. The English were not better
+than the French, but they had the excuse at least of being the enemy.
+France saved by a happy chance her /blanches mains/ from the actual
+blood of the pure and spotless Maid; but with exultation she prepared
+the victim for the stake, sent her thither, played with her like a cat
+with a mouse and condemned her to the fire. This is not to free us
+from our share: but it is the height of hypocrisy to lay the blood of
+Jeanne, entirely to our door.
+
+Thus Jeanne's inspiration proved itself over again in blood and tears;
+it had been proved already on battle-field and city wall, with loud
+trumpets of joy and victory. But the "voices" had spoken again,
+sounding another strain; not always of glory--it is not the way of
+God; but of prison, downfall, distress. "Be not astonished at it,"
+they said to her; "God will be with you." From day to day they had
+spoken in the same strain, with no joyful commands to go forth and
+conquer, but the one refrain: "Before the St. Jean." Perhaps there was
+a certain relief in her mind at first when the blow fell and the
+prophecy was accomplished. All she had to do now was to suffer, not to
+be surprised, to trust in God that He would support her. To Jeanne, no
+doubt, in the confidence and inexperience of her youth, that meant
+that God would deliver her. And so He did; but not as she expected.
+The sunshine of her life was over, and now the long shadow, the bitter
+storm was to come.
+
+Nothing could be more remarkable than the response of France in
+general to this extraordinary event. In Paris there were bonfires
+lighted to show their joy, the /Te Deum/ was sung at Notre Dame. At
+the Court Charles and his counsellors amused themselves with another
+prophet, a shepherd from the hills who was to rival Jeanne's best
+achievements, but never did so. Only the towns which she had delivered
+had still a tender thought for Jeanne. At Tours the entire population
+appeared in the streets with bare feet, singing the /Miserere/ in
+penance and affliction. Orleans and Blois made public prayers for her
+safety. Rheims, in which there was much independent interest in Jeanne
+and her truth, had to be specially soothed by a letter from the
+Archbishop, in which he made out with great cleverness that it was the
+fault of Jeanne alone that she was taken. "She did nothing but by her
+own will, without obeying the commandments of God," he says; "she
+would hear no counsel, but followed her own pleasure,"; and it is in
+this letter that we hear of the shepherd lad who was to replace
+Jeanne, and that it was his opinion or revelation that God had
+suffered the Maid to be taken because of her growing pride, because
+she loved fine clothes, and preferred her own will to any guidance. We
+do not know whether this contented the city of Rheims; similar
+reasoning however seems to have silenced France. Nobody uttered a
+protest, nor struck a blow; the mournful procession of Tours, where
+she had been first known in the outset of her career, the prayers of
+Orleans which she had delivered, are the only exceptions we know of.
+Otherwise there was lifted in France neither voice nor hand to avert
+her doom.
+----------
+[1] The three camps must have formed a sort of irregular triangle. The
+    English at Venette being only half a mile from the gates of
+    Compiègne.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE CAPTIVE.
+MAY, 1430-JAN., 1431.
+
+We have here to remark a complete suspension of all the ordinary laws
+at once of chivalry and of honest warfare. Jeanne had been captured as
+a general at the head of her forces. She was a prisoner of war. Such a
+prisoner ordinarily, even in the most cruel ages, is in no bodily
+danger. He is worth more alive than dead--a great ransom perhaps--
+perhaps the very end of the warfare, and the accomplishment of
+everything it was intended to gain: at least he is most valuable to
+exchange for other important prisoners on the opposite side. It was
+like taking away so much personal property to kill a prisoner, an
+outrage deeply resented by his captor and unjustified by any law. It
+was true that Jeanne herself had transgressed this universal custom
+but a little while before, by giving up Franquet d'Arras to his
+prosecutors. But Franquet was beyond the courtesies of war, a noted
+criminal, robber, and destroyer: yet she ought not perhaps to have
+departed from the military laws of right and wrong while everything in
+the country was under the hasty arbitration of war. No one, however,
+so far as we know, produces this matter of Franquet as a precedent in
+her own case. From the first moment of her seizure there was no
+question of the custom and privilege of warfare. She was taken as a
+wild animal might have been taken, the only doubt being how to make
+the most signal example of her. Vengeance in the gloomy form of the
+Inquisition claimed her the first day. No such word as ransom was
+breathed from her own side, none was demanded, none was offered. Her
+case is at once separated from every other.
+
+Yet the reign of chivalry was at its height, and women were supposed
+to be the objects of a kind of worship, every knight being sworn to
+succour and help them in need and trouble. There was perhaps something
+of the subtle jealousy of sex so constantly denied on the stronger
+side, but yet always existing, in the abrogation of every law of
+chivalry as well as of warfare, in respect to the Maid. That man is
+indeed of the highest strain of generosity who can bear to be beaten
+by a woman. And all the seething, agitated world of France had been
+beaten by this girl. The English and Burgundians, in the ordinary
+sense of the word, had been overcome in fair field, forced to fly
+before her; the French, her own side, had experienced an even more
+penetrating downfall by having the honours of victory taken from them,
+she alone winning the day where they had all failed. This is bitterer,
+perhaps, than merely to be compelled to raise a siege or to fail in a
+fight. The Frenchmen fought like lions, but the praise was to Jeanne
+who never struck a blow. Such great hearts as Dunois, such a courteous
+prince as Alençon, were too magnanimous to feel, or at least to
+resent, the grievance; they seconded her and fought under her with a
+nobility of mind and disinterestedness beyond praise; but it was not
+to be supposed that the common mass of the French captains were like
+these; she had wronged and shamed them by taking the glory from them,
+as much as she had shamed the English by making those universal
+victors fly before her. The burghers whom she had rescued, the poor
+people who were her brethren and whom she sought everywhere, might
+weep and cry out to Heaven, but they were powerless at such a moment.
+And every law that might have helped her was pushed aside.
+
+On the 25th the news was known in Paris, and immediately there appears
+in the record a new adversary to Jeanne, the most bitter and
+implacable of all; the next day, May 26, 1430, without the loss of an
+hour, a letter was addressed to the Burgundian camp from the capital.
+Quicherat speaks of it as a letter from the Inquisitor or vicar-
+general of the Inquisition, written by the officials of the
+University; others tell us that an independent letter was sent from
+the University to second that of the Inquisitor. The University we may
+add was not a university like one of ours, or like any existing at the
+present day. It was an ecclesiastical corporation of the highest
+authority in every cause connected with the Church, while gathering
+law, philosophy, and literature under its wing. The first theologians,
+the most eminent jurists were collected there, not by any means always
+in alliance with the narrower tendencies and methods of the
+Inquisition. It is notable, however, that this great institution lost
+no time in claiming the prisoner, whose chief offence in its eyes was
+less her career as a warrior than her position as a sorceress. The
+actual facts of her life were of secondary importance to them.
+Orleans, Rheims, even her attack upon Paris were nothing in comparison
+with the black art which they believed to be her inspiration. The
+guidance of Heaven which was not the guidance of the Church was to
+them a claim which meant only rebellion of the direst kind. They had
+longed to seize her and strip her of her presumptuous pretensions from
+the first moment of her appearance. They could not allow a day of her
+overthrow to pass by without snatching at this much-desired victim.
+
+No one perhaps will ever be able to say what it is that makes a trial
+for heresy and sorcery, especially in the days when fire and flame,
+the rack and the stake, stood at the end, so exciting and horribly
+attractive to the mind. Whether it is the revelations that are hoped
+for, of these strange commerces between earth and the unknown, into
+which we would all fain pry if we could, in pursuit of some better
+understanding than has ever yet fallen to the lot of man; whether it
+is the strange and dreadful pleasure of seeing a soul driven to
+extremity and fighting for its life through all the subtleties of
+thought and fierce attacks of interrogation--or the mere love of
+inflicting torture, misery, and death, which the Church was prevented
+from doing in the common way, it is impossible to tell; but there is
+no doubt that a thrill like the wings of vultures crowding to the
+prey, a sense of horrible claws and beaks and greedy eyes is in the
+air, whenever such a tribunal is thought of. The thrill, the stir, the
+eagerness among those black birds of doom is more evident than usual
+in the headlong haste of that demand. /Sous l'influence de
+l'Angleterre/, say the historians; the more shame for them if it was
+so; but they were clearly under influence wider and more infallible,
+the influence of that instinct, whatever it may be, which makes a
+trial for heresy ten thousand times more cruel, less restrained by any
+humanities of nature, than any other kind of trial which history
+records.
+
+That is what the Inquisitor demanded after a long description of
+Jeanne, "called the Maid," as having "dogmatised, sown, published, and
+caused to be published, many and diverse errors from which have ensued
+great scandals against the divine honour and our holy faith." "Using
+the rights of our office and the authority committed to us by the Holy
+See of Rome we instantly command, and enjoin you in the name of the
+Catholic faith, and under penalty of the law: and all other Catholic
+persons of whatsoever condition, pre-eminence, authority, or estate,
+to send or to bring as prisoner before us with all speed and surety
+the said Jeanne, vehemently suspected of various crimes springing from
+heresy, that proceedings may be taken against her before us in the
+name of the Holy Inquisition, and with the favour and aid of the
+doctors and masters of the University of Paris, and other notable
+counsellors present there."
+
+It was the English who put it into the heads of the Inquisitor and the
+University to do this, all the anxious Frenchmen cry. We can only
+reply again, the more shame for the French doctors and priests! But
+there was very little time to bring that influence to bear; and there
+is an eagerness and precipitation in the demand which is far more like
+the headlong natural rush for a much desired prize than any course of
+action suggested by a third party. Nor is there anything to lead us to
+believe that the movement was not spontaneous. It is little likely,
+indeed, that the Sorbonne nowadays would concern itself about any
+inspired maid, any more than the enlightened Oxford would do so. But
+the ideas of the fifteenth century were widely different, and
+witchcraft and heresy were the most enthralling and exciting of
+subjects, as they are still to whosoever believes in them, learned or
+unlearned, great or small.
+
+It must be added that the entire mind of France, even of those who
+loved Jeanne and believed in her, must have been shaken to its depths
+by this catastrophe. We have no sympathy with those who compare the
+career of any mortal martyr with the far more mysterious agony and
+passion of our Lord. Yet we cannot but remember what a tremendous
+element the disappointment of their hopes must have been in the misery
+of the first disciples, the Apostles, the mother, all the spectators
+who had watched with wonder and faith the mission of the Messiah. Had
+it failed? had all the signs come to nothing, all those divine words
+and ways, to our minds so much more wonderful than any miracles? Was
+there no meaning in them? Were they mere unaccountable delusions,
+deceptions of the senses, inspirations perhaps of mere genius--not
+from God at all except in a secondary way? In the three terrible days
+that followed the Crucifixion the burden of a world must have lain on
+the minds of those who had seen every hope fail: no legions of angels
+appearing, no overwhelming revelation from heaven, no change in a
+moment out of misery into the universal kingship, the triumphant
+march. That was but the self-delusion of the earth which continually
+travesties the schemes of Heaven; yet the most terrible of all
+despairs is such a pause and horror of doubt lest nothing should be
+true.
+
+But in the case of this little Maiden, this handmaid of the Lord, the
+deception might have been all natural and perhaps shared by herself.
+Were her first triumphs accidents merely, were her "voices" delusions,
+had she been given up by Heaven, of which she had called herself the
+servant? It was a stupor which quenched every voice--a great silence
+through the country, only broken by the penitential psalms at Tours.
+The Compiègne people, writing to Charles two days after May 23d, do
+not mention Jeanne at all. We need not immediately take into account
+the baser souls always plentiful, the envious captains and the rest
+who might be secretly rejoicing. The entire country, both friends and
+foes, had come to a dreadful pause and did not know what to think. The
+last circumstance of which we must remind the reader, and which was of
+the greatest importance, is, that it was only a small part of France
+that knew anything personally of Jeanne. From Tours it is a far cry to
+Picardy. All her triumphs had taken place in the south. The captive of
+Beaulieu and Beaurevoir spent the sad months of her captivity among a
+population which could have heard of her only by flying rumours coming
+from hostile quarters. From the midland of France to the sea, near to
+which her prison was situated, is a long way, and those northern
+districts were as unlike the Orleannais as if they had been in two
+different countries. Rouen in Normandy no more resembled Rheims, than
+Edinburgh resembled London: and in the fifteenth century that was
+saying a great deal. Nothing can be more deceptive than to think of
+these separate and often hostile duchies as if they bore any
+resemblance to the France of to-day.
+
+The captor of Jeanne was a vassal of Jean de Luxembourg and took her
+as we have seen to the quarters of his master at Margny, into whose
+hands she thenceforward passed. She was kept in the camp three or four
+days and then transferred to the castle of Beaulieu, which belonged to
+him; and afterwards to the more important stronghold of Beaurevoir,
+which seems to have been his principal residence. We know very few
+details of her captivity. According to one chronicler, d'Aulon, her
+faithful friend and intendant, was with her at least in the former of
+those prisons, where at first she would appear to have been hopeful
+and in good spirits, if we may trust to the brief conversation between
+her and d'Aulon, which is one of the few details which reach us of
+that period. While he lamented over the probable fate of Compiègne she
+was confident. "That poor town of Compiègne that you loved so much,"
+he said, "by this time it will be in the hands of the enemies of
+France." "No," said the Maid, "the places which the king of Heaven
+brought back to the allegiance of the gentle King Charles by me, will
+not be retaken by his enemies." In this case at least the prophecy
+came true.
+
+And perhaps there might have been at first a certain relief in
+Jeanne's mind, such as often follows after a long threatened blow has
+fallen. She had no longer the vague tortures of suspense, and probably
+believed that she would be ransomed as was usual: and in this silence
+and seclusion her "voices" which she had not obeyed as at first, but
+yet which had not abandoned her, nor shown estrangement, were more
+near and audible than amid the noise and tumult of war. They spoke to
+her often, sometimes three times a day, as she afterwards said, in the
+unbroken quiet of her prison. And though they no longer spoke of new
+enterprises and victories, their words were full of consolation. But
+it was not long that Jeanne's young and vigorous spirit could content
+itself with inaction. She was no mystic; willingly giving herself over
+to dreams and visions is more possible to the old than to the young.
+Her confidence and hope for her good friends of Compiègne gave way
+before the continued tale of their sufferings, and the inveterate
+siege which was driving them to desperation. No doubt the worst news
+was told to Jeanne, and twice over she made a desperate attempt to
+escape, in hope of being able to succour them, but without any
+sanction, as she confesses, from her spiritual instructors. At
+Beaulieu the attempt was simple enough: the narrative seems to imply
+that the doorway, or some part of the wall of her room, had been
+closed with laths or planks nailed across an opening: and between
+these she succeeded in slipping, "as she was very slight," with the
+hope of locking the door to an adjoining guard-room upon the men who
+had charge of her, and thus getting free. But alas! The porter of the
+château, who had no business there, suddenly appeared in the corridor,
+and she was discovered and taken back to her chamber. At Beaurevoir,
+which was farther off, her attempt was a much more desperate one, and
+indicates a despair and irritation of mind which had become
+unbearable. At this place her own condition was much alleviated; the
+castle was the residence of Jean de Luxembourg's wife and aunt, ladies
+who visited Jeanne continually, and soon became interested and
+attached to her; but as the master of the house was himself in the
+camp before Compiègne, they had the advantage or disadvantage, as far
+as the prisoner was concerned, of constant news, and Jeanne's trouble
+for her friends grew daily.
+
+She seems, indeed, after the assurance she had expressed at first, to
+have fallen into great doubt and even carried on within herself a
+despairing argument with her spiritual guides on this point, battling
+with these saintly influences as in the depths of the troubled heart
+many have done with the Creator Himself in similar circumstances.
+"How," she cried, "could God let them perish who had been so good and
+loyal to their King?" St. Catherine replied gently that He would
+Himself care for these /bons amis/, and even promised that "before the
+St. Martin" relief would come. But Jeanne had probably by this time--
+in her great disappointment and loneliness, and with the sense in her
+of so much power to help were she only free--got beyond her own
+control. They bade her to be patient. One of them, amid their
+exhortations to accept her fate cheerfully, and not to be astonished
+at it, seems to have conveyed to her mind the impression that she
+should not be delivered till she had seen the King of England. "Truly
+I will not see him! I would rather die than fall into the hands of the
+English," cried Jeanne in her petulance. The King of England is spoken
+of always, it is curious to note, as if he had been a great, severe
+ruler like his father, never as the child he really was. But Jeanne in
+her helplessness and impotence was impatient even with her saints. Day
+by day the news came in from Compiègne, all that was favourable to the
+Burgundians received with joy and thanksgiving by the ladies of
+Luxembourg, while the captive consumed her heart with vain
+indignation. At last Jeanne would seem to have wrought herself up to
+the most desperate of expedients. Whether her room was in the donjon,
+or whether she was allowed sufficient freedom in the house to mount to
+the battlements there, we are not informed--probably the latter was
+the case: for it was from the top of the tower that the rash girl at
+last flung herself down, carried away by what sudden frenzy of alarm
+or sting of evil tidings can never be known. Probably she had hoped
+that a miracle would be wrought on her behalf, and that faith was all
+that was wanted, as on so many other occasions. Perhaps she had heard
+of the negotiations to sell her to the English, which would give a
+keener urgency to her determination to get free; all that appears in
+the story, however, is her wild anxiety about Compiègne and her /bons
+amis/. How she escaped destruction no one knows. She was rescued for a
+more tremendous and harder fate.
+
+The Maid was taken up as dead from the foot of the tower (the height
+is estimated at sixty feet); but she was not dead, nor even seriously
+hurt. Her frame, so slight that she had been able to slip between the
+bars put up to secure her, had so little solidity that the shock would
+seem to have been all that ailed her. She was stunned and unconscious
+and remained so far some time; and for three days neither ate nor
+drank. But though she was so humbled by the effects of the fall, "she
+was comforted by St. Catherine, who bade her confess and implore the
+mercy of God" for her rash disobedience--and repeated the promise that
+before Martinmas Compiègne should be relieved. Jeanne did not perhaps
+in her rebellion deserve this encouragement; but the heavenly ladies
+were kind and pitiful and did not stand upon their dignity. The
+wonderful thing was that Jeanne recovered perfectly from this
+tremendous leap.
+
+The earthly ladies, though so completely on the other side, were
+scarcely less kind to the Maid. They visited her daily, carried their
+news to her, were very friendly and sweet: and no doubt other visitors
+came to make the acquaintance of a prisoner so wonderful. There was
+one point on which they were very urgent, and this was about her
+dress. It shamed and troubled them to see her in the costume of a man.
+Jeanne had her good reasons for that, which perhaps she did not care
+to tell them, fearing to shock the ears of a demoiselle of Luxembourg
+with the suggestion of dangers of which she knew nothing. No doubt it
+was true that while doing the serious work of war, as she said
+afterwards, it was best that she should be dressed as a man; but
+Jeanne had reason to know besides, that it was safer, among the rough
+comrades and gaolers who now surrounded her, to wear the tight-fitting
+and firmly fastened dress of a soldier. She answered the ladies and
+their remonstrances with all the grace of a courtier. Could she have
+done it she would rather have yielded the point to them, she said,
+than to any one else in France, except the Queen. The women wherever
+she went were always faithful to this young creature, so pure-womanly
+in her young angel-hood and man-hood. The poor followed to kiss her
+hands or her armour, the rich wooed her with tender flatteries and
+persuasions. There is not record in all her career of any woman who
+was not her friend.
+
+For the last dreary month of that winter she was sent to the fortress
+of Crotoy on the Somme, for what reason we are not told, probably to
+be more near the English into whose hands she was about to be given
+up: again another shameful bargain in which the guilt lies with the
+Burgundians and not with the English. If Charles I. was sold as we
+Scots all indignantly deny, the shame of the sale was on our nation,
+not on England, whom nobody has ever blamed for the transaction. The
+sale of Jeanne was brutally frank. It was indeed a ransom which was
+paid to Jean of Luxembourg with a share to the first captor, the
+archer who had secured her; but it was simple blood-money as everybody
+knew. At Crotoy she had once more the solace of female society, again
+with much pressing upon her of their own heavy skirts and hanging
+sleeves. A fellow-prisoner in the dungeon of Crotoy, a priest, said
+mass every day and gave her the holy communion. And her mind seems to
+have been soothed and calmed. Compiègne was relieved; the saints had
+kept their word: she had that burden the less upon her soul: and over
+the country there were against stirrings of French valour and success.
+The day of the Maid was over, but it began to bear the fruit of a
+national quickening of vigour and life.
+
+It was at Crotoy, in December, that she was transferred to English
+hands. The eager offer of the University of Paris to see her speedy
+condemnation had not been accepted, and perhaps the Burgundians had
+been willing to wait, to see if any ransom was forthcoming from
+France. Perhaps too, Paris, which sang the /Te Deum/ when she was
+taken prisoner, began to be a little startled by its own enthusiasm
+and to ask itself the question what there was to be so thankful about?
+--a result which has happened before in the history of that impulsive
+city:--and Paris was too near the centre of France, where the balance
+seemed to be turning again in favour of the national party, to have
+its thoughts distracted by such a trial as was impending. It seemed
+better to the English leaders to conduct their prisoner to a safer
+place, to the depths of Normandy where they were most strong. They
+seem to have carried her away in the end of the year, travelling
+slowly along the coast, and reaching Rouen by way of Eu and Dieppe, as
+far away as possible from any risk of rescue. She arrived in Rouen in
+the beginning of the year 1431, having thus been already for nearly
+eight months in close custody. But there were no further ministrations
+of kind women for Jeanne. She was now distinctly in the hands of her
+enemies, those who had no sympathy or natural softening of feeling
+towards her.
+
+The severities inflicted upon her in her new prison at Rouen were
+terrible, almost incredible. We are told that she was kept in an iron
+cage (like the Countess of Buchan in earlier days by Edward I.), bound
+hands, and feet, and throat, to a pillar, and watched incessantly by
+English soldiers--the latter being an abominable and hideous method of
+torture which was never departed from during the rest of her life.
+Afterwards, at the beginning of her trial she was relieved from the
+cage, but never from the presence and scrutiny of this fierce and
+hateful bodyguard. Such detestable cruelties were in the manner of the
+time, which does not make us the less sicken at them with burning
+indignation and the rage of shame. For this aggravation of her
+sufferings England alone was responsible. The Burgundians at their
+worst had not used her so. It is true that she was to them a piece of
+valuable property worth so much good money; which is a powerful
+argument everywhere. But to the English she meant no money: no one
+offered to ransom Jeanne on the side of her own party, for whom she
+had done so much. Even at Tours and Orleans, so far as appears, there
+was no subscription--to speak in modern terms,--no cry among the
+burghers to gather their crowns for her redemption--not a word, not an
+effort, only a barefooted procession, a mass, a Miserere, which had no
+issue. France stood silent to see what would come of it; and her
+scholars and divines swarmed towards Rouen to make sure that nothing
+but harm should come of it to the ignorant country lass, who had set
+up such pretences of knowing better than others. The King
+congratulated himself that he had another prophetess as good as she,
+and a Heaven-sent boy from the mountains who would do as well and
+better than Jeanne. Where was Dunois? Where was La Hire,[1] a soldier
+bound by no conventions, a captain whose troop went like the wind
+where it listed, and whose valour was known? Where was young Guy de
+Laval, so ready to sell his lands that his men might be fit for
+service? All silent; no man drawing a sword or saying a word. It is
+evident that in this frightful pause of fate, Jeanne had become to
+France as to England, the Witch whom it was perhaps a danger to have
+had anything to do with, whose spells had turned the world upside down
+for a moment: but these spells had become ineffectual or worn out as
+is the nature of sorcery. No explanation, not even the well-worn and
+so often valid one of human baseness, could explain the terrible
+situation, if not this.
+----------
+[1] La Hire was at Louvain, which we hear a little later the new
+    English levies would not march to besiege till the Maid was dead,
+    and where Dunois joined him in March of this fatal year. These two
+    at Louvain within a few leagues of Rouen and not a sword drawn for
+    Jeanne!--the wonder grows.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE JUDGES.
+1431.
+
+The name of Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, appears to us at this
+long distance as arising out of the infernal mists, into which, when
+his ministry of shame was accomplished, he disappeared again, bearing
+with him nothing but hatred and ill fame. Yet in his own day and to
+his contemporaries, he was not an inconsiderable man. He was of
+Rheims, a great student, and excellent scholar, the friend of many
+good men, highly esteemed among the ranks of the learned, a good man
+of business, which is not always the attribute of a scholar, and at
+the same time a Burgundian of pronounced sentiments, holding for his
+Duke, against the King. When Beauvais was summoned by Charles, after
+his coronation, at that moment of universal triumph when all seemed
+open for him to march upon Paris if he would, the city had joyfully
+thrown open its doors to the royal army, and in doing so had driven
+out its Bishop, who was hot on the other side. He would not seem to
+have been wanted in Paris at that moment. The "triste Bedford," as
+Michelet calls him, had no means of employing an ambitious priest, no
+dirty work for the moment to give him. It is natural to suppose that a
+man so admirably adapted for that employment went in search of it to
+the ecclesiastical court, not beloved of England, which the Cardinal
+Bishop of Winchester held there. Winchester was the only one of the
+House of Lancaster who had money to carry on the government either at
+home or abroad. The two priests, as the historians are always pleased
+to insinuate in respect to ecclesiastics, soon understood each other,
+and Winchester became aware that he had in Cauchon a tool ready for
+any shameful enterprise. It is not, however, necessary to assume so
+much as this, for we have not the least reason to believe that either
+one or the other of them had the slightest doubt on the subject of
+Jeanne, or as to her character. She was a pernicious witch, filling a
+hitherto invincible army with that savage fright which is but too well
+understood among men, and which produces cruel outrages as well as
+cowardly panic. The air of this very day, while I write, is ringing
+with the story of a woman burnt to death by her own family under the
+influence of that same horrible panic and terror. Cauchon was the
+countryman, almost the /pays/--an untranslatable expression,--of
+Jeanne; but he did not believe in her any more than the loftier
+ecclesiastics of France believed in Bernadette of Lourdes, who was of
+the spiritual lineage of Jeanne, nor than we should believe to-day in
+a similar pretender. It seems unnecessary then to think of dark plots
+hatched between these two dark priests against the white, angelic
+apparition of the Maid.
+
+What services Cauchon had done to recommend him to the favour of
+Winchester we are not told, but he was so much in favour that the
+Cardinal had recommended him to the Pope for the vacant archbishopric
+of Rouen a few months before there was any immediate question of
+Jeanne. The appointment was opposed by the clergy of Rouen, and the
+Pope had not come to any decision as yet on the subject. But no doubt
+the ambition of Cauchon made him very eager, with such a tempting
+prize before him, to recommend himself to his English patron by every
+means in his power. And he it was who undertook the office of
+negotiating the ransom of Jeanne from the hands of Jean de Luxembourg.
+We doubt whether after all it would be just even to call this a
+nefarious bargain. To the careless seigneur it would probably be very
+much a matter of course. The ransom offered--six thousand francs--was
+as good as if she had been a prince. The ladies at home might be
+indignant, but what was their foolish fancy for a high-flown girl in
+comparison with these substantial crowns in his pocket; and to be free
+from the responsibility of guarding her would be an advantage too. And
+if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why should he? A most
+pertinent question. Cauchon, on the other hand, could assure all
+objectors that no summary vengeance was to be taken on the Maid. She
+was to be judged by the Church, and by the best men the University
+could provide, and if she were found innocent, no doubt would go free.
+
+They must have been sanguine indeed who hoped for a triumphant
+acquittal of Jeanne; but still it may have been hoped that a trial by
+her countrymen would in every case be better for her than to languish
+in prison or to be seized perhaps by the English on some after
+occasion, and to perish by their hands. Let us therefore be fair to
+Cauchon, if possible, up to the beginning of the /Procès/. He was no
+Frenchman, but a Burgundian; his allegiance was to his Duke, not to
+the King of England; but his natural sovereign did so, and many, very
+many men of note and importance were equally base, and did not esteem
+it base at all. Had the inhabitants of Rheims, his native town, or of
+Rouen, in which /his/ trial and downfall took place as well as
+Jeanne's, pronounced for the King of Prussia in the last war, and
+proclaimed themselves his subjects, the traitors would have been hung
+with infamy from their own high towers, or driven into their river
+headlong. But things were very different in the fifteenth century.
+There has never been a moment in our history when either England or
+Scotland has pronounced for a foreign sway. Scotland fought with
+desperation for centuries against the mere name of suzerainty, though
+of a kindred race. There have been terrible moments of forced
+subjugation at the point of the sword; but never any such phenomena as
+appeared in France, so far on in the world's history as was that
+brilliant and highly cultured age. Such a state of affairs is to our
+minds impossible to understand or almost to believe: but in the
+interests of justice it must be fully acknowledged and understood.
+
+Cauchon arises accordingly, not at first with any infamy, out of the
+obscurity. He had been expelled and dethroned from his See, but this
+only for political reasons. He was ecclesiastically Bishop of Beauvais
+still; it was within his diocese that the Maid had taken prisoner, and
+there also her last acts of magic, if magic there was, had taken
+place. He had therefore a legal right to claim the jurisdiction, a
+right which no one had any interest in taking from him. If Paris was
+disappointed at not having so interesting a trial carried on before
+its courts, there was compensation in the fact that many doctors of
+the University were called to assist Cauchon in his examination of the
+Maid, and to bring her, witch, sorceress, heretic, whatever she might
+be, to question. These doctors were not undistinguished or unworthy
+men. A number of them held high office in the Church; almost all were
+honourably connected with the University, the source of learning in
+France. "With what art were they chosen!" exclaims M. Blaze de Bury.
+"A number of theologians, the élite of the time, had been named to
+represent France at the council of Bâle; of these Cauchon chose the
+flower." This does not seem on the face of it to be a fact against,
+but rather in favour of, the tribunal, which the reader naturally
+supposes must have been the better, the more just, for being chosen
+among the flower of learning in France. They were not men who could be
+imagined to be the tools of any Bishop. Quicherat, in his moderate and
+able remarks on this subject, selects for special mention three men
+who took a very important part in it, Guillame Érard, Nicole Midi, and
+Tomas de Courcelles. They were all men who held a high place in the
+respect of their generation. Érard was a friend of Machet, the
+confessor of Charles VII., who had been a member of the tribunal at
+Poitiers which first pronounced upon the pretensions of Jeanne; yet
+after the trial of the Maid Machet still describes him as a man of the
+highest virtue and heavenly wisdom. Nicole Midi continued to hold an
+honourable place in his University for many years, and was the man
+chosen to congratulate Charles when Paris finally became again the
+residence of the King. Courcelles was considered the first theologian
+of the age. "He was an austere and eloquent young man," says
+Quicherat, "of a lucid mind, though nourished on abstractions. He was
+the first of theologians long before he had attained the age at which
+he could assume the rank of doctor, and even before he had finished
+his studies he was considered as the successor of Gerson. He was the
+light of the council of Bâle. Eneas Piccolomini (Pope Pius II.) speaks
+with admiration of his capacity and his modesty. In him we recognise
+the father of the freedom of the Gallican Church. His
+disinterestedness is shown by the simple position with which he
+contented himself. He died with no higher rank than that of Dean of
+the Chapter of Paris."
+
+Did this in Cæsar seem ambitious? Was this the man to be used for
+their vile ends by a savage English party thirsting for the blood of
+an innocent victim, and by the vile priest who was its tool? It does
+not seem so to our eyes across the long level of the centuries which
+clear away so many mists. And no more dreadful accusation can be
+brought against France than the suggestion that men like these, her
+best and most carefully trained, were willing to act as blood-hounds
+for the advantage and the pay of the invader. But there are many
+French historians to whom the mere fact of a black gown or at least an
+ecclesiastical robe, confounds every testimony, and to whom even the
+name of Frenchman does not make it appear possible that a priest
+should retain a shred of honour or of honesty. We should have said by
+the light of nature and probability that had every guarantee been
+required for the impartiality and justice of such a tribunal, they
+could not have been better secured than by the selection of such men
+to conduct its proceedings. They made a great and terrible mistake, as
+the wisest of men have made before now. They did much worse, they
+behaved to an unfortunate girl who was in their power with
+indescribable ferocity and cruelty; but we must hope that this was
+owing to the period at which they lived rather than to themselves.
+
+It is not perhaps indeed from the wise and learned, the Stoics and
+Pundits of a University, that we should choose judges for the divine
+simplicity of those babes and sucklings out of whose mouth praise is
+perfected. At the same time to choose the best men is not generally
+the way adopted to procure a base judgement. Cauchon might have been
+subject to this blame had he filled the benches of his court with
+creatures of his own, nameless priests and dialecticians, knowing
+nothing but their own poor science of words. He did not do so. There
+were but two Englishmen in the assembly, neither of them men of any
+importance or influence although there must have been many English
+priests in the country and in the train of Winchester. There were not
+even any special partisans of Burgundy, though some of the assessors
+were Burgundian by birth. We should have said, had we known no more
+than this, that every precaution had been taken to give the Maid the
+fairest trial. But at the same time a trial which is conducted under
+the name of the Inquisition is always suspect. The mere fact of that
+terrible name seems to establish a foregone conclusion; few are the
+prisoners at that bar who have ever escaped. This fact is almost all
+that can be set against the high character of the individuals who
+composed the tribunal. At all events it is no argument against the
+English that they permitted the best men in France to be chosen as
+Jeanne's judges. It is the most bewildering and astonishing of
+historical facts that they were so, and yet came to the conclusion
+they did, by the means they did, and that without falling under the
+condemnation, or scorn, or horror of their fellow-men.
+
+This then was the assembly which gathered in Rouen in the beginning of
+1431. Quicherat will not venture to affirm even that intimidation was
+directly employed to effect their decision. He says that the evidence
+"tends to prove" that this was the case, but honestly allows that, "it
+is well to remark that the witnesses contradict each other." "In all
+that I have said," he adds, "my intention has been to prove that the
+judges of the Maid had in no way the appearance of partisans hotly
+pursuing a political vengeance; but that, on the contrary, their known
+weight, the consideration which most of them enjoyed, and the nature
+of the tribunal for which they were assembled, were all calculated to
+produce generally an expectation full of confidence and respect."
+
+Meanwhile there is not a word to be said for the treatment to which
+Jeanne herself was subjected, she being, so far as is apparent,
+entirely in English custody. She had been treated with tolerable
+gentleness it would seem in the first part of her captivity while in
+the hands of Jean de Luxembourg, the Count de Ligny. The fact that the
+ladies of the house were for her friends must have assured this, and
+there is no complaint made anywhere of cruelty or even unkindness.
+When she arrived in Rouen she was confined in the middle chamber of
+the donjon, which was the best we may suppose, neither a dungeon under
+the soil, nor a room under the leads, but one to which there was
+access by a short flight of steps from the courtyard, and which was
+fully lighted and not out of reach or sight of life. But in this
+chamber was an iron cage,[1] within which she was bound, feet, and
+waist and neck, from the time of her arrival until the beginning of
+the trial, a period of about six weeks. Five English soldiers of the
+lowest class watched her night and day, three in the room itself, two
+at the door. It is enough to think for a moment of the probable
+manners and morals of these troopers to imagine what torture must have
+been inflicted by their presence upon a young woman who had always
+been sensitive above all things to the laws of personal modesty and
+reserve. Their course jests would no doubt be unintelligible to her,
+which would be an alleviation; but their coarse laughter, their
+revolting touch, their impure looks, would be an endless incessant
+misery. We are told that she indignantly bestowed a hearty buffet on
+the cheek of a tailor who approached her too closely when it was
+intended to furnish her with female dress; but she was helpless to
+defend herself when in her irons, and had to endure as she best could
+--the bars of her cage let us hope, if cage there was, affording her
+some little protection from the horror of the continual presence of
+these rude attendants, with whom it was a shame to English gentlemen
+and knights to surround a helpless woman.
+
+When her trial began Jeanne was released from her cage, but was still
+chained by one foot to a wooden beam during the day, and at night to
+the posts of her bed. Sometimes her guards would wake her to tell her
+that she had been condemned and was immediately to be led forth to
+execution; but that was a small matter. Attempts were also made to
+inflict the barest insult and outrage upon her, and on one occasion
+she is said to have been saved only by the Earl of Warwick, who heard
+her cries and went to her rescue. By night as by day she clung to her
+male garb, tightly fastened by the innumerable "points" of which
+Shakespeare so often speaks. Such were the horrible circumstances in
+which she awaited her public appearance before her judges. She was
+brought before them every day for months together, to be badgered by
+the keenest wits in France, coming back and back with artful questions
+upon every detail of every subject, to endeavour to shake her firmness
+or force her into self-contradiction. Imagine a cross-examination
+going on for months, like those--only more cruel than those--to which
+we sometimes see an unfortunate witness exposed in our own courts of
+law. There is nothing more usual than to see people break down
+entirely after a day or two of such a tremendous ordeal, in which
+their hearts and lives are turned inside out, their minds so
+bewildered that they know not what they are saying, and everything
+they have done in their lives exhibited in the worst, often in an
+entirely fictitious, light, to the curiosity and amusement of the
+world.
+
+But all our processes are mercy in comparison with those to which
+French prisoners at the bar are still exposed. It is unnecessary to
+enter into an account of these which are so well known; but they show
+that even such a trial as that of Jeanne was by no means so contrary
+to common usage, as it would be, and always would have been in
+England. In England we warn the accused to utter no rash word which
+may be used against him; in France the first principle is to draw from
+him every rash word that he can be made to bring forth. This was the
+method employed with Jeanne. Her judges were all Churchmen and
+dialecticians of the subtlest wit and most dexterous faculties in
+France; they had all, or almost all, a strong prepossession against
+her. Though we cannot believe that men of such quality were suborned,
+there was, no doubt, enough of jealous and indignant feeling among
+them to make the desire of convicting Jeanne more powerful with them
+than the desire for pure justice. She was a true Christian, but not
+perhaps the soundest of Church-women. Her visions had not the sanction
+of any priest's approval, except indeed the official but not warm
+affirmation of the Council at Poitiers. She had not hastened to take
+the Church into her confidence nor to put herself under its
+protection. Though her claims had been guaranteed by the company of
+divines at Poitiers, she herself had always appealed to her private
+instructions, through her saints, rather than to the guiding of any
+priest. The chief ecclesiastical dignitary of her own party had just
+held her up to the reprobation of the people for this cause: she was
+too independent, so proud that she would take no advice but acted
+according to her own will. The more accustomed a Churchman is to
+experience the unbounded devotion and obedience of women, the more
+enraged he is against those who judge for themselves or have other
+guides on whom they rely. Jeanne was, beside all other sins alleged
+against her, a presumptuous woman: and very few of these men had any
+desire to acquit her. They were little accustomed to researches which
+were solely intended to discover the truth: their principle rather
+was, as it has been the principle of many, to obtain proofs that their
+own particular way of thinking was the right one. It is not perhaps
+very good even for a system of doctrine when this is the principle by
+which it is tested. It is more fatal still, on this principle, to
+judge an individual for death or for life. It will be abundantly
+proved, however, by all that is to follow, that in face of this
+tribunal, learned, able, powerful, and prejudiced, the peasant girl of
+nineteen stood like a rock, unmoved by all their cleverness, undaunted
+by their severity, seldom or never losing her head, or her temper, her
+modest steadfastness, or her high spirit. If they hoped to have an
+easy bargain of her, never were men more mistaken. Not knowing a from
+b, as she herself said, untrained, unaided, she was more than a match
+for them all.
+
+Round about this centre of eager intelligence, curiosity, and
+prejudice, the cathedral and council chamber teeming with Churchmen,
+was a dark and silent ring of laymen and soldiers. A number of the
+English leaders were in Rouen, but they appear very little.
+Winchester, who had very lately come from England with an army, which
+according to some of the historians would not budge from Calais, where
+it had landed, "for fear of the Maid"--was the chief person in the
+place, but did not make any appearance at the trial, curiously enough;
+the Duke of Bedford we are informed was visible on one shameful
+occasion, but no more. But Warwick, who was the Governor of the town,
+appears frequently and various other lords with him. We see them in
+the mirror held up to us by the French historians, pressing round in
+an ever narrowing circle, closing up upon the tribunal in the midst,
+pricking the priests with perpetual sword points if they seem to
+loiter. They would have had everything pushed on, no delay, no
+possibility of escape. It is very possible that this was the case, for
+it is evident that the Witch was deeply obnoxious to the English, and
+that they were eager to have her and her endless process out of the
+way; but the evidence for their terror and fierce desire to expedite
+matters is of the feeblest. A canon of Rouen declared at the trial
+that he had heard it said by Maître Pierre Morice, and Nicolas
+l'Oyseleur, judges assessors, and by other whose names he does not
+recollect, "that the said English were so afraid of her that they did
+not dare to begin the siege of Louviers until she was dead; and that
+it was necessary if one would please them, to hasten the trial as much
+as possible and to find the means of condemning her." Very likely this
+was quite true: but it cannot at all be taken for proved by such
+evidence. Another contemporary witness allows that though some of the
+English pushed on her trial for hate, some were well disposed to her;
+the manner of Jeanne's imprisonment is the only thing which inclines
+the reader to believe every evil thing that is said against them.
+
+Such were the circumstances in which Jeanne was brought to trail. The
+population, moved to pity and to tears as any population would have
+been, before the end, would seem at the beginning to have been
+indifferent and not to have taken much interest one way or another:
+the court, a hundred men and more with all their hangers-on, the
+cleverest men in France, one more distinguished and impeccable than
+the others: the stern ring of the Englishmen outside keeping an eye
+upon the tedious suit and all its convolutions: these all appear
+before us, surrounding as with bands of iron the young lonely victim
+in the donjon, who submitting to every indignity, and deprived of
+every aid, feeling that all her friends had abandoned her, yet stood
+steadfast and strong in her absolute simplicity and honesty. It was
+but two years in that same spring weather since she had left
+Vaucouleurs to seek the fortune of France, to offer herself to the
+struggle which now was coming to an end. Not a soul had Jeanne to
+comfort or stand by her. She had her saints who--one wonders if such a
+thought ever entered into her young visionary head--had lured her to
+her doom, and who still comforted her with enigmatical words, promises
+which came true in so sadly different a sense from that in which they
+were understood.
+----------
+[1] We are glad to add that the learned Quicherat has doubts on the
+    subject of the cage.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BEFORE THE TRIAL.
+LENT, 1431.
+
+We have not, however, sufficiently described the horror of the prison,
+and the treatment to which Jeanne was exposed, though the picture is
+already dark enough. It throws a horrible yet also a grotesque light
+upon the savage manners of the time to find that the chamber in which
+she was confined, had secret provision for an /espionnage/ of the most
+base kind, openings made in the walls through which everything that
+took place in the room, every proceeding of the unfortunate prisoner,
+could be spied upon and every word heard. The idea of such a secret
+watch has always been attractive to the vulgar mind, and no doubt it
+has been believed to exist many times when there was little or no
+justification for such an infernal thought. From the "ear" of
+Dionysius, down to the /Trou Judas/, which early tourists on the
+Continent were taught to fear in every chamber door, the idea has
+descended to our own times. It would seem, however, to be beyond doubt
+that this odious means of acquiring information was in full operation
+during the trial of Jeanne, and various spies were permitted to peep
+at her, and to watch for any unadvised word she might say in her most
+private moments. We are told that the Duke of Bedford made use of the
+opportunity in a still more revolting way, and was present, a secret
+spectator, at the fantastic scene when Jeanne was visited by a
+committee of matrons who examined her person to prove or to disprove
+one of the hateful insinuations which were made about her. The
+imagination, however, refuses to conceive that a man of serious age
+and of high functions should have degraded himself to the level of a
+Peeping Tom in this way; all the French historians, nevertheless,
+repeat the story though on the merest hearsay evidence. And they also
+relate, with more apparent truth, how a double treachery was committed
+upon the unfortunate prisoner by stationing two secretaries at these
+openings, to take down her conversation with a spy who had been sent
+to her in the guise of a countryman of her own; and that not only
+Cauchon but Warwick also was present on this occasion, listening,
+while their plot was carried out by the vile traitor inside. The
+clerks, we are glad to say, are credited with a refusal to act: but
+Warwick did not shrink from the ignominy. The Englishmen indeed shrank
+from no ignominy; nor did the great French savants assembled under the
+presidency of the Bishop. It is necessary to grant to begin with that
+they were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the
+trial almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked,
+in the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the
+profoundest ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken,
+L'Oyseleur (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented
+to be sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, a /pays/,
+like herself from Lorraine, to invite her confidence: but his long
+conversations with the Maid, which were heard behind their backs by
+the secretaries, elicited nothing from her that she did not say in the
+public examination. She had no secret devices to betray to a traitor.
+She would not seem, indeed, to have suspected the man at all, not even
+when she saw him among her judges taking part against her. Jeanne
+herself suspected no falsehood, but made her confession to him, when
+she found that he was a priest, and trusted him fully. The bewildering
+and confusing fact, turning all the contrivances of her judges into
+foolishness, was, that she had nothing to confess that she was not
+ready to tell in the eye of day.
+
+The adoption of this abominable method of eliciting secrets from the
+candid soul which had none, was justified, it appears, by the manner
+of her trial, which was after the rules of the Inquisition--by which
+even more than by those which regulate an ordinary French trial the
+guilt of the accused is a foregone conclusion for which proof is
+sought, not a fair investigation of facts for abstract purposes of
+justice. The first thing to be determined by the tribunal was the
+counts of the indictment against Jeanne; was she to be tried for
+magical arts, for sorcery and witchcraft? It is very probable that the
+mission of L'Oyseleur was to obtain evidence that would clear up this
+question by means of recalling to her the stories of her childhood, of
+the enchanted tree, and the Fairies' Well; from which sources, her
+accusers anxiously hoped to prove that she derived her inspiration.
+But it is very clear that no such evidence was forthcoming, and that
+it seemed to them hopeless to attribute sorcery to her; therefore the
+accusation was changed to that of heresy alone. The following mandate
+from the University authorising her prosecution will show what the
+charge was; and the reader will note that one of its darkest items is
+the costume, which for so many good and sufficient reasons she wore.
+Here is the official description of the accused:
+
+"A woman, calling herself the Maid, leaving the dress and habit of her
+sex against the divine law, a thing abominable to God, clothed and
+armed in the habit and condition of a man, has done cruel deeds of
+homicide, and as is said has made the simple people believe, in order
+to abuse and lead them astray, that she was sent by God, and had
+knowledge of His divine secrets; along with several other doctrines
+(/dogmatisations/), very dangerous, prejudicial, and scandalous to our
+holy Catholic faith, in pursuing which abuses, and exercising
+hostility against us and our people, she has been taken in arms,
+before Compiègne, and brought as a prisoner before us."
+
+According to French law the indictment ought to have been founded upon
+a preliminary examination into the previous life of the accused,
+which, as it does not appear in the formal accusations, it was
+supposed had never been made. Recent researches, however, have proved
+that it was made, but was not of a nature to strengthen or justify any
+accusation. All that the examiners could discover was that Jeanne
+d'Arc was a good and honest maid who left a spotless reputation behind
+her in her native village, and that not a suspicion of
+/dogmatisations/, nor worship of fairies, nor any other unseemly thing
+was associated with her name. Other things less favourable, we are
+told, were reported of her: the statement, for instance, made in
+apparent good faith by Monstrelet the Burgundian chronicler, that she
+had been for some time a servant in an /auberge/, and there had
+learned to ride, and to consort with men--a statement totally without
+foundation, which was scarcely referred to in the trial.
+
+The skill of M. Quicherat discovered the substance of those inquiries
+among the many secondary papers, but they were not made use of in the
+formal proceedings. This also we are told, though contrary to the
+habit of French law, was justified by the methods of the Inquisition,
+which were followed throughout the trial. One breach of law and
+justice, however, is permitted by no code. It is expressly forbidden
+by French, and even by inquisitorial law, that a prisoner should be
+tried by his enemies--that is by judges avowedly hostile to him: an
+initial difficulty which it would have been impossible to get over and
+which had therefore to be ignored. One brave and honest man, Nicolas
+de Houppeville, had the courage to make this observation in one of the
+earliest sittings of the assembly:
+
+"Neither the Bishop of Beauvais" (he said) "nor the other members of
+the tribunal ought to be judges in the matter; and it did not seem to
+him a good mode of procedure that those who were of the opposite party
+to the accused should be her judges--considering also that she had
+been examined already by the clergy of Poitiers, and by the Archbishop
+of Rheims, who was the metropolitan of the said Bishop of Beauvais."
+
+Nicolas de Houppeville was a lawyer and had a right to be heard on
+such a point; but the reply of the judges was to throw him into
+prison, not without threats on the part of the civil authorities to
+carry the point further by throwing him into the Seine. This was the
+method by which every honest objection was silenced. That the
+examination at Poitiers, where the judges, as has been seen, were by
+no means too favourable to Jeanne, should never have been referred to
+by her present examiners, though there was no doubt it ought to have
+been one of the most important sources of the preliminary information
+--is also very remarkable. It was suggested indeed to Jeanne at a late
+period of the trial, that she might appeal to the Archbishop; but he
+was, as she well knew, one of her most cruel enemies.
+
+Still more important was the breach of all justice apparent in the
+fact that she had no advocate, no counsel on her side, no one to speak
+to her and conduct her defence. It was suggested to her near the end
+of the proceedings that she might choose one of her judges to fill
+this office; but even if the proposal had been a genuine one or at all
+likely to be to her advantage, it was then too late to be of any use.
+These particulars, we believe, were enough to invalidate any process
+in strict law; but the name of law seems ridiculous altogether as
+applied to this rambling and cruel cross-examination in which was
+neither sense nor decorum. The reader will understand that there were
+no witnesses either for or against her, the answers of the accused
+herself forming the entire evidence.
+
+One or two particulars may still be added to make the background at
+least more clear. The prison of Jeanne, as we have seen, was not left
+in the usual silence of such a place; the constant noise with which
+the English troopers filled the air, jesting, gossiping, and carrying
+on their noisy conversation, if nothing worse and more offensive--
+sometimes, as Jeanne complains, preventing her from hearing (her sole
+solace) the soft voices of her saintly visitors--was not her only
+disturbance. Her solitude was broken by curious and inquisitive
+visitors of various kinds. L'Oyseleur, the abominable detective, who
+professed to be her countryman and who beguiled her into talk of her
+childhood and native place, was the first of these; and it is possible
+that at first his presence was a pleasure to her. One other visitor of
+whom we hear accidentally, a citizen of Rouen, Pierre Casquel, seems
+to have got in private interest and with a more or less good motive
+and no evil meaning. He warned her to answer with prudence the
+questions put to her, since it was a matter of life and death. She
+seemed to him to be "very simple" and still to believe that she might
+be ransomed. Earl Warwick, the commander of the town, appears on
+various occasions. He probably had his headquarters in the Castle, and
+thus heard her cry for help in her danger, executing, let us hope,
+summary vengeance on her brutal assailant; but he also evidently took
+advantage of his power to show his interesting prisoner to his friends
+on occasion. And it was he who took her original captor, Jean de
+Luxembourg, now Comte de Ligny, by whom she had been given up, to see
+her, along with an English lord, sometimes named as Lord Sheffield.
+The Belgian who had put so many good crowns in his pocket for her
+ransom, thought it good taste to enter with a jesting suggestion that
+he had come to buy her back.
+
+"Jeanne, I will have you ransomed if you will promise never to bear
+arms against us again," he said. The Maid was not deceived by this
+mocking suggestion. "It is well for you to jest," she said, "but I
+know you have no such power. I know that the English will kill me,
+believing, after I am dead, that they will be able to win all the
+kingdom of France: but if there were a hundred thousand more Goddens
+than there are, they shall never win the kingdom of France." The
+English lord drew his dagger to strike the helpless girl, all the
+stories say, but was prevented by Warwick. Warwick, however, we are
+told, though he had thus saved her twice, "recovered his barbarous
+instincts" as soon as he got outside, and indignantly lamented the
+possibility of Jeanne's escape from the stake.
+
+Such incidents as these alone lightened or darkened her weary days in
+prison. A traitor or spy, a prophet of evil shaking his head over her
+danger, a contemptuous party of jeering nobles; afterwards
+inquisitors, for ever repeating in private their tedious questions:
+these all visited her--but never a friend. Jeanne was not afraid of
+the English lord's dagger, or of the watchful eye of Warwick over her.
+Even when spying through a hole, if the English earl and knight,
+indeed permitted himself that strange indulgence, his presence and
+inspection must have been almost the only defence of the prisoner. Our
+historians all quote, with an admiration almost as misplaced as their
+horror of Warwick's "barbarous instincts," the /vrai galant homme/ of
+an Englishman who in the midst of the trial cried out "/Brave femme/!"
+(it is difficult to translate the words, for /brave/ means more than
+brave)--"why was she not English?" However we are not concerned to
+defend the English share of the crime. The worst feature of all is
+that she never seems to have been visited by any one favourable and
+friendly to her, except afterwards, the two or three pitying priests
+whose hearts were touched by her great sufferings, though they
+remained among her judges, and gave sentence against her. No woman
+seems ever to have entered that dreadful prison except those "matrons"
+who came officially as has been already said. The ladies de Ligny had
+cheered her in her first confinement, the kind women of Abbeville had
+not been shut out even from the gloomy fortress of Le Crotoy. But here
+no woman ever seems to have been permitted to enter, a fact which must
+either be taken to prove the hostility of the population, or the very
+vigorous regulations of the prison. Perhaps the barbarous watch set
+upon her, the soldiers ever present, may have been a reason for the
+absence of any female visitor. At all events it is a very distinct
+fact that during the whole period of her trial, five months of misery,
+except on the one occasion already referred to, no woman came to
+console the unfortunate Maid. She had never before during all her
+vicissitudes been without their constant ministrations.
+
+One woman, the only one we ever hear of who was not the partisan and
+lover of the Maid, does, however, make herself faintly seen amid the
+crowd. Catherine of La Rochelle--the woman who had laid claim to
+saintly visitors and voices like those of Jeanne, and who had been for
+a time received and fêted at the Court of Charles with vile
+satisfaction, as making the loss of the Maid no such great thing--had
+by this time been dropped as useless, on the appearance of the
+shepherd boy quoted by the Archbishop of Rheims, and had fallen into
+the hands of the English: was not she too a witch, and admirably
+qualified to give evidence as to the other witch, for whose blood all
+around her were thirsting? Catherine was ready to say anything that
+was evil of her sister sorceress. "Take care of her," she said; "if
+you lose sight of her for one moment, the devil will carry her away."
+Perhaps this was the cause of the guard in Jeanne's room, the
+ceaseless scrutiny to which she was exposed. The vulgar slanderer was
+allowed to escape after this valuable testimony. She comes into
+history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights that mean
+nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again with
+her false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have
+been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians.
+Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It
+is profane to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of
+a mountebank. This is the only woman in all her generation, so far as
+appears to us, who was not the partisan and devoted friend of the
+spotless Maid.
+
+The aspect of that old-world city of Rouen, still so old and
+picturesque to the visitor of to-day, though all new since that time
+except the churches, is curious and interesting to look back upon. It
+must have hummed and rustled with life through every street; not only
+with the English troops, and many a Burgundian man-at-arms, swaggering
+about, swearing big oaths and filling the air with loud voices,--but
+with all the polished bands of the doctors, men first in fame and
+learning of the famous University, and beneficed priests of all
+classes, canons and deans and bishops, with the countless array that
+followed them, the cardinal's tonsured Court in addition, standing by
+and taking no share in the business: but all French and English alike,
+occupied with one subject, talking of the trial, of the new points
+brought out, of the opinions of this doctor and that, of Maître
+Nicolas who had presumed on his lawyership to correct the bishop, and
+had suffered for it: of the bold canon who ventured to whisper a
+suggestion to the prisoner, and who ever since had had the eye of the
+governor upon him: of Warwick, keeping a rough shield of protection
+around the Maid but himself fiercely impatient of the law's delay,
+anxious to burn the witch and be done with her. And Jeanne herself,
+the one strange figure that nobody understood; was she a witch? Was
+she an angelic messenger? Her answers so simple, so bold, so full of
+the spirit and sentiment of truth, must have been reported from one to
+another. This is what she said; does that look like a deceiver? could
+the devils inspire that steadfastness, that constancy and quiet? or
+was it not rather the angels, the saints as she said? Never, we may be
+sure, had there been in Rouen a time of so much interest, such a theme
+for conversations, such a subject for all thoughts. The eager court
+sat with their tonsured heads together, keen to seize every weak
+point. Did you observe how she hesitated on this? Let us push that,
+we'll get an admission on that point to-morrow. It is impossible to
+believe that in such an assembly every man was a partisan, much less
+that each one of them was thinking of the fee of the English, the
+daily allowance which it was the English habit to make. That were to
+imagine a France, base indeed beyond the limits of human baseness. All
+the Norman dignitaries of the Church, all the most learned doctors of
+the University--no! that is too great a stretch of our faith. The
+greater part no doubt believed as an indisputable fact, that Jeanne
+was either a witch or an impostor, as we should all probably do now.
+And the vertigo of Inquisition gained upon them; they became day by
+day more exasperated with her seeming innocence, with what must have
+seemed to them the cunning and cleverness, impossible to her age and
+sex, of her replies. Who could have kept the girl so cool, so
+dauntless, so embarrassing in her straight-forwardness and sincerity?
+The saints? the saints were not dialecticians; far more likely the
+evil one himself, in whom the Church has always such faith. "He hath a
+devil and by Beelzebub casteth out devils." It was all like a play,
+only more exciting than any play, and going on endlessly, the
+excitement always getting stronger till it became the chief stimulus
+and occupation of life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PUBLIC EXAMINATION.
+FEBRUARY, 1431.
+
+It was in the chapel of the Castle of Rouen, on the 21st of February,
+that the trial of Jeanne was begun. The judges present numbered about
+forty, and are carefully classed as doctors in theology, abbots,
+canons, doctors in canonical and civil law, with the Bishop of
+Beauvais at their head (the archepiscopal see of Rouen being vacant,
+as is added: but not that my lord of Beauvais hoped for that
+promotion). They were assembled there in all the solemnity of their
+priestly and professional robes, the reporters ready with their pens,
+the range of dark figures forming a semicircle round the presiding
+Bishop, when the officer of the court led in the prisoner, clothed in
+her worn and war-stained tunic, like a boy, with her hair cut close as
+for the helmet, and her slim figure, no doubt more slim than ever,
+after her long imprisonment. She had asked to be allowed to hear mass
+before coming to the bar, but this was refused. It was a privilege
+which she had never failed to avail herself of in her most triumphant
+days. Now the chapel--the sanctuary of God contained for her no sacred
+sacrifice, but only those dark benches of priests amid whom she found
+no responsive countenance, no look of kindness.
+
+Jeanne was addressed sternly by Cauchon, in an exhortation which it is
+sad to think was not in Latin, as it appears in the /Procès/. She was
+then required to take the oath on the Scriptures to speak the truth,
+and to answer all questions addressed to her. Jeanne had already held
+that conversation with L'Oyseleur in the prison which Cauchon and
+Warwick had listened to in secret with greedy ears, but which Manchon,
+the honest reporter, had refused to take down. Perhaps, therefore, the
+Bishop knew that the slim creature before him, half boy half girl, was
+not likely to be overawed by his presence or questions; but it cannot
+have been but a wonder to the others, all gazing at her, the first men
+in Normandy, the most learned in Paris, to hear her voice, /assez
+femme/, young and clear, arising in the midst of them, "I know not
+what things I may be asked," said Jeanne. "Perhaps you may ask me
+questions which I cannot answer." The assembly was startled by this
+beginning.
+
+"Will you swear to answer truly all that concerns the faith, and that
+you know?"
+
+"I will swear," said Jeanne, "about my father and mother and what I
+have done since coming to France; but concerning my revelations from
+God I will answer to no man, except only to Charles my King; I should
+not reveal them were you to cut off my head, unless by the secret
+counsel of my visions."
+
+The Bishop continued not without gentleness, enjoining her to swear at
+least that in everything that touched the faith she would speak truth;
+and Jeanne kneeling down crossed her hands upon the book of the
+Gospel, or Missal as it is called in the report, and took the required
+oath, always under the condition she stated, to answer truly on
+everything she knew concerning the faith, except in respect to her
+revelations.
+
+The examination then began with the usual formalities. She was asked
+her name (which she said with touching simplicity was Jeannette at
+home but Jeanne in France), the names of her father and mother,
+godfather and godmothers, the priest who baptised her, the place where
+she was born, etc., her age, almost nineteen; her education,
+consisting of the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Credo, which her mother
+had taught her.
+
+Here she was asked, a curious interruption to the formal
+interrogatory, to say the Pater Noster--the reason of which sudden
+demand was that witches and sorcerers were supposed to be unable to
+repeat that prayer. As unexpected as the question was Jeanne's reply.
+She answered that if the Bishop would hear her in confession she would
+say it willingly. She had been refused all the exercises of piety, and
+she was speaking to a company of priests.
+
+There is a great dignity of implied protest against this treatment in
+such an answer. The request was made a second time with a promise of
+selecting two worthy Frenchmen to hear her: but her reply was the
+same. She would say the prayer when she made her confession but not
+otherwise. She was ready it would seem in proud humility to confess to
+any or to all of her enemies, as one whose conscience was clear, and
+who had nothing to conceal.
+
+She was then commanded not to attempt to escape from her prison, on
+pain of being condemned for heresy, but to this again she demurred at
+once. She would not accept the prohibition, but would escape if she
+could, so that no man could say that she had broken faith; although
+since her capture she had been bound in chains and her feet fastened
+with irons. To this, her examiner said that it was necessary so to
+secure her in order that she might not escape. "It is true and
+certain," she replied, "whatever others may wish, that to every
+prisoner it is lawful to escape if he can." It may be remarked, as she
+forcibly pointed out afterwards, that she had never given her faith,
+never surrendered, but had always retained her freedom of action.
+
+The tribunal thereupon called in the captain in charge of Jeanne's
+prison, a gentleman called John Gris in the record, probably John
+Grey, along with two soldiers, Bernoit and Talbot, and enjoined them
+to guard her securely and not to permit her to talk with any one
+without the permission of the court. This was all the business done on
+the first day of audience.
+
+On the 22d of February at eight o'clock in the morning, the sitting
+was resumed. In the meantime, however, the chapel had been found too
+small and too near the outer world, the proceedings being much
+interrupted by shouts and noises from without, and probably incommoded
+within by the audience which had crowded it the first day. The judges
+accordingly assembled in the great hall of the castle; they were
+forty-nine in number on the second day, the number being chiefly
+swelled by canons of Rouen. After some preliminary business the
+accused was once more introduced, and desired again to take the oath.
+Jeanne replied that she had done so on the previous day and that this
+was enough; upon which there followed a short altercation, which,
+however, ended by her consent to swear again that she would answer
+truly in all things that concerned the faith. The questioner this day
+was Jean Beaupère (/Pulchri patris/, as he is called in the Latin), a
+theologian, Master of Arts, Canon of Paris and of Besançon, "one of
+the greatest props of the University of Paris," a man holding a number
+of important offices, and who afterwards appeared at the Council of
+Bâle as the deputy of Normandy. He began by another exhortation to
+speak the truth, to which Jeanne replied as before that what she did
+say she would say truly, but that she would not answer upon all
+subjects. "I have done nothing but by revelation," she said.
+
+These preliminaries on both sides having been gone through, the
+examination was resumed. Jeanne informed the court in answer to
+Beaupère's question that she had been taught by her mother to sew and
+did not fear to compete with any woman in Rouen in these crafts; that
+she had once been absent from home when her family were driven out of
+their village by fear of the Burgundians, and that she had then lived
+for about fifteen days in the house of a woman called La Rousse, at
+Neufchâteau; that when she was at home she was occupied in the work of
+the house and did not go to the fields with the sheep and other
+animals; that she went to confession regularly to the Curé of her own
+village, or when he could not hear her, to some other priest, by
+permission of the Curé; also that two or three times she had made her
+confession to the mendicant friars--this being during her stay in
+Neufchâteau (where presumably she was not acquainted with the clergy);
+and that she received the sacrament always at Easter. Asked whether
+she had communicated at other feasts than Easter, she said briefly
+that this was enough. "Go on to the rest," /passez outre/, she added,
+and the questioner seems to have been satisfied. Then came the really
+vital part of the matter. She proceeded--no direct question on the
+point being recorded, though no doubt it was made--to tell how when
+she was about thirteen she heard voices from God bidding her to be
+good and obedient. The first time she was much afraid. The voice came
+about the hour of noon, in summer, in her father's garden. She was
+fasting but had not fasted the preceding day. The voice came from the
+right, towards the church; and came rarely without a great light. This
+light came always from the side whence the voice proceeded, and was a
+very bright radiance. When she came into France she still continued to
+hear the same voices.
+
+She was then asked how she could see the light when it was at the
+side; to which foolish question Jeanne gave no reply, but "turned to
+other matters," saying voluntarily with a soft implied reproof of the
+noise around her--that if she were in a wood, that is in a quiet
+place, she could hear the voices coming towards her. She added (going
+on, one could imagine, in a musing, forgetting the congregation of
+sinners about her) that it seemed to her a noble voice, and that she
+believed it came from God, and that when she had heard it three times
+she knew it was the voice of an angel; the voice always came quite
+clearly to her, and she understood it well.
+
+She was then asked what it said to her concerning the salvation of her
+soul.
+
+She said that it taught her to rule her life well, to go often to
+church: and told her that it was necessary that she, Jeanne, should go
+to France. The said Jeanne added that she would not be questioned
+further concerning the voice, or the manner in which it was made known
+to her, but that two or three times in a week it had said to her that
+she must go to France; but that her father knew nothing of this. The
+voice said to her that she should go to France, until she could endure
+it no longer; it said to her that she should raise the siege, which
+was set against the city of Orleans. It said also that she must go to
+Robert of Baudricourt, in the city of Vaucouleurs, who was captain of
+that place, and that he would give her people to go with her; to which
+she had answered that she was a poor girl who knew not how to ride,
+nor how to conduct war. She then said that she went to her uncle and
+told him that she wished to go with him for a little while to his
+house, and that she lived there for eight days; she then told her
+uncle that she must go to Vaucouleurs, and the said uncle took her
+there. Also she went on to say that when she came to the said city of
+Vaucouleurs, she recognised Robert of Baudricourt; though she had
+never seen him before she knew him by the voice that said to her which
+was he. She then told this Robert that it was necessary that she
+should go to France, but twice over he refused and repulsed her; the
+third time, however, he received her, and gave her certain men to go
+with her; the voice had told her that this would be so.
+
+She said also that the Duke of Lorraine sent for her to come to him,
+and that she went under a safe conduct granted by him, and told him
+that she must go to France. He asked her whether he should recover
+from his illness; but she told him that she knew nothing of that, and
+she talked very little to him of her journey. She told the Duke that
+he ought to send his son and his people with her to take her to
+France, and that she would pray God to restore his health; and then
+she was taken back to Vaucouleurs. She said also that when she left
+Vaucouleurs she wore the dress of a man, without any other arms than a
+sword which Robert de Baudricourt had given her; and that she had with
+her a chevalier, a squire, and four servants, and that they slept for
+the first night at St. Urbain, in the abbey there. She was then asked
+by whose advice she wore the dress of a man, but refused to answer.
+Finally she said that she charged no man with giving her this advice.
+
+She went on to say that the said Robert de Baudricourt exacted an oath
+from those who went with her, that they would conduct her to the end
+of her journey well and safely; and that he said, as she left him,
+"Go, and let come what will." She also said that she knew well that
+God loved the Duke of Orleans, concerning whom she had more
+revelations than about any other living man, except him whom she
+called her King. She added that it was necessary for her to wear male
+attire, and that whoever advised her to do so had given her wise
+counsel.
+
+She then said that she sent a letter to the English before Orleans, in
+which she required them to go away, a copy of which letter had been
+read to her in Rouen; but there were two or three mistakes, especially
+in the words which called upon them to surrender to the Maid instead
+of to surrender to the King. (There is no indication why these two
+latter statements should have been introduced into the midst of her
+narrative of the journey; it may have been in reply to some other
+question interjected by another of her examiners: /Passez outre/, as
+she herself says. She immediately resumes the simple and
+straightforward tale.)
+
+The said Jeanne went on to say that her further journey to him whom
+she called her King was without any impediment; and that when she
+arrived at the town of St. Catherine de Fierbois she sent news of her
+arrival to the town of Chasteau-Chinon where the said King was. She
+arrived there herself about noon and went to an inn[1]; and after
+dinner went to him whom she called her King, who was in the castle.
+She then said that when she entered the chamber where he was, she knew
+him among all others, by the revelation of her "voices." She told her
+King that she wished to make war against the English.
+
+She was then asked whether when she heard the "voices" in the presence
+of the King the light was also seen in that place. She answered as
+before: /Passez outre: Transeatis ultra/. "Go on," as we might say,
+"to the other questions."
+
+She was asked if she had seen an angel hovering over her King. She
+answered: "Spare me; /passez outre/." She added afterwards, however,
+that before he put his hand to the work, the King had many beautiful
+apparitions and revelations. She was asked what these were. She
+answered: "I will not tell you; it is not I who should answer; send to
+the King and he will tell you."
+
+She was then asked if her voices had promised her that when she came
+to the King he would receive her. She answered that those of her own
+party knew that she had been sent from God and that some had heard and
+recognised the voices. Further, she said that her King and various
+others had heard and seen[2] the voices coming to her--Charles of
+Bourbon (Comte de Clermont) and two or three others with him. She then
+said that there was no day in which she did not hear that voice; but
+that she asked nothing from it except the salvation of her soul.
+Besides this, Jeanne confessed that the voice said she should be led
+to the town of St. Denis in France, where she wished to remain--that
+is after the attack on Paris--but that against her will the lords
+forced her to leave it: if she had not been wounded she would not have
+gone: but she was wounded in the moats of Paris: however she was
+healed in five days. She then said that she had made an assault,
+called in French /escarmouche/ (skirmish), upon the town of Paris. She
+was asked if it was on a holy day, and said that she believed it was
+on a festival. She was then asked if she thought it well done to fight
+on a holy day, and answered, "/Passez outre/." Go on to the next
+question."
+
+This is a verbatim account of one day of the trial. Most of the
+translations which exist give questions as well as answers: but these
+are but occasionally given in the original document, and Jeanne's
+narrative reads like a calm, continuous statement, only interrupted
+now and then by a question, usually a cunning attempt to startle her
+with a new subject, and to hurry some admission from her. The great
+dignity with which she makes her replies, the occasional flash of high
+spirit, the calm determination with which she refuses to be led into
+discussion of the subjects which she had from the first moment
+reserved, are very remarkable. We have seen her hitherto only in
+conflict, in the din of battle and the fatigue, yet exuberant energy,
+of rapid journeys. Her circumstances were now very different. She had
+been shut up in prison for months, for six weeks at least she had been
+in irons, and the air of heaven had not blown upon this daughter of
+the fields; her robust yet sensitive maidenhood had been exposed to a
+hundred offences, and to the constant society, infecting the very air
+about, of the rudest of men; yet so far is her spirit from being
+broken that she meets all those potent, grave, and reverend doctors
+and ecclesiastics, with the simplicity and freedom of a princess,
+answering frankly or holding her peace as seems good to her, afraid of
+nothing, keeping her self-possession, all her wits about her as we
+say, without panic and without presumption. The trial of Jeanne is
+indeed almost more miraculous than her fighting; a girl not yet
+nineteen, forsaken of all, without a friend! It is less wonderful that
+she should have developed the qualities of a general, of a gunner,
+every gift of war--than that in her humiliation and distress she
+should thus hold head against all the most subtle intellects in
+France, and bear, with but one moment of faltering, a continued cross-
+examination of three months, without losing her patience, her heart,
+or her courage.
+
+*****
+
+The third day brought a still larger accession of judges, sixty-two of
+them taking their places on the benches round the Bishop in the great
+hall; and the day began with another and longer altercation between
+Cauchon and Jeanne on the subject of the oath again demanded of her.
+She maintained her resolution to say nothing of her voices. "We"
+according to the record "required of her that she should swear simply
+and absolutely without reservation." She would seem to have replied
+with impatience, "Let me speak freely:" adding "By my faith you may
+ask me many questions which I will not answer": then explaining, "Many
+things you may ask me, but I will tell you nothing truly that concerns
+my revelations; for you might compel me to say things which I have
+sworn not to say; and so I should perjure myself, which you ought not
+to wish." This explains several statements which she made later in
+respect to her introduction to the King. She repeated emphatically: "I
+warn you well, you who call yourselves my judges, that you take a
+great responsibility upon you, and that you burden me too much." She
+said also that it was enough to have already sworn twice. She was
+again asked to swear simply and absolutely, and answered, "It is
+enough to have sworn twice," and that all the clerks in Rouen and
+Paris could not condemn her unless lawfully; also that of her coming
+she would speak the truth but not all the truth; and that the space of
+eight days would not be enough to tell all.
+
+"We the said Bishop" (continues the report) "then said to her that she
+should ask advice from those present whether she ought to swear or
+not. She replied again that of her coming she would speak truly and
+not otherwise, nor would it be fit that she should talk at large. We
+then told her that it would throw suspicion on what she said if she
+did not swear to speak the truth. She answered as before. We repeated
+that she must swear precisely and absolutely. She answered that she
+would say what she knew, but not all, and that she had come on the
+part of God, and appealed to God from whom she came. Again requested
+and admonished to swear on pain of every punishment that could be put
+on her, again answered '/Passez outre/.' Finally she consented to
+swear that she would speak the truth in everything that concerned the
+trial."
+
+Her examination was then resumed by Beaupère as before, who elicited
+from her that she had fasted (he seems to have wished to make out that
+the fasting had something to do with her visions) since noon the day
+before (it was Lent); and also that she had heard her voices both on
+that day and the day before, three times on the previous day, the
+first time in the morning when she was asleep, and awakened by them.
+Did she kneel and thank them? She thanked them, sitting up in her bed
+(to which she was chained, as her questioner knew) and clasping her
+hands. She asked them what she was to do, and they told her to answer
+boldly.
+
+It may be remarked here that more frequently as the examination goes
+on, part of Jeanne's words are quoted in the first person, as if the
+reporters had been specially struck by them, while the bulk of her
+evidence goes on more calmly in the third person, the narrative form.
+After saying that she was bidden to answer boldly, she seems to have
+turned to the Bishop, and to have addressed him individually: "You say
+you are my judge; I warn you to take care what you are doing, for I am
+sent from God, and you are putting yourself in much peril" (/magno
+periculo: gallice/, adds the reporter, /en grant dangier/).
+
+She was then asked if her voices ever changed their meaning, and
+answered that she had never heard two speak contrary to each other;
+what they had said that day was that she should speak boldly. Asked,
+if the voice forbade her to reply to questions asked, she replied; "I
+will not answer you. I have revelations touching the King which I will
+not tell you." Asked, if the voices forbade her to reveal these
+revelations, she answered, "I have not consulted them; give me fifteen
+days' delay and I will answer you"; but being again exhorted to reply,
+said: "If the voice forbade me to speak, how many times should I tell
+you?" Again asked, if she were forbidden to speak, answered, "I
+believe I am not forbidden by men"--repeating that she would not
+reply, and knew not how far she should reply, for it had not been
+revealed to her; but that she believed firmly, as firmly as the
+Christian faith, and that God had redeemed us from the pains of hell,
+that this voice came from Him.
+
+Questioned concerning the voice, what it appeared to be when it spoke,
+if that of an angel, or from God Himself; or if it was the voice of a
+saint or of saints (feminine), answered: "The voice comes from God;
+and I believe that I should not tell you all I know, for I should
+displease these voices if I answered you; and as for this question I
+pray you to leave me free." Asked if she thought that to speak the
+truth would displease God, she answered, "What the voices say I am to
+tell to the King, not to you," adding that during that night they had
+said much to her for the good of the King, and that if she could but
+let him know she would willingly drink no wine up to Easter (the
+reader will remember that her frugal fare consisted of bread dipped in
+the wine and water, which is justly called /eau rougie/ in France).
+Asked, if she could not induce the voices to speak to her King
+directly, she answered that she knew not whether her voices would
+consent, unless it were the will of God, and God consented to it,
+adding, "They might well reveal it to the King; and with that I should
+be content." Asked, if the voices could not communicate with the King
+as they did in her presence, she answered, that she did not know
+whether this was God's will; and added, that unless it were the will
+of God she would not know how to act. Asked, if it was by the advice
+of her voices that she attempted to escape from her prison, she
+answered, "I have nothing to say to you on that point." Asked, if she
+always saw a light when the voices were heard, she answered: "Yes:
+that with the sound of the voices light came." Asked if she saw
+anything else coming with the voices, answered: "I do not tell you
+all. I am not allowed to do so, nor does my oath touch that; the
+voices are good and noble, but neither of that will I answer." She was
+then asked to give in writing the points on which she would not reply.
+Then she was asked if her voices had eyes and ears, and answered, "You
+shall not have this either," adding, that it was a saying among
+children that men were sometimes hanged for speaking the truth.
+
+She was then asked if she knew herself to be in the grace of God. She
+replied: "If I am not so, may God put me in His grace; if I am, may
+God keep me in it. I should be the most miserable in the world if I
+were not in the grace of God." She said besides, that if she were in a
+state of sin she did not believe her voices would come to her, and she
+wished that everyone could understand them as she did, adding, that
+she was about thirteen when they came to her first.
+
+She was then asked, whether in her childhood she had played with the
+other children in the fields, and various other particulars about
+Domremy, whether there were any Burgundians there? to which Jeanne
+answered boldly that there was one, and that she wished his head might
+be cut off, adding piously, "that is, if it pleased God"[3]; she was
+also asked whether she had fought along with the other children
+against the children of the neighbouring Burgundian village of Maxy
+(Maxey sur Meuse): why she hated the Burgundians, and many questions
+of this kind, with a close examination about a certain tree near the
+village of Domremy, which some called the Tree of the good Ladies, and
+others, the Fairies' Tree; and also about a well there, the Fairies'
+Well, of which poor patients were said to drink and get well. Jeanne
+(no doubt relieved by the simple character of these questions) made
+answer freely and without hesitation, in no way denying that she had
+danced and sung with the other children, and made garlands for the
+image of the Blessed Marie of Domremy; but she did not remember
+whether she had ever done so after attaining years of discretion, and
+certainly she had never seen a fairy, nor worked any spell by their
+means. At the end, after having thus been put off her guard, she was
+suddenly asked about her dress (a capital point in the eyes of her
+judges): whether she wished to have a woman's dress. Probably she was,
+as they hoped, tired, and expecting no such question, for she answered
+quickly yet with instant recovery: "Bring me one to go home in and I
+will accept it; otherwise no. I prefer this, since it pleases God that
+I should wear it." The recollection of Domremy and of the pleasant
+fields, must have carried her back to the days when the little Jeanne
+was like the rest in her short, full petticoats of crimson stuff, free
+of any danger: what could be better to go home in? but she immediately
+remembered the obvious and excellent reasons she had for wearing
+another costume now. So ended the third day.
+
+In the meantime there had been, we are told, various interruptions
+during the examination; perhaps it was then that Nicolas de
+Houppeville protested against Bishop Cauchon as a partisan and a
+Burgundian, and therefore incapable by law of judging a member of the
+opposite party: and had been rudely silenced, and afterwards punished,
+as we have already heard. Another kind of opposition less bold had
+begun to be remarked, which was that one of the persons present, by
+word and sign, whispering suggestions to her, or warning her with his
+eyes, was helping the unfortunate prisoner in her defence. Probably
+this did little good, "for she was often troubled and hurried in her
+answers," we are told; but it was a sign of good-will, at least. When
+Frère Isambard, who was the person in question, speaks at a later
+period he tells us that "the questions put to Jeanne were too
+difficult, subtle, and dangerous, so that the great clerks and learned
+men who were present scarcely would have known how to answer them, and
+that many in the assembly murmured at them." Perhaps the good Frère
+Isambard might have spared himself the trouble; for Jeanne, however
+she may have suffered, was probably more able to hold her own than
+many of those great clerks, and did so with unfailing courage and
+spirit. One of the other judges, Jean Fabry, a bishop, declared
+afterwards that "her answers were so good, that for three weeks he
+believed that they were inspired." Manchon, the reporter, he who had
+refused to take down the private conversation of Jeanne in her prison
+with the vile traitor, L'Oyseleur, makes his voice heard also to the
+effect that "Monseigneur of Beauvais would have had everything written
+as pleased him, and when there was anything that displeased him he
+forbade the secretaries to report it as being of no importance for the
+trial." On another day a humbler witness still, Massieu, one of the
+officers of the court, who had the charge of taking Jeanne daily from
+her prison to the hall, and back again, met in the courtyard an
+Englishman, who seems to have been a singing man or lay clerk "of the
+King's chapel in England," probably attached to Winchester's
+ecclesiastical retinue. This man asked him: "What do you think of her
+answers? Will she be burned? What will happen?" "Up to this time,"
+said Massieu, "I have heard nothing from her that was not honourable
+and good. She seems to me a good woman, but how it will all end God
+only knows!"
+
+No doubt conversations of this kind were being carried on all over
+Rouen. Would she be burned? What would happen? Could any one stand and
+answer like that hour after hour and day by day, inspired only by the
+devil? There was no popular enthusiasm for her even now. How should
+there have been in that partisan province, more English than French?
+But a chill doubt began to steal into many minds whether she was so
+bad as had been thought, whether indeed she might not after all be
+something quite different from what she had been thought? Nature had
+begun to work in the agitated place, and even in that black-robed,
+eager assembly. If there was a vile L'Oyseleur trying to get her
+confidence in private, and so betray her, there was also a kind Frère
+Isambard, privately plucking at her sleeve, imploring her to be
+cautious, whispering an answer probably not half so wise as her own
+natural reply, yet warming her heart with the suggestion of a friend
+at hand.
+
+On the fourth day, Jeanne was again required to swear, and replied as
+before, that so far as concerned the trial she would answer truly, but
+not all she knew. "You ought to be satisfied: I have sworn
+sufficiently," she said; and with this her judges seem to have been
+content. Beaupère then resumed his questions, but first asked her,
+perhaps with a momentary gleam of compassion and a sudden
+consciousness of the pallor and weariness of the young prisoner, how
+she did. She answered, one can imagine with what tone of indignant
+disdain: "You see how I am: I am as well as I can be." He then cross-
+examined her closely as to what voices she had heard since her last
+appearance in court, but drew from her only the same answer, "The
+voice tells me to answer boldly," and that she would tell them as much
+as she was permitted by God to tell them, but concerning her
+revelations for the King of France she would say nothing except by
+permission of her voices.
+
+She was then asked what kind of voices they were which she heard, were
+they voices of angels, or of saints (/sancti aut sanctæ/, male or
+female saints) or from God Himself? She answered that the voices were
+those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, whose heads were crowned with
+beautiful crowns, very rich and precious. "So much as this God allows
+me to say. If you doubt send to Poitiers, where I was questioned
+before." (It may perhaps be permissible to suppose that the kind
+whisperer at her elbow might have suggested the repeated references to
+Poitiers that follow, but which are not to be found before: though it
+was most natural she should refer to this place where she was examined
+at the beginning of her mission.) Asked how she knew which of these
+two saints, she answered that she could quite distinguish one from the
+other by the manner of their salutation; that she had been led and
+guided by them for seven years, and that she knew them because they
+had named themselves to her. She was then asked how they were dressed?
+and answered: "I cannot tell you; I am not permitted to reveal this;
+if you do not believe me send to Poitiers." She said also that at her
+coming into France she had revealed these things, but could not now.
+She was asked what was the age of her saints, but replied that she was
+not permitted to tell. Asked, if both saints spoke at once or one
+after the other, she replied: "I have not permission to tell you: but
+I always consult them both together." Asked, which had appeared to her
+first, and answered: "I do not know which it was; I did know, but have
+forgotten. It is written in the register of Poitiers."
+
+"She then said she had much comfort from St. Michael. Again, asked,
+which had come first, she replied that it was St. Michael. Asked, if a
+long time had passed since she first heard the voice of St. Michael,
+answered: "I do not name to you the voice of St. Michael; but his
+conversation was of great comfort to me." Asked, again, what voice
+came first to her when she was thirteen, answered, that it was St.
+Michael whom she saw before her eyes, and that he was not alone, but
+accompanied by many angels of Heaven. She said also that she would not
+have come into France but by the command of God. Asked, if she saw St.
+Michael and the angels really, with her ordinary senses, she answered:
+"I saw them with my bodily eyes as I see you, and when they left me I
+wept, desiring much that they would take me with them." Asked, what
+was the form in which he appeared, she replied: "I cannot answer you;
+I am not permitted." Asked, what St. Michael said to her the first
+time, she cried, "You shall have no answer to-day." Then went on to
+say that her voices told her to reply boldly. Afterwards she said that
+she had told her King once all that had been revealed to her; said
+also that she was not permitted to say here what St. Michael had said;
+but that it would be better to send for a copy of the books which were
+at Poitiers than to question her on this subject. Asked, what sign she
+had that these were revelations of God, and that it was really St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret with whom she talked, she answered: "It is
+enough that I tell you they were St. Catherine and St. Margaret:
+believe me or not as you will."
+
+Asked how she distinguished the points on which she was allowed to
+speak from the others, she answered, that on some points she had asked
+permission to speak, and not on others, adding, that she would rather
+have been torn by wild horses than to have come to France, unless by
+the license of God. Asked how it was that she put on a man's dress,
+she answered, that dress appeared to her a small matter, that she did
+not adopt that dress by the counsel of any man, and that she neither
+put on a dress nor did anything, but according as God, or the angels,
+commanded her to do so. Asked, if she knew whether such a command to
+assume the dress of a man was lawful, she answered: "All that I did, I
+did by the precepts of our Lord; and if I were bidden to wear another
+dress I would do so, because it was at the bidding of God." Asked, if
+she had done it by the orders of Robert de Baudricourt, answered "No."
+Asked, if she thought that she had done well in assuming a man's
+dress, answered, that as all she did was by the command of the Lord,
+she believed that she had done well, and expected a good guarantee and
+good succour. Asked, if in this particular case of assuming the dress
+of a man she thought she had done well, answered, that nothing in the
+world had made her do it, but the command of God.
+
+She was then asked whether light always accompanied the voices when
+they came to her, she answered, with an evident reference to her first
+interview with Charles, that there were many lights on every side as
+was fit. "It is not only to you that light comes" (or you have not all
+the light to yourself,--a curious phrase). Asked, if there was an
+angel over the head of the King when she saw him for the first time,
+she answered: "By the Blessed Mary, if there were, I know not, I saw
+none." Asked, if there was light, she answered: "There were about
+three hundred soldiers, and fifty of them held torches, without
+counting any spiritual light. And rarely do I have the revelations
+without light." Asked, if her King had faith in what she said, she
+answered, that he had good signs, and also by his clergy. Asked, what
+revelations her King had, she answered: "You shall have nothing from
+me this year." Then added that for three weeks she was cross-examined
+by the clergy, both in the town of Chinon and at Poitiers, and that
+her King had signs concerning her, before he believed in her. And the
+clergy of his party had found nothing in her, in respect to her faith,
+that was not good. Asked, whether she gone to the church of St.
+Catherine of Fierbois, answered: "yes," and that she had there heard
+three masses in one day, and from thence went to Chinon; she added
+that she had sent a letter thence to the King, in which it was
+contained that she sent this to know if she might come to the town in
+which the King was; for that she had travelled a hundred and fifty
+leagues to come to him and to bring him help, for she knew much good
+concerning him. And she thought it was contained in this letter that
+she should recognise the King among all the rest.
+
+She said besides, that she had a sword which was given to her at
+Vaucouleurs; she said also that, being in Tours or at Chinon, she sent
+for a sword which was in the church of St. Catherine of Fierbois
+behind the altar, and that when it was found it was rusty. Asked, how
+she knew about this sword, she answered, that it was rusty because of
+being in the ground, and there were five crosses on it, and that she
+knew this sword by her voices, and not by any man's report. She wrote
+to the ecclesiastics of the place where it was and asked them for this
+sword, and they sent it to her. It was found not much below the ground
+behind the altar; she was not sure if it was before or behind the
+altar, but wrote that it was behind the altar. And when it was found
+the clergy cleaned it and rubbed off the rust, which came off easily;
+and it was an armourer of Tours who went to fetch it. The clergy made
+a scabbard for it before sending it to the said Jeanne, and they of
+Tours made another, so that it had two scabbards, one of crimson
+velvet and one of cloth of gold. And she herself procured another of
+strong leather. She said also that when she was captured she had not
+that sword. Said also that she continued to wear the said sword until
+she left St. Denis after the assault on Paris. Asked, what benediction
+she made, or if she made any on this sword, she answered, that she
+made no benediction, nor knew how to make one, but that she loved the
+sword because it had come to her from the Church of the blessed
+Catherine whom she loved much. Asked, if she had placed it on the
+altar at the village of Coulenges, Les Vineuses, or elsewhere, placing
+it there that it might bring good luck, she answered, that she knew
+nothing of this. Asked, if she did not pray that the sword might have
+good fortune: "It is good to know that I wish all my armour
+(/harnesseum meum; gallice, mon harnois/) to be very fortunate."
+Asked, where she had left the sword, answered, that she had deposited
+a sword and armour at St. Denis, but it was not this sword. She added
+that she had it in Lagny: but that she afterwards wore the sword which
+had been taken from a Burgundian, which was a good sword for war and
+gave good strokes (/gallice, de bonnes bouffes/ and /de bons
+torchons/). Said also that to tell where she left it had nothing to do
+with the trial, and she would answer nothing.
+
+She said also that her brothers had everything that belonged to her,
+her horses, swords, and everything, and that she believed they were
+worth in all about 12,000 francs. She was also asked whether when she
+was at Orleans she had a standard, and what colour it was; answered,
+that she had a standard, the field of which was sown with lilies, and
+on it was a figure of the world with angels on each side. It was
+white, and made of a stuff called boucassin, upon which was written
+the name /Jhesus Maria/, so that all might see, and it was fringed
+with silk. Asked, if the name /Jhesus Maria/ was written above or
+below or at the side, she answered, "At the side." Asked, if she loved
+her sword or standard best, she answered, that she loved her standard
+best. Asked, why she had that picture on the standard, she answered:
+"I have sufficiently told you that I did nothing but by the command of
+God." She added that she herself carried her standard when in battle
+that she might not hurt anyone, and said that she had never killed any
+man.
+
+Asked, how many men her King gave her when she began her work,
+answered, from ten to twelve[4] thousand men, and that she attacked
+first the bastile of St. Loup at Orleans, and afterwards that of the
+bridge. Asked, from which bastile it was that her men were driven
+back, she answered, that she did not remember; adding, that she had
+been sure that she could raise the siege at Orleans, for it had been
+so revealed to her; and that she told this to her King before it
+occurred. Asked, whether, when she made assault, she told her men that
+all the arrows, stones, cannon-balls, etc., would be intercepted by
+her, she answered no--that more than a hundred were wounded: that what
+she had said to her people was that they should have no doubts, for
+they should certainly raise the siege of Orleans. She said also that
+in attacking the bastile of the bridge she herself was wounded by an
+arrow in the neck, and was much comforted by St. Catherine, and was
+healed in fifteen days; but that she never gave up riding and working
+all that time. Asked, if she knew that she would be wounded, she
+answered, that she knew it well and had told her King, but that,
+notwithstanding, she went about her business. It was revealed to her
+by the voices of her two saints, the blessed Catherine and the blessed
+Margaret. She said besides, that she was the first to place a scaling
+ladder on the bastile of the bridge, and as she raised it she was
+struck in the neck.
+
+She was then asked why she did not treat with the Captain of Jargeau;
+she answered that the lords of her party had replied to the English,
+who had asked for a truce of fifteen days, that they could not have
+it, but that they might retire, they and their horses at once; she had
+said for her part that if they retired in their doublets and tunics
+their lives should be spared, otherwise the city would be taken by
+storm. Asked, if she had consulted with her counsel, that is with her
+voices, whether the truce should be granted or not, she answered, that
+she did not remember.
+
+It will be remarked, as the slow examination goes on day after day,
+that Jeanne, becoming at moments impatient, sometimes gives a rough
+answer, and at other times plays a little with her questioner as if in
+contempt. "By the Blessed Mary, I know not!" is evidently an outburst
+of impatience at the exhausting, exasperating folly of some of these
+questions, and this will be further visible in future sittings. It
+seems very likely that the reference to Poitiers, which was an
+excellent suggestion, commending itself to her invariable good sense,
+came from the kind priest who tried to serve her as he best could; but
+there are other answers a little incoherent, which look as if Frère
+Isambard, if it were he, had confused her in her own response without
+conveying anything better to her mind, especially on the occasions
+when she refuses to reply, and then does so, abandoning her ground at
+once. Her patience and steadiness are quite extraordinary however even
+in the less self-collected moments. Thus end the proceedings of the
+fourth day.
+
+*****
+
+The fifth day began with the usual dispute about the oath, Jeanne
+still retaining her reservation with the greatest firmness. She seems,
+however, at the end, to have repeated her oath to answer everything
+that had to do with the trial--"And as much as I say I will say as if
+I were before the Pope of Rome." These words must have given the
+Magister Beaupère an admirable occasion for introducing one of the
+things charged against her for which there was actual proof--her
+letter to the Comte d'Armagnac in respect to the Pope. He seized upon
+it evidently with eagerness, and asked her which she held to be the
+true Pope. To this she answered quietly, "Are there two?"--the most
+confusing reply.[5]
+
+She was asked if she had received letters from the Comte d'Armagnac,
+asking to know which of the three existing Popes he ought to obey; she
+answered that she had his letter, and had replied to it, saying among
+other things that when she was in Paris and at rest she would answer
+him; and added that she was on the point of mounting her horse when
+she gave that reply. The copy of the letter and the reply being read
+to her she was asked if that was what she had said; to which she
+replied that she had answered his letter in part, not in full. Asked,
+if she knew the counsels of the King of Kings so as to be able to say
+which the count should obey, she answered, that she knew nothing.
+Asked, if she was in doubt as to which the count ought to obey, she
+replied that she knew not which to bid him obey; but that she, the
+said Jeanne, held and believed that we ought to obey our Pope who was
+in Rome; that as for what he asked, that she should tell him which God
+desired him to obey, she had said she knew nothing; but she sent much
+to him which was not put in writing. And as for herself she believed
+in the Lord Pope of Rome. Asked, whether in respect to the three
+pontiffs she had received counsel, she answered, that she had neither
+written nor made to be written anything about the three pontiffs. And
+this she swore on her oath. Asked, if she were in the habit of putting
+on her letters the name /Jhesus Maria/ with a cross, answered, that
+she did so sometimes but not always, and that sometimes she put a
+cross to shew that these letters were not to be taken seriously (as
+likely to fall into the enemy's hands).
+
+Some questions were then put to her about her letters to the Duke of
+Bedford and to the English King, and copies were read to her to which
+she objected on some small points, but mistakenly it would seem, as
+that she had summoned them to surrender to the King, while the scribe
+had put "surrender to the Maid." She said, however, that they were
+her letters, and that she held by them. She added that before seven
+years the English would lose more than they had lost at Orleans,[6]
+and that their cause would be lost in France; she said also that the
+said English should have greater disasters than they had yet had in
+France, and that God would give greater victories to France. Asked,
+how she knew this, she replied: "I know it by the revelations made to
+me, and that it will happen in seven years, and I might well be angry
+that it is deferred so long." Asked, when this would happen, she said
+that she knew neither the day nor the hour.
+
+She was tormented a little further as to the dates, whether this would
+happen before the St. Jean, or before the St. Martin in winter, but
+made no answer except that before the St. Martin in winter they should
+see many things, and it might be that the English should fail; as a
+matter of fact Paris opened its gates to Charles VII. within the seven
+years specified, so that Jeanne's prophecy may be held to have been
+fulfilled.
+
+We then come once more to a long and profitless interrogatory upon her
+saints, in which the crowd of judges forgot their dignity and
+overwhelmed her with a flood of often very foolish, and sometimes
+worse than foolish questions.
+
+Asked, how she knew the future, she answered that she knew it by St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret; asked, if St. Gabriel was with St. Michael
+when he came to her, she answered, that she could not remember. Asked,
+if she saw them always in the same dress, answered yes, and they were
+crowned very richly. Of their other garments she could not speak; she
+knew nothing of their tunics. Asked, how she knew whether they were
+men or women, answered, that she knew well by their voices which
+revealed them to her; and that she knew nothing save by revelation and
+the precepts of God. Asked, what appearances she saw, she answered,
+that she saw faces. Asked, if these saints had hair, she answered, "It
+is good to know." Asked, if there was anything between their crowns
+and their hair, answered, no. Asked, if their hair was long and
+hanging down, answered, "I know nothing about it." She also said that
+their voices were beautiful sweet, and humble, and that she understood
+them well. Asked, how they could speak when they had no bodies, she
+answered, "I refer it to God." She repeated that the voices were
+beautiful, humble, and sweet, and that they could speak French. Asked,
+if St. Margaret did not speak English, answered: "How could she speak
+English when she was not on the English side?"
+
+This would seem to infer that the St. Margaret referred to was not the
+legendary St. Margaret of the dragon, but St. Margaret of Scotland,
+well known in France from the long connection between those two
+countries, and a popular mediæval saint. She would naturally have
+spoken English, being a Saxon, but also quite naturally would have
+been against the English, as a Scottish queen; but of these
+refinements it is very unlikely that Jeanne knew anything, and her
+prompt and somewhat sharp reply evidently cut the inquiry short. The
+next question was, did they wear gold rings in their ears or
+elsewhere, these crowned saints; to which she answered a little
+contemptuously, "I know nothing about it." She was then asked if she
+herself had rings: on which "turning to us the aforesaid Bishop, she
+said, 'You have one of mine; give it back to me.' She then said that
+the Burgundians had her other ring, and asked of us if we had the ring
+to shew it to her. Asked, who gave her this ring, answered, her father
+or her mother, and that the name /Jhesus Maria/ was written upon it,
+but that she knew not who put it there, nor even whether there was a
+stone in the ring; it was given to her in the village of Domremy. She
+added that her brother gave her another ring which we had, and said
+that she desired that it might be given to the Church."
+
+A sudden change was now made in the cross-examination according to the
+methods of that operation, throwing her back without warning upon the
+village superstitions of Domremy, the magic tree and fountain. Many of
+the questions which follow are so trivial and are so evidently
+instinct with evil meaning, that it seems a wrong to Beaupère to
+impute the whole of the interrogatory to him; other questions were
+evidently interposed by the excited assembly.
+
+Asked, if St. Catherine and St. Margaret talked with her under the
+tree of which mention had been made above, she answered, "I know
+nothing about it." Asked, if the saints were seen at the fountain near
+the tree, answered yes, that she had heard them there; but what her
+saints promised to her, there or elsewhere, she answered, that nothing
+was promised except by permission from God. Asked, what promises were
+made to her, she answered, "This has nothing at all to do with your
+trial," but added, that among other things they said to her that her
+King should be restored to his kingdom, and that his adversaries
+should be destroyed. She said also that they promised to take her, the
+said Jeanne, to Paradise, as she had asked them to do. Asked, if she
+had any other promises, she said there was one promise that had
+nothing to do with the trial, but that in three months she would tell
+them what that other promise was. Asked, if the voices told her she
+would be set free from her prison in three months, she answered: "This
+does not concern your trial; nor do I know when I shall be set free."
+And she added that those who wished to send her out of this world
+might well go before her. Asked, if her council did not tell her when
+she should be set free from her present prison, answered: "Ask me this
+in three months' time; I can promise you as much as that"--but added:
+"You may ask those present, on their oaths, if this has anything to do
+with the trial."
+
+Startled by this suggestion, the judges seem to have held a hurried
+consultation among themselves to see whether these matters did really
+touch the trial; the result apparently decided them to return again to
+the question of the local superstitions of Domremy, the only point on
+which there seemed a chance of breaking down the extraordinarily just
+and steadfast intelligence of the girl who stood before them. After
+this pause she resumed, apparently not in answer to any question.
+
+"I have well told you that there were things you should not know, and
+some time I must needs be set free. But I must have permission if I
+speak; therefore I will ask to have delay in this." Asked, if her
+voices forbade her to speak the truth, she said: "Do you expect me to
+tell you things that concern the King of France? There is a great deal
+here that has nothing to do with the trial." She said also that she
+knew that her King should enjoy the kingdom of France, as well as she
+knew that they were there before her in judgment. She added that she
+would have been dead but for the revelations which comforted her
+daily. She was then asked what she had done with her mandragora
+(mandrake)? she answered that she had no mandragora, nor had ever had.
+She had heard say that near her village there was one, but had never
+seen it. She had heard say that it was a dangerous thing, and that it
+was wicked to keep it; but knew nothing of its use. Asked, in what
+place this mandrake was, and what she had heard of it? she said that
+she had heard that it grew under the tree of which mention has been
+made, but did not know the place; she said also that she had heard
+that above the mandragora was a hazel tree. Asked, what she heard was
+done with the mandragora, answered, that she had heard that it brought
+money, but did not believe it; and added that her voices had never
+told her anything about it.
+
+Asked, what was the appearance of St. Michael when she saw him first,
+she answered, that she saw no crown, and knew nothing of his dress.
+Asked, if he was naked, she answered, "Do you think God has nothing to
+clothe him with?" Asked, if he had hair, she answered, "Why should it
+have been cut?" She said further that she had not seen the blessed
+Michael since she left the castle of Crotoy, nor did she see him
+often. At last she said that she knew not whether he had hair or not.
+Asked, whether he carried scales, she answered, "I know nothing of
+it," but added that she had much joy in seeing him, and she knew when
+she saw him that she was not in a state of sin. She also said that St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret often made her confess to them, and said
+that if she had been in a state of sin it was without knowing it. She
+was then asked whether, when she confessed, she believed herself to be
+in a state of mortal sin; she answered, that she knew not whether she
+had been in that state, but did not believe she had done the works of
+sin. "It would not have pleased God," she said, "that I should have
+been so; nor would it have pleased Him that I should have done the
+works of sin by which my soul should have been burdened."
+
+She was then asked what sign she gave to the King that she came to him
+from God; she answered: "I have told you always that nothing should
+draw this from me.[7] Ask me no more." Asked, if she had not sworn to
+reveal what was asked of her touching the trial, answered, "I have
+told you that I will tell you nothing that was for our King; and of
+this which belongs to him I will not speak." Asked, if she knew the
+sign which she gave to the King, she answered: "You shall know nothing
+from me." When it was said to her that this did concern the trial, she
+answered, "Of that which I have promised to keep secret I shall tell
+you nothing"; and further she said, "I promised in that place and I
+could not tell you without perjuring myself." Asked, to whom she
+promised? answered, that she had promised to Saints Catherine and
+Margaret, and this was shown to the King. She also said she had
+promised it to these two saints, because they had required it of her.
+And the same Jeanne had done this at their request. "Too many people
+would have asked me concerning it, if I had not promised to the
+aforesaid saints." She was then asked, when she showed this sign to
+the King if there were others with him; she answered, that to her
+there was no one near him, even though many people might have been
+present. (As a matter of fact the sign was given to Charles when he
+talked with the Maid apart in a recess, the great hall being full of
+the Court and followers; so that this was strictly true.) Asked
+further, if she saw a crown over the head of her King when she showed
+him this sign, but replied: "I cannot answer you without perjury."
+Asked further if her King had a crown when he was at Rheims, answered,
+that in her opinion her King had a crown which he found at Rheims, but
+a very fine one was afterwards brought for him. He did this to hasten
+matters, at the desire of the city of Rheims; but if he had been more
+certain, he could have had a crown a thousand times richer. (All this
+is very obscure.)
+
+Asked, if she had seen this crown, she answered: "I could not tell you
+without perjury, but I heard that it was a very rich one." It was then
+determined to conclude for this day.
+
+On the sixth day there was again the same questions about the oath,
+ending in the usual way. And the cross-examination was at once
+continued.
+
+She was asked if she would say whether St. Michael had wings, and what
+bodies and members had St. Catherine and St. Margaret; and she
+answered, "I have told you what I know, and will make no other reply";
+she said, moreover, that when she saw St. Michael and St. Catherine
+and St. Margaret, she knew at once that they were saints of Paradise.
+Asked, if she saw anything more than their faces, she answered: "I
+have told you all I know of them: and I would rather have had my head
+taken off than tell you all I know." She then said that in whatever
+concerned the trial she would speak freely. Asked, if she believed
+that St. Michael and St. Gabriel had natural heads, she answered: "I
+saw them with my eyes and I believe that they are, as firmly as I
+believe that God is." Asked, if she believed that God made them in the
+form in which she saw them, she answered, "Yes." Asked, if she
+believed that God had created them in the same form from the
+beginning, answered: "You shall have no more for the present, except
+what I have already said."
+
+This subject was then dropped, and the examiner made another leap
+forward to a different part of her life. "Did you know by revelation
+that you should break prison?" he said. To this Jeanne answered
+indignantly: "This has nothing to do with your trial. Would you have
+me speak against myself?"
+
+Again questioned what her "voices" had said to her in respect to her
+attempts at escape, she again answered: "This has nothing to do with
+the trial; I go back to the trial. If all your questions were about
+that, I should tell you all." She said besides, on her faith, that she
+knew neither the day nor the hour when she should escape. She was then
+asked what the voices said to her generally, and answered: "In truth,
+they tell me I shall be freed, but neither the day nor the hour; and
+that I ought to speak boldly, and with a glad countenance." She was
+then asked whether, when first she saw her King, he asked her whether
+it was by revelation that she had assumed the dress of a man? she
+replied: "I have answered this. I cannot recollect whether he asked
+me. But it is written in the book at Poitiers." Asked, whether the
+doctors who examined her there, some for a month, some for three
+weeks, had asked her about her change of dress; she answered: "I don't
+remember; but I know they asked me when I assumed the dress of a man,
+and I told them it was in the town of Vaucouleurs." Asked, whether
+these doctors had inquired whether it was her voices which had made
+her take that dress, answered, "I don't remember." Asked if her Queen
+wished her to change her dress when she first saw her, answered, "I
+don't remember." Asked if her King, Queen, and all of her party did
+not ask her to lay aside the dress of a man, she answered, "This has
+nothing to do with the trial." Asked, if the same was not requested of
+her in the castle of Beaurevoir, she answered: "It is true. And I
+replied that I could not lay it aside without the permission of God."
+She said further that the demoiselle of Luxembourg (aunt of Jeanne's
+captor, and a very old woman) and the lady of Beaurevoir offered her a
+woman's dress, or stuff to make one, and begged her to wear it; but
+she replied that she had not yet the permission of our Lord, and that
+it was not yet time. Asked, if M. Jean de Pressy and others at Arras
+had offered her a woman's dress, she answered, "He and others have
+often asked it of me." Asked, if she thought she would have done wrong
+in putting on a woman's dress, she answered, that it was better to
+obey her sovereign Lord, that is, God; she said also that if she had
+done it, she would rather have done it at the request of these two
+ladies than of any other in France, except her Queen. Asked, if, when
+God revealed to her that she should change her dress, it was by the
+voice of St. Michael, St. Catherine, or St. Margaret, she answered,
+"You shall hear no more about it." Asked, when the King first employed
+her, and her standard was made, whether the men-at-arms and others who
+took part in the war did not have flags imitated from hers? she
+answered, "It is well to know that the lords retained their own arms";
+she also added that her brothers-in-arms made such pennons as pleased
+them. Asked, how these were made, if they were of linen or cloth,
+answered, that they were of white satin, some of them with lilies;
+that she had but two or three lances in her own company--but that in
+the rest of the army some carried pennons like hers, but only to
+distinguish them from others. Asked, if the banners were often
+renewed, answered: "I know not; when the staff was broken it was
+renewed." Asked, if she had not said that the pennons copied from hers
+were fortunate, answered, that she had said, "Go in boldly among the
+English"; and that she had done the same herself. Asked, if she said
+that they should have good luck if they bore the banners well,
+answered, that she had told them what would happen, and what should
+still happen. Asked, if she had caused holy water to be sprinkled on
+the pennons when they were new, she answered, "That has nothing to do
+with the trial"; but added that if she did so sprinkle them she was
+not instructed to answer that question now. Asked, if the others put
+/Jhesus Maria/ upon their pennons, she answered: "By my faith, I know
+nothing about it." Asked, if she had ever carried or caused to be
+carried in a procession round a church or altar the linen of which the
+pennons were made, answered no, that she had never seen anything of
+the kind done.
+
+Asked, when she was before Jargeau, what it was that she wore behind
+her helmet, and if she had not something round it, she answered: "By
+my faith, there was nothing." Asked, if she knew a certain Brother
+Richard, she answered: "I never saw him till I was before Troyes."
+Asked, what cheer Brother Richard made to her, answered, that she
+thought the people of Troyes had sent him to her, doubting whether she
+had come on the part of God, and that as he approached her he made the
+sign of the cross, and sprinkled holy water; she said to him: "Come on
+boldly; I shall not fly away." Asked, if she had seen, or had caused
+to be made, any images or pictures of herself, she answered, that at
+Arras she had seen a picture in the hands of a Scot, where she was
+represented fully armed, kneeling on one knee, and presenting a letter
+to the King; but that she had never caused any image or picture of
+herself to be made. Asked concerning a table in the house of her host,
+upon which were painted three women, with /Justice, Peace, Union/
+inscribed beneath, answered, that she knew nothing of it. Asked, if
+she knew that those of her party caused masses and prayers to be made
+in her honour, she answered, that she knew not; and if they did so, it
+was not by any command of hers; but that if they did so, her opinion
+was that they did no wrong. Asked, if those of her party firmly
+believed that she was sent from God, she answered: "I know not whether
+they believed it; but even if they did not believe it, I am none the
+less sent on the part of God." Asked, whether she thought that to
+believe that she was sent from god was a worthy faith, she answered,
+that if they believed that she was sent from God they were not
+mistaken. Asked, if she knew what her party meant by kissing her feet
+and hands and her garments, answered, that many people did it, but
+that her hands were kissed as little as she could help it. The poor
+people, however, came to her of their own free will, because she never
+oppressed them, but protected them as far as was in her power. Asked,
+what reverence the people of Troyes made to her, she answered, "None
+at all," and added that she believed Brother Richard came into Troyes
+with her army, but that she had not seen him coming in. Asked, if he
+had not preached at the gates when she came, answered, that she
+scarcely paused there at all, and knew nothing of any sermon. Asked,
+how long she was at Rheims, and answered, four or five days. Asked,
+whether she baptised (stood godmother to) children there, she
+answered: To one at Troyes, but did not remember any at Rheims or at
+Château-Thierry; but there were two at St. Denis; and willingly she
+called the boys "Charles," in honour of her King, and the girls
+"Jeanne," according to what their mothers wished. Asked, if the good
+women of the town did not touch with their rings the rings she wore,
+she answered, that many women touched her hands and her rings; but she
+did not know why they did it. Asked, what she did with the gloves in
+which her King was consecrated, she answered that "Gloves were
+distributed to the knights and nobles that came there"; and there was
+one who lost his; but she did not say that she would find it for him.
+Also she said that her standard was in the church at Rheims, and she
+believed near the altar, and she herself had carried it for a short
+time, but did not know whether Brother Richard had held it.
+
+She was then asked if she communicated and went to confession often
+while moving about the country, and if she received the sacrament in
+her male costume; to which she answered "yes, but without her arms";
+she was then questioned about a horse belonging to the Bishop of
+Senlis, which had not suited her, a matter completely without
+importance. The inference intended was that it was taken from him
+without being paid for; but there was no evidence that the Maid knew
+anything about it. We then come to the incident of Lagny.
+
+She was asked how old the child was which she saw at Lagny, and
+answered, three days; it hed been brought to Lagny to the Church of
+Nôtre Dame, and she was told that all the maids in Lagny were before
+our Lady praying for it, and she also wished to go and pray God and
+our Lady that its life might come back; and she went, and prayed with
+the rest. And finally life appeared; it yawned three times, and was
+baptised and buried in consecrated ground. It had given no sign of
+life for three days and was black as her coat, but when it yawned its
+colour began to come back. She was there with the other maids on her
+knees before our Lady to make her prayer.
+
+The reader must understand that this was no special appeal to Jeanne's
+miraculous power, but a custom of that intense and tender charity with
+which the Church of Rome corrects her dogmatism upon questions of
+salvation. A child unbaptised could not be buried in consecrated
+ground, and was subject to all the sorrows of the unredeemed; but who
+could doubt that the priest would be easily persuaded by some wavering
+of the tapers on the altar upon the little dead face, some flicker of
+his own compassionate eyelids, that sufficient life had come back to
+permit the holy rite to be administered? The whole little scene is
+affecting in the extreme, the young creatures all kneeling, fervently
+appealing to the Maiden-mother, the priest ready to take instant
+advantage of any possible flicker, the Maid of France, no conspicuous
+figure, but weeping and praying among the rest. There was no thought
+here of the raising of the dead--the prayer was for breath enough only
+to allow of the holy observance, the blessed water, the last
+possibility of human love and effort.
+
+Jeanne was then questioned concerning Catherine of La Rochelle, the
+supposed prophetess, who had been played against her by La Tremouille
+and his follows, and narrated how she had watched two nights to see
+the mysterious lady clothed in cloth of gold who was said to appear to
+Catherine, but had not seen her, and that she had advised the woman to
+return to her husband and children. Catherine's mission was to go
+through the "good towns" with heralds and trumpets to call upon those
+who had money or treasure of any kind to give it to the King, and she
+professed to have a supernatural knowledge where such money was
+hidden. [No doubt La Tremouille must have thought that to get money,
+which was so scarce, in such a simple way, was worth trying at least.
+But Jeanne's opinion was that it was folly, and that there was nothing
+in it; an opinion fully verified. Catherine's advice had been that
+Jeanne should go to the Duke of Burgundy to make peace; but Jeanne had
+answered that no peace could be made save at the end of the lance.]
+
+She was then asked about the siege of La Charité; she answered, that
+she had made an assault: but had not sprinkled holy water, or caused
+it to be sprinkled. Asked, why she did not enter the city as she had
+the command of God to do so, she replied: "Who told you that I was
+commanded to enter?" Asked, if she had not had the advice of her
+voices, she answered, that she had desired to go into France (meaning
+towards Paris), but the generals had told her that it was better to go
+first to La Charité. She was then asked if she had been long in the
+tower of Beaurevoir; answered, that she was there about four months,
+and that when she heard the English come she was angry and much
+troubled. Her voices forbade her several times to attempt to escape;
+but at last, in the doubt she had of the English she threw herself
+down, commending herself to God and to our Lady, and was much hurt.
+But after she had done this the voice of St. Catherine said to her not
+to be afraid, that she should be healed, and that Compiègne would be
+relieved.
+
+Also she said that she prayed always for the relief of Compiègne with
+her council. Asked, what she said after she had thrown herself down,
+she answered, that some said that she was dead; and as soon as the
+Burgundians saw that she was not dead, they told her that she had
+thrown herself down. Asked, if she had said that she would rather die
+than fall into the hands of the English, she answered, that she would
+much rather have rendered her soul to God than have fallen into the
+hands of the English. Asked, if she was not in a great rage, and if
+she did not blaspheme the name of God, she answered, that she never
+said evil of any saint, and that it was not her custom to swear. Asked
+respecting Soissons, when the captain had surrendered the town,
+whether she had not cursed God, and said that if she had gotten hold
+of the captain, she would have cut him into four pieces; she answered,
+that she never swore by any saint, and that those who said so had not
+understood her.
+
+*****
+
+At this point the public trial of Jeanne came to a sudden end. Either
+the feeling produced in the town, and even among the judges, by her
+undeviating, simple, and dignified testimony had begun to be more than
+her persecutors had calculated upon; or else they hoped to make
+shorter work with her when deprived of the free air of publicity, the
+sight no doubt of some sympathetic faces, and the consciousness of
+being still able to vindicate her cause and to maintain her faith
+before men. Two or three fierce Inquisitors within her cell, and the
+Bishop, that man without heart or pity at their head, might still tear
+admissions from her weariness, which a certain sympathetic atmosphere
+in a large auditory, swept by waves of natural feeling, would
+strengthen her to keep back. The Bishop made a proclamation that in
+order not to vex and tire his learned associates he would have the
+minutes of the previous sittings reduced into form, and submitted to
+them for judgment, while he himself carried on apart what further
+interrogatory was necessary. We are told that he was warned by a
+counsellor of the town that secret examinations without witnesses or
+advocate on the prisoner's side, were illegal; but Monseigneur de
+Beauvais was well aware that anything would be legal which effected
+his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or
+illegality of the proceedings would be of small importance. I have
+thought it right to give to the best of my power a literal translation
+of these examinations, notwithstanding their great length; as, except
+in one book, now out of print and very difficult to procure, no such
+detailed translation,[8] so far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to
+me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader (always capable of
+skipping at his pleasure), it is better to unfold the complete scene
+with all its tedium and badgering, which brings out by every touch the
+extraordinary self-command, valour, and sense of this wonderful Maid,
+the youngest, perhaps, and most ignorant of the assembly, yet meeting
+all with a modest and unabashed countenance, true, pure, and natural,
+--a far greater miracle in her simplicity and noble steadfastness than
+even in the wonders she had done.
+----------
+[1] She was in reality detained two days, which fact, no doubt, she
+    judged to be an unimportant detail.
+
+[2] Probably meaning, had been present when the voices came to her and
+    had perceived her state of listening and abstraction.
+
+[3] This was her special friend, Gerard of Epinal--her /compère/ and
+    gossip; was it jesting beguiled by some childish recollection, or
+    mock threat of youthful days that she said this?
+
+[4] An answer evidently given in the vagueness of imperfect knowledge,
+    meaning a very great number.
+
+[5] Quicherat gives a note on this subject to point out that there was
+    really was but one Pope at this moment, the question having been
+    settled by the abdication of Clement VIII., Benedict XIV. being a
+    mere impostor. We cannot believe, however, that this historical
+    cutting of the knot could be known to Jeanne. She probably felt
+    only, with her fine instinct, that there could be but one Pope,
+    and that to be deceived on such a matter ought to have been a
+    thing impossible to all those priests and learned men; as a matter
+    of fact the three claimants, on account of whom the Comte
+    d'Armagnac had appealed to her, were no longer existing at the
+    time he wrote.
+
+[6] She meant Paris, which was lost by the English, according to her
+    prophecy within the time named.
+
+[7] It should here be noted that Jeanne's sign to the King being, as
+    he afterwards declared, the answer to his most private devotions
+    and the final setting at rest of a doubt which might have injured
+    him much had it been known that he entertained it--it would have
+    been dishonourable on her part and a great wrong to him had she
+    revealed it.
+
+[8] The translation of M. Fabre is now, I believe, reprinted, but it
+    is not satisfactory.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE EXAMINATION IN PRISON.
+LENT, 1431.
+
+It must not be forgotten, in the history of this strange trial, that
+the prisoner was brought from the other side of France expressly that
+she might be among a people who were not of her own party, and who had
+no natural sympathies with her, but a hereditary connection with
+England, which engaged all its partialities on that side. For this
+purpose it was that the /venue/, the town expected the coming of the
+Witch, and all the dark revelations that might be extracted from her,
+her spells, and the details of that contract with the devil which was
+so entrancing to the popular imagination, with excitement and
+eagerness. Such a /Cause Célèbre/ had never taken place among them
+before; and everybody no doubt looked forward to the pleasure of
+seeing it proved that it was not by the will of Heaven, but by some
+monstrous combination of black arts, that such an extraordinary result
+as the defeat of the invincible English soldiers had been brought
+about. The litigious and logical Normans no doubt looked forward to it
+as to the most interesting entertainment, ending in the complete
+vindication of their own side and the exposure of the nefarious arms
+used by their adversaries.
+
+But when the proceedings had been opened, and in place of some dark-
+browed and termagant sorceress, with the mark of every evil passion in
+her face, there appeared before the spectators crowding into every
+available corner, the slim, youthful figure--was it boy or girl?--the
+serene and luminous countenance of the Maid, the flower of youth
+raising its whiteness and innocence in the midst of all those black-
+robed, subtle Doctors, it is impossible but that the very first glance
+must have given a shock and thrill of amazement and doubt to what may
+be called the lay spectators, those who had no especial bias more than
+common report, and whose credit or interest were not involved in
+bringing this unlikely criminal to condemnation. "A girl! Like our own
+Jeanne at home," might many a father have said, dismayed and
+confounded. She had, they all say, those eyes of innocence which it is
+so impossible not to believe, and that virginal voice, /assez femme/,
+which a sentimental Frenchman insists upon as belonging only to the
+spotless. At all events she had the bearing of honesty, purity, and
+truth. She was not afraid though all the powers of hell--or was it
+only of the Church and the Law?--were arrayed against her: no guilty
+mystery to be discovered, was in her countenance. But it must have
+been plain to the keen and not too charitable Normans that such
+semblances are not always to be trusted, and that the devil himself
+even, on occasion, can take upon himself the appearance of an angel of
+light; so that after the first shock of wonder they no doubt settled
+themselves to listen, believing that soon they would have their
+imaginations fed with tales of horror, and would discover the hoofs
+and the horns and unveil with triumph the lurking demon. The French
+historians never take into consideration the fact that it was the
+belief of Rouen and Normandy, as well as of any similar town or
+province in England, that the child Henry VI. was lawful king, and
+that whatever was on the other side was a hateful adversary, to be
+brought to such disaster and shame as was possible, without mercy and
+without delay.
+
+But after a few days of the examination which we have just reported,
+public opinion was greatly staggered, and knew not how to turn.
+Gradually the conviction must have been forced upon every mind which
+had any candour left, that Jeanne, at that dreadful bar, with the
+stake in sight, and all the learning of Paris--the entire power of one
+great national and half of another, all England and half France
+against--(many more than half France, for the other part had abandoned
+her cause),--showed nothing of the demon, but all--if not of the
+angel, yet of the Maid, the emblem of perfection to that rude world,
+though often so barbarously handled. It might almost be said of the
+age, notwithstanding its immorality and rampant viciousness, that in
+its eyes a true virgin could do no harm. And hers was one if ever such
+a thing existed on earth. The talk in the streets began to take a very
+different tone. Massieu the clerical sheriff's officer saw nothing in
+her answers that was not good and right. Out of the midst of the crowd
+of listeners would burst an occasional cry of "Well said!" An
+Englishman, even a knight, overcome by his feelings, cried out: "Why
+was not she English, this brave girl!" All these were ominous sounds.
+Still more ominous was the utterance of Maître Jean Lohier, a lawyer
+of Rouen, who declared loudly that the trial was not a legal trial for
+the reasons which follow:
+
+"In the first place because it was not in the form of an ordinary
+trial; secondly, because it was not held in a public court, and those
+present had not full and complete freedom to say what was their full
+and unbiassed opinion; thirdly, because there was question of the
+honour of the King of France of whose party Jeanne was, without
+calling him, or any one for him; fourthly, because neither libel nor
+articles were produced, and this woman who was only an uninstructed
+girl, had no advocate to answer for her before so many Masters and
+Doctors, on such grave matters, and especially those which touched
+upon the revelations of which she spoke; therefore it seemed to him
+that the trial was worth nothing. For these things Monseigneur de
+Beauvais was very indignant against the said Maître Lohier, saying:
+'Here is Lohier who is going to make a fine fuss about our trial; he
+calumniates us all, and tells the world it is of no good. If one were
+to go by him, one would have to begin everything over again, and all
+that has been done would be of no use.' Monseigneur de Beauvais said
+besides: 'It is easy to see on which foot he halts [/de quel pied il
+cloche/]. By St. John, we shall do nothing of the kind; we shall go on
+with our trial as we have begun it.'"
+
+A day or two later Manchon, the Clerk of the Court (he who refused to
+take down Jeanne's conversation with her Judas), met this same lawyer
+Lohier at church, and asked him, as no doubt every man asked every
+other whom he met, how did he think the trial was going? to which
+Lohier answered: "You see the manner in which they proceed; they will
+take her, if they can, in her words--that is to say, the assertions in
+which she says /I know for certain/, things that concern her
+apparitions. If she would say, 'It seems to me' instead of 'I know for
+certain,' I do not see how any man could condemn her. It appears that
+they proceed against her rather from hate than from any other cause,
+and for this reason I shall not remain here. I will have nothing to do
+with it." This I think shows very clearly that Lohier, like the bulk
+of the population, by no means thought at first that it was "from
+hate" that the trial proceeded, but honestly believed that he had been
+called to try Jeanne as a professor of the black arts; and that he had
+discovered from her own testimony that she was not so, and that the
+motive of the trial was entirely a different one from that of justice;
+one in fact with which an honest man could have nothing to do.
+
+It is very significant also that the number of judges present in court
+on the sixth day, the last of the public examination, was only thirty-
+eight, as against the sixty-two of the second day, which seems to
+prove that a general disgust and alarm was growing in the minds of
+those most closely concerned. Warwick and the soldiers, impatient of
+all such business, striding in noisily from time to time to give a
+careless glance at the proceedings, might not stay long enough to
+share the impression--or might, who can say? Their business was to get
+this pestilent woman, even if by chance she might be an innocent
+fanatic, cleared off the face of the earth and out of their way.
+
+After the sixth day, however, it would seem that the Bishop and his
+tools had taken fright at the progress of public opinion. Before
+dismissing the court on that occasion, Cauchon made an address to the
+disturbed and anxious judges, informing them that he would not tire
+them out with prolonged sittings, but that a few specially chosen
+assistants would now examine into what further details were necessary.
+In the meantime all would be put in writing; so that they might think
+it over and deliberate within themselves, so as to be able each to
+make a report either to himself, the Bishop, or to some one deputed by
+him. The assessors, thus thrown out of work, were however forbidden to
+leave Rouen without the Bishop's permission--probably because of the
+threat of Lohier. Repeated meetings were held in Cauchon's house to
+arrange the details of the proceedings to follow; and during this time
+it was perhaps hoped that any excitement outside would quiet down. The
+Bishop himself had in the meantime other work in hand. He had to
+receive certain important visitors, one of them the man who held the
+appointment of Chancellor of France on the English side, and who was
+well acquainted with the mind of his masters. We have no information
+whatever whether Cauchon ever himself wavered, or allowed the
+possibility of acquitting Jeanne to enter his mind; but he must have
+seen that it was of the last necessity to know what would satisfy the
+English chiefs. No doubt he was confirmed and strengthened in the
+conviction that by hook or by crook her condemnation must be
+accomplished, by the conversation of these illustrious visitors. To
+save Jeanne was impossible he must have been told. No English soldier
+would strike a blow while she lived. England itself, the whole
+country, trembled at her name. Till she was got rid of nothing could
+be done.
+
+There was of course great exaggeration in all this, for the English
+had fought desperately enough in her presence except on the one
+occasion of Patay, notwithstanding all the early prestige of Jeanne.
+But at all events it was made perfectly clear that the foregoing
+conclusion must be carried out, and that Jeanne must die: and, not
+only so, but she must die with opprobrium and disgrace as a witch,
+which almost everybody out of Rouen now believed her to be. The public
+examination which lasted six days was concluded on the third of March,
+1430. On the following days, the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh,
+eighth, and ninth of March, meetings were held, as we have said, in
+the Bishop's house to consider what it would be well to do next, at
+one of which a select company of Inquisitors was chosen to carry on
+the examination in private. These were Jean de la Fontaine, a lawyer
+learned in canon law; Jean Beaupère, already her interrogator; Nicolas
+Midi, a Doctor in Theology; Pierre Morice, Canon of Rouen and
+Ambassador from the English King to the Council of Bâle; Thomas de
+Courcelles, the learned and excellent young Doctor already described;
+Nicolas l'Oyseleur, the traitor, also already sufficiently referred
+to; and Manchon, the honest Clerk of the court: the names of Gerard
+Feuillet, also a distinguished man, and Jean Fecardo, an advocate, are
+likewise also mentioned. They seem to have served in their turn, three
+or four at a time. This private session began on the 10th of March, a
+week after the conclusion of the public trial, and was held in the
+prison chamber inhabited by the Maid.
+
+We shall not attempt to follow literally those private examinations,
+which would take a great deal more space than we have at our command,
+and would be fatiguing to the reader from the constant and prolonged
+repetitions; we shall therefore quote only such parts as are new or so
+greatly enlarged from Jeanne's original statements as to seem so. At
+the first day's examination in her prison she was questioned about
+Compiègne and her various proceedings before reaching that place.[1]
+She was asked, for one thing, if her voices had bidden her make the
+sally in which she was taken; to which she answered that had she known
+the time she was to be taken she would not have gone out, unless upon
+the express command of the saints. She was then asked about her
+standard, her arms, and her horses, and replied that she had no coat-
+of-arms, but her brothers had, who also had all her money, from ten to
+twelve thousand francs, which was "no great treasure to make war
+upon," besides five chargers, and about seven other horses, all from
+the King. The examiners then came to their principal object, and
+having lulled her mind with these trifles, turned suddenly to a
+subject on which they still hoped she might commit herself, the sign
+which had proved her good faith to the King. It is scarcely possible
+to avoid the feeling, grave as all the circumstances were, that a
+little /malice/, a glance of mischievous pleasure, kindled in Jeanne's
+eye. She had refused to enter into further explanations again and
+again. She had warned them that she would give them no true light on
+the subjects that concerned the King. Now she would seem to have had
+sudden recourse to the mystification that is dear to youth, to have
+tossed her young head and said: "/Have then your own way/"; and
+forthwith proceeded to romance, according to the indications given her
+of what was wanted, without thought of preserving any appearance of
+reality. Most probably indeed, her air and tone would make it apparent
+to her persistent questioners how complete a fable, or at least
+parable, it was.
+
+Asked, what sign she gave to the King, she replied that it was a
+beautiful and honourable sign, very creditable and very good, and rich
+above all. Asked, if it still lasted; answered, "It would be good to
+know; it will last a thousand years and more if well guarded," adding
+that it was in the treasure of the King. Asked, if it was of gold or
+silver or of precious stones, or in the form of a crown; answered: "I
+will tell you nothing more; but no man could devise a thing so rich as
+this sign; but the sign that is necessary for you is that God should
+deliver me out of your hands, and that is what He will do." She also
+said that when she had to go to the King it was said by her voices:
+"Go boldly; and when you are before the King he will have a sign which
+will make him receive and believe in you." Asked, what reverence she
+made when the sign came to the King, and if it came from God;
+answered, that she had thanked God for having delivered her from the
+priests of her own party who had argued against her, and that she had
+knelt down several times; she also said that an angel from God, and
+not from another, brought the sign to the King; and she had thanked
+the Lord many times; she added that the priests ceased to argue
+against when they had seen that sign. Asked, if the clergy of her
+party (/de par delà/) saw the above sign; answered yes, that her King
+if he were satisfied; and he answered yes. And afterwards she went to
+a little chapel close by, and heard them say that after she was gone
+more than three hundred people saw the said sign. She said besides
+that for love of her, and that they should give up questioning her,
+God permitted those of her party to see the sign. Asked, if the King
+and she made reverence to the angel when he brought the sign; answered
+yes, for herself, that she knelt down and took off her hood.
+
+What Jeanne meant by this strange romance can only, I think be
+explained by this hypothesis. She was "dazed and bewildered," say some
+of the historians, evidently not knowing how to interpret so strange
+an interruption to her narrative; but there is no other sign of
+bewilderment; her mind was always clear and her intelligence complete.
+Granting that the whole story was boldly ironical, its object is very
+apparent. Honour forbade her to betray the King's secret, and she had
+expressly said she would not do so. But her story seems to say--/since
+you will insist that there was a sign, though I have told you I could
+give you no information, have it your own way; you shall have a sign
+and one of the very best; it delivered me from the priests of my own
+party (de par delà)/. Jeanne was no milk-sop; she was bold enough to
+send a winged shaft to the confusion of the priests of the other side
+who had tormented her in the same way. One can imagine a lurking smile
+at the corner of her mouth. Let them take it since they would have it.
+And we may well believe there was that in her eye, and in the details
+heaped up so lightly to form the miraculous tale, which left little
+doubt in the minds of the questioners, of the spirit in which she
+spoke: though to us who only read the record the effect is of a more
+bewildering kind.
+
+Two days after, on Monday, the 12th of March, the Inquisitors began by
+several additional questions concerning the angel who brought the sign
+to the King; was it the same whom she first saw, or another? She
+answered that it was the same, and no other was wanted. Asked, if this
+angel had not deceived her since she had been taken prisoner;
+answered, that SHE BELIEVED SINCE IT SO PLEASED OUR LORD THAT IT WAS
+BEST THAT SHE SHOULD BE TAKEN. Asked, if the angel had not failed her;
+answered, "How could he have failed me, when he comforts me every
+day?" This comfort is what she understands to come through St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, whether she called them, or they
+came without being called, she answered, that they often came without
+being called, and if they did not come soon enough, she asked our
+Saviour to send them. Asked, if St. Denis had ever appeared to her;
+answered, not that she knew. Asked, if when she promised to our Lord
+to remain a virgin she spoke to Him; answered, that it ought to be
+enough to speak to those who were sent by Him that is to say, St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret. Asked, what induced her to summon a man to
+Toul, in respect to marriage; answered, "I did not summon him; it was
+he who summoned me"; and that on that occasion she had sworn before
+the judge to speak the truth, which was that she had not made him any
+promise. She also said that the first time she had heard the voices
+she made a vow of virginity so long as it pleased God, being then
+about the age of thirteen.
+
+It was the object of the judges by these questions to prove that,
+according to a fable which had obtained some credit, Jeanne during her
+visit to La Rousse, the village inn-keeper at Neufchâteau, had acted
+as servant in the house and tarnished her good fame--so that her
+betrothed had refused to marry her: and that he had been brought
+before the Bishop's court at Toul for his breach of promise, as we
+should say. Exactly the reverse was the case, as the reader will
+remember.
+
+Jeanne was further asked, if she had spoken of her visions to her curé
+or to any ecclesiastic: and answered no, but only to Robert de
+Baudricourt and to her King; but added that she was not bidden by her
+voices to conceal them, but feared to reveal them lest the Burgundians
+should hear of them and prevent her going. And especially she had much
+doubt of her father, lest he should hinder her from going. Asked, if
+she thought she did well to go away without the permission of her
+father and mother, when it is certain we ought to honour our father
+and mother; answered, that in every other thing she had fully obeyed
+him, except in respect to her departure; but she had written to them,
+and they had pardoned her. Asked, if when she left her father and
+mother she did not think it was a sin; answered, that her voices were
+quite willing that she should tell them, if it were not for the pain
+it would have given them; but as for herself, she would not have told
+them for any consideration; also that her voices left her to do as she
+pleased, to tell or not.
+
+*****
+
+Having gone so far the reverend fathers went to dinner, and Jeanne we
+hope had her piece of bread and her /eau rougie/. In the afternoon
+these indefatigable questioners returned, and the first few questions
+throw a fuller light on the troubled cottage at Domremy, out of which
+this wonderful maiden came like a being of another kind.
+
+She was questioned as to the dreams of her father; and answered, that
+while she was still at home her mother told her several times that her
+father said he had dreamt that Jeanne his daughter had gone away with
+the troopers, that her father and mother took great care of her and
+held her in great subjection: and she obeyed them in every point
+except that of her affair at Toul in respect to marriage. She also
+said that her mother had told her what her father had said to her
+brothers: "If I could think that the thing would happen of which I
+have dreamed, I wish she might be drowned first; and if you would not
+do it, I would drown her with my own hands"; and that he nearly lost
+his senses when she went to Vaucouleurs.
+
+How profound is this little village tragedy! The suspicious, stern,
+and unhopeful peasant, never sure even that the most transparent and
+pure may not be capable of infamy, distracted with that horror of
+personal degradation which is involved in family disgrace, cruel in
+the intensity of his pride and fear of shame! He has been revealed to
+us in many lands, always one of the most impressive of human pictures,
+with no trust of love in him but an overwhelming faith in every
+vicious possibility. If there is no evidence to prove that, even at
+the moment when Jeanne was supreme, when he was induced to go to
+Rheims to see the coronation, Jacques d'Arc was still dark,
+unresponsive, never more sure than any of the Inquisitors that his
+daughter was not a witch, or worse, a shameless creature linked to the
+captains and the splendid personages about her by very different ties
+from those which appeared--there is at least not a word to prove that
+he had changed his mind. She does not add anything to soften the
+description here given. The sudden appearance of this dark remorseless
+figure, looking on from his village, who probably in all Domremy--when
+Domremy got to hear the news--would be the only person who would in
+his desperation almost applaud that stake and devouring flame, is too
+startling for words.
+
+The end of this day's examination was remarkable also for a sudden
+light upon the method she had intended to adopt in respect to the Duke
+of Orleans, then in prison in England, whom it was one of her most
+cherished hopes to deliver.
+
+Asked, how she meant to rescue the Duc d'Orléans: she answered, that
+by that time she hoped to have taken English prisoners enough to
+exchange for him: and if she had not taken enough she should have
+crossed the sea, in power, to search for him in England. Asked, if St.
+Catherine and St. Margaret had told her absolutely and without
+condition that she should take enough prisoners to exchange for the
+Duc d'Orléans, who was in England, or otherwise, that she should cross
+the sea to fetch him and bring him back within three years; she
+answered yes: and that she had told the King and had begged him to
+permit her to make prisoners. She said further that if she had lasted
+three years without hindrance, she should have delivered him.
+Otherwise she said she had not thought of so long a time as three
+years, although it should have been more than one; but she did not at
+present recollect exactly.
+
+There is a curious story existing, though we do not remember whence it
+comes and there is not a scrap of evidence for it, which suggests a
+rumour that Jeanne was not the child of the d'Arc family at all, but
+in fact an abandoned and illegitimate child of the Queen, Isabel of
+Bavaria, and that her real father was the murdered Duc d'Orléans. This
+suggestion might explain the ease with which she fell into the way of
+Courts, a sort of air /à la Princesse/ which certainly was about her,
+and her especial devotion to Orleans, both to the city and the duke. A
+shadow of a supposed child of our own Queen Mary has also appeared in
+history, quite without warrant or likelihood. It is a little
+conventional and well worn even in the way of romance, yet there are
+certain fanciful suggestions in the thought.
+
+After the above, Jeanne was again questioned and at great length upon
+the sign given to the King, upon the angel who brought it, the manner
+of his coming and going, the persons who saw him, those who saw the
+crown bestowed upon the King, and so on, in the most minute detail.
+That the purpose of the sign was that "they should give up arguing and
+so let her proceed on her mission," she repeated again and again; but
+here is a curious additional note.
+
+She was asked how the King and the people with him were convinced that
+it was an angel; and answered, that the King knew it by the
+instruction of the ecclesiastics who were there, and also by the sign
+of the crown. Asked, how the ecclesiastics (/gens d'église/) knew it
+was an angel she answered, "By their knowledge [science], and because
+they were priests."
+
+Was this the keenest irony, or was it the wandering of a weary mind?
+We cannot tell; but if the latter, it was the only occasion on which
+Jeanne's mind wandered; and there was method and meaning in the
+strange tale.
+
+She was further questioned whether it was by the advice of her voices
+that she attacked La Charité, and afterwards Paris, her two points of
+failure; the purpose of her examiners clearly being to convince her
+that those voices had deceived her. To both questions she answered no.
+To Paris she went at the request of gentlemen who wished to make a
+skirmish, or assault of arms (/vaillance d'armes/); but she intended
+to go farther, and to pass the moats; that is, to force the fighting
+and make the skirmish into a serious assault; the same was the case
+before La Charité. She was asked whether she had no revelation
+concerning Pont l'Evêque, and said that since it was revealed to her
+at Melun that she should be taken, she had had more recourse to the
+will of the captains than to her own; but she did not tell them that
+it was revealed to her that she should be taken. Asked, if she thought
+it was well done to attack Paris on the day of the Nativity of our
+Lady, which was a festival of the Church; she answered, that it was
+always well to keep the festivals of our Lady: and in her conscience
+it seemed to her that it was and always would be a good thing to keep
+the feasts of our Lady, from one end to the other.
+
+In the afternoon the examiners returned to the attempt at escape or
+suicide--they seemed to have preferred the latter explanation--made at
+Beaurevoir; and as Jeanne expresses herself with more freedom as to
+her personal motives in these prison examinations and opens her heart
+more freely, there is much here which we give in full.
+
+She was asked first what was the cause of her leap from the tower of
+Beaurevoir. She answered that she had heard that all the people of
+Compiègne, down to the age of seven, were to be put to the sword, and
+that she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good
+people; this was one of the reasons; the other was that she knew that
+she was sold to the English and that she would rather die than fall
+into the hands of the English, her enemies. Asked, if she made that
+leap by the command of her voices; answered, that St. Catherine said
+to her almost every day that she was not to leap, for that God would
+help her, and also the people of Compiègne: and she, Jeanne, said to
+St. Catherine that since God intended to help the people of Compiègne
+she would fain be there. And St. Catherine said: "You must take it in
+good part, but you will not be delivered till you have seen the King
+of the English." And she, Jeanne, answered: "Truly I do not wish to
+see him. I would rather die than fall into the hands of the English."
+Asked, if she had said to St. Catherine and St. Margaret, "Will God
+leave the good people of Compiègne to die so cruelly?" answered, that
+she did not say "so cruelly," but said it in this way: "Will God leave
+these good people of Compiègne to die, who have been and are so loyal
+to their lord?" She added that after she fell there were two or three
+days that she would not eat; and that she was so hurt by the leap that
+she could not eat; but all the time she was comforted by St.
+Catherine, who told her to confess and ask pardon of God for that act,
+and that without doubt the people of Compiègne would have succour
+before Martinmas. And then she took pains to recover and began to eat,
+and shortly was healed.
+
+Asked, whether, when she threw herself down, she wished to kill
+herself, she answered no; but that in throwing herself down she
+commended herself to God, and hoped by means of that leap to escape
+and to avoid being delivered to the English. Asked, if, when she
+recovered the power of speech, she had denied and blasphemed God and
+the saints, as had been reported; answered, that she remembered
+nothing of the kind, and that, as far as she knew, she had never
+denied and blasphemed God and His saints there nor anywhere else, and
+did not confess that she had done so, having no recollection of it.
+Asked, if she would like to see the information taken on the spot,
+answered: "I refer myself to God, and not another, and to a good
+confession." Asked, if her voices ever desired delay for their
+replies; answered, that St. Catherine always answered her at once, but
+sometimes she, Jeanne, could not hear because of the tumult round her
+(/turbacion des personnes/) and the noise of her guards; but that when
+she asked anything of St. Catherine, sometimes she, and sometimes St.
+Margaret asked of our Lord, and then by the command of our Lord an
+answer was given to her. Asked, if, when they came, there was always
+light accompanying them, and if she did not see that light when she
+heard the voice in the castle without knowing whether it was in her
+chamber or not: answered, that there was never a day that they did not
+come into the castle, and that they never came without light: and that
+time she heard the voice, but did not remember whether she saw the
+light, or whether she saw St. Catherine. Also she said she had asked
+from her voices three things: one, her release: the other, that God
+would help the French, and keep the town faithful: and the other the
+salvation of her soul. Afterwards she asked that she might have a copy
+of these questions and her answers if she were to be taken to Paris,
+that she may give them to the people in Paris, and say to them, "This
+is how I was questioned in Rouen, and here are my replies," that she
+might not be exhausted by so many questions.
+
+Asked, what she meant when she said that Monseigneur de Beauvais put
+himself in danger by bringing her to trial, and why Monseigneur de
+Beauvais more than others, she answered, that this was and is what she
+said to Monseigneur de Beauvais: "You say that you are my judge. I
+know not whether you are so; but take care that you judge well, or you
+will put yourself in great danger. I warn you, so that if our Lord
+should chastise you for it, I may have done my duty in warning you."
+Asked, what was that danger? she answered, that St. Catherine had said
+that she should have succour, but that she knew not whether this meant
+that she would be delivered from prison, or that, when she was before
+the tribunal, there might come trouble by which she should be
+delivered; she thought, however, it would be the one or the other. And
+all the more that her voices told her that she would be delivered by a
+great victory; and afterwards they said to her: "Take everything
+cheerfully, do not be disturbed by this martyrdom: thou shalt thence
+come at last to the kingdom of Heaven." And this the voices said
+simply and absolutely--that is to say, without fail; she explained
+that she called It martyrdom because of all the pain and adversity
+that she had suffered in prison; and she knew not whether she might
+have still more to suffer, but waited upon our Lord. She was then
+asked whether, since her voices had said that she should go to
+Paradise, she felt assured that she should be saved and not damned in
+hell; she answered, that she believed firmly what her voices said
+about her being saved, as firmly as if she were so already. And when
+it was said to her that this answer was of great weight, she answered
+that she herself held it as a great treasure.
+
+We have said that Jeanne's answers to the Inquisitors in prison had a
+more familiar form than in the public examination; which seem to prove
+that they were not unkind to her, further, at least, than by the
+persistence and tediousness of their questions. The Bishop for one
+thing was seldom present; the sittings were frequently presided over
+by the Deputy Inquisitor, who had made great efforts to be free of the
+business altogether, and had but very recently been forced into it; so
+that we may at least imagine, as he was so reluctant, that he did what
+he could to soften the proceedings. Jean de la Fontaine, too, was a
+milder man than her former questioners, and in so small an assembly
+she could not be disturbed and interrupted by Frère Isambard's well-
+meant signs and whispers. She speaks at length and with a self-
+disclosure which seems to have little that was painful in it, like one
+matured into a kind of age by long weariness and trouble, who regards
+the panorama of her life passing before her with almost a pensive
+pleasure. And it is clear that Jeanne's ear, still so young and keen,
+notwithstanding that attitude of mind, was still intent upon sounds
+from without, and that Jeanne's heart still expected a sudden assault,
+a great victory for France, which should open her prison doors--or
+even a rising in the very judgment hall to deliver her. How could they
+keep still outside, Dunois, Alençon, La Hire, the mighty men of
+valour, while they knew that she was being racked and tortured within?
+She who could not bear to be out of the conflict to serve her friends
+at Compiègne, even when succour from on high had been promised, how
+was it possible that these gallant knights could live and let her die,
+their gentle comrade, their dauntless leader? In those long hours,
+amid the noise of the guards within and the garrison around, how she
+must have thought, over and over again, where were they? when were
+they coming? how often imagined that a louder clang of arms than
+usual, a rush of hasty feet, meant that they were here!
+
+But honour and love kept Jeanne's lips closed. Not a word did she say
+that could discredit King, or party, or friends; not a reproach to
+those who had abandoned her. She still looked for the great victory in
+which Monseigneur, if he did not take care, might run the risk of
+being roughly handled, or of a sudden tumult in his own very court
+that would pitch him form his guilty seat. It was but the fourteenth
+of March still, and there were six weary weeks to come. She did not
+know the hour or the day, but yet she believed that this great
+deliverance was on its way.
+
+And there was a great deliverance to come: but not of this kind. The
+voices of God--how can we deny it?--are often, though in a loftier
+sense, like those fantastic voices that keep the word of promise to
+the ear but break it to the heart. They promised her a great victory:
+and she had it, and also the fullest deliverance: but only by the
+stake and the fire, which were not less dreadful to Jeanne than to any
+other girl of her age. They did not speak to deceive her, but she was
+deceived; they kept their promise, but not as she understood it.
+"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having
+seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them."
+Jeanne too was persuaded of them, but was not to receive them--except
+in the other way.
+
+On the afternoon of the same day (it was still Lent, and Jeanne
+fasted, whatever our priests may have done), she was again closely
+questioned on the subject, this time, of Franquet d'Arras, who, as has
+been above narrated, was taken by her in the course of some
+indiscriminate fighting in the north. She was asked if it was not
+mortal sin to take a man as prisoner of war and then give him up to be
+executed. There was evidently no perception of similarities in the
+minds of the judges, for this was precisely what had been done in the
+case of Jeanne herself; but even she does not seem to have been struck
+by the fact. Their object, apparently, was by proving that she was in
+a state of sin, to prove also that her voices were of no authority, as
+being unable to discover so simple a principle as this.
+
+When they spoke to her of "one named Franquet d'Arras, who was
+executed at Lagny," she answered that she consented to his death, as
+he deserved it, for he had confessed to being a murderer, a thief, and
+a traitor. She said that his trial lasted fifteen days, the Bailli de
+Senlis and the law officers of Lagny being the judges; and she added
+that she had wished to have Franquet, to exchange him for a man of
+Paris, Seigneur de Lours (corrected, innkeeper at the sign of l'Ours);
+but when she heard that this man was dead, and when the Bailli told
+her that she would go very much against justice if she set Franquet
+free, she said to the Bailli: "Since my man is dead whom I wished to
+deliver, do with this one whatever justice demands." Asked, if she
+took the money or allowed it to be taken by him who had taken
+Franquet, she answered, that she was not a money changer or a
+treasurer of France, to deal with money.
+
+She was then reminded that having assaulted Paris on a holy day,
+having taken the horse of Monseigneur de Senlis, having thrown herself
+down from the tower of Beaurevoir, having consented to the death of
+Franquet d'Arras, and being still dressed in the costume of a man, did
+she not think that she must be in a state of mortal sin? She answered
+to the first question about Paris: "I do not think I was guilty of
+mortal sin, and if I have sinned it is to God that I would make it
+known, and in confession to God by the priest." To the second
+question, concerning the horse of Senlis, she answered, that she
+believed firmly that there was not mortal sin in this, seeing it was
+valued, and the Bishop had due notice of it, and at all events it was
+sent back to the Seigneur de la Trémouille to give it back to
+Monseigneur de Senlis. The said horse was of no use to her; and, on
+the other hand, she did not wish to keep it because she heard that the
+Bishop was displeased that his horse should have been taken. And as
+for the tower of Beaurevoir: "I did it not to destroy myself, but in
+the hope of saving myself and of going to the aid of the good people
+who were in need." But after having done it, she had confessed her
+sin, and asked pardon of our Lord, and had pardon of Him. And she
+allowed that it was not right to have made that leap, but that she did
+wrong.
+
+The next day an important question was introduced, the only one as yet
+which Jeanne does not seem to have been able to answer with
+understanding. On points of fact or in respect to her visions she was
+always quite clear, but questions concerning the Church were beyond
+her knowledge. It is only indeed after some time has elapsed that we
+perceive why such a question was introduced.
+
+After admonitions made to her she was required, if she had done
+anything contrary to the faith, to submit herself to the decision of
+the Church. She replied, that her answers had all been heard and seen
+by clerks, and that they could say whether there was anything in them
+against the faith: and that if they would point out to her where any
+error was, afterwards she would tell them what was said by her
+counsellors. At all events if there was anything against the faith
+which our Lord had commanded, she would not sustain it, and would be
+very sorry to go against that. Here it was shown to her that there was
+a Church militant and a Church triumphant, and she was asked if she
+knew the difference between them. She was also required to put herself
+under the jurisdiction of the Church, in respect to what she had done,
+whether it was good or evil, but replied, "I will answer no more on
+this point for the present."
+
+Having thrown in this tentative question which she did not understand,
+they returned to the question of her dress, which holds such an
+important place in the entire interrogatory. If she were allowed to
+hear mass as she wished, having been all this time deprived of
+religious ordinances, did not she think it would be more honest and
+befitting that she should go in the dress of a woman? To this she
+replied vaguely, that she would much rather go to mass in the dress of
+a woman than to retain her male costume and not to hear mass; and that
+if she were certified that she should hear mass, she would be there in
+a woman's dress. "I certify you that you shall hear mass," the
+examiner replied, "but you must be dressed as a woman." "What would
+you say," she answered as with a momentary doubt, "if I had sworn to
+my King never to change?" but she added: "Anyhow I answer for it. Find
+me a dress, long, touching the ground, without a train, and give it to
+me to go to mass; but I will return to my present dress when I come
+back." She was then asked why she would not have all the parts of a
+female dress to go to mass in; she said, "I will take counsel upon
+that, and answer you," and begged again for the honour of God and our
+Lady that she might be allowed to hear mass in this good town.
+Afterwards she was again recommended to assume the whole dress of a
+woman and gave a conditional assent: "Get me a dress like that of a
+young /bourgeoise/, that is to say, a long /houppelande/; I will wear
+that and a woman's hood to go to mass." After having promised,
+however, she made an appeal to them to leave her free, and to think no
+more of her garb, but to allow her to hear mass without changing it.
+This would seem to have been refused, and all at once without warning
+the jurisdiction of the Church was suddenly introduced again.
+
+She was asked, whether in all she did and said she would submit
+herself to the Church, and replied: "All my deeds and works are in the
+hands of God, and I depend only on Him; and I certify that I desire to
+do nothing and say nothing against the Christian faith; and if I have
+done or said anything in the body that was against the Christian faith
+which our Lord has established, I should not defend it but cast it
+forth from me." Asked again, if she would not submit to the laws of
+the Church she replied: "I can answer no more to-day on this point;
+but on Saturday send the clerk to me, if you do not come, and I will
+answer by the grace of God, and it can be put in writing."
+
+A great many questions followed as to her visions, but chiefly what
+had been asked before. One thing only we may note, since it was one of
+the special sayings all her own, which fell from the lips of Jeanne,
+during this private and almost sympathetic examination. After being
+questioned closely as to how she knew her first visitor to be St.
+Michael, etc., she was asked, how she would have known had he been
+"l'Anemy" himself (a Norman must surely have used this word), taking
+the form of an angel: and finally, what doctrine he taught her?
+
+She answered; above all things he said that she was to be a good child
+and that God would help her: and among other things that she was to go
+to the succour of the King of France. But the greater part of what the
+angel taught her, she continued, was already in their book; and THE
+ANGEL SHOWED HER THE GREAT PITY THERE WAS OF THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE.
+
+The pity of it! That which has always gone most to the tender heart: a
+country torn in pieces, brother fighting against brother, the invader
+seated at the native hearth, and blood and fire making the smiling
+land a desert: "/la pitie qui estoit au royaume de France/."
+
+Did the Inquisitor break down here? Could no one go on? or was it mere
+human incompetence to feel the divine touch? Some one broke into a
+foolish question about the height of the angel, and the sitting was
+hurriedly concluded. Monseigneur might well be on his mettle; that
+very pity, was it not stealing into the souls of his private committee
+deputed for so different a use?
+
+*****
+
+Next day the questions about St. Michael's personal appearance were
+resumed, as a little feint we can only suppose, for the great question
+of the Church was again immediately introduced; but in the meantime
+Jeanne had described her visitor in terms which it is pleasant to
+dwell on. "He was in the form of a /très vrai prud' homme/." The term
+is difficult to translate, as is the Galantuomo of Italy. The "King-
+Honest Man," we used to say in English in the days of his late Majesty
+Victor Emmanuel of Italy; but that is not all that is meant--/un vrai
+prud' homme/, a man good, honest, brave, the best man, is more like
+it. The girl's honest imagination thought of no paraphernalia of wings
+or shining plumes. It was not the theatrical angel, not even the angel
+of art whom she saw--whom it would have been so easy to invent, nay to
+take quite truthfully from the first painted window, radiating colour
+and brightness through the dim, low-roofed church. But even with such
+material handy, Jeanne was not led into the conventional. She knew
+nothing about wings or emblematic scales. He was in the form of a
+brave and gentle man. She knew not anything greater, nor would she be
+seduced into fable however sacred. Then once more the true assault
+began.
+
+She was asked, if she would submit all her sayings and doings, good or
+evil, to the judgment of our Holy Mother, the Church. She replied,
+that as for the Church, she loved it and would sustain it with all her
+might for our Christian faith; and that it was not she whom they ought
+to disturb and hinder from going to church or from hearing mass. As to
+the good things she had done, and that had happened, she must refer
+all to the King of Heaven, who had sent her to Charles, King of
+France; and it should be seen that the French would soon gain a great
+advantage which God would send them, so great that all the kingdom of
+France would be shaken. And this, she said, that when it came to pass,
+they might remember that she had said it. She was again asked, if she
+would submit to the jurisdiction of the Church, and answered, "I refer
+everything to our Lord who sent me, to our Lady, and to the blessed
+Saints of Paradise"; and added her opinion was that our Lord and the
+Church meant the same thing, and that difficulties should not be made
+concerning this, when there was no difficulty, and they were both one.
+She was then told that there was the Church triumphant, in which are
+God, the saints, the angels, and all saved souls. The Church militant
+is our Holy Father the Pope, vicar of God on earth, the cardinals, the
+prelates of the Church, and the clergy and all good Christians and
+Catholics, which Church properly assembled cannot err, but is guided
+by the Holy Spirit. And this being the case she was asked if she would
+refer her cause to the Church militant thus explained to her. She
+replied that she had come to the King of France on the part of God, on
+the part of the Virgin Mary, the blessed Saints of Paradise, and the
+Church victorious in Heaven, and at their commandment; and to that
+Church she submitted all her good deeds, and all that she had done and
+might do. And if they asked her whether she would submit to the Church
+militant, answered, that she would now answer no more than this.
+
+Here again the argument strayed back to the futile subject of dress,
+always at hand to be taken up again, one would say, when the judges
+were non-plussed. Her first reply on this subject is remarkable and
+shows that dark and terrible forebodings were already beginning to
+mingle with her hopes.
+
+Asked, what she had to say about the woman's dress that had been
+offered to her, to hear mass in: she answered, that she would not take
+it yet, not until the Lord pleased; but that if it were necessary to
+lead her out to be executed, and if she should then have to be
+undressed, she required of the Lords of the Church that they would
+give her the grace to have a long chemise, and a kerchief for her
+head; that she would prefer to die rather than to alter what our Lord
+had directed her to do, and that she firmly believed our Lord would
+not let her descend so low, but that she should soon be helped by God
+and by a miracle. She was then asked, if what she did in respect to
+the man's costume was by command of God, why she asked for a woman's
+chemise in case of death? answered, /It is enough that it should be
+long/.
+
+The effect of these words in which so much was implied, must have made
+a supreme sensation among the handful of men gathered round the
+helpless girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror
+before the eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could
+have been suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold,
+the fire--and the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to
+every evil gaze, must have showed themselves at least for a moment
+against that dark background of prison wall. It was enough that it
+should be long--to hide her as much as was possible from those
+dreadful staring eyes.
+
+The interrogatory goes on wildly after this about the age and the
+dress of the saints. But a tone of fate had come into it, and Jeanne
+herself, it was evident, was very serious; her mind turned to more
+weighty thoughts. Presently they asked if the saints hated the
+English, to which she replied that they hated what God hated and loved
+what He loved. She was then asked if God hated the English. She
+replied that of the love or hate that God had for the English, or what
+God did for their souls, she knew nothing; but she knew well that they
+should be driven out of France, except those who died there; and that
+God would send victory to the French against the English. Asked, if
+God was for the English so long as they were prosperous in France: she
+answered, that she knew not whether God hated the French, but believed
+He had allowed them to be beaten because of their sins.
+
+Jeanne was then brought to a test which, had she been a great
+statesman or a learned doctor, would have been as dangerous, as the
+question concerning John the Baptist was to the priests and scribes.
+"If we shall say: From heaven, he will say, Why then believed ye him
+not? but if we shall say of men we fear the people." And she was only
+a peasant girl and the event of which they spoke had been before her
+little time.
+
+Asked, if she thought and believed firmly that her King did well to
+kill Monseigneur de Bourgogne, she answered that IT WAS A GREAT
+MISFORTUNE FOR THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE: but that however it might be
+among themselves, God had sent her to the succour of the King.
+
+One or two other questions of some importance followed amid perpetual
+changes of the subject: one of which called forth as follows her last
+deliverance on the subject of the Pope.
+
+Asked, if she had said to Monseigneur de Beauvais that she would
+answer as exactly to him and to his clerks as she would have done
+before our Holy Father the Pope, although at several points in the
+trial she would have had to refuse to answer, if she did not answer
+more plainly than before Monseigneur de Beauvais--she said that she
+had answered as much as she knew, and that if anything came to her
+memory that she had forgotten to say, she would say it willingly.
+Asked, if it seemed to her that she would be bound to answer the plain
+truth to the Pope, the vicar of God, in all he asked her touching the
+faith and her conscience, she replied that she desired to be taken
+before him, and then she would answer all that she ought to answer.
+
+Here we seem to perceive dimly that there was beginning to be a second
+party among those examiners, one of which was covertly but earnestly
+attempting to lead Jeanne into an appeal to the Pope, which would have
+conveyed her out of the hands of the English at least, and gained
+time, probably deliverance for her, could Jeanne have been made to
+understand it.
+
+This, however, was by no means the wish of Cauchon, whose spy and
+whisperer, L'Oyseleur, was working against it in the background.
+Jeanne evidently failed to take up what they meant. She did not
+understand the distinction between the Church militant and the Church
+triumphant: that God alone was her judge, and that no tribunal could
+decide upon the questions which were between her Lord and herself, was
+too firmly fixed in her mind: and again and again the men whose desire
+was to make her adopt this expedient, were driven back into the ever
+repeated questions about St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+One other of her distinctive sayings fell from her in the little
+interval that remained, in a series of useless questions about her
+standard. Was it true that this standard had been carried into the
+Cathedral at Rheims when those of the other captains were left behind?
+"It had been through the labour and the pain," she said, "there was
+good reason that it should have the honour."
+
+This last movement of a proud spirit, absolutely disinterested and
+without thought of honour or advancement in the usual sense of the
+word, gives a sort of trumpet note at the end of these wonderful
+wranglings in prison, in which, however, there is a softening of tone
+visible throughout, and evident effect of human nature bringing into
+immediate contact divers human creatures day after day. Jeanne is
+often at her best, and never so frequently as during these less formal
+sittings utters those flying words, simple and noble and of absolute
+truth to nature, which are noted everywhere, even in the most rambling
+records.
+
+*****
+
+The private examination, concluding with that last answer about the
+banner, came to an end on the 17th March, the day before Passion
+Sunday. Several subsequent days were occupied with repeated
+consultations in the Bishop's palace, and the reading over of the
+minutes of the examinations, to the judges first and afterwards to
+Jeanne, who acknowledged their correctness, with one or two small
+amendments. It is only now that Cauchon reappears in his own person.
+On the morning of the following Sunday, which was Palm Sunday, he and
+four other doctors with him had a conversation with Jeanne in her
+prison, very early in the morning, touching her repeated application
+to be allowed to hear mass and to communicate. The Bishop offered her
+his ultimatum: if she consented to resume her woman's dress, she might
+hear mass, but not otherwise; to which Jeanne replied, sorrowfully,
+that she would have done so before now if she could; but that it was
+not in her power to do so. Thus after the long and bitter Lent her
+hopes of sharing in the sacred feast were finally taken from her. It
+remains uncertain whether she considered that her change of dress
+would be direct disobedience to God, which her words seem often to
+imply; or whether it would mean renunciation of her mission, which she
+still hoped against hope to be able to resume; or if the fear of
+personal insult weighed most with her. The latter reason had evidently
+something to do with it, but, as evidently, not all.
+
+The background to these curious sittings, afterwards revealed to us,
+casts a hazy side-light upon them. Probably the Bishop, never present,
+must have been made aware by his spies of an intention on the part of
+those most favourable to Jeanne to support an appeal to the Pope; and
+L'Oyseleur, the traitor, who was all this time admitted to her cell by
+permission of Cauchon, and really as his tool and agent, was actively
+employed in prejudicing her mind against them, counselling her not to
+trust to those clerks, not to yield to the Church. How he managed to
+explain his own appearance on the other side, his official connection
+with the trial, and constant presence as one of her judges, it is hard
+to imagine. Probably he gave her to believe that he had sought that
+position (having got himself liberated from the imprisonment which he
+had represented himself as sharing) for her sake, to be able to help
+her.
+
+On the other hand her friends, whose hearts were touched by her
+candour and her sufferings, were not inactive. Jean de la Fontaine and
+the two monks--l'Advenu and Frère Isambard--also succeeded in gaining
+admission to her, and pressed upon her the advantage of appealing to
+the Church, to the Council of Bâle about to assemble, or to the Pope
+himself, which would have again changed the /venue/, and transferred
+her into less prejudiced hands. It is very likely that Jeanne in her
+ignorance and innocence might have held by her reference to the
+supreme tribunal of God in any case; and it is highly unlikely that of
+the English authorities, intent on removing the only thing in France
+of which their forces were afraid, should have given her up into the
+hands of the Pope, or allowed her to be transferred to any place of
+defence beyond their reach; but at least it is a relief to the mind to
+find that all these men were not base, as appears on the face of
+things, but that pity and justice and human feeling sometimes existed
+under the priest's gown and the monk's cowl, if also treachery and
+falsehood of the blackest kind. The Bishop, who remained withdrawn, we
+know not why, from all these private sittings in the prison (probably
+busy with his ecclesiastical duties as Holy Week was approaching),
+heard with fury of this visit and advice, and threatened vengeance
+upon the meddlers, not without effect, for Jean de la Fontaine, we are
+told--who had been deep in his councils, and indeed his deputy, as
+chief examiner--disappeared from Rouen immediately after, and was
+heard of no more.
+----------
+[1] Compiègne was a strong point. Had she proclaimed a promise from
+    St. Catherine, of victory? Chastelain says so, long after date and
+    with errors in fact. Two Anglo-Compiègnais were at her trial. The
+    Rehabilitation does not go into this question.--(From Mr. Lang.)
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+RE-EXAMINATION.
+MARCH-MAY, 1431.
+
+Upon all these contentions followed the calm of Palm Sunday, a great
+and touching festival, the first break upon the gloom of Lent, and a
+forerunner of the blessedness of Easter. We have already told how--a
+semblance of charity with which the reader might easily be deceived--
+the Bishop and four of his assessors had gone to the prison to offer
+to the Maid permission to receive the sacrament if she would do so in
+a woman's dress: and how after pleading that she might be allowed that
+privilege as she was, in her male costume, and with a pathetic
+statement that she would have yielded if she could, but that it was
+impossible--she finally refused; and was so left in her prison to pass
+that sacred day unsuccoured and alone. The historian Michelet, in the
+wonderful sketch in which he rises superior to himself, and which
+amidst all after writings remains the most beautiful and touching
+memorial of Jeanne d'Arc, has made this day a central point in his
+tale, using with the skill of genius the service of the Church
+appropriate to the day, in heart-rending contrast with those doors of
+the prison which did not open, and the help of God which did not come
+to the young and solitary captive. /Le beau jour fleuri/ passed over
+her in darkness and desertion: her agony and passion lay before her
+like those of the Divine Sufferer, to whom every day of the succeeding
+week is specially consecrated. There is almost indeed a painful
+following of the Saviour's steps in these dark days, the circumstances
+lending themselves in a wonderful way to the comparison which French
+writers love to make, but which many of us must always feel, however
+spotless the sufferer, to have a certain irreverence in them. But if
+ever martyr were worthy of being called a partaker of the sufferings
+of Christ it was surely this girl, free, if ever human creature was,
+from self-seeking, or thought of reward, or ambitious hope, in whose
+heart there had never been any motive but the service of God and the
+deliverance of her country, who had neither looked before nor after,
+nor put her own interests into consideration in any way. Silently the
+feast passed with no holy privileges of religion, no blessed token of
+the spring, no remembrance of the waving palms and scattered blossoms
+over which her Lord rode into Jerusalem to die. She had not that sweet
+fallacious triumph; but the darker ordeal remained for her to follow.
+
+On Tuesday the 27th of March, her troubles began again. Before Palm
+Sunday, the report of the trial had been read to her. She had now to
+hear the formal reading of the articles founded upon it, to give a
+final response if she had any to give, or explanation, or addition, if
+she thought proper. The sitting was held in the great hall of the
+Castle of Rouen before a band of more than forty, all assembled for
+this final test. The Bishop made a prefactory speech to the prisoner,
+pointing out to her how benign and merciful were the judges now
+assembled, that they had no wish to punish, but rather to instruct and
+lead her in the right way; and requesting her at this late period in
+the proceedings to choose one or more from among them to help her. To
+which Jeanne replied; "In the first place concerning my good and our
+faith, I thank you and all the company. As for the counsellor you
+offer me I thank you also, but I have no need to depart from our Lord
+as my counsellor."
+
+The articles, in which the former questions put to her and answered by
+her, were now repeated in the form of accusations, were then read to
+her one by one; her sorcery, sacrilege, etc., being taken as facts. To
+a few she repeated, with various forcible and fine turns of phrase,
+her previous answers, with here and there a new explanation; but to
+the great majority she referred simply to her former replies, or
+denied the charge, as follows: "The second article concerning
+sortilège, superstitious acts and divination, she denied, and in
+respect to adoration (i.e. allowing herself to be adored) said: If any
+kissed her hands or her garments, it was not by her will, and that she
+kept herself from it as much as she could; and the rest of the article
+she denies." This is a specimen of the manner in which she responded,
+with a clear-headed and undisturbed intelligence, point after point--
+/ipsa Johanna negat/, is the usual refrain: or else she referred with
+dignity to previous replies as her sole answer. But sometimes the girl
+was moved to indignation, sometimes added a word in her own defence:
+"As for fairies she knew not what they were, and as for her education
+she had been well and duly instructed what to believe, as a good child
+should." This was her answer to the article in which all the folk-lore
+of Domremy, all the fairy tales, had been collected into a solemn
+statement of heresy. The matter of dress was once more treated in
+endless detail, with many interjected questions and reports of what
+she had already said: and at the end, answering the statement that
+woman's dress was most fit for woman's work, Jeanne added the quick
+/mot/: "As for the usual work of women, there are enough of other
+women to do it." On another occasion when the report ran that she
+claimed to have done all things by the counsel of God, she interrupted
+and said "that it ought to be, all that I have done well." To her
+former answer that she had yielded to the desire of the French knights
+in attacking Paris, she added the fine words, "It seemed to me that it
+was their duty to attack their adversaries." In respect to her visions
+she added to her former answer, "that she had not asked advice of
+bishop, curé, or any other before believing her revelations, but had
+many times prayed God to reveal them to others of her party." About
+calling her saints when she required their aid she added, that she
+asked God and Our Lady to send her council and comfort, and
+immediately her heavenly visitors came; and that this was the prayer
+she made:
+
+ "Gentle God, in honour of Your[1] passion, I pray You, if You love
+  me, that You would reveal to me how I ought to answer these people
+  of the Church. I know well by what command it was that I took this
+  dress, but I know not in what manner I ought to give it up. For
+  this may it please You to teach me."
+
+In respect to the reproach that she had been a general in the war
+(/chef de guerre/), she explained that if she were, it was to drive
+out the English, repelling the accusation that she had assumed this
+title in pride; and to that which accused her of preferring to live
+among men, she explained that when she was in a lodging she generally
+had a woman with her; but that when engaged in war she lived in her
+clothes whenever there was not a woman present. In respect to her hope
+of escaping from prison, she was asked if her council had thrown any
+light on that question, and replied, "I have yet to tell you."
+Manchon, the clerk, makes a note upon his margin at these words,
+"Proudly answered"--/superbe responsum/.
+
+This re-examination lasted for two long days, the 27th and 28th of
+March. On several points Jeanne requested that she might be allowed to
+give an answer on Saturday, and accordingly, on Saturday, the last day
+of March, Easter Eve, she was visited in prison by the Bishop and
+seven or eight assessors. She was then asked if she would submit to
+the judgment of the Church on earth all that she had done and said,
+specially in things that concerned her trial. She answered that she
+would submit to the judgment of the Church militant, provided that it
+did not enforce anything that was impossible. She explained that what
+she called impossible was to acknowledge that the visions and
+revelations came otherwise than from God, or that what she had done
+was not on the part of God: these she would never deny or revoke for
+any power on earth: and that which our Lord had commanded or should
+command, she would not give up for any living man, and this would be
+impossible to her. And in case the Church should command her to do
+anything contrary to the command given her by God she would not do it
+for any reason whatsoever. Asked whether she would submit to the
+Church if the Church militant pronounced that her revelations were
+delusions or from the devil, or superstitious, or evil things, she
+answered that she would refer everything to our Lord, whose command
+she always obeyed; and that she knew well that everything had come to
+her by the commandment of God; and that what she had affirmed during
+this trial to have been done by the commandment of God it would be
+impossible for her to deny. And in case the Church militant commanded
+her to go against God, she would submit herself to no man in this
+world but to our Lord, whose good commandment she had always obeyed.
+She was asked if she did not believe that she was subject to the
+Church on earth, that is, to our Holy Father the Pope, the Cardinals,
+Bishops, and other prelates of the Church. She answered, "/Yes, our
+Lord being served first/." Asked if she had directions from her voices
+not to submit to the Church militant which is on earth, nor to its
+judgment, she replied that she does not answer according to what comes
+into her head, but that when she replies it is by commandment; and
+that she has never been told not to obey the Church, our Lord being
+served first (/noster Sire premier servi/).
+
+Other less formal particulars come to us long after, from various
+witnesses at the /procès de rehabilitation/, in which a lively picture
+is given of this scene. Frère Isambard had apparently managed, as was
+his wont, to get close to the prisoner, and to whisper to her to
+appeal to the Council of Bâle. "What is this Council of Bâle?" she
+asked in the same tone. Isambard replied that it was the "congregation
+of the whole Church, Catholic and Universal, and that there would be
+as many there on her side as on that of the English." "Ah!" she cried,
+"since there will be some of our party in that place, I will willingly
+yield and submit to the Council of Bâle, to our Holy Father the Pope,
+and to the sacred Council."[2] And immediately--continues the
+deposition--the Bishop of Beauvais cried out, "Silence, in the devil's
+name!" and told the notary to take no notice of what she said, that
+she would submit herself to the Council of Bâle; whereupon a second
+cry burst from the bosom of Jeanne, "You write what is against me, but
+you will not write what is for me." "Because of these things, the
+English and their officers threatened terribly the said Frère
+Isambard, warning him that if he did not hold his peace he would be
+thrown in the Seine." No notice whatever is taken of any such
+interruption in the formal record. It must have been before this time
+that Jean de la Fontaine disappeared. He left Rouen secretly and never
+returned, nor does he ever appear again. Frère Isambard is said to
+have taken temporary refuge in his convent; they scattered, /de par
+l'diable/, according to the Christian adjuration of Mgr. De Beauvais;
+though l'Advenu would seem to have held his ground, and served as
+Confessor to Jeanne in her agony, at which Frère Isambard was also
+present. We are told that the Deputy Inquisitor Lemâitre, he who had
+been got to lend the aid of his presence with such difficulty,
+fiercely warned the authorities that he would have no harm done to
+those two friars, from which we may infer that he too had leanings
+towards the Maid; and these honest and loyal men, well deserving of
+their country and of mankind, should not lose their record when the
+tragic story of so much human treachery and baseness has to be told.
+
+*****
+
+After this there came a long pause, full of much business to the
+judges, councillors, and clerks who had to reduce the seventy articles
+to twelve, in order to forward a summary of the case to the University
+of Paris for their judgment. Jeanne in the meantime had been left, but
+not neglected, in her prison. The great Feast of Easter had passed
+without any sacred consolation of the Church; but Monseigneur de
+Beauvais, in his kindness, sent her a carp to keep the feast withal,
+if not any spiritual food. It was quite congenial to the spirit of the
+time to imagine that the carp had been poisoned, and such a thought
+seems to have crossed the mind of Jeanne, who was very ill after
+eating of it, and like to die. But it was not thus, poisoned in
+prison, that it would have suited any of her persecutors to let her
+die. As a matter of fact, as soon as it was known that she was ill,
+the best doctors procurable were sent to the prison with peremptory
+orders to prolong her life and cure her at any cost. But for a little
+time we lose sight of the sick-bed on which the unfortunate Maid lay
+fully dressed, never relinquishing the garb which was her protection,
+with her feet chained to her uneasy couch. Even at the moment when her
+life hung in the balance we read of no indulgence granted in this
+respect, no unlocking of the infamous chain, nor substitution of a
+gentler nurse for the attendant /houspillers/, who were her guards
+night and day.
+
+When the Bishop and his court had completed their business and sent
+off to Paris the important document on which so much depended, they
+found themselves at leisure to return to Jeanne, to inquire after her
+health and to make her "a charitable admonition." It was on the 18th
+of April, after the silence of more than a fortnight, that their visit
+was made with this benevolent purpose. Seven of her judges attended
+the Bishop into the sick-chamber. They had come, he assured her,
+charitably and familiarly, to visit her in her sickness and to carry
+her comfort and consolation. Most of these men were indeed familiar
+enough: she had seen their faces already through many a dreadful day,
+though there were one or two which were new and strange, come to stare
+at her in the depths of her distress. Cauchon reminded her how much
+and how carefully she had been questioned by the most wise and learned
+men; and that those there present were ready to do anything for the
+salvation of her soul and body in every possible way, by instructing
+or advising her. He added, however, that if she still refused to
+accept advice, and to act according to the counsel of the Church, she
+was in the greatest danger--to which she replied:
+
+"It seems to me, being so ill as I am, that I am in great danger of
+death. And if it is thus that God pleases to decide for me, I ask of
+you to be allowed to confess and receive my Saviour, and to be laid in
+holy ground."
+
+"If you desire to have the rites and sacraments of the Church," said
+Cauchon, "you must do as good Catholics ought to do, submit to Holy
+Church." She answered, "I can say no other thing to you." She was then
+told that if she was in fear of death through sickness she ought all
+the more to amend her life; but that she could not have the privileges
+of the Church as a Catholic, if she did not submit to the Church. She
+answered: "If my body dies in prison, I hope that you will bury me in
+consecrated ground: yet if not, I still hope in our Lord."
+
+She was then reminded that she had said in her trial--if anything had
+been said or done by her against our Christian faith ordained by our
+Lord, that she would not stand by it. She answered, "I refer to the
+answer I made, and to our Lord."
+
+It was then asked of her, since she believed herself to have had many
+revelations from God by St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret,
+whether if there should appear some good creature (/sic/) who
+professed to have had a revelation from God in respect to her, she
+would believe that? She answered that there was no Christian in the
+world who could come to her professing to have had a revelation, of
+whom she should not know whether he spoke the truth or not: she would
+know it through St. Catherine and St. Margaret.
+
+Asked, if she could not imagine that God might reveal something to a
+good creature who might be unknown to her, she answered: "Yes; but I
+would not believe either man or woman without a sign."
+
+Asked, if she believed that the Holy Scripture was revealed by God,
+she answered, "You know that I do, and it is good to know."
+
+The last answer she made in respect to submission to Holy Church was
+this, "Whatever may happen to me I will neither do nor say anything
+else, for I have answered before, during the trial."
+
+She was then "exhorted powerfully by the venerable doctors present"
+(four are mentioned by name) to submit to our Mother the Church, with
+many authorities and examples drawn from the Holy Scriptures; and
+finally, Magister Nicolas Midi made her an exhortation from Matthew
+xviii.: "If your brother trespass against you," and what follows, "If
+he will not hear the Church, let him be to you as a heathen man and a
+publican." This was expounded to Jeanne in the French tongue and,
+finally, she was told that if she would not obey and submit to the
+Church she must be given up as if she was a Saracen. To which Jeanne
+replied that she was a good Christian and well baptised, and that she
+desired to die as a Christian. She was then asked whether, since she
+begged leave of the Church to receive her Saviour, she would submit to
+the Church if it were promised to her that she should receive. She
+answered that she would say no more than she had said; that she loved
+God, served Him, and was a good Christian, and would aid and uphold
+the Holy Church with all her power. Asked if she wished that a
+beautiful procession should be made for her to restore her to health,
+she answered that she would be glad if the Church and the Catholics
+would pray for her.
+
+For another fortnight Jeanne was sent back into the silence, and to
+her own thoughts, which must have grown heavier and heavier as the
+weary days went on, and no sound of approaching deliverance came, no
+rumour of help at hand. All was quiet and safe at Rouen; amid the
+babble of the courtyard which she might hear fitfully when her
+guardians were quieter than usual, there was not one word which
+brought the hope of a French army at hand, or of any movement to
+rescue her. All was silent in the world around, not a breath of hope,
+not the whisper of a friend. It was not till the 2d of May that the
+dreadful blank was again broken, and she was called to the great hall
+of the castle for another interview with her tormentors. When she was
+led into the hall it was full, as in the first sitting, sixty-three
+judges in all being present. The interest had flagged or the pity had
+grown as the trial dragged its slow length along; but now, when every
+day the verdict was expected from Paris, the interest had risen again.
+On her way from her prison to the hall, it was necessary to pass the
+door of the castle chapel: and here once or twice Massieu, the officer
+of the court, had permitted her to pause and kneel down as she passed.
+This was all the celebration of the Paschal Feast that was permitted
+to Jeanne. The compassionate official, however, was discovered in this
+small service of charity, and sternly reprimanded and threatened.
+Henceforward she had to pass without even a longing look through the
+door at the altar on which was the holy sacrament.
+
+She came in on the renewed sitting of the 2d May to find the assembled
+priests settling themselves, after the address which had been made to
+them, to hear another address which John de Chasteillon, Archdeacon,
+had prepared for herself, in which he said much that was good both for
+body and soul, to which she consented. He had a list of twelve
+articles in his hands, and explained and expounded them to her, as
+they were the occasion of the sitting. He then "admonished her in
+charity," explaining that those who were faithful to Christ hold
+firmly and closely to the Christian creed, and adjuring her to consent
+and to amend her ways. To this Jeanne answered: "Read your book,"
+meaning the schedule held by Monseigneur the Archdeacon, "and then I
+will answer you. I refer myself to God my master in all things; and I
+love Him with all my heart."
+
+To read this book, however, was precisely what Monseigneur the
+Archdeacon had no intention of doing. She was never allowed to hear
+the twelve articles upon which the verdict against her was founded;
+but the speaker gave her a long discourse by way of explanation,
+following more or less the schedule which he held. This "monition
+general," however, elicited no detailed reply from Jeanne, who
+answered briefly with some impatience, "I refer myself to my judge,
+who is the King of Heaven and earth." The "Lord Archdeacon" then
+proceeded to "monitions particulares."
+
+It was then once more explained to her that this reference to God
+alone was a refusal to submit to the Church militant, and she was
+instructed in the authority of the Church, which it was the duty of
+every Christian to believe--/unam sanctam Ecclesiam/ always guided by
+the Holy Spirit and which could not err, to the judgment of which
+every question should be referred. She answered: "I believe in the
+Church here below; but my doings and sayings, as I have already said,
+I refer and submit to God. I believe that the Church militant cannot
+err or fail; but as for my deeds and words I put them all before God,
+who has made me do that which I have done"; she also said that she
+submitted herself to God, her Creator, who had made her do everything,
+and referred everything to Him, and to Him alone.
+
+She was then asked, if she would have no judge on earth and if our
+Holy Father the Pope were not her judge; she answered: "I will tell
+you nothing more. I have a good master, that is our Lord, on whom I
+depend for everything, and not an any other."
+
+She was then told that if she would not believe the Church and the
+article /Ecclesiam sanctam Catholicam/, that she might be reckoned as
+a heretic and punished by burning: to which she answered: "I can say
+nothing else to you; and if I saw the fire before me, I should say
+only that which I say, and could do nothing else." (Once more at this
+point the clerk writes on his margin, "Proud reply"--/Superba
+responsio/--but whether in admiration or in blame it would be hard to
+say.)
+
+Asked, if the Council General, or the Holy Father, Cardinals, etc.,
+were there--whether she would submit to them. "You shall have no
+other answer from me," she said.
+
+Asked, if she would submit to our Holy Father the Pope: she answered,
+"Take me to him and I will answer him," but would say no more.
+
+Questioned in respect to her dress, she answered, that she would
+willingly accept a long dress and a woman's hood to go to church to
+receive her Saviour, provided that, as she had already said, she were
+allowed to wear it on that occasion only, and then to take back that
+which she at present wore. Further, when it was set before her that
+she wore that dress without any need, being in prison, she answered,
+"When I have done that for which I was sent by God, I will then take
+back a woman's dress." Asked, if she thought she did well in being
+dressed like a man, she answered, "I refer every thing to our Lord."
+
+Again, after the exhortation made to her, namely, that in saying that
+she did well and did not sin in wearing that dress, and in the
+circumstances which concerned her assuming and wearing it, and in
+saying that God and the saints made her do so--she blasphemed, and as
+is contained in this schedule, erred and did evil: she answered that
+she never blasphemed God or the saints.
+
+She was then admonished to give up that dress, and no longer to think
+it was right, and to return to the garb of a woman; but answered that
+she would make no change in this respect.
+
+Concerning her revelations: she replied in regard to them, that she
+referred everything to her judge, that is God, and that her
+revelations were from God, without any other medium.
+
+Asked concerning the sign given to the King if she would refer to the
+Archbishop of Rheims, the Sire de Boussac, Charles de Bourbon, La
+Tremouille, and La Hire, to them or to any one of them, who, according
+to what she formerly said, had seen the crown, and were present when
+the angel brought it, and gave it to the Archbishop; or if she would
+refer to any others of her party who might write under their seals
+that it was so; she answered, "Send a messenger, and I will write to
+them about the whole trial": but otherwise she was not disposed to
+refer to them.
+
+In respect to her presumption in divining the future, etc., she
+answered, "I refer everything to my judge who is God, and to what I
+have already answered, which is written in the book."
+
+Asked, if two or three or four knights of her party were to be brought
+here under a safe conduct, whether she would refer to them her
+apparitions and other things contained in this trial; answered, "Let
+them come and then I will answer:" but otherwise she was not willing
+to refer to anyone.
+
+Asked whether, at the Church of Poitiers where she was examined, she
+had submitted to the Church, she answered, "Do you hope to catch me in
+this way, and by that draw advantage to yourselves?"
+
+In conclusion, "afresh and abundantly," she was admonished to submit
+herself to the Church, on pain of being abandoned by the Church; for
+if the Church left her she would be in great danger of body and of
+soul; and she might well put herself in peril of eternal fire for the
+soul, as well as of temporal fire for the body, by the sentence of
+other judges. "You will not do this which you say against me, without
+doing injury to your own bodies and souls," she said.
+
+Asked, whether she could give a reason why she would not submit to the
+Church: but to this she would make no additional reply.
+
+Again a week passed in busy talk and consultation without, in silence
+and desertion within. On the 9th of May the prisoner was again led,
+this time to the great tower, apparently the torture chamber of the
+castle, where she found nine of her judges awaiting her, and was once
+more adjured to speak the truth, with the threat of torture if she
+continued to refuse. Never was her attitude more calm, more dignified
+and lofty in its simplicity, than at this grim moment.
+
+"Truly," she replied, "if you tear the limbs from my body, and my soul
+out of it, I can say nothing other than what I have said; or if I said
+anything different, I should afterwards say that you had compelled me
+to do it by force." She added that on the day of the Holy Cross, the
+3d of May past, she had been comforted by St. Gabriel. She believed
+that it was St. Gabriel: and she knew by her voices that it was St.
+Gabriel. She had asked counsel of her voices whether she should submit
+to the Church, because the priests pressed her so strongly to submit:
+but it had been said to her that if she desired our Lord to help her
+she must depend upon Him for everything. She added that she knew well
+that our Lord had always been the master of all she did, and that the
+Enemy had nothing to do with her deeds. Also she had asked her voices
+if she should be burned, and the said voices had replied to her that
+she was to wait for the Lord and He would help her.
+
+Afterwards in respect to the crown which had been handed by the angel
+to the Archbishop of Rheims, she was asked if she would refer to him.
+She answered: "Bring him here, that I may hear what he says, and then
+I shall answer you; he will not dare to say the contrary of that which
+I have said to you."
+
+The Archbishop of Rheims had been her constant enemy; all the
+hindrances that had occurred in her active life, and the constant
+attempts made to balk her even in her brief moment of triumph, came
+from him and his associate La Trémouille. He was the last person in
+the world to whom Jeanne naturally would have appealed. Perhaps that
+was the admirable reason why he was suggested in this dreadful crisis
+of her fate.
+
+A few days later, it was discussed among those dark inquisitors
+whether the torture should be applied or not. Finally, among thirteen
+there were but two (let not the voice of sacred vengeance be silent on
+their shame though after four centuries and more), Thomas de
+Courcelles, first of theologians, cleverest of ecclesiastical lawyers,
+mildest of men, and Nicolas L'Oyseleur, the spy and traitor, who voted
+for the torture. One man most reasonably asked why she should be put
+to torture when they had ample material for judgment without it? One
+cannot but feel that the proceedings on this occasion were either
+intended to beguile the impatience of the English authorities, eager
+to be done with the whole business, or to add a quite gratuitous pang
+to the sufferings of the heroic girl. As the men were not devils,
+though probably possessed by this time, the more cruel among them, by
+the horrible curiosity, innate alas! in human nature, of seeing how
+far a suffering soul could go, it is probable that the first motive
+was the true one. The English, Warwick especially, whose every
+movement was restrained by this long-pending affair, were exceedingly
+impatient, and tempted at times to take the matter into their own
+hands, and spoil the perfectness of this well constructed work of art,
+conducted according to all the rules, the beautiful trial which was
+dear to the Bishop's heart--and destined to be, though perhaps in a
+sense somewhat different to that which he hoped, his chief title to
+fame.
+
+Ten days after, the decision of the University of Paris arrived, and a
+great assembly of counsellors, fifty-one in all, besides the permanent
+presidents, collected together in the chapel of the Archbishop's
+house, to hear that document read, along with many other documents,
+the individual opinions of a host of doctors and eminent authorities.
+After an explanation of the solemn care given by the University to the
+consideration of every one of the twelve articles of the indictment,
+that learned tribunal pronounced its verdict upon each. The length of
+the proceedings makes it impossible to reproduce these. First as to
+the early revelations given to Jeanne, described in the first and
+second articles, they are denounced as "murderous, seductive, and
+pernicious fictions," the apparitions those of "malignant spirits and
+devils, Belial, Satan, and Behemoth." The third article, which
+concerned her recognition of the saints, was described more mildly as
+containing errors in faith; the fourth, as to her knowledge of future
+events, was characterised as "superstitious and presumptuous
+divination." The fifth, concerning her dress, declared her to be
+"blasphemous and contemptuous of God in His Sacraments." The sixth, by
+which she was accused of loving bloodshed, because she made war
+against those who did not obey the summons in her letters bearing the
+name Jhesus Maria, was declared to prove that she was cruel, "seeking
+the shedding of blood, seditious, and a blasphemer of God." The tenor
+is the same to the end: Blasphemy, superstition, pernicious doctrine,
+impiety, cruelty, presumption, lying; a schismatic, a heretic, an
+apostate, an idolator, an invoker of demons. These are the conclusions
+drawn by the most solemn and weighty tribunal on matters of faith in
+France. The precautions taken to procure a full and trustworthy
+judgment, the appeal to each section in turn, the Faculty of Theology,
+the Faculty of Law, the "Nations," all separately and than all
+together passing every item in review--are set forth at full length.
+Every formality had been fulfilled, every rule followed, every detail
+was in the fullest order, signed and sealed and attested by solemn
+notaries, bristling with well-known names. A beautiful judgment, equal
+to the trial, which was beautiful too--not a rule omitted except those
+of justice, fairness, and truth! The doctors sat and listened with
+every fine professional sense satisfied.
+
+ "If the beforesaid woman, charitably exhorted and admonished by
+  competent judges, does not return spontaneously to the Catholic
+  faith, publicly abjure her errors, and give full satisfaction to
+  her judges, she is hereby given up to the secular judge to receive
+  the reward of her deeds."
+
+The attendant judges, each in his place, now added their adhesion.
+Most of them simply stated their agreement with the judgment of the
+University, or with that of the Bishop of Fecamp, which was a similar
+tenor; a few wished that Jeanne should be again "charitably
+admonished"; many desired that on this selfsame day the final sentence
+should be pronounced. One among them, a certain Raoul Sauvage
+(Radulphus Silvestris), suggested that she should be brought before
+the people in a public place, a suggestion afterwards carried out.
+Frère Isambard desired that she should be charitably admonished again
+and have another chance, and that her final fate should still be in
+the hands of "us her judges." The conclusion was that one more
+"charitable admonition" should be given to Jeanne, and that the law
+should then take its course. The suggestion that she should make a
+public appearance had only one supporter.
+
+This dark scene in the chapel is very notable, each man rising to
+pronounce what was in reality a sentence of death,--fifty of them
+almost unanimous, filled no doubt with a hundred different motives, to
+please this man or that, to win favour, to get into the way of
+promotion,--but all with a distinct consciousness of the great yet
+horrible spectacle, the stake, the burning:--though perhaps here and
+there was one with a hope that perpetual imprisonment, bread of sorrow
+and water of anguish, might be substituted for that terrible death.
+Finally, it was decided that--always on the side of mercy, as every
+act proved--the tribunal should once more "charitably admonish" the
+prisoner for the salvation of her soul and body, and that after all
+this "good deliberation and wholesome counsel" the case should be
+concluded.
+
+Again there follows a pause of four days. No doubt the Bishop and his
+assessors had other things to do, their ecclesiastical functions,
+their private business, which could not always be put aside because
+one forsaken soul was held in suspense day after day. Finally on the
+24th of May, Jeanne again received in her prison a dignified company,
+some quite new and strange to her (indeed the idea may cross the
+reader's mind that it was perhaps to show off the interesting prisoner
+to two new and powerful bishops, the first, Louis of Luxembourg, a
+relative of her first captor, that this last examination was held),
+nine men in all, crowding her chamber--/exponuntur Johannæ defectus
+sui/, says the record--to expound to Jeanne her faults. It was
+Magister Peter Morice to whom this office was confided. Once more the
+"schedule" was gone over, and an address delivered laden with all the
+bad words of the University. "Jeanne, dearest friend," said the orator
+at last, "it is now time, at the end of the trial, to think well what
+words these are." She would seem to have spoken during this address,
+at least once--to say that she held to everything she had said during
+the trial. When Morice had finished she was once more questioned
+personally.
+
+She was asked if she still thought and believed that it was not her
+duty to submit her deeds and words to the Church militant, or to any
+other except God, upon which she replied, "What I have always said and
+held to during the trial, I maintain to this moment"; and added that
+if she were in judgment and saw the fire lighted, the faggots burning,
+and the executioner ready to rake the fire, and she herself within the
+fire, she could say nothing else, but would sustain what she had said
+in her trial, to death.
+
+Once more the scribe has written on his margin the words /Responsio
+Johannæ superba/--the proud answer of Jeanne. Her raised head, her
+expanded breast, something of a splendour of indignation about her,
+must have moved the man, thus for the third time to send down to us
+his distinctly human impression of the worn out prisoner before her
+judges. "And immediately the promoter and she refusing to say more,
+the cause was concluded," says the record, so formal, sustained within
+such purely abstract limits, yet here and there with a sort of throb
+and reverberation of the mortal encounter. From the lips of the
+Inquisitor too all words seemed to have been taken. It is as when amid
+the excited crowd in the Temple the officers of the Pharisees
+approaching to lay hands on a greater than Jeanne, fell back, not
+knowing why, and could not do their office. This man was silenced
+also. Two bishops were present, and one a great man full of patronage;
+but not for the richest living in Normandy could Peter Morice find any
+more to say.
+
+These are in one sense the words of Jeanne; the last we have from her
+in her prison, the last of her consistent and unbroken life. After,
+there was a deeper horror to go through, a moment when all her forces
+failed. Here on the verge of eternity she stands heroic and
+unyielding, brave, calm, and steadfast as at the outset of her career,
+the Maid of France. Were the fires lighted and the faggots burning,
+and she herself within the fire, she had no other word to say.
+----------
+[1] It is correct in French to use the second person plural in
+    addressing God, /thou/ being a more intimate and less respectful
+    form of speech. Such a difference is difficult to remember, and
+    troubles the ear. The French, even those who ought to know better,
+    sometimes speak of it as a supreme profanity on the part of the
+    profane English, that they address God as /thou/.
+
+[2] The French report goes on, "et requiert ----," but no more. It is
+    not in the Latin. The scribe was stopped by the Bishop's profane
+    outcry, and forbidden to register the fact she was about to make a
+    direct appeal to the Pope.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE ABJURATION.
+MAY 24, 1431.
+
+On the 23d of May Jeanne was taken back to her prison attended by the
+officer of the court, Massieu, her frame still thrilling, her heart
+still high, with that great note of constancy yet defiance. She had
+been no doubt strongly excited, the commotion within her growing with
+every repetition of these scenes, each one of which promised to be the
+last. And the fire and the stake and the executioner had come very
+near to her; no doubt a whole murmuring world of rumour, of strange
+information about herself, never long inaudible, never heard outside
+of the Castle of Rouen, rose half-comprehended from the echoing
+courtyard outside and the babble of her guards within. She would hear
+even as she was conveyed along the echoing stone passages something
+here and there of the popular expectation:--a burning! the wonderful
+unheard of sight, which by hook or by crook everyone must see; and no
+doubt among the English talk she might now be able to make out
+something concerning this long business which had retarded all warlike
+proceedings but which would soon be over now, and the witch burnt.
+There must have been some, even among those rude companions, who would
+be sorry, who would feel that she was no witch, yet be helpless to do
+anything for her, any more than Massieu could, or Frère Isambard: and
+if it was all for the sake of certain words to be said, was the wench
+mad? would it not be better to say anything, to give up anything
+rather than be burned at the stake? Jeanne, notwithstanding the
+wonderful courage of her last speech, must have returned to her cell
+with small illusion possible to her intelligent spirit. The stake had
+indeed come very near, the flames already dazzled her eyes, she must
+have felt her slender form shrink together at the thought. All that
+long night, through the early daylight of the May morning did she lie
+and ponder, as for far less reasons so many of us have pondered as we
+lay wakeful through those morning watches. God's promises are great,
+but where is the fulfilment? We ask for bread and he gives us, if not
+a stone, yet something which we cannot realise to be bread till after
+many days. Jeanne's voices had never paused in their pledge to her of
+succour. "Speak boldly, God will help you--fear nothing"; there would
+be aid for her before three months, and great victory. They went on
+saying so, though the stake was already being raised. What did they
+mean? what did they mean? Could she still trust them? or was it
+possible ----?
+
+Her heart was like to break. At their word she would have faced the
+fire. She meant to do so now, notwithstanding the terrible, the
+heartrending ache of hope that was still in her. But they did not give
+her that heroic command. Still and always, they said God will help
+you, our Lord will stand by you. What did that mean? It must mean
+deliverance, deliverance! What else could it mean? If she held her
+head high as she returned to the horrible monotony of that prison so
+often left with hope, so often re-entered in sadness, it must soon
+have dropped upon her tired bosom. Slowly the clouds had settled round
+her. Over and over again had she affirmed them to be true--these
+voices that had guided her steps and led her to victory. And they had
+promised her the aid of God if she went forward boldly, and spoke and
+did not fear. But now every way of salvation was closing; all around
+her were fierce soldiers thirsting for her blood, smooth priests who
+admonished her in charity, threatening her with eternal fire for the
+soul, temporal fire for the body. She felt that fire, already blowing
+towards her as if on the breath of the evening wind, and her girlish
+flesh shrank. Was that what the voices had called deliverance? was
+that the grand victory, the aid of the Lord?
+
+It may well be imagined that Jeanne slept but little that night; she
+had reached the lowest depths; her soul had begun to lose itself in
+bitterness, in the horror of a doubt. The atmosphere of her prison
+became intolerable, and the noise of her guards keeping up their rough
+jests half through the night, their stamping and clamour, and the
+clang of their arms when relieved. Early next morning a party of her
+usual visitors came in upon her to give her fresh instruction and
+advice. Something new was about to happen to-day. She was to be led
+forth, to breathe the air of heaven, to confront the people, the
+raging sea of men's faces, all the unknown world about her. The crowd
+had never been unfriendly to Jeanne. It had closed about her, almost
+wherever she was visible, with sweet applause and outcries of joy.
+Perhaps a little hope stirred her heart in the thought of being
+surrounded once more by the common folk, though probably it did not
+occur to her to think of these Norman strangers as her own people. And
+a great day was before her, a day in which something might still be
+done, in which deliverance might yet come. L'Oyseleur, who was one of
+her visitors, adjured her now to change her conduct, to accept
+whatever means of salvation might be offered to her. There was no
+longer any mention of Pope or Council, but only of the Church to which
+she ought to yield. How it was that he preserved his influence over
+her, having been proved to be a member of the tribunal that judged
+her, and not a fellow-prisoner, nor a fellow-countryman, nor any of
+the things he had professed to be, no once can tell us; but evidently
+he had managed to do so. Jeanne would seem to have received him
+without signs of repulsion or displeasure. Indeed she seems to have
+been ready to hear anyone, to believe in those who professed to wish
+her well, even when she did not follow their counsel.
+
+It would require, however, no great persuasion on L'Oyseleur's part to
+convince her that this was a more than usually important day, and that
+something decisive must be done, now or never. Why should she be so
+determined to resist her only chance of safety? If she were but
+delivered from the hands of the English, safe in the gentler keeping
+of the Church, there would be time to think of everything, even to
+make her peace with her voices who would surely understand if, for the
+saving of her life, and out of terror for the dreadful fire, she
+abandoned them for a moment. She had disobeyed them at Beaurevoir and
+they had forgiven. One faltering word now, a mark of her hand upon a
+paper, and she would be safe--even if still all they said was true;
+and if indeed and in fact, after buoying her up from day to day, such
+a dreadful thing might be as that they were not true ----
+
+The traitor was at her ear whispering; the cold chill of
+disappointment, of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in her heart.
+
+Then there came into the prison a better man than L'Oyseleur, Jean
+Beaupère, her questioner in the public trial, the representative of
+all these notabilities. What he said was spoken with authority and he
+came in all seriousness, may not we believe in some kindness too? to
+warn her. He came with permission of the Bishop, no stealthy visitor.
+"Jean Beaupère entered alone into the prison of the said Jeanne by
+permission, and advertised her that she would straightway be taken to
+the scaffold to be addressed (/pour y être preschée/), and that if she
+was a good Christian she would on that scaffold place all her acts and
+words under the jurisdiction of our Holy Mother, the Church, and
+specially of the ecclesiastical judges." "Accept the woman's dress and
+do all that you are told," her other adviser had said. When the car
+that was to convey her came to the prison doors, L'Oyseleur
+accompanied her, no doubt with a show of supporting her to the end.
+What a change from the confined and gloomy prison to the dazzling
+clearness of the May daylight, the air, the murmuring streets, the
+throng that gazed and shouted and followed! Life that had run so low
+in the prisoner's veins must have bounded up within her in response to
+that sunshine and open sky, and movement and sound of existence--
+summer weather too, and everything softened in the medium of that soft
+breathing air, sound and sensation and hope. She had been three months
+in her prison. As the charrette rumbled along the roughly paved
+streets drawing all those crowds after it, a strange object appeared
+to Jeanne's eyes in the midst of the market-place, a lofty scaffold
+with a stake upon it, rising over the heads of the crowd, the logs all
+arranged ready for the fire, a car waiting below with four horses, to
+bring hither the victim. The place of sacrifice was ready, everything
+arranged--for whom? for her? They drove her noisily past that she
+might see the preparations. It was all ready; and where then was the
+great victory, the deliverance in which she had believed?
+
+In front of the beautiful gates of St. Ouen there was a different
+scene. That stately church was surrounded then by a churchyard, a
+great open space, which afforded room for a very large assembly. In
+this were erected two platforms, one facing the other. On the first
+sat the court of judges in number about forty, Cardinal Winchester
+having a place by the side of Monseigneur de Beauvais, the president,
+with several other bishops and dignified ecclesiastics. Opposite, on
+the other platform, were a pulpit and a place for the accused, to
+which Jeanne was conducted by Massieu, who never left her, and
+L'Oyseleur, who kept as near as he could, the rest of the platform
+being immediately covered by lawyers, doctors, all the camp followers,
+so to speak, of the black army, who could find footing there. Jeanne
+was in her usual male dress, the doublet and hose, with her short-
+clipped hair--no doubt looking like a slim boy among all this dark
+crowd of men. The people swayed like a sea all about and around--the
+throng which had gathered in her progress through the streets pushing
+out the crowd already assembled with a movement like the waves of the
+sea. Every step of the trial all through had been attended by
+preaching, by discourses and reasoning and admonishments, charitable
+and otherwise. Now she was to be "preached" for the last time.
+
+It was Doctor Guillaume Érard who ascended the pulpit, a great
+preacher, one whom the "copious multitude" ran after and were eager to
+hear. He himself had not been disposed to accept this office, but no
+doubt, set up there on that height before the eyes of all the people,
+he thought of his own reputation, and of the great audience, and
+Winchester the more than king, the great English Prince, the
+wealthiest and most influential of men. The preacher took his text
+from a verse in St. John's Gospel: "A branch cannot bear fruit except
+it remain in the vine." The centre circle containing the two platforms
+was surrounded by a close ring of English soldiers, understanding none
+of it, and anxious only that the witch should be condemned.
+
+It was in this strange and crowded scene that the sermon which was
+long and eloquent began. When it was half over, in one of his fine
+periods admired by all the people, the preacher, after heaping every
+reproach upon the head of Jeanne, suddenly turned to apostrophise the
+House of France, and the head of that House, "Charles who calls
+himself King." "He has," cried the preacher, stimulated no doubt by
+the eye of Winchester upon him, "adhered, like a schismatic and
+heretical person as he is, to the words and acts of a useless woman,
+disgraced and full of dishonour; and not he only, but the clergy who
+are under his sway, and the nobility. This guilt is thine, Jeanne, and
+to thee I say that thy King is a schismatic and a heretic."
+
+In the full flood of his oratory the preacher was arrested here by
+that clear voice that had so often made itself heard through the
+tumult of battle. Jeanne could bear much, but not this. She was used
+to abuse in her own person, but all her spirit came back at this
+assault on her King. And interruption to a sermon has always a
+dramatic and startling effect, but when that voice arose now, when the
+startled speaker stopped, and every dulled attention revived, it is
+easy to imagine what a stir, what a wonderful, sudden sensation must
+have arisen in the midst of the crowd. "By my faith, sire," cried
+Jeanne, "saving your respect, I swear upon my life that my King is the
+most noble Christian of all Christians, that he is not what you say."
+
+The sermon, however, was resumed after this interruption. And finally
+the preacher turned to Jeanne, who had subsided from that start of
+animation, and was again the subdued and silent prisoner, her heart
+overwhelmed with many heavy thoughts. "Here," said Èrard, "are my
+lords the judges who have so often summoned and required of you to
+submit your acts and words to our Holy Mother the Church; because in
+these acts and words there are many things which it seemed to the
+clergy were not good either to say or to sustain."
+
+To which she replied (we quote again from the formal records), "I will
+answer you." And as to her submission to the Church she said: "I have
+told them on that point that all the works which I have done and said
+may be sent to Rome, to our Holy Father the Pope, to whom, but to God
+first, I refer in all. And as for my acts and words I have done all on
+the part of God." She also said that no one was to blame for her acts
+and words, neither her King nor any other; and if there were faults in
+them, the blame was hers and no other's.
+
+Asked, if she would renounce all that she had done wrong; answered, "I
+refer everything to God and to our Holy Father the Pope."
+
+It was then told her that this was not enough, and that our Holy
+Father was too far off; also that the Ordinaries were judges each in
+his diocese, and it was necessary that she should submit to our Mother
+the Holy Church, and that she should confess that the clergy and
+officers of the Church had a right to determine in her case. And of
+this she was admonished three times.
+
+After this the Bishop began to read the definitive sentence. When a
+great part of it was read, Jeanne began to speak and said that she
+would hold to all that the judges and the Church said, and obey in
+everything their ordinance and will. And there in the presence of the
+above-named and of the great multitude assembled she made her
+abjuration in the manner that follows:
+
+And she said several times that since the Church said her apparitions
+and revelations should not be sustained or believed, she would not
+sustain them; but in everything submit to the judges and to our Mother
+the Holy Church.
+
+*****
+
+In this strange, brief, subdued manner is the formal record made.
+Manchon writes on his margin: /At the end of the sentence Jeanne,
+fearing the fire, said she would obey the Church/. Even into the bare
+legal document there comes a hush as of awe, the one voice responding
+in the silence of the crowd, with a quiver in it; the very animation
+of the previous outcry enhancing the effect of this low and faltering
+submission, /timens igneum/--in fear of the fire.
+
+The more familiar record, and the recollections long after of those
+eye-witnesses, give us another version of the scene. Èrard, from his
+pulpit, read the form of abjuration prepared. But Jeanne answered that
+she did not know what abjuration meant, and the preacher called upon
+Massieu to explain it to her. "And he" (we quote from his own
+deposition), "after excusing himself, said that it meant this: that if
+she opposed the said articles she would be burnt; but he advised her
+to refer it to the Church universal whether she should abjure or not.
+Which thing she did, saying to Èrard, 'I refer to the Church universal
+whether I should abjure or not.' To which Èrard answered, 'You shall
+abjure at once or you will be burnt.' Massieu gives further
+particulars in another part of the Rehabilitation process. Èrard, he
+says, asked what he was saying to the prisoner, and he answered that
+she would sign if the schedule was read to her; but Jeanne said that
+she could not write, and then added that she wished it to be decided
+by the Church, and ought not to sign unless that was done: and also
+required that she should be placed in the custody of the Church, and
+freed from the hands of the English. The same Èrard answered that
+there had been ample delay, and that if she did not sign at once she
+should be burned, and forbade Massieu to say any more."
+
+Meanwhile many cries and entreaties came, as far as they dared, from
+the crowd. Some one, in the excitement of the moment, would seem to
+have promised that she should be transferred to the custody of the
+Church. "Jeanne, why will you die? Jeanne, will you not save
+yourself?" was called to her by many a bystander. The girl stood fast,
+but her heart failed her in this terrible climax of her suffering.
+Once she called out over their heads, "All that I did was done for
+good, and it was well to do it:"--her last cry. Then she would seem to
+have recovered in some measure her composure. Probably her agitated
+brain was unable to understand the formula of recantation which was
+read to her amid all the increasing noises of the crowd, but she had a
+vague faith in the condition she had herself stated, that the paper
+should be submitted to the Church, and that she should at once be
+transferred to an ecclesiastical prison. Other suggestions are made,
+namely, that it was a very short document upon which she hastily in
+her despair made a cross, and that it was a long one, consisting of
+several pages, which was shown afterwards with /Jehanne/ scribbled
+underneath. "In fact," says Massieu, "she abjured and made a cross
+with the pen which the witness handed to her:" he, if any one must
+have known exactly what happened.
+
+No doubt all this would be imperfectly heard on the other platform.
+But the agitation must have been visible enough, the spectators
+closing round the young figure in the midst, the pleadings, the
+appeals, seconded by many a cry from the crowd. Such a small matter to
+risk her young life for! "Sign, sign; why should you die!" Cauchon had
+gone on reading the sentence, half through the struggle. He had two
+sentences all ready, two courses of procedure, cut and dry: either to
+absolve her--which meant condemning her to perpetual imprisonment on
+bread and water: or to carry her off at once to the stake. The English
+were impatient for the last. It is a horrible thing to acknowledge,
+but it is evidently true. They had never wished to play with her as a
+cat with a mouse, as her learned countrymen had done those three
+months past; they had desired at once to get her out of their way. But
+the idea of her perpetual imprisonment did not please them at all; the
+risk of such a prisoner was more than they chose to encounter.
+Nevertheless there are some things a churchman cannot do. When it was
+seen that Jeanne had yielded, that she had put her mark to something
+on a paper flourished forth in somebody's hand in the sunshine, the
+Bishop turned to the Cardinal on his right hand, and asked what he was
+to do? There was but one answer possible to Winchester, had he been
+English and Jeanne's natural enemy ten times over. To admit her to
+penitence was the only practicable way.
+
+Here arises a great question, already referred to, as to what it was
+that Jeanne signed. She could not write, she could only put her cross
+on the document hurriedly read to her, amid the confusion and the
+murmurs of the crowd. The /cédule/ to which she put her sign
+"contained eight lines:" what she is reported to have signed is three
+pages long, and full of detail. Massieu declares certainly that this
+(the abjuration published) was not the one of which mention is made in
+the trial; "for the one read by the deponent and signed by the said
+Jeanne was quite different." This would seem to prove the fact that a
+much enlarged version of an act of abjuration, in its original form
+strictly confined to the necessary points and expressed in few words--
+was afterwards published as that bearing the sign of the penitent. Her
+own admissions, as will be seen, are of the scantiest, scarcely enough
+to tell as an abjuration at all.
+
+When the shouts of the people proved that this great step had been
+taken, and Winchester had signified his conviction that the penitence
+must be accepted, Cauchon replaced one sentence by another and
+pronounced the prisoner's fate. "Seeing that thou hast returned to the
+bosom of the Church by the grace of God, and hast revoked and denied
+all thy errors, we, the Bishop aforesaid, commit thee to perpetual
+prison, with the bread of sorrow and water of anguish, to purge thy
+soul by solitary penitence." Whether the words reached her over all
+those crowding heads, or whether they were reported to her, or what
+Jeanne expected to follow standing there upon her platform, more
+shamed and downcast than through all her trial, no one can tell. There
+seems even to have been a moment of uncertainty among the officials.
+Some of them congratulated Jeanne, L'Oyseleur for one pressing forward
+to say, "You have done a good day's work, you have saved your soul."
+She herself, excited and anxious, desired eagerly to know where she
+was not to go. She would seem for the moment to have accepted the fact
+of her perpetual imprisonment with complete faith and content. It
+meant to her instant relief from her hideous prison-house, and she
+could not contain her impatience and eagerness. "People of the Church
+--/gens de' Église/--lead me to your prison; let me be no longer in
+the hands of the English," she cried with feverish anxiety. To gain
+this point, to escape the irons and the dreadful durance which she had
+suffered so long, was all her thought. The men about her could not
+answer this appeal. Some of them no doubt knew very well what the
+answer must be, and some must have seen the angry looks and stern
+exclamation which Warwick addressed to Cauchon, deceived like Jeanne
+by this unsatisfactory conclusion, and the stir among the soldiers at
+sight of his displeasure. But perhaps flurried by all that had
+happened, perhaps hoping to strengthen the victim in her moment of
+hope, some of them hurried across to the Bishop to ask where they were
+to take her. One of these was Pierre Miger, friar of Longueville.
+Where was she to be taken? In Winchester's hearing, perhaps in
+Warwick's, what a question to put! An English bishop, says this
+witness turned to him angrily and said to Cauchon that this was a
+"fauteur de ladite Jeanne," "/this fellow was also one of them/."
+Miger excused himself in alarm as St. Peter did before him, and
+Cauchon turning upon him commanded grimly that she should be taken
+back whence she came. Thus ended the last hope of the Maid. Her
+abjuration, which by no just title could be called an abjuration, had
+been in vain.
+
+Jeanne was taken back, dismayed and miserable, to the prison which she
+had perilled her soul to escape. It was very little she had done in
+reality, and at that moment she could scarcely yet have realised what
+she had done, except that it had failed. At the end of so long and
+bitter a struggle she had thrown down her arms--but for what? to
+escape those horrible gaolers and that accursed room with its ear of
+Dionysius, its Judas hole in the wall. The bitterness of the going
+back was beyond words. We hear of no word that she said when she
+realised the hideous fact that nothing was changed for her; the bitter
+waters closed over her head. Again the chains to be locked and double
+locked that bound her to her dreadful bed, again the presence of those
+men who must have been all the more odious to her from the momentary
+hope that she had got free from them for ever.
+
+The same afternoon the Vicar-Inquisitor, who had never been hard upon
+her, accompanied by Nicole Midi, by the young seraphic doctor,
+Courcelles, and L'Oyseleur, along with various other ecclesiastical
+persons, visited her prison. The Inquisitor congratulated and almost
+blessed her, sermonising as usual, but briefly and not ungently,
+though with a word of warning that should she change her mind and
+return to her evil ways there would be no further place for
+repentance. As a return for the mercy and clemency of the Church, he
+required her immediately to put on the female dress which his
+attendants had brought. There is something almost ludicrous, could we
+forget the tragedy to follow, in the bundle of humble clothing brought
+by such exalted personages, with the solemnity which became a thing
+upon which hung the issues of life or death. Jeanne replied with the
+humility of a broken spirit. "I take them willingly," she said, "and
+in everything I will obey the Church." Then silence closed upon her,
+the horrible silence of the prison, full of hidden listeners and of
+watching eyes.
+
+Meantime there was great discontent and strife of tongues outside. It
+was said that many even of the doctors who condemned her would fain
+have seen Jeanne removed to some less dangerous prison: but
+Monseigneur de Beauvais had to hold head against the great English
+authorities who were out of all patience, fearing that the witch might
+still slip through their fingers and by her spells and incantations
+make the heart of the troops melt once more within them. If the mind
+of the Church had been as charitable as it professed to be, I doubt if
+all the power of Rome could have got the Maid now out of the English
+grip. They were exasperated, and felt that they too, as well as the
+prisoner, had been played with. But the Bishop had good hope in his
+mind, still to be able to content his patrons. Jeanne had abjured, it
+was true, but the more he inquired into that act, the less secure he
+must have felt about it. And she might relapse; and if she relapsed
+there would be no longer any place for repentance. And it is evident
+that his confidence in the power of the clothes was boundless. In any
+case a few days more would make all clear.
+
+They did not have many days to wait. There are two, to all appearance,
+well-authenticated stories of the cause of Jeanne's "relapse." One
+account is given by Frère Isambard, whom she told in the presence of
+several others, that she had been assaulted in her cell by a /Millourt
+Anglois/, and barbarously used, and in self-defence had resumed again
+the man's dress which had been left in her cell. The story of Massieu
+is different: To him Jeanne explained that when she asked to be
+released from her bed on the morning of Trinity Sunday, her guards
+took away her female dress which she was wearing, and emptied the sack
+containing the other upon her bed. She appealed to them, reminding
+them that these were forbidden to her; but got no answer except a
+brutal order to get up. It is very probable that both stories are
+true. Frère Isambard found her weeping and agitated, and nothing is
+more probable than this was the occasion on which Warwick heard her
+cries, and interfered to save her. Massieu's version, of which he is
+certain, was communicated to him a day or two after when they happened
+to be alone together. It was on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday
+that she put on the female dress, but it would seem that rumours on
+the subject of a relapse had begun to spread even before the Sunday on
+which that event happened: and Beaupère and Midi were sent by the
+Bishop to investigate. But they were very ill-received in the Castle,
+sworn at by the guards, and forced to go back without seeing Jeanne,
+there being as yet, it appeared, nothing to see. On the morning of the
+Monday, however, the rumours arose with greater force; and no doubt
+secret messages must have informed the Bishop that the hoped-for
+relapse had taken place. He set out himself accordingly, accompanied
+by the Vicar-Inquisitor and attended by eight of the familiar names so
+often quoted, triumphant, important, no doubt with much show of
+pompous solemnity, to find out for himself. The Castle was all in
+excitement, report and gossip already busy with the new event so
+trifling, so all-important. There was no idea now of turning back the
+visitors. The prison doors were eagerly thrown open, and there indeed
+once more, in her tunic and hose, was Jeanne, whom they had left four
+days before painfully contemplating the garments they had given her,
+and humbly promising obedience. The men burst in upon her with an
+outcry of astonishment. What she had changed her dress again? "Yes,"
+she replied, "she had resumed the costume of a man." There was no
+triumph in what she said, but rather a subdued tone of sadness, as of
+one who in the most desperate strait has taken her resolution and must
+abide by it, whether she likes it or not. She was asked why she had
+resumed that dress, and who had made her do so. There was no question
+of anything else at first. The tunic and /gippon/ were at once enough
+to decide her fate.
+
+She answered that she had done it by her own will, no one influencing
+her to do so; and that she preferred the dress of a man to that of a
+woman.
+
+She was reminded that she had promised and sworn not to resume the
+dress of a man. She answered that she was not aware she had ever sworn
+or had made any such oath.
+
+She was asked why she had done it. She answered that it was more
+lawful to wear a man's dress among men, than the dress of a woman; and
+also that she had taken it back because the promise made to her had
+not been kept, that she should hear the mass, and receive her Saviour,
+and be delivered from her irons.
+
+She was asked if she had not abjured that dress, and sworn not to
+resume it. She answered that she would rather die than be left in
+irons; but if they would allow her to go to mass and take her out of
+her irons and put her in a gracious prison, and a woman with her, she
+would be good, and do whatever the Church pleased.
+
+She was then asked suddenly, as if there had been no condemnation of
+her voices as lying fables, whether since Thursday she had heard them
+again. To this she answered, recovering a little courage, "Yes."
+
+She was asked what they said to her; she answered that they said God
+had made known to her by St. Catherine and St. Margaret the great pity
+there was of the treason to which she had consented by making
+abjuration and revocation in order to save her life: and that she had
+earned damnation for herself to save her life. Also that before
+Thursday her voices had told her that she should do what she did that
+day, that on the scaffold they had told her to answer the preachers
+boldly, and that this preacher whom she called a false preacher had
+accused her of many things she never did. She also added that if she
+said God had not sent her she would damn herself, for true it was that
+God had sent her. Also that her voices had told her since, that she
+had done a great sin in confessing that she had sinned; but that for
+fear of the fire she had said that which she had said.
+
+She was asked (all over again) if she believed that these voices were
+those of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. She answered, Yes, they were
+so; and from God. And as for what had been said to her on the scaffold
+that she had spoken lies and boasted concerning St. Catherine and St.
+Margaret, she had not intended any such thing. Also she said that she
+never intended to deny her apparitions, or to say that they were not
+St. Catherine and St. Margaret. All that she had done was in fear of
+the fire, and she had denied nothing but what was contrary to truth;
+and she said that she would like better to make her penitence all at
+one time--that is to say, in dying, than to endure a long penitence in
+prison. Also that she had never done anything against God or the faith
+whatever they might have made her say; and that for what was in the
+schedule of the abjuration she did not know what it was. Also she said
+that she never intended to revoke anything so long as it pleased our
+Lord. At the end she said that if her judges would have her do so, she
+might put on again her female dress; but for the rest she would do no
+more.
+
+"What need we any further witness; for we ourselves have heard of his
+own mouth." Jeanne's protracted, broken, yet continuous apology and
+defence, overawed her judges; they do not seem to have interrupted it
+with questions. It was enough and more than enough. She had relapsed;
+the end of all things had come, the will of her enemies could now be
+accomplished. No one could say she had not had full justice done her;
+every formality had been fulfilled, every lingering formula carried
+out. Now there was but one thing before her, whose sad young voice
+with many pauses thus sighed forth its last utterance; and for her
+judges, one last spectacle to prepare, and the work to complete which
+it had taken them three long months to do.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE SACRIFICE.
+MAY 31, 1431.
+
+It is not necessary to be a good man in order to divine what in
+certain circumstances a good and pure spirit will do. The Bishop of
+Beauvais had entertained no doubt as to what would happen. He knew
+exactly, with a perspicuity creditable to his perceptions at least,
+that, notwithstanding the effect which his theatrical /mise en scène/
+had produced upon the imagination of Jeanne, no power in heaven or
+earth would induce that young soul to content itself with a lie. He
+knew it, though lies were his daily bread; the children of this world
+are wiser in their generation than the children of light. He had
+bidden his English patrons to wait a little, and now his predictions
+were triumphantly fulfilled. It is hard to believe of any man that on
+such a certainty he could have calculated and laid his devilish plans;
+but there would seem to have existed in the mediæval churchman a
+certain horrible thirst for the blood of a relapsed heretic which was
+peculiar to their age and profession, and which no better principle in
+their own minds could subdue. It was their appetite, their delight of
+sensation, in distinction from the other appetites perhaps scarcely
+less cruel which other men indulged with no such horrified
+denunciation from the rest of the world. Others, it is evident, shared
+with Cauchon that sharp sensation of dreadful pleasure in finding her
+out; young Courcelles, so modest and unassuming and so learned, among
+the rest; not L'Oyseleur, it appears by the sequel. That Judas, like
+the greater traitor, was struck to the heart; but the less bad man who
+had only persecuted, not betrayed, stood high in superior virtue, and
+only rejoiced that at last the victim was ready to drop into the
+flames which had been so carefully prepared.
+
+The next morning, Tuesday after Trinity Sunday, the witnesses hurried
+with their news to the quickly summoned assembly in the chapel of the
+Archbishop's house; thirty-three of the judges, having been hastily
+called together, were there to hear. Jeanne had relapsed; the sinner
+escaped had been re-caught; and what was now to be done? One by one
+each man rose again and gave his verdict. Once more Egidius, Abbot of
+Fécamp, led the tide of opinion. There was but one thing to be done:
+to give her up to the secular justice, "praying that she might be
+gently dealt with." Man after man added his voice "to that of Abbot of
+Fécamp aforesaid"--that she might be gently dealt with! Not one of
+them could be under any doubt what gentle meaning would be in the
+execution; but apparently the words were of some strange use in
+salving their consciences.
+
+The decree was pronounced at once without further formalities. In
+point of view of the law, there should have followed another trial,
+more evidence, pleadings, and admonitions. We may be thankful to
+Monseigneur de Beauvais that he now defied law, and no longer
+prolonged the useless ceremonials of that mockery of justice. It is
+said that in coming out of the prison, through the courtyard full of
+Englishmen, where Warwick was in waiting to hear what news, the Bishop
+greeted them with all the satisfaction of success, laughing and
+bidding them "Make good cheer, the thing is done." In the same spirit
+of satisfaction was the rapid action of the further proceedings. On
+Tuesday she was condemned, summoned on Wednesday morning at eight
+'clock to the Old Market of Rouen to hear her sentence, and there,
+without even that formality, the penalty was at once carried out. No
+time, certainly, was lost in this last stage.
+
+All the interest of the heart-rending tragedy now turns to the prison
+where Jeanne woke in the early morning without, as yet, any knowledge
+of her fate. It must be remembered that the details of this wonderful
+scene, which we have in abundance, are taken from reports made twenty
+years after by eye-witnesses indeed, but men to whom by that time it
+had become the only policy to represent Jeanne in the brightest
+colours, and themselves as her sympathetic friends. There is no doubt
+that so remarkable an occurrence as her martyrdom must have made a
+deep impression on the minds of all those who were in any way actors
+in or spectators of that wonderful scene. And every word of all these
+different reports is on oath; but notwithstanding, a touch of
+unconscious colour, a more favourable sentiment, influenced by the
+feeling of later days, may well have crept in. With this warning we
+may yet accept these depositions as trustworthy, all the more for the
+atmosphere of truth, perfectly realistic, and in no way idealised,
+which is in every description of the great catastrophe; in which
+Jeanne figures as no supernatural heroine, but as a terrified,
+tormented, and often trembling girl.
+
+On the fatal morning very early, Brother Martin l'Advenu appeared in
+the cell of the Maid. He had a mingled tale to tell--first "to
+announce to her her approaching death, and to lead her to true
+contrition and penitence; and also to hear her confession, which the
+said l'Advenu did very carefully and charitably." Jeanne on her part
+received the news with no conventional resignation or calm. Was it
+possible that she had been deceived and really hoped for mercy? She
+began to weep and to cry at the sudden stroke of fate. Notwithstanding
+the solemnity of her last declaration, that she would rather bear her
+punishment all at once than to endure the long punishment of her
+prison, her heart failed before the imminent stake, the immediate
+martyrdom. She cried out to heaven and earth: "My body, which has
+never been corrupted, must it be burned to ashes to-day!" No one but
+Jeanne knew at what cost she had kept her perfect purity; was it good
+for nothing but to be burned, that young body not nineteen years old?
+"Ah," she said, "I would rather be beheaded seven times than burned! I
+appeal to God against all these great wrongs they do me." But after a
+while the passion wore itself out, the child's outburst was stilled;
+calming herself, she knelt down and made her confession to the
+compassionate friar, then asked for the sacrament, to "receive her
+Saviour" as she had so often prayed and entreated before. It would
+appear that this had not been within Friar Martin's commission. He
+sent to ask the Bishop's leave, and it was granted "anything she asked
+for"--as they give whatever he may wish to eat to a condemned convict.
+But the Host was brought into the prison without ceremony, without
+accompanying candles or vestment for the priest. There are always some
+things which are insupportable to a man. Brother Martin could bear the
+sight of the girl's anguish, but not to administer to her a diminished
+rite. He sent again to demand what was needful, out of respect for the
+Holy Sacrament and the present victim. And his request had come, it
+would seem, to some canon or person in authority whose heart had been
+touched by the wonderful Maid in her long martyrdom. This nameless
+sympathiser did all that a man could do. He sent the Host with a train
+of priests chanting litanies as they went through the streets, with
+torches burning in the pure early daylight; some of these exhorted the
+people who knelt as they passed, to pray for her. She must have heard
+in her prison the sound of the bell, the chant of the clergy, the
+pause of awe, and then the rising, irregular murmur of the voices,
+that sound of prayer never to be mistaken. Pray for her! At last the
+city was touched to its heart. There is no sign that it had been
+sympathetic to Jeanne before; it was half English or more. But she was
+about to die: she had stood bravely against the world and answered
+like a true Maid; and they had now seen her led through their streets,
+a girl just nineteen. The popular imagination at least was subjugated
+for the time.
+
+Thus Jeanne for the first time, after all the feasts were over,
+received at last "her Saviour" as she said, the consecration of that
+rite which He himself had instituted before He died. But she was not
+permitted to receive it in simplicity and silence as becomes the
+sacred commemoration. All the time she was still /preschée/ and
+admonished by the men about her. A few days after her death the Bishop
+and his followers assembled, and set down in evidence their different
+parts in that scene. How far it is to be relied upon, it is difficult
+to say. The speakers did not testify under oath; there is no formal
+warrant for their truth, and an anxious attempt to prove her change of
+mind is evident throughout; still there seem elements of truth in it,
+and a certain glimpse is afforded of Jeanne in the depths, when hope
+and strength were gone. The general burden of their testimony is that
+she sadly allowed herself to have been deceived, as to the liberation
+for which all along she had hoped. Peter Morice, often already
+mentioned, importuning her on the subject of the spirits, endeavouring
+to get from her an admission that she had not seen them at all, and
+was herself a deceiver: or if not that, at least that they were evil
+spirits, not good,--drew from her the impatient exclamation: "Be they
+good spirits, or be they evil, they appeared to me." Even in the act
+of giving her her last communion, Brother Martin paused with the
+consecrated Host in his hands.
+
+"Do you believe," he said, "that this is the body of Christ?" Jeanne
+answered: "Yes, and He alone can free me; I pray you to administer."
+Then this brother said to Jeanne: "Do you believe as fully in your
+voices?" Jeanne answered: "I believe in God alone and not in the
+voices, which have deceived me." L'Advenu himself, however, does not
+give this deposition, but another of the persons present, Le Camus,
+who did not live to revise his testimony at the Rehabilitation.
+
+The rite being over, the Bishop himself bustled in with an air of
+satisfaction, rubbing his hands, one may suppose from his tone. "So,
+Jeanne," he said, "you have always told us that your 'voices' said you
+were to be delivered, and you see now they have deceived you. Tell us
+the truth at last." Then Jeanne answered: "Truly I see that they have
+deceived me." The report is Cauchon's, and therefore little to be
+trusted; but the sad reply is at least not unlike the sentiment that,
+even in records more trustworthy, seems to have breathed forth in her.
+The other spectators all report another portion of this conversation.
+"Bishop, it is by you I die," are the words with which the Maid is
+said to have met him. "Oh Jeanne, have patience," he replied. "It is
+because you did not keep your promise." "If you had kept yours, and
+sent me to the prison of the Church, and put me in gentle hands, it
+would not have happened," she replied. "I appeal from you to God."
+Several of the attendants, also according to the Bishop's account,
+heard from her the same sad words: "They have deceived me"; and there
+seems no reason why we should not believe it. Her mind was weighed
+down under this dreadful unaccountable fact. She was forsaken--as a
+greater sufferer was; and a horror of darkness had closed around her.
+"Ah, Sieur Pierre," she said to Morice, "where shall I be to-night?"
+The man had condemned her as a relapsed heretic, a daughter of
+perdition. He had just suggested to her that her angels must have been
+devils. Nevertheless perhaps his face was not unkindly, he had not
+meant all the harm he did. He ought to have answered, "In Hell, with
+the spirits you have trusted"; that would have been the only logical
+response. What he did say was very different. "Have you not good faith
+in the Lord?" said the judge who had doomed her. Amazing and notable
+speech! They had sentenced her to be burned for blasphemy as an envoy
+of the devil; they believed in fact that she was the child of God, and
+going straight in that flame to the skies. Jeanne, with the sound,
+clear head and the "sane mind" to which all of them testified, did she
+perceive, even at that dreadful moment, the inconceivable
+contradiction? "Ah," she said, "yes, God helping me, I shall be in
+Paradise."
+
+There is one point in the equivocal report which commends itself to
+the mind, which several of these men unite in, but which was carefully
+not repeated at the Rehabilitation: and this was that Jeanne allowed
+"as if it had been a thing of small importance," that her story of the
+angel bearing the crown at Chinon was a romance which she neither
+expected nor intended to be believed. For this we have to thank
+L'Oyseleur and the rest of the reverend ghouls assembled on that
+dreadful morning in the prison.
+
+Jeanne was then dressed, for her last appearance in this world, in the
+long white garment of penitence, the robe of sacrifice: and the mitre
+was placed on her head which was worn by the victims of the Holy
+Office. She was led for the last time down the echoing stair to the
+crowded courtyard where her "chariot" awaited her. It was her
+confessor's part to remain by her side, and Frère Isambard and
+Massieu, the officer, both her friends, were also with her. It is said
+that L'Oyseleur rushed forward at this moment, either to accompany her
+also, or, as many say, to fling himself at her feet and implore her
+pardon. He was hustled aside by the crowd and would have been killed
+by the English, it is said, but for Warwick. The bystanders would seem
+to have been seized with a sudden disgust for all the priests about,
+thinking them Jeanne's friends, the historians insinuate--more likely
+in scorn and horror of their treachery. And then the melancholy
+procession set forth.
+
+The streets were overflowing as was natural, crowded in every part:
+eight hundred English soldiers surrounded and followed the cortège, as
+the car rumbled along over the rough stones. Not yet had the Maid
+attained to the calm of consent. She looked wildly about her at all
+the high houses and windows crowded with gazers, and at the throngs
+that gaped and gazed upon her on every side. In the midst of the
+consolations of the confessor who poured pious words in her ears,
+other words, the plaints of a wondering despair fell from her lips,
+"Rouen! Rouen!" she said; "am I to die here?" It seemed incredible to
+her, impossible. She looked about still for some sign of disturbance,
+some rising among the crowd, some cry of "France! France!" or glitter
+of mail. Nothing: but the crowds ever gazing, murmuring at her, the
+soldiers roughly clearing the way, the rude chariot rumbling on.
+"Rouen, Rouen! I fear that you shall yet suffer because of this," she
+murmured in her distraction, amid her moanings and tears.
+
+At last the procession came to the Old Market, an open space
+encumbered with three erections--one reaching up so high that the
+shadow of it seemed to touch the sky, the horrid stake with wood piled
+up in an enormous mass, made so high, it is said, in order that the
+executioner himself might not reach it to give a merciful blow, to
+secure unconsciousness before the flames could touch the trembling
+form. Two platforms were raised opposite, one furnished with chairs
+and benches for Winchester and his court, another for the judges, with
+the civil officers of Rouen who ought to have pronounced sentence in
+their turn. Without this form the execution was illegal: what did it
+matter? No sentence at all was read to her, not even the
+ecclesiastical one which was illegal also. She was probably placed
+first on the same platform with her judges, where there was a pulpit
+from which she was to be /preschée/ for the last time. Of all Jeanne's
+sufferings this could scarcely be the least, that she was always
+/preschée/, lectured, addressed, sermonised through every painful step
+of her career.
+
+The moan was still unsilenced on her lips, and her distracted soul
+scarcely yet freed from the sick thought of a possible deliverance,
+when the everlasting strain of admonishment, and re-enumeration of her
+errors, again penetrated the hum of the crowd. The preacher was
+Nicolas Midi, one of the eloquent members of that dark fraternity; and
+his text was in St. Paul's words: "If any of the members suffer, all
+the other members suffer with it." Jeanne was a rotten branch which
+had to be cut off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and
+that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer,
+an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false
+penitence the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of
+that flood of invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade
+her "Go in peace." Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not
+cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her
+to a final repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The
+narrative shows that the prisoner, now arrived at the last point in
+her career, paid no attention to the tirade levelled at her from the
+president's place. "She knelt down on the platform showing great signs
+and appearance of contrition, so that all those who looked upon her
+wept. She called on her knees upon the blessed Trinity, the blessed
+glorious Virgin Mary, and all the blessed saints of Paradise." She
+called specially--was it with still a return towards the hoped for
+miracle? was it with the instinctive cry towards an old and faithful
+friend?--"St. Michael, St. Michael, St. Michael, help!" There would
+seem to have been a moment in which the hush and silence of a great
+crowd surrounded this wonderful stage, where was that white figure on
+her knees, praying, speaking--sometimes to God, sometimes to the
+saintly unseen companions of her life, sometimes in broken phrases to
+those about her. She asked the priests, thronging all round, those who
+had churches, to say a mass for her soul. She asked all whom she might
+have offended to forgive her. Through her tears and prayers broke
+again and again the sorrowful cry of "Rouen, Rouen! Is it here truly
+that I must die?" No reason is given for the special pang that seems
+to echo in this cry. Jeanne had once planned a campaign in Normandy
+with Alençon. Had there been perhaps some special hope which made this
+conclusion all the more bitter, of setting up in the Norman capital
+her standard and that of her King?
+
+There have been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their
+fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to
+the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and
+the deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men,
+perhaps the profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted
+in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have
+him." That which her Lord had borne, the little sister had now to
+bear. She called upon the saints, but they did not answer. She was
+shamed in the sight of men. But as she knelt there weeping, the
+Bishop's evil voice scarcely silenced, the soldiers waiting impatient
+--the entire crowd, touched to its heart with one impulse, broke into
+a burst of weeping and lamentation, "/à chaudes larmes/" according to
+the graphic French expression. They wept hot tears as in the keen
+personal pang of sorrow and fellow-feeling and impotence to help.
+Winchester--withdrawn high on his platform, ostentatiously separated
+from any share in it, a spectator merely--wept; and the judges wept.
+The Bishop of Boulogne was overwhelmed with emotion, iron tears flowed
+down the accursed Cauchon's cheeks. The very world stood still to see
+that white form of purity, and valour, and faith, the Maid, not
+shouting triumphant on the height of victory, but kneeling, weeping,
+on the verge of torture. Human nature could not bear this long. A
+hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us here all day; must we dine
+here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain that simulated cruelty. And
+then the executioner stepped in and seized the victim.
+
+It has been said that her stake was set so high, that there might be
+no chance of a merciful blow, or of strangulation to spare the victim
+the atrocities of the fire; perhaps, let us hope, it was rather that
+the ascending smoke might suffocate her before the flame could reach
+her: the fifteenth century would naturally accept the most cruel
+explanation. There was a writing set over the little platform which
+gave footing to the attendants below the stake, upon which were
+written the following words:
+
+  JEANNE CALLED THE MAID, LIAR, ABUSER OF THE PEOPLE, SOOTHSAYER,
+  BLASPHEMER OF GOD, PERNICIOUS, SUPERSTITIOUS, IDOLATROUS, CRUEL,
+  DISSOLUTE, INVOKER OF DEVILS, APOSTATE, SCHISMATIC, HERETIC.
+
+This was how her countrymen in the name of law and justice and
+religion branded the Maid of France--one half of her countrymen: the
+other half, silent, speaking no word, looking on.
+
+Before she began to ascend the stake, Jeanne, rising from her knees,
+asked for a cross. No place so fit for that emblem ever was: but no
+cross was to be found. One of the English soldiers who kept the way
+seized a stick from some one by, broke it across his knee in unequal
+parts, and bound them hurriedly together; so, in the legend and in all
+the pictures, when Mary of Nazareth was led to her espousals, one of
+her disappointed suitors broke his wand. The cross was rough with its
+broken edges which Jeanne accepted from her enemy, and carried,
+pressing it against her bosom. One would rather have that rude cross
+to preserve as a sacred thing, than the highest effort of art in gold
+and silver. This was her ornament and consolation as she trod the few
+remaining steps and mounted the pile of the faggots to her place high
+over all that sea of heads. When she was bound securely to her stake,
+she asked again for a cross, a cross blessed and sacred from a church,
+to be held before her as long as her eyes could see. Frère Isambard
+and Massieu, following her closely still, sent to the nearest church,
+and procured probably some cross which was used for processional
+purposes on a long staff which could be held up before her. The friar
+stood upon the faggots holding it up, and calling out broken words of
+encouragement so long that Jeanne bade him withdraw, lest the fire
+should catch his robes. And so at last, as the flames began to rise,
+she was left alone, the good brother always at the foot of the pile,
+painfully holding up with uplifted arms the cross that she might still
+see it, the soldiers crowding, lit up with the red glow of the fire,
+the horrified, trembling crowd like an agitated sea around. The wild
+flames rose and fell in sinister gleams and flashes, the smoke blew
+upwards, by times enveloping that white Maid standing out alone
+against a sky still blue and sweet with May--Pandemonium underneath,
+but Heaven above. Then suddenly there came a great cry from among the
+black fumes that began to reach the clouds: "My voices were of God!
+They have not deceived me!" She had seen and recognised it at last.
+Here it was, the miracle: the great victory that had been promised--
+though not with clang of swords and triumph of rescuing knights, and
+"St. Denis for France!"--but by the sole hand of God, a victory and
+triumph for all time, for her country a crown of glory and ineffable
+shame.
+
+Thus died the Maid of France--with "Jesus, Jesus," on her lips--till
+the merciful smoke breathing upwards choked that voice in her throat;
+and one who was like unto the Son of God, who was with her in the
+fire, wiped all memory of the bitter cross, wavering uplifted through
+the air in the good monk's trembling hands--from eyes which opened
+bright upon the light and peace of that Paradise of which she had so
+long thought and dreamed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+AFTER.
+
+The natural burst of remorse which follows such an event is well known
+in history; and is as certainly to be expected as the details of the
+great catastrophe itself. We feel almost as if, had there not been
+fact and evidence for such a revulsion of feeling, it must have been
+recorded all the same, being inevitable. The executioner, perhaps the
+most innocent of all, sought out Frère Isambard, and confessed to him
+in an anguish of remorse fearing never to be pardoned for what he had
+done. An Englishman who had sworn to add a faggot to the flames in
+which the witch should be burned, when he rushed forward to keep his
+word was seized with sudden compunction--believed that he saw a white
+dove flutter forth from amid the smoke over her head, and, almost
+fainting at the sight, had to be led by his comrades to the nearest
+tavern for refreshment, a life-like touch in which we recognise our
+countryman; but he too found his way that afternoon to Frère Isambard
+like the other. A horrible story is told by the /Bourgeois de Paris/,
+whose contemporary journal is one of the authorities for this period,
+that "the fire was drawn aside" in order that Jeanne's form, with all
+its clothing burned away, should be visible by one last act of
+shameless insult to the crowd. The fifteenth century believed, as we
+have said, everything that is cruel and horrible, as indeed the vulgar
+mind does at all ages; but such brutal imaginings have seldom any
+truth to support them, and there is no such suggestion in the actual
+record. Isambard and Massieu heard from one of the officials that when
+every other part of her body was destroyed the heart was found intact,
+but was, by the order of Winchester, flung into the Seine along with
+all the ashes of that sacrifice. It was wise no doubt that no relics
+should be kept.
+
+Other details were murmured abroad amid the excited talk that followed
+this dreadful scene. "When she was enveloped by the smoke, she cried
+out for water, holy water, and called to St. Michæl; then hung her
+head upon her breast and breathing forth the name of Jesus, gently
+died." "Being in the flame her voice never ceased repeating in a loud
+voice the holy name of Jesus, and invoking without cease the saints of
+paradise, she gave up her spirit, bowing her head and saying the name
+of Jesus in sign of the fervour of her faith." One of the Canons of
+Rouen, standing sobbing in the crowd, said to another: "Would that my
+soul were in the same place where the soul of that woman is at this
+moment"; which indeed is not very different from the authorised saying
+of Pierre Morice in the prison. Guillaume Manchon, the reporter, he
+who wrote /superba responsio/ on his margin, and had written down
+every word of her long examination--his occupation for three months,--
+says that he "never wept so much for anything that happened to
+himself, and that for a whole month he could not recover his calm."
+This man adds a very characteristic touch, to wit, that "with part of
+the pay which he had for the trial, he bought a missal, that he might
+have a reason for praying for her." Jean Tressat, "secretary to the
+King of England" (whatever that office may have been), went home from
+the execution crying out, "We are all lost, for we have burned a
+saint." A priest, afterwards bishop, Jean Fabry, "did not believe that
+there was any man who could restrain his tears."
+
+The modern historians speak of the mockeries of the English, but none
+are visible in the record. Indeed, the part of the English in it is
+extraordinarily diminished on investigation; they are the supposed
+inspirers of the whole proceedings; they are believed to be
+continually pushing on the inquisitors; still more, they are supposed
+to have bought all that large tribunal, the sixty or seventy judges,
+among whom were the most learned and esteemed Doctors in France; but
+of none of this is there any proof given. That they were anxious to
+procure Jeanne's condemnation and death, is very certain. Not one
+among them believed in her sacred mission, almost all considered her a
+sorceress, the most dangerous of evil influences, a witch who had
+brought shame and loss to England by her incantations and evil spells.
+On that point there could be no doubt whatever. She alone had stopped
+the progress of the invaders, and broken the charm of their invariable
+success. But all that she had done had been in favour of Charles, who
+made no attempt to serve or help her, and who had thwarted her plans,
+and hindered her work so long as it was possible to do so, even when
+she was performing miracles for his sake. And Alençon, Dunois, La
+Hire, where were they and all the knights? Two of them at least were
+at Louvins, within a day's march, but never made a step to rescue her.
+We need not ask where were the statesmen and clergy on the French
+side, for they were unfeignedly glad to have the burden of condemning
+her taken from their hands. No one in her own country said a word or
+struck a blow for Jeanne. As for the suborning of the University of
+Paris /en masse/, and all its best members in particular, that is a
+general baseness in which it is impossible to believe. There is no
+appearance even of any particular pressure put upon the judges. Jean
+de la Fontaine disappeared, we are told, and no one ever knew what
+became of him: but it was from Cauchon he fled. And nothing seems to
+have happened to the monks who attended the Maid to the scaffold, nor
+to the others who sobbed about the pile. On the other side, the
+Doctors who condemned her were in no way persecuted or troubled by the
+French authorities when the King came to his own. There was at the
+time a universal tacit consent in France to all that was done at Rouen
+on the 31st of May, 1431.
+
+One reason for this was not far to seek. We have perhaps already
+sufficiently dwelt upon it. It was that France was not France at that
+dolorous moment. It was no unanimous nation repulsing an invader. It
+was two at least, if not more countries, one of them frankly and
+sympathetically attaching itself to the invader, almost as nearly
+allied to him in blood, and more nearly by other bonds, than any tie
+existing between France and Burgundy. This does not account for the
+hostile indifference of southern France and of the French monarch to
+Jeanne, who had delivered them; but it accounts for the hostility of
+Paris and the adjacent provinces, and Normandy. She was as much
+against them as against the English, and the national sentiment to
+which she, a patriot before her age, appealed,--bidding not only the
+English go home, or fight and be vanquished, which was their only
+alternative--but the Burgundians to be converted and to live in peace
+with their brothers,--did not exist. Neither to Burgundians, Picards,
+or Normans was the daughter of far Champagne a fellow countrywoman.
+There was neither sympathy nor kindness in their hearts on that score.
+Some were humane and full of pity for a simple woman in such terrible
+straits; but no more in Paris than in Rouen was the Maid of Orleans a
+native champion persecuted by the English; she was to both an enemy, a
+sorceress, putting their soldiers and themselves to shame.
+
+I have no desire to lessen our[1] guilt, whatever cruelty may have
+been practised by English hands against the Heavenly Maid. And much
+was practised--the iron cage, the chains, the brutal guards, the final
+stake, for which may God and also the world, forgive a crime fully and
+often confessed. But it was by French wits and French ingenuity that
+she was tortured for three months and betrayed to her death. A
+prisoner of war, yet taken and tried as a criminal, the first step in
+her downfall was a disgrace to two chivalrous nations; but the shame
+is greater upon those who sold than upon those who bought; and
+greatest of all upon those who did not move Heaven and earth, nay, did
+not move a finger, to rescue. And indeed we have been the most
+penitent of all concerned; we have shrived ourselves by open
+confession and tears. We have quarrelled with our Shakespeare on
+account of the Maid, and do not know how we could have forgiven him,
+but for the notable and delightful discovery that it was not he after
+all, but another and a lesser hand that endeavoured to befoul her
+shining garments. France has never quarrelled with her Voltaire for a
+much fouler and more intentional blasphemy.
+
+The most significant and the most curious after-scene, a pendant to
+the remorse and pity of so many of the humbler spectators, was the
+assembly held on the Thursday after Jeanne's death, how and when we
+are not told. It consisted of "nos judices antedicti," but neither is
+the place of meeting named, nor the person who presided. Its sole
+testimonial is that the manuscript is in the same hand which has
+written the previous records: but whereas each page in that record was
+signed at the bottom by responsible notaries, Manchon and his
+colleagues, no name whatever certifies this. Seven men, Doctors and
+persons of high importance, all judges on the trial, all concerned in
+that last scene in the prison, stand up and give their report of what
+happened there--part of which we have quoted--their object being to
+establish that Jeanne at the last acknowledged herself to be deceived.
+According to their own showing it was exactly such an acknowledgment
+as our Lord might have been supposed to make in the moment of his
+agony when the words of the psalm, "My God, my God, why hast thou
+forsaken me?" burst from his lips. There seems no reason that we can
+see, why this evidence should not be received as substantially true.
+The inference that any real recantation on Jeanne's part was then
+made, is untrue, and not even asserted. She was deceived in respect to
+her deliverance, and felt it to the bottom of her heart. It was to her
+the bitterness of death. But the flames of her burning showed her the
+truth, and with her last breath she proclaimed her renewed conviction.
+The scene at the stake would lose something of its greatness without
+that momentary cloud which weighed down her troubled soul.
+
+Twenty years after the martyrdom of Jeanne, long after he had,
+according to her prophecy, regained Paris and all that had been lost,
+it became a danger to the King of France that it should be possible to
+imagine that his kingdom had been recovered for him by means of
+sorcery; and accordingly a great new trial was appointed to revise the
+decisions of the old. In the same palace of the Archbishop at Rouen,
+which had witnessed so many scenes of the previous tragedy, the
+depositions of witnesses collected with the minutest care, and which
+it had taken a long time to gather from all quarters, were submitted
+for judgment, and a full and complete reversal of the condemnation was
+given. The /procès/ was a civil one, instituted (nominally) by the
+mother and brothers of Jeanne, one of the latter being now a knight,
+Pierre de Lys, a gentleman of coat armour--against the heirs and
+representatives of Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and Lemaître, the
+Deputy Inquisitor--with other persons chiefly concerned in the
+judgment. Some of these men were dead, some, wisely, not to be found.
+The result was such a mass of testimony as put every incident of the
+life of the Maid in the fullest light from her childhood to her death,
+and in consequence secured a triumphant and full acquittal of herself
+and her name from every reproach. This remarkable and indeed unique
+occurrence does not seem, however, to have roused any enthusiasm.
+Perhaps France felt herself too guilty: perhaps the extraordinary calm
+of contemporary opinion which was still too near the catastrophe to
+see it fully: perhaps that difficulty in the diffusion of news which
+hindered the common knowledge of a trial--a thing too heavy to be
+blown upon the winds,--while it promulgated the legend, a thing so
+much more light to carry: may be the cause of this. But it is an
+extraordinary fact that Jeanne's name remained in abeyance for many
+ages, and that only in this century has it come to any sort of glory,
+in the country of which Jeanne is the first and greatest of patriots
+and champions, a country, too, to which national glory is more dear
+than daily bread.
+
+In the new and wonderful spring of life that succeeded the revolution
+of 1830, the martyr of the fifteenth century came to light as by a
+revelation. The episode of the Pucelle in Michelet's /History of
+France/ touched the heart of the world, and remains one of the finest
+efforts of history and the most popular picture of the saint. And
+perhaps, though so much less important in point of art, the maiden
+work of another maiden of Orleans--the little statue of Jeanne, so
+pure, so simple, so spiritual, made by the Princess Marie of that
+house, the daughter of the race which the Maid held in visionary love,
+and which thus only has ever attempted any return of that devotion--
+had its part in reawakening her name and memory. It fell again,
+however, after the great work of Quicherat had finally given to the
+country the means of fully forming its opinion on the subject which
+Fabre's translation, though unfortunately not literal and adorned with
+modern decorations, was calculated to render popular. A great crop of
+statues and some pictures not of any great artistic merit have since
+been dedicated to the memory of the Maid: but yet the public
+enthusiasm has never risen above the tide mark of literary applause.
+
+There has been, however, a great movement of enthusiasm lately to gain
+for Jeanne the honour of canonisation[2]; but it seems to have failed,
+or at least to have sunk again for the moment into silence. Perhaps
+these honours are out of date in our time. One of the most recent
+writers on the subject, M. Henri Blaze de Bury, suggests that one
+reason which retards this final consecration is "England, certainly
+not a negligible quantity to a Pope of our time." Let no such illusion
+move any mind, French or ecclesiastical. Canonisation means to us, I
+presume, and even to a great number of Catholics, simply the highest
+honour that can be paid to a holy and spotless name. In that sense
+there is no distinction of nation, and the English as warmly as the
+French, both being guilty towards her, and before God on her account--
+would welcome all honour that could be paid to one who, more truly
+than any princess of the blood, is Jeanne of France, the Maid, alone
+in her lofty humility and valour, and in everlasting fragrance of
+modesty and youth.
+----------
+[1] The writer must add that personally, as a Scot, she has no right
+    to use this pronoun. Scotland is entirely guiltless of this crime.
+    The Scots were fighting on the side of France through all these
+    wars, a little perhaps for love of France, but much more out of
+    natural hostility to the English. Yet at this time of day, except
+    to state that fact, it is scarcely necessary to throw off the
+    responsibility. The English side is now our side, though it was
+    not so in the fifteenth century: and a writer of the English
+    tongue must naturally desire that there should at least be fair
+    play.
+
+[2] I am informed, however, that she is already "Venerable," not a
+    very appropriate title--the same, I presume, as Bienheureuse,
+    which is prettier,--and may therefore be addressed by the faithful
+    in prayer, though her rank is only, as it were, brevet rank, and
+    her elevation incomplete.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Jeanne d'Arc, by Mrs. Oliphant
+
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