Jeanne dArc | Page 6

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