Jeanne dArc | Page 8

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