Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc quotes

Then came, finally, the bitterest winter which had visited France in five hundred years. Famine, pestilence, slaughter, ice, snow—Paris had all these at once.

The dead lay in heaps about the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured them.

Ah, France had fallen low—so low!

and as they grew up they became properly stocked with narrowness and prejudices got at second hand from their elders, and adopted without reserve; and without examination also—which goes without saying.

Their religion was inherited, their politics the same.

John Huss and his sort might find fault with the Church, in Domremy it disturbed nobody’s faith;

It was thought that this dragon was of a brilliant blue color, with gold mottlings, but no one had ever seen it, therefore this was not known to be so, it was only an opinion. It was not my opinion;

I think there is no sense in forming an opinion when there is no evidence to form it on. If you build a person without any bones in him he may look fair enough to the eye, but he will be limber and cannot stand up; and I consider that evidence is the bones of an opinion.

But I will take up this matter more at large at another time, and try to make the justness of my position appear.

Joan and I believed alike about this matter. But Pierre Morel and Jacques d’Arc, and many others believed that the vision appeared twice—to a sinner. In fact, they and many others said they knew it.

Probably because their fathers had known it and had told them; for one gets most things at second hand in this world.

Now one thing that does make it quite likely that there were really two apparitions of the Tree is this fact:

She said that for that very reason people ought to pity them, and do every humane and loving thing they could to make them forget the hard fate that had been put upon them by accident of birth and no fault of their own.

“Poor little creatures!” she said. “What can a person’s heart be made of that can pity a Christian’s child and yet can’t pity a devil’s child, that a thousand times more needs it!”

She had torn loose from Père Fronte, and was crying, with her knuckles in her eyes, and stamping her small feet in a fury;

It was splendid to see; and everybody said he had never come up to that speech in his life before, and never could do it again.

Eloquence is a power, there is no question of that.

Even old Jacques d’Arc was carried away, for once in his life, and shouted out:

but Joan was there first, hugged close to his breast, and covering his face with idolatrous kisses.

The storm raged on outside, but that was no matter; this was the stranger’s home now, for as long as he might please.

One by one the boys and girls crept out, and we stood there gazing, open-mouthed, till those two entered the village and were hid from sight.

It was then that we named her the Brave.

We left the black flag there to continue its mournful office, for we had other matter to think of now. We started for the village on a run, to give warning, and get Joan out of her peril;

for although these dull peasants may have thought they recognized the bigness of some of the previous occurrences that had filtered from the world’s history dimly into their minds, the truth is that they hadn’t.

One biting little fact, visible to their eyes of flesh and felt in their own personal vitals, became at once more prodigious to them than the grandest remote episode in the world’s history which they had got at second hand and by hearsay.

It amuses me now when I recall how our elders talked then. They fumed and fretted in a fine fashion.

To hear them talk, one would have imagined that all the previous ten thousand sackings and burnings in France had been but fables, and this one the only fact.

It is always the way; words will answer as long as it is only a person’s neighbor who is in trouble, but when that person gets into trouble himself, it is time that the King rise up and do something.

The big event filled us young people with talk, too. We let it flow in a steady stream while we tended the flocks.

“Indeed? and who is going to perform all these sublime impossibilities?”

It was a reverent low note, but it rang clear.

What could have put those strange ideas in her head? This question kept running in my mind during two or three days. It was inevitable that I should think of madness. What other way was there to account for such things?

She went on thinking for others, planning for others, sacrificing herself for others, just as always before. She went on ministering to her sick and to her poor, and still stood ready to give the wayfarer her bed and content herself with the floor.

There was a secret somewhere, but madness was not the key to it.

This was plain.

Human nature is the same everywhere: it defies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat.

The village considered that Joan had disgraced it with her grotesque performance and its ridiculous failure; so all the tongues were busy with the matter, and as bilious and bitter as they were busy;

“

It is not a wish, it is a purpose. He will grant it. I can wait.

”

An odor as of breakfast came stealing through the wood; the Paladin unconsciously inflated his nostrils in lustful response, and got up and limped painfully away, saying he must go and look to his horse.

At bottom he was all right and a good-hearted giant, without any harm in him, for it is no harm to bark, if one stops there and does not bite, and it is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick.

If this vast structure of brawn and muscle and vanity and foolishness seemed to have a libelous tongue, what of it? There was no malice behind it; and besides, the defect was not of his own creation;

The result was an unqualified success. Noël prized the society of the Paladin above everybody else’s; the Paladin preferred anybody’s to Noël’s.

The big fellow was often seen with the little fellow, but it was for the same reason that the bull is often seen with the gnat.

With the first opportunity, I had a talk with Noël. I welcomed him to our expedition, and said:

“

It is a pity that you should plot another’s death when your own is so close at hand.

”

She was silent a moment, turning the matter over in her mind, then she added, with quiet decision, “

But the thing itself was right, and I would do it again.

”

“No, you are wrong there.

Discretion hasn’t anything to do with brains; brains are an obstruction to it, for it does not reason, it feels.

Perfect discretion means absence of brains. Discretion is a quality of the heart—solely a quality of the heart; it acts upon us through feeling.

We housed ourselves in an inn, and soon the town came flocking to get a glimpse of the Maid.

Ah, the tedious King and his tedious people!

Our two good knights came presently, their patience well wearied, and reported.

“

When God fights it is but small matter whether the hand that bears His sword is big or little.

He will perceive this in time. Is there none in that Castle of Chinon who favors us?”

I was miserable with curiosity to know what it was that she would tell him, but she did not say, and I did not expect she would.

She was but a child, it is true; but she was not a chatterer to tell great matters and make herself important to little people; no, she was reserved, and kept things to herself, as the truly great always do.

The next day Queen Yolande got one victory over the King’s keepers, for, in spite of their protestations and obstructions, she procured an audience for our two knights, and they made the most they could out of their opportunity.

He arrive at a decision too precipitately! So they sent a committee of priests—always priests—into Lorraine to inquire into Joan’s character and history—a matter which would consume several weeks, of course. You see how fastidious they were.

It was as if people should come to put out the fire when a man’s house was burning down, and they waited till they could send into another country to find out if he had always kept the Sabbath or not, before letting him try.

So the days poked along; dreary for us young people in some ways, but not in all, for we had one great anticipation in front of us;

He put his heart into his extravagant narrative, just as a poet puts his heart into a heroic fiction, and his earnestness disarmed criticism—disarmed it as far as he himself was concerned.

Nobody believed his narrative, but all believed that he believed it.

He made his enlargements without flourish, without emphasis, and so casually that often one failed to notice that a change had been made. He spoke of the governor of Vaucouleurs, the first night, simply as the governor of Vaucouleurs;

Instead of setting a military commission to find out if this valorous little soldier could win victories, they set a company of holy hairsplitters and phrase-mongers to work to find out if the soldier was sound in her piety and had no doctrinal leaks.

The rats were devouring the house, but instead of examining the cat’s teeth and claws, they only concerned themselves to find out if it was a holy cat.

If it was a pious cat, a moral cat, all right, never mind about the other capacities, they were of no consequence.

“

I don’t know A from B; but I know this: that I am come by command of the Lord of Heaven to deliver Orleans from the English power and crown the King of Rheims, and the matters ye are puttering over are of no consequence!

”

“

He helps who help themselves. The sons of France will fight the battles, but He will give the victory!

”

“As to that, I—I believe I cannot say,” said she, and was going on, but stopped. Then she added, almost as if she were saying it to herself, “

Still, it was an improvement on yours!

”

“

I have not come to Poitiers to show signs and do miracles. Send me to Orleans and you shall have signs enough.

Give me men-at-arms—few or many—and let me go!”

“

They will hear the drums⁠—and they will answer, they will march!

”

General of the Armies of France, with a prince of the blood for subordinate!

Yesterday she was nothing⁠—today she was this.

Yesterday she was not even a sergeant, not even a corporal, not even a private—today, with one step, she was at the top.

I said, like an unthinking fool, ‘The seeing eye?—I shouldn’t count on that for much—I suppose we all have it.’ ‘No,’ he said; ‘very few have it.’ Then he explained, and made his meaning clear.

He said the common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn’t indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn’t detect.

He said the mightiest military genius must fail and come to nothing if it have not the seeing eye—that is to say, if it cannot read men and select its subordinates with an infallible judgment.

“Of course, I would rather hear him swear than another man pray. He is the frankest man there is, and the naivest. Once when he was rebuked for pillaging on his raids, he said it was nothing. Said he, ‘

If God the Father were a soldier, He would rob.

’ I judge he is the right man to take temporary charge there at Blois. Joan has cast the seeing eye upon him, you see.”

“Well, we shall see. Joan probably knows what is in him better than we do. And I’ll give you another idea.

When a person in Joan of Arc’s position tells a man he is brave, he believes it; and believing it is enough; in fact, to believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

”

“Now you’ve hit it!” cried Noël. “She’s got the creating mouth as well as the seeing eye! Ah, yes, that is the thing.

France was cowed and a coward; Joan of Arc has spoken, and France is marching, with her head up!

”

“

Two or three days ago it was afraid of a hen-roost; one could storm the gates of hell with it now.

”

“

There they come⁠—Satan and the Page of Christ!

”

“

Fair Sir God, I pray you to do by La Hire as he would do by you if you were La Hire and he were God.

”

The delirium of the people went on the rest of the night, and with it the clamor of the joy-bells and the welcoming cannon.

Joan of Arc had stepped upon her stage at last, and was ready to begin.

Blessedest feature of all, Catherine Boucher was dying with ecstasies, and presently there was little left of her but gasps and suffocations.

Victory? It was a perfect Agincourt.

The Paladin was gone only a couple of minutes; he found out at once that a trick had been played on him, so he came back. When he approached the door he heard Noël ranting in there and recognized the state of the case;

“You have done well, and you have my thanks. It may be that you have prevented a disaster. Your name and service shall receive official mention.”

Then he bowed low, and when he rose he was eleven feet high.

As he swelled out past me he covertly pulled down the corner of his eye with his finger and muttered part of that defiled refrain, “Oh, tears, ah, tears, oh, sad sweet tears!—name in General Orders—personal mention to the King, you see!”

then they noticed it, and each man hove a deep sigh, and glanced up with a surprised look as wondering to see the others there, and how he came to be there himself—but that is the way with people, as I have said.

There is no way of accounting for people. You have to take them as they are.

“There,” said Joan at last, pleased with her success; “another could have done it no better—not as well, I think. Tell me—what is it you did? Tell me all.”

“

Because it was death. She was all I had. There was nothing left to love.

”

“

They call me the Dwarf, but I think it is more in jest than otherwise.

”

“

It is to persuade persons to respect France.

”

And so it is as I say; to the Dwarf, Joan was our country embodied, our country made visible flesh cast in a gracious form.

When she stood before others, they saw Joan of Arc, but he saw France.

Sometimes he would speak of her by that name. It shows you how the idea was embedded in his mind, and how real it was to him.

These marvels disturbed Catherine profoundly, but I had long ceased to be surprised at them.

One can get used to anything in this world.

Catherine said:

If the English had captured Joan then, Charles VII would have flown the country, the Treaty of Troyes would have held good, and France, already English property, would have become, without further dispute, an English province, to so remain until Judgment Day.

A nationality and a kingdom were at stake there, and no more time to decide it in than it takes to hard-boil an egg.

It was the most momentous ten minutes that the clock has ever ticked in France, or ever will.

A nationality and a kingdom were at stake there, and no more time to decide it in than it takes to hard-boil an egg.

It was the most momentous ten minutes that the clock has ever ticked in France, or ever will.

Whenever you read in histories about hours or days or weeks in which the fate of one or another nation hung in the balance, do not you fail to remember, nor your French hearts to beat the quicker for the remembrance, the ten minutes that …

and if Joan’s feet had not been protected by iron they would have kissed them off of her. “Welcome! welcome to the Maid of Orleans!” That was the cry; I heard it a hundred thousand times. “Welcome to our Maid!” some of them worded it.

No other girl in all history has ever reached such a summit of glory as Joan of Arc reached that day.

And do you think it turned her head, and that she sat up to enjoy that delicious music of homage and applause? No; another girl would have done that, but not this one. That was the greatest heart and the simplest that ever beat.

and when the people found she was wounded and would rest, they shut off all passage and traffic in that region and stood guard themselves the whole night through, to see that her slumbers were not disturbed.

They said, “She has given us peace, she shall have peace herself.”

All knew that that region would be empty of English next day, and all said that neither the present citizens nor their posterity would ever cease to hold that day sacred to the memory of Joan of Arc.

sometimes, when there is a big crowd of strangers, it is even likely to make her cry if she is as young as Joan was. God knows the reason for this, it is hidden from men.

As for me, I would as soon blush as sneeze; in fact, I would rather.

However, these meditations are not of consequence: I will go on with what I was saying. The King rallied her for blushing, and this brought up the rest of the blood and turned her face to fire.

“No, sir, there is no state, and no use for a minister.

France is shrunk to a couple of acres of ground; a sheriff’s constable could take care of it; its affairs are not matters of state.

The term is too large.”

“

Oh, use me; I beseech you, use me⁠—there is but little time!

”

but she was troubled, and said these honors were not meet for one of her lowly birth and station, and by their kind grace she would remain simple Joan of Arc, nothing more—and so be called.

Nothing more! As if there could be anything more, anything higher, anything greater.

My Lady du Lis—why, it was tinsel, petty, perishable. But, Joan of Arc! The mere sound of it sets one’s pulses leaping.

Why, one would have supposed that some great and fortunate thing had happened to her. But we did not think any great things of it. To our minds no mere human hand could add a glory to Joan of Arc.

To us she was the sun soaring in the heavens, and her new nobility a candle atop of it; to us it was swallowed up and lost in her own light.

And she was as indifferent to it and as unconscious of it as the other sun would have been.

“

By God, she knows her trade, and none can teach it her!

”

Then a faraway look came into her eyes, and I think that a picture of her home drifted across the vision of her mind; for she said very gently, and as one who muses, “

But that I know God guides us and will give us success, I had liefer keep sheep than endure these perils.

”

“

Work! work! and God will work with us!

”

He recovered, and was himself again after two or three hours; and then he was happy and proud, and made the most of his wound, and went swaggering around in his bandages showing off like an innocent big-child—which was just what he was.

He was prouder of being wounded than a really modest person would be of being killed.

But there was no harm in his vanity, and nobody minded it. He said he was hit by a stone from a catapult—a stone the size of a man’s head. But the stone grew, of course.

“Let him alone,” said Noël Rainguesson. “

Don’t interrupt his processes. Tomorrow it will be a cathedral.

”

and she accomplished it. She persuaded him to disobey the King in the interest of the nation, and to be reconciled to Count Richemont and welcome him. That was statesmanship; and of the highest and soundest sort.

Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.

In the early morning, June 17th, the scouts reported the approach of Talbot and Fastolfe with Fastolfe’s succoring force. Then the drums beat to arms;

“Name of God, what would you? We must smite these English, and we will.

They shall not escape us. Though they were hung to the clouds we would get them!

”

Joan had said true: France was on the way to be free.

The war called the Hundred Years’ War was very sick today. Sick on its English side—for the very first time since its birth, ninety-one years gone by.

The dead of that war make a mournful long list—an interminable list. Of men slain in the field the count goes by tens of thousands; of innocent women and children slain by bitter hardship and hunger it goes by that appalling term, millions.

It was an ogre, that war; an ogre that went about for near a hundred years, crunching men and dripping blood from its jaws.

And with her little hand that child of seventeen struck him down; and yonder he lies stretched on the field of Patay, and will not get up any more while this old world lasts.

It was an ogre, that war; an ogre that went about for near a hundred years, crunching men and dripping blood from its jaws.

And with her little hand that child of seventeen struck him down; and yonder he lies stretched on the field of Patay, and will not get up any more while this old world lasts.

When we took Troyes a calf was worth thirty francs, a sheep sixteen, a French prisoner eight. It was an enormous price for those other animals—a price which naturally seems incredible to you.

It was the war, you see. It worked two ways: it made meat dear and prisoners cheap.

Well, here were these poor Frenchmen being carried off. What could we do? Very little of a permanent sort, but we did what we could.

Châlons surrendered to us; and there by Châlons in a talk, Joan, being asked if she had no fears for the future, said yes, one—treachery. Who would believe it? who could dream it? And yet in a sense it was prophecy.

Truly, man is a pitiful animal.

We marched, marched, kept on marching; and at last, on the 16th of July, we came in sight of our goal, and saw the great cathedral towers of Rheims rise out of the distance! Huzza after huzza swept the army from van to rear;

They still kept their hands up in reverent salute many steps after they had passed by. Every time Joan put her handkerchief to her eyes you could see a little quiver of emotion crinkle along the faces of the files.

The march-past after a victory is a thing to drive the heart mad with jubilation; but this one was a thing to break it.

We rode now to the King’s lodgings, which was the Archbishop’s country palace; and he was presently ready, and we galloped off and took position at the head of the army.

How easy it was for her to do miracles like to this!

She was like the sun; on whatsoever dim and humble object her rays fell, that thing was straightway drowned in glory.

All graciously the King said:

… all in a moment the pomps and grandeurs dissolved away and she was a little child again herding her sheep with the tranquil pastures stretched about her, and war and wounds and blood and death and the mad frenzy and turmoil of battle a dream.

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magicians, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

That was the King’s invention, that sweet and dear surprise.

And then he turned around, this old simpleton, and looked a long time in a dazed way at Joan where she had her face in a cushion, dying, apparently, and says:

“What do you reckon she is laughing at?”

And old d’Arc stood looking at her the same way, sort of absently scratching his head; but had to give it up, and said he didn’t know—“must have been something that happened when we weren’t noticing.”

Isn’t it wonderful? And more—he had conscience; he had a sense of right and wrong, such as it was; he was able to find remorse. It looks impossible, it looks incredible, but it is not.

I believe that some day it will be found out that peasants are people.

Yes, beings in a great many respects like ourselves. And I believe that some day they will find this out, too—and then!

And we say in our anguish, “If they could only come back!” Which is all very well to say, but, as far as I can see, it doesn’t profit anything.

In my opinion the best way is not to do the thing in the first place.

And I am not alone in this; I have heard our two knights say the same thing;

There is but one thing to do, and only one, and lo, ye call a council of war! Councils of war have no value but to decide between two or several doubtful courses. But a council of war when there is only one course?

Conceive of a man in a boat and his family in the water, and he goes out among his friends to ask what he would better do?

A council of war, name of God! To determine what?”

Consider—and be just. When have you two spared her? What dark charges and harsh names have you withheld when you spoke of her?” Then he added, with a veiled twinkle in his eyes, “

If these are offenses I see no particular difference between them, except that she says her hard things to your faces, whereas you say yours behind her back.

”

But in any case, she said, she would not allow the blood royal to be abused, and would keep the army in good order and ready for work at the end of the truce.

Poor child, to have to fight England, Burgundy, and a French conspiracy all at the same time

—it was too bad. She was a match for the others, but a conspiracy—ah, nobody is a match for that, when the victim that is to be injured is weak and willing.

And more—he declared the campaign ended! And more still—he had made a new truce and a long one, in which he had agreed to leave Paris unthreatened and unmolested, and go back to the Loire whence he had come!

Joan of Arc, who had never been defeated by the enemy, was defeated by her own King.

She had said once that all she feared for her cause was treachery. It had struck its first blow now. She hung up her white armor in the royal basilica of St.

He beguiled the King to use compulsion. Joan had to submit—because she was wounded and helpless. In the Great Trial she said she was carried away against her will; and that if she had not been wounded it could not have been accomplished.

Ah, she had a spirit, that slender girl! a spirit to brave all earthly powers and defy them.

We shall never know why the Voices ordered her to stay. We only know this; that if she could have obeyed, the history of France would not be as it now stands written in the books. Yes, well we know that.

“

A dozen men! name of God, I have fifty-thousand, and will never budge till this place is taken! Sound the charge!

”

But can any man tell you what the mourning in the hearts of the peasantry of France was like? No, nobody can tell you that, and, poor dumb things, they could not have told you themselves, but it was there—indeed, yes.

Why, it was the spirit of a whole nation hung with crape!

The 24th of May. We will draw down the curtain now upon the most strange, and pathetic, and wonderful military drama that has been played upon the stage of the world. Joan of Arc will march no more.

The 24th of May.

We will draw down the curtain now upon the most strange, and pathetic, and wonderful military drama that has been played upon the stage of the world. Joan of Arc will march no more.

enemies who hungered for her life as being the only puissance able to stand between English triumph and French degradation.

Sold to a French priest by a French prince, with the French King and the French nation standing thankless by and saying nothing.

And she—what did she say? Nothing. Not a reproach passed her lips. She was too great for that—she was Joan of Arc; and when that is said, all is said.

The soldiery found that they could depend utterly on Joan, and upon her alone. With her gone, everything was gone.

She was the sun that melted the frozen torrents and set them boiling; with that sun removed, they froze again

, and the army and all France became what they had been before, mere dead corpses—that and nothing more; incapable of thought, hope, ambition, or motion.

My wound gave me a great deal of trouble clear into the first part of October; then the fresher weather renewed my life and strength. All this time there were reports drifting about that the King was going to ransom Joan. I believed these, for

I was young and had not yet found out the littleness and meanness of our poor human race, which brags about itself so much, and thinks it is better and higher than the other animals.

In October I was well enough to go out with two sorties, and in the second one, on the 23rd, I was wounded again. My luck had turned, you see.

Now the memorable inquisition called in history the Great Trial began.

Fifty experts against a novice, and no one to help the novice!

The judge summarized the circumstances of the case and the public reports and suspicions upon which it was based; then he required Joan to kneel and make oath that she would answer with exact truthfulness to all questions asked her.

They kept this up several minutes; and because Joan sat untroubled and indifferent they grew madder and noisier all the time. Once she said, with a fleeting trace of the old-time mischief in her eye and manner:

“Prithee, speak one at a time, fair lords, then I will answer all of you.”

At the end of three whole hours of furious debating over the oath, the situation had not changed a jot.

Joan sunk at once to her knees; and as she laid her hands upon the Gospels, that big English soldier set free his mind:

“By God, if she were but English, she were not in this place another half a second!”

It was the soldier in him responding to the soldier in her. But what a stinging rebuke it was, what an arraignment of French character and French royalty! Would that he could have uttered just that one phrase in the hearing of Orleans!

But the Bishop refused, and reminded her that she had broken out of prison twice before. Joan of Arc was too proud to insist. She only said, as she rose to go with the guard:

“It is true I have wanted to escape, and I do want to escape.”

Then she added, in a way that would touch the pity of anybody, I think, “It is the right of every prisoner.”

yet here she was, as I say, collected, unworn, and ready for the conflict; yes, and the only person there who showed no signs of the wear and worry of yesterday. And her eyes—ah, you should have seen them and broken your hearts.

Have you seen that veiled deep glow, that pathetic hurt dignity, that unsubdued and unsubduable spirit that burns and smolders in the eye of a caged eagle and makes you feel mean and shabby under the burden of its mute reproach?

Her eyes were like that. How capable they were, and how wonderful! Yes, at all times and in all circumstances they could express as by print every shade of the wide range of her moods.

Then the invincible soldier, victor of Patay, conqueror of the lion Talbot, deliverer of Orleans, restorer of a king’s crown, commander-in-chief of a nation’s armies, straightened herself proudly up, gave her head a little toss, and said with naive complacency,

“And when it comes to that, I am not afraid to be matched against any woman in Rouen!”

The crowd of spectators broke out with applause—which pleased Joan—and there was many a friendly and petting smile to be seen. But Cauchon stormed at the people and warned them to keep still and mind their manners.

They make that poor country-girl out the match, and more than the match, of the sixty-two trained adepts. Isn’t it so? They from the University of Paris, she from the sheepfold and the cow-stable! Ah, yes, she was great, she was wonderful.

It took six thousand years to produce her; her like will not be seen in the earth again in fifty thousand.

Such is my opinion.

That made the very bones of my body turn cold, and I saw cheeks about me blanch—for it meant fire and the stake! But Joan, still standing, answered him back, proud and undismayed:

“Not all the clergy in Paris and Rouen could condemn me, lacking the right!”

This made a great tumult, and part of it was applause from the spectators. Joan resumed her seat. The Bishop still insisted. Joan said:

The Bishop plagued her straight along, till at last she said, in a weary tone:

“I came from God; I have nothing more to do here. Return me to God, from whom I came.”

It was piteous to hear; it was the same as saying, “You only want my life; take it and let me be at peace.”

and mainly it was glad excitement. Joan looked out upon these hungering faces with innocent, untroubled eyes, and then humbly and gently she brought out that immortal answer which brushed the formidable snare away as it had been but a cobweb:

“If I be not in a state of Grace, I pray God place me in it; if I be in it, I pray God keep me so.”

Ah, you will never see an effect like that; no, not while you live. For a space there was the silence of the grave. Men looked wondering into each other’s faces, and some were awed and crossed themselves; and I heard Lefevre mutter:

“Did you think you did well in taking the dress of a man?”

“I did well to do whatsoever thing God commanded me to do.”

“But in this particular case do you think you did well in taking the dress of a man?”

“What revelations were made to the King?”

“You will not get that out of me this year.”

Presently she added: “During three weeks I was questioned by the clergy at Chinon and Poitiers. The King had a sign before he would believe; and the clergy were of opinion that my acts were good and not evil.”

“What languages do your Voices speak?”

“Verily; why not? She is on our side, not on the English!”

Saints and angels who did not condescend to speak English! a grave affront. They could not be brought into court and punished for contempt, but the tribunal could take silent note of Joan’s remark and remember it against her; which they did.

The soldier-spirit in Joan was offended at this puerility. She drew herself up, and said with dignity and fire:

“What I said to them was, ‘Ride those English down!’ and I did it myself.”

Whenever she flung out a scornful speech like that at these French menials in English livery it lashed them into a rage; and that is what happened this time.

“What impulse was it, think you, that moved the people to kiss your hands, your feet, and your vestments?”

“They were glad to see me, and so they did those things; and I could not have prevented them if I had had the heart. Those poor people came lovingly to me because I had not done them any hurt, but had done the best I could for them according to my strength.”

See what modest little words she uses to describe that touching spectacle, her marches about France walled in on both sides by the adoring multitudes: “They were glad to see me.” Glad?

“Do you know if St. Catherine and St. Marguerite hate the English?”

“They love whom Our Lord loves, and hate whom He hates.”

“Does God hate the English?”

“Of the love or the hatred of God toward the English I know nothing.” Then she spoke up with the old martial ring in her voice and the old audacity in her words, and added,

“But I know this⁠—that God will send victory to the French, and that all the English will be flung out of France but the dead ones!”

“Was God on the side of the English when they were prosperous in France?”

Joan was stirred. Her eyes flashed, and she exclaimed:

“I was commanded of God, and it was right to go! If I had had a hundred fathers and mothers and been a king’s daughter to boot I would have gone.”

“Did you never ask your Voices if you might tell your parents?”

Then, soft and low, came that touching speech which will live as long as language lives, and pass into all tongues, and move all gentle hearts wheresoever it shall come, down to the latest day:

“It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor.”

How simple it is, and how beautiful. And how it beggars the studied eloquence of the masters of oratory. Eloquence was a native gift of Joan of Arc; it came from her lips without effort and without preparation.

“It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor.”

How simple it is, and how beautiful. And how it beggars the studied eloquence of the masters of oratory.

Eloquence was a native gift of Joan of Arc; it came from her lips without effort and without preparation. Her words were as sublime as her deeds, as sublime as her character;

The snare was ingeniously devised, but Joan’s simple and humble answer left it empty:

“One cannot keep his conscience too clean.”

We were now arriving at the last day of this new trial. Joan had come through the ordeal well. It had been a long and wearisome struggle for all concerned. All ways had been tried to convict the accused, and all had failed, thus far.

“I will submit them to Our Lord who sent me. It would seem to me that He and His Church are one, and that there should be no difficulty about this matter.” Then she turned upon the judge and said,

“Why do you make a difficulty when there is no room for any?”

Then Jean de la Fontaine corrected her notion that there was but one Church. There were two—the Church Triumphant, which is God, the saints, the angels, and the redeemed, and has its seat in heaven;

Now a thunderclap fell out of a clear sky:

“Take me to the Pope. I will answer to everything that I ought to.”

It made the Bishop’s purple face fairly blanch with consternation. If Joan had only known, if she had only known!

Think of that—a court made up of Loyseleur and his breed of reptiles.

It was granting leave to a lamb to ask help of a wolf.

Joan looked up to see if he was serious, and perceiving that he was at least pretending to be, she declined, of course.

She refused, as always before, when asked if she would put off the male attire if she were given permission to commune. And she added this:

“When one receives the sacrament, the manner of his dress is a small thing and of no value in the eyes of Our Lord.”

She was charged with being so stubborn in clinging to her male dress that she would not lay it off even to get the blessed privilege of hearing Mass. She spoke out with spirit and said:

She was reproached with doing man’s work in the wars and thus deserting the industries proper to her sex. She answered, with some little touch of soldierly disdain:

“As to the matter of women’s work, there’s plenty to do it.”

It was always a comfort to me to see the soldier spirit crop up in her. While that remained in her she would be Joan of Arc, and able to look trouble and fate in the face.

Joan replied quite simply, contenting herself with explaining that war was not her first move, but her second:

“To begin with, I demanded that peace should be made. If it was refused, then I would fight.”

The judge mixed the Burgundians and English together in speaking of the enemy which Joan had come to make war upon.

Joan smiled at that. She could have reminded these people that Our Lord, who is no respecter of persons, had chosen the lowly for his high purposes even oftener than he had chosen bishops and cardinals; but she phrased her rebuke in simpler terms:

“It is the prerogative of Our Lord to choose His instruments where He will.”

She was asked what form of prayer she used in invoking counsel from on high. She said the form was brief and simple; then she lifted her pallid face and repeated it, clasping her chained hands:

so, in her answer to this charge she did not condescend to go into any explanations or excuses, but delivered herself with bland indifference and military brevity.

“If I was Commander-in-Chief, it was to thrash the English!”

Death was staring her in the face here all the time, but no matter; she dearly loved to make these English-hearted Frenchmen squirm, and whenever they gave her an opening she was prompt to jab her sting into it.

“No! It is not necessary.”

“Ah,” said poor Joan, reproachfully, “you set down everything that is against me, but you will not set down what is for me.”

It was piteous. It would have touched the heart of a brute. But Cauchon was more than that.

But I was foolish to think that thought and hope that hope. Joan of Arc was not made as others are made.

Fidelity to principle, fidelity to truth, fidelity to her word, all these were in her bone and in her flesh⁠—they were parts of her.

She could not change, she could not cast them out. She was the very genius of Fidelity; she was Steadfastness incarnated. Where she had taken her stand and planted her foot, there she would abide; hell itself could not move her from that place.

Joan of Arc was not made as others are made. Fidelity to principle, fidelity to truth, fidelity to her word, all these were in her bone and in her flesh—they were parts of her. She could not change, she could not cast them out.

She was the very genius of Fidelity; she was Steadfastness incarnated.

Where she had taken her stand and planted her foot, there she would abide; hell itself could not move her from that place.

but she—she was serene, she was not troubled. She had done what she believed to be her duty, and that was sufficient; the consequences were not her affair. The last thing she said that time was full of this serenity, full of contented repose:

“I am a good Christian born and baptized, and a good Christian I will die.”

Again this happened, and then a third time. The poor man’s face was red with embarrassment, the whole great house was pitying him, which made the matter worse; then Joan dropped in a remark which completed the trouble. She said:

“Read your book⁠—and then I will answer you!”

Why, it was almost cruel the way those moldy veterans laughed; and as for the orator, he looked so flustered and helpless that almost anybody would have pitied him, and I had difficulty to keep from doing it myself.

Ah, that would have smitten you or me dead with fright, but it only roused the lion heart of Joan of Arc, and in her answer rang that martial note which had used to stir her soldiers like a bugle-call:

“I will not say otherwise than I have said already; and if I saw the fire before me I would say it again!”

It was uplifting to hear her battle-voice once more and see the battle-light burn in her eye. Many there were stirred; every man that was a man was stirred, whether friend or foe;

Her answer was always in this form or to this effect:

“When you give me leave, then you will know.”

Yes, Joan was at her best that second of May. She had all her wits about her, and they could not catch her anywhere.

Then she made that great answer which will live forever; made it without fuss or bravado, and yet how fine and noble was the sound of it:

“I will tell you nothing more than I have told you; no, not even if you tear the limbs from my body. And even if in my pain I did say something otherwise, I would always say afterward that it was the torture that spoke and not I.”

There was no crushing that spirit. You should have seen Cauchon. Defeated again, and he had not dreamed of such a thing.

So all Rouen laughed again, and kept it up for three days, saying:

“The sow has littered six times, and made six messes of it.”

And the palace walls got a new decoration—a mitered hog carrying a discarded rack home on its shoulder, and Loyseleur weeping in its wake. Many rewards were offered for the capture of these painters, but nobody applied.

Two voted with the Bishop and insisted upon the torture. These two were Loyseleur and the orator—the man whom Joan had bidden to “read his book”—Thomas de Courcelles, the renowned pleader and master of eloquence.

Age has taught me charity of speech; but it fails me when I think of those three names⁠—Cauchon, Courcelles, Loyseleur.

Only that!—a crown in heaven; a promissory note and no endorser; always something away off yonder; not a word about the Archbishopric of Rouen, which was the thing Cauchon was destroying his soul for.

A crown in heaven; it must have sounded like a sarcasm to him, after all his hard work. What should he do in heaven? he did not know anybody there.

On the nineteenth of May a court of fifty judges sat in the archiepiscopal palace to discuss Joan’s fate. A few wanted her delivered over to the secular arm at once for punishment, but the rest insisted that she be once more “charitably admonished” first.

He finished with a stern threat: if she remained obstinate the damnation of her soul was certain, the destruction of her body probable. But Joan was immovable. She said:

“If I were under sentence, and saw the fire before me, and the executioner ready to light it⁠—more, if I were in the fire itself, I would say none but the things which I have said in these trials; and I would abide by them till I died.”

A deep silence followed now, which endured some moments. It lay upon me like a weight. I knew it for an omen. Then Cauchon, grave and solemn, turned to Pierre Maurice:

a foot or two from this was a supplemental supply of wood and fagots compacted into a pile shoulder-high and containing as much as six packhorse loads. Think of that.

We seem so delicately made, so destructible, so insubstantial; yet it is easier to reduce a granite statue to ashes than it is to do that with a man’s body.

The sight of the stake sent physical pains tingling down the nerves of my body; and yet, turn as I would, my eyes would keep coming back to it, such fascination has the gruesome and the terrible for us.

That made the crowd laugh.

A mob has small respect for a grown man who has to call on a sheriff to protect him from a sick girl.

Joan had damaged the preacher’s cause more with one sentence than he had helped it with a hundred; so he was much put out, and had trouble to get a good start again. But he needn’t have bothered; there was no occasion.

Joan said plaintively to these people:

“Ah, you do not do well to seduce me.”

The judges joined their voices to the others. Yes, even the iron in their hearts melted, and they said:

It stopped my heart, it turned my blood to ice. That was more than sixty years ago, but that triumphant note rings as clear in my memory today as it rang in my ear that long-vanished summer morning.

We are so strangely made; the memories that could make us happy pass away; it is the memories that break our hearts that abide.

Soon other voices took up that cry—tens, scores, hundreds of voices; all the world seemed filled with the brutal joy of it.

I was full of anxiety to hear her answer to that question; and when it came it was just what I was expecting. She said—quiet quietly:

“I have never intended and never understood myself to swear I would not resume it.”

There—I had been sure, all along, that she did not know what she was doing and saying on the platform Thursday, and this answer of hers was proof that I had not been mistaken. Then she went on to add this: