第10章 DOMREMY AND VAUCOULEURS.1424-1429.(5)

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 Icould 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.