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TITLE: JEANNE D'ARC
AUTHOR: MRS. OLIPHANT
EBOOK: E00499 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

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

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