How easily we might have missed the wealth we found there. We did not know the name of the village. We did not recognize Cléry, even when we heard it, and the guidebook gives it just four lines. But we had been inside only a moment when we realized that the Church of Our Lady of Cléry is an ancient and sacred shrine. A great tablet told us that since 1325 kings of France, sinners and saints have made pilgrimages there; Charles IV, Philippe VI, Charles VII, St. François Xavier, and so down the centuries to Marshal MacMahon of our own time. But to us greater than all the rest are the names of Dunois and Joan of Arc. Joan had passed this way with her army, of course; for the moment we had forgotten that we were following her footsteps to Orléans.
The place was rich in relics. Among these the tomb of Louis XI and a column which inclosed the heart of Charles VIII. There could hardly have been a shrine in France more venerated in the past than this forgotten church by the roadside, in this forgotten village where, I suppose, tourists to-day never stop at all. It was hard to believe in the reality of our discovery, even when we stood there. But there were the tablets and inscriptions—they could not be denied.
We wandered about, finding something new and precious at every turn, until the afternoon light faded. Then we crossed a long bridge over the Loire to the larger village of Meung, where there was the Hôtel St. Jacques, one of the kind we like best and one of the best of the kind.
Chapter XXVIII
ORLÉANS
There is some sight-seeing to be done in Meung, but we were too anxious to get to Orléans to stop for it. Yet we did not hurry through our last summer morning along the Loire. I do not know what could be more lovely than our leisurely hour—the distance was fifteen miles—under cool, outspreading branches, with glimpses of the bright river and vistas of happy fields.
We did not even try to imagine, as we approached the outskirts, that the Orléans of Joan's time presented anything of its appearance to-day. Orléans is a modern, or modernized, city, and, except the river, there could hardly be anything in the present prospect that Joan saw. That it is the scene of her first military conquest and added its name to the title by which she belongs to history is, however, enough to make it one of the holy places of France.
It has been always a military city, a place of battles. Cæsar burned it, Attila attacked it, Clovis captured it—there was nearly always war of one sort or another going on there. The English and Burgundians would have had it in 1429 but for the arrival of Joan's army. Since then war has visited Orléans less frequently. Its latest experience was with the Germans who invested it in 1870-71.
Joan was misled by her generals, whose faith in her was not complete. Orléans lies on the north bank of the Loire; they brought her down on the south bank, fearing the prowess of the enemy's forces. Discovering the deception, the Maid promptly sent the main body of her troops back some thirty-five miles to a safe crossing, and, taking a thousand men, passed over the Loire and entered the city by a gate still held by the French. That the city was not completely surrounded made it possible to attack the enemy simultaneously from within and without, while her presence among the Orléanese would inspire them with new hope and valor. Mark Twain in his Recollections pictures the great moment of her entry.