*Quicherat, v. pp. 334, 335; c.f. Lefevre-Pontalis, Les Sources
Allemands, 113-115. Fontemoing, Paris, 1903.
The most extraordinary circumstance remains to be told. Apparently the brothers and cousins of the true Maid continued to entertain and accept the impostor! We have already seen that, in 1443, Pierre du Lys, in his petition to the Duc d’Orleans, writes as if he did not believe in the death of his sister, but that may be a mere ambiguity of language; we cannot repose on the passage.
In 1476 a legal process and inquest was held as to the descendants of the brother of the mother of Jeanne d’Arc, named Voulton or Vouthon. Among other witnesses was Henry de Voulton, called Perinet, a carpenter, aged fifty-two. He was grandson of the brother of the mother of Jeanne d’Arc, his grand-maternal aunt. This witness declared that he had often seen the two brothers du Lys, Jehan and Pierre, with their sister, La Pucelle, come to the village of Sermaise and feast with his father. They always accepted him, the witness, as their cousin, ‘in all places where he has been, conversed, eaten, and drunk in their company.’ Now Perinet is clearly speaking of his associations with Jeanne and her brothers AFTER HE HIMSELF WAS A MAN GROWN. Born in 1424, he was only five years old when the Maid left Domremy for ever. He cannot mean that, as a child of five, he was always, in various places, drinking with the Maid and her brothers. Indeed, he says, taking a distinction, that in his early childhood—‘son jeune aage’—he visited the family of d’Arc, with his father, at Domremy, and saw the Maid, qui pour lors estoit jeune fille.*
*De Bouteiller et de Braux, Nouvelles Recherches sur la Famille de
Jeanne d’Arc, Paris, 1879, pp. 8, 9.
Moreover, the next witness, the cure of Sermaise, aged fifty-three, says that, twenty-four years ago (in 1452), a young woman dressed as a man, calling herself Jeanne la Pucelle, used to come to Sermaise, and that, as he heard, she was the near kinswoman of all the Voultons, ‘and he saw her make great and joyous cheer with them while she was at Sermaise.‘* Clearly it was about this time, in or before 1452, that Perinet himself was conversant with Jehan and Pierre du Lys, and with their sister, calling herself La Pucelle.
*Op. cit. p. 11.
Again, Jehan le Montigueue, aged about seventy, deposed that, in 1449, a woman calling herself Jeanne la Pucelle came to Sermaise and feasted with the Voultons, as also did (but he does not say at the same time) the Maid’s brother, Jehan du Lys.* Jehan du Lys could, at least, if he did not accept her, have warned his cousins, the Voultons, against their pretended kinswoman, the false Pucelle. But for some three years at least she came, a welcome guest, to Sermaise, matched herself against the cure at tennis, and told him that he might now say that he had played against la Pucelle de France. This news gave him the greatest pleasure.
*Op. cit. pp. 4,5, MM. de Bouteiller and de Graux do not observe the
remarkable nature of this evidence, as regards the BROTHERS of the Maid;
see their Preface, p. xxx.
Jehan Guillaume, aged seventy-six, had seen both the self-styled Pucelle and the real Maid’s brothers at the house of the Voultons. He did not know whether she was the true Maid or not.
It is certain, practically, that this PUCELLE, so merry at Sermaise with the brothers and cousins of the Maid, was the Jeanne des Armoises of 1436-1439. The du Lys family could not successively adopt TWO impostors as their sister! Again, the woman of circ. 1449-1452 is not a younger sister of Jeanne, who in 1429 had no sister living, though one, Catherine, whom she dearly loved, was dead.