He won victory even after his death, so say the chronicles of that day. It is related that an agreement had been made for the surrender of the besieged fortress, and that the date fixed was July 14, the day after Du Guesclin died. The new commander of the army summoned the governor to surrender, but he declared that he had given his word to Du Guesclin, and would yield the place to no other. He was told that the constable was dead.
"Very well;" he replied, "I will carry the keys of the town to his tomb."
And so he did. He marched out of the place at the head of his garrison, passed through the lines of the besieging army, knelt before Du Guesclin's corpse, and laid the keys of Châteauneuf-Randon on his bier.
And thus passed away one of the greatest and noblest warriors France had ever known, honored in life and triumphant in death.
JOAN OF ARC, THE MAID OF ORLEANS.
At the hour of noon, on a sunny summer's day in the year of our Lord 1425, a young girl of the little village of Domremy, France, stood with bent head and thoughtful eyes in the small garden attached to her father's humble home. There was nothing in her appearance to attract a second glance. Her parents were peasants, her occupation was one of constant toil, her attire was of the humblest, her life had been hitherto spent in aiding her mother at home or in driving her father's few sheep afield. None who saw her on that day could have dreamed that this simple peasant maiden was destined to become one of the most famous women whose name history records, and that this day, was that of the beginning of her career.
She had been born at a critical period in history. Her country was in extremity. For the greater part of a century the dreadful "Hundred Years' War" had been waged, desolating France, destroying its people by the thousands, bringing it more and more under the dominion of a foreign foe. The realm of France had now reached its lowest depth of disaster, its king uncrowned, its fairest regions overrun,—here by the English, there by the Burgundians,—the whole kingdom in peril of being taken and reduced to vassalage. Never before nor since had the need of a deliverer been so vitally felt. The deliverer chosen of heaven was the young peasant girl who walked that summer noon in her father's humble garden at Domremy.
Young as she was, she had seen the horrors of war. Four years before the village had been plundered and burnt, its defenders slain or wounded, the surrounding country devastated. The story of the suffering and peril of France was in all French ears. Doubtless little Joan's soul burned with sympathy for her beloved land as she moved thoughtfully up and down the garden paths, asking herself if God could longer permit such wrongs and disasters to continue.
Suddenly, to her right, in the direction of the small village church, Joan heard a voice calling her, and, looking thither, she was surprised and frightened at seeing a great light. The voice, continued; her courage returned; "it was a worthy voice," she tells us, one that could come only from angels. "I saw them with my bodily eyes," she afterwards said. "When they departed from me I wept and would fain have had them take me with them." Again and again came to her the voices and the forms; they haunted her; and still the burden of their exhortation was the same, that she should "go to France to deliver the kingdom." The girl grew dreamy. She became lost in meditation, full of deep thoughts and budding purposes, wrought by the celestial voices into high hopes and noble aspirations, possessed with the belief that she had been chosen by heaven to deliver France from its woes and to disconcert its enemies.