I.
“Give me Duke René de Barrois, the noble son of good Queen Yolande, to guide me into France.” The request was made by a simple village maiden aged not more than seventeen years, and the personage she addressed was Charles II., Duke of Lorraine. It was an extraordinary request; the occasion, too, was extraordinary.
Born on the Feast of the Epiphany in the year 1412, of worthy peasants, at Domremy, in Alsace,—Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée, his wife,—Jeanne was the younger of their two daughters; she had three brothers older than herself. Domremy was a squalid little hamlet, like many another upon the Meuse, boasting of the mother-church of the commune—a grim old building, but glorified by many figures of holy saints in its coloured windows. The nearest village was Maxey, upon the borders of Lorraine. The villagers were in constant feud—Domremy for the King of France and her own Duke at Nancy, Maxey for the Duke of Burgundy and the hated English. Sieur Jacques d’Arc and his three stalwart, hard-working sons were as ready with the pike as they were handy with the plough. Mère Isabelle and her two daughters were zealous backers of their menfolk.
Sieur Jacques was, as peasant farmers went, a man of substance and well connected. He had saved a goodly sum of money, and owned, perhaps, the biggest flock of sheep in the country-side. Milch cows and fattening oxen grazed his wide meadows. He was a man of probity, and had served the ancestral office of Maire of Domremy for many a year. Mère Isabelle excelled in stitchery as well as in the rearing of poultry and the cultivation of her fair garden plot. When about to be delivered of her youngest child, she dreamed three times that she should bear a girl, and that she should become famous in her country’s history. The narrative goes on to say that many unusual circumstances attended her child’s nativity: a fierce thunderstorm shook the dwelling, and mysterious voices uttered the strange cry: “Aux secours! aux secours de la France!”
Jeanne, the little daughter, was duly christened by the curé, and from her mother’s womb she was a child of dedication—St. Catherine and St. Margaret were her spiritual sponsors. Precocious from her weaning, both in physical growth and mental development, she grew up a devotee at Mass and shrine. She sought solitude and silence, and declined to share her playmates’ games. Other children thought her odd, and old crones shook their heads and pitied Sieur Jacques and his worthy spouse. Jeanne’s favourite resort was a thicket near her parents’ home,—Le Bois Chènus it was called,—an oak-wood grove where her father’s pigs greedily sought for acorns. The Bois had, however, a weird repute; it had been, centuries before, a sacrificial site of heathen worship, and the village folk avoided it at night, for they said they saw strange figures under the trees and heard strange sounds,—in fact, the wood was haunted.
JEANNE D’ARC
From a Fresco by E. Lepenveu. Pantheon, Paris