[Original]
On the 6th of January, 1428, this young girl, the daughter of simple peasants, humble tillers of the soil, of good life and repute, she herself a good, simple, gentle girl, no idler, occupied in sewing and spinning with her mother, or driving afield her father's sheep, and sometimes even, when her father's turn came round, keeping for him the whole flock of the commune, was fulfilling her sixteenth year. ("Jeanne d'Arc," by M. Wallon, Vol. I, p. 32.) It was Joan of Arc, whom all the neighbors called Joannette. She was no recluse; she often went with her companions to sing and eat cakes beside the fountain by the gooseberry bush, under an old beech, which was called the fairy-tree; but dancing she did not like. She was constant at church, she delighted in the sound of the bells, she often went to confession and communion, and she blushed when her friends taxed her with being too religious. In 1421, when Joan was hardly nine, a band of Anglo-Burgundians penetrated into her country and transferred thither the ravages of war. The village of Domremy and the little town of Vaucouleurs were French and faithful to the French kingship; and Joan wept to see the lads of her parish returning bruised and bleeding from encounters with the enemy. Her relatives and neighbors were one day obliged to take flight, and at their return they found their houses burnt or devastated. Joan wondered whether it could possibly be that God permitted such excesses and disasters. In 1425, on a summer's day, at noon, she was in her father's little garden. She heard a voice calling her, at her father's right side, in the direction of the church, and a great brightness shone upon her at the same time in the same spot.
At first she was frightened, but she recovered herself on finding that "it was a worthy voice"; and at the second call she perceived that it was the voice of angels. "I saw them with my bodily eyes," she said six years later to her judges at Rouen, "as plainly as I see you; when they departed from me I wept and would fain have had them take me with them."
The apparitions came again, and exhorted her "to go to France for to deliver the kingdom." She became dreamy, wrapt in constant meditation. "I could endure no longer," said she at a later period, "and the time went heavily with me as with a woman in travail."
She ended with telling everything to her father, who listened to her words anxiously at first, and afterwards wrathfully. He himself one night dreamed that his daughter had followed the King's men-at-arms to France, and from that moment he kept her under strict superintendence.
"If I knew of your sister's going," he said to his sons, "I would bid you drown her; and, if you did not do it, I would drown her myself."
Joan submitted: there was no leaven of pride in her sublimation, and she did not suppose that her intercourse with celestial voices relieved her from the duty of obeying her parents..
Attempts were made to distract her mind. A young man who courted her was induced to say that he had a promise of marriage from her and claim the fulfillment of it. Joan went before the ecclesiastical judge, made affirmation that she had given no promise and without difficulty gained her cause. Everybody believed her and respected her.
In a village hard by Domremy she had an uncle whose wife was near her confinement; she got herself invited to go and nurse her aunt, and thereupon she opened her heart to her uncle, repeating a popular saying which had spread indeed throughout the country: