| “Que peut-il d’autre estre dit plus Ne des grands faits du temps passé: Moysès en qui Dieu afflus Mit graces et vertus assez; | Il tira sans estre lassez Le peuple Israël hors d’Egypte; Par miracle ainsi repassez Nous as de mal, pucelle eslite.” Buchon, p. 542. |
The question which troubled Armagnac was a last struggle of the Great Schism. Benedict XIII., who had never submitted to the Council of Constance, died in 1424, when his cardinals quarrelled and elected two successors to his shadowy papacy—Clement VIII. and Benedict XIV. In 1429, the Council of Tortosa suppressed them both, but at the moment it was a subject on which Armagnac might imagine that heavenly guidance was desirable.
[373] Görres, pp. 241-2, 273.—Procès, p. 482.—Buchon, pp. 513-4.—Dynteri Chron. Duc. Brabant. Lib. VI. ch. 235.
In the register of taxes every year was written opposite the names of Domremy and Greux, “Neant, la Pucelle.” The grant of nobility to her family had the very unusual clause that it passed by the female as well as the male descendants, who were thus all exempt from taxation. As matrimonial alliances extended among the rich bourgeoisie this exemption spread so far that in 1614 the financial results caused its limitation to the male lines for the future (Vallet de Viriville, Charles du Lis, pp. 24, 88).
[374] Nider Formicar v. viii.—Rymer, X. 459, 472.—Gersoni Opp. Ed. 1488, liii. T-Z.—M. de l’Averdy gives an abstract of other learned disputations on the subject of Joan (ubi sup. III. 212-17).
[375] Chronique, p. 447.—Buchon, p. 524.—Pez, Thesaur. Anecd. VI. III. 237.—Procès, p. 484.—L’Averdy, III. 338.
The popular explanation of Joan’s career connected her good-fortune with a sword marked with five crosses on the blade, which she had miraculously discovered in the church of St. Catharine de Fierbois, and which she thenceforth carried. On the march to Reims, finding her commands disregarded as to the exclusion of prostitutes from the army, she beat some loose women with the flat of the blade and broke it. No smith could weld the fragments together; she was obliged to wear another sword, and her unvarying success disappeared.—Jean Chartier. pp. 20, 29, 42.
[376] Chronique, pp. 446-50.—Jean Chartier, p. 33-36.—Görres, p. 215.—Monstrelet, II. 66-70.—Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, an 1429.—Procès, pp. 486, 490.—Mémoires de Saint-Remy, ch. 152.—Buchon, pp. 524, 539.
[377] Görres, pp. 292-5.—Jean Chartier, pp. 39-40.—Jean le Bouvier, p. 381.—Martini d’Auvergne, Vigiles de Charles VII.—Buchon, p. 544.—Procès, pp. 480, 488, 490.
[378] Procès, pp. 481, 482, 488.—Mémoires de Saint-Remy, ch. 158.—Monstrelet, II. 84-86.—Chronique, p. 456.—Jean Chartier, p. 42.