Nursed in an atmosphere of patriotism, therefore, the little Jeanne had the horrors of war brought vividly before her when a band of brigands, nominally English or Burgundian partisans, rushed down upon Domremy, sacked the town, burned the church, and drove many of the inhabitants, including Jeanne's family, into temporary exile. The family came back again, and the immediate ravages of the soldiers were repaired, but Jeanne never forgot, and told in after years how she would shiver with horror and then weep from sheer pity at seeing her village friends come back wounded and bleeding from some affray with the English.
Jeanne, the daughter of one who is described as a simple laboureur (which may mean that he was an independent farmer in a small way, not a mere laborer), was born in 1412, and was therefore old enough to see and to appreciate the worst of the miseries of France and to understand the tales of war and of English outrages brought to her father's door by many a traveller on the great highway that passed through Domremy; and her heart was filled with pity for the poor dauphin, repudiated by his own mother, exiled from his kingdom by the English, wandering aimlessly from province to province where the arms of his enemies made it safe for him to pass. The child's mind could but be stirred and filled with those vague, generous dreams of sacrifice, of heroism, of impossible achievements, which, like other visions, fade "into the light of common day" with most of us. Not so with Jeanne, in whom from the start there was something mystical, something that set her apart from other children.
With her work-a-day life we are not concerned, nor with those members of her family who stand for none of the things of the spirit for which she was to serve. Her father, of whom even tradition has been able to make neither a monster nor a hero, was merely a commonplace peasant, apparently amiable and kindly, but manifestly incapable of sympathy with things ethereal and supernatural; we need not go so far as De Quincey and deny him patriotism: "He would greatly have preferred... the saving of a pound or so of bacon to saving the Oriflamme of France." And so with her brothers, Jean and Pierre; though ennobled by the king, and though doubtless very good fellows, they were certainly very far from being noble in spirit, or in any way comparable to their sister. For Jeanne's nobility was based upon no accident of birth or favor of a prince: it was the gift of God.
The life of Jeanne d'Arc was probably not essentially different from that of other girls of her class, at least up to her fourteenth or fifteenth year. From the testimony of those who recalled the childhood of the heroine long after she had become a heroine we must turn with some distrust; for motives the most diverse may have induced, and doubtless did induce, them to conceal or even to misrepresent many things in this simple story. But there seems to be no doubt that Jeanne tended sheep, like her sister and other children of the neighborhood, that she learned all the simple little domestic arts, and "was a good girl, diligent at her work"; she herself refers with pride to her skill as a needlewoman: "My mother taught me so well that I could sew as well as any woman in Rouen," and Rouen was one of the centres of fine work; but of reading and writing, even the rudiments of education, she knew nothing. Of one other thing, too, there is no doubt, though the legend-mongers have doubtless colored the picture a little here also; this is that the child was pious, manifesting greater devoutness than was common among her class. And in this devoutness, too, a thing more significant still, she manifested a diffidence, a desire to withdraw herself and her prayers from the profanation of vulgar and inquisitive eyes.
Much has been made of the mysterious associations of forests fairy-haunted, of trees where the children danced and hung garlands in honor of some fairy queen, whom the good curé of the village devoutly exorcised every spring. What community in a land neighbored by mountains but has its "little people," whether fairies, hobgoblins, or gnomes? The learned doctors at Jeanne's trial were trying to fasten upon her some preposterous charge of witchcraft and association with the powers of evil; it was their business to drag in the fairies and to show that Jeanne knew more of such things than was good for the glory of God; and ever since, the biographers have seized upon what scanty ravellings of childish legend Jeanne could recall upon her trial, and have woven of them fine cobwebs of filmy pattern, to show how the whole soil of Domremy, more than any other particular spot in France, produced mushroom crops of fairies, and that a very miasma of enchantment was in the air. The mass of fanciful and sometimes exquisite rhetoric on this theme in the lives of Jeanne would surely have convicted her of witchcraft in the fifteenth century. In good truth, Jeanne probably had as firm belief in fairies as you and I once had in Hop-o'-my-Thumb and Red Ridinghood; but those were childish things, in no way connected with her mission.
That which is of importance to note is that she was always a gentle and tender-hearted girl, ready to nurse the sick or to play with the children. "Well do I know it," says an aged peasant who testified for her memory years after she was dead, "I was then but a child, and she nursed me." But most important of all is the knowledge that her enemies could not find in Domremy one witness to testify against her; there was in her native village no envious wretch, no Ascalaphus, who could concoct a probable tale of any sort to the injury of one who had as a child led a life so pure, so good, but likewise so uneventful.
At what time Jeanne began to see visions we cannot tell exactly; it is probable that the dreams of childhood, long indulged, merged at first unconsciously into visions that seemed to her as real as things seen with the bodily eye. By her own account, it was some six or seven years after she first felt called by the heavenly voices before she found courage to attempt the apparently impossible things they commanded. One vision she remembered all her life long, because it was kept constantly before her mind by the great passion of her life. She herself tells of this one, and neither persuasions nor ridicule nor the terrors of the prison could shake her absolute faith in its reality. "Long had she heard celestial voices, sometimes counselling her to be a good girl, sometimes specially recommending to her the practice of piety and the careful guarding of her virginity, sometimes echoing in unison with her own thoughts as they told her of the woes of France and the groans of the people. One day as she sat working and musing in the garden next to the church wall, there came a bright and blinding light, a heavenly effulgence stronger than the midday sun; then out of this glory came the voice, soft, yet commanding, of a man, whose glorious winged figure she could see dimly, saying: 'Jeanne, arise! go to the succor of the Dauphin, and thou shalt restore his kingdom to him.' The poor girl, all abashed, fell upon her knees: 'Messire, how can I do this, since I am but a poor girl, and know not how to ride or to lead men-at-arms?' But the voice insisted: 'Thou shalt go to the Sire de Baudricourt, commanding for the King at Vaucouleurs, and he will conduct thee to the Dauphin. Fear not; Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine will aid thee.'"
Jeanne was in tears, for the fear of the thing, not daring as yet to confide in anyone. But the voices continued to importune her, and again she saw the angel, him whom in her simple fashion she described as moult prudhomme (a very noble man), and whom she now recognized to be the very Saint Michael whose image she had seen in her church, triumphing over the dragon. And with him came fair women, all in white, with lights and troops of angels all about them, the holy and brave virgins Margaret and Catherine. They had come, as Saint Michael the Archangel had promised, to be her spiritual guides and comforters; and their blessed forms were never far from her, and their voices whispered to her to be of good cheer, for that through her and her alone France would be saved.
Tortured by doubts and fears, she revealed these visions to her mother, from whom she had learned her Ave, Pater, Credo, the sweet and simple faith that meant so much to her. Her mother was half inclined to believe in Jeanne, and was at least sympathetic; but her father could see in these visions but childish nonsense that would lead his daughter astray. For him there was no faith in such things; can one blame him if he thought them but the silly moonings of a child, and dealt with that child sternly in the hope of saving her? He declared that he would drown Jeanne with his own hands rather than see her ride off with men-at-arms into that France of which he and she knew nothing but that it was from end to end given over to war and pillage. Thinking that marriage might dispel her illusions about saving France,--as indeed it would,--they persecuted her to marry a young villager who had fallen desperately in love with her and claimed that she had promised to marry him. With a courage that must have surprised even herself, she went before the ecclesiastical court of Toul and told her story so frankly that the judge dismissed the desperate lover. Not for her were the joys and sorrows of a wife and mother.
With all her determination and masculine contempt for those things that are terrors to most women, Jeanne loved her home. In after years she was ever sighing for the quiet life of her father's cottage, where she might sit and spin with her mother, or wander forth over the fields with her sister to tend the sheep. What a piteous struggle must there have been in her breast! On the one hand, an angry father, whom she loved, a mother whom she loved better, a safe home, and in it all that her simple heart desired; on the other, the great and terrible world, the armies of rough men, the dissolute courtiers, the long journeys over an unknown country, for one who had hardly stirred out of sight of Domremy church tower. Love of home, so strong in the hearts of all women, so precious to the peasant woman of France above all others, must be renounced for love of country. There have been no better or more determined patriots than women, as Cæsar found when the women of Gaul cheered their husbands on to the contest with his legions; but these women were fighting at home, as it were upon the threshold; they did not go forth to lead armies in offensive warfare; theirs was the steady courage of desperation, not the active courage which must sustain itself, keep its own fires alive, instead of relying upon the stimulus of impulse and a desperate crisis. All the fears and heartbreakings of the struggle in Jeanne's mind have been hidden from us, for she speaks not of them; having fought out this battle with herself and decided that France needs her more than does her mother, she does not allow herself to turn back, and we get but a plaintive reminiscence here and there, since she has locked up this grief in her heart.