When the crown was placed on the dauphin's head Jeanne knelt before him, and wept as she embraced his knees. "O gentle king," she said, "now is fulfilled the will of God, who was pleased that I should raise the siege of Orléans and should bring you to your city of Rheims to be crowned and anointed, in proof that you are true king and rightful possessor of the realm of France." She herself felt that her mission was accomplished, and besought the king to allow her to return to her home, "to my father and mother, to keep their sheep for them, as was my wont." But Jeanne was too useful to be allowed to retire, and though she no longer heard the call of her divine monitors Charles insisted on her remaining to help him to win back his kingdom; but "all that was to be done she had now accomplished; what remained was--to suffer."
As she rode through the streets of Rheims she exclaimed: "O why can I not die here!" "And where, then, will you die?" asked the archbishop. "I know not; it will be where God pleases. I have done what my Lord commanded me to do. Now I would that it might please Him to send me back to keep my sheep with my sister and my mother." Her courage was as high as ever, the brave heart faltered not, but it was no longer inspired. "She began to hear those voices, no longer from heaven, but from the hearth, those voices that vainly call disheartened man, sick of ambition and glory, to the home of his earliest affections, to the humble occupations of his childhood, to the obscurity of his early days." Hearken to those voices, Jeanne, and strive no longer to awaken faint echoes of thy heavenly voices:
"The oracles are dumb,...
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."
This portion of Jeanne's life has always seemed to me the most pitiful, the period when "her God had forsaken her," when her heart warned her that her divine task was done, and when yet that heart yearned to do more for France. In the hour of supreme trial strength came to her with the thought that her suffering was the will of God; but now what was the will of God? In vain she prayed for guidance; there was nothing but the timidity and the yearning for rest of this girlish heart on the one hand, and the pleading of the king and the courtiers on the other. It was not to be expected that Jeanne, always willing to sacrifice herself, should do anything else than consent still to be, as she had been for three glorious months, the leader of France, the bodily representative of national feeling. With or without inspiration, she could serve.
Disaster followed upon disaster in her brief subsequent career; but always she was the same honest, hopeful, pure girl, striving her utmost to discipline her army, to restrain the cruelty of her soldiers, to win for the dauphin a reconciliation with his cousin of Burgundy. Some of her biographers have noted, or pretended to note, a lamentable change in her character at this time. It is said that she became less scrupulous of shedding blood, less careful in enforcing moral and religious discipline among her followers, above all, less gentle and patient in temper. But Jeanne had never been able to compel absolute obedience from soldiers little better than banditti, and when the notion of her sanctity began to fade away as the men saw her in the daily life of the camp, and saw her a mere human creature, fallible like themselves, her strongest hold on them was loosened. She had never been, since her mission was assumed, a mere dainty, meek, unresisting heroine of romance, a paragon of grace and beauty for whom knights risked their lives while she sat by and smiled and dressed the wounds of the victor after the fight. She had definitely and from the first taken an active part in the real business of fighting, had on more than one occasion displayed her prowess in the field. A generation after her death, when all France had come to regard her as a martyr, a priest testified that "she would not use her sword, nor would she slay anyone"; but this testimony is certainly at variance with all that we know of the actual behavior of Jeanne in battle, and seems sufficiently contradicted by her own statement that the sword she used at Compiègne was "excellent, either for cutting or thrusting." She made the statement frankly, without any suspicion of its apparent inconsistency with her professions of a divine mission. We have no doubt that Jeanne delivered many a good stroke in deadly earnest, and we do not respect her the less for it. We need not even sorrow, but rather rejoice, at that display of honest indignation against the unruly and immoral in her camp, when she broke her sword of Saint Catherine over one rascal's head.
Town after town had thrown open its gates at sight of the white banner and the Maid of Orléans; but Paris still remained in the hands of the English. Jeanne was averse to making any attack upon Paris; her heart misgave her, but she yielded to the will of the king. The assault that followed (September 8, 1429), in which she behaved with desperate but hopeless courage, fighting on in spite of a severe wound, resulted in a disastrous repulse, the French losing heavily. Jeanne, who had opposed making the attack, was nevertheless held responsible for the result. Faith in her was rudely shaken, and even those courtiers who had fawned upon her now said that her impiety--they, of course, were qualified to pronounce upon such a point--had been fitly rebuked in this defeat: had she not ventured to deliver the assault upon the anniversary of the Nativity of Our Lady? "The Armagnacs," says the journal of a pious citizen of Paris, "were so filled with wickedness and unbelief, that, on the word of a creature in the shape of a woman with them, called La Pucelle (what it might be God alone knows!), they conspired on the anniversary of the Nativity of Our Lady... to attack Paris."
Jeanne, utterly disheartened by her defeat, and half believing that she had merited this rebuke from heaven, humbled herself before God and before the king, and renounced her arms, laying her sword upon the altar of Saint-Denis. But though willing to shift the blame for failures upon her, Charles was not willing to dispense with her services if there was anything more to be hoped from them. She was induced to take up arms again; but we will pass over in silence the details of her later valiant but hopeless service and speak only of her last feat of arms.
The Burgundians, though their duke was already in secret correspondence with Charles, had laid siege to Compiègne. Jeanne, with a small body of troops succeeded in forcing her way into the town, and that same day (May 23, 1430) led a sortie that at first drove back the besiegers. The Burgundians rallied, however, and Jeanne's troops were beaten back into the town. As she herself, bringing up the rear in the retreat, turned to drive back a band of the pursuers that her troops might reach the gates in safety, she was left alone; and the drawbridge of Compiègne rose, cutting her off from rescue or from escape. Surrender, Jeanne, there is no hope for thee; France is weary of thee; for hast thou not done all that France could hope from thee? Jeanne herself had said that she feared nothing but treachery. Whatever the immediate motive of those who raised the drawbridge at Compiègne, whether they were bribed by the Burgundians or merely exasperated because the heroine had not performed miracles, the act was clear treachery, and the pitiful little moat of this town was the impassable barrier that shut Jeanne d'Arc out of that France she had saved.