COME now, the good ship City of Paris sails in a few days, so let us away over the ocean to France.
Here we are in Paris, the most beautiful, though not the best city in the world, they say.
But after six days sightseeing we’ll hurry to another place, and here we are in Domremy. Here we’ll roam over the hills and think. See that cluster of trees? We must sit under them and upon that very stone. There on that grassy bank where the flowers are blooming, and at whose foot runs a gentle brook, we must spend an hour and think, think who sat upon that very spot nearly five hundred years ago and watched her father’s flock of sheep or listened to the singing birds or talked with God through the sweet roses she holds. Now she looks up at the great sun, now at a passing cloud; now a soft wind fans her face; a shepherd dog lies at her feet; just yonder some lambs are nestled together.
She is but thirteen years old, but she loves to speak to God as though he were by her side—and is he not?
Late one evening she comes leading the sheep home. Sitting alone looking out into the moonlight, Jeanne’s mother inquires: “My child, what keeps you so long in the field? You must come home earlier, my darling, or something will happen to you.”
“But, mamma, I’ve heard voices in the fields, and they seem to come from the roses and the rocks and the robins and in every wind, and they tell me of my native land and my home and God, that I must love ma belle France, and save it out of the hands of all its enemies, and this is what keeps me so late, my sweet, dear mamma.”
“Voices, child?”
“Aye, mamma, voices from Heaven speaking in my heart. Your Jeanne hears them loud, in my heart, at least, and they say I must save my poor sad country.”
Jeanne’s mother could say nothing, but wonder if the child was out of her mind, or if she had really had a vision of angels, as in olden times they came to the shepherds while they watched their flocks.