After several years of revelations, Joan, urged more and more by that inward voice which excited her to arm for her country, formed the resolution of presenting herself to Baudricourt, governor of Vaucouleurs, a small city of the neighbourhood:—“Master captain,” said she, “know that God has for some time past often given me to know, and has commanded me to go to the gentil dauphin, who ought, it is true, to be king of France, and that he should place under me men-at-arms, and that I should raise the siege of Orleans, and lead him to be crowned at Reims.” The astonished Baudricourt supposed her to be mad, and wanted to have her exorcised by the curé of the place. Joan continued to urge him for six months, and at length the governor, subdued by her importunities, armed her at all points, gave her in charge to two gentlemen with their servants, and dismissed her, saying, “Go, come of it what may!” Towards the end of February she arrived at Chinon, where the dauphin then was. It was precisely the moment when the vacillating Charles appeared to be sinking under the weight of his ill fortune.[11] She announced herself at the court of the monarch. During two days it was deliberated whether she should be heard or not; but at length curiosity prevailed, and she was admitted. The king, without any mark of superior dignity, mingled with the crowd of courtiers, on purpose to prove her. Joan distinguished him, pointed him out, and in spite of the cries “You are mistaken! you are mistaken!” continued to exclaim, “That is he! that is he!” They all admire her noble boldness; they surround her, and gaze on her with astonished looks. Charles himself cannot explain what passes in his heart at the aspect of this unknown girl: “Gentil dauphin,” said the heroine, without being the least disconcerted, “my name is Jeanne la Pucelle. The King of Heaven has sent me to succour you; if you will please to give me men of war, by divine grace and force of arms I will raise the siege of Orleans, and will lead you to Reims to be crowned, in spite of all your enemies. This is what the King of Heaven has ordered me to tell you, and it is His will that the English should return to their own country, and leave you peaceful in yours, as being the only true and legitimate heir of it; that if you make this offering to God, He will make you much greater and more flourishing than your predecessors have ever been; and He will take it ill of the English if they do not retire.”
Thus spoke La Pucelle; the fire of her words, the naïveté of her manner, her simple but precise replies, everything convinced. The king caused her to be examined by matrons, by theologians, and by his parliament. Yoland of Arragon, queen of Sicily, accompanied by the ladies De Gaucourt, De Tiénes, and several others of the first distinction, visited Joan, and pronounced her to be as pure as she had described herself. The theologians, after many interrogations, decided that she was inspired. The parliament of Poitiers, after the most scrupulous observations, required that she should manifest the truth of her revelations by some prodigy. “I did not come to Poitiers,” she haughtily replied, “to perform miracles; but conduct me to Orleans, and I will give you certain signs of my mission.” This firm reply so astonished her judges, that all with one voice declared that this heavenly instrument which the All-Powerful had sent to their country ought to be instantly employed. Charles ordered a splendid and complete suit of armour to be made for her, gave her a standard, squires, pages, an intendant, a chaplain, and a train becoming the state of a great warlike leader. The new Amazon placed herself at the head of a considerable convoy destined for Orleans; and her warriors soon felt themselves inspired with her enthusiasm. She set out, followed by Marshal De Boussac, Gilles de Rais, the admiral De Couland, Ambroise de Loté, and Lahire, and arrived on the 29th of April within sight of the place. Dunois came to meet her; he begged her to satisfy the desire the inhabitants had to behold their liberator: she yielded to his entreaties, and she entered the city as if in triumph. A thousand cries of joy were heard; at that moment the Orléannais believed themselves invincible, and in fact were so. Everything was changed; the English, to that day conquerors, trembled at the name of Joan of Arc; they as firmly believed her to be a sorceress as the French believed her to be celestially inspired. “English,” wrote the heroine to them, “you who have no right to this kingdom of France, God commands you by me, Jeanne la Pucelle, to abandon your forts and to retire.” The couriers were arrested, and no reply was made to this awful summons but insults. Joan, outraged but dreaded, now prepared to prove her mission. On Wednesday, the 4th of May, she selected a body of troops, and, filled with an ardour more than human, she precipitated herself upon the enemy’s forts, and carried them after an assault of four hours. She then thought of gaining possession of the boulevard and fort of the Tourelles, where the élite of the English were cantoned, under the orders of the celebrated Glansdale. After having made her dispositions during the night, she gave the signal as the first rays of day appeared. The ready troops follow her, mount with her to the breach, fight with ardour, press, pierce through, and overthrow the English, who, nevertheless, defend themselves with great courage. The French were on the point of carrying all before them, when Joan, wounded in the neck, was obliged to retire to put a dressing to her wound. Her absence extinguished the courage of the assailants; the soldiers missed the warlike illusion which rendered them victorious. Each began to desire to place himself in safety: even Dunois judged it most prudent to do so. All at once La Pucelle reappears! She rushes to the foot of the fort, and there plants her standard. Her intrepidity passes into all hearts; the efforts of her followers are redoubled, their fatigues and fears are forgotten, the English fly, the boulevard is carried!
On the morrow the vanquished English draw up in order of battle on the side of La Beauce; the French, still led on, still animated by their heroine, present themselves in the same order, resolved to fight, although inferior in numbers. But their enemies, till that time so proud and so terrible, did not dare to stand before them; they precipitately retreated, leaving behind them their sick, their baggage, their provisions, their artillery, and nearly five thousand dead. Thus, contrary to all hopes and expectations, the city of Orleans was relieved on the 8th of May, 1419. Public gratitude exhausted itself, so to say, to prove to Joan of Arc how deeply the greatness of her benefits was felt; the king ennobled her, with her father, her three brothers, and all her posterity. A statue was erected to her on the bridge of the city she had saved, and, to eternize the memory of this fortunate event, a festival was established, which is still celebrated every year on the 8th of May. At this festival an eulogy is pronounced on Joan of Arc, who, from the period of the raising of the siege, has been styled the Maid of Orleans. During the troubles of the Revolution, ignorant and barbarous men overthrew, in Orleans, the statue of a heroine who had preserved their city from the yoke of the English, and roused the spirit in France which shortly afterwards expelled the invaders from their soil; it was, however, reinstated by Buonaparte, during his consulship, on which occasion he did not forget to introduce a pungent reflection upon his and Joan’s enemies, the English.
The momentary gratitude was such as we have above described it; but what was the conduct of the king she had saved, when she became a captive? After she had fulfilled her mission, and effected the consecration of the king at Reims, she wished to retire, “to be taken back,” as she said, “to her father and mother, and keep their sheep and tend to their cattle.” But Charles’s captains had found the value of the enthusiasm she created, and refused to let her go. She, however, never was again as she had been; if she had had any faith in the divinity of her mission, with its completion it was gone. She was wounded at the siege of Paris, and was afterwards taken prisoner. As no Englishman can speak of her death without a blush, we will pass over that in humbled silence; but what shall we say for her king, who owed her so much, who heard of her imprisonment and death with the utmost indifference, and did not make the least effort to save her, or mitigate the horrors of her punishment? It was twenty-five years before he bethought himself of doing her memory justice: but Charles VII. was then a very different man from what he had been when he was so deeply indebted to Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc is one of those remarkable characters who have achieved miracles by working upon the current superstitions of the times they lived in. To what a degree they were superstitious, we may judge by the one instance of the duchess of Gloucester, the wife of the king’s uncle, being tried and punished to the full extent the court durst venture, for dabbling in witchcraft. Acknowledging the immense benefit Joan’s efforts produced, and at the same time admitting the spirit and intelligence with which she carried out her plans, when we look at the pretence under which she operated, we are made sceptical, as we are in all such cases, of the first moving cause. In fact, we think it much more probable that the keen-witted Dunois should have trained a bold, shrewd girl to impose upon a weak young king and a superstitious people, than for an instant to imagine there was anything supernatural in her mission, or even that she devised a scheme entirely herself. Shakespeare generally follows the chronicles pretty faithfully; and the manner in which Dunois introduces her to the notice of the king is very suspicious. We do not take Shakespeare’s view of her character, but we are quite as much at variance with those poets who throw a veil of perfection and sickly sentimentality over it. In our opinion, Joan is a person who almost unwittingly effected wonders; neither she nor Dunois contemplated the extent of the good she did for France. Had she appeared under any banner but that of superstition, we should not have said a word against the faith that is placed in her; but no student of history should allow that pretence to pass without the closest investigation. As a high-spirited, intelligent, persevering, patriotic woman, she has much of our admiration, but as the inspired Maid of Orleans, she has none.
Her intervention was critically timed. The nobles were beginning to be ashamed of allowing a foreign power to dominate over the fair fields of France; the patience of the people under an oppressive yoke was exhausted; the English leaders, brave and wise as they were, were many and divided, under a minor king of weak character even when a man. In addition to these causes all beginning to operate favourably for France, Charles VII. was becoming of an age to perceive his legitimate course, and if he had not shaken off the trammels of sloth and pleasure, occasionally showed some little scintillations of what he afterwards became. When paying tribute to the memory of Joan of Arc as the regenerator of France, the French should not forget another remarkable woman to whom they are indebted: Agnes Sorel employed no magic but beauty and good sense, and yet the rousing of the king to a sense of his duty was as much due to her as the rousing of the people was due to Joan.
PAVIA.
A.D. 476.
Orestes having undertaken to dethrone Nepos, the emperor of the West, raised an army, merely showed himself, and the weak monarch abandoned the diadem. The fortunate rebel encircled the head of his son Romulus Augustulus with it. The Roman empire of the West was in its last period of decay. Odoacer, at the head of an army of Goths, Heruli, Scyrri, and Thuringians, came to give it the last blow, and to reign over its vast wreck. Terror and confusion preceded him. All fled, all dispersed at his approach. The plains were deserted, the cities opened their gates to him. Orestes, too weak to withstand him, shut himself up in Pavia. Odoacer pursued him thither, carried the city by storm, made a frightful carnage, and set fire to the churches and houses. Orestes was taken and decapitated on the 28th of August, 476, the very day on which, one year before, he had dragged Nepos from his throne. Augustulus, abandoned by everybody, stripped himself of his dangerous dignity, and delivered up the purple to his conqueror, who, out of compassion for his age, left him his life, with a pension of six thousand golden pence, that is, about three thousand three hundred pounds sterling. Thus disappeared the empire of the West, after having subsisted five hundred and six years from the battle of Actium, and twelve hundred and twenty-nine from the foundation of Rome. Scarcely was its fall perceived, scarcely a look was fixed upon its last moments; it might be compared to an old man who dies of caducity.