GERMINATION.
Several weeks went by. The prophecy of Merlin, the remembrance of the
King's misfortunes and of the disasters of France, ravaged by the
English, obstinately crowded upon Jeannette's mind, before whom her
parents frequently conversed upon the sad plight of the country. Thus,
often during the hours she spent in solitary musings with her flock in
the fields or the woods, she repeated in a low voice the passage from
the prophecy of the Gallic bard:
"Gaul, lost by a woman, shall be saved by a virgin
From the borders of Lorraine and a forest of old oaks."
Or that other:
"Oh, how much blood!
It spouts up, it flows in torrents!
It steams and, like a mist, it rises heavenward
Where the thunder peals, where the lightning flashes!
Athwart those peals of thunder, those flashes of lightning,
I see a martial virgin.
White is her steed, white is her armor;
She battles, she battles still in the midst of a forest of lances,
And seems to be riding on the backs of the archers."
Whereupon the angel of dazzling light would place the royal crown in the
hands of the martial virgin, who crowned her King in the midst of shouts
of joy and chants of victory!
Every day, looking with her mind's eyes towards the borders of Lorraine
and failing to see the emancipating virgin, Jeannette beseeched her two
good saints--St. Marguerite and St. Catherine--to intercede with the
Lord in behalf of the safety of the gentle Dauphin, who had been
deprived of his throne. Vainly did she beseech them to obtain the
deliverance of poor France, for so many years a prey to the English; and
she also fervently implored heaven for the fulfilment of the prophecy of
Merlin, a prophecy that seemed plausible to Jeannette's mind after
Sybille had told her of the exploits of the martial virgins who came in
their ships from the distant seas of the North and besieged Paris; or
the prowess of Jeannette of Montfort, battling like a lioness defending
her whelps; or, finally, the heroic deeds of the Gallic women of olden
days who accompanied their husbands, their brothers and their fathers to
battle.
Jeannette was approaching her fourteenth year, an age at which robust
and healthy natures, well developed by the invigorating labors of a
rustic life, ordinarily enter their period of puberty. In that period of
their lives, on the point, so grave for their sex, of becoming maids,
they are assailed by unaccountable fears, by a vague sense of sadness,
by an imperious demand for solitude where to give a loose rein to
languorous reveries, novel sensations at which their chaste instincts
take alarm, symptoms of the awakening of the virginal heart, first and
shadowy aspirations of the maid for the sweet pleasures and austere
duties of the wife and mother--the sacred destinies of woman.
It was not thus with Jeannette. She experienced these mysterious
symptoms; but her simplicity misled her as to their cause. Her
imagination filled with the marvelous legends of her god-mother, whom
she continued to meet almost daily at the Fountain of the Fairies, her
spirit ever more impressed by the prophecies of Merlin, although she
never identified herself with them, Jeannette imputed, in the chaste
ignorance of her soul, the vague sense of sadness that assailed her, her
involuntary tears, her confused aspirations--all precursory symptoms of
puberty--to the painful and tender compassion that the misfortunes of
Gaul and of her young King inspired her with.
Jeannette Darc was to know but one love, the sacred love of her
mother-land.