"BURGUNDY!"--"FRANCE!"
During her sojourn in the Castle of Ile Jeannette had been the prey of
severe attacks of fever. At times during her delirium she invoked St.
Catherine and St. Marguerite, her good saints, believing that she saw
them near her, and beseeching them with her hands clasped to put an end
to the atrocities of the English. At other times the shocking scene of
the hamlet of St. Pierre would rise in her troubled brain and she would
cry out aloud or would sob at the sight of the victims that rose before
her, livid and blood-bespattered. At still other times, her eyes
shooting fire and her cheeks aflame she spoke of a martial virgin clad
in white armor and mounted on a milk white steed whom, she said, she saw
falling upon and exterminating the English. At such times Jeannette
repeated with a quivering voice the refrain of Merlin's prophecy--
"Gaul, lost by a woman, will be saved by a virgin
From the borders of Lorraine and a forest of old oaks."
Isabelle sat up night and day nursing her daughter, imputing the ravings
of the poor child to the violence of the fever and to the recollections
of the horrible spectacle at St. Pierre. Great dejection of spirit and
extreme feebleness succeeded Jeannette's malady. Back in Domremy, she
was compelled to remain in bed several weeks; but her dreams reflected
the identical pictures of her delirium. Moreover a deep sorrow had
fallen upon her, for, strangely, her god-mother was one of the few
victims of the English raid into Domremy. Her corpse was found riddled
with wounds; and Jeannette wept for Sybille as much on account of her
tender affection for her god-mother as on account of her regret at being
separated forever from her who told such marvelous legends.
Two months passed and Jeannette was now nearly fourteen. She seemed to
have regained her normal health, but the symptoms of puberty had
disappeared and she frequently suffered from intolerable headaches
followed by severe attacks of vertigo.
Feeling all the more uneasy as she remembered the words of the
physician, Isabelle once more consulted him and he answered that the
violent emotion caused by the invasion of the English and the spectacle
of their cruelty must have deeply disturbed the girl's organization and
checked her sexual development; but that her ailments would cease and
the laws of nature resume their course in her physical being as the
mental effects of her deeply stirred emotion wore off.
The physician's answer allayed Isabelle's fears. Moreover Jeannette
again busied herself with her wonted household and field labors and she
redoubled her activity in the effort to conceal from public gaze the
spells of sadness and absent mindedness that now no longer were wholly
without cause since she had witnessed some of the disasters to which her
country was subject. Jeannette reflected to herself that the horrors
she had seen at St. Pierre stained with blood all other sections of the
land and fell heaviest upon those of her own class, the peasants. In
pitying them she pitied her own. Since that fatal day Jeannette felt
perhaps sadder at and wept more over the ghastly ills, an example of
which she had seen with her own eyes, than at or over the misfortunes of
the young Dauphin whom she did not know. The girl looked with increasing
impatience for the advent of the warrior maid who was to bring
deliverance to Gaul by driving the stranger out of the country, and by
restoring his crown to the King and peace and rest to France.
These thoughts ever absorbed Jeannette's mind when alone in the woods or
the field grazing her herd. Then would she yield unrestrained to revery
and to the recollections of the legends that had had so much to do in
forming her mind.
The undefinable emotion produced in her by the chiming of the bells
began to raise visions before her eyes. The distant tintinnabulations,
expiring on her ears, seemed to her transformed into a murmur of
celestial voices of inexpressible sweetness.[11] At such moments
Jeannette felt the blood rush to her head; her eyes were covered as with
a mist; the visible world disappeared from her sight and she fell into a
kind of ecstasy from which she recovered worn out as if awakened from
some painful dream.
One day when Jeannette was grazing her herd while plying the distaff
under the old beech tree near the Fountain of the Fairies a singular
incident occurred that had a decisive influence over the fate of the
young shepherdess. Reinforced by several bands of Burgundians, furnished
by Marshall John of Luxemburg, the English had persisted in the siege of
Vaucouleurs; which latter was defending itself heroically. The invasion
by the English of that valley, otherwise so peaceful, incited a schism
among its inhabitants. Many of them, especially the people of St. Pierre
and of Maxey, who had been so cruelly dealt with by the invaders, were
inclined to pass over to the English in order to save their property and
lives. These formed, in the valley, the "English" or "Burgundian" party.
Others, on the contrary, more irritated than frightened, preferred to
resist the English. These poor people counted upon the support of their
sovereign, the King of France, who, they said, would not longer leave
them exposed to such miseries. The latter comprised the "Armagnac" or
"Royalist" party. The children, ever the imitators of their parents,
likewise became "Armagnacs" and "Burgundians" when they played war. In
these games the two parties ever finished by taking their roles
seriously; when imprecations and actual blows with sticks and stones
exchanged by the two "armies" gave these affairs the actual semblance of
war.
The people of Domremy belonged mostly to the royalist, and those of St.
Pierre and Maxey to the English party; and, of course, the children of
these several localities shared, or rather aped, the political opinions
of their respective families. It thus often happened that the lads of
Maxey, while guarding their cattle, came to the borders of the commune
of Domremy and flung insults at the little shepherds of the latter
village. The dispute often became heated and hard words would be
exchanged, when it would be decided to settle the difference of opinion
by force of arms, that is with their fists and sticks accompanied by
volleys of stones that figured as cross-bow bolts or cannon balls.[12]
Guarding her sheep, Jeannette spun her hemp under the trees of the
forest of old oaks. In her revery she repeated in a low murmur the
passage from Merlin's prophecy:
"For whom that royal crown? That steed? That armor?
Oh, how much blood! It spouts up, it flows in torrents!
Oh, how much blood I see! How much blood I see!
It is a lake, a sea of blood.
It steams--its vapor ascends--
It ascends like an autumn mist to the sky,
To the sky where the thunder peals and the lightning flashes.
Athwart these peals of thunder, these flashes of lightning,
That blood-red mist, I see a martial virgin.
White is her armor, white her steed.
She battles--
She battles and battles still in the midst of a forest of lances
And seems to ride on the backs of the archers--"
Suddenly Jeannette heard in the distance a noise, at first indistinct,
but drawing nearer and nearer accompanied by clamorous cries of
"Burgundy! England!" uttered by infantile voices and answered by the
counter cries of "France and Armagnac!" Almost immediately a crowd of
Domremy boys appeared at the turn of the forest's skirt, fleeing in
disorder under a shower of stones fired at them by the boys of Maxey.
The engagement had been lively and the victory hotly contested, to judge
by the torn clothes, the bruised eyes and the bleeding noses of the more
heroic ones of the urchins. But yielding to a panic, they were now in
full flight and rout. Their adversaries, satisfied with their victory,
out of breath with running, and no doubt afraid of drawing too close to
Domremy, the stronghold of the retreating army, prudently stopped near
the forest which now hid them and repeated three times the cry:
"Burgundy and England!"
The cry of victory caused Jeannette to bound to her feet transported
with anger and shame at the sight of the boys of her village who battled
for Gaul and the King fleeing before the partisans of Burgundy and
England. A lad of about fifteen years, named Urbain, who captained the
fleeing troop, and who was personally a brave soldier, seeing that his
scalp was cut by a stone and his cap remained in the hands of the enemy,
ran past Jeannette.
"Are you running for safety, Urbain?"
"Sure! That's what I'm doing," answered the mimic captain, raising his
head and wiping the blood from his forehead with a handful of grass. "We
fought as long as we could--but those of Maxey are about twenty and we
are only eleven!"
Jeannette stamped on the ground with her foot and replied: "You have
strength to run--and yet you have no strength to fight!"
"But they have sticks, and that is not fair--we are the weaker side."
"Fall upon them and capture their sticks!"
"That is easy to say, Jeannette!"
"As easy to do as to say!" cried the shepherdess.
"You will see--Come! Come back with me!"
Without noticing whether she was followed or not, but yielding to an
involuntary prompting, Jeannette walked toward the enemy, then masked by
a clump of trees, and cried out in ringing tones, while brandishing her
distaff in lieu of a banner: "France! France! Off with you Burgundians
and English!"
With her feet and arms bare, in her short white sleeves and scarlet
skirt, her little straw hat on her long black hair, her cheeks aflame,
her eyes sparkling, her poise heroic, Jeannette was at that moment so
inspiring that Urbain and his followers felt themselves all at once
strengthened and exalted. They picked up stones and rushed after the
young shepherdess, who in her rapid course now barely seemed to touch
the sward with her feet, crying, with her, "France! Off with you
Burgundians and English!"
In the security of their triumph, the soldiers of the hostile army, who
never expected to see their adversaries rally, had stopped about a
hundred yards away and were resting on their laurels; and stretching
themselves on the flower-studded grass, picked wild strawberries and
played with stones. Presently some of them climbed up in the trees
looking for birds' nests, and the others scattered among the bushes
picking and eating berries. The unexpected resumption of hostilities,
the sudden cries hurled at them by the royalist army and by Jeannette,
who now led it, greatly surprised the Burgundians, who, nevertheless,
did not show the white feather. Their chief recalled his soldiers to
arms. Immediately the plunderers of birds' nests slid down the trees,
the berry pickers rushed up with crimson lips and those who had begun to
fall asleep on the grass jumped up and rubbed their eyes. But before the
line of battle could be formed the soldiers of Jeannette, anxious to
avenge their former defeat, and carried away by the inspiring conduct of
their present chief, fell valiantly upon the foe with redoubled cries
of: "France! France!" Our heroes seized the Burgundians and English by
the hair, boxed their ears and thumped them with such fury that the
tables were completely turned; the erstwhile victors now became the
vanquished, broke ranks and took to their heels.
The triumph redoubled the ardor of the assailants, who were now animated
with the desire to carry off a few bonnets as spoils and trophies. The
French army rushed breathlessly upon the English, with Jeannette ever in
the lead. She fought intrepidly and made havoc with her distaff, which
was garnished with a thick bunch of hemp--a terrible weapon, as many
discovered that day. In the meantime, the English, stupefied by the
sudden apparition of the young shepherdess in scarlet, who emerged so
strangely from the neighborhood of the Fountain of the Fairies, the
mystic reputation of which place extended far over the valley, took
Jeannette for a hobgoblin. Fear lent them wings and the French were
again vanquished--but only in running. The swiftest ones of the army
pushed forward in pursuit of the enemy, but were obliged to desist for
want of breath. Urbain and two or three of the most resolute kept up the
pursuit with Jeannette, who, now seized with heroic exaltation, no
longer thought of her own soldiers or took cognizance at all of her
surroundings, but kept her flashing eyes fixed upon a number of fleeing
English whom she wished to capture. Could she accomplish this it seemed
to her that her victory would be complete.
But the runaways had so much the lead and ran so fast that she was
almost despairing of being able to come to close quarters with them,
when, still running, she perceived a donkey peacefully grazing on the
meadow, totally unconcerned as to the battle or its outcome. Agile and
robust, as became a child of the field, she leaped with one bound upon
the back of the ass, urged it with heels, distaff and voice, and forced
it into a gallop. The animal yielded all the more readily to the desires
of Jeannette, seeing that the direction whither it was going was that of
its own stable. It pricked up its ears and kicked up its heels with
great joy, without, however, throwing Jeannette, and ran toward the
English, who, unfortunately for themselves, were also on the route to
the ass's stable and who, still more unfortunately for themselves, in
the heat of their flight had never thought to look behind. Suddenly,
however, hearing the hoof beats of the animal galloping at their heels
and the victorious cries of the young shepherdess, they thought
themselves pursued by devils; and fearing to see some horrible
apparition, they threw themselves upon their knees with their eyes shut,
their hands joined as if in prayer and begging for mercy. The enemy was
decidedly vanquished.
Jumping off the ass, Jeannette allowed it to continue its route; and
threatening with her innocent distaff the soldiers, who surrendered at
discretion, she shouted to them in a resonant voice:
"Wretches! Why do you call yourselves Burgundians and English, seeing
that we are all of France? It is against the English that we must all
take the field! Oh, they do us so much harm!"
Saying this, the young shepherdess, a prey to an undefinable emotion,
broke into tears, her knees trembled and she fell to the ground beside
the vanquished foe, who, rising in inexpressible terror, incontinently
resumed their headlong flight, leaving Jeannette alone so confused in
mind that she knew not whether she was awake or dreaming.
Nevertheless, her heart still palpitating from the effects of the recent
struggle, vague but exhilarating aspirations began to ferment in her
being. She had just experienced for the first time the martial ardor
caused by a glorious victory, won to the orchestration of the cries of
"France!" and "Armagnac!" Forgetting that this childish battle was but
play, indignant at and aroused by the check suffered by her party, she
had seen her boys cheered and re-encouraged by her voice and, carried
away by her example, return to the fray and vanquish the hitherto
victorious enemy.
These aspirations were vaguely mixed with the recollections of the
horrible butchery in the village of St. Pierre and the prophecy of
Merlin, and caused the young shepherdess to raise her thoughts to St.
Catherine and St. Marguerite, her two good saints, to whom she now
prayed fervently to chase the English from France and to take pity on
the gentle Dauphin. The chaotic jangle of these apparently disconnected
and aimless thoughts that clashed together in the burning brain of
Jeannette immediately brought on one of those painful spells of
dizziness to which she had been ever more subject since the profound
perturbation of her health. She relapsed into a sort of ecstasy; again a
misty curtain was drawn before her eyes; and when she regained
consciousness the sun had gone down and it was dusk.
On arising Jeannette hastened back to the Fountain of the Fairies, near
which she had left her lambs browsing. The walk was long, she lost much
time in getting her scattered flock together, and it was dark night ere
she reached Domremy, trembling at having incurred the anger of her
father by her delay; and above all fearing the scolding that she
expected for the part she had taken in the combat between the boys.
Urbain, full of pride at his victory, might, upon his return to the
village, have boasted of the battle. Thus the poor child felt her heart
beat with dismay when, arriving near her house, she saw the uneasy and
angry face of James Darc. The moment he caught sight of his daughter he
went toward her with a threatening look, saying: "By the Savior, is it
in the dark of night that you must gather the sheep?" And approaching
her with increasing irritation and with his hand raised over her head,
he continued: "Bad and shameless child! Have you not been battling with
the boys of the village against the boys of Maxey?"
In his rage James was on the point of beating the guilty girl, when
Isabelle ran to him and caught his arm, crying, "James, I beg of you to
pardon her this time!"
"Very well--I will be indulgent this time; but let her never again take
a notion to romp with the boys. If she does it again, as sure as I am
her father, I shall punish her severely; but for this time she can go to
bed without supper."