DOMRÉMY
"_Quand j'étais chez mon père, petite Jeanneton ..._"
"I thought this was a life of Joan of Arc!" some bewildered reader may
protest. "I don't want to read a History of France!"
Patience, gentle one! the Maid and her France may not be separated.
Now, however, it is time to go back a little to the year 1412, and make
our way to the village of Domrémy on the banks of the Meuse, near the
border of Lorraine.
Domrémy is not an important place: it has to-day, as it had four hundred
years ago, about forty or fifty houses. It lies pleasantly enough by the
river side, amid green meadows; a straggling line of stone cottages,
with roofs of thatch or tile; behind it rise low hills, now bare, once
covered with forests of oak and beech. Its people are, as they have
always been, grave and God-fearing; there is a saying about them that
they "seldom die and never lie." They have always been farming people,
growing corn, planting vineyards, raising cattle. In old times, as
to-day, the cattle fed on the rich pastures of the river valley; the
village children tended them by day, and at nightfall drove them back to
the little stone-walled farms.
The houses were "small, of one or two or three rooms, and sometimes
there was a low garret overhead. The furniture was simple: a few stools
and benches, a table or a pair of trestles with a board to cover them, a
few pots and pans of copper, and some pewter dishes. The housewife had
in her chest two or three sheets for her feather-bed, two or three
kerchiefs, a cloak, a piece of cloth ready to be made into whatever
garment was most needed, and a few buttons and pins. Often there was a
sword in the corner, or a spear or an arblast, but the peasants were
peaceful, seldom waged war, and often were unable even to resist
attack."[9]
The people of Domrémy were vassals of the lords of Bourlemont, whose
castle still overlooks the Meuse valley. The relationship was a
friendly one in the main. The dues were heavy, to be sure. "Twice a year
a tax must be paid on each animal drawing a cart; the lord's harvest
must be gathered, his hay cut and stored, firewood drawn to his house,
fowls and beef and bacon furnished to his table. Those who had no carts
must carry his letters."[10]
But this was the common lot of French peasants. In return, the lord of
Bourlemont recognized certain responsibilities for them in time of
trouble. His own castle was four miles distant, but in the village
itself he owned a little fortress called the Castle of the Island, which
the villagers guarded for him in time of peace and where they could take
refuge in time of danger. Sometimes even, the Seigneur seems to have had
pangs of conscience concerning his villagers, as when, in 1399, the then
lord provided in his will that "if the people of Domrémy can show that
they have been unjustly compelled to give him two dozen goslings,
restitution shall be made."[11]
In one of the stone cottages (standing still, though overmuch restored)
lived, early in the fifteenth century, Jacques d'Arc and Isabel his
wife. Jacques was a responsible man, liked and respected by his
neighbors. As dean of the village, he inspected weights and measures,
commanded the watch, collected the taxes. Dame Isabel had enough
learning to teach her five children their _Credo_, _Pater_ and _Ave_,
but probably little more; she spun and wove, and was doubtless a good
house-mother. With four of the children we have little concern; our
affair is with the fifth, a daughter born (probably) in January, 1412,
and named Jeanne or Jehane. All her names are beautiful: "Jeanne la
Pucelle," "the Maid of Orleans," "the Maid of France"; most familiar of
all to our Anglo-Saxon ears, "Joan of Arc."
Joan was three years old when Agincourt was lost and won. It was a far
cry from upper Normandy to the province of Bar where Domrémy lay; the
Meuse flowed tranquilly by, but no echoes of the English war reached it
at this time. Life went peacefully on; the children, as I have said,
drove the cattle to the river meadows, frolicked beside the clear
stream, gathering flowers, singing the immemorial songs of France; and
as evening closed, drove them home again to the farm: or they tended
their sheep on the Common, or followed their pigs through the oak forest
that stretched behind and above it. In the forest lurked romance and
adventure, possible danger. There were wolves there; no doubt about
that. There were also, most people thought, fairies, both good and bad.
Near the village itself stood the great beech tree known as "the Ladies'
Tree," or the "Fairies' Tree," with its fountain close by, the Fountain
of the Gooseberry Bushes, where people came to be healed of various
diseases. Another great tree was called "_Le Beau Mai_," and was even
more mystical. Who knows from what far Druid time came the custom of
dancing around its huge trunk and hanging garlands on its gnarled
boughs? They were pious garlands now, dedicated to Our Lady of Domrémy;
but it was whispered that the fairies still held their revels there. The
lord of Bourlemont and his lady sometimes joined the dancing; had not
his ancestor loved a fairy when time was, and been loved of her? They
never failed to join the rustic festival that was held under the Fairy
Tree on the "Sunday in Lent called _Laetere_, or _des Fontaines_." One
of Joan's godmothers said she had seen the fairies: Joan never did. She
hung garlands, with the other little girls; danced with them hand in
hand, singing. One would like to know the songs they sang. Was one of
them the quaint ditty whose opening lines head this chapter?
"_Quand j'étais chez mon père, petite Jeanneton,
La glin glon glon,
M'envôit a la fontaine pour remplir mon cruchon!_"
Or was it the story of that _vigneron_ who had a daughter whom he would
give to neither poor nor rich, _lon la_, and whom he finally saw carried
off by a cavalier of Hungary,
"_La prit et l'importa,
Sur son cheval d'Hongrie, lon la!_"
A warning to selfish Papas. Or did there come to Domrémy, wandering down
the Meuse as the wind wanders, some of those wild, melancholy sea-songs
that the Corsairs and the fishermen sang, as they sharpened their
cutlasses or drew their nets in harbor?
"_Il était trois mâtelots de Grois,
Embarqués sur le Saint Francois,
Tra la derida la la la!_"
Olivier Basselin, of Val-de-Vire, died when Joan was six years old, but
his songs are alive to-day: gay little songs, called from the place of
their origin "_Vaux-de-Vire_," whence the modern word _vaudeville_.
Perhaps Joan and her playmates sang his songs; I do not know.
In later, sadder years, Joan's enemies made, as we shall see, all that
could be made out of these simple woodland frolics. "_Le Beau Mai_,"
which in spring was "fair as lily flowers, the leaves and branches
sweeping the ground"[12] became a tree of doom, a gathering-place of
witches, of worse than witches. Joan herself, hanging her pretty
garlands to the Virgin, as sweet a child-figure as lives in history,
became a dark sorceress, ringed with flame, summoning to her aid the
fiends of the pit. We need not yet turn that page; we may see her as her
neighbors saw her, a grave, brown-eyed child, beloved by old and young:
industrious, as all her people were; guiding the plough, watching the
sheep or cattle, gathering flowers, acorns, fagots: or indoors,
spinning, sewing, learning all household work under her mother's
guidance. She loved to go to church, and hastened thither when the bell
rang for mass; preferring it to dance or play.
"There was not a better girl," the neighbors said, "in the two villages
(Domrémy and Greux). For the love of God she gave alms; and if she had
money would have given it to the _curé_ for masses to be said."
The village beadle being a trifle lax in his ways, she would bribe him
with little presents to ring the church bell punctually. The children
did not always understand her, would laugh sometimes when she left the
games and went to kneel in the little gray church; but the sick and the
poor understood her well enough. She loved nursing, and had a light hand
with the sick; they never forgot her care of them; it was her way, if
any poor homeless body came wandering by (there were many such in France
then, almost as many as to-day) to give up her bed to the vagrant and
sleep on the hearth all night.
Joan was eight years old when the Treaty of Troyes was signed, by which
France virtually passed into the hands of England. Not long after, the
miseries of war invaded the quiet valley of the Meuse; Burgundian and
Armagnac began to burn, harry and slay here as they had long been doing
elsewhere. The latter were headed by Stephen de Vignolles, better known
as La Hire, a man as brave as he was brutal, and with a spark of humor
which lights his name yet on the clouded page of the time. It is told
how one day, starting out to relieve Montargis, besieged by the English,
he met a priest on the way, and thinking it might be well to add
spiritual armor to "helm and hauberk's twisted mail," demanded
absolution. The priest demurred; confession must come first. "I have no
time for that!" said La Hire, "I'm in a hurry; I have done in the way of
sins all that men of war are in the habit of doing." "Whereupon," says
the chronicler, "the chaplain gave him absolution for what it was worth,
and the knight, putting his hands together, prayed thus, 'God, I pray
thee to do for La Hire this day as much as thou wouldest have La Hire
do for thee if he were God and thou La Hire!'"
Similar stories are told of many men in many lands; this may be as true
as the rest of them.
La Hire's valiant doings by the side of Joan and Dunois at Orleans and
elsewhere, are on the credit side of his book of life; but in the years
following 1420, he and his like wrought dreadful havoc in the valley of
the Meuse. They pretended to seek redress for hostile acts; in reality,
they wanted blood and plunder, and took both without stint. They drove
off the cattle and burned the crops; this was the least of it. "These
men," wrote Juvenal des Ursins, "under pretence of blackmail and so
forth, seized men, women, and little children, regardless of age and
sex; violated women and girls; killed husbands and fathers before their
wives and daughters; carried off nurses, and left their children to die
of hunger; seized priests and monks, put them to the torture, and beat
them until they were maimed or driven mad. Some they roasted, dashed out
the teeth of others, and others they beat with great clubs. God knows
what cruelty they wrought."
Jacques d'Arc and another man of means (as means went in Domrémy!)
hired the Castle of the Island from the lady of Bourlemont, at a
considerable rent, for the safekeeping of their families and their
flocks and herds in case of attack. A year or two later, the men of
Domrémy bound themselves to pay a hearth-tax to the lord of Commercy, a
highborn ruffian of the neighborhood, so long as he abstained from
burning and pillaging their homes. The bond declares itself to be given
"with good will, and without any force, constraint, or guile
whatsoever." No need for an Artemas Ward to add, "This is rote
sarkasticul!" The villagers knew well enough that if the blackmail were
not paid, houses, church and all would go up in smoke and flame.
Joan, as she herself says, "helped well to drive the cattle and sheep to
the Island," when news came of raiders prowling up or down the valley.
Burgundian or Armagnac, it mattered little which; neither boded any good
to the village. The Castle itself was uninhabited: its blank windows
looked down on a garden, with great poplar trees here and there, and
neglected flower-beds, once the delight of the Lady and her children.
Bees hummed in the lilies, birds flitted from branch to branch, caring
nothing for Burgundian or Armagnac; all was peace and tranquillity. Here
the dreamy child wandered, looking up at the silent walls, seeing in
thought, it may be, shadowy figures of knight and lady gazing down on
her, the child of France who was to be her country's saviour.
Doubtless she watched the boys playing at siege and battle in and around
the little fortress: for aught we know, she may have joined their play,
and so learned her first lessons in arms. In any case, tales of blood
and rapine must have been daily in her ears; emphasized about this time
by news of the death of a cousin, "struck by a ball or stone from a
gun."
Other tales were doubtless in her ears. Among the wanderers who sat by
the kindly fireside of Jacques d'Arc would be mendicant friars,
Franciscan or Cordelier, making their way from door to door, from
village to village, giving in return for food and shelter what they had
to give: a blessing for the hospitable house, a prayer for its inmates,
and news of the countryside. The last raid discussed, the next
prognosticated, the general state of country and world deplored, there
might be talk of things spiritual. The d'Arc family would naturally tell
of their patron St. Rémy, who, watching over the holy city of Rheims,
was so kind as to extend his protection over Domrémy. What a learned,
what a wonderful man! how bold in his admonition to King Clovis at the
latter's baptism! "Bow thy head meekly, O Sicambrian! adore what thou
hast burnt, and burn what thou hast adored!" Yes! yes! brave words!
Then the guest might ask, was not this the country of the Oak Wood, "_le
Bois Chesnu_?" Had they heard the prophecy that a Maid should be born in
the neighborhood, who should do great deeds? Yes, truly, there was such
a prophecy. It was made by Merlin the Wise. In Latin he made it; _Nemus
Canutum_, the place; surely an oak wood, on the borders of Lorraine.
That was long and long ago, and had been well-nigh forgotten; but a
generation ago only--surely they had heard this?--a holy woman, Marie of
Avignon, had made her way to his sacred Majesty, then suffering cruelly
under the dispensations of God and also under that wicked Queen Isabeau,
on whom might his sufferings be avenged, amen! made her way to him, and
told of a dream she had dreamed, a terrible dream, full of clashing of
swords. She saw shining armor, and cried out, alas! she could not use
it! but a voice said that it was for a Maid who should restore France.
Yes, indeed, that would be a fine thing, if our fair country, ruined by
a woman, should be restored by a woman from the marches of Lorraine.
_Pax vobiscum!_
These things, and others like them, no doubt Joan heard, sitting quietly
by with her sewing or knitting while the elders talked. These things by
and by were to be a sword in her hand, and--later still--a torch in the
hands of her enemies.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Lowell. "Joan of Arc," p. 15.
[10] Lowell. "Joan of Arc," p. 18.
[11] Luce. "Jeanne d'Arc à Domrémy," p. 19.
[12] Gerardin.