THE English were besieging Orleans; Joan the Maid drove them from its
walls. How did it happen that a girl of seventeen, who could neither
read nor write, became the greatest general on the side of France? How
did a woman defeat the hardy English soldiers who were used to chase the
French before them like sheep?
[Illustration: JOAN IN CHURCH]
We must say that France could only be saved by a miracle, and by a
miracle she was saved. This is a mystery; we cannot understand it. Joan
the Maiden was not as other men and women are. But, as a little girl,
she was a child among children, though better, kinder, stronger than the
rest, and, poor herself, she was always good and helpful to those who
were poorer still.
Joan's parents were not indigent; they had lands and cattle, and a
little money laid by in case of need. Her father was, at one time,
_doyen_, or head-man, of Domremy. Their house was hard by the church,
and was in the part of the hamlet where the people were better off, and
had more freedom and privileges than many of their neighbours. They were
devoted to the Royal House of France, which protected them from the
tyranny of lords and earls further east. As they lived in a village
under the patronage of St. Remigius, they were much interested in Reims,
his town, where the kings of France were crowned, and were anointed with
Holy Oil, which was believed to have been brought in a sacred bottle by
an angel.
In the Middle Ages, the king was not regarded as really king till this
holy oil had been poured on his head. Thus we shall see, later, how
anxious Joan was that Charles VII., then the Dauphin, should be crowned
and anointed in Reims, though it was still in the possession of the
English. It is also necessary to remember that Joan had once an elder
sister named Catherine, whom she loved dearly. Catherine died, and
perhaps affection for her made Joan more fond of bringing flowers to the
altar of her namesake, St. Catherine, and of praying often to that
saint.
Joan was brought up by her parents, as she told her judges, to be
industrious, to sew and spin. She did not fear to match herself at
spinning and sewing, she said, against any woman in Rouen. When very
young she sometimes went to the fields to watch the cattle, like the
goose-girl in the fairy tale. As she grew older, she worked in the
house, she did not any longer watch sheep and cattle. But the times were
dangerous, and, when there was an alarm of soldiers or robbers in the
neighbourhood, she sometimes helped to drive the flock into a fortified
island, or peninsula, for which her father was responsible, in the river
near her home. She learned her creed, she said, from her mother. Twenty
years after her death, her neighbours, who remembered her, described her
as she was when a child. Jean Morin said that she was a good industrious
girl, but that she would often be praying in church when her father and
mother did not know it. Beatrix Estellin, an old widow of eighty, said
Joan was a good girl. When Domremy was burned, Joan would go to church
at Greux, 'and there was not a better girl in the two towns.' A
priest, who had known her, called her 'a good, simple, well-behaved
girl.' Jean Waterin, when he was a boy, had seen Joan in the fields;
'and when they were all playing together, she would go apart, and pray
to God, as he thought, and he and the others used to laugh at her. She
was good and simple, and often in churches and holy places. And when she
heard the church bell ring, she would kneel down in the fields.' She
used to bribe the sexton to ring the bells (a duty which he rather
neglected) with presents of knitted wool.
All those who had seen Joan told the same tale: she was always kind,
simple, industrious, pious, and yet merry and fond of playing with the
others round the Fairy Tree. They say that the singing birds came to
her, and nestled in her breast.[2]
Thus, as far as anyone could tell, Joan was a child like other children,
but more serious and more religious. One of her friends, a girl called
Mengette, whose cottage was next to that of Joan's father, said: 'Joan
was so pious that we other children told her she was too good.'
In peaceful times Joan would have lived and married and died and been
forgotten. But the times were evil. The two parties of Burgundy and
Armagnac divided town from town and village from village. It was as in
the days of the Douglas Wars in Scotland, when the very children took
sides for Queen Mary and King James, and fought each other in the
streets. Domremy was for the Armagnacs--that is, against the English and
for the Dauphin, the son of the mad Charles VI. But at Maxey, on the
Meuse, a village near Domremy, the people were all for Burgundy and the
English. The boys of Domremy would go out and fight the Maxey boys with
fists and sticks and stones. Joan did not remember having taken part in
those battles, but she had often seen her brothers and the Domremy boys
come home all bruised and bleeding.