es Woman, since He fashioned Thee!

* * * * *

O strange! This little maid sixteen years old
On whom no harness weigheth overmuch.
So strong the little hands! enduring hold
She seemeth fed by that same armour's touch,
Nurtured on iron--as before her vanish
The enemies of her triumphal day;
And this by many men is witnessed;
Yea, many eyes be witness of that fray!

* * * * *

Castles and towns, she wins them back for France,
And France is free again, and this her doing!
Never was power given as to her lance!
A thousand swords could do no more pursuing.
Of all staunch men and true she is the Chief,
Captain and Leader, for that she alone
Is braver than Achilles the brave Greek.
All praise be given to God who leadeth Joan!

AGNES SOREL

So much glamour has attached, and rightly so, to Joan of Arc, the
soldier-saviour of Charles the Seventh of France, that another woman,
Agnes Sorel--Charles's good angel of a less militant order--has been
almost entirely overlooked, and where she has been remembered, has
been treated by the few with the honour due to her, and by the many
merely as Charles's mistress. But to her it was given to be a great
inspirer of Charles, and much of the good that this weak king and
ungrateful man did for his country may assuredly be in large measure
attributed to her influence, just as the greatest merit that can be
recorded of him personally was his devotion to her whilst she lived,
though the memory of her availed naught after she had passed away.
Agnes Sorel came as it were between the ebb and flow of the late
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when chivalry, not as a passing
emotion but as an education, still lingered in men's relation with
women. Respect for womankind grew in the Middle Ages in France under
the double influence of religion and chivalry, of which the cult of
the Virgin and the cult of woman were the outcome. In honour of both,
men strove in tournament and fought in battle. With the cry, "For our
Lady," or "For God and my Lady," men hurled themselves into the thick
of the strife as if the goddess, whether divine or human, in whose
name they ventured, had made her champions invulnerable. And, in a
manner as it would seem of action and re-action, the goddess became
humanised and the woman deified. The former tendency may be traced in
miracles at