ed the scene. The joke would seem to have been
exhausted by the time Jeanne appeared, or her perfect gravity and
simplicity, and beautiful manners--so unlike her rustic dress and
village coif--imposed upon the Seigneur and his little court. This is
how the story is told, twenty-five years after, by the witness, then an
elderly knight, recalling the story of his youth.

"She said that she came to Robert on the part of her Lord, that he
should send to the Dauphin, and tell him to hold out, and have no fear,
for the Lord would send him succour before the middle of Lent. She also
said that France did not belong to the Dauphin but to her Lord; but her
Lord willed that the Dauphin should be its King, and hold it in command,
and that in spite of his enemies she herself would conduct him to be
consecrated. Robert then asked her who was this Lord? She answered, 'The
King of Heaven.' This being done (the witness adds) she returned to her
father's house with her uncle, Durand Laxart of Burey le Petit."

This brief and sudden preface to her career passed over and had no
immediate effect; indeed but for Bertrand we should have been unable
to separate it from the confused narrative to which all these witnesses
brought what recollection they had, often without sequence or order,
Durand himself taking no notice of any interval between this first
visit to Vaucouleurs and the final one.(2) The episode of Ascension Day
appears like the formal _sommation_ of French law, made as a matter of
form before the appellant takes action on his own responsibility; but
Baudricourt had probably more to do with it than appears to be at all
certain from the after evidence. One of the persons present, at all
events, young Poulengy above mentioned, bore it in mind and pondered it
in his heart.

Meantime, Jeanne returned home--the strangest home-going,--for by this
time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and rumour
must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern telegraph,
to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore unaware of any
difference between Jeanne and her companions save the greater goodness
to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must have reached
Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with the kind Durand,
a changed creature, already the consecrated Maid of France, La Pucelle,
apart from all others. The French peasant is a hard man, more fierce in
his terror of the unconventional, of