having his domestic affairs exposed
to the public eye, or his family disgraced by an exhibition of anything
unusual either in act or feeling, than almost any other class of beings.
And it is evident that he took his daughter's intention according to the
coarsest interpretation, as a wild desire for adventure and intention
of joining herself to the roving troopers, the soldiers always hated and
dreaded in rural life. He suddenly appears in the narrative in a fever
of apprehension, with no imaginative alarm or anxiety about his girl,
but the fiercest suspicion of her, and dread of disgrace to ensue. We do
not know what passed when she returned, further than that her father had
a dream, no doubt after the first astounding explanation of the purpose
that had so long been ripening in her mind. He dreamed that he saw her
surrounded by armed men, in the midst of the troopers, the most evident
and natural interpretation of her purpose, for who could divine that
she meant to be their leader and general, on a level not with the common
men-at-arms, but of princes and nobles? In the morning he told his dream
to his wife and also to his sons. "If I could think that the thing would
happen that I dreamed, I would wish that she should be drowned; and
if you would not do it, I should do it with my own hands." The reader
remembers with a shudder the Meuse flowing at the foot of the garden,
while the fierce peasant, mad with fear lest shame should be coming to
his family, clenched his strong fist and made this outcry of dismay.

No doubt his wife smoothed the matter over as well as she could, and,
whatever alarms were in her own mind, hastily thought of a feminine
expedient to mend matters, and persuaded the angry father that to
substitute other dreams for these would be an easier way. Isabeau most
probably knew the village lad who would fain have had her child, so good
a housewife, so industrious a workwoman, and always so friendly and so
helpful, for his wife. At all events there was such a one, too willing
to exert himself, not discouraged by any refusal, who could be egged
up to the very strong point of appearing before the bishop at Toul and
swearing that Jeanne had been promised to him from her childhood. So
timid a girl, they all thought, so devout a Catholic, would simply obey
the bishop's decision and would not be bold enough even to remonstrate,
though it is curious that with the spectacle of her grave determination
before them,