hinon, perhaps even whether their mission might not expose them to the
ridicule of their kind, if not to unknown dangers of magic and contact
with the Evil One, should this wonderful girl turn out no inspired
virgin but a pretender or sorceress. Jean de Metz informs us that she
bade them not to fear, that she had been sent to do what she was now
doing; that her brothers in paradise would tell her how to act, and that
for the last four or five years her brothers in paradise and her God had
told her that she must go to the war to save the kingdom of France. This
phrase must have struck his ear, as he thus repeats it. Her brothers in
paradise! She had not apparently talked of them to anyone as yet, but
now no one could hinder her more, and she felt herself free to speak.
A great calm seems to have been in her soul. She had at last begun her
work. How it was all to end for her she neither foresaw nor asked;
she knew only what she had to do. When they ventured into a town she
insisted on stopping to hear mass, bidding them fear nothing. "God
clears the way for me," she said; "I was born for this," and so
proceeded safe, though threatened with many dangers. There is something
that breathes of supreme satisfaction and content in her repetition of
those words.

(1) She was, however, acquainted with the simpler byword,
that France should be destroyed by a woman and afterwards
redeemed by a virgin, which she quoted to several persons on
her first setting out.

(2) I have to thank Mr. Andrew Lang for making the course of
these events quite clear to myself.

(3) Mr. Andrew Lang thinks that this appearance at Toul was
made after she had finally left Domremy, and when she was
already accompanied by the escort which was to attend her to
Chinon.

(4) Mr. Andrew Lang will not hear of this. He thinks the man
was a mere King's messenger with news, probably charged with
the melancholy tidings of the loss at Rouvray (Battle of the
Herrings): and that the fact he did accompany Jeanne and her
little part was entirely accidental.

(5) Her brother Pierre is said by some to have been of the
party. _La Chronique de la Pucelle_ says two of her
brothers. Mr. Andrew Lang, however, tells us that Pierre did
not join his sister's party till much later--in the
beginning of June: and this is the statement of Jean de
Metz. But Quicherat is also