e soul; from the Maid she expects all the good things she
longs for. She believes that Jeanne will restore concord to the
Christian Church. The gentlest spirits of those days looked to fire
and sword for the bringing in of unity and obedience; they never
dreamed that Christian charity could mean charity towards the whole
human race. Wherefore, on the strength of prophecy, the poetess
expects the Maid to destroy the infidel and the heretic, or in other
words the Turk and the Hussite.

"In her conquest of the Holy Land, she will tear up the Saracens like
weeds. Thither will she lead King Charles, whom God defend! Before he
dies he shall make that journey. He it is who shall conquer the land.
There shall she end her life. There shall the thing come to pass."

The good Christine would appear to have brought her poem to this
conclusion when she received tidings of the King's coronation. She
then added thirteen stanzas to celebrate the mystery of Reims and to
foretell the taking of Paris.[1668]

[Footnote 1668: _Trial_, vol. v, pp. 3 _et seq._ R. Thomassy, _Essai sur
les ecrits politiques de Christine de Pisan, suivi d'une notice
litteraire et de pieces inedites_, Paris, 1838, in 8vo.]

Thus in the gloom and silence of one of those convents where even the
hushed noises of the world penetrated but seldom, this virtuous lady
collected and expressed in rhyme all those dreams of church and state
which centred round a child.

In a fairly good ballad written at the time of the coronation, in love
and honour "of the beautiful garden of the noble flowers de luce,"[1669]
and for the elevation of the white cross, King Charles VII is
described by that mysterious name "the noble stag," which we have
first discovered in Christine's poem. The unknown author of the ballad
says that the Sibyl, daughter of King Priam, prophesied the
misfortunes of this royal stag; but such a prediction need not
surprise us, when we remember that Charles of Valois was of Priam's
royal line, wherefore Cassandra, when she revealed the destiny of the
Flying Hart, did but prolong down the centuries the vicissitudes of
her own family.[1670]

[Footnote 1669: _Du beau jardin des nobles fleurs de lis._]

[Footnote 1670: M. Pierre Champion has kindly communicated to me the
text of this unpublished ballad, which he discovered in a French MS.
at Stockholm, LIII, fol. 238. This is the title which the copyist
affixed to it about 1472: _Ballade faicte quant le Roy C