entirety of events, and discover that sequence between
cause and effect which escape the clerk or the burgher. "I have
contracted my horizon," says the Chatterton of Alfred de Vigny, when
he explains how he is conscious of nothing that has happened since the
days of the old Saxons. But Chatterton wrote poems, pseudo chronicles,
and not history. The historian must alternately contract his horizon
and widen it. If he undertake to tell an old story, he must needs
successively--or sometimes at one and the same moment--assume the
credulity of the folk he restores to life, and the discernment of the
most accomplished critic. By a strange process, he must divide his
personality. He must be at once the ancient man and the modern man; he
must live on two different planes, like that curious character in a
story by Mr. H.G. Wells, who lives and moves in a little English town,
and all the time sees herself at the bottom of the ocean.

I have carefully visited cities and countries in which the events I
propose to relate took place. I have seen the valley of the Meuse
amidst the flowers and perfumes of spring, and I have seen it again
beneath a mass of mist and cloud. I have travelled along the smiling
banks of the Loire, so full of renown; through La Beauce, with its
vast horizons bordered with snow-topped mountains; through
l'Ile-de-France, where the sky is serene; through La Champagne, with
its stony hills covered with those low vines which, trampled upon by
the coronation army, bloomed again into leaves and fruit, says the
legend, and by St. Martin's Day yielded a late but rich vintage.[142]
I have lingered in barren Picardy, along the Bay of the Somme so sad
and bare beneath the flight of its birds of passage. I have wandered
through the fat meadows of Normandy to Rouen with its steeples and
towers, its ancient charnel houses, its damp streets, its last
remaining timbered houses with high gables. I have imagined these
rivers, these lands, these chateaux and these towns as they were five
hundred years ago.

[Footnote 142: Germain Lefevre-Pontalis, _Les sources allemandes de
l'histoire de Jeanne d'Arc_, p. 93.]

I have accustomed my gaze to the forms assumed by the beings and the
objects of those days. I have examined all that remains of stone, of
iron, or of wood worked by the hands of those old artisans, who were
freer and consequently more ingenious than ours, and whose handicraft
reveals a desire to animate and adorn everyt