ac captains considered simple. Nevertheless, a careful
examination will reveal in this missive, at any rate in the second
half of it, certain of those bluntly naive passages and some of that
childish assurance which are noticeable in Jeanne's genuine letters,
especially in her reply to the Count of Armagnac;[1921] and more than
once there occurs an expression characteristic of a village sibyl. The
following, for example, is quite in Jeanne's own manner: "If you will
return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, send me your ambassadors;
I will tell you what you have to do." And her usual threat: "Expect me
with all strength human and divine."[1922] As for the phrase: "If I
hear not shortly of your conversion, of your return to the bosom of
the Church, I will peradventure leave the English and come against
you," here we may suspect the mendicant friar, less interested in the
affairs of Charles VII than in those of the Church, of having ascribed
to the Maid greater eagerness to set forth on the Crusade than she
really felt. Good and salutary as she deemed the taking of the Cross,
as far as we know her, she would never have consented to take it until
she had driven the English out of the realm of France. She believed
this to be her mission, and the persistence, the consistency, the
strength of will she evinced in its fulfilment, are truly admirable.
It is quite probable that she dictated to the good Brother some phrase
like: "When I have put the English out of the kingdom, I will turn
against you." This would explain and excuse Brother Pasquerel's error.
It is very likely that Jeanne believed she would dispose of the
English in a trice and that she already saw herself distributing good
buffets and sound clouts to the renegade and infidel Bohemians. The
Maid's simplicity makes itself felt through the clerk's Latin. This
epistle to the Bohemians recalls, alas! that fagot placed upon the
stake whereon John Huss was burning, by the pious zeal of the good
wife whose saintly simplicity John Huss himself teaches us to admire.

[Footnote 1921: _Trial_, vol. i, p. 246.]

[Footnote 1922: _Ibid._, vol. v, p. 95.]

One cannot help reflecting that Jeanne and those very men against whom
she hurled menace and invective had much in common; alike they were
impelled by faith, chastity, simple ignorance, pious duty, resignation
to God's will, and a tendency to magnify the minor matters of
devotion. Zizka[1923] had established in his camp tha