had had more
revelations than concerning any man living, save the King; that she
had been obliged to change her woman's dress for man's attire and that
her _Council_ had advised her well.[2236]

[Footnote 2236: _Ibid._, p. 54.]

The letter to the English was read before her. She admitted having
dictated it in those terms, with the exception of three passages. She
had not said _body for body_ nor _chieftain of war_; and she had said
_surrender to the King_ in the place _of surrender to the Maid_. That
the judges had not tampered with the text of the letter we may assure
ourselves by comparing it with other texts, which did not pass through
their hands, and which contain the expressions challenged by
Jeanne.[2237]

[Footnote 2237: _Ibid._, pp. 55, 56; vol. v, p. 95.]

In the beginning of her career, she believed that Our Lord, the true
King of France, had ordained her to deliver the government of the
realm to Charles of Valois, as His deputy. The words in which she gave
utterance to this idea are reported by too many persons strangers one
to another for us to doubt her having spoken them. "The King shall
hold the kingdom as a fief (_en commande_); the King of France is the
lieutenant of the King of Heaven." These are her own words and she did
actually say to the Dauphin: "Make a gift of your realm to the King of
Heaven."[2238] But we are bound to admit that at Rouen not one of these
mystic ideas persists, indeed there they seem altogether beyond her.
In all her replies to her examiners, she seems incapable of any
abstract reasoning whatsoever and of any speculation however simple,
so that it is hard to understand how she should ever have conceived
the idea of the temporal rule of Jesus Christ over the Land of the
Lilies. There is nothing in her speech or in her thoughts to suggest
such meditations, wherefore we are led to believe that this
politico-theology had been taught her in her tender, teachable years
by ecclesiastics desiring to remove the woes of Church and kingdom,
but that she had failed to seize its spirit or grasp its inner
meaning. Now, in the midst of a hard life lived with men-at-arms,
whose simple souls accorded better with her own than the more
cultivated minds of the early directors of her meditations, she had
forgotten even the phraseology in which those suggested meditations
were expressed. Interrogated concerning her coming to Chinon, she
replied:

"Without let or hindrance I went to my King. W