ents thought she was tending the
herds, she was kneeling at the feet of the miracle-working Virgin. The
village priest, Messire Guillaume Frontey, could do nothing but praise
the most guileless of his parishioners.[301] One day he happened to
say with a sigh: "If Jeannette had money she would give it to me for
the saying of masses."[302]

[Footnote 300: _Ibid._, vol. ii, pp. 404, 407, 409, 411, 414, 416,
_passim_.]

[Footnote 301: _Trial_, vol. ii, pp. 402, 434.]

[Footnote 302: _Ibid._, p. 402. Concerning Jeanne's religious
observances, see _Ibid._, index, under the words _Messe_, _Vierge_,
_Cloche_.]

As for the good man, Jacques d'Arc, it is possible that he may have
occasionally complained of those pilgrimages, those meditations, and
those other practices which ill accorded with the ordinary tenor of
country life. Every one thought Jeanne odd and erratic. Mengette and
her friends, when they found her so devout, said she was too
pious.[303] They scolded her for not dancing with them. Among others,
Isabellette, the young wife of Gerardin d'Epinal, the mother of little
Nicholas, Jeanne's godson, roundly condemned a girl who cared so
little for dancing.[304] Colin, son of Jean Colin, and all the
village lads made fun of her piety. Her fits of religious ecstasy
raised a smile. She was regarded as a little mad. She suffered from
this persistent raillery.[305] But with her own eyes she beheld the
dwellers in Paradise. And when they left her she would cry and wish
that they had taken her with them.

[Footnote 303: _Ibid._, vol. ii, p. 429.]

[Footnote 304: _Ibid._, p. 427.]

[Footnote 305: _Trial_, vol. ii, p. 432.]

"Daughter of God, thou must leave thy village and go forth into
France."[306]

[Footnote 306: _Ibid._, vol. i, pp. 52, 53.]

And the ladies Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret spoke again and
said: "Take the standard sent down to thee by the King of Heaven, take
it boldly and God will help thee." As she listened to these words of
the ladies with the beautiful crowns, Jeanne was consumed with a
desire for long expeditions on horseback, and for those battles in
which angels hover over the heads of the warriors. But how was she to
go to France? How was she to associate with men-at-arms? Ignorant and
generously impulsive like herself, the Voices she heard merely
revealed to her her own heart, and left her in sad agitation of mind:
"I am a poor girl, knowing neither how to bestride a horse nor how to
m