a German merchant, one Eberhard de
Windecke,[45] a conscientious and clever edition of which has also
been published by M. Germain Lefevre-Pontalis, presents the same
phenomenon. Nothing here related of the Maid is even probable. As soon
as she appears a whole cycle of popular stories grow up round her
name. Eberhard obviously delights to relate them. Thus we learn from
these good foreign merchants that at no period of her existence was
Jeanne known otherwise than by fables, and that if she moved
multitudes it was by the spreading abroad of countless legends which
sprang up wherever she passed and made way before her. And indeed,
there is much food for thought in that dazzling obscurity, which from
the very first enwrapped the Maid, in those radiant clouds of myth,
which, while concealing her, rendered her all the more imposing.

[Footnote 45: G. Lefevre-Pontalis, _Les sources allemandes de
l'histoire de Jeanne d'Arc_, Eberhard Windecke, Paris, 1903, in 8vo.]

Thirdly, with its memoranda, its consultations, and its one hundred
and forty depositions, furnished by one hundred and twenty-three
deponents, the rehabilitation trial forms a very valuable collection
of documents.[46] M. Lanery d'Arc has done well to publish in their
entirety the memoranda of the doctors as well as the treatise of the
Archbishop of Embrun, the propositions of Master Heinrich von Gorcum
and the _Sibylla Francica_.[47] From the trial of 1431 we learn what
theologians on the English side thought of the Maid. But were it not
for the consultations of Theodore de Leliis and of Paul Pontanus and
the opinions included in the later trial we should not know how she
was regarded by the doctors of Italy and France. It is important to
ascertain what were the views held by the whole Church concerning a
damsel condemned during her lifetime, when the English were in power,
and rehabilitated after her death when the French were victorious.

[Footnote 46: _Trial_, vols. ii to iii, 1844-1845 (vols. v and vi,
1846-1847, contain the evidence).]

[Footnote 47: Lanery d'Arc, _Memoires et consultations en faveur de
Jeanne d'Arc_, 1889, in 8vo. _Trial_, vol. iii, pp. 411-468.]

Doubtless many matters were elucidated by the one hundred and
twenty-three witnesses heard at Domremy, at Vaucouleurs, at Toul, at
Orleans, at Paris, at Rouen, at Lyon, witnesses drawn from all ranks
of life--churchmen, princes, captains, burghers, peasants, artisans.
But we are bound to ad