the virgin announced by prophecy, raised up for the
deliverance of the kingdom, marked with a sign, who was then making
her humble entrance into the town. Perhaps more than one applied what
that passage of Scripture says of the Holy Nation to the realm of
France, and in the coincidence of that liturgical text and the happy
coming of the Maid found occasion for hope. _Laetare, Jerusalem!_
Rejoice ye, O people, in your true King and your rightful sovereign.
_Et conventum facite_: and come together. Unite all your strength
against the enemy. _Gaudete cum laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis_:
after your long mourning, rejoice. The Lord sends you succour and
consolation.

[Footnote 626: _Trial_, vol. i, p. 56.]

[Footnote 627: _Ibid._, vol. ii, pp. 394, 462.]

[Footnote 628: Isaiah, ch. 66, verse 10 (W.S.).]

By the intercession of Saint Julien, and probably with the aid of
Collet de Vienne, the King's messenger, Jeanne found a lodging in the
town, near the castle, in an inn kept by a woman of good repute.[629]
The spits were idle. And the guests, deep in the chimney-corner, were
watching the grilling of Saint Herring, who was suffering worse
torments than Saint Lawrence.[630] In those times no one in
Christendom neglected the Church's injunctions concerning the fasts
and abstinences of Holy Lent. Following the example of Our Lord Jesus
Christ who fasted forty days in the desert, the faithful observed the
fast from Quadragesima Sunday until Easter Sunday, making forty days
after abstracting the Sundays when the fast was broken but not the
abstinence. Thus fasting and with her soul comforted, Jeanne listened
to the soft whisper of her Voices.[631] The two days she spent in the
inn were passed in retirement, on her knees.[632] The banks of the
Vienne and the broad meadows, still in their black wintry garb, the
hill-slopes over which light mists floated, did not tempt her. But
when, on her way to church, climbing up a steep street, or merely
grooming her horse in the inn yard, she raised her eyes to the north,
there on a mountain close at hand, just about the distance that would
be traversed by one of those stone cannon-balls which had been in use
for the last fifty or sixty years, she saw the towers of the finest
castle of the realm. Behind its proud walls there breathed that King
to whom she had journeyed, impelled by a miraculous love.

[Footnote 629: _Trial_, vol. i, p. 143.]

[Footnote 630: _La vie de saint Harenc g