t for thee, but for a Virgin, who shall come and with these
weapons deliver the realm of France.'" Maitre Jean Erault meditated on
these marvellous revelations and came to believe that Jeanne was the
Virgin announced by Marie of Avignon.[754]

[Footnote 754: _Trial_, vol. iii, p. 83.]

Maitre Gerard Machet, the King's Confessor, had found it written that
a Maid should come to the help of the King of France. He remarked on
it to Gobert Thibault, the Squire, who was no very great
personage;[755] and he certainly spoke of it to several others.
Gerard Machet, Doctor of Theology, sometime Vice Chancellor of the
University, from which he was now excluded, was regarded as one of the
lights of the Church. He loved the court,[756] although he would not
admit it, and enjoyed the favour of the King, who had just rewarded
his services by giving him money with which to purchase a mule.[757]
All doubts concerning the disposition of these doctors are removed by
the discovery that the King's Confessor himself put into circulation
those prophecies which had been distorted in favour of the Maid from
the Bois-Chenu.

[Footnote 755: _Ibid._, p. 75.]

[Footnote 756: _Lettres de Gerard Machet_, Bibl. nat. Latin documents,
no. 8577. Launoy, _Regii Navarrae Gymnasii Parisiensis historia_,
Paris, 1682 (2 vols. in 4to), vol. ii, pp. 533, 557. Du Boulay, _Hist.
Univ. Parisiensis_, vol. v, p. 875. Vallet de Viriville, in _Nouvelle
biographie generale_.]

[Footnote 757: De Beaucourt, _Extrait du catalogue des actes de
Charles VII_, p. 18.]

The damsel was interrogated concerning her Voices, which she called
her Council, and her saints, whom she imagined in the semblance of
those sculptured or painted figures peopling the churches.[758] The
doctors objected to her having cast off woman's clothing and had her
hair cut round in the manner of a page. Now it is written: "The woman
shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man
put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the
Lord thy God" (Deuteronomy xxii, 5). The Council of Gangres, held in
the reign of the Emperor Valens, had anathematised women who dressed
as men and cut short their hair.[759] Many saintly women, impelled by
a strange inspiration of the Holy Ghost, had concealed their sex by
masculine garb. At Saint-Jean-des-Bois, near Compiegne, was preserved
the reliquary of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who lived for
thirty-eight years in man's