individual and in the most wretched
abortion of the same species.

[Footnote 84: Vol. ii, Appendices ii and iii.]

The free-thinkers of our day, imbued as they are, for the most part,
with transcendentalism, refuse to recognise in Jeanne not merely that
automatism which determines the acts of such a seeress, not only the
influence of constant hallucination, but even the suggestions of the
religious spirit. What she achieved through saintliness and
devoutness, they make her out to have accomplished by intelligent
enthusiasm. Such a disposition is manifest in the excellent and
erudite Quicherat, who all unconsciously introduces into the piety of
the Maid a great deal of eclectic philosophy. This point was not
without its drawbacks. It led free-thinking historians to a ridiculous
exaggeration of Jeanne's intellectual faculties, to the absurdity of
attributing military talent to her and to the substitution of a kind
of polytechnic phenomenon for the fifteenth century's artless marvel.
The Catholic historians of the present day when they make a saint of
the Maid are much nearer to nature and to truth. Unfortunately the
Church's idea of saintliness has grown insipid since the Council of
Trent, and orthodox historians are disinclined to study the variations
of the Catholic Church down the ages. In their hands therefore she
becomes sanctimonious and bigoted. So much so that in a search for the
most curiously travestied of all the Jeannes d'Arc we should have been
driven to choose between their miraculous protectress of Christian
France, the patroness of officers, the inimitable model of the pupils
of Saint-Cyr, and the romantic Druidess, the inspired woman-soldier of
the national guard, the patriot gunneress of the Republicans, had
there not arisen a Jesuit Father to create an ultramontane Jeanne
d'Arc.[85]

[Footnote 85: Le P. Ayroles, _La vraie Jeanne d'Arc_, 5 vols. in large
8vo, Paris, 1894-1902. Writing of this book in a study of
_L'Abjuration de Jeanne d'Arc_ (Paris, 1902, pp. 7 and 8, note), Canon
Ulysse Chevalier, author of a valuable _Repertoire des sources du
moyen age_, displays boldness and sound sense. "From the dimensions of
these five volumes," he says, "one might expect this work to be the
fullest history of Jeanne d'Arc; it is nothing of the sort. It is a
chaos of memoranda translated or rendered into modern French,
reflections and arguments against free-thought as represented by
Michelet, H. Martin, Quiche