h. Nat. f. Fr. 10448, fol. 12mo.]

[Footnote 114: "The Life of Saint Catherine, virgin and martyr, is
fabulous throughout from beginning to end," _Valesiana_, p. 48. "M. de
Launoy, doctor of theology, had cut Saint Catherine, virgin and
martyr, out of his calendar. He said that her life was a myth, and to
show that he placed no faith in it, every year when the feast of the
saint came round, he said a Requiem mass. This curious circumstance I
learn from his own telling," _Ibid._, p. 36.]

Take Chapelain, for example, whose poem was first published in 1656.
Chapelain is unconsciously burlesque; he is a Scarron without knowing
it. It is none the less interesting to learn from him that he merely
treated his subject as an occasion for glorifying the Bastard of
Orleans. He expressly says in his preface: "I did not so much regard
her (the Maid) as the chief character of the poem, who, strictly
speaking, is the Comte de Dunois." Chapelain was in the pay of the Duc
de Longueville, a descendant of Dunois.[115] It is of Dunois that he
sings; "the illustrious shepherdess" contributes the marvellous
element to his poem, and, according to the good man's own expression,
furnishes _les machines necessaires_ for an epic. Saint Catherine and
Saint Margaret are too commonplace to be included among _ces
machines_. Chapelain tells us that he took particular care so to
arrange his poem that "everything which happens in it by divine favour
might be believed to have taken place through human agency carried to
the highest degree to which nature is capable of ascending." Herein we
discern the dawn of the modern spirit.

[Footnote 115: Jean Chapelain, _La Pucelle ou la France delivree_,
Paris, 1656, in fol.]

Bossuet also is careful not to mention Saint Catherine and Saint
Margaret. The four or five quarto pages which he devotes to Jeanne
d'Arc in his "Abrege de l'Histoire de France pour l'instruction du
Dauphin"[116] are very interesting, not for his statement of facts,
which is confused and inexact,[117] but for the care the author takes
to represent the miraculous deeds attributed to Jeanne in an
incidental and dubious manner. In Bossuet's opinion, as in Gerson's,
these things are matters of edification, not of faith. Writing for the
instruction of a prince, Bossuet was bound to abridge; but his
abridgment goes too far when, representing Jeanne's condemnation to be
the work of the Bishop of Beauvais, he omits to say that the Bishop of
Bea