f having once
resumed man's dress, which had been left near her on purpose to tempt
her, her judges ... declared her a relapsed heretic and caused to be
burnt at the stake one who in heroic ages, when men erected altars to
their liberators, would have had an altar raised to her for having
served her King. Afterwards Charles VII rehabilitated her memory,
which her death itself had sufficiently honoured."]

It was precisely at the end of the eighteenth century that Jeanne
began to be better known and more justly appreciated, first through a
little book, which the Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy derived almost wholly
from the unpublished history of old Richer,[120] then by l'Averdy's
erudite researches into the two trials.[121]

[Footnote 120: L'Abbe Lenglet du Fresnoy, _Histoire de Jeanne d'Arc,
vierge, heroine et martyre d'Etat suscitee par la Providence pour
retablir la monarchie francaise, tiree des proces et pieces originales
du temps_, Paris, 1753-1754, 3 vols. in 12mo.]

[Footnote 121: F. de L'Averdy, _Memorial lu au comite des manuscrits
concernant la recherche a faire des minutes originales des differentes
affaires qui ont eu lieu par rapport a Jeanne d'Arc, appelee
communement la Pucelle d'Orleans_, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1787, in
4to; _Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliotheque du roi,
lus au comite etabli par sa Majeste dans l'Academie royale des
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres_, Paris, Imp. Royale, 1790, vol. iii.]

Nevertheless humanism, and after humanism the Reformation, and after
the Reformation Cartesianism, and after Cartesianism experimental
philosophy had banished the old credulity from thoughtful minds. When
the Revolution came, the bloom had already long faded from the flower
of Gothic legend. It seemed as if the glory of Jeanne d'Arc, so
intimately related to the traditions of the royal house of France,
could not survive the monarchy, and as if the tempest which scattered
the royal ashes of Saint Denys and the treasure of Reims, would also
bear away the frail relics and the venerated images of the saint of
the Valois. The new _regime_ did indeed refuse to honour a memory so
inseparable from royalty and from religion. The festival of Jeanne
d'Arc at Orleans, shorn of ecclesiastical pomp in 1791, was
discontinued in 1793. Later the Maid's history appeared somewhat too
Gothic even to the _emigres_; Chateaubriand did not dare to introduce
her into his "Genie du Christianisme."[122]

[Footnote