hree hundred inhabitants, straggles along the highway. The houses are
well built--the church is a handsome, ogival building of the fifteenth
century, restored in our day, but quite in keeping with the place and
its associations. Within it, under a tomb built into the wall, lie the
two brothers Tiercelin, sons of the godmother of Jeanne, who bore their
testimony manfully to the character of the deliverer of France, when the
Church was at last compelled to intervene in the interest of truth and
justice between the French Catholics who had worshipped her as a
'creature of God,' and the English Catholics who had burned her as an
emissary of the Evil One.

Almost under the shadow of the church tower stands the house in which
Jeanne was born and bred. A charming, old-fashioned garden, very well
kept, surrounds it. If when you leave the church you pass around by the
main street of the village, you soon find yourself in front of a neat
iron railing which connects two modern buildings of no great size, but
neat and unpretending. Entering the gateway of this railing you see
before you, shaded by well-grown trees, one or two of which may possibly
be of the date of the house, the quaint fifteenth-century facade of the
house of Jacques d'Arc, and his wife Isabelle Vouthon, called Romee
because she had made a pilgrimage to the Eternal City. A curious
demi-gable gives the house the appearance of having been cut in two. But
there is no reason to suppose it was ever any larger than it is now.
Probably, indeed, this facade was erected long after the martyrdom of
Jeanne. Over the ogival doorway is an escutcheon showing three shields,
and the date, 1480, with an inscription, '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy
Louys!_' This goes to confirm a local tradition that the facade was
built at the cost of Louis XI., who understood much better than his
father the political value to the crown and to the country of France of
the marvellous career of the peasant girl of Domremy. The date of this
inscription is particularly significant. In 1479 was fought the battle
of Guinegate, which was lost to France by the headlong flight of the
French chivalry from the field. Louis XI. turned this disaster to good
account. He made it the excuse for founding, in 1480, his regular army
of mercenaries, liberating the peasants from the burden of personal
military service to the lords, and drawing to himself the power of the
State through taxation. '_Vive Labeur, Vive le Roy Lo