of it somehow.
“Which aided most–you the Standard, or the Standard you?”
“Whether it was the Standard or whether it was I, is nothing–the
victories came from God.”
“But did you base your hopes of victory in yourself or in your
Standard?”
“In neither. In God, and not otherwise.”
“Was not your Standard waved around the King’s head at the
Coronation?”
“No. It was not.”
“Why was it that your Standard had place at the crowning of the
King in the Cathedral of Rheims, rather than those of the other
captains?”
Then, soft and low, came that touching speech which will live as
long as language lives, and pass into all tongues, and move all
gentle hearts wheresoever it shall come, down to the latest day:
“It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor.” [1] How simple
it is, and how beautiful. And how it beggars the studies eloquence
of the masters of oratory. Eloquence was a native gift of Joan of
Arc; it came from her lips without effort and without preparation.
Her words were as sublime as her deeds, as sublime as her
character; they had their source in a great heart and were coined in
a great brain.
[1] What she said has been many times translated, but never with
success. There is a haunting pathos about the original which eludes
all efforts to convey it into our tongue. It is as subtle as an odor,
and escapes in the transmission. Her words were these:
“Il avait ‚t‚ a la peine, c’etait bien raison qu’il fut a l’honneur.”
Monseigneur Ricard, Honorary Vicar-General to the Archbishop of
Aix, finely speaks of it (Jeanne d’Arc la V‚n‚rable, page 197) as
“that sublime reply, enduring in the history of celebrated sayings
like the cry of a French and Christian soul wounded unto death in
its patriotism and its faith.” — TRANSLATOR.
Chapter 12 Joan’s Master-Stroke Diverted
NOW, as a next move, this small secret court of holy assassins did
a thing so base that even at this day, in my old age, it is hard to
speak of it with patience.
In the beginning of her commerce with her Voices there at
Domremy, the child Joan solemnly devoted her life to God,
vowing her pure body and her pure soul to His service. You will
remember that her parents tried to stop her from going to the wars
by haling her to the court at Toul to compel her to make a
marriage which she had never promised to make–a marriage with
our poor, good, windy, big, hard-fighting, and most dear and
lamented comrade, the Standard-Bearer, who fell in honorable
battle and sleeps with God these sixty years, peace to his ashes!
And you will remember how Joan, sixteen years old, stood up in
that venerable court and conducted her case all by herself, and tore
the poor Paladin’s case to rags and blew it away with a breath; and
how the astonished old judge on the bench spoke of her as “this
marvelous child.”
You remember all that. Then think what I felt, to see these false
priests, here in the tribunal wherein Joan had fought a fourth lone
fight in three years, deliberately twist that matter entirely around
and try to make out that Joan haled the Paladin into court and
pretended that he had promised to marry her, and was bent on
making him do it.
Certainly there was no baseness that those people were ashamed to
stoop to in their hunt for that friendless girl’s life. What they
wanted to show was this–that she had committed the sin of
relapsing from her vow and trying to violate it.
Joan detailed the true history of the case, but lost her temper as she
went along, and finished with some words for Cauchon which he
remembers yet, whether he is fanning himself in the world he
belongs in or has swindled his way into the other.
The rest of this day and part of the next the court labored upon the
old theme–the male attire. It was shabby work for those grave men
to be engaged in; for they well knew one of Joan’s reasons for
clinging to the male dress was, that soldiers of the guard were