convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at
all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the
core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of
fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope
and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was
spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest
places was foul in both–she was all these things in an age when
crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when
the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even
that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their
atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries,
and beastialities.
She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name
has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of
self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. When she
had rescued her King from his vagabondage, and set his crown
upon hi8s head, she was offered rewards and honors, but she
refused them all, and would take nothing. All she would take for
herself–if the King would grant it–was leave to go back to her
village home, and tend her sheep again, and feel her mother’s arms
about her, and be her housemaid and helper. The selfishness of this
unspoiled general of victorious armies, companion of princes, and
idol of an applauding and grateful nation, reached but that far and
no farther.
The work wrought by Joan of Arc may fairly be regarded as
ranking any recorded in history, when one considers the conditions
under which it was undertaken, the obstacles in the way, and the
means at her disposal. Caesar carried conquests far, but he did it
with the trained and confident veterans of Rome, and was a trained
soldier himself; and Napoleon swept away the disciplined armies
of Europe, but he also was a trained soldier, and the began his
work with patriot battalions inflamed and inspired by the
miracle-working new breath of Liberty breathed upon them by the
Revolution–eager young apprentices to the splendid trade of war,
not old and broken men-at-arms, despairing survivors of an
age-long accumulation of monotonous defeats; but Joan of Arc, a
mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl
unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in
chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its
treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit
torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long
years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King
cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and
she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and
followed her. She led it from victory to victory, she turned back
the tide of the Hundred Years’ War, she fatally crippled the English
power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER OF
FRANCE, which she bears to this day.
And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned,
stood supine and indifferent, while French priests took the noble
child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the
ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.
A PECULIARITY OF JOAN OF ARC’S HISTORY
THE DETAILS of the life of Joan of Arc form a biography which
is unique among the world’s biographies in one respect: It is the
only story of a human life which comes to us under oath, the only
one which comes to us from the witness-stand. The official records
of the Great Trial of 1431, and of the Process of Rehabilitation of
a quarter of a century later, are still preser4ved in the National
Archives of France, and they furnish with remarkable fullness the
facts of her life. The history of no other life of that remote time is
known with either the certainty or the comprehensiveness that
attaches to hers.
The Sieur Louis de Conte is faithful to her official history in his
Personal Recollections, and thus far his trustworthiness is
unimpeachable; but his mass of added particulars must depend for
credit upon his word alone.