ught to flatter
this vain and lovely lady by prophesying: "Some day thou shalt be the
wife of the greatest king on earth." Agnes, with ready wit, rose at once
to her occasion. "If that be my true fortune," said she to the dauphin,
"I must leave you this instant and go marry the King of England; for I
see that, in the sloth that confines you here, you will not long be King
of France." The shot told, and Charles was stung into momentary
activity. Throughout her life Agnes continued to exert a salutary
influence upon him; and when she died,--poisoned, it was said, by the
then dauphin, afterward Louis XI,--evil favorites soon replaced the wise
counsellors at the king's board, and his last years were as full of
misery as had been those before Jeanne came mysteriously out of the east
and gave him his crown.

It was not Charles, the miserable, ungrateful voluptuary whose character
we have attempted to show, that was loved and saved by Jeanne d'Arc; it
was France, represented to her in the person of the dauphin. For her,
Charles was a symbol, a mere incarnate _patrie_ for whose salvation she
was commissioned by the Lord of Hosts; the man himself was nothing; in
her simple peasant's heart, she hardly thought of him as a man, rather
as a sort of divinity that could do no wrong, that must be worshipped,
that must first of all be saved and set up safely in its tabernacle of
Rouen. Unworthier idol never was created than this insensible thing
called the dauphin, with as little care for the victims crushed beneath
him as if he had been in very truth a mere wooden Juggernaut or Mumbo
Jumbo; but all of us worship unworthy idols and are quite unconscious of
their unworthiness. And, as in the case of Jeanne, if worship and
worshipper be pure, what matter if the idol be a little unsteady on the
pedestal to which our blind devotion has raised it?

The worship of Jeanne for the dauphin had begun in very childhood, when
this dream-guided little maid of Lorraine hardly knew what "king" or
"kingdom" meant. Writers have remarked, as De Quincey and Michelet, upon
the fact that Jeanne was born in a border land, on the marches of
Lorraine and Champagne, in the debatable land between the great parties
of Orleans and Burgundy; but the mere situation of this little village
of Domremy upon the great Franco-German highway is a geographical fact
that could be conned over and over, and then forgotten, without our
being one whit the better or the worse. T