half inclined to believe
in Jeanne, and was at least sympathetic; but her father could see in
these visions but childish nonsense that would lead his daughter astray.
For him there was no faith in such things; can one blame him if he
thought them but the silly moonings of a child, and dealt with that
child sternly in the hope of saving her? He declared that he would drown
Jeanne with his own hands rather than see her ride off with men-at-arms
into that France of which he and she knew nothing but that it was from
end to end given over to war and pillage. Thinking that marriage might
dispel her illusions about saving France,--as indeed it would,--they
persecuted her to marry a young villager who had fallen desperately in
love with her and claimed that she had promised to marry him. With a
courage that must have surprised even herself, she went before the
ecclesiastical court of Toul and told her story so frankly that the
judge dismissed the desperate lover. Not for her were the joys and
sorrows of a wife and mother.

With all her determination and masculine contempt for those things that
are terrors to most women, Jeanne loved her home. In after years she was
ever sighing for the quiet life of her father's cottage, where she might
sit and spin with her mother, or wander forth over the fields with her
sister to tend the sheep. What a piteous struggle must there have been
in her breast! On the one hand, an angry father, whom she loved, a
mother whom she loved better, a safe home, and in it all that her simple
heart desired; on the other, the great and terrible world, the armies of
rough men, the dissolute courtiers, the long journeys over an unknown
country, for one who had hardly stirred out of sight of Domremy church
tower. Love of home, so strong in the hearts of all women, so precious
to the peasant woman of France above all others, must be renounced for
love of country. There have been no better or more determined patriots
than women, as Caesar found when the women of Gaul cheered their husbands
on to the contest with his legions; but these women were fighting at
home, as it were upon the threshold; they did not go forth to lead
armies in offensive warfare; theirs was the steady courage of
desperation, not the active courage which must sustain itself, keep its
own fires alive, instead of relying upon the stimulus of impulse and a
desperate crisis. All the fears and heartbreakings of the struggle in
Jeanne's mind have b