e glorious months, the leader of France, the bodily representative
of national feeling. With or without inspiration, she could serve.

Disaster followed upon disaster in her brief subsequent career; but
always she was the same honest, hopeful, pure girl, striving her utmost
to discipline her army, to restrain the cruelty of her soldiers, to win
for the dauphin a reconciliation with his cousin of Burgundy. Some of
her biographers have noted, or pretended to note, a lamentable change in
her character at this time. It is said that she became less scrupulous
of shedding blood, less careful in enforcing moral and religious
discipline among her followers, above all, less gentle and patient in
temper. But Jeanne had never been able to compel absolute obedience from
soldiers little better than banditti, and when the notion of her
sanctity began to fade away as the men saw her in the daily life of the
camp, and saw her a mere human creature, fallible like themselves, her
strongest hold on them was loosened. She had never been, since her
mission was assumed, a mere dainty, meek, unresisting heroine of
romance, a paragon of grace and beauty for whom knights risked their
lives while she sat by and smiled and dressed the wounds of the victor
after the fight. She had definitely and from the first taken an active
part in the real business of fighting, had on more than one occasion
displayed her prowess in the field. A generation after her death, when
all France had come to regard her as a martyr, a priest testified that
"she would not use her sword, nor would she slay anyone"; but this
testimony is certainly at variance with all that we know of the actual
behavior of Jeanne in battle, and seems sufficiently contradicted by her
own statement that the sword she used at Compiegne was "excellent,
either for cutting or thrusting." She made the statement frankly,
without any suspicion of its apparent inconsistency with her professions
of a divine mission. We have no doubt that Jeanne delivered many a good
stroke in deadly earnest, and we do not respect her the less for it. We
need not even sorrow, but rather rejoice, at that display of honest
indignation against the unruly and immoral in her camp, when she broke
her sword of Saint Catherine over one rascal's head.

Town after town had thrown open its gates at sight of the white banner
and the Maid of Orleans; but Paris still remained in the hands of the
English. Jeanne was averse to making