ror of a
few and the pity of many, it is probable that not one in the great crowd
hurrying away from the scene of Jeanne d'Arc's martyrdom realized that
she was a martyr or that the cause for which she had died was near its
hour of triumph. Their fear was but of one whom they deemed a favored
ally of the powers of evil; their pity was but for one whom they deemed
a simple girl, and for whose anguish they grieved as they would have
grieved for that of their own daughters or sisters. The pity of it, that
one so young, so gentle, so innocent of worldly taint should suffer this
cruel death! After all, 'this is the truest compassion, dispensed with
even justice, without regard to person or rank, without thought as to
whether the sufferer be the repentant thief or the Divine Master upon
the Cross, the nameless woman taken in adultery or this girl of Lorraine
who was to be acknowledged as the greatest woman in French history. Yet
for us the knowledge that heartless political schemers had tortured to
the death a woman becomes knowledge of far more moment when we know that
Jeanne d'Arc was the woman, and our indignation against her persecutors
is enhanced in proportion to our estimate of the greatness and the
goodness of the heroine.

In the course of our narrative we have taken occasion, from time to
time, to present estimates of the character of Jeanne d'Arc; perhaps it
may be well, now that her meteoric career has ended in the flames of the
market place of Rouen, to consider once more the character of this
heroine in its main features. The results of her activity in French
history, though not in all cases immediately apparent, were so
marvellous that our judgment may well be unduly influenced. On the one
hand, in our desire to emphasize the extraordinary nature of her deeds,
we may tend to depreciate the actual abilities of Jeanne; on the other,
the glory of the deeds may blind us to the shortcomings of the woman.

In her own day, and especially after her death, her contemporaries in
France had begun to regard her as a saint, and a veritable cult of
Jeanne d'Arc soon grew up, encrusting the simple facts of her story with
endless and fantastic arabesques of legend. Charles VII., who had
abandoned the woman in her hour of need, who had made no earnest effort
to succor the leader to whom he owed his crown, entered with
considerable energy and enthusiasm into the cult of the saint. It was
due to his initiative that, in 1455, Pop